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Datastax acquires The Last Pickle

Published March 3, 2020

Data management company Datastax, one of the largest contributors to the Apache Cassandra project, today announced that it has acquired The Last Pickle (and no, I don’t know what’s up with that name either), a New Zealand-based Cassandra consulting and services firm that’s behind a number of popular open-source tools for the distributed NoSQL database.

As Datastax Chief Strategy Officer Sam Ramji, who you may remember from his recent tenure at Apigee, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Google and Autodesk, told me, The Last Pickle is one of the premier Apache Cassandra consulting and services companies. The team there has been building Cassandra-based open source solutions for the likes of Spotify, T Mobile and AT&T since it was founded back in 2012. And while The Last Pickle is based in New Zealand, the company has engineers all over the world that do the heavy lifting and help these companies successfully implement the Cassandra database technology.

It’s worth mentioning that Last Pickle CEO Aaron Morton first discovered Cassandra when he worked for WETA Digital on the special effects for Avatar, where the team used Cassandra to allow the VFX artists to store their data.

“There’s two parts to what they do,” Ramji explained. “One is the very visible consulting, which has led them to become world experts in the operation of Cassandra. So as we automate Cassandra and as we improve the operability of the project with enterprises, their embodied wisdom about how to operate and scale Apache Cassandra is as good as it gets — the best in the world.” And The Last Pickle’s experience in building systems with tens of thousands of nodes — and the challenges that its customers face — is something Datastax can then offer to its customers as well.

And Datastax, of course, also plans to productize The Last Pickle’s open-source tools like the automated repair tool Reaper and the Medusa backup and restore system.

As both Ramji and Datastax VP of Engineering Josh McKenzie stressed, Cassandra has seen a lot of commercial development in recent years, with the likes of AWS now offering a managed Cassandra service, for example, but there wasn’t all that much hype around the project anymore. But they argue that’s a good thing. Now that it is over ten years old, Cassandra has been battle-hardened. For the last ten years, Ramji argues, the industry tried to figure out what the de factor standard for scale-out computing should be. By 2019, it became clear that Kubernetes was the answer to that.

“This next decade is about what is the de facto standard for scale-out data? We think that’s got certain affordances, certain structural needs and we think that the decades that Cassandra has spent getting harden puts it in a position to be data for that wave.”

McKenzie also noted that Cassandra provides users with a number of built-in features like support for mutiple data centers and geo-replication, rolling updates and live scaling, as well as wide support across programming languages, give it a number of advantages over competing databases.

“It’s easy to forget how much Cassandra gives you for free just based on its architecture,” he said. “Losing the power in an entire datacenter, upgrading the version of the database, hardware failing every day? No problem. The cluster is 100 percent always still up and available. The tooling and expertise of The Last Pickle really help bring all this distributed and resilient power into the hands of the masses.”

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

Published March 3, 2020

“The best-kept secret in quantum computing.” That’s what Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) CEO Ilyas Khan called Honeywell‘s efforts in building the world’s most powerful quantum computer. In a race where most of the major players are vying for attention, Honeywell has quietly worked on its efforts for the last few years (and under strict NDA’s, it seems). But today, the company announced a major breakthrough that it claims will allow it to launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer within the next three months.

In addition, Honeywell also today announced that it has made strategic investments in CQC and Zapata Computing, both of which focus on the software side of quantum computing. The company has also partnered with JPMorgan Chase to develop quantum algorithms using Honeywell’s quantum computer. The company also recently announced a partnership with Microsoft.

Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.

This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

“It starts really with the heritage that Honeywell had to work from,” Tony Uttley, the president of Honeywell Quantum Solutions, told me. “And we, because of our businesses within aerospace and defense and our business in oil and gas — with solutions that have to do with the integration of complex control systems because of our chemicals and materials businesses — we had all of the underlying pieces for quantum computing, which are just fabulously different from classical computing. You need to have ultra-high vacuum system capabilities. You need to have cryogenic capabilities. You need to have precision control. You need to have lasers and photonic capabilities. You have to have magnetic and vibrational stability capabilities. And for us, we had our own foundry and so we are able to literally design our architecture from the trap up.”

The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.

So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.

Khan, whose company provides software tools for quantum computing and was one of the first to work with Honeywell on this project, also noted that the focus on the ion trap is giving Honeywell a bit of an advantage. “I think that the choice of the ion trap approach by Honeywell is a reflection of a very deliberate focus on the quality of qubit rather than the number of qubits, which I think is fairly sophisticated,” he said. “Until recently, the headline was always growth, the number of qubits running.”

The Honeywell team noted that many of its current customers are also likely users of its quantum solutions. These customers, after all, are working on exactly the kind of problems in chemistry or material science that quantum computing, at least in its earliest forms, is uniquely suited for.

Currently, Honeywell has about 100 scientists, engineers and developers dedicated to its quantum project.

Robinhood suffers prolonged outage on the day the Dow enjoyed its single biggest point gain

Published March 3, 2020

Robinhood, the startup with a stock trading app valued upwards of at least $7.6 billion, suffered one of its worst outages on one of the busiest trading days of the year.

As the Dow Jones Industrial Average enjoyed the single biggest point-gain in the history of the index, Robinhood’s application fell prey to an error that locked users out of the service for the duration of Monday’s trading.

“We started experiencing downtime issues across our platform this morning at market open,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “We don’t have an estimate when the issue will be resolved but all of us at Robinhood are working as hard as we can to resume service.”

One potential cause of the outages could just be the high trading volumes that have accompanied highly volatile markets over the past month. While there were some early reports that the bug was caused by a Leap Day bug, the company has denied that a February 29th error was at fault.

The company’s mistake could cost its users lots of money as they sought to trade on stocks that were hit in last week’s string of losses due to investor worries over the impact the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, would have on the global economy.

This isn’t the first time that Robinhood’s code has got the company into trouble. Last year, faulty coding allowed users to borrow more money than the company intended, giving a potential windfall to would-be traders.

Back in 2013 when the founders of the company discussed their idea around TechCrunch reporter Josh Constine’s kitchen table, they envisioned the app as a way to share hot tips. That quickly morphed into a trading platform that the company says has more than 10 million users on its platform.

As Morgan Stanley buys E-Trade, Robinhood preps social trading

The secret to the company’s initial success was free stock trading — a pricing model which many of its competitors have since gone on to copy.

According to Apptopia, Robinhood is far and away the most popular of the free stock trading services, having far more volume and users than its legacy contenders. However, as today’s outage showed, that user base may be negatively impacted by not working with companies who have had their services stress tested over decades. Even so, the big trading houses have also experienced technical issues over the past week, as CNBC reported earlier today.

Sonantic scores €2.3M funding to bring ‘human-quality’ artificial voices to games

Published March 2, 2020

Sonantic, a U.K. startup that has developed “human-quality” artificial voice technology for the games and entertainment industry, has raised €2.3 million in funding.

Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from existing backers, including Entrepreneur First (EF), AME Cloud Ventures and Bart Swanson of Horizons Ventures. I also understand one of the company’s earlier investors is Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin.

Founded in 2018 by CEO Zeena Qureshi and CTO John Flynn as they went through EF’s company builder programme in London, Sonantic (previously Speak Ai) says it wants to disrupt the global gaming and entertainment voice industry. The startup has developed artificial voice tech that it claims is able to offer “expressive, realistic voice acting” on-demand for use by game studios. It already has R&D partnerships underway with more than 10 AAA game studios.

“Getting dialogue into game development is a slow, expensive and labour-intensive task,” says Qureshi, when asked to define the problem Sonantic wants to solve. “Dialogue pipelines consist of casting, booking studios, contracts, scheduling, editing, directing and a whole lot of coordination. Voiced narrative video games can take up to 10 years to make with game design changing frequently, defaulting game devs to carry out several iteration cycles — often leading to going over budgets and game releases being delayed.”

To help remedy this, Sonantic offers what Qureshi dubs “dynamic voice acting on-demand,” with the ability to craft the exact type of character in terms of gender, personality, accent, tone and emotional state. The startup’s human quality text-to-speech system is offered via an API and a graphical user interface tool that lets its synthetic voice actors be edited, sculpted and directed “just like a human actor,” she tells me.

This sees Sonantic work directly with actors to synthesise their voices whilst also harnessing their unique skills in performance. “We then augment how actors work by offering them a digital version of themselves that can create passive income for them,” explains the Sonantic CEO.

For the games studios, Sonantic offers faster iteration cycles at a cheaper price because it cuts down logistical costs and has voice models ready to perform. Its SaaS model and API also makes it easier to create audio performances to test out potential narratives or to finesse a story, helping with editing and directing.

Meanwhile, Sonantic says it is gearing up to publicly reveal how its technology can capture “deep emotions across the full spectrum,” from subtle all the way through to exaggerated, which it says is usually something only very skilled actors can achieve.

Google cancels Cloud Next because of coronavirus, goes online-only

Published March 2, 2020

Google today announced that it is canceling the physical part of Cloud Next, its cloud-focused event and its largest annual conference by far with around 30,000 attendees, over concerns around the current spread of COVID-19.

Given all of the recent conference cancellations, this announcement doesn’t come as a huge surprise, especially after Facebook canceled its F8 developer conference only a few days ago.

Cloud Next was scheduled to run from April 6 to 8. Instead of the physical event, Google will now host an online event under the “Google Cloud Next ’20: Digital Connect” moniker. So there will still be keynotes and breakout sessions, as well as the ability to connect with experts.

“Innovation is in Google’s DNA and we are leveraging this strength to bring you an immersive and inspiring event this year without the risk of travel,” the company notes in today’s announcement.

The virtual event will be free and in an email to attendees, Google says that it will automatically refund all tickets to this year’s conference. It will also automatically cancel all hotel reservations made through its conference reservation system.

It now remains to be seen what happens to Google’s other major conference, I/O, which is slated to run from May 12 to 14 in Mountain View. The same holds true for Microsoft’s rival Build conference in Seattle, which is scheduled to start on May 19. These are the two premier annual news events for both companies, but given the current situation, nobody would be surprised if they get canceled, too.

Connie Chan of Andreessen Horowitz discusses consumer tech’s winners and losers

Published March 2, 2020

Last week, I sat down with Connie Chan, a general partner with Andreessen Horowitz who focuses on investing in consumer tech. She joined the firm in 2011 after working at HP in China.

From her temporary offices located in a modest skyscraper with unobscured views of San Francisco, we talked about where she sees the biggest opportunities right now, along with how big of an impact fears over coronavirus could have on the startup industry — and for how long.

Our conversation has been edited for length. You can also find a longer version of our chat in podcast form.

TechCrunch: There’s so much money flowing into the Bay Area and startups generally from all over the world. What happens if that slows down because of the coronavirus?

Connie Chan: It’s interesting, I was just talking to a friend of mine who is an investor in Asia, in China. And she said that some industries are going to suffer significantly. Restaurants, for example, are hurting [along with] any store that relies on foot traffic [like] bookstores, so forth. Yet you see a lot of companies also doing really well in this time. You’ll see grocery delivery as something that’s in high demand. Insurance is in very high demand. People are spending more time at home, so whether it’s games or streaming or whatever they’re doing at home is doing well. Lots of my counterparts in China are also taking all their pitches via video conference. They’re still doing work, but they’re all just working from home.

Where do you think we’ll see the biggest impact most immediately?

Apple agrees to settlement of up to $500 million from lawsuit alleging it throttled older phones

Published March 2, 2020

Apple Inc. has agreed to pay a settlement of up to $500 million, following a lawsuit accusing the company of intentionally slowing down the performance of older phones to encourage customers to buy newer models or fresh batteries.

The preliminary proposed class action lawsuit was disclosed Friday night and would see Apple pay consumers $25 per phone, as reported by Reuters.

Any settlement needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who oversaw the case brought in San Jose, Calif.

For consumers, the $25 payout may seem a little low, as a new iPhone can cost anywhere from $649 to $849 (for a lower-end model). The cost may be varied depending on how many people sue, and the company is set to pay at least $310 million under the terms of the settlement.

For its part, Apple is denying wrongdoing in the case and said it was only agreeing to avoid the cost and burden associated with the lawsuit.

Any U.S. owner of the iPhone 6, 6 Plus, 6s, 6s Plus, 7 Plus or SE that ran on iOS 10.2.1 or any of the later operating systems are covered by the settlement. Users of the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which ran iOS 11.2 or later before Dec. 21, 2017 are also covered by the settlement.

Apple customers said their phone performance slowed down after they installed Apple software updates. The customers contend that Apple’s software updates intentionally degraded the performance of older models to encourage customers to unnecessarily upgrade to newer models or install new batteries.

Lawyers for Apple said that the problems were mainly due to high usage, temperature changes and other issues and that its engineers tried to address the problems as quickly as possible.

In February, Apple was fined $27 million by the French government for the same issue.

As we reported at the time:

A couple of years ago, Apple released an iOS update (10.2.1 and 11.2) that introduced a new feature for older devices. If your battery is getting old, iOS would cap peak performances as your battery might not be able to handle quick peaks of power draw. The result of those peaks is that your iPhone might shut down abruptly.

While that feature is technically fine, Apple failed to inform users that it was capping performances on some devices. The company apologized and introduced a new software feature called “Battery Health,” which lets you check the maximum capacity of your battery and if your iPhone can reach peak performance.

And that’s the issue here. Many users may have noticed that their phone would get slower when they play a game, for instance. But they didn’t know that replacing the battery would fix that. Some users may have bought new phones even though their existing phone was working fine.

Shares of Apple were up more than 9% today in a general market rally.

The companies that will shape the upcoming multiverse era of social media

Published March 2, 2020

Throughout this series on the rise of multiverse virtual worlds, I have outlined the collision of gaming and social media into a new multiverse era of social media within virtual worlds due to technological and cultural changes. The result will be a healthier ecosystem of social media than what currently exists and the economic development of these virtual worlds such that many people turn to them as sources of income.

The critical question that remains in this final part of the series: Who will be the dominant companies of this multiverse era who build the most popular virtual worlds? Will one virtual world achieve a monopoly or will there be many worlds we hop between on a daily basis? Will the most influential company be the developer of a certain world or an infrastructure layer underpinning many worlds?

(This is the final column in a seven-part series about “multiverse” virtual worlds.)

There are three categories of competitors in position for this new stage: gaming incumbents, social media incumbents and new virtual world startups.

Pixel phones updated with new gesture controls, emoji, AR effects & more

Published March 2, 2020

One of the benefits of owning a Pixel smartphone is that it improves over time, as Pixels are first to receive updates that deliver the latest fixes and improvements. The first round of new features arrived in December, including a filter for robocalls, more photo controls, improved Duo calls and more. Today Google says Pixel owners are getting a second set of additions, this time including new music controls, new emoji, still more photo and video features, expanded emergency help features, Google Pay improvements and several others.

Last year, Google introduced a new sort of gesture control, called Motion Sense, with the introduction of the Pixel 4. The idea is that you can now control your phone without having to touch it. Instead, the smartphone detects the wave of your hands and translates that into software controls.

Already, Motion Sense allowed Pixel 4 owners to skip forward or go back to a previous song. With today’s update, they’ll also be able to pause and resume music by making a tapping gesture above the phone.

Google suggests this will be an easy way to pause your music when you need to have a conversation. But in reality, it will only be useful if it works consistently — and so far, reviews have said the Motion Sense system was finicky and underdeveloped. That could change in time, of course.

Another improvement today is an update to Pixel 4’s Personal Safety app, which first arrived in October. The app uses the phone’s sensors to detect if you’ve been in a severe car crash and checks with you to see if you need help. It also lets U.S. users call 911 with a tap or voice command. If you’re unresponsive, the phone shares your location and details with emergency responders. Now the feature is coming to users in Australia (000) and the U.K. (999).

The new set of updates also includes added AR effects for Google’s video calling app Duo, which can change with your expression and move around the screen. These aren’t Duo’s first set of effects, but keeping the roster of effects updated is critical for social communication apps.

Meanwhile, the Pixel 4’s selfie camera can now create images with depth, which improves Portrait Blur and color pop, and lets you create 3D photos for Facebook.

Pixel phones will also now receive the emoji version 12.1 update, which hit iPhone with the iOS 3.2 update in October 2019, and which arrived on Twitter in January 2020. The set includes 169 new and more inclusive emoji, offering a wider array of gender and skin tones as well as more couple combinations.

A change to Google Pay will now let you press and hold the power button to swipe through your debit and credit cards, event tickets, boarding passes and other stored items. This is coming first to the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Taiwan and Singapore.

You can also now take a screenshot of a boarding pass’s barcode, then tap a notification to add it to Google Pay to then receive real-time flight updates as notifications. This is rolling out to all countries with Google Play on Pixel 3, 3a and 4 during March.

For power users, another useful addition lets you now configure rules based on Wi-Fi or physical location. For example, you can set your phone to automatically silence your ringtone when you arrive at work, or go to Do Not Disturb mode when you get home, among other things.

Other new features include the rollout of Live Caption (automatic captions) to Pixel 2 phones, the ability to schedule when Pixel’s Dark Theme turns off and on, an easier means of accessing emergency contacts and medical info, improved long-press options for getting faster help from your apps and an update to Adaptive brightness to make reading in direct sunlight easier.

Google says the new feature set is rolling out starting today. You may not see it immediately, but should fairly soon.

Daily Crunch: Nokia’s CEO is stepping down

Published March 2, 2020

Nokia announces a big leadership change, an AT&T streaming service expands and we look at how our jobs may have to evolve during to the coronavirus pandemic. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 2, 2020.

1. Rajeev Suri to step down as Nokia CEO; Pekka Lundmark to take over

The company, like its rivals Sweden-based Ericsson and Chinese giant Huawei, has shifted its attention in recent years to aggressively build a portfolio of technologies and products for 5G networks.

“After 25 years at Nokia, I have wanted to do something different,” said Rajeev Suri, who will leave his current position on August 31 and continue to serve as an advisor to the Nokia Board until the end of this year. Pekka Lundmark is expected to start in his new role on September 1.

2. Streaming service AT&T TV launches nationwide, but isn’t meant for cord cutters

Not to be confused with AT&T TV Now — AT&T’s over-the-top live TV service aimed at cord-cutters, previously called DirecTV Now — the new service is more of an alternative to AT&T-owned DirecTV. AT&T TV offers hundreds of live TV channels, plus 40,000 on-demand titles, and 500 hours of DVR space on a set-top box.

3. How to work during a pandemic

The world is bracing for the seemingly inevitable proliferation of the COVID-19 coronavirus, which has already paralyzed cities and isolated millions. Devin Coldewey offers some guidelines for CEOs, aspiring founders and tech industry employees on how they can continue working in this environment.

4. mParticle raises $45M to help marketers unify customer data

A whole industry of customer data platforms has sprung up since mParticle was founded back in 2013, all offering tools to help marketers create a single view of their customers by unifying data from various sources.

5. Making money from games: The future of virtual economies

In part six of our series about “multiverse” virtual worlds, we explore the dynamics of games’ virtual economies, the exchange of virtual assets for real money, challenges with money laundering and underage gambling, the compliance infrastructure needed for virtual economies and the challenges in balancing a virtual economy’s monetary supply. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. India’s Spinny raises $43.7M to expand its online platform for selling used cars

Niraj Singh, co-founder and chief executive of the startup, told TechCrunch that Spinny brings the trust factor that people are looking for when they are purchasing a car.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full-length episode of Equity looks at the stock market’s tumble due the coronavirus pandemic, while the Monday news roundup discusses the continuing trickle of tech IPOs. (Original Content will be back next week!)

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 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.