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There’s something difficult to reconcile watching Spot walk up a flight of stairs in some industrial setting. After years of watching viral videos of Boston Dynamics robots perform aesthetically impressive feats, there’s a banality in the quadruped performing those dull, dirty and dangerous tasks that roboticist love to talk about.
But six and half months after the company opened Spot up for sale (and more than 400 sold, per BD), companies have been deploying the advanced piece of machinery in some downright dreary settings. Yesterday morning, I had the opportunity to pilot the robot around one of them, from the comfort of my own desk.
This week the Hyundai-owned robotics pioneer is introducing Scout, a browser-based interface for remotely controlling the robot. The arrival will also be joined by a self-charging “Enterprise” edition of the robot and the already announced Spot Arm. All of the new hardware is available starting today through Boston Dynamics’ site (it’s one of those “call for a quote” pricing deals), though Scout will also be compatible with any version of the robot.
Image Credits: Boston Dynamics
That said, the company is recommending it be paired with the self-docking Enterprise version. After all, the robot runs about 90 minutes on a charge, so if you’re intending to use it to monitor a situation without people present, that’s probably the way to go.
I’ve driven Spot around a few times in person — and like those, there’s a bit of a learning curve here. Boston Dynamics estimates it will take around 15 minutes to get you fully up to speed, but after a minute or two, I was able to send the robot up and down a flight of stairs at BD HQ. There are, thankfully, a whole bunch of cameras and other sensors built into the $75,000 robot to help you avoid doing something really stupid.
Image Credits: Boston Dynamics
The system will work with Bluetooth gaming controllers, but for my demo, I was stuck with the keyboard. There’s a basic WASD control scheme that should be familiar if you’ve done any PC gaming. The arrow keys, meanwhile, can be used to switch between four cameras, giving you a view from all sides. There are a number of additional views, including a terrain mode that gives you a kind of top-down rendered view of the robot. That’s probably the best way to view all of the immediate obstacles — or better still, you can do a picture in picture to get views at once.
I found myself using “click to go” a lot, as well. It essentially works the way it sounds: You click on a point on the ground and Spot walks toward it. The feature is designed primarily for those with connection issues — imagine, say, you’ve got poor Spot deployed on some oil rig somewhere.
“[W]e have a power plant customer who had a possible equipment failure. They were able to use the robot to repeatedly inspect something that, if it failed could have been dangerous to a human inspector,” Spot’s Chief Engineer Zack Jackowski told TechCrunch. “So they logged in, checked on this pipe repeatedly and were able to avoid an expensive shut down.”
Image Credits: Boston Dynamics
There’s also a “stair mode” that positions the robot for walking up and down stairs. The feature needs to be manually toggled on and off, though the robot should be able to walk up a flight of stairs in normal mode (I did this in my demo, and didn’t appear to give anyone on staff a heart attack). For the time being, the functionality is limited to line of sight. Jackowski adds, “We have all sorts of crazy plans to extend that to building scale, but the first thing we want to get out there is line of vision.”
In addition to a new docking connector on the Robot’s bum, the Enterprise version will also sport an enhanced CPU and improved wireless connectivity. It will ship either as a bundle with the dock or solo.
Sadly, we weren’t able to take the new arm out for a spin, but Jackowski did offer some detail on that functionality, noting, “you issue the arm commands, like ‘move your hand here’ or ‘pick up this object’ or ‘turn this valve,’ and the robot’s actually smart enough to figure out, ‘hey, if I’m going to turn that valve, I need to stand over here, I need to shift my weight like this, I need to figure out how to keep the right part of my wrist limp to accommodate how that valve moves.’ ”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/soon-boston-dynamics-spot-will-be-remotely-opening-doors-anywhere/
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Yesterday, China flipped the switch on a nationwide carbon trading market, in what could be one of the most significant steps taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2021 — if the markets can work effectively.
China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and its share of the world’s emissions output continues to climb.
As the Chinese government works to curb its environmental impact, policies like a carbon trading system could spur the adoption of new technologies, increasing demand for goods and services from domestic startups and tech companies around the world.
Carbon markets, implemented in some parts of the U.S. and widely across Europe, put a price on industrial emissions and force companies to offset those emissions by investing in projects that would remove an equivalent portion of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.
They’re a key component of the 2015 Paris Agreement, but they’re also a controversial one. That’s because if they’re not implemented properly and managed effectively they can be a “massive loophole” for emitters, as Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Markets Watch, told Time last year.
This is especially true of China. Corruption in China is endemic and the country has long sacrificed environmental policy and stewardship at the altar of economic growth. China’s not alone in making that calculus, but the decisions have happened at a scale orders of magnitude larger than almost any other nation (with the exception of the U.S.)
The efficacy of the policy is also effected by the hierarchies that exist within the bureaucracy of the Chinese Communist Party. As ChinaDialogue noted, the measures were issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which carry lower legal authority than if they came from the NDRC, the leading governing body for macroeconomic policy across China and the overseer of the nation’s major economic initiatives.
That said, no country as large as China, which accounts for 28% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, has ever implemented a national carbon emissions trading market.
BEIJING, CHINA – MARCH 20: Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a speech during the closing session of the National People’s Congress (NPC) at the Great Hall of the People on March 20, 2018 in Beijing, China. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
China first started testing regional emissions trading systems back in 2011 in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangdong, Tianjin, Hubei, Chongqing and Fujian. Using a system that instituted caps on emissions based on carbon intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) rather than an absolute emissions cap, the Chinese government began rolling out these pilots across its power sector and to other industries.
After a restructuring in 2018, the plan, which was initially drafted under the auspices of the National Development and Reform Commission was kicked down to the Ministry of Ecology and the Environment. The devolution of China’s cap and trade emissions program came as the United States was withdrawing from the Paris Agreement amid an abdication of climate regulation or initiatives under the Presidency of Donald Trump.
For now, the emissions trading system covers China’s power industry and roughly 2,000 energy generation facilities. That alone represents 30% of the nation’s total emissions and over time the trading system will encompass heavy industry like cement, steel, aluminum, chemicals and oil and gas, according to ChinaDialogue.
Initially, the government is allocating emissions allowances for free and will begin auctioning allowances “at the appropriate time according to the situation.”
That kind of language, and concerns raised by state-owned enterprises and financial services firms flagging the effect carbon pricing could have on profitability and lending risk shows that the government in Beijing is still putting more weight on the economic benefits rather than environmental costs of much of its industrial growth.
That said, a survey of market participants cited by ChinaDialogue indicated that prices are expected to start at 41 yuan (US$6.3) per ton of CO2 and rise to 66 yuan per ton in 2025. The price of carbon in China is expected to hit 77 yuan by 2030.
Meanwhile, a commission on carbon prices formed in 2017 and helmed by the economists Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern indicated that carbon needed to be priced at somewhere between $40 and $80 by 2020 and somewhere in the $50 to $100 range by 2030 if the markets and prices were to have any impact on behavior.
No nation has actually hit those price targets, although the European Union has come the closest — and seen the most reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as a result.
Still, the plan from the Chinese government does include public reporting requirements for verified company-level emissions. And the existence of a market, if the government decides to put real prices in place and consequences for flouting the system, could be a huge boon for the monitoring and management equipment startups that are developing tech to track emissions.
As the analysts at ChinaDialogue note:
“The hardest part of carbon pricing is often getting it started. The moment that the Chinese government decides to increase ambition with the national ETS, it can. The mechanism is now in place, and it can be ramped up if the momentum and political will provided by President Xi’s climate ambition continues. In the coming years, this could see an absolute and decreasing cap, more sectors covered, more transparent data provision and more effective cross-government coordination. This is especially so with energy and industrial regulators who will need to see the ETS not as a threat to their turf, but as a measure with significant co-benefits for their own policy objectives.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/02/china-launched-its-national-carbon-trading-market-yesterday/
The growth of remote working and managing workforces that are distributed well beyond the confines of a centralized physical office — or even a single country — have put a spotlight on the human resources technology that organizations use to help manage those people. Today, one of the HR startups that’s been seeing a surge of growth is announcing a round of funding to double down on its business.
Oyster, a startup and platform that helps companies through the process of hiring, onboarding and then providing contractors and full-time employees in the area of “knowledge work” with HR services like payroll, benefits and salary management, has closed a Series A round of $20 million.
The company is already working in 100 countries, and CEO and Tony Jamous (who co-founded the company with Jack Mardack) said in an interview that the plan is to expand that list of markets, and also bring in new services, particularly to address the opportunity in emerging markets to hire more people. In terms of services, currently Oyster does not cover candidate sourcing or any of the interviewing and evaluation process: those could be areas to build or partner to provide them as part of its one-stop shop.
“There 1.5 billion knowledge workers coming into the workforce in next 10 years, mostly from emerging economies, while in developed economies there are some 90 million jobs unfilled,” Jamous said. “There are super powers you can gain from being globally distributed, but it poses a major challenge around HR and payroll.”
Emergence Capital, the B2B VC that has backed the likes of Zoom, Salesforce, Bill.com and our former sister site Crunchbase, is leading the funding. The Slack Fund (Slack’s strategic investment vehicle), and London firm Connect Ventures (which has previously backed the company at seed stage) are also participating. The investment will accelerate Oyster’s rapid growth, and support its mission of enabling people to work from anywhere.
Oyster’s valuation is not being disclosed. The startup has raised about $24 million to date.
One of the great ironies of the global health pandemic is that while our worlds have become much smaller — travel and even local activities have been drastically curtailed and many of us spend day in, day out at home — the employment opportunity and scope of how organizations are expected to operate has become significantly bigger.
Public health-enforced remote working has led to companies de-coupling workers from offices, and that has opened the door to seeking out and working with the best talent, regardless of location.
This predicament may have become more acute in the last year, but it’s been one that has been gradually coming into focus for years, helped by trends in cloud computing and globalization. Jamous said that the idea for Oyster came to him was something that he’s been thinking about for years, but became more apparent when he was still at his previous startup, Nexmo — the cloud communications provider that was acquired by Vonage for $230 million in in 2016.
At Nexmo we wanted to be a great local employer, headquartered in two countries but wanted to have people everywhere,” he said. “We spent millions building employment infrastructure to do that, becoming knowledgable about local laws in France, Korea and more countries.” He realised quickly that this was a highly inefficient way to work. “We weren’t ready for the complexity and diversity of issues that would come up.”
After he moved on from Nexmo and did some angel investing (he backs other distributed work juggernauts like Hopin, among others), he decided that he would try to tackle the workforce challenge as the focus of his next venture. That was in mid-2019, pre-pandemic. It turned out that the timing was spot on, with every organization looking in the next year at ways to address their own distributed workforce challenges.
The emerging market focus, meanwhile, also has a direct link to Jamous himself: he left his home country of Lebanon to study in France when he was 17, and has essentially lived abroad since then. But as with many people who move into developed from emerging markets, he realised that the base of technical talent in his home country was something that was worth tapping, using tech to help.
Related to its wider social mission, Oyster has a pending application to become a B-Corporation.
Jamous is not the only one that founded an HR company based on his personal experience: Turing’s founders have cited their own experience growing up in India and working with people remotely from there, while Remote’s founder hails from Europe but built Gitlab (where he had been head of product) based on a similar premise of tapping into the talent he knew existed all around the world.
And indeed, Oyster is not alone in tackling this opportunity. The list of HR startups looking to be the ADP’s of the world of distributed work include Deel, Remote, Hibob, Papaya Global, Personio, Factorial, Lattice, Turing and Rippling. And these are just some of the HR startups that have raised money in the last year; there are many, many more.
The attraction of Oyster seems to come in the simplicity of how the services are provided — you have options for contractors, and full-timers, and full, larger staff deployments in other countries. You have options to add on benefits for employees if you choose. And you have some tools to work out how hires fit into your bigger budgets, and also to guide you on remuneration in each local market. Pricing starts at $29 per person, per month for contractors, to $399 for working with full employees, to other packages for larger deployments.
“It has a few well funded competitors, but that’s usually a good signal,” said Jason Green, the Emergence partner who led on its investment. “But you want to bet on the horse that will lead the race, and that comes down to execution. Here, we are betting on a team that’s done it before, an entrepreneur experienced in building a company and selling it. Tony’s made money and knows how to build a business. But more than that, he’s mission driven and that will matter in the space, and to employees.”
