After the onstage presentation at Made by Google 2019, we got our hands on a Pixel 4. In this video, you can watch us do a quick run-through of the major new features — like Motion Sense, which provides gesture controls that don’t require you to touch your phone, and improved Night Sight, which allows you to take high-quality photos in dark environments.
The Pixel 4 will start shipping on October 24, with a starting price of $799.
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Days out of Y Combinator, venture capitalists valued ZeroDown, a financial and real estate technology startup, at $150 million, the company has confirmed. The startup had the perfect match of experienced founders and eye-popping ambitions to carve a new path to home ownership.
“I think we will be known as a company that makes it easier to buy a home in every single aspect,” ZeroDown co-founder and chief executive officer Abhijeet Dwivedi tells TechCrunch.
The startup, which has raised $30 million in total equity funding and more than $110 million in debt financing to help Bay Area residents make down payments on homes, now plans to take on Zillow and Redfin with its new home search engine.
The business, founded by former Zenefits chief operating officer Dwivedi, Laks Srini, Zenefits’ former chief technology officer, and Hari Viswanathan, a former Zenefits staff engineer, was founded last year and quickly landed backing from Sam Altman, followed by consumer technology venture capital fund Goodwater Capital. Targeting those in the Bay Area, where costs of home ownership are amongst the highest in the country, ZeroDown charges $10,000 to purchase your home outright and front your entire down payment.
That is, however, if your home is priced between approximately $550,000 and $1,750,000 and you have an individual or combined salary of more than $200,000, stock options and some money put away (or some variation of this). If you meet these criteria, ZeroDown will purchase your home and lease it to you. The goal is to eliminate one of the largest pain points of home-buying, the down payment, and facilitate more real estate purchases.
The company says it intends to expand the service outside the greater San Francisco area to cities like Denver, Seattle and Austin, but given the $10,000 price tag and large population of wealthy tech workers in the Bay, the business could flourish in this area without expanding.
With the launch of its home search engine, Dwivedi says users will be able to learn about more than just the square footage of a home. The tool tells users whether a potential home is naturally lit, if it has a large backyard, if it has a decent commute to your work and to various schools and, most importantly, whether it’s dog friendly.
ZeroDown has also partnered with a number of San Francisco-based tech companies, including Pinterest, Postmates and Square, to provide their employees a rebate if they choose to purchase a home using ZeroDown.
“We know first-hand what companies need to support a great quality of life and keep their employees in the Bay Area,” Dwivedi said. “A part of that is loving where you live — feeling part of a local community.”
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French company Kabuto is launching a Kickstarter campaign today for the second generation of its smart carry-on suitcase. The company was previously known as Xtend.
If you think about smart suitcases, chances are you picture a suitcase with a battery pack in it and that’s it. In other words, they are not that smart. Kabuto is packing a bunch of electronics to add some more features.
At the top of the suitcase, you’ll find a fingerprint reader. You can unlock the suitcase with your fingerprint or use a key in case your suitcase battery is dead — yes, a smart suitcase means you have one more thing to charge in your life.
The suitcase comes with a 10,000 mAh battery that you plug to various USB-A and USB-C cables. This way, you can charge a device using a USB-A or USB-C cable from the top of the suitcase.
The pocket at the back of the suitcase is removable. For instance, you can store a laptop and a book in it in order to take it with you on a flight. The company uses a magnetic connection between the pocket and the suitcase, which means that you can plug the included USB-C cable to your laptop and then attach the pocket to the suitcase to charge your laptop when you’re not using it.
The suitcase features an expandable structure, four wheels with metallic bearings and tires and a strap to attach another bag to the large handle on top of your suitcase. It costs $435 on Kickstarter and it will cost $595 after the Kickstarter campaign.
People who like to pack things exactly the right way will think the Kabuto suitcase offers a lot of options. It’s not a suitcase for everyone, but it’s an interesting take. The company promises to ship all suitcases by the end of the year. The startup has previously raised $1 million (€900,000) from Frédéric Mazzella, Michel & Augustin, Bpifrance, Fabien Pierlot and others.
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This is the Pixel 4, the handset that literally everyone saw coming. Even by Google’s standards, the handset leaked like crazy. Some was almost certainly by design, as the company looked to hype its new flagship amid slowing smartphone sales. That said, showing up for pre-order on two different sites in the past few days is a lot, even by Pixel Standards.
From the front, at least, the new device doesn’t really stand out. The standard Pixel 4 maintains some pretty sizable bezels on the top and bottom, even as most of the industry has moved toward a notch or hole punch to accommodate the camera.
The back of the device is another story entirely, of course. After a few generations of pushing back on multiple camera setups, Google is finally embracing them with the 4. The pair of cameras are positioned in a square configuration, similar to the iPhone 11.
The sensor is up top and the flash is on the bottom, with the wide angle and telephoto sitting next to one another in the middle. There is a 12-megapixel and a 16-megapixel, per earlier leaks. I’ve included a handful of random shots I’ve taken here. They leave a little to be desired — more when we get our hands on the device later for a proper review, but this should give you some idea of what we’re working with here.
Honestly, I’m pretty excited to see what’s on offer with the device here. Google’s always done a good job using AI/ML to augment the single-lens configuration, so the idea of what it’s capable of producing in tandem with dual lenses could well make it a contender for one of the best camera phones on the market.
Imaging has been improved across the board here, including the already solid Night Sight, Portrait Mode and zoom, which uses a hybrid of digital and the physical telephoto lens. I mean, if it’s good enough for Annie Leibovitz, right?
Recorder is an exciting new prospect for someone who makes a living interviewing people such as myself. I tried it out, but honestly, it leaves a bit to be desired in this super noisy setting. Again, a more official write-up of that later, though I do appreciate that the company is doing the transcribing on-board, versus the cloud.
That means a faster response and no concern over more sensitive stuff. Once recording, you’ll see a gray wave form that turns blue when speech is detected. Tapping “transcript” will show the speech. From there you can share it via social media or save it to Google Drive.
It’s fun to see Google embracing gestures here, as a natural followup to its squeezable Active Edge. Admittedly, it’s something that plenty of phone makers have tried with limited success. Perhaps the inclusion of the new radar chip will save it from accidental gestures and make it more user-friendly.
Or maybe the inclusion of a kind of game where you can wave at Pikachu and other Pokémon will help with adoption. I don’t have particularly high hopes on either one, if I’m being honest. Training users on a new form of input is an uphill climb, though the gestures are pretty responsive. At least everyone is already familiar with face unlocks, which is augmented by the aforementioned radar feature, detecting the user as they reach for the phone and beginning the unlock process from there.
The handset ships October 24, starting at $799. Look for a much meatier review in the near future.
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Spearhead, an investment fund launched by AngelList’s Naval Ravikant and Accomplice’s Jeff Fagnan, plans to raise roughly $100 million for its third fund to provide founders $1 million each to invest in technology startups of their choosing.
The firm, created in 2017, initially provided founders $200,000 in investment capital sourced from Spearhead I, a $25 million vehicle, followed by Spearhead II, a $35 million vehicle. The group now plans roughly $100 million to give its founders 5x more capital to play with.
Each founder is allotted 15% carry in his or her fund, while Spearhead holds on to 5%. This time around, says Spearhead’s Jeff Fagnan, standout “leads,” or those tapped to deploy capital from the fund, will also have the opportunity to receive another $10 million to invest at the end of the two-year program during a culminating demo day-like event.
Spearhead is designed to train founders, who tend to be well-connected to the tech ecosystem and knowledgeable about startups, to be effective angel investors. Previous Spearhead leads include Shippo co-founder and chief executive officer Laura Behrens Wu, Scale AI founder and CEO Alex Wang and Rippling co-founder and chief technology officer Prasanna Sankar. To date, 35 founders have completed the program.
Applications to join Spearhead’s third cohort will become available this week. Those who participate will be encouraged to write checks at the pre-seed stage.
“There’s starting to be gap opening up again at the pre-seed,” Fagnan tells TechCrunch. “Founders are the right way to fill that gap. Founders backing their most talented friends … founders backing founders is the right way for this to go. We need to redefine who thinks of themselves as an angel investor.”
To be eligible to become a Spearhead lead, you must live in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston or New York City and run, or very recently have run, a startup. The firm plans to accept around 15 applicants.
“We are trying to build an active community within the leads and we’ve found smaller equals better; fewer people coming together and taking deeper accountability,” Fagnan said.
Spearhead leads can invest their capital in any tech startups, so long as there’s no existing equity relationship. Existing Spearhead investments include ZeroDown, Altitude Networks, Scythe, Airgarage, Cloosiv, Height, O.School, PopSQL, Superplastic and Sword Health.
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Google ended today’s hardware event by going deep on the photo technology in its new Pixel 4, and brought out someone who’s actually been using the camera — legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz.
The company announced that it was working with Leibovitz back in October 2018. Today, she spoke about the experience of working with the Pixel 3 and Pixel 4 for the past year.
Leibovitz told the audience that while she’s been using camera phones for a while, she was “dying for this opportunity, to be given this opportunity by Google” to go out and use a camera phone as a professional photographer.
The discussion didn’t include too many details about the project itself — from what I gathered, it’s a collection of photos of a wide range of activists and “changemakers.” Leibovitz said each portrait is a “diptych,” combining a photo of the ostensible subject with a second photo of something that’s important to them and their work.
She admitted that in the beginning, she had “a little bit of a rough start,” but as time went on, Leibovitz said, “I just relaxed and I totally enjoyed myself.” For example, she said her final shoot was with soccer star Megan Rapinoe, and she described the experience as one where “it really felt like we were just floating … I wasn’t really thinking about the camera.”
Google’s Lily Lin ended their conversation by asking about “pro tips” for other photographers.
“It’s all inside you,” Leibovitz replied. “You just go out and you do it … I mean, we all are using this camera, and it’s a brand new language.”
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AWS and Oracle love to take shots at each other, but as much as Amazon has knocked Oracle over the years, it was forced to admit that it was in fact a customer. Today in a company blog post, the company announced it was shedding Oracle for AWS databases, and had effectively turned off its final Oracle database.
The move involved 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases, according to the company. “I am happy to report that this database migration effort is now complete. Amazon’s Consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated),” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in the company blog post announcing the migration.
Over the last several years, the company has been working to move off of Oracle databases, but it’s not an easy task to move projects on Amazon scale. Barr wrote there were lots of reasons the company wanted to make the move. “Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases. Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted,” he wrote.
More than 100 consumer services have been moved to AWS databases, including customer-facing tools like Alexa, Amazon Prime and Twitch, among others. It also moved internal tools like AdTech, its fulfillment system, external payments and ordering. These are not minor matters. They are the heart and soul of Amazon’s operations.
Each team moved the Oracle database to an AWS database service like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Redshift. Each group was allowed to choose the service they wanted, based on its individual needs and requirements.
Oracle declined to comment on this story.
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French startup Strapi has raised a $4 million seed round led by Accel and Stride.vc. The company has been working on an open-source Node.js headless content management system.
That’s a lot of technical words in a row, but it’s not that hard to understand what Strapi is. Content management systems, or CMS, are web applications that let you publish and manage content on a website. It can be a blog, a corporate website with multiple pages, a portfolio, etc. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress.
Over the past few years, many companies and developers have started to separate the CMS back end (the administration pages where you write and upload content) and the front end (the public website accessible to anyone).
This way, you can run a CMS in the back end, and develop your own custom front end that queries the back end using API calls — this is what’s called a headless CMS. It provides a ton of flexibility and should make your website faster. This is how TechCrunch.com works for instance, with WordPress running as a headless CMS.
Strapi has become quite popular in the headless CMS space, with 500,000 downloads and 250 contributors to the open-source project. The first version was released on GitHub in 2015.
Anybody can download Strapi and run it on their own server. You can then develop your front end, fetch content in your mobile app using the Strapi API and more. Strapi lets you customize the admin panel so that you only see the fields you need when you add content. It works with SQLite, MongoDB, MySQL and Postgres databases.
The company plans to build an ecosystem of plugins to expand the features of your CMS installation. Eventually, the startup could launch a hosted version of Strapi so you don’t have to manage the server infrastructure yourself.
Solomon Hykes, Guillermo Rauch and Eli Collins are also participating in today’s round. Existing investors include Bpifrance, SGPA, François-Charles Debeunne, Jean-Philippe Bellaiche, Kima Ventures, Nicolas Debock, Patrick Dalsace and Nicolas Rosset.
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Google dropped a bit of news right off the bat at this morning’s Made by Google event: Stadia, its on-demand cloud game streaming service, will launch on November 19th.
Stadia is Google’s experiment in changing up the way we play video games; rather than rendering video games on a console or a powerful local PC, Stadia games are rendered in the cloud and pushed to your Chromecast, smartphone or browser on-the-fly.
Google has already announced a few dozen games they plan to support on the $10 per month service — you can find that list here.
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After approximately 48 hours offline, Fortnite has returned from its black hole hiatus with a brand new map for the launch of Chapter 2.
The new map features 13 points of interest, and also includes a web of rivers that allow for new water gameplay, such as swimming, fishing and armed motorboats that seem awfully similar to the dinghies in Call of Duty: Blackout.
Players can also swim now, instead of just hopping around in shallow water, and can eat fish for more health.
Epic Games has added a few new mechanics to the game, most notably the ability to actually pick up and carry knocked teammates to a safer location to resurrect them. Plus, the game now has something called the bandage bazooka, which helps players heal their teammates (kind of like the chug splashes in Season 10).
And for folks who are sick of running around with common weaponry, they can visit the Upgrade Bench and use resources to upgrade their weapons.
As with any new season launch, new map or not, there is a brand new Battlepass in Fortnite that players can work their way through to receive skins, emotes, etc.
Here’s the Chapter 2 trailer:
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