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EV fleet management gets another venture-backed contender as Electriphi raises $3.5 million

21 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Jonathan Shieber

Electriphi, a provider of charging management and fleet monitoring software for electric vehicles, has joined the scrum of startups looking to provide services to the growing number of electric vehicle fleets in the U.S.

The San Francisco-based company has just raised $3.5 million in seed funding from investors including Wireframe Ventures, the Urban Innovation Fund, and Blackhorn Ventures. Lemnos Labs and Acario Innovation also participated in the round.

Electriphi’s pitch has resonated with school districts. It counts the Twin Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento, Calif. as one of its benchmark customers.

“Twin Rivers Unified School District has the largest fleet of electric school buses in North America, and our ambition is to transition to a fully electric fleet in the coming years,” said Tim Shannon, transportation services director, Twin Rivers Unified School District, in a statement. “This is a significant undertaking, and we needed a trusted partner that could provide us state-of-the-art charging management and help us with data collection and monitoring.”

There are several companies pursuing this market — all with either a bit of a head start, significant corporate backers, or more capital. Existing offerings from EVConnect, GreenLots, GreenFlux, AmplyPower all compete with …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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The Org nabs $8.5M led by Founders Fund to build a global database of company org charts

20 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Ingrid Lunden

LinkedIn has cornered the market when it comes to putting your own professional profile online and using it to network for jobs, industry connections and professional development. But when it comes to looking at a chart of the people, and specifically the leadership teams, who make up organizations more holistically, the Microsoft-owned network comes up a little short: you can search by company names, but chances are that you get a list of people based on their connectivity to you, and otherwise in no particular order (including people who may no longer even be at the company). And pointedly, there is little in the way of verification to prove that someone who claims to be working for a company really is.

Now, a startup called The Org is hoping to take on LinkedIn and address that gap with an ambitious idea: to build a database (currently free to use) of organizational charts for every leading company, and potentially any company in the world, and then add on features after that, such as job advertising, for example organizations looking to hire people where there are obvious gaps in their org charts.

With 16,000 companies profiled so far …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Well, Bill Gates is never going to buy a Tesla now

19 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Connie Loizos

Elon Musk is not one to mince words, but he may have just lost a potential customer because of a cutting tweet.

That customer is renowned big deal Bill Gates, who sat down recently with YouTuber Marques Brownlee, who joined the platform in 2009 and has amassed more than 10 million viewers. Gates and Brownlee have met before, and the idea was to have Gates discuss some of what the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has planned for this year, which marks the 20th anniversary of the organization.

Unsurprisingly, the conversation touched on climate change and in pretty short order sustainable transportation, with Brownlee bringing up Tesla and asking if, when “premium” electric cars grow more affordable, they’ll also become more ubiquitous.

Gates didn’t exactly malign Tesla with his answer, telling Brownlee: “The premium today is there, but over the next decade — except that the [mileage] range will still be a little bit less — that premium will come to zero. [When we look at all the sectors addressing climate change] passenger cars is certainly one of the most hopeful, and Tesla, if you had to name one company that’s help drive …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Gojek reportedly buys 4.3% stake in Indonesian taxi company Blue Bird

18 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Catherine Shu

Gojek has paid $30 million to take a minority stake in Blue Bird, one of the largest taxi operators in Indonesia, according to Bloomberg, which first reported that the deal was in progress last month.

Gojek’s stake in Blue Bird is worth $30 million. The taxi operator’s holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing earlier this month that it had sold 108 million shares of Blue Bird at 3,800 rupiahs (about 28 cents) to an undisclosed buyer. The company already offered reservations for Blue Bird taxis on its super-app, and the investment brings the two closer.

Gojek’s “super-app,” called that because it offers a wide range of services, including on-demand rides and deliveries, a payment service, streaming entertainment and services like home cleaning, competes against Grab, which announced last July that it will use $2 billion of the funding it raised from SoftBank to invest in Indonesian transportation infrastructure and businesses.

While Gojek and Grab compete in several markets, Gojek is currently the biggest player in Indonesia.

TechCrunch has contacted Gojek for comment.

SoftBank pumps $2B into Indonesia through Grab investment, putting it head to head with Gojek

<iframe title="“SoftBank pumps $2B into Indonesia through …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Oyo’s revenue surged in FY19, but loss widened, too

17 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Manish Singh

Budget-lodging startup Oyo reported a loss of $335 million on $951 million revenue globally for the financial year ending March 31, 2019, and pledged to cut down on its spending as the India-headquartered firm grows cautious about its aggressive expansion.

The six-year-old startup’s growing revenue, up from $211 million in financial year ending March 31, 2018 (FY18), is in line with the company’s ambitions to be in a clear path to profitability this year, said Abhishek Gupta, Global CFO of OYO Hotels & Homes, in a statement.

But the startup’s loss has widened, too. Its consolidated loss at $335 million in FY19 rose over sixfold from $52 million in FY18. In India, where Oyo clocked $604 million in revenue in FY19 (up 2.9X since FY18), it was able to reduce its loss to 14% (from 24%) of revenue in FY19 to $83 million.

The startup, which today operates more than 43,000 hotels with over a million rooms in 800 cities in 80 nations, said its expansion to China and other international markets contributed to the loss. Oyo entered China in 2018, and it has already become its second largest market.

“These markets constituted 36.5% of the global revenues. While consistently improving operating economics …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Can we debate free will versus destiny in four pages?

15 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Danny Crichton

The informal TechCrunch book club (which is now a whole week off schedule thanks to the news cycle — let’s see if we can catch up here shortly!) is now venturing into the very, very short story What’s Expected of Us, the third piece in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation collection. If you’re one of those people that fall behind in book clubs, don’t fret: you’ve had two weeks to read four pages. You can probably read the short story before finishing this post.

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the previous editions of this book club which explores the first two (larger) short stories in the collection, The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, a beautiful story exploring predestination and fate, and Exhalation, a vital yet subtle story about climate change, the connections between people and society, and so, so much more.

Next, we will read the lengthier story The Lifecycle of Software Objects — some reading questions are posted at the bottom of this article.

Some further …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Living with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip

15 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Brian Heater

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip

The Galaxy Z Flip ships with the same “Care Instructions” as the Fold. It’s a five-item list with the following basic points:

  • Don’t scratch the screen with a pen or fingernail
  • Don’t stick stuff between the screens when folding
  • Don’t get it dusty, wet or feed it after midnight
  • Don’t stick stickers to the screen
  • Don’t get it near credit cards or your pacemaker

Unlike the last time around, however, these warnings seem to have been included out of an (understandable) abundance of caution. As stated in my hands-on the other day, the Flip feels more solid than the Fold in just about every way, from the folding mechanism to the display, which now sports foldable protective glass.

A couple of notes before we start here. First, and most importantly, this is a rare 24-hour device loan. Short loan times are not entirely uncommon with high-end products, but a single day is a bit extreme. I’m being upfront about this because:

  1. You can only go into so much depth with limited time.
  2. It’s worth …read more

    Source: Tech Crunch

        

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Instagram prototypes “Latest Posts” feature

14 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Josh Constine

Instagram users who miss the reverse chronological feed might get a new way to see the most recent pics and videos from who they follow. Instagram has been spotted internally prototyping a “Latest Posts” feature. It appears as a pop-up over the main feed and brings users to a special area showing the newest content from their network.

Instagram Latest Posts

For now, this doesn’t look like a full-fledged “Most Recent” reverse-chronological feed option like what Facebook has for the News Feed. But if launched, Latest Posts could help satisfy users who want to make sure they haven’t missed anything or want to know what’s going on right now.

The prototype was discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, the master of reverse engineering who’s provided tips to TechCrunch on scores of new features in development by tech giants. She generated the screenshots above from the code of Instagram’s Android app. “Welcome Back! Get caught up on the posts from [names of people you follow] and 9 more” reads the pop-up that appears over the home screen. If users tap “See Posts” instead of “Not Now”, they’re sent to a separate screen showing recent feed posts.

We’ve reached out to …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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Fiddler Labs, SRI and Berkeley experts open up the black box of machine learning at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI

13 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Devin Coldewey

As AI permeates the home, work, and public life, it’s increasingly important to be able to understand why and how it makes its decisions. Explainable AI isn’t just a matter of hitting a switch, though; Experts from UC Berkeley, SRI, and Fiddler Labs will discuss how we should go about it on stage at TC Sessions: Robotics+AI on March 3.

What does explainability really mean? Do we need to start from scratch? How do we avoid exposing proprietary data and methods? Will there be a performance hit? Whose responsibility will it be, and who will ensure it is done properly?

On our panel addressing these questions and more will be two experts, one each from academia and private industry.

Trevor Darrell is a professor at Berkeley’s Computer Science department who helps lead many of the university’s AI-related labs and projects, especially those concerned with the next generation of smart transportation. His research group focuses on perception and human-AI interaction, and he previously led a computer vision group at MIT.

Krishna Gade has passed in his time through Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Microsoft, and has seen firsthand how AI is developed …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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European founders look to new markets, aim for profitability

12 Feb 2020/0 Comments/in /by

By Mike Butcher

To get a better sense of what lies ahead for the European startup ecosystem, we spoke to several investors and entrepreneurs in the region about their impressions and lessons learned from 2019, along with their predictions for 2020.

We asked for blunt responses — and we weren’t disappointed.

These responses have been edited for clarity and length.

Kenny Ewan, founder/CEO, Wefarm (London)

I’ve often been faced with questions around how we can generate revenue in markets like Africa. There has historically been a view that you can do something good, or you can generate revenue — and companies that talk about developing markets usually get squarely lumped into the former. While mission-led companies achieving tremendous growth has been talked about for a while, 2019 has been a year I have felt conversations with investors and others really begin to shift to the reality of that and it’s thanks to more and more proof points being delivered by startups across the board.

As more and more businesses begin to realize they don’t need to wait for the internet to descend from the sky for these markets to become hubs of commerce and innovation — and see that it’s already happening — I believe 2020 will continue …read more

Source: Tech Crunch

    

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