Only Products and Other Stuff

Tesla CEO Elon Musk kicked off its Tesla AI Day 2022 with a quick level set on expectations — “we’ve come a long way” — and then stepped aside to allow the first iteration of its robot walk out onto the stage. The robot wasn’t a human dressed in a robot costume like last year.  Instead, Tesla introduced a functioning robot, albeit with exposed cables and a bit wobbly, at its second annual event. According to Musk, it was the first time it was working without “any support, cranes, mechanical mechanisms or cables.” Tesla Robot moving and waving After a brief turn about the stage, the robot left the stage before the rest of the presentation continued, which included several short videos of the robot (now tethered for stability) carrying a box in an office, watering a plant and lifting a small piece of metal in the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. The aim of the demo and ensuing presentation, in which a number of Tesla employees gave what can only be described as a bipedal r...

When ByteDance bought the Chinese VR headset maker Pico a year ago, the message it sent was clear: it was betting that the immersive device would be where future generations spend most of their time consuming digital content. It’s a marriage reminiscent of Meta’s acquisition of Oculus back in 2014, except the world is now in a different place with technological advances that make VR headsets cheaper, less laggy, and more comfortable to wear. The TikTok parent has long aimed to compete in a market dominated by Oculus’s VR devices for consumers. When Meta launched Quest 2 in 2020, ByteDance worked on a confidential internal project to develop AR glasses, The Information reported . Pico’s product launch this week is a further indication of its ambition to challenge Quest, which has enjoyed roughly two-thirds of the global AR and VR market for the past two years. The Pico 4, which starts at €429 (around $420 thanks to a strong dollar) for 128GB and ships to Europe, Japan, and Sout...

Google appears to have disabled access to Google Translate in parts of China , redirecting visitors to the Hong Kong domain — which isn’t accessible from the mainland. According to users on Reddit and site archives viewed by TechCrunch, Google swapped the Google Translate interface at translate.google.cn with a generic Google Search page at some point within the last 24 hours. The change is reportedly impacting the translation features of apps like KOReader, a document viewer, for China-based users, as well as Chrome’s built-in translation functionality. Google hasn’t responded to a request for comment; we’ll update this piece if we hear back. Google has a long and complicated relationship with the Chinese government. In 2006, the company entered the Chinese market with a version of its search engine that was subject to government censorship rules. But after state-sponsored hacks and government-ordered blocks on Google services in response to YouTube footage showing Chinese secur...

Embedded insurance — selling coverage at the same time as another product or service — is on the rise. According to data platform Dealroom , it accounts for a growing share of all policies sold, and startups in this space raised nearly $800 million in 2021 alone. Having recently polled investors on all things insurtech, we were curious to know if the market remained as bullish on embedded insurance as last year — and whether it was warranted. “Personally, I remain bullish on embedded insurance,” Brewer Lane Ventures general partner Martha Notaras told TechCrunch. “Many insurance purchases are difficult, so rolling insurance into another transaction makes a lot of sense.” While seeing clear value in the ability to bundle insurance with another purchase, Notaras and other investors we talked to also had reservations. “We believe in the concept of embedded insurance, but a more measured approach would suit investors well when analyzing these businesses,” Distributed Ventures partner...

Twitter is launching a redesigned user interface for DMs on Android, the company announced on Friday. Starting today, Twitter users on Android will see a more modern interface for direct messages that is consistent with the rest of the app. With this rollout, Twitter is bringing the Android experience on par with its iOS interface. The refresh also brings an improved composer, as well as better tweet forwarding, context for message requests and clearer read receipts. The social network is also introducing improvements to the interface’s scrolling performance and responsiveness. Image Credits: Twitter Now, when Android users open their DMs, they will no longer see the boxy design they’re used to. They will now also see if they have received message requests from people they may know. The three-dot menu in the top right corner of the UI has also been replaced with a Settings symbol. Twitter says it saw a need to improve how people use DMs on Twitter on Android devices, which is wh...

Between recent drama around gambling and its controversial decision to take a bigger slice of the subscription revenue pie , it’s been a dramatic couple of weeks for Twitch. Now, the company says it’s testing one new way for streamers to bring in cash from their most committed followers in the form of “elevated chats,” which let viewers pay to highlight a chat message and keep it visible for a set amount of time. Twitch’s elevated chats look a lot like YouTube’s “super chats.” Like that feature, paying more will get your message featured for a longer interval, starting at $5 for 30 seconds and going up to $100 for 2.5 minutes in the spotlight. Those time intervals aren’t customizable for the time being. We're experimenting with a new way for viewers to pay to support their favorite streamers! Elevated Chat will be available on select channels today. Keep your messages visible in chat a for a longer period of time! Learn more https://t.co/t54NIG5uay — Twitch Support (...

Truepill , a platform that helps other companies offer diagnostics, telehealth services and prescriptions, has conducted its fourth layoff of the year. Sources say the layoff impacted around 65% of the existing staff across the engineering, human resources, design, IT and finance teams. The layoff comes around two months after its last round, which impacted about a third of the company, or 175 people. One employee, who spoke to TechCrunch on the condition of anonymity, said that they were told that their position was “no longer sustainable due to economic factors” on a 1:1 call with leadership. Severance was mentioned but HR has not yet reached out to the employee with further details. “[The company said] it hoped there wasn’t going to be any layoffs after the August round,” the source said. “[Leadership said that] investors made some requests in order for the company to extend the financial runway so they made tough choices, but that we were now on good footing.” A company-wide al...

SpaceX and NASA have signed a new agreement to study the feasibility of sending a commercial crew in a SpaceX Dragon to boost the orbit of the Hubble Space Telescope. If completed, the mission could extend the operational lifespan of the telescope by as much as 20 years. NASA officials cautioned that today’s news is not a mission announcement. For now, it’s just a feasibility study to consider whether such a mission is sensible, given technical and other constraints. Indeed, one might assume that an uncrewed space tug might be best suited for an orbital boosting mission, and there are plenty of space startups working on that kind of technology. But apparently the mission was SpaceX’s idea, and for some reason, they (and their partner, Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Program) want humans involved. The agreement starts to make more sense with NASA’s acknowledgement that the mission, should it go forward, would come at no cost to the government. NASA and SpaceX are also each funding their part...

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here . Today we are mostly listening to acoustic covers of songs we love (a surprise Iron and Wine cover , perhaps?), and mentally preparing ourselves for TechCrunch Disrupt. Which reminds us — did you know you can get 15% off passes with the DC discount code for being a Daily Crunch reader ? Don’t say we never did anything for you, dear reader!  — Christine and Haje The TechCrunch Top 3 Simple crypto : Cryptocurrencies are still complex, or that’s the viewpoint of Solvo, a new app that is making crypto investment simpler, Romain reports. What’s different is that instead of being offered dozens of currencies to choose from, Solvo has curated a list of 10 so you don’t get lost in all the names. Well that didn’t last long : On Monday we brought you news that “the OG app is out to bring Instagram back to its glory days .” Today, Ivan has an update tha...

It’s demo day season. This morning marked the kickoff of VC firm 500 Global’s Fall 2022 Demo Day, which saw over a dozen startups give their best pitches to prospective investors — and customers. Participants ran the gamut from fintech and sustainability to edtech and developer tools, and several stood out from the rest of the pack. The event comes just weeks after Y Combinator had its bi-annual Demo Day , its first since moving operations back to in-person. 500 Global, formerly branded under 500 Startups , has an accelerator that competes with YC. Both outfits look to back early-stage founders with money and advice in exchange for equity. YC has backed over 3,500 founders, while 500 Global has backed more than 2,800 founders, according to each institution’s websites. Unlike YC, 500 Global has geographic-specific accelerator programs, similar to Techstars, with focus on areas like Aichi, Japan, Cambodia, and Alberta, Canada. That said, today’s debut from 500 Global is from its first ...

Consumers reduced their mobile app spending in the third quarter of 2022 by roughly 5%, but the social video app TikTok just delivered another record-breaking quarter on this front. For the fourth straight quarter in a row, TikTok continued its streak as the app that has ever generated the most revenue in a quarter. These new findings, in a report published today by Sensor Tower, see TikTok again becoming the highest-grossing app in the world even as the overall market is seeing a slight decline. However, the report does combine TikTok revenue with its Chinese version, known as Douyin — so it’s technically the revenue generated by the two apps offering the same feature set of short-form, vertical videos — not one. TikTok’s global app along with Douyin on iOS together retained the position as the top-grossing non-game app across the App Store and Google Play combined, with approximately $914.4 million in consumer spending in the quarter. Reached for comment, Sensor Tower explained t...

Doccla , a Sweden founded but London-headquartered health tech startup that sells a remote patient monitoring platform to hospitals to run so-called ‘virtual wards’, has closed a £15 million (~$17M) Series A funding round a year after raising a $3.3M seed . The Series A is led by US VC General Catalyst, with participation from funds managed by healthcare investors KHP Ventures (a collaboration between King’s College London, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust). Existing investors Giant Ventures, who led the seed round, and Speedinvest also backed the Series A — which sees Chris Bischoff, MD at General Catalyst, joining the board. General Catalyst is an investor in US remote care health tech unicorn Cadence which also sells a remote monitoring service, so could be seen as a potential competitor to Doccla. Although the (currently) different target markets (US vs Europe) and specific product presentation — we understand Cadenc...

French startup Pigment has raised a new round of funding less than a year after raising a $73 million Series B round . If you’re not familiar with Pigment, the company develops a business planning and forecasting platform. For small companies that are growing up, it can replace Microsoft Excel as it’s more secure and more solid in general. For bigger companies that already use a business planning product from Oracle or SAP, Pigment can replace these legacy platforms with something a bit more modern. The company calls this new $65 million round a Series B+ because it’s more or less in the same ballpark as its Series B. While Pigment isn’t disclosing the valuation of the startup, it is going up following today’s deal. So why did Pigment raise again so quickly? Because there was an opportunity and because the current economic environment doesn’t look great. IVP and Meritech Capital are leading the round. Pigment’s co-founder and CEO Eléonore Crespo told me that she doesn’t need to ra...

Tesla has appointed Airbnb co-founder and billionaire Joe Gebbia to its board of directors, according to a securities filing. Gebbia, a designer who co-founded Airbnb, officially joined the board September 25 as an independent director. His appointment comes a few months after leaving day-to-day operations at Airbnb. He is now an advisor to the short-term rental company and also serves on its board. Gebbia also is on the board of Airbnb.org, an organization that encourages its hosts to open homes in times of crisis. Gebbia has waived  any entitlement to cash compensation, according to the filing posted Wednesday. He has also waived equity compensation until July 2023. Gebbia replaces Oracle founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison who left the board earlier this year. Ellison joined the board in 2018, along with former Walgreens exec Kathleen Wilson-Thompson as part of Tesla’s settlement with U.S. securities regulators over CEO Elon Musk’s infamous tweets about taki...

Rocket launch company Astra will no longer send the remaining NASA TROPICS payloads to space, but instead will launch other “comparable” scientific missions for the agency, the company announced Wednesday. The change to the launch agreement comes a little over three months after Astra’s first TROPICS launch ended in failure after the upper stage shut down prior to delivering the payload to orbit. NASA’s TROPICS (Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of SmallSats) program includes a trio of launches aimed at sending a total of six earth science CubeSats to space. The TROPICS satellites will be used to measure variables like humidity and pressure inside storm systems — a need that’s especially prescient today, when Hurricane Ian made landfall on the west coast of Florida. Astra was awarded the launch contract for TROPICS in February 2021 at a total value of $7.95 million. It is unclear whether the modification to this existing l...

On the same day that Lionsgate renamed Starzplay to Lionsgate+, MGM’s Epix announced it would also get a “+” in its brand title. Epix, the ad-free streaming service, announced today that it will relaunch as MGM+ in early 2023. While the new name is hardly original, mainly the plus sign, the rebranding comes as streaming services continue to take on the name of their larger brands. This, of course, includes Lionsgate’s new Lionsgate+ . Can we stop with the plus signs now? Also, it’s doubtful that the timing of MGM’s news and Lionsgate’s announcement is just a coincidence. Epix was previously owned by Lionsgate and Viacom. In 2017, MGM acquired full ownership of Epix in a $1 billion deal . Amazon completed its  acquisition of MGM this past March. Amazon completes $8.5 billion acquisition of MGM “This rebrand is a promise to existing and new viewers that MGM+ is the place to find television that reflects and celebrates the legacy of the iconic MGM brand — cinematic progra...

When UiPath announced in April that it was bringing on veteran enterprise executive Rob Enslin as co-CEO, it was a big surprise. UiPath had gone public the prior year , while Enslin was leaving Google Cloud after only two years, just as it was beginning to find its footing . But at the time, UiPath faced some harsh realities in the public markets. Perhaps that’s why co-founder and CEO Daniel Dines was ready to bring in an industry leader who understood the enterprise market. Dines led UiPath through some heady times, topping out with a private valuation of $35 billion in early 2021. At that point, the markets were strong, an IPO was in sight, and the future looked bright. But since then, the company has had to deal with a market that’s been particularly unforgiving to SaaS companies . Today, UiPath’s stock price sits around $12.60 per share, down from a 52-week high of almost $60. Its market cap has plunged to less than $7 billion, a fifth of its final private valuation. Ensli...