Tag Archives: Blog

News: Twitter now lets you limit who can reply to a tweet after the fact

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If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief. Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Previously, you could limit who

If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief.

Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Previously, you could limit who could reply to tweets when they were created, but you couldn’t go in and change your selection after the fact.

On Twitter, you don’t always have a sense of what kind of tweets will attract unwanted attention until it’s too late. The new feature makes the option to limit replies to people you follow or only people mentioned in a tweet much more useful, particularly because the mute button doesn’t always cut it.

Twitter added the option to limit replies last August to boost “meaningful conversations” on the social network and to help people feel safer from harassment when they tweet. Product researcher Jane Manchun Wong first spotted the feature’s expansion in June.

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Crucial API metrics, US startup funding, advanced SEO tactics

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Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

On a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Retail Zipline founder Melissa Wong and Emergence Capital investor Lotti Siniscalco joined Managing Editor Jordan Crook to walk attendees through Zipline’s Series A deck.

Interestingly, the conversation revealed that Wong declined an invitation to do a virtual pitch and insisted on an in-person meeting.

“She was one of the few or maybe the only CEO who ever stood up to pitch the entire team,” said Siniscalco.

“She pointed to the screen projected behind her to help us stay on the most relevant piece of information. The way she did it really made us stay with her. Like, we couldn’t break eye contact.”

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Beyond Wong’s pitch technique, this post also examines some of the key “customer love” metrics that helped Zipline win the day, such as CAC, churn rates and net promoter score.

“In retrospect, I really underestimated the competitive advantage of coming from the industry,” said Wong. “But it resulted in the numbers in our deck, because I know what customers want, what they want to buy next, how to keep them happy and I was able to be way more capital-efficient.”

Read our recap with highlights from their conversation, or click though to watch a video with their entire chat.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Investors don’t expect the US startup funding market to slow down

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Global venture capital reached $156 billion in Q2 2021, a YOY increase of 157%. A record number of unicorns found their feet during the same period and valuations rose across the board, report Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm in today’s edition of The Exchange.

Even if round counts didn’t set all-time highs, “the general vibe of Q2 venture capital data was clear: It’s a great time for startups looking to raise capital.”

Anna and Alex are interviewing VCs in different regions to find out why they’re feeling so generous and optimistic. Today, they started with the following U.S.-based investors:

• Amy Cheetham, principal, Costanoa Ventures
• Marlon Nichols, founding managing partner, MaC Venture Capital
• Vanessa Larco, partner, New Enterprise Associates
• Jeff Grabow, venture capital leader, EY US

Despite the hype, construction tech will be hard to disrupt

Image Credits: AzmanJaka (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The construction industry might seem like a sector wanting innovation, Safe Site Check In CEO and founder David Ward writes in a guest column, but there are unique challenges that make construction firms slow to adapt to new technology.

From the way construction projects are funded to complicated local regulations, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for the construction industry’s tech problems.

Construction tech might be appealing to investors, Ward writes, but it must be “easy to use, easy to deploy or access while on a job site, and improve productivity almost immediately.”

3 analysts weigh in: What are Andy Jassy’s top priorities as Amazon’s new CEO?

Image Credits: AP Photo/Isaac Brekken/John Locher

Now that he’s stepping away from AWS and taking over for Jeff Bezos, what are the biggest challenges facing incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy?

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller reached out to three analysts to get their take:

• Robin Ody, Canalys
• Sucharita Kodali, Forrester
• Ed Anderson, Gartner

Amazon is listed second in the Fortune 500, but it’s not all sunshine and roses — maintaining growth, unionization, and the potential for antitrust regulation at home and abroad are just a few of his responsibilities.

“I think the biggest to-do is to just continue that momentum that the company has had for the last several years,” Kodali says. “He has to make sure that they don’t lose that. If he does that, I mean, he will win.”

The most important API metric is time to first call

Image Credits: Peter Dazeley (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Publishing an API isn’t enough for any startup: Once it’s released, the hard work of cultivating a developer base begins.

Postman’s head of developer relations, Joyce Lin, wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch based on the findings of a study aimed at increasing adoption of APIs that utilize a public workspace.

Lin found that the most important metric for a public API is time to first call (TTFC). It makes sense — faster TTFC allows developers to begin using new tools quickly. As a result, “legitimately streamlining TTFC results in a larger market potential of better-educated users for the later stages of your developer journey,” writes Lin.

This post isn’t just for the developers in our audience: TTFC is a metric that product and growth teams should also keep top of mind, they suggest.

“Even if your market is defined as a limited subset of the developer community, any enhancements you make to TTFC equate to a larger available market.”

Q3 IPO cycle starts strong with Couchbase pricing and Kaltura relisting

Image Credits: olli0815/iStock

Couchbase and Kaltura offered new filings Monday, with NoSQL provider Couchbase setting an initial price range for its IPO and Kaltura resurrecting its public offering with a fresh price range and new financial information.

“Both bits of news should help us get a handle on how the Q3 2021 IPO cycle is shaping up at the start,” Alex Wilhelm writes.

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

Image Credits: PM Images (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images

Mark Spera, the head of growth marketing at Minted, offers SEO tips to help smaller sites stand out.

He writes in a guest column that Google’s algorithm “errs on the side of caution,” which leads the search engine to favor larger, more established websites.

“The cards aren’t in your favor, so you need to be even more strategic than the big guys,” he writes. “This means executing on some cutting-edge hacks to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search. I call these five tactics ‘advanced-ish,’ because none of them are complicated, but all of them are supremely important for search marketers in 2021.”

News: Why did file sharing drive so much startup innovation?

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One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes. To wit, one common theme that came

One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes.

To wit, one common theme that came from our recent profiles of Expensify and NS1 is the centrality of file sharing (or, illegal file sharing if you are on that side of the fence) and internet infrastructure in the origin stories of the two companies. That’s peculiar, because the duo honestly couldn’t be more different. Expensify is an SF-founded (now Portland-based), decentralized startup focused on building expense reporting and analytics software for companies and CFOs. New York-based NS1 designs highly-redundant DNS and internet traffic performance tools for web applications.

Yet, take a look at how the two companies were founded. Anna Heim on the origins of Expensify:

To truly understand Expensify, you first need to take a close look at a unique, short-lived, P2P file-sharing company called Red Swoosh, which was Travis Kalanick’s startup before he founded Uber. Framed by Kalanick as his “revenge business” after his previous P2P startup Scour was sued into oblivion for copyright infringement, Red Swoosh would be the precursor for Expensify’s future culture and ethos. In fact, many of Expensify’s initial team actually met at Red Swoosh, which was eventually acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $18.7 million.

[Expensify founder and CEO David] Barrett, a self-proclaimed alpha geek and lifelong software engineer, was actually Red Swoosh’s last engineering manager, hired after the failure of his first project, iGlance.com, a P2P push-to-talk program that couldn’t compete against Skype. “While I was licking my wounds from that experience, I was approached by Travis Kalanick who was running a startup called Red Swoosh,” he recalled in an interview.

Then you head over to Sean Michael Kerner’s story on how NS1 came together:

NS1’s story begins back at the turn of the millennium, when [NS1 co-founder and CEO Kris] Beevers was an undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York and found himself employed at a small file-sharing startup called Aimster with some friends from RPI. Aimster was his first taste of life at an internet startup in the heady days of the dot-com boom and bust, and also where he met an enterprising young engineer by the name of Raj Dutt, who would become a key relationship over the next two decades.

By 2007, Beevers had completed his Ph.D. in robotic mapping at RPI and tried his hand at co-founding and running an engineered-wood-product company named SolidJoint Research, Inc. for 10 months. But he soon boomeranged back to the internet world, joining some of his former co-workers from Aimster at a company called Voxel that had been founded by Dutt.

The startup provided a cornucopia of services including basic web hosting, server co-location, content delivery and DNS services. “Voxel was one of those companies where you learn a lot because you’re doing way more than you rightfully should,” Beevers said. “It was a business sort of built out of love for the tech, and love for solving problems.”

The New York City-based company peaked at some 60 employees before it was acquired in December 2011 by Internap Network Services for $35 million.

Note some of the similarities here. First, these wildly different founders ended up both working on key internet plumbing. Which makes sense of course, since back two decades ago, building out the networking and compute capacity of the internet was one of the major engineering challenges of that period in the web’s history.

Additionally in both cases, the founding teams met at little-known companies defined by their engineering cultures and which sold to larger internet infrastructure conglomerates for relatively small amounts of money. And those acquirers ended up being laboratories for all kinds of innovation, even as few people really remember Akamai or Internap these days (both companies are still around today mind you).

The cohort of founders is fascinating. Obviously, you have Travis Kalanick, who would later go on to found Uber. But the Voxel network that went to Internap is hardly a slouch:

Dutt would leave Internap to start Grafana, an open-source data visualization vendor that has raised over $75 million to date. Voxel COO Zachary Smith went on to found bare metal cloud provider, Packet, in 2013, which he ran as CEO until the company was acquired by Equinix in March 2020 for $335 million. Meanwhile, Justin Biegel, who spent time at Voxel in operations, has raised nearly $62 million for his startup Kentik. And of course, NS1 was birthed from the same alumni network.

What’s interesting to me with these two companies (and some others in our set of stories) is how often founders worked on other problems before starting the companies that would make them famous. They learned the trade, built networks of hyper-intelligent present and future colleagues, understood business development and growth, and started to create a flywheel of innovation amidst their friends. They also got a taste of an exit without really getting the whole meal, if you will.

In particular with file sharing, what’s interesting is the rebellious and democratic ethos that came with that world back at the turn of the millennium. To work in file sharing in that era meant fighting the big music labels, overturning the economics of entire industries, and breaking down barriers to allow the internet economy to flourish. It attracted a weird bunch of folks — the exact kind of weirdness that happens to make good startup founders, apparently. It echos one of the key arguments of Fred Turner’s book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.”

Which begs the question then: what are the “file sharing” markets today that these sorts of individuals congregate around? One that seems obvious to me is blockchain, which has precisely that balance of rebelliousness, democratization, and technical excellence (well, at least some of the time!) And then there are the modern-day “pirates” today such as Alexandra Elbakyan who invented and has operated Sci-Hub to make the world’s research and knowledge democratized.

It’s maybe not the current batch of companies that we see which will become the next extraordinary unicorns. But watch the people who show up in the interesting places — because their next projects often seem to hit gold.

News: Zomato raises $562 million from anchor investors ahead of IPO

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Indian food delivery startup Zomato said on Tuesday evening that it has raised $562.3 million from its anchor investors ahead of IPO opening on Wednesday. Zomato, which counts Ant Financial  has already secured nearly 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise through the IPO, the 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered startup revealed in a filing to

Indian food delivery startup Zomato said on Tuesday evening that it has raised $562.3 million from its anchor investors ahead of IPO opening on Wednesday.

Zomato, which counts Ant Financial  has already secured nearly 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise through the IPO, the 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered startup revealed in a filing to local stock exchanges. The public share sale will open on Wednesday and close Friday.

Tiger Global, Fidelity, New World, Baillie Gifford, Government of Singapore, Canada Pension Plan, Mirae Asset, T. Rowe Price, and Steadview are among the investors that are backing the startup in the public markets.

The investors have subscribed the shares at Rs 76 ($1) — the upper end of the price range for Zomato’ shares — giving the Indian startup an implied valuation of $8.6 billion, up from $5.4 billion in February this year.

The oversubscription illustrates the confidence high-profile investors are placing in the world’s second largest internet market’s first real consumer internet offering.

In a virtual press conference last week, Zomato executives said the startup, which has search and discovery in nearly two dozen markets, will focus largely on India and will explore categories such as online grocery delivery in the future.

The executives also dismissed Amazon as a serious competitor for now. “There’s no major impact on market share from Amazon so far,” the company’s chief financial officer said. Amazon entered the food delivery market last year and is operational in just Bangalore for now. Swiggy, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, is Zomato’s chief rival in India.

For the financial year that ended in March this year, its revenue was down 23% to $283 million, and it also shrank its losses to $110 million, down 66% from the same period a year ago.

News: Where is suptech heading?

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With the finance world now leveraging tech to conduct business, financial services regulators are also developing new tech to monitor markets, supervise institutions and for administration.

Technology plays a huge role in nearly every aspect of financial services today. As the world moved online, tools and infrastructure to help people manage their money and make payments have burgeoned the world over in the past decade.

With much of the finance world now leveraging technology to conduct business, predict trends and deliver services, financial services regulators are also developing new technologies to monitor markets, supervise financial institutions and conduct other administrative activities. The emergence of purpose-built technologies to facilitate regulator oversight has, over the past few years, garnered its own moniker of supervisory technology, or suptech.

Interest in suptech is proliferating across the globe thanks to a diverse set of prudential and conduct regulators. A sampling of regulators developing suptech include the FDIC, CFPB, FINRA and Federal Reserve in the U.S.; the U.K.’s FCA and Bank of England; the National Bank of Rwanda in Africa; as well as the ASIC, HKMA and MAS in Asia. Several “super regulators” are also engaged in suptech efforts such as the Bank of International Settlements, the Financial Stability Board and the World Bank.

In this post, we’ll examine a few core suptech use cases, consider its future and explore the challenges facing regulators as the market matures. The uses are diverse, so we’ll focus on three key areas: regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulation, and market and conduct oversight.

A quick general note: Nearly every financial services regulator is engaged in some type of suptech activity and the use cases discussed in this article are intended as a sample, not a comprehensive list.

But what exactly is suptech?

As a preliminary matter, we should quickly survey a few definitions of suptech to frame our understanding. Both the World Bank and BIS have offered definitions that provide useful outlines for this discussion. The World Bank states that suptech “refers to the use of technology to facilitate and enhance supervisory processes from the perspective of supervisory authorities.” It’s a little circular, but helpful.

The BIS defines suptech as “the use of technology for regulatory, supervisory and oversight purposes.” This is a similarly loose definition that describes the broader scope better.

Regardless of differences on the margins, the “sup” in these suptech definitions acknowledges the primacy of the idea that regulators’ objectives are to oversee the conduct, structure, and health of the financial system. Suptech technologies facilitate related regulatory supervision and enforcement processes.

Regulatory reporting

Regulatory reporting refers to a broad swath of activities such as financial firms providing trading data to regulatory authorities and regulators’ analysis of financial data or corporate information to determine the projected health or potential risks facing an institution or the market.

The MAS and FDIC are incorporating transactional and financial data reported by firms as a means to assess their financial viability. The MAS, in conjunction with BIS, has run tech sprints soliciting new ideas relating to regulatory reporting, while the FDIC has “a regulatory reporting solution that would allow ‘on-demand’ monitoring of banks as opposed to being constrained by ‘point-in-time’ reporting. This project is particularly targeted at smaller, community banks that provide only aggregated data on their financial health on a quarterly basis.”

The HKMA recently outlined its three-year plan for the development of suptech, which includes developing an approach to “network analysis.” The HKMA will analyze reporting data related to corporate shareholding and financial exposure to bring them “to life as network diagrams, so that the relationships between different entities become more apparent. Greater transparency of the connections and dependencies between banks and their customers will enable HKMA supervisors to detect early warning signals within the entire credit network.”

These reporting initiatives touch on a theme regulators have continuously struggled with: How to regulate markets and firms based on a reactive approach to historical data. Regulation and enforcement are often retrospective activities — examining past behavior and data to decide how to sanction an organization or develop a regulatory framework to govern a particular type of activity or financial product. This can result in an approach to regulation too rooted in past failures, which might lack the flexibility to anticipate or adapt to emerging risks or financial products.

News: Discord buys Sentropy, which makes AI moderation software to fight online hate and abuse

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The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate. Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins to create ground rules for individual servers. A Trust and Safety

The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate.

Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins to create ground rules for individual servers. A Trust and Safety team dedicated to protecting users and shaping content moderation policies comprised 15% of Discord’s workforce as of May 2020.

Discord plans to integrate Sentropy’s own products into its existing toolkit and the company will also bring the smaller company’s leadership group aboard. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition is a sign that taking toxic content and harassment seriously isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s good business too.

“T&S tech and processes should not be used as a competitive advantage,” Sentropy CEO John Redgrave said in a blog post on the announcement. “We all deserve digital and physical safety, and moderators deserve better tooling to help them do one of the hardest jobs online more effectively and with fewer harmful impacts.”

Discord hasn’t always had a reputation for taking dangerous content seriously. Far-right groups with ties to real-world violence previously thrived on the platform. Discord cracked down on hate and extremism following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which left anti-racist protester Heather Heyer dead.

By February of 2018, the company was purging white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, cleaning up the platform on its journey to transcend its gaming roots and grow into a mainstream social network. Now, Discord boasts 150 million monthly active users and is positioning itself as a comfy home for all kinds of communities while holding onto its core user base of gamers.

In a blog post, Redgrave elaborated on the company’s natural connection with Discord:

“Discord represents the next generation of social companies — a generation where users are not the product to be sold, but the engine of connectivity, creativity, and growth. In this model, user privacy and user safety are essential product features, not an afterthought. The success of this model depends upon building next-generation Trust and Safety into every product. We don’t take this responsibility lightly and are humbled to work at the scale of Discord and with Discord’s resources to increase the depth of our impact.”

Sentropy launched out of stealth last summer with an AI system designed to detect, track and cleanse platforms of online harassment and abuse. The company emerged then with $13 million in funding from notable backers including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his VC firm Initialized Capital, King River Capital, Horizons Ventures and Playground Global.

Sentropy will offer existing enterprise customers who use its software products Detect and Defend service through the end of September. The company shut down its free consumer dashboard, Sentropy Protect, earlier this month.

Sentropy’s products were conceived as social network-agnostic tools rather than as platform-specific solutions. It sounds like even under Discord’s wing, the team plans to share insights on building safer online spaces with the internet at large.

“We are excited to help Discord decide how we can most effectively share with the rest of the Internet the best practices, technology, and tools that we’ve developed to protect our own communities,” Redgrave said.

Discord’s future is looking bright. The company walked away from a possible acquisition by Microsoft earlier this year that reportedly valued it at around $10 billion. Discord looks content to remain independent for now and could chart a path toward an IPO in the not-too-distant future.

News: Panda Express is piloting Beyond Meat orange chicken in select locations

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Just under a week after Beyond Meat announced that it will be releasing a reworked version of its plant-based Chicken Tenders at restaurants in the U.S., the faux meat company has returned with a potentially sizable restaurant partnership. Starting July 26, select Panda Express restaurants in Southern California and New York City will offer an

Just under a week after Beyond Meat announced that it will be releasing a reworked version of its plant-based Chicken Tenders at restaurants in the U.S., the faux meat company has returned with a potentially sizable restaurant partnership.

Starting July 26, select Panda Express restaurants in Southern California and New York City will offer an orange chicken dish using Beyond’s chicken product. It’s a big potential partnership for Beyond, as the Asian American fast food chain currently has 2,200 locations, largely in food courts and other high-traffic spots.

It could also be a big step for Panda Express, which has traditionally had fairly limited vegetarian options. You know it’s a bit dire for veggies when the press release lists “steamed white and brown rice” as two of its six “plant-based dishes.”

Image Credits: Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat isn’t calling it a pilot, exactly, but notes in an email to TechCrunch, “we are confident that people will love the new menu item and we will keep our guests updated with information on additional rollouts.” One assumes a larger rollout depends on early feedback and perceived consumer demand for a non-meat-based main dish.

“Beyond The Original Orange Chicken is the next step in the brand’s journey to offer more diverse and plant-based options, while still delivering comfort and crave-ability in innovative ways,” Panda Express’  chef Jimmy Wang said in a release tied to the soft launch. “Creating a fresh new take on a classic favorite is a great and accessible way to introduce plant-based proteins to our guests and perhaps even drawing a new audience for Panda.”

Baby steps, but anything that helps reduce meat consumption is probably a net positive. Beyond also recently inked a deal to bring plant-based pepperoni to select Little Caesars locations. Beyond also has deals with White Castle, Denny’s and Dunkin’ for its various plant-based meat substitutes.

News: Nas Academy raises $11 million to help creators build their own MasterClass-like courses

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Investors are buying into a creator-led future, and Nas Academy wants to turn that creator influence into a broad network of “virtual universities.” The Singapore startup is building out a platform for creators to monetize their knowledge, giving them the tools to create their own classes and academies that fans can attend online. The platform

Investors are buying into a creator-led future, and Nas Academy wants to turn that creator influence into a broad network of “virtual universities.”

The Singapore startup is building out a platform for creators to monetize their knowledge, giving them the tools to create their own classes and academies that fans can attend online. The platform is founded and led by Nuseir Yassin, a video blogger and influencer whose Nas Daily social media accounts boast tens of millions of followers across platforms.

Nas Academy has closed an $11 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional backing from Balaji Srinivasan, Emilie Choi, TechAviv Founder Partners, 500 Startups and Metapurse, among others.

The platform can help creators build on-demand class portfolios or live courses, while the marketplace allows users to navigate and shop around for courses that appeal to them. Yassin hopes the platform can bring some predictability to consumers who are interested in signing up for online courses, but are wary of scams and half-baked offerings. “This market needs to have some trusted brands and quality assurances,” he says.

At the moment, a good chunk of the courses skew towards the business of online influence, with classes on video editing, content marketing and entrepreneurship. It’s also a pretty wide range of price points with costs for courses live on the platform now ranging from $29 to $499. Users can also pay for a bundle of courses, and Yassin says the platform has plans for a subscription offering down the road.

Nas Academy will monetize by taking a cut of these revenues, which may vary a bit, especially right now as the platform is invite-only for creators. As the platform opens up further, Yassin wants it to be a way for creators to find new audiences too. Course operators will have access to emails of their audience and be able to reach out to them directly outside the platform if they so desire.

Investors have been increasingly signing on to back startups building products in the creator economy vertical, especially in the past year. Creator platform Patreon recently raised at a $4 billion valuation. Yassin sees a massive opportunity in not only facilitating closer relationships between creators and fans but serving as an on-ramp for aspiring creators coming to their platform to learn.

“We think there are another 100,000 creators who will never get asked to make a Masterclass,” Yassin tells TechCrunch. “Internet skills are low in supply and high in demand.”

News: Zero’s FXE offers electric motorcycle fun in a slightly new package

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Zero Motorcycles has been around for over a decade and in that time it’s consistently improved its fleet of electric bikes. With the new FXE, the northern California company has taken the thoroughly enjoyable FXS supermoto and transformed it into something a bit more futuristic looking with a new easier-to-parse display. The FXE likely isn’t

Zero Motorcycles has been around for over a decade and in that time it’s consistently improved its fleet of electric bikes. With the new FXE, the northern California company has taken the thoroughly enjoyable FXS supermoto and transformed it into something a bit more futuristic looking with a new easier-to-parse display.

The FXE likely isn’t a great pick for two-wheeled beginners or for folks that want a weekend cruiser, but for the experienced rider who needs a daily commuter that packs agility and power into a fun package, the 100-mile range FXE might be the best way to get to and from work. Watch our first ride video for the full story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. Roberto Baldwin is an Engadget contributor. 

News: Widespread AV adoption starts with driver assistance systems consumers can trust

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Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To start building this critical trust today, automakers should aim to accelerate the adoption of advanced driver assistance systems.

In the past year, many of the conversations around autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been dominated by the same question: When will self-driving cars be the norm on public roads?

While industry leaders talked a big game on AVs monopolizing our roads back in 2016, today some experts have put widespread Level 4 adoption over a decade away. However, even that timeline only works if automakers overcome significant barriers — both technical and behavioral. The challenge of bringing AVs to consumers will be tougher than anticipated, with a central part of the effort being focused on earning the public’s trust.

Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To meet the projected timelines and start building this critical trust today, automakers should accelerate the adoption of autonomous capabilities into advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

The challenges facing current ADAS technologies

The truth is that consumers do not yet trust the ADAS capabilities in their vehicles. A 2021 AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey found that 80% of drivers wanted current vehicle safety systems, like automatic emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance, to work better, noting the lack of confidence consumers feel around current offerings.

Despite significant recent advancements in the industry, including announcements from Cruise gaining permission to give rides in driverless test vehicles to passengers in California, AAA studies indicate that still only one in 10 drivers would be comfortable riding in a self-driving car. While consumers seem to be aware that AV technologies are advancing quickly, this lack of trust from users will be a major barrier to full adoption and can pose a threat to the industry — no matter how far along the technology develops.

To aid in building the public’s confidence, the industry must focus today on more advanced and reliable ADAS to meet consumer demands. However, current offerings face major challenges that must be resolved before the majority of consumers will get on board:

1. Lack of reliability in common adverse conditions: Technologies including lidar and camera are limited to what they can “see” around them. These systems can be easily obstructed by snow, dirt and debris covering the vehicle’s sensors. Additionally, without clear, crisp lane markings — in the event of snow, heavy rainfall or off-road conditions — or strong GPS signals, the typical sensors tracking vehicle location will not function properly.
2. Poor detection: There have been several cases where ADAS technologies have been unable to detect degraded lane markings, pedestrians, other vehicles or common on-road objects, resulting in injury and even death for drivers and pedestrians.
3. Low understanding by the general public: While some ADAS features are designed to operate independently, there is still a consistent lack of public knowledge when it comes to understanding how to best utilize the systems’ abilities to maximize safety. This lack of awareness poses an unnecessary threat to drivers who inadvertently misuse the technology as well as to those with whom they share the roads.

Addressing these challenges and creating better automated driving experiences for consumers is a critical step to mass adoption of future AV technology. The most immediate opportunity to move the needle with consumer acceptance in this area is to target improving reliability and user experience — especially with dynamic vehicle safety systems. To do so, automated and autonomous vehicles need improved sensors and software that enhance today’s systems and, as a result, boost consumer confidence in the safety of automated capabilities.

A fresh perspective on vehicle positioning

In the last decade, the industry has made various advancements in positioning systems, which locate a vehicle to the centimeter on roadways and are critical additions to traditional hardware stacks. As a result, experts have been placing bets on technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and novel mapping techniques as the final missing piece to robust vehicle positioning due to their ability to operate in adverse driving conditions and navigate highly dynamic environments.

While it is clear there are different avenues AVs can take to increase their reliability on the road, automakers are still trying to determine which approach can unlock the change in performance required for broad adoption.

When taking a closer look at the differentiators that make these technologies stand out, a common thread is how they address three critical issues: the absence of roadside features such as on open highways, within parking lots or when a car is boxed in by trucks and vision is limited; the reliance of camera-based systems on clear, consistent lane markings; and quickly changing environments in which the scene on the surface looks different from one moment to the next and HD maps quickly become unusable. These common challenges have left consumers frustrated with inconsistent and unreliable ADAS features.

One way to overcome these critical gaps is to explore other avenues for reliable vehicle positioning such as ground-penetrating radar — which allows vehicles to determine their precise location in adverse weather or in rough terrain, amid poor GPS availability and other common barriers faced by automated systems today — to show improved autonomy is possible. By adding these novel approaches into vehicles, automakers can create more reliable and accurate ADAS features — safeguarding the automated driving experience.

Leaning on ADAS as a vehicle for consumer confidence and mass AV adoption

A recent study from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) found that consumers familiar with ADAS technology were more likely to feel positive about autonomous cars and that 75% who currently own a vehicle with ADAS features say they are excited about future safety technology. This shows consumer engagement in today’s ADAS features can lead to more positive attitudes on tomorrow’s AV adoption.

As an industry, where do we go from here? Many are finding that there is a unique opportunity to resolve the future issues of autonomous vehicle operations by attacking them head-on in present-day ADAS systems — where they will otherwise be a future problem that will block mass adoption.

We need to address these critical issues with ADAS technologies and create better driving experiences to earn the public’s trust. By using higher-performing ADAS as a pathway to mass AV adoption, we can arrive at the destination safely.

The industry, along with consumers, can build a safe autonomous future.