Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Aevum is building a modular autonomous drone for space and terrestrial deliveries

• May 18, 2021
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Logistics and delivery providers are territorially split between Earth and space, with companies like Amazon and FedEx working to master ground, air and drone transportation, and new entrants like SpaceX honing its expertise in space launch. Autonomous transportation startup Aevum wants to do both. And it was just issued a patent that will help it

Logistics and delivery providers are territorially split between Earth and space, with companies like Amazon and FedEx working to master ground, air and drone transportation, and new entrants like SpaceX honing its expertise in space launch.

Autonomous transportation startup Aevum wants to do both. And it was just issued a patent that will help it move dexterously between space launch to low Earth orbit, and air cargo and drone deliveries here on Earth.

The key is Aevum’s unmanned aircraft system, which it calls Ravn X. So far, Aevum has only publicly discussed its plans for the Ravn X in the context of space launches. It works like this: the Ravn X uses conventional jet fuel and takes off from an airport runway, like a plane, but it has a rocket nested in its belly that deploys at high altitude to deliver payload to space. As the second stage detaches, the Ravn X returns to Earth using conventional touch-down techniques, ready for another delivery.

The new Aevum patent, which was issued on May 4, is for a unique modular payload design positioned in the belly of the drone. With the new system described in the patent, that rocket payload module can be switched out for a cargo bay to carry deliveries around the world, or a drone module that can carry up to 264 smaller drones for last-mile delivery services. Theoretically, the Ravn X could depart from an airport, deliver its payload to space, return back to the airport to be reloaded with a filled cargo module, then take off again for earthbound deliveries.

While the exact amount a Ravn X can carry depends on the distance it’s traveling, the Ravn X air cargo will be able to carry up to 15,000 lbs and the space delivery payload will be able to carry up to 330 lbs. As of now, the rockets are expendable, but the company has plans for 100% reusability across its space launch and air cargo operations.

Aevum’s business model includes operating autonomous transportation and logistics as a service and partnering with existing logistics providers. One interesting possibility for the company is partnerships with logistics giants that so far have been effectively cut-off from space deliveries due to the vertically integrated models of companies like SpaceX, which handles logistics and launch services in-house.

“We aim to enable FedEx, Amazon, UPS, DHL, and others to build upon the logistics infrastructure they have already mastered,” Aevum CEO Jay Skylus said. “Any or all of these respected giants could partner with Aevum or purchase a fleet of Ravn X for their own and add space launch to their offerings. Space logistics should no longer be separated from general logistics.”

Aevum founder and CEO Jay Skylus with Ravn X

Likewise, large companies that have struggled to establish drone delivery services could use the Ravn X’s drone module to deliver and deposit drones over a central area, like a city center, for last-mile deliveries.

“The patent is so significant because what the patent allows you to do is say – the existing FedEx and UPS logistics architecture that’s sorting 70,000 packages an hour right now could not service the needs of defense and space because fundamentally that logistics infrastructure was designed to go from Earth to Earth and not Earth to space,” Skylus explained. “But if you really look at the problem and study it in detail, you know the missing link to allow this existing infrastructure to now be able to service the space domain – that missing link is what we just patented.”

Skylus imagines Ravn X fleets operating around-the-clock. “In my company, what matters is asset utilization. For any reusable flying machine, it doesn’t generate revenue on the ground. My machines will fly around the clock, every day,” he said in a statement.

The company still has a ways to go before it still takes to the skies, however. Ravn X is still undergoing ground test operations and will begin flight testing this year at an FAA-licensed testing facility for unmanned aircraft systems. Aevum’s intention is to fly with the United States Air Force’s ASLON-45 mission this fall and to take its air cargo service live next year.

Because the Ravn X has so many different capabilities, it will need to pursue a few different FAA certifications: for space launches, a license from the FAA Commercial Space Transportation office; for cargo operations, an FAA aircraft type certification and standard airworthiness certification.

“What we’ve patented is the next layer and large batch of connections in the global logistics infrastructure,” Skylus said. “Space logistics shouldn’t be separated from logistics that already exist.”

News: Spotify to add automatic transcripts for its own Exclusive and Original podcasts

• May 18, 2021
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Spotify is taking the first step towards making transcripts available for the podcasts on its service. The company announced this morning it’s soon launching a limited beta that will introduce automatic transcripts for its own Spotify Exclusive and Original shows, with the larger goal of enabling transcripts across all podcasts published to its platform in

Spotify is taking the first step towards making transcripts available for the podcasts on its service. The company announced this morning it’s soon launching a limited beta that will introduce automatic transcripts for its own Spotify Exclusive and Original shows, with the larger goal of enabling transcripts across all podcasts published to its platform in the future. The company also introduced a handful of other accessibility improvements alongside the announcement, including readability features and options for text resizing.

The new transcripts feature will automatically generate transcripts for Spotify’s own shows, allowing users to read the text of the podcast on their iOS or Android device, either with or without sound.

This can be useful from an accessibility standpoint, as it makes the audio programs available to a wider audience that includes those who are hard of hearing or deaf. However, it also makes it easier for any listener who wants to jump to a particular part of a conversation without having to fast-forward or rewind to trying to find the right spot.

Image Credits: Spotify

Users will be able to scroll and navigate the provided transcripts, then click on any paragraph to start streaming the show from that point, the company explains.

If Spotify makes good on its promise to make transcripts available across its full podcast library, it could save podcasters from having to do the extra work of transcribing shows and publishing those to their website. Instead, they could simply inform listeners that those who wanted a transcript could visit Spotify. Plus, the feature could steer users away from third-party apps offering transcripts, while competing with Apple’s podcasts transcription search. (And it could potentially signal that Apple is poised to release an update in this area in the near future, too, given its recent investment in its redesigned Apple Podcasts app, which will now include subscriptions.)

The transcripts feature will roll out in the “coming weeks,” Spotify said.

Alongside the news of the beta, Spotify introduced a handful of readability improvements to aid low-vision and visually impaired users better see various buttons in the app, like those to start listening or shuffle play, by adjusting the button’s color, text formatting and size.

And while Spotify already supports the system-wide text size changes known as Dynamic Type, it’s now allowing users to increase text sizes even more through a new feature under Settings on iOS. (Settings –> Accessibility –> Display & Text Size; tap “Larger Text” and drag the slider.)

News: Father and son duo take on global logistics with Optimal Dynamics’ sequential decision AI platform

• May 18, 2021
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Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all kinds of different problems and alternative and often incompatible ways to solve them. One robust area of research here that has antecedents going back to

Like “innovation,” machine learning and artificial intelligence are commonplace terms that provide very little context for what they actually signify. AI/ML spans dozens of different fields of research, covering all kinds of different problems and alternative and often incompatible ways to solve them.

One robust area of research here that has antecedents going back to the mid-20th century is what is known as stochastic optimization — decision-making under uncertainty where an entity wants to optimize for a particular objective. A classic problem is how to optimize an airline’s schedule to maximize profit. Airlines need to commit to schedules months in advance without knowing what the weather will be like or what the specific demand for a route will be (or, whether a pandemic will wipe out travel demand entirely). It’s a vibrant field, and these days, basically runs most of modern life.

Warren B. Powell has been exploring this problem for decades as a researcher at Princeton, where he has operated the Castle Lab. He has researched how to bring disparate areas of stochastic optimization together under one framework that he has dubbed “sequential decision analytics” to optimize problems where each decision in a series places constraints on future decisions. Such problems are common in areas like logistics, scheduling and other key areas of business.

The Castle Lab has long had industry partners, and it has raised tens of millions of dollars in grants from industry over its history. But after decades of research, Powell teamed up with his son, Daniel Powell, to spin out his collective body of research and productize it into a startup called Optimal Dynamics. Father Powell has now retired full-time from Princeton to become Chief Analytics Officer, while son Powell became CEO.

The company raised $18.4 million in new funding last week from Bessemer led by Mike Droesch, who recently was promoted to partner earlier this year with the firm’s newest $3.3 billion fundraise. The company now has 25 employees and is centered in New York City.

So what does Optimal Dynamics actually do? CEO Powell said that it’s been a long road since the company’s founding in mid-2017 when it first raised a $450,000 pre-seed round. We were “drunkenly walking in finding product-market fit,” Powell said. This is “not an easy technology to get right.”

What the company ultimately zoomed in on was the trucking industry, which has precisely the kind of sequential decision-making that father Powell had been working on his entire career. “Within truckload, you have a whole series of uncertain variables,” CEO Powell described. “We are the first company that can learn and plan for an uncertain future.”

There’s been a lot of investment in logistics and trucking from VCs in recent years as more and more investors see the potential to completely disrupt the massive and fragmented market. Yet, rather than building a whole new trucking marketplace or approaching it as a vertically-integrated solution, Optimal Dynamics decided to go with the much simpler enterprise SaaS route to offer better optimization to existing companies.

One early customer, which owned 120 power units, saved $4 million using the company’s software, according to Powell. That was a result of better utilization of equipment and more efficient operations. They “sold off about 20 vehicles that they didn’t need anymore due to the underlying efficiency,” he said. In addition, the company was able to replace a team of ten who used to manage trucking logistics down to one, and “they are just managing exceptions” to the normal course of business. As an example of an exception, Powell said that “a guy drove half way and then decided he wanted to quit,” leaving a load stranded. “Trying to train a computer on weird edge events [like that] is hard,” he said.

Better efficiency for equipment usage and then saving money on employee costs by automating their work are the two main ways Optimal Dynamics saves money for customers. Powell says most of the savings come in the former rather than the latter, since utilization is often where the most impact can be felt.

On the technical front, the key improvement the company has devised is how to rapidly solve the ultra-complex optimization problems that logistics companies face. The company does that through value function approximation, which is a field of study where instead of actually computing the full range of stochastic optimization solutions, the program approximates the outcomes of decisions to reduce compute time. We “take in this extraordinary amount of detail while handling it in a computationally efficient way,” Powell said. That’s where we have really “wedged ourselves as a company.”

Early signs of success with customers led to a $4 million seed round led by Homan Yuen of Fusion Fund, which invests in technically-sophisticated startups (i.e. the kind of startups that take decades of optimization research at Princeton to get going). Powell said that raising the round was tough, transpiring during the first weeks of the pandemic last year. One corporate fund pulled out at the last minute, and it was “chaos ensuing with everyone,” he said. This Series A process meanwhile was the opposite. “This round was totally different — closed it in 17 days from round kickoff to closure,” he said.

With new capital in the bank, the company is looking to expand from 25 employees to 75 this year, who will be trickling back to the company’s office in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan in the coming months. Optimal Dynamics targets customers with 75 trucks or more, either fleets for rent or private fleets owned by companies like Walmart who handle their own logistics.

News: Inside Marqeta’s fascinating fintech IPO

• May 18, 2021
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Marqeta has long been a fintech darling, but it’s less well-known than other companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature.

The IPO market is gearing up for a hot close to the second quarter and a hotter Q3.

That’s The Exchange’s takeaway from recent IPO filings from Monday.com (enterprise planning and communications) and a number of SPAC-led combinations from Bird (scooter sharing), Bright Machines (AI-powered microfactories) and others. Looking ahead, Squarespace (site design and hosting) will direct list this week, while Oatly (pressed grain juice) and Procore (construction tech) will price and complete traditional IPOs in the next few days.

Late last week, Marqeta (card issuing and payments tech) filed as well, and just this morning, Flywire (global payments) set a price range for its own debut. The two fintechs are our targets today, though we’ll take them in sequential posts.

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Public equities have seen some price declines in recent sessions, and there’s been observable multiples-compression afoot among both tech stocks and shares more generally. But many companies are betting that it remains a fertile moment to list. A slow drift downward in the value of technology revenue, in other words, is not stopping what could be an enthusiastic exit market from here to the end of the year.

Forget the larger market for now. Let’s narrow our focus to Marqeta, long a darling of the fintech market though less well-known than some companies in its sector due to its infrastructure nature.

If you are not familiar with Marqeta, it powers the payment card tech behind products that you use, like Square, a key customer and driver of the unicorn’s growth. Marqeta exhibits a number of fascinating fintech characteristics (majority revenue from interchange, a rabidly competitive market) that make it very interesting to unspool.

News: Settle raises $15M from Kleiner Perkins to give e-commerce companies more working capital

• May 18, 2021
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Alek Koenig spent four years at Affirm, where he was head of Credit. There he saw firsthand just how powerful the alternative lending model could be. Koenig realized that it wasn’t just consumers who could benefit from the model, but businesses too. So in November 2019, he founded Settle as a way to give e-commerce

Alek Koenig spent four years at Affirm, where he was head of Credit.

There he saw firsthand just how powerful the alternative lending model could be. Koenig realized that it wasn’t just consumers who could benefit from the model, but businesses too.

So in November 2019, he founded Settle as a way to give e-commerce and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies access to non-dilutive capital. (Not every company wants to raise venture money). By June 2020, the startup had launched its platform, which is designed to help these businesses manage their cash flow. Over time, he recruited a previous co-worker, Shane Moriah, to serve as Settle’s CTO.

And today, the company is announcing that it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. This follows a previously unannounced $6 million seed raise led by Founders Fund in November 2020. Other investors in the company include SciFi (Affirm founder Max Levchin’s VC firm), Caffeinated Capital, WorkLife Ventures, Background Capital and AngelList Venture CEO Avlok Kohli.

With the pandemic leading to a massive shift toward digital and online shopping, e-commerce and CPG businesses found themselves with the challenge of keeping up with demand while trying to manage their cash flow. The main problem was the lag between accounts receivables and accounts payables.

“These companies suffer from the problem where there are these huge cash flow gaps from buying inventory, waiting to receive it and then turning it into revenue,” Koenig explains. “It takes quite a bit of time for these customers to actually get revenue from all those inventory purchases they need to make. What we do is make it really easy for companies to pay their vendors with extended payment terms.”

Settle does this by automatically syncing to a business’ accounting software and combining that with working capital products it’s developed.

Put simply, Settle will pay a vendor, and then brands can pay Settle back when they turn that COGS (cost of goods sold) into revenue. The startup says it also saves brands money on expensive wire fees.

Image Credits: Settle

“Businesses really value getting cash sooner, so they can use it in their operations,” Koenig said. “We’ve worked to reimagine the CFO suite for brands, starting with integrated financing and bill pay solutions.”

The concept of non-dilutive capital is not a new one with other startups tackling the space in different ways. For example, Pipe aims to give SaaS companies a way to get their revenue upfront, by pairing them with investors on a marketplace that pays a discounted rate for the annual value of those contracts.

Settle is focused on the e-commerce vertical, and building a unique product for that category, Koenig says, rather than trying to build a product targeting several different industries.

“We don’t want to be a mediocre product for everybody,” he told TechCrunch. “But rather a phenomenal product for this vertical.”

Since its launch last June, Settle has seen its business jump by 1,000%, although it’s important to note that’s from a small base. Settle is currently working with more than 300 brands, including baby stroller retailer Lalo, Spiceology and men’s skincare brand Disco. So far, all of its growth has been organic.

“Last year when the pandemic hit, offline retail shut down and e-commerce got a big boost. But that meant that a lot of these companies were running out of orders and were out of stock on many items, so they were just kind of leaving money on the table,” Koenig said. “Once they started using us, they were able to buy more inventory, so we actually help them make more profit, and not just create more sales.”

His reasoning for that last statement is that by giving these businesses the ability to purchase items in bulk, they could get cheaper price per unit costs as well as cheaper shipping costs.

The company is planning to use its new capital in part to grow its team of 20, as well as raise more debt so that it can continue lending money to businesses.

Kleiner Perkins’ Monica Desai Weiss said her firm believes that Koenig and CTO Moriah’s expertise in underwriting, capital markets and e-commerce give the pair “a rare skill set that’s unique to their market.”

She’s also drawn to the company’s embedded approach.

“Whereas most lending businesses are fairly transactional and opportunistic, Settle becomes deeply embedded in the way their merchants forecast and grow,” she told TechCrunch. “That approach has demonstrated inherent virality and their timing is perfect — the past year has changed consumer behaviors permanently and also produced massive opportunities for global entrepreneurship via ecommerce. In that way, we see the umbrella of e-commerce expanding massively in the coming years, and we believe Settle will be key to enabling that shift.”

News: How Expensify got to $100M in revenue by hiring “stem cells” and not “cogs in a wheel”

• May 18, 2021
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The influence of a founder on their company’s culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company’s employees will behave.

The influence of a founder on their company’s culture cannot be overstated. Everything from their views on the product and business to how they think about people affects how their company’s employees will behave, and since behavior in turn informs culture, the consequences of a founder’s early decisions can be far-reaching.

So it’s not very surprising that Expensify has its own take on almost everything it does when you consider what its founder and CEO David Barrett learned early in his life: “Basically everyone is wrong about basically everything.” As we saw in part 1 of this EC-1, this led him to the revelation that it’s easier to figure things out for yourself than finding advice that applies to you. Eventually, these insights — and the adventurous P2P hacker attitude he nurtured alongside his colleagues and Travis Kalanick at Red Swoosh — would inform how he would go about shaping Expensify.

It’s striking how Expensify has managed to maintain this character 13 years later, even on the threshold of an IPO. How did this happen? During a series of interviews in February and early March, we found the answer is tied to the level of thought and effort this expense management business puts into its culture.

You see, the people at Expensify are prepared to invent their own playbook, develop it and, if needed, rewrite it completely. Its HR policies and strategy are tailored to find people who would have fun building an expense management product. It has a unique growth and recognition scheme to offset the drawbacks of a flat organizational structure. It’s even got a “Senate” that vets all major decisions. No kidding.

All this, and more, has ultimately helped Expensify reach more than 10 million users and achieve $100 million in annual revenue with just 130 employees. Let’s take a closer look at how Expensify makes it happen.

“We want the fewest people necessary to get the job done”

It’s clear Expensify’s unusually high employee-to-revenue ratio is intentional: “We want the fewest people necessary to get the job done,” Barrett says. But how do you actually achieve it? How do you hire and keep people who can deliver such results? Barrett had to learn how the hard way.

Expensify’s first team was based in San Francisco and comprised Barrett’s old Red Swoosh and Akamai colleagues, who joined a few months after Akamai fired him. A small team was enough to get started, but it was much more difficult to hire additional people. Barrett is eager to clarify the Valley is not really the best place to recruit talent: “Sure, Silicon Valley has a ton of really awesome people, but all of them have jobs!,” he says.

News: Discovery’s new reality show ‘Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?’ will pick one winner to go to space

• May 18, 2021
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Discovery has ordered a new reality show, to air in 2022, which will be an eight episode competition series where competitors will vie for a chance to take a trip to the International Space Station on commercial Axiom Space mission. The winner will be a crew member for AX-2, the second mission from Axiom to

Discovery has ordered a new reality show, to air in 2022, which will be an eight episode competition series where competitors will vie for a chance to take a trip to the International Space Station on commercial Axiom Space mission. The winner will be a crew member for AX-2, the second mission from Axiom to transport a fully private group of space travellers to the ISS following AX-1, which is set to take place as early as next January.

Axiom and NASA went into detail about AX-1 earlier this month in a press briefing, explaining that the mission will span eight days and take four paying customers to the orbital science station for a brief stay, with an overall price tag of $1.69 million being paid to NASA for the privilege (which excludes the value of some in-kind supply transport services that Axiom is providing).

Axiom will be using a SpaceX Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon spacecraft to transport its private astronaut customers to the ISS for AX-1. The initial press materials for the ‘Who Wants to Be an Astronaut?’ series doesn’t specify which vehicle will be used for the AX-2 mission that will play host to the winner, but it’s reasonable to expect it’ll be SpaceX for that one as well, given that it’s the only fully private trip provider active so far.

Here’s how Discovery describes the actual selection process that will take place during the reality series:

[W]hat does it take to win a coveted seat to space? The process will be grueling and only a select few will make it through the rigorous selection process. The series will follow each of the contestants competing for the opportunity in a variety of extreme challenges designed to test them on the attributes real astronauts need most, and as they undergo the training necessary to qualify for space flight and life on board the space station.

In the end, one lucky candidate, deemed to have the right stuff by a panel of expert judges, will punch their ticket for an adventure few have ever taken. The series will chronicle each pivotal moment along the way – from lift off to re-entry and the return home.

The competition is open to “everyday people,” and there’s an application form with the requirement of a short, 30 to 60 second accompanying video if you want to throw your hat in the ring.

News: Growth expert Susan Su shares insights for marketing in 2021 at TC Early Stage

• May 18, 2021
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It’s 2021. Contact importers are old history, and everyone’s a creator, building for their own audience. How can early-stage startups find meaningful traction at the velocity they need when the distribution channels are more competitive and complex than ever? Which ads are worth spending money on? Growth and marketing expert Susan Su is joining us

It’s 2021. Contact importers are old history, and everyone’s a creator, building for their own audience. How can early-stage startups find meaningful traction at the velocity they need when the distribution channels are more competitive and complex than ever? Which ads are worth spending money on?

Growth and marketing expert Susan Su is joining us at TC Early Stage in July to lead a session on key strategies for finding the right users in 2021. She’ll go over how to test and bootstrap early on, develop basic frameworks for growth and how to adapt your approach for each marketing channel as they evolve.

Su has more than a decade of growth experience and is currently the head of portfolio strategy for Sound Ventures. Her focus at the firm includes market positioning, branding, growth operations and strategic partnerships. She was previously the first hire and head of growth and marketing at Reforge, a professional development platform and community for PMs and marketing professionals. Over the years she has also mentored and advised dozens of companies from YC, 500 Startups and other accelerators globally. She also hosted a very popular session at Early Stage last year, and we’re delighted to have her back! Oh, I also worked with her a decade ago, and would work with her again in a heartbeat.

One more thing: You may recognize her name from the climate education and media work she is doing, including a Climate Change for VCs course, a nightly Clubhouse room called Climate Headlines and a newsletter on startup opportunities in the world of climate innovation.

Don’t miss her workshop at TC Early Stage this July 8-9. Get your tickets at the early bird price for the next few weeks before prices increase.

News: Sidewalk Labs launches Pebble, a sensor that uses real-time data to manage city parking

• May 18, 2021
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Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that’s designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real time parking and curb availability data. Here’s how it works: small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a

Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s urban innovation organization, has announced the launch of Pebble, a vehicle sensor that’s designed to help manage parking in cities by providing real time parking and curb availability data.

Here’s how it works: small spherical sensors are stuck to the ground on parking spaces to note the absence or presence of a vehicle. Then solar-powered gateway hardware, which can be strapped easily to street poles, uses IoT to connect the sensor to the cloud through the cellular network. The data is then viewed and analyzed by real estate developers, parking operators or municipal agencies via a dashboard. 

Pebble doesn’t use cameras or collect identifying information about a person or vehicle, and is touting a “privacy preserving” approach. Sidewalk Labs has been relatively quiet since it shut down its $1.3 billion tech-enabled real estate project in Toronto amid privacy concerns a year ago. Rather than try to tackle large urban infrastructure projects, the company appears to be focusing its efforts on smaller scale solutions that can be used by private and public entities to improve cities. 

In October last year, Sidewalk Labs unveiled Delve, a design tool that uses machine learning to help developers, architects and planners to create optimal design plans for urban projects. Just a few weeks ago, Sidewalk Labs spinout Replica – an AI-powered data platform that uses machine learning to generate “synthetic” populations whose behaviors can be tracked in order to simulate plausible scenarios in the real world – secured $41 million in Series B funding. 

New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority relied on Replica during the pandemic to adapt its public transit schedule. Now, as the country begins to open up in earnest, those with a stake in parking and mobility, especially cities looking to unroll sustainable transport recovery plans, might consider using tools like Pebble’s to manage parking supplies effectively. 

Between 9% and 56% of traffic, and all the pollution that comes with it, is caused by people who are cruising for parking. Pebble says its real-time parking availability can be integrated into navigation apps, like Google Maps, through an API to help users spend less time circling the block.  

“Real-time parking information can also alert would-be drivers when spaces are limited before they even leave home, leading them to use alternative travel modes, such as park-and-ride transit or ferries,” wrote Sidewalk Labs’ senior creative technologist, Nick Jonas, in a blog post announcing the launch. “For example, a smart parking program at a BART park-and-ride station reduced driving by a monthly average of nearly 10 miles per person — and even shortened commutes.”

While cities could certainly benefit from a tool that could monitor curb and municipal parking, the effort involved could be enormous. Imagine a city like New York widely placing individual sensors to mark street parking spaces! It would be quite the job, not to mention difficult to define static parking spaces. Pebble says it is already working with pilot customers to manage tens of thousands of parking spaces, but it did not reply to a request for more information about whether or not any of those pilot customers are cities. 

In the blog post announcing the Pebble launch, Sidewalk Labs covers a range of potential use cases. City agencies that apply Pebble hardware to curbs can also gain insights on how to help businesses generate revenue by assigning relevant curb space for things like outdoor dining and applying flexible programs like dynamic pricing, which adjusts on-street parking rates based on supply and demand.

Pebble also says real estate developers can use its insights to create shared parking zones or build less parking if they can prove to cities that sufficient parking already exists to meet demand. 

While it seems more efficient parking would make for people relying further on cars, Sidewalk Labs says the opposite is true. Sidewalk Labs’ Senior Creative Technologist Nick Jonas says that Pebble can help “reduce driving and new parking in several ways,” including by helping real estate developers collect the data needed to provide compelling counterarguments for city ordinances requiring certain amounts of parking spots be built for new residential and office spaces.

“Pebble can help […] prove that parking demand can be met through existing spaces or shared parking zones, reducing the need to build new spaces,” Jonas said. And in terms of traffic generated by drivers searching for spots, Pebble can help by “facilitating direct navigation to a parking space,” which can make a dent in the “30 percent of traffic congestion that occurs from drivers for a parking space.”

On top of those infrastructure benefits, Jonas notes that Pebble can help with economic and convenience incentives that encourage commuters to opt for other methods of transit instead of driving.

“By facilitating dynamic pricing programs, Pebble can help cities “right-price” parking and encourage alternative travel modes,” he noted, adding that based on early data from pilots in the Bay Area, Pebble data including “direct navigation and real-time space availability data can also encourage people to use park-and-ride transit rather than driving all the way into an office.”

Much of the operating thesis upon which Sidewalks Labs is based is that cities would be able to run much more efficiently, effectively and safely if they can just address the existing data gaps and blindspots about how people actually live in, and navigate them. Pebble looks like it could be a key ingredient in help fill in the blanks for parking and garage usage.

News: Lamborghini is kicking off its electrification plan with two gas-powered super sports cars

• May 18, 2021
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Lamborghini will pay homage to combustion engines with the introduction of two new V12 luxury sports cars this year before it makes a push into electrification as the company tries to balance its storied gas-powered past with a hybrid, and eventually electric, future. The company laid out Tuesday its electrification roadmap, a plan that will

Lamborghini will pay homage to combustion engines with the introduction of two new V12 luxury sports cars this year before it makes a push into electrification as the company tries to balance its storied gas-powered past with a hybrid, and eventually electric, future.

The company laid out Tuesday its electrification roadmap, a plan that will see its full lineup of vehicles become hybrids by the end of 2024 and the launch of an all-electric Lamborghini in the second half of the decade.

Lamborghini said it plans to invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.82 million) over four years to make the transition to hybrid vehicles, the largest allocation in its history. The Volkswagen-owned brand it will launch its first hybrid series production car in 2023 and then hybridize the rest of the lineup the following year. During this second phase of its roadmap, Lamborghini will focus on developing new technologies and the application of lightweight carbon fiber materials — both of which will be crucial in compensating for weight due to electrification, the company said.

The aim, during this phase, is to reduce the product emissions 50% by 2025, the company said.

“Lamborghini’s electrification plan is a newly-plotted course, necessary in the context of a radically-changing world, where we want to make our contribution by continuing to reduce environmental impact through concrete projects,” Lamborghini President and CEO Stephan Winkelmann said in a statement. He emphasized that this plan, which begins with a celebration of the combustion engine, will take the company towards a “more sustainable future while always remaining faithful to our DNA.”

The Italian brand has already moved towards hybrids with the Sián and its roofless cousin the Sián Roadster. These vehicles, which were unveiled in 2019 and 2020 respectively, are mid-engine sports cars that combine a naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 engine, a supercapcitor instead of a lithium-ion battery that operates its powertrain and a 48-volt electric motor.

Together, this system produces 819 horsepower that propels the vehicle from zero to 62 mph in 2.8 seconds and a top speed of 218 mph. Lamborghini is producing 63 Sián and 19 Sián Roadsters. All of these have been sold, which suggests there is demand for a hybridized version of the classic Lamborghini.