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SpaceX has launched its 17th batch of Starlink satellites during its first mission of 2021, using a Falcon 9 rocket that was flying for the eighth time, and that landed again, recording a record for its reusability program. This puts the total Starlink constellation size at almost 1,000, as the company has expanded its beta access program for the service to the UK and Canada, with a first deployment in the latter company serving a rural First Nations community in a remote part of the province of Ontario.
The launch took off from Florida at 8:02 AM EST (5:02 AM PST), with delivery of the satellites following as planned at around an hour after lift-off. The booster on this launch flew seven times previously, as mentioned – including just in December when it was used to delivery a SiriusXM satellite to orbit to support that company’s satellite radio network.
Today’s launch was also notable because it included a landing attempt in so-called “envelope expansion” conditions, which means that the winds in the landing zone where SpaceX’s drone recovery ship was stationed at sea actually exceeded the company’s previously-defined safety window for making a landing attempt.
As a result of today’s success, SpaceX will likely now have higher tolerances for wind speeds in order to attempt recovery, which should translate to fewer cancellations of launches based on weather conditions in the landing zone.
A four-year antitrust investigation into PC games geo-blocking in the European Union by distribution platform Valve and five games publishers has led to fines totalling €7.8 million (~$9.4M) after the Commission confirmed today that the bloc’s rules had been breached.
The geo-blocking practices investigated since 2017 concerned around 100 PC video games of different genres, including sports, simulation and action games.
In addition to Valve — which has been fined just over €1.6M — the five sanctioned games publishers are: Bandai Namco (fined €340k), Capcom (€396k), Focus Home (€2.8M), Koch Media (€977k) and ZeniMax (€1.6M).
The Commission said the fines were reduced by between 10% and 15% owing to cooperation from the companies, with the exception of Valve who it said chose not to cooperate (a “prohibition Decision” rather than a fine reduction was applied in its case).
Valve has been contacted for comment.
The antitrust investigation begun in February 2017, with a formal statement of objections issued just over two years later when the Commission accused the companies of “entering into bilateral agreements to prevent consumers from purchasing and using PC video games acquired elsewhere than in their country of residence” in contravention of EU rules.
The mechanisms used by the companies to prevent certain cross-border sales of certain PC games were geo-blocked Steam activation keys and bilateral licensing and distribution agreements to restrict certain cross-border sales.
EU lawmakers has now found that these business practices partitioned certain European markets according to national borders — denying regional consumers the benefits of the EU’s Digital Single Market to shop around for the best offer.
Commenting in a statement, EVP Margrethe Vestager, who heads up competition policy for the bloc, said: “Today’s sanctions against the ‘geo-blocking’ practices of Valve and five PC video game publishers serve as a reminder that under EU competition law, companies are prohibited from contractually restricting cross-border sales. Such practices deprive European consumers of the benefits of the EU Digital Single Market and of the opportunity to shop around for the most suitable offer in the EU.”.
According to the Commission’s investigation, geo-blocking of Steam activation keys prevented activation of certain of the five games’ publishers titles outside of Czechia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
It said agreements between the companies to geo-block activation keys had lasted between one and five years and were found to have been implemented at various times between September 2010 and October 2015.
While four of the games publishers (not Capcom) were found to have entered into licensing and distribution agreements with various PC games distributors (not Value) in the European Economic Area (EEA) which contained clauses which restricted cross-border sales of the affected titles within the EEA, including the aforementioned Central and Eastern European countries.
The Commission said these agreements lasted generally longer (“between three and 11 years”), and were implemented at different times between March 2007 and November 2018.
Since the investigation started, EU lawmakers have passed a regulation against unjustified geo-blocking. Although the legislation only applies to PC video games distributed on CDs or DVDs, not to downloads. So games are only partially covered.
A Commission review of how the geo-blocking regulation is operating, published last November, discussed a possible extension of its scope in a range of areas, including for games. However it did not make a strong case for that change. (It also found demand for cross-border access to games (and software generally) relatively low vs other content services.)
But while games distributed via digital downloads look set to remain outside the scope of the EU’s unjustified geo-blocking regulation, the fines against Valve et al show that geo-blocking can still be a legal minefield as contractual agreements to restrict cross-border sales run counter to the bloc’s antitrust rules.
The specific breaches are of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and Article 53 of the Agreement on the European Economic Area which prohibit agreements between companies that prevent, restrict or distort competition within the EU’s Single Market, per the Commission.
Rocket Lab has launched its 18th mission, and the first of 2021, as of 8:26 PM NZT (2:30 AM EST). The ‘Another One Leaves The Crust’ mission took off from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, and flew a single communications microsatellite on behalf of client OHB Group, a satellite manufacturer based in Europe with facilities in Germany, Sweden and the Czech Republic.
Rocket Lab’s launches often feature payloads from more than one customer on the same Electron launch vehicle, but this dedicated payload launch is an example of how the flexibility of its smaller rocket can serve customers even for single small satellite missions. The rocket successfully delivered its payload as intended shortly following take-off.
While Rocket Lab has been developing and testing a booster stage recovery process to help it re-use part of its launch vehicles on subsequent flights, this particular mission did not include a recovery attempt. The company has had significant success with that development process however, and recovered its first booster last year. Sometime this year, it’s expected to attempt a recovery that includes a mid-air catch of the returning first stage via helicopter.
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HiPeople, a HR tech startup based in Berlin that wants to automate the reference checking process, has raised $3 million in seed funding.
Leading the round is Mattias Ljungman’s Moonfire, with participation from Capnamic Ventures, and Cherry Ventures. It follows a $1.1 million pre-seed in late 2019. Notably, the seed round was closed fully remote, without any in-person meetings. “Just like the hiring processes of HiPeople’s clients,” founders Jakob Gillmann and Sebastian Schüller told me in an email.
HiPeople says the investment will be used to support growth so that more recruiters can hire remotely using automated reference checks. Longer term, the company is developing a candidate analytics platform to provide rich data and insights on each candidate and enable what it frames as “data-driven” hiring.
“Abstractly-speaking HiPeople is in the talent insights business,” say Gillmann and Schüller. “It’s mission is to enable better hiring by automatically collecting and analyzing talent data, and providing rich insights. HiPeople currently solves this by automating candidate reference checks from request, to collection, and analysis. This allows companies to extend the information they have on a candidate without additional manual work”.
The idea behind the software-as-a-service is that HiPeople’s approach creates a seamless user experience for the recruiter, and “verified, in-depth reference checks they can trust”. As a result, the startup claims that its users on average collect 2x the amount of references on a candidate, in 50% of the time. “Traditionally, reference checks are underutilized due to the highly manual process, and often only exclusively used for executive hiring. HiPeople dusts off reference checks, and enables rich talent insights by rethinking how they are done,” says HiPeople’s founders.
HiPeople’s customers span fast growing startups to tech scale-ups and more established upper mid-market companies. For example, process mining company Celonis, which doubled its workforce in the last 12 months to 1,200 employees globally, uses HiPeople to improve hiring quality for roles in San Francisco, Munich and Tokyo. “By programmatically conducting reference checks the company hires talent based on verified insights on topics like areas of improvement, skills, teamwork style, or work values,” explains HiPeople.
Adds Moonfire’s Mattias Ljungman: “Workflow automation of repetitive processes, and insights on the candidate that go beyond the limitations of the CV, are a clear pain for anybody in recruiting. The Covid-influenced reality of remote work, hence remote hiring practices, has increased the complexity of finding the right talent. HiPeople created a way to enable anybody who is hiring to make better decisions, whilst improving processes and increasing hiring velocity”.
Gillmann and Schüller tell me that in Europe, HiPeople mainly competes with the existing infrastructure and processes recruiters use to manually conduct references checks. In the U.S., companies like Xref or Crosschq are more direct competitors in terms of automating reference checks.
