& meet dozens of singles today!
User blogs
Facebook said it will begin restoring news sharing to Australian users’ feeds in “the coming days” after reaching an agreement with the country’s government. The social media giant made the drastic move of restricting news content in Australia last Wednesday after a dispute over a proposed media bargaining code that is expected to be voted into law soon. The code would have forced Facebook, and other major tech companies like Google, to make revenue-sharing agreements with publishers for content posted to their social media platforms.
Australian treasurer Josh Frydenberg said changes have been made to the code to “provide further clarity to digital platforms and news media businesses about the way the Code is intended to operate and strengthen the framework for ensuring news media businesses are fairly remunerated,” reported Seven News.
The amendments mean the code now includes a two-month mediation period to allow digital platforms like Facebook and publishers to agree on deals before they are forced to enter into arbitration. The Australian government will also consider commercial agreements tech platforms have already made with local publishers before deciding if the code applies to them, and give them one month’s notice before reaching a final decision.
William Easton, managing director of Facebook Australia and New Zealand, said in a statement that the company was “satisfied” with the changes, adding that they addressed Facebook’s “core concerns about allowing commercial deals that recognize the value our platform provides to publishers relative to the value we receive from them.”
Facebook’s restrictions last week meant Australian publishers were restricted from sharing or posting content from Facebook Pages, and users in Australia were unable to view or share Australian or international news content.
The Australian government announced in April 2020 it would adopt a mandatory code ordering Google, Facebook and other tech giants to pay local media for reusing their content, after an earlier attempt to create a voluntary code with the companies stalled.
As it lobbied against the proposed law, Facebook first threatened to restrict the public sharing of news content in Australia last September. Google also claimed that user experience in Australia would suffer and suggested it may no longer be able to offer free services in the country.
Lucid Motors reached an agreement to become a publicly traded company through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp, in the largest deal yet between a blank-check company and electric vehicle startup.
The combined company, in which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will continue to be the largest shareholder, will have a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion. Private investment in the public equity deal is priced at $15 a share, putting the implied the pro-forma equity value at $24 billion. The announcement comes more than a week after Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, reported a deal was close to being finalized.
Lucid follows a string of other, albeit smaller valued, SPAC mergers with electric vehicle startups that have been announced this year, including Arrival, Canoo, Fisker and Lordstown Motors. Several EV infrastructure companies including EVgo and ChargePoint have also become public companies via SPAC mergers.
Lucid might have been the most anticipated. The hype and speculation that has been rampant for weeks drove up the stock price of Churchill Capital IV Corp from its opening price of $10 a share more than 470% since January 2021. The skyrocketing share price, plummeted more than 30% after the details of the deal were announced.
The private investment and cash from Churchill will provide roughly $4.4 billion in total funding to Lucid. That capital will be put to work to speed up and expand Lucid’s plans. The company plans to begin production and deliveries of the Lucid Air in North America in the second half of this year. The Air will come to Europe in 2022, followed by China in 2023. The Gravity performance luxury SUV is expected to come to market in North America in 2023. The vehicles will be produced at its new factory in Casa Grande, Arizona.
The funding will be used to bring those two vehicles to market as well as to expand its factory in Arizona, Lucid CEO and CTO Peter Rawlinson said Monday. The company plans to expand the factory over another three phases in the coming years to have the capacity to produce 365,000 units per year at scale. The initial phase of the $700 million factory was completed late last year and will have the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year.
Image Credits: Lucid Motors
The deal will also help Lucid realize its vision to supply electric vehicle technologies to third parties such as other automotive manufacturers as well as offer energy storage solutions in the residential, commercial and utility segments, Rawlinson said.
Scaling an electric vehicle company is not cheap or easy. Lucid narrowly missed imploding several years ago as it struggled to find an investor that would provide the capital it needed to bring its ultra-luxe electric Air sedan into production. That investor ended up being Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, which agreed in September 2018 to invest $1 billion into Lucid Motors.
Lucid began in 2007 as Atieva, a company founded by former Tesla VP and board member Bernard Tse and entrepreneur Sam Weng that focused on developing electric car battery technology. The early research, development and eventual progress in the components and overall electric architecture would lay the critical ground work for the future Lucid, which emerged at the end of 2016 with new publicly stated purpose to make electric vehicles (although the company had already been working quietly at this for a couple of years). Rawlinson, who left Tesla to join Lucid in 2013 as CTO, was one of the driving forces behind this new mission. He later took on the CEO title and responsibility as well.
While Lucid is often couched as a competitor to Tesla, Rawlinson has told TechCrunch the Air is meant to be a rival of the Mercedes S Class, the internal combustion engine flagship of the German automaker. The investor presentation released Monday echoes Rawlinson’s earlier comments, noting that “Tesla is innovative but not luxury.” Lucid describes itself as “post luxury” and in competition with “established luxury” brands Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.
Lucid is taking a page out of Tesla’s playbook and outlined plans to eventually offer more affordable EVs once it scales production.
Rawlinson will remain as CEO and CTO. The deal is expected to close in the second quarter.
Not everyone has Type 2 Diabetes, the disease that causes chronically high blood sugar levels, but many do. Around 9% of Americans are afflicted, and another 30% are at risk of developing it.
Enter software by January AI, a four-year-old, subscription-based startup that in November began providing personalized nutritional and activity-related suggestions to its customers based on a combination of food-related data the company has spent the last three years painstakingly amassing, as well as each person’s unique profile, which it gleans based on how an individual reacts to certain foods over the first four days of using the software.
Why the need for personalization? Because believe it or not, people can react very differently to every single food, from rice to salad dressing.
The tech may sound mundane but it’s eye-opening, promises cofounder and CEO Nosheen Hashemi and her cofounder, Michael Snyder, a genetics professor at Stanford who has focused on diabetes and pre-diabetes for years.
Investors apparently agree, too. Felicis Ventures just led a $21 million Series A investment in the company, joined by HAND Capital and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. (Earlier investors include Ame Cloud Ventures, SignalFire, YouTube cofounder Steve Chen, and Sunshine cofounder Marissa Mayer, among others.) Says Felicis founder Aydin Senkut, “While other companies have made headway in understanding biometric sensor data—from heart rate and glucose monitors, for example—January AI has made progress in analyzing and predicting the effects of food consumption itself [which is] key to addressing chronic disease.”
We talked with Hashemi and Snyder this afternoon to learn more. Below is part of our chat, edited for length and clarity.
TC: What have you built?
NH: We’ve built a multiomic platform where we take data from different sources and predict people’s glycemic response, allowing them to consider their choices before they make them. We pull in data from heart rate monitors and continuous glucose monitors and a 1,000-person clinical study and an atlas of 16 million foods for which, using machine learning, we have derived nutritional values and created nutritional labeling [that didn’t exist previously].
[The idea is to] predict for [customers] what their glycemic response is going to be to any food in our database after just four days of training. They don’t actually have to eat the food to know whether they should eat it or not; our product tells them what their response is going to be.
TC: So glucose monitoring existed previously, but this is predictive. Why is this important?
NH: We want to bring the joy back to eating and remove the guilt. We can predict, for example, how long you’d have to walk after eating any food in our database in order to keep your blood sugar at the right level. Knowing what “is” isn’t enough; we want to tell you what to do about it. If you’re thinking about fried chicken and a shake, we can tell you: you’re going to have to walk 46 minutes afterward to maintain a healthy [blood sugar] range. Would you like to do the uptime for that? No? Then maybe [eat the chicken and shake] on a Saturday.
TC: This is subscription software that works with other wearables and that costs $488 for three months.
NH: That’s retail price, but we have an introductory offer of $288.
TC: Are you at all concerned that people will use the product, get a sense of what they could be doing differently, then end their subscription?
NH: No. Pregnancy changes [one’s profile], age changes it. People travel and they aren’t always eating the same things. . .
MS: I’ve been wearing [continuous glucose monitoring] wearables for seven years and I still learn stuff. You suddenly realize that every time you eat white rice, you spike through the roof, for example. That’s true for many people. But we are also offering a year-long subscription soon because we do know that people slip sometimes [only to be reminded] later that these boosters are very valuable.
TC: How does it work practically? Say I’m at a restaurant and I’m in the mood for pizza but I don’t know which one to order.
NH: You can compare curve over curve to see which is healthier. You can see how much you’ll have to walk [depending on the toppings].
TC: Do I need to speak all of these toppings into my smart phone?
NH: January scans barcodes, it also understands photos. It also has manual entry, and it takes voice [commands].
TC: Are you doing anything else with this massive food database that you’ve aggregated and that you’re enriching with your own data?
NH: We will definitely not sell personal information.
TC: Not even aggregated data? Because it does sound like a useful database . . .
MS: We’re not 23andMe; that’s really not the goal.
TC: You mentioned that rice can cause someone’s blood sugar to soar, which is surprising. What are some of the things that might surprise people about what your software can show them?
NH: The way people’s glycemic response is so different, not just between by Connie and Mike, but also for Connie and Connie. If you eat nine days in a row, your glycemic response could be different each of those nine days because of how much you slept or how much thinking you did the day before or how much fiber was in your body and whether you ate before bedtime.
Activity before eating and activity after eating is important. Fiber is important. It’s the most under overlooked intervention in the American diet. Our ancestral diets featured 150 grams of fiber a day; the average American diet today includes 15 grams of fiber. A lot of health issues can be traced to a lack of fiber.
TC: It seems like coaching would be helpful in concert with your app. Is there a coaching component?
NH: We don’t offer a coaching component today, but we’re in talks with several coaching solutions as we speak, to be the AI partner to them.
TC: Who else are you partnering with? Healthcare companies? Employers that can offer this as a benefit?
NH: We are selling to direct to consumers, but we’ve already had a pharma customer for two years. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because we are able to use lifestyle as a biomarker. We essentially give them [anonymized] visibility into someone’s lifestyle for a period of two weeks or however long they want to run the program for so they can gain insights as to whether the therapeutic is working because of the person’s lifestyle or in spite of a person’s lifestyle. Pharma companies are very interested in working with us because they can potentially get answers in a trial phase faster and even reduce the number of subjects they need.
So we’re excited about pharma. We are also very interested in working with employers, with coaching solutions, and ultimately, with payers [like insurance companies].
Spotify makes a bunch of announcements, Netflix introduces an intriguing new feature and Clubhouse faces security concerns. This is your Daily Crunch for February 22, 2021.
The big story: Spotify announces a high-end subscription
Spotify listeners will get the chance to pay for higher-quality audio when the streaming service launches a new tier that it says will offer “CD-quality, lossless audio.” The pricing and launch date have yet to be announced, but Spotify HiFi will, unsurprisingly, cost more than Spotify Premium and be marketed as a Premium add-on.
That was probably the biggest news that Spotify made at today’s “Stream On” event, where it also announced an audience development tool for artists, an audio ad marketplace, continued international expansion, a podcast co-hosted by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen and a test of paid podcast subscriptions.
The tech giants
Netflix launches ‘Downloads for You,’ a new feature that automatically downloads content you’ll like — After turning on the feature for the first time, you’ll be able to select the amount of storage space you want to dedicate for these recommended downloads.
Twitter explored buying India’s ShareChat and turning Moj into a global TikTok rival — According to sources, Twitter offered to buy the five-year-old Indian startup for $1.1 billion.
Startups, funding and venture capital
EquityBee raises $20M to help startup employees actually afford their stock options — EquityBee CEO Oren Barzilai says his company’s mission is to help educate startup employees on the meaning of their stock options, as well as provide them with funds to be able to purchase those options.
Splice gets $55M for its software bringing beats from bedrooms to bandstands — Splice gained a following for its ability to help electronic dance music creators save, share, collaborate and remix music.
A race to reverse-engineer Clubhouse raises security concerns — The fact that it takes programmers little effort to reverse-engineer and fork Clubhouse is sounding an alarm about the app’s security.
Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch
If Coinbase is worth $100B, what’s a fair valuation for Stripe? — We dig into Coinbase’s 2019 and 2020 financial performance.
Bain’s Matt Harris and Justworks’ Isaac Oates to talk through the Series B deal that brought them together — All the way back in 2016, Bain Capital Ventures caught a whiff of Justworks’ potential for success.
Winning enterprise sales teams know how to persuade the Chief Objection Officer — Many enterprise software startups have at some point faced the invisible wall.
(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)
Everything else
Watch Perseverance’s harrowing descent to the surface of Mars — NASA has released video taken by the Perseverance landing module and rover showing the famous “seven minutes of terror.”
Calling Oslo VCs: Be featured in The Great TechCrunch Survey of European VC — TechCrunch is embarking on a major project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe, and their cities.
Original Content podcast: Apple’s ‘Ted Lasso’ is all about relentless optimism — This will be our last episode on TechCrunch, as Original Content goes independent!
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/2021/02/22/daily-crunch-spotify-announces-a-high-end-subscription/
In the face of rising homelessness, increasing crime and inadequate public transit in San Francisco, many tech influencers are pulling up stakes to geographies that offer a seemingly more welcome climate to conduct business and make investments. But the ongoing disaster in Texas makes one cold truth very clear: No place is safe from America’s failure to invest in infrastructure or take climate change seriously.
The shock of seeing the cradle of America’s energy industry crippled by its inability to prepare its own power grid for the “once in a century storms” that increasingly look to be coming every 10 years (a phenomenon that Texas Tech climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe calls “global weirding”) underscores a point that should have been plain years ago: By refusing to invest in adequate public infrastructure, the country’s leadership has failed to perform the basic duty of protecting the health and safety of its citizens.
And the shocks that result from these investment failures will affect anyone without the means or desire to leave the country entirely.
Decline
This failure reaches from the woefully inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic which is on track to kill half a million people in the U.S., to the millions across the country who faced a week without adequate heat, water and sometimes even food or shelter from the bitter cold bearing down on the nation.
The catastrophe also crystallizes the inanity of many of the issues currently consuming the technology community that holds itself in such high esteem as a pillar of rational discourse and as the architects of America’s future.
The investors, who decried California’s broken, over-regulated dystopia, are now trying to change their ZIP codes for broken, under-regulated dystopias.
The problem is that they’re moving without confronting the substantive issues that make these regions unlivable for large portions of the population. And that’s caused by a historic failure to engage in any politics that isn’t directly tied to the bottom line of the corporations these entrepreneurs have created or their investors have financed.
As Michael Solana, a vice president at Founders Fund, noted in a great piece on his Pirate Wires Substack:
The truth is, had tech workers actually assumed a significant measure of political influence, and led in local politics, San Francisco would today be one of the greatest cities in the world. But not only was such political influence not achieved, it was never attempted. Throughout the most recent technology boom of the last fifteen years, there has been almost no meaningful engagement in local politics from the industry.
Not that the deregulatory streak prized by many in the tech community would have solved Texas’s problem or Florida’s (California is a different kind of disaster).
In Texas, lack of regulations around construction and the state’s independent energy grid have made it more vulnerable to catastrophic climactic events — whether that’s 2017’s Hurricane Harvey or this year’s deadly winter storms, which killed Texans in their homes, vehicles and backyards.
California can claim that it’s grid failed by fewer megawatts than Texas’s — but the overall result from the natural disasters, blackouts, billions of dollars lost and scores of deaths are much the same.
Surveying this broken world, many in the tech community have decided that the best result is to try the same thing somewhere else. But they’re going to face many of the same problems in Florida or Texas.
Homeowners concerned about construction lowering the value of their properties? Check. Rampant income inequality? Check. Reluctance to put in effective oversight that could ensure failures don’t occur? Check.
The difference those states offer is lower taxes for the wealthy, which means more of an ability to pay privately for the services to ensure that the burdens of climate change don’t fall on these billionaires in their new waterfront homes.
The through-line in all of this is a cynicism and abdication of responsibility papered over by the thinnest lips paying the smallest amount of service to solving climate problems.
One step forward, eleventy-seven back
Don’t think that I’m merely being cynical about what some tech companies are doing when confronted with the rising catastrophe of climate change and decrepit American infrastructure.
Why else would Elon Musk commit $100 million to a carbon capture prize while his publicly traded energy company invests $1.5 billion in Bitcoin? Some analysts estimate that the deal and the resulting skyrocketing price of the cryptocurrency will erase all of the gains in emissions offsets from the use of every Tesla ever made.
“The immediate impact of Tesla’s buy is that the Bitcoin price went up by more than $5,000. We can estimate this will lead to the network consuming an additional 34 TWh of electrical energy per year. That’s about the size of a country like Denmark’s total annual electrical energy requirement. We can also estimate this will result in an additional 17 million metric tons of CO2 being put out by the network every year,” wrote Alex de Vries, the founder of the cryptocurrency analysis site, Digiconomist. “According to Tesla, the amount of CO2 saved by Tesla vehicles adds up to 3.7 million tons. The amount of additional CO2 produced by the Bitcoin network, as a result of Tesla’s buy, would thus amount to more than four times the amount of CO2 saved by all their vehicles to date.”
Some argue that Bitcoin mining uses a disproportional amount of renewable energy to produce the cryptocurrency, but that argument is complicated by the seasonal sources of some renewables that miners (especially Chinese miners who produce the bulk of Bitcoin) rely on for power.
Tesla could potentially make more money from that investment than it has from the sale of cars and has definitely boosted the emissions spewing mining processes that make Bitcoin’s digital printers go brrrrr. All of which makes the company’s commitment to combating climate change look a bit specious.
Some hope?
The most frustrating thing about all of this is that entrepreneurs and investors are working on solutions to the climate crisis. Technologies exist that can help address some of the issues that confront these cities. And there’s billions to be made solving something that is very much an existential problem.
Unfortunately unlocking those billions in a timeframe that’s viable for society’s survival is going to require policy movement and the type of engagement that many tech investors would rather hand off to someone else as they move to more temperate, and tax advantaged, climates.
With the waters rising and the temperatures dropping, maybe those tax savings can buy a nice microgrid for power or a bigger boat. Given the projections that put the cost of climate change at nearly half a trillion dollars annually by the end of the century, it’d have to be a pretty big boat.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/22/no-place-is-safe-from-failing-u-s-infrastructure/
