Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
Thanks to aggressive government subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles, a Model 3 in South Korea is even more reasonably priced than it would be in the US.
Source: CNET
The $600 million supercomputer will be the world’s fastest.
Source: CNET
The best time of year to see shooting stars doesn’t disappoint, despite a bright moon.
Source: CNET
It’s starting with sports.
Source: CNET
You may soon be able to organize Twitter’s web of hashtags and handles in a smarter way — that is, if the company can pull off its ambitious new rethinking of the app’s timelines.
The company isn’t getting rid of the process of following users, but at a press event in SF, company execs announced they are planning to push users to start following “topics” that bring in well-engaged tweets from a variety of accounts that the user might not necessarily follow. Twitter is currently testing the feature on Android with topics focused around sports, “from MMA to Formula 1” to specific professional franchises.
The company plans to greatly expand the scope of these topics so that fans will be able to have timelines devoted to BTS and skincare routines. The feature is focused on helping users find new accounts and communities into which they can dive deeper.
The company is curating the overall topics manually, but Twitter will be relying on machine learning to intelligently populate the topics themselves so that the tweets can stay up to date. The company is also testing the ability to not only follow topics in your central timeline, but create your own secondary timelines into which you can bring multiple topics, accounts and hashtags.
A feature that Twitter says it is also starting to experiment with is the ability to temporarily unfollow a topic so you can keep certain tweets out of your timeline, like tweets chronicling an ongoing finale of a TV show or a football game. You can currently mute specific words and accounts indefinitely or for a finite amount of time.
Source: TechCrunch
En un sector dominado por empleos precarios, un pequeño grupo de compañÃas como CloudFactory, iMerit y Samasource promete que sus trabajadores están bien remunerados y atendidos. Pero, a falta de regulación, es imposible saber si realmente lo están haciendo
Source: MIT
Aunque está ubicado en la galaxia Holm 15A, a unos 700 millones de años luz de distancia, su enorme tamaño deberÃa poder ser captado por los radiotelescopios terrestres. Se estima es 40.000 millones de veces más grande que el Sol
Source: MIT
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was a bit special. Instead of meeting up at the TechCrunch HQ to record the episode, Kate and Alex met up in muggy Boston at Drift’s office, where we linked up with Axios’s Dan Primack. And because we were feeling chatty, we went a bit long.
After checking in with Primack (he has a newsletter and a podcast), we first dealt with the latest from Tumblr. In short, Verizon Media is selling Tumblr to Automattic for a few dollars. How did Verizon wind up owning Tumblr? Ah. Well, Yahoo bought it. Later, after Verizon bought AOL, it bought Yahoo. Then it smushed them together and called it Oath. Then Verizon decided that it didn’t like that much and renamed the group Verizon Media. But Verizon doesn’t want to own media (besides TechCrunch, of course), so it sold Tumblr to Automattic, a venture-backed company best known for operating WordPress.
That’s a lot, I know. What matters is that Yahoo bought Tumblr for more than $1 billion. Verizon sold it for around $3 million. Now, Automattic has a few hundred new employees and a shot at juicing its user base before it goes public.
After that, we lamented that the WeWork S-1 had yet to appear. This was a tragedy, frankly. We had expected to spend half the show riffing on WeWork’s financials, alas…
So we turned to some normal material, like Ramp’s recent $7 million raise to take on Brex, and, SmartNews’s recent round, which gave it an eye-popping $1.1 billion valuation.
We ran a bit long because we were having fun, fitting in some conversation surrounding the notes from the SEC regarding the now-dead and then-fraudulent Rothenberg Ventures. More on that here if you want to get angry.
And finally, Vision Fund 2. It’s been a big source of interest for everyone on the show, and we expect whatever the second-act Vision Fund winds up becoming to be a big damn deal. The fund will invest in more than just consumer marketplaces; in fact, it’s eyeing more AI businesses and even biotech. That should be interesting.
All that and we have a lot more good stuff coming. Thanks for listening to the show, and we’ll be right back.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
Source: TechCrunch
Recharge, a startup that tried convincing hotels to let its customers rent their rooms by the hour and even minute, has revamped and rebranded. Now Globe, the company is hoping to convince guests to sign up for short stays instead in people’s homes so that they can kick back between other commitments, and, if the host allows it, to shower and nap.
It’s at once crazy sounding and intriguing, which is perhaps why the popular accelerator program Y Combinator accepted the company into its most recent class of companies. (It shows off its newest batch of startups next week.) YC was famously early to spy the opportunity that Airbnb could chase, after all. The question is whether Globe, which likens itself to an Airbnb for day breaks, will have anywhere near the same appeal.
Its proposition is certainly similar. Home owner or renter wrings out some extra income by renting out all or part of their home, except that unlike with Airbnb, where the minimum stay is at least one night, with Globe, a host rents out his or her space for smaller increments of time.
In a world where the economic divide continues to grow between the haves and have-nots, it’s easy to see the logic in maximizing an underutilized asset — even one’s living room — in order to live more comfortably. It’s especially easy to see the logic in prohibitively expensive cities like San Francisco and New York.
At the same time, letting in a stranger — even a “businessperson” — for a shorter period of time is not going to be a no-brainer for many people who might otherwise rent their home while away for a weekend. And on the other side of the marketplace, getting enough hosts with nice enough places to become hosts is a high hurdle for Globe to surmount. After all, if someone is looking for an alternative to Starbucks for a few hours, and that individual has to take some form of transportation to get to a host’s couch that may or may not be as nice as pictured, that individual may well go the coffee shop route instead. (The company is also up against startups like Breather that offer hourly or daily “space as a service.”)
Founder Manny Bamfo appreciates the challenge, he says. In fact, after running Recharge for a couple of years, he’s gotten well-acquainted with adversity.
Though he says that Recharge wound up seeing $4 million in revenue from its hotel partners, renting rooms to Recharge customers “wasn’t their number one priority, and that made it hard to provide a consistent experience for our customers.” Bamfo suggests their “unionized cleaning labor” wasn’t excited at the prospect of cleaning rooms more frequently than once daily, either, which is partly why Recharge decided to relaunch as a home-sharing service instead.
It’s not just a branding exercise. Along with the new name, Globe is starting from scratch with a new cap table, though Bamfo says Globe opened up a small round for previous investors that was “oversubscribed instantly.” Recharge had raised $10 million from investors. One of these backers was Binary Capital, which has since evolved into little more than a tangle of lawsuits. Another backer was the real estate-focused firm Fifth Wall Ventures, which maintains a small stake in the new company, says Bamfo.
In the meantime, Globe is looking to “do a proper seed round at [YC’s] Demo Day.” It’s also busy spreading the word in an effort to build up its burgeoning new marketplace of homes and apartments for rent, and advertising a rate of $50 per hour to people who host their entire home by the hour and $25 per hour to those who share less room. (Globe keeps 20% of the fee.)
Last but not least, Globe is also promising $1 million in general liability insurance and, for now, guests who have been verified and vetted by Bamfo himself.
It’s not a scalable solution, he acknowledges, but at the moment, he says, it’s all about building the right community, and he sounds optimistic — of course — about its odds.
“People view it like selling a lamp on Craigslist. ‘If it’s not much work, and it’s another form of income, I’ll do it.’ ” There are a “lot of people with great jobs living in cities that are very expensive — people who are cops, who are teachers, who aren’t quite making six figures, and any extra income is a godsend.”
Asked then why Airbnb isn’t already chasing the same opportunity, Bamfo says it’s basic time management, and also a different market opportunity. “For any company to do this well, it has to be their number one priority.” Besides, he adds, Airbnb is “a travel company. We’re localized, with the ability to charge on a minute-by-minute basis. It’s a huge engineering undertaking and, for now, it’s part of our moat, too.”
Source: TechCrunch
The administration said it would delay planned 10 percent tariffs on a range of electronics until Dec. 15, meaning they should not affect holiday shopping.
Source: Wired