News: Apple puts contract partner Wistron on probation after violence at India plant

• December 19, 2020
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Apple has placed its contract manufacturing partner Wistron on probation and won’t give the Taiwanese firm any new business until it took “complete corrective actions” following lapses at its southern India plant. The iPhone maker said on Saturday that its employees and independent auditors hired by the company to investigate the issues at Wistron’s Narasapura

Apple has placed its contract manufacturing partner Wistron on probation and won’t give the Taiwanese firm any new business until it took “complete corrective actions” following lapses at its southern India plant.

The iPhone maker said on Saturday that its employees and independent auditors hired by the company to investigate the issues at Wistron’s Narasapura facility found that Apple’s ‘Supplier Code of Conduct’ was violated at the facility and Wistron failed to implement proper working hour management processes. This led to “payment delays for some workers in October and November,” Apple said, citing preliminary findings.

“As always, our focus is on making sure everyone in our supply chain is protected and treated with dignity and respect. We are very disappointed and taking immediate steps to address these issues. Wistron has taken disciplinary action and is restructuring their recruitment and payroll teams in Narasapura,” Apple said in a statement. “Apple employees, along with independent auditors, will monitor their progress.”

Thousands of workers rioted over unpaid salaries — of about $200 a month — on December 12 at Wistron’s Narasapura facility — situated about 40 miles outside of the tech hub Bangalore — destroying property, iPhones, and factory equipments. Wistron, a key manufacturing partner for Apple in India, has this year more than quadrupled workers and ramped up its production capacity in the South Asian nation.

A report by the Karnataka state government concluded this week that serious violations of labor laws — including underpayment of wages, and irregular hours and poor working conditions — were taking place at Wistron’s facility in India. The report estimated that assets worth $7 million were damaged in the recent riot.

In a statement earlier today, Wistron acknowledged that some workers at its plant had not been paid properly. It also announced it was removing a top executive who oversaw Taiwanese firm’s India business. “Some of the processes we put in place to manage labor agencies and payments need to be strengthened and upgraded,” it said.

Wistron assembles older iPhone models at its Indian facility. In recent years, Apple has broadened its partnership with others — including Foxconn — to expand the iPhone production capacity in India. Earlier this year, Foxconn had started to assemble the iPhone 11 models in India.

“India is democratic. Its unions are vocal, and local politicians have to be responsive. Foreign companies eager to tap the large domestic market and vast labor pool will need to adjust to the reality that workers may be more quick to stand up for their interests. And Cook will need to get used to his company’s name alongside words like riot and uprising. In many respects, it’s unfair to pick on Apple — the latest complaints appear aimed squarely at Wistron — yet the U.S. company is the client and wields the power to force change, something it’s done in China over the past decade,” Bloomberg columnist Tim Culpan wrote.

More to follow…

News: Wish (and Airbnb, and Palantir) investor Justin Fishner-Wolfson doesn’t care about first-day pops

• December 19, 2020
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It’s probably no wonder that when Founders Fund was still a very young venture firm 13 years ago, it brought aboard as its first principal Justin Fishner-Wolfson. Having nabbed two computer science degrees from Stanford and spent two years as CEO of an organization that provides asset management services to the school’s student organizations, Fishner-Wolfson

It’s probably no wonder that when Founders Fund was still a very young venture firm 13 years ago, it brought aboard as its first principal Justin Fishner-Wolfson. Having nabbed two computer science degrees from Stanford and spent two years as CEO of an organization that provides asset management services to the school’s student organizations, Fishner-Wolfson wasn’t shy about voicing his opinions at the venture fund. In fact, he says Founders Fund made a much bigger bet on SpaceX than it originally planned because he pushed for it.

He stayed three years before spying what he thought was an even better opportunity, owing to friends who worked at Facebook before the company’s 2012 IPO. They were beginning to look for ways to liquidate their shares, and while they had options, to his mind, they weren’t great. More, Fishner-Wolfson says he foresaw more companies like Facebook staying private longer. He said goodbye to Founders Fund and formed 137 Ventures to acquire secondary shares from founders, investors, and employees.

That was 10 years ago, and the firm seems to be doing just fine for itself. Last year, it closed its fourth fund with $210 million in capital commitments, bringing its assets under management to more than $1 billion. Its approach of focusing on roughly 10 to 12 companies per fund appears to be paying off, too. Since late September, it has seen three of its portfolio companies — Palantir, Airbnb, and Wish — hit the public market.

We talked at length with Fishner-Wolfson this week to learn more about how 137 Ventures works, from how it screens companies, to the impact it has seen from companies that are giving their employees longer windows in which to keep their vested stock options. (“It has certainly stopped the desperate calls from people who have huge amounts of equity that’s about to expire, which, I’m totally happy to not get those phone calls, because I feel terrible for people who are in that sort of situation,” he said.) We also talked about that early deal in SpaceX, which also appears in 137 Ventures’s portfolio.

You can listen to that longer conversation here. In the meantime, we’re pulling out part of our conversation that centered on Wish, the discount e-commerce company whose IPO this week has been called a dud.

TC: Two of your portfolio companies have done very well as they’ve entered the public market — Palantir and Airbnb. Wish was a different story, dropping in its debut. What do you make of its IPO? Do you think investors misunderstand this company?

JFW: I think it takes the investment community a long time to understand any newly public company. At the end of the day, the IPO is just one day, right? What really matters is how companies perform over the next 10 or 20 years.

I would look at Microsoft or Amazon or more recently, Facebook, whose [share price] dropped 50% in the week or two following its offering and Facebook has gone on to be an incredible business. I have no idea what the market is going to do tomorrow [or] the day after. But over a decade, if you can really build a great sustainable business that compounds, it all comes out in the wash.

Wish has done an incredible job of scaling the business. I think [cofounder and CEO] Peter [Szulczewski] is one of the best operators I’ve met in this industry. And they’ve done a lot of innovative things in terms of mobile. There’s a lot more discovery on the Wish platform. The whole in-store pickup has been really innovative; they’re helping consumers get products quickly in an asset-light kind of way where you don’t need to buy millions and millions of square feet of warehouses.

TC: You’re talking about these partnerships that Wish starting striking with mom-and-pop shops in the U.S. and Europe, where those who have extra storage space will now take receipt of Wish goods, which in turn gives them a little bit more foot traffic when people come in to pick up their items. That’s a big shift from how Wish used to operate, which was by shipping things very cheaply from China through a USPS deal whose economics have since changed. Is that right?

JFW: Right. They’re helping small and medium-size businesses drive foot traffic, which was always valuable but in the current environment, going to become even more important to these sorts of businesses. They’re [also] helping those businesses leverage the data they have across their entire platform because Wish understands what consumers in that geography are looking for, and they can help those businesses merchandise better. And then, because they’re shipping product to one location, they’re aggregating orders from a whole bunch of people who don’t know each other, and that reduces logistics and shipping time and costs. So they send that stuff in, and it’s easier for the consumer to walk or drive five to 15 minutes, and go pick it up. That allows Wish to focus on the value-conscious consumer who is willing to trade a little bit of time for a much better price on things.

TC: Wish is known as a place to get tchotchkes from China. Now that it’s trying to sell more mainstream goods, how does it go about changing the perception that it has in the marketplace?

JFW: I’m not sure they need to do a whole lot to change that perception, because I still think they haven’t penetrated the market as a whole. There are lots of people who don’t even know about them quite frankly. And as [I’ve] watched the marketplace evolve, you’ve just seen more and more merchants, and more and more data back from customers about both the merchants and the quality of the merchandise, and all those things feed back into this very powerful system, where they can leverage the data to improve product quality and make sure that they’re selling what people want.

TC: Do you think uneven quality explains the company’s uneven revenue? It grew something like 57% in 2018, then 10% in 2019, and picked up again in the first nine months of this year. Why do you think it’s been topsy turvy?

JFW: All businesses go through these cycles of growth, and then focusing on efficiency. If you just focus on growth, you tend to grow, and then break things, and then do things in relatively inefficient ways. And then ultimately, you need to turn around and focus on how you drive operational efficiencies. So I think the cycles that you’re describing, if you look at the underlying metrics, you [see] improvement in operating efficiency.

TC: Wish’s shares did not “pop.” On the other hand, former Snap executive Imran Khan told CNBC on Tuesday that the recent post IPO stock pops, including those of Airbnb and Doordash, represent an “epic level of incompetency” from the bankers who underwrote the stocks. Do you believe it was incompetency on the part of the bankers or just market volatility that caused those stocks to pop as high as they did?

JFW: I think no one actually knows the answer to that question. I think it makes for a good sound bite. At the end of the day, I don’t think the price on the first day is a meaningful indicator of anything.

TC: Are the feverish embrace of these companies driving prices up in the secondary market? What are you seeing?

It really does matter what the public prices are [because] that ultimately trickles into the private markets and also vice versa. At some point, things can’t have massive differences in value between their private market valuations and their public market valuations. So you definitely see multiples shift as the market shifts. But these things are often averages. People focus on one company or one example of these things without necessarily looking at all the companies because that would be quite difficult.

But there are always examples of things that are overpriced. There are also examples of things that are under priced. As an investor, you want to try to invest more of your money in the good companies that are on the lower end of that spectrum, certainly. But the focus is always on good companies. If you can find companies that are going to compound over long periods of time, as long as you’re not too crazy on multiples or valuations, you end up being in a good spot.

TC: Who are you tracking right now? What’s an investment that’s not up on your website yet?

JFW: Snapdocs [a company that helps real estate professionals to digitally manage the mortgage process and other paperwork and which just closed on $60 million in funding in October].

Aaron [King], who is the founder and CEO of the company, has done really a fantastic job of building a product that that people are willing to adopt, and this is the right moment in time for that growth to really accelerate. They’ve been having a good year.

Pictured above: The 137 Ventures’ team, with Wolfson center (in glasses).

News: FDA authorizes Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use

• December 19, 2020
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as expected after an independent panel commissioned by the administration recommended its approval earlier this week. This is the second vaccine now authorized for use in the U.S. under EUA, after the Pfizer -BioNTech vaccine was approved

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine, as expected after an independent panel commissioned by the administration recommended its approval earlier this week. This is the second vaccine now authorized for use in the U.S. under EUA, after the Pfizer -BioNTech vaccine was approved last week.

Moderna’s vaccine could begin being administered to Americans by “Monday or Tuesday” next week, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci speaking to NBC’s Today show in a new interview. That’s in keeping with the timelines between the Pfizer EUA and the first patients actually receiving the vaccine last week.

Like Pfizer’s vaccine, Moderna’s is an mRNA therapy. That means that it contains no actual virus — just genetic instructions that tell a person’s body to create a specific protein. That protein is more or less identical to the one that SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes COVID-19, uses to attach to a host’s cells and replicate. Moderna’s vaccine causes a person to create just the protein, which on its own is harmless, and then their natural defenses via their immune system react to that and develop a method for fighting it off. That defense system is “remembered” by the body, while the vaccine itself naturally dissolves after a brief time, leaving a person with immunity but nothing else.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has yet to be approved for use in the U.S., uses a weakened and modified common cold virus that doesn’t spread in humans to create the spike protein in recipients, resulting in the body generating its own immune response. That’s a much more tried-and-tested method for creating a vaccine, but both Moderna and Pfizer’s mRNA therapies have shown to be very effective in preliminary data from their large Phase 3 clinical trials.

News: Extra Crunch roundup: ‘Nightmare’ security breach, Poshmark’s IPO, crypto boom, more

• December 18, 2020
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The rest of the world may be slowing down as we prepare for Christmas and New Year’s, but we are not taking our foot off the gas.

The rest of the world may be slowing down as we prepare for Christmas and the new year, but we are not taking our foot off the gas.

Alex Wilhelm keeps a close watch on the public markets in his column The Exchange, but this week, he branched out to look at some of the metrics underpinning soaring cryptocurrency prices and turned his gaze on StockX, the consumer reseller marketplace that just raised $275 million in a Series E that values the company at approximately $2.8 billion.

“Selling a tenth of your company for north of a quarter-billion may be somewhat common among late-stage software startups with tremendous growth,” he says, but “don’t laugh — the round actually makes pretty OK sense.”

Our staff continues to file their end-of-year stories: We ran a post this morning by Manish Singh that studies India’s massive total addressable market for retail. The nation has more than 60 million mom-and-pop neighborhood stores, and companies like Walmart and Amazon are eager to offer help with payments, logistics and inventory management — as are hundreds of native and foreign startups.

In an interview with author and MIT professor Sinan Aral, Managing Editor Danny Crichton discussed some of the debates currently swirling around the desire in some quarters to regulate social media platforms. In “The Hype Machine,” Aral explores topics like neuroscience, economics and misinformation before offering potential solutions for resolving what he calls “a full-blown social media crisis.”

The stories that follow are an overview of Extra Crunch from the last five days. Complete articles are only available to members, but you can use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one or two-year subscription. Details here.

Thank you very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; I hope you have a safe, relaxing weekend!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing

How did fashion marketplace Poshmark go from posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020?

After the company filed a public S-1 last night, Alex Wilhelm pondered the question this morning in The Exchange.

Like many e-commerce platforms, Poshmark saw a surge in activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also slashed its marketing spend, which helped boost profits. As the cash-rich company prepares its road show, “Poshmark is valuable,” Alex concluded.

“How valuable the market will decide. But who will it enrich with its final pricing decision?”

Just how bad is that hack that hit US government agencies?

The breach of FireEye and SolarWinds by hackers working on behalf of Russian intelligence is “the nightmare scenario that has worried cybersecurity experts for years,” reports Zack Whittaker.

The intrusion began several months ago, but news of the breach wasn’t made public until this week.

“Given that potential victims include defense contractors, telecoms, banks, and tech companies, the implications for critical infrastructure and national security, although untold at this point, could be significant,” said Erin Kenneally, director of cyber risk analytics at Guidewire, an industry platform for insurance carriers.

In his analysis for Extra Crunch, Zack breaks down the rippling effects of supply-chain attacks that can compromise platforms like SolarWinds, which is used by more than 420 of the Fortune 500.

From startups to Starbucks: The embedded API opportunity

Embedded finance connects services like payment processing with everyday activities like grabbing a coffee before unlocking an e-scooter.

“The ability to be at the right place at the right time, supporting consumers and merchants alike, where they want it, how they want it and when they want it — cannot be understated,” says Simon Wu, an investment director with Cathay Innovation.

In a post that identifies embedded finance’s top providers and enablers, he offers advice for startups and established brands that are hoping to “earn and build customer loyalty while generating new revenue streams.”

Is rising usage driving crypto’s recent price boom?

Bitcoin is at an all-time high.

CoinMarketCap reports that crypto market values have reached almost $659 billion; that figure was just $140 billion in March 2020.

“These gains have created a huge amount of wealth for crypto holders,” Alex Wilhelm wrote yesterday.

To get a better handle on why crypto values are sky-bound, he parsed some basic industry metrics, including the number of unique bitcoin addresses, fees paid and transactions per day.

“Do the price gains make sense in the short term? Who knows,” he wrote, “but they are not based on nothing.”

2020 was a disaster, but the pandemic put security in the spotlight

For his year-end Extra Crunch story, security reporter Zack Whittaker looked back at the myriad security challenges and vulnerabilities COVID-19 brought to the fore.

The hacks of Fire Eyes and SolarWinds were just one link in the chain: How well is your company prepared to deal with file-encrypting malware, hackers backed by nation-states or employees accessing secure systems from home?

“With 2020 wrapping up, much of the security headaches exposed by the pandemic will linger into the new year,” says Zack.

Inside Zoox’s six-year ride from prototype to product

After six years of research and development, autonomous vehicle company Zoox this week unveiled an electric robotaxi that can carry four people at a maximum speed of 75 miles per hour.

Automotive writer Kirsten Korosec interviewed Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson to learn more about the vehicle’s development and how the company overcame a series of technical and legal challenges.

“I would say that if you have a big idea and you’re confident that it makes sense, you should at least explore the idea, rather than giving up because the current regulations aren’t designed for it,” said Levinson.

Kirsten only had 15 minutes to interview Levinson, but this comprehensive interview covers topics like regulatory compliance, Zoox’s relationship with parent company Amazon and the highest (and lowest) moments he experienced along the way.

Pluralsight $3.5B deal signals a matured edtech market

In one of the largest enterprise acquisitions of 2020, Visa Equity Partners this week purchased Utah-based edtech startup Pluralsight for $3.5 billion.

According to the entrepreneurs and investors reporter Natasha Mascarenhas spoke to, this deal “shows the strength of edtech’s capital options as the pandemic continues.”

“What’s happening in edtech is that capital markets are liquidating,” a major change from “the old days where the options to exit were very narrow,” says Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at GSV Advisors and seed investor in Pluralsight.

Dear Sophie: How did immigration change for startup founders in 2020?

Dear Sophie:

I’m on an F1 OPT and am about to incorporate a startup with my two American co-founders.

What were the biggest immigration changes in 2020 affecting us?

—Ambitious in Albany

How to pick an investor in good or bad times

Founders and the VCs who back them may not be friends, but they’re usually friendly.

Investors are on a first-name basis with entrepreneurs from their portfolio companies and frequently have candid conversations with them about life, work and the world in general. In the before times, they might even have shared a meal or attended a baseball game together.

But make no mistake, it is a top-down relationship — the investor will always have the upper hand. When an entrepreneur accepts a check, they are hiring their next boss.

In an Extra Crunch guest post, Quiq CEO and founder Mike Myer poses two questions for founders who are considering a new relationship with a VC:

• How can the investor help the business?
• What’s the risk that the investor will hurt the business?

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores

In India, about 90% of consumers buy their everyday goods from neighborhood-based kirana stores instead of supermarkets.

As a result, U.S. retail giants like Walmart and Amazon have adopted an “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach, offering the nation’s 60 million mom-and-pop shops software for inventory control, payments and e-commerce.

India’s retail market will be worth an estimated $1.3 trillion by 2025, but e-commerce represents just 3% of that activity today, reports Manish Singh.

For his final Extra Crunch story of 2020, he looked at the startups and major players who are hoping to carve out their niche in one of the world’s largest retail ecosystems.

ClickUp CEO talks hiring, raising and scaling in the white-hot productivity space

Earlier this year, business productivity software startup ClickUp raised a $35 million Series A.

Now, just six months later, the company has closed a second round of $100 million that values the San Diego-based startup at $1 billion.

Lucas Matney interviewed CEO Zeb Evans this week to learn more about how the company was buoyed by pandemic-based behavior shifts that doubled its customer base and multiplied revenue by a factor of nine.

“I think that the biggest thing that we’ve always focused on is shipping a new version of ClickUp every week. That is our differentiation,” he said. “We’ve kind of created these iterative cycles called natural product-market fit and it’s been hard to keep up with that.”

2020’s top 10 enterprise M&A deals totaled a staggering $165B

In 2018, the total value of the year’s 10 top enterprise mergers and acquisitions reached $87 billion; last year, that figure fell to just $40 billion.

But in 2020, 10 M&A deals accounted for $165.2 billion.

“Last year’s biggest deal — Salesforce buying Tableau for $15.7 billion — would have only been good for fifth place on this year’s list,” notes enterprise reporter Ron Miller. “And last year’s fourth largest deal, where VMware bought Pivotal for $2.7 billion, wouldn’t have even made this year’s list at all.”

News: Daily Crunch: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

• December 18, 2020
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We interview the senior senator from Minnesota about fitness trackers, Sony pulls “Cyberpunk 2077” from the PlayStation Store and Indian delivery startup Zomato raises a massive round. This is your Daily Crunch for December 18, 2020. The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to

We interview the senior senator from Minnesota about fitness trackers, Sony pulls “Cyberpunk 2077” from the PlayStation Store and Indian delivery startup Zomato raises a massive round. This is your Daily Crunch for December 18, 2020.

The big story: Amy Klobuchar discusses Amazon Halo concerns

Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar recently wrote an open letter to Alex Azar of the Department of Health and Human Services, in which she discussed Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker and expressed concern that “the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.”

Klobuchar elaborated on these issues in an interview with TechCrunch. HHS, she said, “should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health” and work with the FTC “to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information.”

Klobuchar added, “I think the Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of it, but there’s a number of other devices that have the same issues.”

The tech giants

CD Projekt Red, Sony, Microsoft offer refund to Cyberpunk 2077 customers after bug complaints — Sony has pulled “Cyberpunk 2077” from its PlayStation Store after a flood of complaints.

The big Google DOJ antitrust case probably won’t go to trial until 2023 — In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case.

Twitter bots and memorialized users will become ‘new account types’ in 2021 — Twitter plans to add a way of distinguishing bots and other automated accounts.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Indian food delivery giant Zomato secures $660M — The 12-year-old startup is also in the process of closing a $140 million secondary transaction.

Bumble reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO — The news that Bumble is pursuing an IPO is not a surprise.

Unfold launches lightweight, link-centric profiles called Bio Sites — Squarespace acquired social media startup Unfold last year.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores — After spending more than a decade disrupting neighborhood stores in the U.S. and other markets, Amazon and Walmart are employing a different strategy in India.

Watch Space Force commander Gen. John Raymond explain public-private partnerships for space defense — The Space Force commander explained how the new military service operates like a startup and how startups can learn from the Space Force.

Unpacking Poshmark’s IPO filing — From posting regular losses in 2019 to generating net income in 2020.

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

Everything else

TechCrunch Early Stage is coming back in a big way in 2021 — TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top experts across the core competencies involved in entrepreneurship.

Tips for applying an intersectional framework to AI development — What can we do to move away from using AI/ML models that demonstrate unfair bias?

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: Gift Guide: Our favorite headphones of 2020

• December 18, 2020
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Headphones! They make a pretty solid gift any year, but they’re an even better option when we’re all stuck at home. It’s hard to think (much less get anything done) when the background track of your life is a cacophony of conference calls and Zoom school.

We spent a lot of time with a lot of different headphones this year, so we thought it’d be good to highlight some of our favorites.

Welcome to TechCrunch’s 2020 Holiday Gift Guide! Need help with gift ideas? We’re here to help! We’ll be rolling out gift guides from now through the end of December. You can find our other guides right here.

Headphones! They make a pretty solid gift any year, but they’re an even better option when we’re all stuck at home. It’s hard to think (much less get anything done) when the background track of your life is a cacophony of conference calls and Zoom school.

We spent a lot of time with a lot of different headphones this year, so we thought it’d be good to highlight some of our favorites. As with all things audio-related, “best” is deeply subjective — but these ones all absolutely earned our stamp of approval. Between over-ear, on-ear, in-ear, and gaming headsets, we’ve got the bases covered.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

Over-Ear and On-ear Headphones:

Marshall Major IV

Darrell writes:

Marshall’s latest on-ear headphones combine great sound with a lightweight design, and some unique benefits – including over 80 hours of playtime on a single charge. They also charge either via USB-C, or wirelessly with most standard chargers, by folding them up and resting them on their right ear cup. The on-ear design means no noise cancellation and noise isolation is minimal, so they’re not great for commutes but a very solid choice for the home office. For the price, they’re a great deal, and a stylish accessory, to boot.

Price: $129 from Marshall

Sony WH-1000XM4

Taylor writes:

If you need really serious noise canceling and you aren’t willing to sacrifice on sound quality, Sony’s WH-1000XM4 over-ear headphones are a no-brainer.

Widely regarded as the best at what they do, these headphones actually do quite a few different things very, very well. The sleek over-ear design and sophisticated active noise canceling means they can create a totally silent work environment if that’s what you want. And if you’re just in it for the Sony’s signature killer, punchy sound, that’s enough of a reason to buy them too. (Bose’s Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 are another top-tier pick for over-ear noise canceling if you prefer their look or Bose’s more neutral sound.) For a budget pick, Sony’s last-gen Sony WH-1000XM3 offer the same sound quality and noise canceling with a few fewer bells and whistles.

Price: $278 from Best Buy

 

Master & Dynamic MW65

Veanne writes:

The MW65s are Master & Dynamic’s wireless over-ear noise cancelling model. Between deejaying at dirty underground raves in my early twenties and editing videos for the next decade, I have probably gone through about two dozen headphones. By far, the MW65s are my favorite. 

They’re beautifully designed, and well-constructed with lightweight anodized aluminum and premium leather. The 40mm beryllium drivers deliver clarity throughout the spectrum and audiophiles will love their natural sound profile. The memory foam ear pads already do a decent job of muffling out garbage trucks and police sirens, but the ANC is great for shutting out the world — on high mode, it’s eerily silent. The MW65s work wirelessly via Bluetooth 4.2 with 65+ feet of signal range – a must have for grabbing snacks from the fridge while on important Zoom meetings or to avoid accidentally yanking the laptop off the table. Bonus feature: Google Assistant integration. 

They’ll cost you a steep $400+, but they’re solid headphones and you’re ultimately paying for luxury.

Price: Currently $400 on Amazon

 

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In-Ear Headphones:

Sony WF-1000XM3

Taylor writes:

It should come as no surprise that Sony’s prowess in over-ear noise canceling translates extremely well to a smaller form factor. Earbuds can’t match the sweet silence that over-ear designs provide, but if you don’t like big ol’ headphones the compromise is likely worth it. Sony’s earbuds are a great choice, tuning out a shocking amount of outside noise in a very small package. Like the Sony over-ear pick, they have incredible sound, a very attractive design and come with a huge selection of rubbery caps of different sizes and textures to make them comfortable in different ears. If you value Apple connectivity above all else, pick the AirPods pro. If sound quality or silence matter more, you won’t be disappointed here.

Price: $158 from Best Buy

Also great: Sennheiser’s Momentum True Wireless 2 ($269) earbuds keep pace with Sony’s earbuds, and depending on your sound/fit preferences they’re also a great pick (especially if you find them on sale.)

For the Apple devotee: AirPods Pro

Lucas writes:

Though Apple is now positioning the $249 AirPods Pro as the mid-range product in the AirPods line with the introduction of the ludicrously priced $549 AirPods Max, they are still Apple’s headphone product that seems to have the biggest lead over mainstream competitors.

Features like passthrough mode and spatial audio are nice but are likely features you will use pretty infrequently depending on your setup. As with the less expensive non-Pro AirPods, you’ll be sure to find better sound quality in bluetooth headphones at the price, but you won’t find a better total package that involves so little troubleshooting, a tight package and such quality noise cancellation. The AirPods Pro are a finessed product that just work in a way that makes using other wireless buds comparably painful.

Retailers are really looking to move product this holiday season, so if you’re prodigious, you’ll likely be able to score a good deal on these headphones so if you’re plotting an upgrade or trying to see what all the buzz is about, I recommend you take the plunge.

Price: Currently $199 from Amazon

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Gaming Headsets:

SteelSeries 7P (for Playstation) or 7X (for Xbox)

Devin writes:

Whether you’re planning on playing games on a PC or any console out there, the SteelSeries Arctis 7 gets an unreserved recommendation from me. These headphones have amazing sound in a surprisingly large soundstage, making them suitable for any gaming or media. They’re also light and comfortable while offering decent isolation (and can pipe in surrounding noise if you want). Plus there’s a built-in telescoping mic for chatting with. There are two versions, one for PlayStation and one for Xbox consoles, though both work with PC.

Their downsides are a cluttered physical interface — there’s a lot going on on the undersides of the earcups — and a corded, multi-part (rather than USB key shaped) wireless dongle. But these are minor issues considering what you get for the $150 price.

Price: $150 from SteelSeries

Budget pick: Razer Kraken X USB

Devin writes:

This is my go-to headset for when friends need something solid but inexpensive. The sound is a bit bass-heavy and it’s not wireless, but I used these personally for quite a while and found them comfortable, reliable, and the built-in mic is easily operated.

Price: $44 from Amazon

Upgrade pick: SteelSeries Arctis Pro Wireless

While on the pricier end for a gaming headset, SteelSeries’ Arctis Pros are outstanding. They’re extremely comfortable largely thanks to a ski-goggle inspired suspension headband, and swappable rechargeable batteries (one in the headset, one charging in the base station) help ensure you’re never caught scrambling for a charging cable mid-battle. A dedicated mixer helps you tweak the sound to your liking even in games where it’s otherwise locked, and a very visible mute indicator on the tip of the microphone makes it clear whether you’re on air or not. One catch: they’ll work with PC, Mac, and Playstation (including PS5 with an upcoming firmware update), but not Xbox.

Price: $326 from Amazon

News: Orbital refueling and manufacturing go from theory to reality in 2021

• December 18, 2020
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The idea of satellites and other spacecraft being able to refuel, repair, or even add new capabilities while in orbit has generally seemed like a “nice in theory” one, but as leaders from Maxar, Astroscale, and Orbit Fab explained at TC Sessions: Space, 2021 will be the year that theory becomes reality — or at

The idea of satellites and other spacecraft being able to refuel, repair, or even add new capabilities while in orbit has generally seemed like a “nice in theory” one, but as leaders from Maxar, Astroscale, and Orbit Fab explained at TC Sessions: Space, 2021 will be the year that theory becomes reality — or at the very least, realistic.

Once they go up, satellites are generally considered fixed assets that only depreciate, become obsolete, or reach the end of their fuel supply and inevitably deorbit. But with a bit of coordination many of these phenomenally expensive spacecraft could have their lives extended in a number of ways, and considering the costs involved in lofting a new one, the prospect may be an attractive one.

“Launch costs are going down, but also launch frequency, the cadence in which things are being sent up into space is also going up,” pointed out Lucy Condakchian, GM of robotics at Maxar Technologies . “So if you can launch smaller subsystems payloads and whatnot, and then be able to assemble things in space, maybe change out a certain aspect of what that satellite is doing… Why can’t we go up and actually change out a power subsystem, change out a camera mechanism, a computing element, whatever the case may be?”

That’s what Maxar and NASA will be demonstrating next year with OSAM-1, formerly called Restore-L, in which a spacecraft will attempt to service, assemble, and manufacture items (hence the name) while on orbit.

“Just being able to demonstrate something in space shows that we can do that, proves the point of ‘Yes, it is possible,’ and hopefully it opens up much further opportunities down the road,” said Condakchian. The company’s robotic arms for Martian landers have shown their versatility, as well, and there’s no reason to think that satellite arms won’t be as broadly useful.

While Maxar is aiming to equip future spacecraft, Ron Lopez, President of Astroscale US (the original company is Japan-based), sees an opportunity in today’s aging space infrastructure.

“There are a lot of companies that are developing on orbit inspection services. That’s for the satellites that are already out there that don’t have those robotic capabilities, or can’t afford to have them in the future when the product owner-operator decides not to put them on,” he explained.

“There’s any number of different use cases for this kind of capability,” he continued. “Insurance claims if there’s an anomaly on a satellite, and it needs to be determined what it was that happened, etc, or space situational awareness. Of course, we know that this is a big concern for everybody with the increasing number of objects in space, understanding what’s where, doing what, and is it a threat to other objects in space, is very important.”

Astroscale, which recently raised a $51M series E, is about to launch a mission in just a few months that will demonstrate orbital debris detection and removal. That doesn’t mean spare screws dropped by ISS spacewalks — more likely dead satellites that have been left to drift and deorbit on their own time, which could be years from now. All they need is a little push and low-Earth orbit is that much safer and cleaner.

Daniel Faber, CEO and founder of Orbit Fab, wants to prevent that situation from occurring in the first place by building what he calls “gas stations in space.” It’s a bit different from the terrestrial ones, closer perhaps to in-flight refueling of jets, but you get the idea.

“The future that Orbit Fab sees is a fully cooperative and bustling in space economy, we don’t think that that can be achieved by relying on robotics on every spacecraft, there’s always going to be a need for tow trucks, there’s always going to be a need for complex robotic servicing when things go wrong, and things break down. And right now, nothing has been designed to be serviced. So you need a tow truck for any of these type of things,” he said.

“We failed to build a satellite gas tanker because we couldn’t find the fueling port. So we built one,” he said, referring to the company’s RAFTI connector, which dozens of partners are now looking at including in their spacecraft. “We’ve had to develop other products and technologies as well to make refueling accessible to our customers.”

The tanker will have its first orbit tests — you guessed it, next year. A recently announced investment, bringing their seed total to $6M, should help make that happen. 2021 is looking to be a big one for many areas of space, but in this particular sector it will be the moment where the capability is proven out, perhaps leading to a major expansion the following year.

That was just a fraction of what we talked about on the panel. If you missed it live, don’t worry – Extra Crunch subscribers get access to all the on-stage content from TC Sessions: Space and every other event as well. Sign up here.

News: Amazon’s Halo fitness tracker raises privacy concerns for Amy Klobuchar

• December 18, 2020
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After reading a review of Amazon’s new fitness tracker, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar penned an open letter. “Recent reports have raised concerns about the Halo’s access to this extensive personal and private health information,” the lawmaker wrote to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “Among publicly available consumer health devices, the

After reading a review of Amazon’s new fitness tracker, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar penned an open letter.

“Recent reports have raised concerns about the Halo’s access to this extensive personal and private health information,” the lawmaker wrote to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. “Among publicly available consumer health devices, the Halo appears to collect an unprecedented level of personal information.”

The senator is far from the first critic to express concern about the fitness tracker — the Halo raised eyebrows the moment it was unveiled in August. She is, however, one of the few critics in a position to actually do something about the device, which features both an always-on microphone and asks wearers to perform a full body scan.

“I’m wearing my Fitbit,” Klobuchar says in an interview with TechCrunch. She takes a moment before correcting herself. “Oh, I didn’t put it on this morning. That’s very bad. I wear a Fitbit nearly every day. I sometimes have gone years without doing it, but since, I’d say, about February I’ve been wearing it.”

The senator’s not alone, certainly. According to a January 2020 report from Pew, roughly one-in-five U.S. adults regularly wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker. I’m wearing one as I type this, and chances are pretty good you’re wearing one as well. The Halo may cross a line for some, but the device is far from the first tracker to raise concern among privacy advocates. Klobuchar says that while the Halo’s specific level of data collection, “just cries out for some kind of rules and regulations in place,” stronger scrutiny and regulation is needed for the category across the board.

“I really do think there’s got to be rules in place,” she says. “The reason I’m writing HHS is because they should play a larger role in ensuring data privacy when it comes to health, but between the HHS and the Federal Trade Commission, they’ve got to come up with some rules to safeguard private health information. And I think the Amazon Halo is just the ultimate example of it, but there’s a number of other devices that have the same issues. I’m thinking there’s some state regulations going on and things like that, and we just need federal standards.”

The letter lays out four questions for Azar and the HHS, pertaining to the department’s role in safeguarding health data. Amazon’s defense of the product is two-fold: body scanning and speech collection are optional, and the company does not have direct access to this locally stored data.

Asked for response to the letter, the company tells TechCrunch:

We have been in touch with Senator Klobuchar’s office to address their questions about Amazon Halo. Privacy is foundational to how we designed and built Amazon Halo. Body and Tone are both optional features that are not required to use the product. Amazon does not have access to Body scan images or Tone speech samples. We are transparent about the privacy practices for this service and you can read more in the Amazon Halo privacy whitepaper.

“[The letter is] specifically about that they’re safeguarding the private health information, they’re ensuring security and privacy,” Klobuchar tells TechCrunch. “And even if Amazon Halo is saying they’re doing all of this, we need to have rules of the road in place for any company that does it.”

Health privacy concerns have been top of mind since Google announced plans to acquire Fitbit for $2.1 billion in November 2019. At the time, the deal was expected to close at some point in 2020. That timeline has since proven overly optimistic. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August, Fitbit said the closing date could be pushed as late as May 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic may well have played an issue in that delay, but Google’s biggest hurdle thus far has been government approval. A number of groups and individuals have raised concern over the deal, including Amnesty International. In August, the EU posited that the deal could “further entrench Google’s market position in the online advertising markets by increasing the already vast amount of data that Google could use for personalization of the ads it serves and displays.”

After launching an investigation into the deal, the Commission greenlit the deal earlier this week — with major caveats. At the top of the list is Google’s 10-year commitment to not use Fitbit health data for ad targeting. The E.U. has also reserved the right to extend the safeguard by another 10 years beyond that.

Klobuchar says she believes the privacy caveats were necessary. “I think the decision about if they’re sufficient or not should be made in the U.S. by our own regulators based on the facts. I am glad they created the data silo. […] And I think we need to greatly up our examination of mergers. We should use those mergers to either say ‘no, because they’re so anti-competitive,’ or to put conditions on them.”

Increased antitrust scrutiny has been a key project for the senator. In August 2019, she introduced the Monopolization Deterrence Act with Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal. Klobuchar says she hopes to get the bill passed after the new president takes office.

“This new session will be the moment,” she tells TechCrunch. “The Trump administration actually brought these major cases. They were late in the game, but they actually did their job here at the end. But the president wasn’t organized enough in terms of his focus to be able to actually get legislation done on monopolies. And so I think this is going to be incumbent on the Biden administration and the next AG to do that.”

Any meaningful effort to reduce the size and influence of tech corporations will have to go further than simply increasing regulatory scrutiny at the point of acquisition, however. In many cases, that bridge was crossed long ago.

“It’s not just future monopoly mergers being considered,” Klobuchar says. “It’s looking back at what’s happened. That’s what the Facebook suit is. That’s what the Google suit is in a different way. There’s still stuff about DoubleClick and everything, but mostly it’s about how they’re using their monopoly power. So you can be sued for looking back at mergers (that’s what they’re doing at Facebook), but you also can be sued for what we call ‘exclusionary conduct,’ for things that you’ve done that are anti-competitive.”

The Fitbit-wearing senator is quick to close by adding that she’s not anti-technology, per se. “I think the innovations are great. I use them all the time, even though I’ve had some hilarious online ordering experiences, including when I now have six two-pound things of maple yogurt. I mistook it and I thought they were small yogurts in my refrigerator. I think that they’re great, but I think that they can still be great with allowing from our competition, they’ll be better.”

 

News: The big Google DOJ antitrust case probably won’t go to trial until 2023

• December 18, 2020
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The Justice Department’s historic lawsuit against Google is moving along — albeit very, very slowly. In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case. The good news and the bad news for both parties involved is that it’s more than two years away. As CNBC reports, Mehta

The Justice Department’s historic lawsuit against Google is moving along — albeit very, very slowly. In a status hearing Friday, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set a tentative date for the case. The good news and the bad news for both parties involved is that it’s more than two years away.

As CNBC reports, Mehta chose Sept. 12, 2023 as the first day of the trial, which is expected to last weeks. That date could change, but with both the Justice Department and Google agreeing to that timeline it’s a pretty good estimate.

It might be years before the trial, but the DOJ’s lawsuit against Google, filed in October, is already hanging over Silicon Valley’s head. The suit focuses on Google’s search and ads business and accuses the company of maintaining illegal monopolies in those markets. A date in 2023 gives Google plenty of time to sharpen its defenses and do what it wants until then, but it also means the specter of a major regulatory threat will loom large for the foreseeable future.

States are also pursing their own aggressive efforts to regulate the search giant, with two separate major multistate lawsuits similarly focused on Google’s search and advertising power filed this week. Last week, the state of California also asked to join the Justice Department’s lawsuit, with Michigan and Wisconsin following suit on Thursday.

“Their proposed joinder, along with the separate complaint filed today by a coalition of state Attorneys General, underscores the broad and bipartisan consensus that Google’s practices in search and search advertising need antitrust redress,” Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen said of the states deciding to join the suit.

The historic case is the first major federal antitrust action to hit a technology company since the U.S. pursued a case against Microsoft more than two decades ago. That case was settled in 2001, just three years after Google’s founding.

With few regulations in place to rein it in, the tech industry exploded over the course of the last twenty years. Silicon Valley’s innovations are now woven into every market and corner of society imaginable, making the era of the Microsoft antitrust saga looks downright quaint in comparison.

News: TechCrunch Early Stage is coming back in a big way in 2021

• December 18, 2020
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What’s next? That’s the question we ask ourselves here at TechCrunch every day for the past 15 years. The answer, more often than not, comes from the earliest stage founders. That’s why last year, we introduced a new event called TechCrunch Early Stage. TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top

What’s next? That’s the question we ask ourselves here at TechCrunch every day for the past 15 years. The answer, more often than not, comes from the earliest stage founders. That’s why last year, we introduced a new event called TechCrunch Early Stage.

TC Early Stage is all about providing founders access to the top experts across all the core competencies involved in entrepreneurialism, from fundraising to marketing to operations. It quickly became one of the most beloved offerings from TechCrunch, so it should come as no surprise that we’re doubling down in 2021.

Next year, we’ll host two TC Early Stage events (virtually) one on April 1 & 2 and one on July  8 & 9 with different perspectives and content at each.

Here’s how it works:

Experts in fundraising, marketing and operations will give presentations to the audience with plenty of time for live Q&A. These workshops will span the entire startup experience, with speakers that include early-stage investors (lots of investors), legal whizzes, growth gurus, product-market fit wallahs, tech stack experts, recruiting aces and much more, including workshops on pitch breakdowns.

TechCrunch’s goal is to provide founders with insights and new relationships on par with what an accelerator experience provides, only in a single day, and with a much greater variety of experts and investors.

TC Early Stage is designed for founders who are in their early innings, anywhere from pre-seed through Series A, when entrepreneurs need all the guidance they can get. With that in mind, the event’s heart is dozens of breakout sessions run by experts and curated by TechCrunch editors. The breakouts will be long on attendee questions and conversation, and the event is structured so that attendees can easily get to six to eight different breakouts over the course of the day.

Last year, we had sessions on:

• “When It Comes To Fundraising, Timing Is Everything” with Jake Saper
• “Seed Funding Tips and Tricks” with Jeff Clavier
• “What VCs Want In a Term Sheet” with Lior Zorea
• “How To Get People Obsessed with Your Brand” with Emily Heyward
• “How To Sell An Idea When You Don’t Have a Product” with Charles Hudson
• “How To Get Into Y Combinator” with Dalton Caldwell

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’re not in the business of reinventing the wheel and have no plans to fix what ain’t broken. Expect more like this from our 2021 Early Stage events going down on April 1 & 2 and July 8 & 9. You can get a single event ticket at the Early Bird rate of $199 if you’re an early stage founder and $299 if you are a later stage founder, investor or just want to add some more tools to your knowledge kit. But you can save more when you book the dual two-event ticket – there will be different speakers and topics for each event so you won’t want to miss out on both!

Can’t wait to see you there!