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AWS today announced a number of IoT-related updates that, for the most part, aim to make getting started with its IoT services easier, especially for companies that are trying to deploy a large fleet of devices. The marquee announcement, however, is about the Alexa Voice Service, which makes AmazonAlex voice assistant available to hardware manufacturers who want to build it into their devices. These manufacturers can now create &Alexa built-in& devices with very low-powered chips and 1MB of RAM.

Until now, you needed at least 100MB of RAM and an ARM Cortex A-class processor. Now, the requirement for Alexa Voice Service integration for AWS IoT Core has come down 1MB and a cheaper Cortex-M processor. With that, chances are you&ll see even more lightbulbs, light switches and other simple, single-purpose devices with Alexa functionality. You obviously can&t run a complex voice-recognition model and decision engine on a device like this, so all of the media retrieval, audio decoding, etc. is done in the cloud. All it needs to be able to do is detect the wake word to start the Alexa functionality, which is a comparably simple model.

&We now offload the vast majority of all of this to the cloud,& AWS IoT VP Dirk Didascalou told me. &So the device can be ultra dumb. The only thing that the device still needs to do is wake word detection. That still needs to be covered on the device.& Didascalou noted that with new, lower-powered processors from NXP and Qualcomm, OEMs can reduce their engineering bill of materials by up to 50 percent, which will only make this capability more attractive to many companies.

Didascalou believes we&ll see manufacturers in all kinds of areas use this new functionality, but most of it will likely be in the consumer space. &It just opens up the what we call the real ambient intelligence and ambient computing space,& he said. &Because now you don&t need to identify wheremy hub — you just speak to your environment and your environment can interact with you. I think thata massive step towards this ambient intelligence via Alexa.&

No cloud computing announcement these days would be complete without talking about containers. Todaycontainer announcement for AWS& IoT services is that IoT Greengrass, the companymain platform for extending AWS to edge devices, now offers support for Docker containers. The reason for this is pretty straightforward. The early idea of Greengrass was to have developers write Lambda functions for it. But as Didascalou told me, a lot of companies also wanted to bring legacy and third-party applications to Greengrass devices, as well as those written in languages that are not currently supported by Greengrass. Didascalou noted that this also means you can bring any container from the Docker Hub or any other Docker container registry to Greengrass now, too.

&The idea of Greengrass was, you build an application once. And whether you deploy it to the cloud or at the edge or hybrid, it doesn&t matter, because itthe same programming model,& he explained. &But very many older applications use containers. And then, of course, you saying, okay, as a company, I don&t necessarily want to rewrite something that works.&

Another notable new feature is Stream Manager for Greengrass. Until now, developers had to cobble together their own solutions for managing data streams from edge devices, using Lambda functions. Now, with this new feature, they don&t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to build a new solution for connection management and data retention policies, etc., but can instead rely on this new functionality to do that for them. Itpre-integrated with AWS Kinesis and IoT Analytics, too.

Also new for AWS IoT Greengrass are fleet provisioning, which makes it easier for businesses to quickly set up lots of new devices automatically, as well as secure tunneling for AWS IoT Device Management, which makes it easier for developers to remote access into a device and troubleshoot them. In addition, AWS IoT Core now features configurable endpoints.

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The Daily Crunch is TechCrunchroundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you&d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Uber has again been denied licence renewal in London over safety risks

With Uber two-month license extension in London coming to an end, the company has once again been denied a full renewal by the citytransport regulator — which said that it had found a &pattern of failures& that put &passenger safety and security at risk.&

This doesn&t mean the company has to halt London operations immediately. Instead, Uber says it will appeal the decision, and it will be able to continue operating in the city during the appeals process.

2. eBay to sell ticket marketplace StubHub to viagogo for $4.05 billion

The deal will merge StubHubU.S.-based marketplace with viagogo, which serves a worldwide audience as a ticket marketplace in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latin America.

3. More than 1 million T-Mobile customers exposed by breach

A T-Mobile representative told us that the attack was discovered in early November and shut down &immediately.& But if you&re a T-Mobile customer, it may be a good idea to change your password and check up on your account details.

4. Scribd raises $58M for subscription e-books and audiobooks

At the beginning of this year, the company — known for a Netflix-style, e-book and audiobook subscription — announced that it had more than 1 million paying subscribers. It also said itbeen profitable since 2017.

5. HP rejects Xerox again, but leaves door open for negotiation

In a letter released this morning, the HP board of directors summarily rejected Xeroxlatest takeover offer, saying it significantly undervalues the company. At the same time, it left the door open for further negotiation.

6. Inside Prosus Ventures& $4.5 billion bet on India

TechCrunch spoke with Larry Illg and Ashutosh Sharma of Prosus Ventures (currently in the midst of a takeover attempt of British food delivery startup Just Eat) to understand how significant food tech is for the investment firm and the bets it is making in India. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. This weekTechCrunch podcasts

This weekEquity skips the normal news roundup for an interview Poshmark CEO Manish Chandra and investor James Currier. And over at Original Content, we review Netflixfirst music competition show &Rhythm + Flow.&

Daily Crunch: Uber faces legal battle in London

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$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand storage work out. Itanother victim of a venture capital-subsidized business offering a convenient service at an unsustainable price.

The startup fought for a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to competitor Clutter in May. Then sources tell me it tried to build a whitelabel software platform for letting brick-and-mortar merchants rent stuff like drills or tents as well as sell them so Omni could get out of hands-on logistics. But now the whole company is folding, with Coinbase hiring roughly 10 of Omniengineers.

&They realized that the core business was just challenging as architected& a source close to Omni tells TechCrunch. &The service was really great for the consumer but when they looked at what it would take to scale, that would be difficult and expensive.& Another source says Omnipeak headcount was around 70.

The news follows TechCrunchreport in October that Omni had laid off operations teams members and was in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase. Omni had internally discussed informing its retail rental partners ahead of time that it would be shutting down. Meanwhile, it frantically worked to stop team members from contacting the press about the startupinternal troubles.

$35M-funded Omni rentals in acqui-hire talks with Coinbase

&We&ll be winding down operations at Omni and closing the platform by the end of this year. We are proud of what we built and incredibl y thankful for everyone who supported our vision over the past five and a half years& an Omni spokesperson says. Omni CEO Tom McLeod did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Oddly, Omni was still allowing renters to pay for items as of this morning, though italready shut down its blog and hasn&t made a public announcement about its shut down.

&Coinbase has reached an agreement with Omni to hire members of its engineering team. We&re always looking for top-tier engineering talent and look forward to welcoming these new team members to Coinbase& a Coinbase spokesperson tells us. The team was looking for more highly skilled engineers they could efficiently hire as a group, though ittoo early to say what they&ll be working on.

Omni storage rentals fails, shutters, sells engineers to Coinbase

Omni originaly launched in 2015, offering to send a van to your house to pick up and index any of your possession, drive them to a nearby warehouse, store them, and bring them back to you whenever you needed for just a few dollars per month. It seemed too good to be true and ended up being just that.

Eventually Omni pivoted towards letting you rent out what you were storing so you and it could earn some extra cash in 2017. Sensing a better business model there, it sold its storage business to Softbank-funded Clutter and moved to helping retail stores run rental programs. But that simply required too big of a shift in behavior for merchants and users, while also relying on slim margins.

Omni Rentals

One major question is whether investors will get any cash back. Omni raised $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple in early 2018. Major investors include Flybridge, Highland, Allen - Company, and Founders Fund, plus a slew of angels.

The implosion of Omni comes as investors are re-examining business fundamentals of startups in the wake of Ubervaluation getting cut in half in the public markets and the chaos at WeWork ahead of its planned IPO. VCs and their LPs want growth, but not at the cost of burning endless sums of money to subsidize prices just to lure customers to a platform.

Itone thing if the value of the service is so high that people will stick with a startup as prices rise to sustainable levels, as many have with ride hailing. But for Omni, ballooning storage prices pissed off users as on-demand became less afforable than a traditional storage unit. Rentals were a hassle, especially considering users had to pick-up and return items themselves when they could just buy the items and get instant delivery from Amazon.

Startups that need a ton of cash for operations and marketing but don&t have a clear path to ultra-high lifetime value they can earn from customers may find their streams of capital running dry.

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Samsung5G-equipped Galaxy A90 has landed Down UnderSamsung’s 5G-equipped Galaxy A90 has landed Down Under

Available in Australia starting today, Samsung's Galaxy A90 5G joins the South Korean electronics giant's premium Galaxy S10 5G and Note 10 Plus 5G handsets in bringing next-generation download speeds to Aussie users – and at a far more affordable price point, at that.

Part of Samsung's mid-range A-series of smartphones, the Galaxy A90 5G

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Europe has run-out of IPv4 addressesEurope has run-out of IPv4 addresses

The not-for-profit organization responsible for allocating and registering IP addresses across 76 countries in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia, the RIPE Network Coordination Centre has announced that is has allocated the last remaining block of its IPv4 addresses.

IPv4 addresses are 32-bit numbers used to uniquely identify devices

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Over a million T-Mobile customers hit in data breachOver a million T-Mobile customers hit in data breach

The US telecom T-Mobile has confirmed that it suffered a data breach in which a malicious actor was able to obtain the personal data of over a million of its customers.

Thankfully though, no financial or password data was exposed and the company has alerted affected customers regarding the breach.

The malicious actor was able to obtain the names,

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