GM reveals an EV for (almost) every purse and purpose
Ed Niedermeyer is an author, columnist and co-host of The Autonocast. His book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, was released in August 2019.
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General Motors’ EV day didn’t just mark the launch of a new flexible battery architecture and an ambitious plan to deploy this underlying foundation across all of the automaker’s brands, including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet and GMC.
It was a resurrection, albeit with a modern twist.
The company’s announcement this week gave new life to its brand ladder — a portfolio that ranges from the heights of luxury to the most basic utility — and tipped its hand about how it will bring EVs “across the chasm.”
This game plan isn’t new. GM is bringing back a strategy that once defined its success and reshaped America’s automotive landscape. This strategy worked for GM until complacency crept in and the brand ladder collapsed. This time, GM is aiming to avoid these snares.
History lesson
Henry Ford’s moving assembly line birthed the early auto industry, but as American prosperity grew in the 1910s-20s, it was General Motors that laid the foundations of the modern car market. Under then-chairman Alfred Sloan, the amalgamation of once-independent automakers united under a strategy that would, in his words, create “a car for every purse and purpose.” From a value Chevrolet to a sporty Pontiac, from a discreetly plush Buick to a majestic Cadillac, and with countless brands in between, what became known as Sloanism birthed the idea that there should be a car to reflect every American’s self-image and social status.
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VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters
As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly.
Coronavirus fears are now affecting fundraising for startups. I am seeing advice that tells any company that might run out of cash in 2020 to start raising now before things might get a lot tighter. RIPGoodTimes?
— Josh Elman (@joshelman) March 1, 2020
Sequoia Capital sent a letter to its founders on Thursday warning that the coronavirus was a “black swan” event and startups should “brace themselves for turbulence” by considering if they have enough cash and preparing to face supply chain disruptions. The letter also warned they could have a harder time fundraising, similar to the market downturns of 2001 and 2009.
The coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world. Seattle, which has seen a cluster of cases, seems almost a ghost town in some parts, according to entrepreneur and former Madrona Capital partner Shauna Causey. She told TechCrunch that many of the coffee shops and co-working spaces popular among VCs have gone empty in the last week and all of her fundraising meetings are conducted via Zoom.
Given that fundraising can take several months, if their cash out date is 2020, they should be fundraising soon anyway
also hearing from founders it’s already getting hard
— Evelyn Rusli (@EvelynRusli) March 2, 2020
A Singapore-based VC firm told a startup I’m working with that they’re not going to wire the entire $2m investment they committed to in the Series A, which has been in closing the last few weeks. The rationale was to conserve capital due to coronavirus. The funding risk is real.
— Tommy Leep (@leepnet) March 4, 2020
And already there’s some chatter that funding might be drying up for early-stage startups, though Bloomberg Beta’s Roy Bahat tells TechCrunch that startups should always be fundraising as soon as they can to protect themselves from this type of calamity.
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This Week in Apps: Google I/O canceled over coronavirus, App Store gets updated rules, TikTok’s owner launches Spotify rival
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week, we’re looking at the further impact of the coronavirus on the app industry, which is now leading to more major event cancellations — including, as of this week, Google I/O and SXSW. That begs the question, will WWDC be next? And what will that mean for developers who rely on the annual event to make those invaluable face-to-face connections? We’re also looking at the revised App Store review guidelines and what that means for developers, as well as Walmart’s plan to dramatically change its app strategy, Robinhood’s bad week, the launch of a new Spotify competitor from the makers of the world’s most viral app, TikTok and much more.
Headlines
Apple changes the rules
Apple this week alerted developers to a new set of App Store review guidelines that detail which apps will be accepted or rejected, and what apps are allowed to do. The changes to the guidelines impact reviews, push notifications, Sign in with Apple, data collection and storage, mobile device management and more, the company says. Some of the more high-profile changes include the ability for apps to now use notifications for ads, stricter rules for dating and fortune-telling apps and a new rule that allows Apple to reject apps that help users evade law enforcement, among other things.
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New funding round values catering marketplace Hungry at $100M+
Hungry, a catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs, announced this week that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Hungry tells me that the funding valued the company at more than $100 million (pre-money).
The investors were also pretty impressive: The round was led by Evolution VC Partners and former Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb, who’s joining the startup’s board. Kevin Hart, Jay-Z, Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley, former Obama aide Reggie Love and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner also participated.
CEO Jeff Grass said that he and his co-founders Eman Pahlavani (COO) and Shy Pahlevani (president) got the idea for the company while working at their previous startup LiveSafe.
“LiveSafe was in a food desert, where the best options were Subway and Ruby Tuesday,” Grass said. “We wanted more authentic food and we started thinking about, ‘Is there a better way that taps into local chefs?’ ”
That eventually led to Hungry, which has built up a network of independent chefs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Atlanta, providing catering to companies including Amazon, E-Trade, Microsoft and BCG. The chefs are all screened by Hungry, they cook out of “ghost kitchens” (commercial kitchens that aren’t attached to a restaurant) and then the food is delivered by the Hungry team.
“The food is produced at a much lower cost structure than at a restaurant with a retail location,” Grass said. “And yet you’re not sacrificing on quality. These are top chefs cooking their best dishes — you get higher than restaurant-quality food, but produced at a much lower cost.”
He added that this lower cost also allows the startup to be generous. Specifically, for every two meals sold, Hungry is supposed to donate one meal to end hunger in the U.S., and it has donated nearly 500,000 meals already.
As for the funding, Grass and his team will use it to expand into new markets — he hopes to be in 23 cities by the end of 2021.
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What to consider when employees need to start working remotely
The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates.
If your organization doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won’t have the luxury of conducting a six-month study.
We spoke to a few people who have been looking at the remote working space for more than a decade and asked about the issues companies should bear in mind when a large number of employees suddenly need to work from home.
The lay of the land
Alan Lepofsky, currently VP of Salesforce Quip, has studied the remote work market for more than a decade. He says there are three main pieces to building a remote working strategy. First, managers need to evaluate which tools they’ll be using to allow employees to continue collaborating when they aren’t together.
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Oribi brings its web analytics platform to the US
Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States.
While we’ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren’t built for Oribi’s customers.
“A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Shoor told me. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”
She said that Oribi, on the other hand, is designed for small and medium businesses that don’t have large technical teams: “They have digital marketing strategies that are worth a few hundred thousand dollars a month, they have very large activity, but they don’t have a team for it. And I would say that all of them are using Google Analytics.”
Shoor described Oribi as designed specifically “to compete with Google Analytics” by allowing everyone on the team to get the data they need without requiring developers to write new code for every event they want to track.
In fact, if you use Oribi’s plugins for platforms like WordPress and Shopify, there’s no coding at all involved in the process. Apparently, that’s because Oribi is already tracking every major event in the customer journey. It also allows the team to define the conversion goals that they want to focus on — again, with no coding required.
Shoor contrasted Oribi with analytics platforms that simply provide “more and more data” but don’t help customers understand what to do with that data.
“We’ve created something that is much more clean,” she said. “We give them insights of what’s working; in the background, we create all these different queries and correlations about which part of the funnels are broken and where they can optimize.”
There are big businesses using Oribi already — including Audi, Sony and Crowne Plaza — but the company is now turning its attention to U.S. customers. Shoor said Oribi isn’t opening an office in the United States right away, but there are plans to do so in the next year.
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FCC looks to mandate anti-robocall tech after prodding from Congress
The FCC is finally going to require wireless carriers to implement an anti-robocalling technology, after asking them nicely for more than a year to do so at their convenience. Of course, the FCC itself is now required to do this after Congress got tired of waiting on them and took action itself.
The technology is called Secure Telephony Identity Revisited / Secure Handling of Asserted information using toKENs, mercifully abbreviated to STIR/SHAKEN, and amounts to a sort of certificate authority for calls that prevents phone numbers from being spoofed. (This is a good technical breakdown if you’re curious.)
STIR/SHAKEN has been talked about for quite some time as a major part of the fight against robocalls, and in 2018 FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said that carriers would have until the end of 2019 to implement it. 2019 came and went, and while the FCC (and indeed carriers) took other actions against robocallers, STIR/SHAKEN went largely undeployed.
Meanwhile, Congress, perhaps tired of receiving scam calls themselves, managed to collectively reach across the aisle and pass the TRACED Act, which essentially empowers the FCC and other departments to take action against robocallers — and prevents carriers from charging for anti-robocall services.
It also ordered the FCC to set a timeline for STIR/SHAKEN implementation, which is what Pai is doing now.
“It’s clear that FCC action is needed to spur across-the-board deployment of this important technology. There is no silver bullet when it comes to eradicating robocalls, but this is a critical shot at the target,” he said in a statement issued today.
There does not, however, appear to be any great hurry. The proposal, which will be voted on at the FCC’s meeting later this month, would require voice service providers to implement STIR/SHAKEN by June 30… of 2021. And one-year extensions will be available to smaller providers who claim difficulty getting the system up and running.
In other words, you can expect to keep receiving strange calls offering discounts on cruises and warning you of IRS penalties for some time to come. Of course, there are some things you can do to stem the flow of scammers — check out our 101 on preventing robocalls for some simple tips to save yourself some aggravation.
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SaaStr postpones annual conference as county officials discourage large gatherings
SaaStr, the venture firm that puts on the largest conference for SaaS companies, postponed its SaaStr Annual 2020 conference today amid concerns from local and national officials around large gatherings in light of the COVID-19 virus. The event was scheduled to take place next week.
On March 5th, Santa Clara County issued updated guidelines that included, “[Minimizing] the number of employees working within arm’s length of one another, including minimizing or canceling large in-person meetings and conferences.”
Company founder Jason Lemkin said his team was prepared to go forward and had put stringent safeguards in place. “We put in place health and safety measures no one else in the industry equaled, but once the County made its statement, we needed to reschedule,” he told TechCrunch.
They outlined the health guidelines for the event in an article on the company website earlier this week, including not allowing anyone from a hot zone to attend, passport checks to enforce that, temperature checks and more. As Lemkin tweeted:
A reminder: we’ve designed SaaStr Annual to have the more stringent health & safety events of any event:
– no handshakes
– wash before every session
– thermal scanning
– lower density, & comfortable spaces for calm discussions— Jason
SaaStrAnnual.com
(@jasonlk) March 2, 2020
The event will now be folded into the company’s fall conference, which they say will be even bigger now, while replacing the company’s annual Scale conference. “Following that [guidance from Santa Clara County] and guidance from the CDC, and the growing escalation of the Covid-19 outbreak around the world and in the United States, SaaStr Annual must now be rescheduled and merged with our existing fall event into a new, less formal ‘SaaStr Bi-Annual’ to take place in September 2020,” the company wrote in a statement.
Lemkin expressed frustration with authorities today on Twitter about the lack of leadership on this:
Where was leadership from cities & convention centers?
Why did everyone ignore us weeks back and mock us when we asked for help?
There is a lot of noise today and I think it is very possible to put on an event far safer than Disneyland or the airport
But not without leadership
— Jason
The event included some of the biggest names in SaaS, from Jennifer Tejada of PagerDuty and Aaron Levie of Box and many more. It’s an event that’s designed to help SaaS companies of all sizes discuss the issues facing them, in one place, with panels, interviews and sessions. Many other tech conferences are being cancelled as well, including SXSW.
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Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6
Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch.
True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration.
The company, which is astoundingly well-funded and led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, says there will be 50 shows live at launch, including:
- “Most Dangerous Game,” a dystopian action thriller starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz
- “Survive,” a drama starring Sophie Turner about the aftermath of a plane crash, based on a novel by Alex Morel
- “Chrissy’s Court,” in which Chrissy Teigen presides over small-claims court
- “Murder House Flip,” in which homeowners try to renovate homes that are infamous for murders committed inside
- “Thanks a Million,” a reality series where celebrities (including executive producer Jennifer Lopez) give $100,000 to regular people who must them pay it forward
- “Last Night’s Last Night,” Entertainment Weekly’s daily recap of late-night shows
- “The Replay by ESPN,” offering daily episodes covering sports news
Quibi says it will release a total of 8,500 episodes across 175 shows in its first year.
Using the company’s “Turnstyle” technology, viewers will be able to switch seamlessly between watching videos in portrait and landscape mode. In fact, some shows are designed specifically to offer different-but-complementary viewing experiences in different viewing modes.
The service will cost $4.99 per month with ads or $7.99 per month without ads. Quibi is also announcing today that it’s offering a 90-day free trial — but you’ll need to sign up on the Quibi website before the official launch on April 6.
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Horizon raises another $5M to put virtual items on the blockchain and launch its first game
If a player picks up an item in an online video game, who owns that item? The player, or the company that made the game?
In most cases, the answer is probably closer to the latter. The item may be in the player’s digital inventory, but the company can take it away as they please, prevent the player from selling or giving it away, etc.
Horizon Blockchain Games is trying to shift up the idea of ownership in games (starting with their own title), and they’ve raised another $5 million to get it done.
Horizon is working down two paths in parallel here: On one path, they’re building an Ethereum-powered platform called Arcadeum for handling in-game items — establishing who owns any specific instance of an item, and allowing that item to be verifiably traded, sold or given from player to player. Once an item is in a player’s possession, it’s theirs to use, trade or sell as they please; Horizon can’t just take it away. In time, they’ll open up this platform for other developers to build upon.
On the other path, the company is building out its own game — a digital trading card game called SkyWeaver — meant to thrive in its own right while simultaneously showcasing the platform.
SkyWeaver is a fantasy-heavy trading card game perhaps most easily compared to Blizzard’s Hearthstone. It’s free-to-play, and cross-platform across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android.
Players in SkyWeaver battle each other using the cards they’ve obtained through buying, earning or trading. There are currently around 500 different cards in all, and each card comes in two different flavors: silver and gold.
ANY card in the game can be purchased in its base “silver” form for $2 — a move the team tells me is meant to level the playing field by enabling anyone with a couple bucks to obtain the cards the playerbase deems most powerful. Meanwhile, a card’s “gold” variant — which changes the card only in appearance, not ability or usefulness — must be earned via competition or bought from other players on the open market. While silver cards can always be bought for $2, gold card values are meant to vary more wildly by rarity/demand.
Cards in SkyWeaver are stored in a player’s Arcadeum wallet on the blockchain — though, for the sake of simplicity, most of the complexities of the blockchain are hidden away behind the scenes. If a player wants to handle things themselves, cards can be transferred to any other Ethereum-based wallet.
SkyWeaver has been in private beta since around July of last year. Horizon’s Chief Architect Peter Kieltyka tells me the game currently has around 12,000 users, with another 92,000 on the wait list.
Horizon first raised $3.75 million in a seed round last year; they’re categorizing this round as an extension of that one. The round is led by returning investors Initialized Capital, and backed by Golden Ventures, DCG, Polychain, CMT Digital, Regah Ventures and ConsenSys.
The company says that SkyWeaver should roll into an open, public beta later this year.
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