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As part of the grant-making associated with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Infrastructure for Rebuilding America program, the agency will for the first time carve out some of that program’s $889 million budget for projects addressing climate change and environmental justice.
The projects will be evaluated on whether they were planned as part of a comprehensive strategy to address climate change, or whether they support strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as deploying zero-emission-vehicle infrastructure or encouraging shifts in modes of transportation or vehicle miles traveled, the agency said in an announcement.
“As we work to recover and emerge from this devastating pandemic stronger than before, now is the time to make lasting investments in our nation’s infrastructure,” said Secretary Pete Buttigieg, in a statement. “We are committed to not just rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, but building back in a way that positions American communities for success in the future—creating good paying jobs, boosting the economy, ensuring equity, and tackling our climate crisis. The INFRA grant program is a tremendous opportunity to help achieve these goals.
Racial equity will also be considered, according to the agency’s announcement. With requirements including equity-focused community outreach and projects designed to benefit underserved communities privileged, along with projects that are located in opportunity, empowerment, or promise zones or choice neighborhoods.
The new programs show just how quickly federal dollars could be made available to startups that are looking at electrification and provide more strength to the tailwinds already propelling the electric vehicle industry — and its attendant charging networks forward.
Large infrastructure projects could receive grants of $25 million or more while small projects must have grant requirements that meet a minimum threshold of at least $5 million, according to the DOT.
Eligible project costs could include: reconstruction, rehabilitation, acquisition of property (including land related to the project and improvements to the land), environmental mitigation, construction contingencies, equipment acquisition, and operational improvements directly related to system performance.
Opportunities for applications are going to be open through Friday, March 19.
Facebook plays hardball in Australia, Epic Games expands its fight against Apple and New York’s attorney general sues Amazon. This is your Daily Crunch for February 17, 2021.
The big story: Facebook cuts off news-sharing in Australia
In response to a proposed law forcing internet platforms to pay news publishers directly, Facebook announced today that Australian users will not be able to share or view news links.
In its post, Facebook drew a direct contrast with the other big company targeted by the law, with managing director for Facebook Australia and New Zealand William Easton writing, “Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content. On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue.”
The tech giants
Epic Games takes its Apple App Store fight to Europe — The Fortnite-maker has lodged a complaint with the bloc’s antitrust regulators.
NY AG sues Amazon over treatment of warehouse workers — The suit alleges that Amazon failed to provide adequate health and safety measures in two New York facilities, and that it unlawfully disciplined and fired employees who complained.
Google Maps users can now pay for parking or their transit fare right from the app — This is part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and ParkMobile.
Startups, funding and venture capital
Locus Robotics has raised a $150M Series E — The round values the robotics company at $1 billion.
SpaceX reportedly raises $850M in new funding — This is a massive round by most standards, but not by SpaceX’s.
Jet co-founder Nate Faust is building a more sustainable e-commerce experience with Olive — Faust said it’s “crazy” that 25 years after the e-commerce industry began, it’s still relying on “single-use, one-way packaging.”
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
Dear Sophie: Tips for filing for a green card for my soon-to-be spouse — The latest edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
With software markets getting bigger, will more VCs bet on competing startups? — Back in the days when inside rounds were bad, SPACs were jokes and crypto a fever dream, there was lots of noise about investors who declined to place competing bets in any particular startup market.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Jamaica’s immigration website exposed thousands of travelers’ data — Immigration documents and COVID-19 lab results were left unprotected.
Reducing the spread of misinformation on social media: What would a do-over look like? — Ideas from the team at Irrational Labs.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/daily-crunch-facebook-cuts-off-news-sharing-in-australia/
Artie, a startup looking to rethink the distribution of mobile games, announced today that it has raised $10 million in funding.
There are some big names backing the company — its latest investors include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, Scooter Braun’s Raised In Space, Shutterstock founder Jon Oringer, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Susquehanna International Group, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment + The Sixers Lab, Googler Manuel Bronstein and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley.
This actually represents a pivot from Artie’s original vision of creating augmented reality avatars. CEO Ryan Horrigan said that he and his co-founder/CTO Armando Kirwin ended up building distribution technology that they felt solved “a much bigger problem.”
The problem, in part, is game developers “looking for ways outside of Apple’s App Stores rules and restrictions.” (That’s certainly something Fortnite-maker Epic Games seems to be fighting for.) So Artie’s platform allows users to play mobile games without installing an app, from the browser or wherever links can be shared online.
Image Credits: Artie
Artie isn’t the only startup focused on the idea of app-less mobile gaming, but Horrigan said that while other companies are limited by JavaScript and HTML5, Artie supports Unity, meaning it can build casual (rather than hyper-casual) games, and eventually games that might even go deeper.
“Similar to cloud games, we’re running Unity games on our cloud, but rather than rendering their graphics on the cloud and pushing the video to players, we’re not running graphics on the cloud,” he said. “We’re streaming assets and animations that are highly-optimized and rendered in real-time through the embedded web browser.”
In other words, the goal is to get frictionless distribution outside of app stores, while avoiding some of the issues facing cloud gaming, namely significant infrastructure costs and lag time.
The startup is developing and releasing games of its own, with an Alice in Wonderland game, a beer pong game and more on the schedule for later this year, then a massively multiplayer online game planned for 2022. But the company also plans to release an SDK allowing other developers to distribute through its platform as well.
Horrigan said Artie’s initial games will be free-to-play, monetized through in-game purchases. They’ll use cookies to remember where players were in the game, but players will also be able to create logins.
Artie is also developing games with a major music star and a superhero IP-owner, and he argued that by combining no-code/low-code authoring tools with Artie’s distribution platform, this could become a bigger trend.
“We want to be working with the next generation of influencers to make games using these low-code or no-code solutions, then publish to their audiences directly on YouTube,” he said. “Imagine what a branded game would look like from your favorite hip hop star. We think that’s coming, and we think Artie is the platform to make that happen.”
The beauty of podcasting is that anyone can do it. It’s a rare medium that’s nearly as easy to make as it is to consume. And as such, no two people do it exactly the same way. There are a wealth of hardware and software solutions open to potential podcasters, so setups run the gamut from NPR studios to USB Skype rigs (the latter of which has become a kind of default during the current pandemic).
We’ve asked some of our favorite podcast hosts and producers to highlight their workflows — the equipment and software they use to get the job done. The list so far includes:
Welcome to Your Fantasy’s Eleanor Kagan
Articles of Interest’s Avery Trufelman
First Draft and Track Changes’ Sarah Enni
RiYL remote podcasting edition
Family Ghosts’ Sam Dingman
I’m Listening’s Anita Flores
Broken Record’s Justin Richmond
Criminal/This Is Love’s Lauren Spohrer
Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale
Jesse Thorn of Bullseye
Ben Lindbergh of Effectively Wild
My own podcast, RiYL
Everyone knows that politics are like sports, only with, you know, real-world consequences that can directly impact the lives of millions. But why deal in abstractions when you can bet actual money? With Election Profit Makers, co-hosts David Rees, Starlee Kine and Jon Kimball put their money where their mouth is, betting on political outcomes with their hard-earned dollars.
Image Credits: David Rees
As a collector of audio gear (mostly effects pedals, old rim-drive tape machines and 1980s keyboards I’ve modified), I wish I could say my podcasting setup featured equipment that is extremely expensive and hard to come by. I would love to brag about using, say, hand-wired boutique preamps and a rare Soviet condenser microphone I bought at a military auction in Kazakhstan. Nothing would please me more than to share photographs of a massive reel-to-reel tape machine on which I record my ad reads (for “warmth”) before mixing them down on my laptop.
Alas, my podcasting setup is extremely normal. I have a Scarlett two-channel interface I bought at a chain store. I have a Rode microphone because I couldn’t afford a Shure SM7B. I record into GarageBand, which is the spiral-bound notebook of audio interfaces. The only slightly unusual thing about my podcasting setup is that on the rare occasion when I edit an episode I do so in Ableton Live, which I originally bought years ago when I was obsessed with making mashups.
Image Credits: David Rees
The only analog affectation I can claim is a shameful one: My laptop is so old the USB ports seem to be going slack — I’m surprised they don’t have hair growing out of them like old men’s ears — so I have to fix the line from my Scarlett into place using electrical tape.
Election Profit Makers is a podcast about betting on political events using the web site PredictIt.org. (My co-host Jon Kimball made enough money on the 2020 election to buy a new car; I made enough to buy a new tremolo pedal.) The only time we’ve done field recordings was last spring, when Jon and I went on a nerd / comedy cruise in the Caribbean the week COVID hit. We recorded daily dispatches at sea using a Zoom H4N, then wandered around Santo Domingo until we found a university library whose Wi-Fi we could use to upload the files to our co-host and editor Starlee. My phone tells me I walked 24,000 steps that day.
Image Credits: David Rees
Because my podcasting setup is so boring, I have spiced up the photos by including some of my other audio gear in the shots! When the world is ready for cassette-based podcasts saturated in analog delay, I will be more than happy to oblige!
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/how-i-podcast-election-profit-makers-david-rees/
Google has suspended the Trump 2020 campaign app from the Google Play Store for policy violations, the company confirmed, following a report from Android Police which noted the app was unable to load any content and appeared to have been taken down. Both the Android version of the app and its iOS counterpart have been left online since the November 2020 elections, but hadn’t received recent updates — which likely contributed to the app’s stability issues.
The Play Store version hadn’t been updated since October 30, 2020, for example, according to data from Sensor Tower.
According to Android Police’s report, the app was hanging and couldn’t load content, and it reported connectivity issues. We understand the issue was as they described — when users downloaded the app, it would either hang on the initial loading screen with a spinning “T” logo or it would immediately report a server error at startup. In either case, it would never load the app experience at all.
Recent user reviews on the Play Store noted these issues, saying things like “will not open,” “the app doesn’t even work,” “absolutely terrible doesn’t even work,” “wouldn’t open keep saying check connections,” and more. One user even asked the developer to respond to the numerous complaints, saying “please reply to people commenting. It’s not loading.” Another implied the issues were Google’s fault, noting “worked great, until Google canceled it.”
Google, though, did not cancel it. The Trump 2020 Android app has actually been experiencing problems for some time before Google took this action.
For example, a tweet from around a month ago described a similar set of issues:
Is the Trump2020 app down?@TrumpWarRoom @DanScavino @JennaEllisEsq @DonaldJTrumpJr @EricTrump pic.twitter.com/YGTJrZB66h
— TexanForTrump. God Bless Trump (@BlueWaterPalms) January 18, 2021
Google told TechCrunch the app has not been banned from the Play Store, only suspended for its non-functionality. It can be reinstated if the problems are addressed. The company also said it attempted to reach out to the app’s developer before taking the app down, but never received a response.
“The Trump 2020 campaign app recently stopped working and we reached out to the developer multiple times in an attempt to get them to address the issue,” a Google spokesperson said. “People expect that apps downloaded from Google Play provide a minimum level of functionality and our policy is to remove non-working apps from the store if they are not fixed.”
Despite the issues on Android, we found the iOS version was still able to load upon first launch, and could send confirmation codes to a phone number at sign-up. But when you visited the app’s main screens, it also now presents an error message. This error doesn’t affect your ability to browse through the past content on iOS, however.
Image Credits: Trump 2020 screenshot on iOS
According to data from Sensor Tower, the Android version hadn’t seen any new installs since February 7, 2021. The firm also noted the Trump 2020 Android app had around 840,000 installs compared with close to 1.5 million on iOS.
This is not the first time the Trump 2020 app’s issues have made headlines.
In the months leading up to last year’s presidential election in the U.S., a number of TikTok users decided to troll the app in its user reviews. (For some reason, Gen Z users believe a lowly rated app will be automatically removed from the app stores. That’s not true.) Their efforts at the time were able to bring the app’s overall star rating down to just 1.2 stars, and eventually forced the Trump 2020 campaign to reset the app’s ratings.
Though the election is long over, users have still been leaving bad reviews on the app along with their 1-star ratings. Sometimes, the trolls even attempt a bit of humor in the process.
“App attempted a coup to overthrow my phone’s operating system,” said one Play Store reviewer. “I’ve suffered enough since 2016,” said another on iOS.
