Monthly Archives: December 2020

News: Uber sells air taxi business Elevate to Joby Aviation, shedding its last moonshot

• December 8, 2020
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Uber has offloaded its air taxi enterprise Elevate to Joby Aviation, the last of several moonshots to be sold by the ride-hailing company in a pursuit to stick to its core business and reach profitability. The transaction announced Tuesday is part of a complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an

Uber has offloaded its air taxi enterprise Elevate to Joby Aviation, the last of several moonshots to be sold by the ride-hailing company in a pursuit to stick to its core business and reach profitability.

The transaction announced Tuesday is part of a complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an expanded partnership between the two companies. Last year, Uber and Joby, which is developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, signed on as a vehicle partner for Uber’s Elevate initiative. Joby was the first partner to commit to deploying air taxi services by 2023.

The $75 million investment comes in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made as part of Joby’s Series C financing round in January 2020, Uber said. To date, Joby Aviation has raised $820 million. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup.

Under the deal, which is expected to close in early 2021, the two parent companies have agreed to integrate their respective services into each other’s apps.

“Advanced air mobility has the potential to be exponentially positive for the environment and future generations,” Uber CEO said Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “This deal allows us to deepen our partnership with Joby, the clear leader in this field, to accelerate the path to market for these technologies.”

While Joby is considered one of the leaders, Elevate did play a role in shaping the nascent industry, including establishing some of the benchmarks used by competitors.

“The team at Uber Elevate has not only played an important role in our industry, they have also developed a remarkable set of software tools that build on more than a decade of experience enabling on-demand mobility,” Joby Aviation CEO JoeBen Bevirt said in a statement.”These tools and new team members will be invaluable to us as we accelerate our plans for commercial launch.”

One year ago, Uber’s business model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic and Khosrowshahi’s focus on profitability prompted the company to dump its moonshots and double down on delivery with its acquisition of Postmates.

Today, Uber is a company focused on ride-hailing and delivery while keeping its hand in micromobility, logistics and autonomous vehicles through a series of deals struck in 2020.

The Joby-Elevate terms are similar to two other Uber deals this year. In spring, Uber led a $170 million funding round in micromobility startup Lime. As part of the deal, Lime acquired Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump. The majority of Jump’s 400 employees were laid off. Earlier this week, autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that will value the combined company at $10 billion.

Just like the Uber’s deals with Lime and now Joby, Aurora isn’t paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was last valued at $7.25 billion. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Uber said October that it sold off a $500 million stake in its Uber Freight business to an investor group led by New York-based investment firm Greenbriar Equity Group. The deal valued the unit at $3.3 billion on a post-money basis. Uber has maintained its majority stake in Uber Freight unlike the Jump, Elevate and ATG deals.

News: Cybersecurity firm FireEye says it was hacked by a nation-state

• December 8, 2020
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FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, has now admitted it too has fallen victim to hackers, which the company called a “sophisticated threat actor” that was likely backed by a nation-state. In a blog post confirming the breach, the company’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the nation-backed hackers have “top-tier offensive

FireEye, normally the first company that cyberattack victims will call, has now admitted it too has fallen victim to hackers, which the company called a “sophisticated threat actor” that was likely backed by a nation-state.

In a blog post confirming the breach, the company’s chief executive Kevin Mandia said the nation-backed hackers have “top-tier offensive capabilities,” but did not attribute blame or say which government was behind the attack.

Mandia, who founded Mandiant, the incident response firm acquired by FireEye in 2014, said the hackers used a “novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past” to steal hacking tools used typically by red teams, which are tasked with launching authorized but offensive hacking campaigns against customers in order to find weaknesses or vulnerabilities before malicious hackers do.

“These tools mimic the behavior of many cyberthreat actors and enable FireEye to provide essential diagnostic security services to our customers,” said Mandia. “None of the tools contain zero-day exploits. Consistent with our goal to protect the community, we are proactively releasing methods and means to detect the use of our stolen red team tools.”

But if stolen, these tools could make it easier for hackers to launch attacks against their victims.

Two years ago, hackers breached and stole similarly offensive hacking tools from the National Security Agency, which the spy agency used to collect intelligence on foreign suspected terrorists. But the exploit was later published and was used to infect thousands of computers with the WannaCry ransomware, causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Mandia said that FireEye has developed hundreds of countermeasures to minimize the impact that these tools pose in the event that the hackers use the tools, but that FireEye has seen no evidence that the tools have been abused.

Although the motives of the hackers are unknown, Mandia said that the hackers appeared to seek information related to its government customers.

But it’s not clear exactly when the breach happened, or how FireEye was alerted to the incident. A spokesperson for FireEye declined to comment beyond the blog post when reached by TechCrunch.

FireEye, valued at about $3.5 billion, saw its stock tank by more than 7% in after-hours trading. The company has gained a reputation as one of the most well-resourced cybersecurity firms on the market, often brought in to understand how a breach happened and what may have been taken.

In this case, FireEye said it had reported the incident to the FBI and alerted industry partners, like Microsoft, to the breach. Microsoft said it was assisting with FireEye’s investigation.

“This incident demonstrates why the security industry must work together to defend against and respond to threats posed by well-funded adversaries using novel and sophisticated attack techniques,” said Microsoft’s Jeff Jones. “We commend FireEye for their disclosure and collaboration, so that we can all be better prepared.”

News: Elon Musk moved to Texas

• December 8, 2020
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SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that he has moved to Texas, confirming months of speculation that the billionaire would leave California, a state of which he has become increasingly critical. Musk confirmed the move during an interview at the The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual summit. His remarks confirmed a CNBC

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Tuesday that he has moved to Texas, confirming months of speculation that the billionaire would leave California, a state of which he has become increasingly critical. Musk confirmed the move during an interview at the The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council annual summit.

His remarks confirmed a CNBC report that Musk had told friends of his intent to move to Texas.

The move coincides with a number of SpaceX and Tesla-related projects in Texas, the sale of several of Musk’s Los Angeles homes as well as his disagreement with how California public officials have handled the COVID-19 pandemic. In May, Musk filed a lawsuit against Alameda County and threatened to move its headquarters and future programs to Texas or Nevada immediately. The lawsuit stemmed from Tesla’s escalating fight with health officials over whether its factory in Fremont could reopen during a stay-at-home order enacted due to the coronavirus.

During the interview, Musk said California was taking its winning position for granted and becoming complacent.

Speculation that Musk would move to Texas picked up after Tesla picked and started construction on a site near Austin for a factory that will build its Cybertruck and the Model 3 and Model Y. His other privately held company, SpaceX, is planning a launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. Bloomberg reported Monday that Musk had moved his foundation to Austin, another signal that he had or was about to make the jump to Texas.

Texas has become a hotspot in recent years, with Austin, Houston and Dallas seeing spikes of growth. During the pandemic, that pace accelerated as California-based tech workers fled expensive areas such as Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

The state has another important perk for Musk: no state income tax.

California is still a major hub of SpaceX and Tesla operations. SpaceX headquarters are in Hawthorne and Tesla’s headquarters are in Silicon Valley. The company’s main factory, which assembles the Model 3, Model X and Model S and Model Y, is in Fremont.

News: AWS expands on SageMaker capabilities with end-to-end features for machine learning

• December 8, 2020
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Nearly three years after it was first launched, Amazon Web Services’ SageMaker platform has gotten a significant upgrade in the form of new features making it easier for developers to automate and scale each step of the process to build new automation and machine learning capabilities, the company said. As machine learning moves into the

Nearly three years after it was first launched, Amazon Web Services’ SageMaker platform has gotten a significant upgrade in the form of new features making it easier for developers to automate and scale each step of the process to build new automation and machine learning capabilities, the company said.

As machine learning moves into the mainstream, business units across organizations will find applications for automation,  and AWS is trying to make the development of those bespoke applications easier for its customers.

“One of the best parts of having such a widely-adopted service like SageMaker is that we get lots of customer suggestions which fuel our next set of deliverables,” said AWS vice president of machine learning, Swami Sivasubramanian. “Today, we are announcing a set of tools for Amazon SageMaker that makes it much easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale.”

Already companies like 3M, ADP, AstraZeneca, Avis, Bayer, Capital One, Cerner, Domino’s Pizza, Fidelity Investments, Lenovo, Lyft, T-Mobile, and Thomson Reuters are using SageMaker tools in their own operations, according to AWS.

The company’s new products include Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which the company said was providing a way to normalize data from disparate sources so the data is consistently easy to use. Data Wrangler can also ease the process of grouping disparate data sources into features to highlight certain types of data. The Data Wrangler tool contains over 300 built-in data transformers that can help customers normalize, transform and combine features without having to write any code.

Amazon also unveiled the Feature Store, which allows customers to create repositories that make it easier to store, update, retrieve and share machine learning features for training and inference.

Another new tool that Amazon Web Services touted was its workflow management and automation toolkit, Pipelines. The Pipelines tech is designed to provide orchestration and automation features not dissimilar from traditional programming. Using pipelines, developers can define each step of an end-to-end machine learning workflow, the company said in a statement. Developers can use the tools to re-run an end-to-end workflow from SageMaker Studio using the same settings to get the same model every time, or they can re-run the workflow with new data to update their models.

To address the longstanding issues with data bias in artificial intelligence and machine learning models, Amazon launched SageMaker Clarify. First announced today, this tool allegedly provides bias detection across the machine learning workflow, so developers can build with an eye towards better transparency on how models were set up. There are open source tools that can do these tests, Amazon acknowledged, but the tools are manual and require a lot of lifting from developers, according to the company.

Other products designed to simplify the machine learning application development process include SageMaker Debugger, which enables to developers to train models faster by monitoring system resource utilization and alerting developers to potential bottlenecks; Distributed Training, which makes it possible to train large, complex, deep learning models faster than current approaches by automatically splitting data cross multiple GPUs to accelerate training times; and SageMaker Edge Manager, a machine learning model management tool for edge devices, which allows developers to optimize, secure, monitor and manage models deployed on fleets of edge devices.

Last but not least, Amazon unveiled SageMaker JumpStart, which provides developers with a searchable interface to find algorithms and sample notebooks so they can get started on their machine learning journey. The company said it would give developers new to machine learning the option to select several pre-built machine learning solutions and deploy them into SageMaker environments.

 

News: Rivian is building its own EV charging network, but with an adventurous twist

• December 8, 2020
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Drivers cruising along an off-the-beaten track might stumble upon an unusual sight in the coming months: a Rivian electric charging station. The electric automaker has designed and is now starting to build out a network of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the United States as it prepares for the first deliveries of its R1T pickup

Drivers cruising along an off-the-beaten track might stumble upon an unusual sight in the coming months: a Rivian electric charging station.

The electric automaker has designed and is now starting to build out a network of electric vehicle charging stations throughout the United States as it prepares for the first deliveries of its R1T pickup truck and RS1 sport utility vehicle. The network will include fast-chargers located along interstates, a strategy employed by Tesla and Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal.

Rivian is adding a second layer to its electric vehicle charging game plan that’s atypical of the industry. The company will set up dozens of EV chargers designed to power up its electric vehicles while parked at adventurous destinations, from mountain bike and hiking trails to kayaking spots and maybe even near popular climbing crags. It’s a direct appeal to Rivian’s customer base and one required to build confidence in the brand and electric vehicles, in general, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told TechCrunch in a wide-ranging interview about charging, batteries and automated driving.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to create Rivian charging locations that aren’t on the interstate, that help draw you or enable you to go to places that normally are not the kinds of places that invite or welcome electric vehicles because of charging infrastructure,” Scaringe said. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how you can essentially create these curated drives where, depending on your point of interest, you can pick different paths. If you want to stop midway through the trip for a one-mile, two-mile or five-mile hike, you know, here’s a route that you want to take and here’s a charging location right next to it.”

An “all of the above” approach

The Rivian consumer-facing network is essentially two-tiers that will offer fast charging along the interstate where drivers need it, and strategically located destination chargers for when speed isn’t as important. It has created what Scaringe described as a “really interesting and challenging real estate” problem as the company figures out where those points of interest are and the best spots to locate charging stations along a particular route.  

Building the Rivian network has been more than a test of consumer brand awareness and real estate wits. The electric automaker, which has raised about $6 billion, developed the tech in-house, including the high-speed DC charger. 

“We haven’t talked about this really, but that charger, the power electronics module — or the backbone of those chargers — is something that we’re going to be deploying at scale,” Scaringe said, adding that the high-speed DC charger will be capable of up to 140 miles in about 20 minutes.

This hardware, and accompanying charging software, will be most visible in the consumer-facing Rivian network. However, the platform and the hardware around it also will be used for a fleet-based product, said Scaringe.

“If you think of commercial vans, the charger and the dispenser may look a little different, but the guts of these power modules that are used to build up the charging capability are identically applied in these very different applications,” he said. “It’s one of the reasons we built all that core competency, so we can build both fleet-based B2B charging solutions and the consumer-facing adventure network for Rivian customers.

Controlling the experience

Rivian has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the R1T and R1S to market. And while it has raised $6 billion to date, those funds could easily be spent on developing technology and scaling up manufacturing. Scaringe argues that the Rivian network is a necessary undertaking if the automaker hopes to build confidence by controlling the entire ownership experience.

There are numerous third-party charging companies in operation today, including ChargePoint, EVConnect, EVGo, Electrify America and Greenlots. Legacy automakers have created partnerships and even made strategic investments in these businesses ahead of their own electric vehicle rollouts. But Scaringe isn’t willing to rely completely on third-party networks.

“The challenge is we don’t control those networks, so the payments platforms, the uptime, the performance, the ability to reserve a charger — all those things that take the friction of charging away — we don’t truly control,” said Scaringe. “With the Rivian Adventure Network, we have 100% control of that; we get to know what vehicles are charging or how they’re charging, the rates. We can be really creative in terms of locations, so it can allow us to get to places that are very specific and unique to Rivian.”

Open or shut?

The Rivian network is clearly being built for Rivian customers. However, it doesn’t mean this will necessarily be a closed proprietary system like Tesla’s Supercharger network.

The two common connectors used for rapid charging are Combined Charging System (CCS) or CHAdeMO. CCS, a direct current connector that Rivian uses, is an open international standard that in recent years has gained popularity in Europe and North America.

This means that Rivian trucks and SUVs can also use any third-party CCS charging station without having to use an adapter. It also means that theoretically other electric vehicles with the CCS standard could use the Rivian network, although software could block their use.

Scaringe wouldn’t say exactly how many charging stations would be open by this summer, when the first deliveries of the electric pickup and SUV are expected to begin. He noted that dozens of charging stations — each station having an average of six charging connectors — will be erected in the U.S. in 2021.

“As that network is built it will take some of the pressure off the need to have the very large battery packs,” Scaringe said.

Every Rivian R1T and R1S comes standard with a battery pack that has more than 300 miles of range. The company plans to make a pack with more than 400 miles of range available in the RT1 beginning in January 2022. A longer range R1S with both five and seven-passenger seating will be announced following start of production, the company has previously said. Rivian is also planning to eventually offer a smaller 250-mile range pack for a lower-priced R1T and R1S.

Even without specific numbers, it’s clear that Scaringe’s aspirations and plans extend well beyond “dozens” of the Rivian stations.

“The scale of a network is not something that you can turn on overnight,” he said. It takes months of time to get full coverage of the U.S. and years of time to get dense coverage, which by 2023 or 2024, we will certainly have.”

News: Cyberpunk 2077 draws criticism for seizure-inducing sequence with no warning or mitigation

• December 8, 2020
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One of the biggest games of the year, “Cyberpunk 2077,” is about to be released, but developer CD Projekt Red is already under fire for an early game sequence with the potential to induce seizures. Players with epilepsy should be warned that there is currently no way to skip this, and the visual feature will

One of the biggest games of the year, “Cyberpunk 2077,” is about to be released, but developer CD Projekt Red is already under fire for an early game sequence with the potential to induce seizures. Players with epilepsy should be warned that there is currently no way to skip this, and the visual feature will be repeated throughout the game.

Strobing lights can induce seizures in some people prone to them, but that hasn’t stopped many high-profile games from including them for effect. Usually there is a boilerplate warning on boot saying this is a possibility, but in most games it’s more of a warning that there may potentially be flashing lights of this type, for example if several flashbang grenades went off one after the other. Many games also offer an option to reduce the intensity of flashing lights or otherwise change their appearance, along with other options for accessibility.

“Cyberpunk” seems to tread especially dangerous territory fundamentally, as its game world is full of the kind of seedy, flickering-neon lighting one associates with a grimy, futuristic dystopia. But within the first few hours of the game there is a much more severe and thoughtlessly designed event that has already caused a reviewer at Game Informer to experience a seizure. It involves the (otherwise quite interesting) “braindances,” or BDs, which let your character relive experiences recorded by others, by donning a special headset… that boots up with intense flashing lights:

When “suiting up” for a BD, especially with Judy, V will be given a headset that is meant to onset the instance. The headset fits over both eyes and features a rapid onslaught of white and red blinking LEDs, much like the actual device neurologists use in real life to trigger a seizure when they need to trigger one for diagnosis purposes. If not modeled off of the IRL design, it’s a very spot-on coincidence, and because of that this is one aspect that I would personally advise you to avoid altogether. When you notice the headset come into play, look away completely or close your eyes. This is a pattern of lights designed to trigger an epileptic episode and it very much did that in my own personal playthrough.

You can see the event referred to in the screenshot above (taken afterwards, but you can see the device). I recall this moment quite clearly from my own playthrough, and remember thinking it was rather an intense light show indeed. Unfortunately for this person, it caused a serious episode and could do so for many others upon its release on the 10th.

Among the many options for changing the appearance of “Cyberpunk 2077,” there isn’t one for reducing flashing lights that I could find. I’ve asked CD Projekt Red about this and hopefully they can ship something to mitigate the issue at or near launch. The company did say on Twitter that it was looking into a solution.

News: Indiegogo founder launches alternative investments discovery platform Vincent

• December 8, 2020
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As more and more alternative investment marketplaces pop up around specific verticals like art or collectibles, Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin is launching a Kayak-like platform called Vincent which helps curious investors get a handle on what the entire asset class has to offer. Rubin and co-founders Evan Cohen and Ross Cohen have raised $2 million

As more and more alternative investment marketplaces pop up around specific verticals like art or collectibles, Indiegogo founder Slava Rubin is launching a Kayak-like platform called Vincent which helps curious investors get a handle on what the entire asset class has to offer.

Rubin and co-founders Evan Cohen and Ross Cohen have raised $2 million for the venture with backing from investors including Uncommon Denominator, ERA Ventures, The Fund and Rubin’s own firm Humbition. Vincent launched in beta this July but the firm is now ready to take the platform wide with a public launch. Rubin says the team has assembled the “most comprehensive database of alternate investments.”

Rubin has been a driving force behind alternative investments since his Indiegogo days and has helped guide some of the existing legislation that has made investments in alternative assets more tenable.

Part of the buzz around alternative investments in 2020 is the result of evolving guidance from stateside regulatory bodies, while added attention comes from the boom around investment platforms that bring users more approachable tools to access financial institutions. Specific verticals may be hoping to build up a Robinhood -like brand and following around their particular niche, but Vincent is aiming to benefit from rising tides and users eyeing diversification.

“[Our partners] are really heads down often on a lot of curation around a specific deal and trying to become experts in that space,” Rubin tells TechCrunch . “What we’ve learned is that the investor is thinking more about trying to get exposure to alternative investments and not only do they want exposure to one alternative investment, they want exposure to the entire asset class.”

The company currently has partnerships with about 50 platforms, Rubin tells me, including platforms like WeFunder, SharesPost, Rally Rd. and Otis. The deals which span real estate, venture, collectibles, and art, among others, bring Vincent users access to $2 billion worth of investments, the company says. Users visiting Vincent are asked whether or not they are accredited which routes them to the list of deals they have access to.

Similar to Kayak, people are using Vincent to source the deals, but once they find an asset that tickles their fancy, they’ve being redirected to the partner platform’s site or app in order to actually carry out the deal. Once a user carries out an investment on said platform, Vincent receives a standard fee from the partner platform.

Vincent’s main challenge is building up a brand that resonates with users without actually managing the actual investments themselves. Most of these partner platforms, as Rubin notes, are built around curating and developing an expertise around a specific niche, whether that works in a broader scenario is the big question.

“The whole goal of an aggregator is to really simplify an experience where the market is massively fragmented,” Rubin says.

Vincent is also aiming to be more than an aggregator, serving up editorial content with a blog and newsletter that the team hopes can make the platform more of a one-stop-shop for investors looking to educate themselves on alternative assets. For his part, Rubin hopes that the gold rush of startups building alternative investment platforms is the perfect time for a player to come in that focuses on streamlining everything.

 

News: Sunshine Contacts may have given out your home address, even if you’re not using the app

• December 8, 2020
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A third-party contacts app you’re not using may be handing out your home address to its users. In November, former Yahoo CEO and Google veteran Marissa Mayer and co-founder Enrique Muñoz Torres introduced their newly rebranded startup Sunshine, and its first product, Sunshine Contacts. The new iOS app offers to organize your address book by

A third-party contacts app you’re not using may be handing out your home address to its users. In November, former Yahoo CEO and Google veteran Marissa Mayer and co-founder Enrique Muñoz Torres introduced their newly rebranded startup Sunshine, and its first product, Sunshine Contacts. The new iOS app offers to organize your address book by handling duplicates and merges using AI technology, as well as fill in some of the missing bits of information by gathering data from the web — like LinkedIn profiles, for example.

But some users were surprised to find they suddenly had home addresses for their contacts, too, including for those who were not already Sunshine users.

TechCrunch reached out to Sunshine to better understand the situation, given the potential privacy concerns.

We understand there are several ways that users may encounter someone’s home address in the Sunshine app. A user may already have the address on file in their phone’s address book, of course, or they may have opted in to allow Sunshine to scan their inbox in order to extract information from email signature lines. This is a feature common to other personal CRM solutions, too, like Evercontact.

In the event that someone had signed an email with their home address included in this field, that data could then be added to their contact card in the Sunshine app. In this case, the contact card is updated in the Sunshine Contacts app, which then syncs with your phone’s address book. But this data is not distributed to any other app users.

The app also augments contact cards with information acquired by other means. For example, it may use the information you do have to complete missing fields — like adding a last name, when you had other data that indicated what someone’s full name is, but hadn’t completed filling out the card. The app may also be able to pull in data from a LinkedIn profile, if available.

For home addresses, Sunshine is using the Whitepages API.

The company confirmed to TechCrunch it’s augmenting contact cards with home addresses under some circumstances, even if that contact is not a Sunshine Contacts user. Sunshine says it doesn’t believe this to be any different from a user going to Google to look for someone’s contact information on the web — it’s just automating the process.

Of course, some would argue when you’re talking about automating the collection of home addresses for hundreds or potentially thousands of users — depending on the size of your personal address book database — it’s a bit different than if you went googling to find your aunt’s address so you can mail a Christmas card or called your old college roommate to find out where to send their birthday gift.

However, Sunshine clarified to TechCrunch that it won’t add the home address except in cases when it determines you have a personal connection to the contact in question.

Here, though, Sunshine enters a gray area where the app and its technology will try to figure out who you know well enough to need a home address.

Before adding the address, Sunshine requires you to have the contact’s phone number on file in your address book, not just their email. That would eliminate some people you only have a loose connection with through work, for instance. And it only updates with the home address if the partner API is able to associate that address with a phone number you have.

In addition, Sunshine says that it’s generally able to understand the type of phone number you have on file — like if it’s a residential or business line, or if it’s a landline or mobile number. (It uses APIs to do this, similar to StrikeIron’s though not that particular one.) It also knows who the phone number belongs to. Using this information and further context, the app tries to determine if a phone number is a personal or a professional number and it will try to understand your relationship with the person who owns that number.

In practice, what this means is that if all the information you had on file for a contact was professional information — where they worked, a job title, a work email and a phone number, perhaps — then that person’s contact card would not be updated to include their home address, too.

And because many people use their personal cell for work, Sunshine won’t consider someone a “personal” relationship just because you have their mobile phone number. For example, if you had only a contact’s name and a cell number, you wouldn’t be able to use the app to get their home address.

The result of all this automated analysis is that Sunshine, in theory, only updates contact cards with home addresses where it’s determined there’s a personal relationship.

This, of course, doesn’t take into account some scenarios like bad exes, stalking or a general desire for privacy. Arguably, there are times when someone may have a lot of personal information for a contact in their address book, but the contact in question would rather not have their home address distributed to that person.

The only way to prevent this, presumably, would be to opt out at the source: Whitepages.com. (Once you have your profile URL from the Whitepages website, you can use this online form to have your information suppressed.)

The way the app functions raises questions about what is truly private information these days.

Sunshine points out that people’s home addresses are not as hidden from the world as they may think, which makes them fair game.

It’s true that our home addresses are often publicly available. Although it’s been years since most of us have had a telephone directory dropped on our doorstep with phone and address listings for people in our city, home addresses today are relatively trivial to find when you know where to look online.

In addition to public records — like voter registration databases — there are web-based people finders, too.

Sunshine’s partner, Whitepages.com, makes visitors pay for its data, but others like TruePeopleSearch.com don’t have the same paywall. With someone’s first and last name and city, its website provides access to someone’s home address, prior addresses, cell phone, age and the names of family members and other close associates. (TruePeopleSearch is not a Sunshine partner, we should clarify.)

Even though this data is “public,” it’s uncomfortable to see it casually distributed in an app, as that makes it even easier to get to than before.

Plus, after years of being burned by data breaches and data privacy scandals, people tend to be more protective of their personal information than before. And, had they been asked, many would probably decline to have their home addresses shared with Sunshine’s user base. Generally speaking, people appreciate the courtesy of having someone come ask for a home address, when it’s needed — they may not want an app creeping the web to find it and hand it out.

Sunshine Contacts is in an invite-only beta in the U.S., so the company has time to reconsider how this feature is implemented based on user feedback before it becomes widely available.

News: Palantir will soon help the FDA evaluate drugs, including COVID-19 treatments

• December 8, 2020
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Palantir’s push into federal health work continues. The data analytics company just picked up a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration contract which will span three years for a total of $44.4 million. The company’s shares, which have doubled in value over the last two months, are up around 20 percent on the news. As

Palantir’s push into federal health work continues. The data analytics company just picked up a new U.S. Food and Drug Administration contract which will span three years for a total of $44.4 million. The company’s shares, which have doubled in value over the last two months, are up around 20 percent on the news.

As Bloomberg reports, Palantir will help the FDA review drugs, including those developed for COVID-19 treatment and assess the safety of other FDA-regulated health products like hand sanitizer. The contract will also bring Palantir’s data analysis software to the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research and the Oncology Center of Excellence, according to Bloomberg.

In late September, after much back and forth with the SEC over its S-1, Palantir went public through a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO. The secretive company, co-founded by Silicon Valley iconoclast Peter Thiel, has attracted unwanted attention in recent years for its ongoing work with ICE, the federal law enforcement agency that carries out deportations.

The FDA sits within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which has already tapped Palantir for work on the coronavirus crisis. In April, Palantir secured two contracts with HHS for its software, which the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force used to track trends and make decisions about the pandemic. Palantir also worked with the CDC to model the spread of the virus as early as mid-March.

Although it isn’t clear if the Biden administration will continue to expand federal work with Palantir, the process of distributing vaccines provides another logistical opportunity for the controversial company. Tracking which individuals have received both doses of a vaccine is work that sounds very much in Palantir’s wheelhouse.

Palantir relies heavily on federal contracts in the U.S., but it also shops its software platforms to governments abroad. In November, the U.K. was considering its software to aid contact tracing efforts, though with vaccines already in distribution there it’s not clear that those talks have continued.

The company’s S-1 filing revealed that Palantir only has 125 clients, with a little over half of its revenue coming from government contracts. While the focus tends to be on Palantir’s relationships in the U.S., 60 percent of its business is international, though many of its clients remain unknown both at home and abroad.

News: Germany’s Isar Aerospace raises $91M to get its satellite launch vehicle off the ground

• December 8, 2020
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The aerospace industry has seen an explosion of activity from the world of startups, where bright engineers are foregoing jobs at large corporations and opting instead to raise funding from increasingly ambitious venture capitalists to build their own startups to turn moonshots into business realities. In the latest development, a startup out of Munich has

The aerospace industry has seen an explosion of activity from the world of startups, where bright engineers are foregoing jobs at large corporations and opting instead to raise funding from increasingly ambitious venture capitalists to build their own startups to turn moonshots into business realities. In the latest development, a startup out of Munich has raised the largest round to date in European space tech.

Isar Aerospace, which is building a micro-satellite launcher significantly smaller and thus lower in price than bigger launchers on the market today, has picked up €75 million ($91 million) in funding. It plans to use the money to continue its research, development and production en route to its first commercial launches, planned for early 2022.

The launcher is not just significant for its design innovation, but if it proves successful, it would make Isar the first European space company to build a successful satellite launcher to compete in the global satellite market.

The round, a Series B, is being led by Lakestar, with previous backers Earlybird and Vsquared Ventures also contributing significantly, the company said. Earlybird and strategic backer Airbus Ventures led Isar’s previous round of $17 million in December 2019.

The startup is a spinout of TUM — the famous Munich Technical University — where co-founders Daniel Metzler, Josef Fleischmann, and Markus Brandl had all studied engineering. Fleishmann had a small claim to fame before Isar: he was part of the team from TUM that built the winning vehicle for the famous Hyperloop competition in the US. It was an achievement that landed him a very interesting job offer with a very high profile space venture in the US that will go unnamed; he opted to come back to Germany to build his own company, which became Isar.

As Metzler described it in an interview, there is a lot of pent-up demand among companies that need or would like to use satellite technology to augment or replace other data sources: this comes from not just the usual suspects of government or communications entities, but also navigation, GPS and mapping specialists, agribusiness interest, media and internet companies and any organizations that need the kind of high speed, far-reaching data access that can only be achieved from space.

The issue is that today’s technology makes launching satellites into orbit a costly and time-sucking operation.

Launchers are large and go up infrequently, so reserving space on them takes a lot of lead time and investment, and even then a launch can hit a snag over a technical or weather issue.

That issue has somewhat been addressed by the growth of private companies like SpaceX, which are building more rockets to address demand; and a proliferation of more launch centers in a larger range of locations to increase the number of launch events.

Isar, on the other hand, is taking a very different approach, building not just a new kind of launchpad but a new kind of rocket that will be smaller and less expensive. The idea will be that by doing so, it will make it cheaper, easier and more flexible for more organizations to book satellite launches. The aim will be to carry a payload of over 1,000 kilograms.

As Metzler describes it, the innovations that Isar has built into its system includes the propulsion systems with a design that relies on a different, lighter fuel than what is typically used today in launchers. It’s also taking a different, simplified approach to the design to further reduce the cost of production.

Metzler said that typically the price for a satellite launch today can be in the range of between $30,000 and $40,000 per kilogram. “We aim to go more in the direction of $10,000 per kilogram,” he said.

The proposition is interesting enough that Isar says it has already racked up $500 million in “customer inquiries” — essentially a loose commitment for sales as and when it gets its launchers ready to run.

The company sees satellite launches as an obvious bottleneck that needs addressing.

“Going to space once a week is very different from planning launches three years in advance,” he said of how Isar envisions the future to look, versus how it looks now. And just to note, he said that Isar is building with sustainability in mind: if a piece does not return to earth to be re-used, it’s designed to be broken up and burned in the atmosphere, leaving no trace of the launcher.

Longer term, Isar might also consider space exploration and other areas of development, an ambitious roadmap (or skymap, as the case may be) that investors seem willing to support.

“We are proud to accompany Isar Aerospace as the largest institutional investor on its way to commercially develop space for Europe. Micro-satellites in the low Earth orbit will become a key platform technology with enormous innovation and business potential in the coming decades. That is why we need a competitive space industry in Europe if we do not want to witness the next technological leaps as a spectator,” said Hendrik Brandis, Co-Founding Partner of Earlybird. “I am particularly pleased that we are able to back a financing round of this magnitude entirely with German money. This is a clear sign of how successfully the start-up and VC industry has developed in this country in recent years.”