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GBatteries let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump

Published January 15, 2019

A YC startup called GBatteries has come out of stealth with a bold claim: they can recharge an electric car as quickly as it takes to fill up a tank of gas.

Created by aerospace engineer Kostya Khomutov, electrical engineers Alex Tkachenko and Nick Sherstyuk, and CCO Tim Sherstyuk, the company is funded by the likes of Airbus Ventures, Initialized Capital, Plug and Play and SV Angel.

The system uses AI to optimize the charging systems in electric cars.

“Most companies are focused on developing new chemistries or materials (ex. Enevate, Storedot) to improve charging speed of batteries. Developing new materials is difficult, and scaling up production to the needs of automotive companies requires billions of $,” said Khomutov. “Our technology is a combination of software algorithms (AI) and electronics, that works with off-the-shelf Li-ion batteries that have already been validated, tested, and produced by battery manufacturers. Nothing else needs to change.”

The team makes some bold claims. The product allows users to charge a 60kWh EV battery pack with 119 miles of range in 15 minutes as compared to 15 miles in 15 minutes today. “The technology works with off-the-shelf lithium ion batteries and existing fast charge infrastructure by integrating via a patented self-contained adapter on a car charge port,” writes the team. They demonstrated their product at CES this year.

Most charging systems depend on fairly primitive systems for topping up batteries. Various factors — including temperature — can slow down or stop a charge. GBatteries manages this by setting a very specific charging model that “slows down” and “speeds up” the charge as necessary. This allows the charge to go much faster under the right conditions.

The company bloomed out of frustration.

“We’ve always tinkered with stuff together since before I was even a teenager, and over time had created a burgeoning hardware lab in our basement,” said Tim Sherstyuk. “While I was studying Chemistry at Carleton University in Ottawa, we’d often debate and discuss why batteries in our phones got so bad so rapidly — you’d buy a phone, and a year later it would almost be unusable because the battery degraded so badly.”

“This sparked us to see if we can solve the problem by somehow extending the cycle life of batteries and achieve better performance, so that we’d have something that lasts. We spent a few weeks in our basement lab wiring together a simple control system along with an algorithm to charge a few battery cells, and after 6 months of testing and iterations we started seeing a noticeable difference between batteries charged conventionally, and ones using our algorithm. A year and a half later of constant iterations and development, we applied and were accepted in 2014 into YC.”

While it’s not clear when this technology will hit commercial vehicles, it could be the breakthrough we all need to start replacing our gas cars with something a little more environmentally friendly.

CES 2019 coverage - TechCrunch

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Microsoft continues to build government security credentials ahead of JEDI decision

Published January 15, 2019

While the DoD is in the process of reviewing the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract RFPs (assuming the work continues during the government shutdown), Microsoft continues to build up its federal government security bona fides, regardless.

Today the company announced it has achieved the highest level of federal government clearance for the Outlook mobile app, allowing US Government Community Cloud (GCC) High and Department of Defense employees to use the mobile app. This is on top of FedRamp compliance, the company achieved last year.

“To meet the high level of government security and compliance requirements, we updated the Outlook mobile architecture so that it establishes a direct connection between the Outlook mobile app and the compliant Exchange Online backend services using a native Microsoft sync technology and removes middle tier services,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the update.

The update will allows these highly security-conscious employees to access some of the more recent updates to Outlook Mobile such as the ability to add a comment when canceling an event.

This is in line with government security updates the company made last year. While none of these changes are specifically designed to help win the $10 billion JEDI cloud contract, they certainly help make a case for Microsoft from a technology standpoint

As Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure, Julia White stated in a blog post last year, which we covered, “Moving forward, we are simplifying our approach to regulatory compliance for federal agencies, so that our government customers can gain access to innovation more rapidly,” White wrote at the time. The Outlook Mobile release is clearly in line with that.

Today’s announcement comes after the Pentagon announced just last week that it has awarded Microsoft a separate large contract for $1.7 billion. This involves providing Microsoft Enterprise Services for the Department of Defense (DoD), Coast Guard and the intelligence community, according to a statement from DoD.

All of this comes ahead of decision on the massive $10 billion, winner-take-all cloud contract. Final RFPs were submitted in October and the DoD is expected to make a decision in April. The process has not been without controversy with Oracle and IBM submitting formal protests even before the RFP deadline — and more recently, Oracle filing a lawsuit alleging the contract terms violate federal procurement laws. Oracle has been particularly concerned that the contract was designed to favor Amazon, a point the DoD has repeatedly denied.

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Instagram caught selling ads to follower-buying services it banned

Published January 15, 2019

Instagram has been earning money from businesses flooding its social network with spam notifications. Instagram hypocritically continues to sell ad space to services that charge clients for fake followers or that automatically follow/unfollow other people to get them to follow the client back. This is despite Instagram reiterating a ban on these businesses in November and threatening the accounts of people who employ them.

A TechCrunch investigation initially found 17 services selling fake followers or automated notification spam for luring in followers that were openly advertising on Instagram despite blatantly violating the network’s policies. This demonstrates Instagram’s failure to adequately police its app and ad platform. That neglect led to users being distracted by notifications for follows and Likes generated by bots or fake accounts. Instagram raked in revenue from these services while they diluted the quality of Instagram notifications and wasted people’s time.

In response to our investigation, Instagram tells me it’s removed all ads as well as disabled all the Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts of the services we reported were violating its policies. Pages and accounts that themselves weren’t in violation but whose ads have been banned from advertising on Facebook and Instagram. However, a day later TechCrunch still found ads from two of these services on Instagram, and discovered five more companies paying to promote policy-violating follower-growth services.

This raises a big question about whether Instagram properly protects its community from spammers. Why would it take a journalist’s investigation to remove these ads and businesses that brazenly broke Instagram’s rules when the company is supposed to have technical and human moderation systems in place? The Facebook-owned app’s quest to “move fast” to grow its user base and business seems to have raced beyond what its watchdogs could safeguard.

Hunting spammers

I began this investigation a month ago after being pestered with Instagram Stories ads by a service called GramGorilla. The slicked-back hipster salesmen boasted how many followers he gained with the service and that I could pay to do the same. The ads linked to the website of a division of Krends Marketing, where for $46 to $126 per month, it promised to score me 1,000 to 2,500 Instagram followers.

Some apps like this sell followers directly, though these are typically fake accounts. They might boost your follower count (unless they’re detected and terminated) but won’t actually engage with your content or help your business, and end up dragging down your metrics so Instagram shows your posts to fewer people. But I discovered that GramGorilla/Krends and the majority of apps selling Instagram audience growth do something even worse.

You give these scammy businesses your Instagram username and password, plus some relevant topics or demographics, and they automatically follow and unfollow, like and comment on strangers’ Instagram profiles. The goal is to generate notifications those strangers will see in hopes that they’ll get curious or want to reciprocate and so therefore follow you back. By triggering enough of this notification spam, they trick enough strangers to follow you to justify the monthly subscription fee.

That pissed me off. Facebook, Instagram and other social networks send enough real notifications as is, growth hacking their way to more engagement, ad views and daily user counts. But at least they have to weigh the risk of annoying you so much that you turn off notifications all together. Services that sell followers don’t care if they pollute Instagram and ruin your experience as long as they make money. They’re classic villains in the “tragedy of the commons” of our attention.

This led me to start cataloging these spam company ads, and I was startled by how many different ones I saw. Soon, Instagram’s ad targeting and retargeting algorithms were backfiring, purposefully feeding me ads for similar companies that also violated Instagram’s policies.

The 17 services selling followers or spam that I originally indexed were Krends Marketing / GramGorilla, SocialUpgrade, MagicSocial, EZ-Grow, Xplod Social, Macurex, GoGrowthly, Instashop / IG Shops, TrendBee, JW Social Media Marketing, YR Charisma, Instagrocery, Social Sensational, SocialFuse, We Grow Social, IG Wildfire and Gramflare. TrendBee and Gramflare were found to still be running Instagram ads after the platform said they’ve been banned from doing so. Upon further investigation after Instagram’s supposed crackdown, I discovered five more services sell prohibited growth services: FireSocial, InstaMason/IWentMissing, NexStore2019, InstaGrow and Servantify.

Knowingly poisoning the well

I wanted to find out if these companies were aware that they violate Instagram’s policies and how they justify generating spam. Most hide their contact info and merely provide a customer support email, but eventually I was able to get on the phone with some of the founders.

“What we’re doing is obviously against their terms of service,” said GoGrowthly’s co-founder who refused to provide their name. “We’re going in and piggybacking off their free platform and not giving them any of the revenue. Instagram doesn’t like us at all. We utilize private proxies depending on clients’ geographic location. That’s sort of our trick to reduce any sort of liability,” so clients’ accounts don’t get shut down, they said. “It’s a careful line that we tread with Instagram. Similar to SEO companies and Google, Google wants the best results for customers and customers want the best results for them. There’s a delicate dance,” said Macurex founder Gun Hudson.

EZ-Grow’s co-founder Elon refused to give his last name on the record, but told me “[Clients] always need something new. At first it was follows and likes. Now we even watch Stories for them. Every new feature that Instagram has we take advantage of it to make more visibility for our clients.” He says EZ-Grow spends $500 per day on Instagram ads, which are its core strategy for finding new customers. SocialFuse founder Alexander Heit says his company spends a couple hundred dollars per day on Instagram and Facebook ads, and was worried when Instagram reiterated its ban on his kind of service in November, but says, “We thought that we were definitely going to get shut down but nothing has changed on our end.”

Several of the founders tried to defend their notification spam services by saying that at least they weren’t selling fake followers. Lacking any self-awareness, Macurex’s Hudson said, “If it’s done the wrong way it can ruin the user experience. There are all sorts of marketers who will market in untasteful or spammy ways. Instagram needs to keep a check on that.” GoGrowthly’s founder actually told me, “We’re actually doing good for the community by generating those targeted interactions.” WeGrowSocial’s co-founder Brandon also refused to give his last name, but was willing to rat out his competitor SocialSensational for selling followers.

Only EZ-Grow’s Elon seemed to have a moment of clarity. “Because the targeting goes to the right people… and it’s something they would like, it’s not spam,” he said before his epiphany. “People can also look at it as spam, maybe.”

Instagram finally shuts down the spammers

In response to our findings, an Instagram spokesperson provided this lengthy statement confirming it’s shut down the ads and accounts of the violators we discovered, claiming that it works hard to fight spam, and admitting it needs to do better:

Nobody likes receiving spammy follows, likes and comments. It’s really important to us that the interactions people have on Instagram are genuine, and we’re working hard to keep the community free from spammy behavior. Services that offer to boost an account’s popularity via inauthentic likes, comments and followers, as well as ads that promote these services, aren’t allowed on Instagram. We’ve taken action on the services raised in this article, including removing violating ads, disabling Pages and accounts, and stopping Pages from placing further ads. We have various systems in place that help us catch and remove these types of ads before anyone sees them, but given the number of ads uploaded to our platform every day, there are times when some still manage to slip through. We know we have more to do in this area and we’re committed to improving.

Instagram tells me it uses machine learning tools to identify accounts that pay third-party apps to boost their popularity and claims to remove inauthentic engagement before it reaches the recipient of the notifications. By nullifying the results of these services, Instagram believes users will have less incentive to use them. It uses automated systems to evaluate the images, captions and landing pages of all its ads before they run, and sends some to human moderators. It claims this lets it catch most policy-violating ads, and that users can report those it misses.

But these ads and their associated accounts were filled with terms like “get followers,” “boost your Instagram followers,” “real followers,” “grow your engagement,” “get verified,” “engagement automation” and other terms tightly linked to policy-violating services. That casts doubt on just how hard Instagram was working on this problem. It may have simply relied on cheap and scalable technical approaches to catching services with spam bots or fake accounts instead of properly screening ads or employing sufficient numbers of human moderators to police the network.

That misplaced dependence on AI and other tech solutions appears to be a trend in the industry. When I recently reported that child sexual abuse imagery was easy to find on WhatsApp and Microsoft Bing, both seemed to be understaffing the human moderation team that could have hunted down this illegal content with common sense where complex algorithms failed. As with Instagram, these products have highly profitable parent companies that can afford to pour more dollars in policy enforcement.

Kicking these services off Instagram is an important step, but the company must be more proactive. Social networks and self-serve ad networks have been treated as efficient cash cows for too long. The profits from these products should be reinvested in policing them. Otherwise, crooks will happily fleece users for our money and attention.

To learn more about the future of Instagram, check out this article’s author Josh Constine’s SXSW 2019 keynote with Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger — their first talk together since leaving the company.

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Doogee is launching a rugged modular smartphone

Published January 15, 2019

The week following CES is probably as good a time as any to launch a Kickstarter campaign for your strange new smartphone. After all, a company like Doogee is going to have difficulty rising above the din during a CES or MWC, even with an idea as interesting as the rugged, modular S90.

The Chinese manufacturer has no shortage of interesting concepts, of course. And while the S90 appears to be a bit of a niche, it’s already surpassed its (admittedly modest) goal several times over.

The product’s modular concept is pretty in line with Motorola’s Moto Z offerings, with a series of plates that snap onto the back of the handset, delivering different hardware features through a multi-pin connector.

Many of the mods should prove familiar, too, including an extra battery (5,000mAh) and a game pad. Though, in addition to the rugged handset, you’ve also got some add-ons specifically tailored to those looking for a device to use in the field. Among those listed are a night-vision camera and a walkie-talkie, which extends the handset’s communication abilities where cellular networks don’t reach.

Doogee is shooting for a February delivery for the new handset.

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Pandora launches a personalized voice assistant on iOS and Android

Published January 15, 2019

Pandora today announced the launch of its own, in-app voice assistant that you can call up at any time by saying “Hey Pandora,” followed by a request to play the music or podcasts you want to hear. The feature will allow you to not only control music playback with commands to play a specific artist, album, radio or playlist, but will also be capable of delivering results customized to you when responding to vague commands or those related to activity or mood. For example, you’ll get personalized results for requests like “play something new,” “play more like this,” “play music for relaxing,” “play workout music,” “play something I like” and others.

The company reports strong adoption of its service on voice-activated speakers, like Amazon Echo devices, where now millions of listeners launch Pandora music by speaking — a trend that inspired the move to launch in-app voice control.

“Voice is just an expected new way that you engage with any app,” notes Pandora Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips. “On the mobile app, we’re doing more than just your typical request against the catalog… asking: ‘hey, Pandora,’ to search and play or pause or skip,” he says. “What we’re doing that we think is pretty special is we’re taking that voice utterance of what someone asks for, and we’re applying our personalized recommendations to the response,” Phillips explains.

That means when you ask Pandora to play you something new, the app will return a selection that won’t resemble everyone else’s music, but will rather be informed by your own listening habits and personal tastes.

The way that result is returned may also vary — for some, it could be a playlist, for others an album and for others, it could be just a new song, a personalized soundtrack or a radio station.

“Play something new” isn’t the only command that will yield a personalized response, Pandora says. It will also return personalized results for commands related to your mood or activity — like workout music, something to relax to, music for cooking and more.

For podcasts, it can dig up episodes with a specific guest, play shows by title, or even deliver show recommendations, among other things.

Voice commands can be used in lieu of pressing buttons, too, in order to do things like add songs to a playlist or giving a song you like a thumbs up, for instance.

The new feature, called “Voice Mode,” taps into Pandora’s machine learning and data science capabilities, which is an active battleground between music services.

Spotify, for example, is well known for its deep personalization with its Discover Weekly and other custom playlists, like its Daily Mixes. But its own “voice mode” option is only available for its Premium users, according to a FAQ on the company’s website.

Pandora, meanwhile, is planning to roll out Voice Mode to all users — both free and paid.

For free users, the feature will work in conjunction with an existing ad product that allows users to opt in to watch a video in order to gain temporary access to Pandora’s on-demand service.

While this option is not live at launch, the plan is to allow any user to use the “Hey Pandora” command, then redirect free users with a request to play music on demand to instead play the opt-in ad first.

Pandora Voice Mode will launch today, January 15, to a percentage of the iOS and Android user base — around a million listeners. The company will track the speed, accuracy and performance of its results before rolling it out more broadly over the next couple of months.

Users with a Google Home device can also cast from their Pandora app to their smart speaker, and a similar feature will arrive on Alexa devices soon, the company believes.

Pandora works with Siri Shortcuts, too. That means you can now use voice to launch the app itself, then play a personalized selection of music without having to touch your phone at all.

Voice Mode will be available in the Pandora app via the search bar next to the magnifying glass.

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German court tosses Qualcomm’s latest iPhone patent suit

Published January 15, 2019

Qualcomm has had a patent lawsuit against Apple dismissed by a court in Mannheim, Germany, as groundless (via Reuters).

The chipmaker had argued Intel -powered iPhones infringed a transistor switch patent it holds. But in an initial verbal decision the court disagreed. Qualcomm has said it will appeal.

In a statement, Don Rosenberg, Qualcomm’s executive VP and general counsel, said: “Apple has a history of infringing our patents. Only last month the Munich Regional Court affirmed the value of another of Qualcomm’s cutting-edge patents against Apple’s infringement and ordered a ban on the import and sale of impacted iPhones in Germany. That decision followed a Court-ordered ban on patent-infringing iPhones in China as well as recognition by an ITC judge that Apple is infringing Qualcomm’s IP. The Mannheim court interpreted one aspect of our patent very narrowly, saying that because a voltage inside a part of an iPhone wasn’t constant the patent wasn’t infringed.  We strongly disagree and will appeal.”

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment. Update: The company told us: “We are happy with the decision and thank the court for their time and diligence.  We regret Qualcomm’s use of the court to divert attention from their illegal behavior that is the subject of multiple lawsuits and proceedings around the world.”

The pair have been embroiled in an increasingly bitter and global legal battle in recent years, as Apple has shifted away from using Qualcomm chips in its devices.

Two years ago the FTC also filed charges against the chipmaker accusing it of anticompetitive tactics in an attempt to maintain a monopoly (Apple is officially cited in the complaint). That trial began early this month.

Cupertino has also filed a billion-dollar royalty lawsuit accusing Qualcomm of charging for patents “they have nothing to do with”.

While the latest court decision in Mannheim has gone in Apple’s favor, a separate ruling in Germany late last year went Qualcomm’s way. And earlier this month Apple was forced to withdraw the iPhone 7 and 8 from its retail stores in Germany, after Qualcomm posted €1.34BN in security bonds to enforce the December court decision — which related to a power management patent.

Although the affected iPhone models remain on sale in Germany via resellers. Apple is also appealing.

Qualcomm also recently secured a preliminary injunction banning the import and sales of some older iPhone models in China. Again, Apple is appealing.

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Freelancer banking service Shine switches to paid subscriptions

Published January 14, 2019

French startup Shine wants to be the only professional bank account you need if you’re a freelancer. So far, 25,000 people have signed up to the service, and the company recently raised a $9.3 million funding round.

Shine wants to help freelancers in France all steps of the way. After signing up, the app helps you fill out all the paperwork to create your freelancer status. You then get a card and banking information.

This way, you can generate invoices, accept payments and also pay for stuff. Creating an account and basic transactions have been free so far, but starting on January 21st, freelancers will have to pay €4.90 to €7.90 per month depending on their status.

Freelancers who generate less than €70,000 (so-called “auto-entrepreneurs”) will pay €4.90 per month, while others will pay more. This is still cheaper than most professional bank accounts. Existing users won’t have to pay anything.

The company mentioned premium plans in the past, but Shine now wants to create a single plan with a unified feature set for everyone. If you’re more serious about your indie lifestyle and generate a lot of revenue, you’ll pay a bit more.

In addition to that change, the startup is working on some new features. Soon, you’ll be able to generate better exports for accounting purposes. You’ll be able to deposit checks, control your account from a web browser, generate better invoices and more.

But Shine doesn’t just want to build an endless list of bullet points with as many features as possible. The company wants to create the best banking assistant for freelancers. You get notifications for admin tasks and you can ask the support team any question you have when it comes to the administrative part of your work.

It’s not just customer support for the product — it’s customer support for French paperwork. And that has some value by itself.

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Computer vision startup AnyVision pulls in new funding from Lightspeed

Published January 14, 2019

While there have been a few massive surveillance startups in China that have raised funds on the back of computer vision advances, there’s seemed to be less fervor outside of that market. Tel Aviv-based AnyVision is aiming to leverage its computer vision chops in tracking people and objects to create some pretty clear utility for the enterprise world.

After announcing a $28 million Series A in mid-2018, the computer vision startup is bringing Lightspeed Venture Partners into the raise, closing out the round at $43 million.

“When you have a company with the technology AnyVision has, and the market need that I’m hearing from across industries, what you need to do is push the gas pedal and build an organization which can monetize and take on this opportunity to grow massively,” Lightspeed partner Raviraj Jain told TechCrunch.

Right now the 200-person company has its eyes on the security and identity markets as it aims to bring its computer vision technology into more industry-tailored solutions.

The company’s “Better Tomorrow” product delivers camera-agnostic surveillance insights from its object and human-tracking tech. “Sesame” is the company’s consumer-facing play for bringing mobile banking authentication to hundreds of millions of phones. The company is still looking to release a retail analytics platform to customers, as well.

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What3words breaks the world down into phrases

Published January 14, 2019

If you’re down in ///joins.slides.predict you may want to visit ///history.writing.closets, or if you’ve got a little money to spend, try the Bananas Foster at ///cattle.excuse.luggage. Either way, don’t forget to stop by ///plotting.nest.reshape before you fly out.

If things go what3words’ way, that’s how you’ll be sending out addresses in the future. Founded by musician Chris Sheldrick and Cambridge mathematician Mohan Ganesalingam, the company has cut the world into three meter boxes that are identified by three words. Totonno’s Pizzeria in Brooklyn is at ///cats.lots.dame, while the White House is at ///kicks.mirror.tops. Because there are only three words, you can easily find spots that have no addresses and without using cumbersome latitude and longitude coordinates.

The team created this system after finding that travelers found it almost impossible to find some out-of-the-way places. Tokyo, for example, is notoriously difficult to traverse via address, while other situations — renting a Yurt in Alaska, for example — require constantly updated addresses that do not lend themselves to GPS coordinates. Instead, you can tell your driver to take you to ///else.impulse.broom and be done with it.

The team has raised £40 million and is currently working on systems to add their mapping API to industrial and travel partners. You can browse the map here.

“I organized live music events around the world. Often in rural places. HeIfound equipment, musicians and guests got lost. We tried to give coordinates but they were impossible to remember and communicate accurately,” said Sheldrick. “This is the only address solution designed for voice, and the only system using words and not alphanumeric codes.”

Obviously this will take some getting used to. The three words might get mispronounced, leading to some fun problems, but in general it might be a good to way to get around the world in a post-modern way. After all, some of the spot names sound like poetry, and if you don’t like it you can always just go to ///drills.dandelions.bounds.

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Geoengineering could solve our climate problems if anyone allowed it

Published January 14, 2019

This weekend, I finished reading Oliver Morton’s The Planet Remade (thanks to reader Eliot Peper for recommending it). Morton has a multitude of goals with the book, but there were two I think are deeply valuable. First, geoengineering is a plausible approach to solving our climate problems this century, and second, engineering the climate generates tough policy challenges, but also opportunities to make the planet more equitable.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new — provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

First and foremost: the book is mind-expanding in the best way possible. Morton confronts an extremely contentious issue with judicious facts and supreme insight gleaned over many years of studying geoengineering. Whether you are a dedicated acolyte of cloud seeding and veils or a committed opponent to any tampering of earth’s environment, he has developed a book that forces us to think about our actions and ultimately what the consequences of those choices are.

Frankly, those choices offer stark consequences. Morton describes the challenge of climate this century:

The world’s population is expected to grow from seven billion today to more or less ten billion by 2100. By that time the number of people enjoying rich-world energy privileges should also reach ten billion. So the challenge is to achieve for an extra eight billion people in the twenty-first century what was achieved for two billion in the twentieth century. Meeting that challenge implies a lot more energy usage.

Morton is a staunch environmentalist and deeply concerned about environmental justice and the inequities of the planet. But he is also a “climate realist” — he understands that our current solutions to climate change are not really solutions at all, since they either lack the scale required to solve the problem, or will continue to exacerbate existing inequities between different people of this planet.

For example, take emissions-free nuclear power, which is brought up as a panacea to our fossil fuel-driven economy. Morton writes:

If the world had the capacity to deliver one of the largest nuclear power plants ever built once a week, week in and week out, it would take 20 years to replace the current stock of coal-fired plants (at present, the world builds about three or four nuclear power plants a year, and retires old ones almost as quickly).

Sure, nuclear power plants are a literal solution, but most definitely not a pragmatic one since the scale required is just not there.

He also spends significant time deconstructing recent climate negotiations, finding that the focus on carbon has been something of a red herring (many other emissions are far worse than carbon and less directly connected to the modern industrial economy). Instead, they have been driven by the alignment of different environmentally-concerned parties:

Carbon dioxide suited scientists because it seemed like a straightforward measure of the problem. It suited greens because it was a pretty good proxy for the industrial society against which their movement was a reaction. The international negotiations that set up the UNFCCC showed that it suited developing countries because it was primarily a developed-country issue; at the time of Rio, the vast majority of all the industrial emissions since the the eighteenth century had come from Europe and America.

Carbon is of course a problem, but it has become a tagline, a brand, a cri de coeur of the international climate movement. Yet the challenges facing the planet are so much deeper than just carbon.

To avoid that narrow focus, Morton argues for a complete reframing of the climate debate toward solutions that can actually repair the climate, and even improve it for diverse populations around the world.

Now, the term “geoengineering” brings with it a bag of Hollywood-induced imagery of nuclear winters and globe-spanning hurricanes. Morton addresses those risks across his chapters, noting that geoengineering can indeed go wrong.

Even so, he convincingly argues that there are geoengineering techniques designed around key climate processes that can be high leverage, reversible, testable, and that have the scale required to actually solve climate challenges in a sustainable way. These processes aren’t speculation — we (mostly) understand the science today, and have pathways toward the technology required to execute a strategy.

The real challenge — as it always is — are humans and their governments. Morton notes that climate change has a huge deleterious impact on nations such as Maldives, but that it can also benefit certain regions by transitioning them from colder to more temperate climates.

That means that any geoengineering solution is going to face the prospect of creating winners and losers. Any international agreement is going to have to contend with those politics, and design mechanisms to ameliorate their effects.

Much as Morton calls for a planet remade, he sees an opportunity for geoengineering to trigger reflection among governments on their own interests:

Much better, rather than treating geoengineering as a technocratic way of avoiding politics, to use it as a way of reinventing politics. Exploring the potential of geoengineering could spur and shape the development of a new way of making planetary decisions. The aim should not be the development of a thermostat alone; it should be the development of a new hand to use it.

Environmentalists may balk at the idea of allowing humans to have their hands on any part of the earth system. But we are here, all seven billion of us, and we already have our brutal hands on the system. The question is whether we can start to use our hands in a far more productive way that can make the earth sustainable for centuries to come. As Morton notes, “The planet has been remade, is being remade, will be remade.” Geoengineering technologies offer solutions, if we can agree in how to use them.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Why Gutenberg can still recognize the book

Craig Mod wrote a compelling piece in Wired on the future of the book, and why today’s books essentially look the same as when the printing press was first invented. Despite the prognosticators expecting books to have moving pictures, interactivity, and dynamic narratives, almost nothing in that direction has actually occurred as readers continue to enjoy the traditional format. Instead, where the real innovation has taken place is on the business side, where new models from crowdfunding to email subscriptions have transformed the economics of book publishing.

Automattic’s Newspack to drive revenue for smaller publishers

While content management systems have been around for decades, almost none of these systems are designed to create revenues for their users out of the box. WordPress doesn’t have any subscription features or advertising networks built-in, which means that sites that want to make money have to spend a lot of dollars just to get setup and started.

So the announcement this morning that Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, is going to offer a new platform combining content management with revenue called Newspack is both interesting and definitely needed. It’s a proper extension of their existing platform, and a reminder for product managers that the sustainability of their customers is critical for long-term success.

Huawei sales executive arrested in Poland

We have been following Huawei’s travails in the West for some time. One major point of contention is whether the company spies on behalf of the Chinese government. Western governments have argued that it does, but as China has repeatedly noted, they have never provided any proof.

On Friday in Poland, a Huawei executive was arrested for alleged espionage, which could provide the first public evidence of collusion between Huawei and Beijing. The company subsequently fired the executive and claimed that his actions were unrelated to the company. Poland has since called on NATO countries to remove Huawei equipment from their telecommunications infrastructure. Huawei equipment is widely installed in Europe and European governments have so far evaded calls by the U.S. to boycott the company. As the largest telecom equipment manufacturer in the world, Huawei’s response could have vast repercussions for the deployment of 5G networks.

PG&E – oh boy

Silicon Valley’s (and much of California’s) gas and electric utility is going bankrupt following massive liability claims against the utility due to its equipment sparking wildfires over the past few years. California may lead the world in innovation, but it seems to always be on the precipice of disaster when it comes to infrastructure.

What’s next & obsessions

  • I am reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
  • Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here.

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