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Technology
Elon Musk revealed Thursday evening the Tesla Cybertruck, a futuristic vehicle that seemed stripped straight out of a post-apocalyptic era movie.
The Tesla Cybertruck, which Musk unveiled in dramatic fashion and to the hoots and hollers of invited guests at the Tesla Design Center in Hawthorne, California, is made of cold-rolled steel, armored glass that did crack in one demonstration, and adaptive air suspension.
And yet despite its cubist look and performance specs, its price is rather modest.
Tesla will offer three variants of the cybertruck. The cheapest version, a single motor and rear wheel drive model, will cost $39,900, have a towing capacity of 7,500 pounds and more than 250 miles of range. The middle version will be a dual-motor all-wheel drive, have a towing capacity of more than 10,000 pounds and be able to travel more than 300 miles on a single charge. The dual motor AWD model is priced at $49,900.
The third version will have three electric motors and all-wheel, a towing capacity of 14,000 pounds and battery range of more than 500 miles. This version, known as &tri motor& is priced at $69,900.
Musk touted the acceleration of the Cybertruck as well, showing a video at one point of the truck beat a Porsche 911 off the line. Musk said the &tri motor& version can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under 2.9 seconds. The single motor rear wheel is the slowest off the line with a 0 to 60 mph acceleration of less than 6.5 seconds.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed Thursday, November 21, 2019, the Tesla Cybertruck.
Tesla said customers can put down a $100 deposit. They&ll be able to complete their configuration as production nears in late 2021. Tri Motor AWD production is expected to begin in late 2022.
Musk has talked about producing an all-electric pickup truckfor years now. In December, Musk resurrected the idea, saying thatTesla might have a prototypeto unveil in 2019.
Musk mentioned on Twitter the desire to produce a pickup truck in April 2017, before the first Model 3 sedans had been handed over to customers and the CEO had entered production hell. At the time, Musk tweeted that a pickup truck would be unveiled in 18 to 24 months.
If Tesla were to hit that mark it would be bringing its electric truck to market after GM and Rivian have started delivering their products.
Rivian is expected to begin vehicle production of its electric R1T pickup truck in the second half of 2020. GM CEO Mary Barra said Thursday during an investor conference that the automaker plans to bring an electric pickup truck to market in 2021. Ford also is planning an electric F-150 truck.
Itunclear how much demand there will be for electric pickup trucks. However, the demand for gas- and diesel-powered trucks is growing. Large trucks account for 14.4% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 12.6% in 2015, according to Edmunds.
Midsize trucks accounted for 3.7% of new vehicle sales through October, compared to 1.5% in 2014.
Automakers are keen to tap into that growth since trucks and SUVs, which tend to have higher profit margins than sedans. And those margins could continue to increase if automakers can keep costs down.
The average transaction price of a full-size truck (gas and diesel) crossed $50,000 for the first time in September, and continues to climb, according Jessica Caldwell, the executive director of insights at Edmunds. The average transaction price of a full-size truck was $50,496 in October, and a midsize truck was $36,251.
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Write comment (98 Comments)ItNovember. We&re eleven years into a bull run. And a protracted trade war with China — not to mention the impeachment proceedings — is causing some nervousness about what next year will hold.
Little wonder that venture firms, which have been writing checks faster than ever in recent years, are also stocking up on dry powder. In the last 10 days alone, some of the many firms to announce new funds include Boldstart Ventures, Drive Capital, .406 Ventures, CAVU Venture Partners, Unusual Ventures, Northzone, Kindred Ventures, EQT Ventures, Inspired Capital and Norwest Venture Partners.
Newly in the same company is Next Coast Ventures, a firm that just closed on $130 million in fresh capital commitments to pursue a thematic approach and that is focused for right now on the future of work, the rise of digital natives, the death of traditional retail and the ways that ubiquitous connectivity is changing marketplaces.
Itthe second fund for the firm, which closed its debut fund with a very respectable $85 million, thanks in large part to the backgrounds of its two managing directors. Michael Smerklo previously bought a technology services company called ServiceSource that he ran for 12 years and eventually took public. His co-founder, Thomas Ball, previously spent more than a decade with Austin Ventures.
Interestingly, for many years, Austin Ventures was the only game in town in Austin, but that has changed meaningfully since it announced in 2015 that it wouldn&t be raising more capital. Not only has Next Coast just gathered up more capital, but so have numerous other regional firms this year. In April, for example, we reported on the newest, $105 million, fund raised by LiveOak Ventures. Meanwhile, Silverton Partners, one of the citymost active investors, is zeroing in on a new $120 million fund just one year after closing a $108 million fund, and several other firms — including ATX Ventures and Quake Capital — are trying to raise sizable new funds.
As for Next Coast, some of its many current bets include Everlywell, a company that sells tens of in-home diagnostic tests and that closed on $50 million in funding earlier this year, and AlertMedia, a cloud-based mass notification system that aims to streamline notifications across devices and platforms and which raised $25 million in Series C funding back in January. (You can check out a longer list of its investments here.)
The firm has also seen five companies in its portfolio sell to acquirers (all for undisclosed terms). While one has yet to be announced, the other four are OnRamp, a cloud hosting company that sold last year to a data and IT company called LightEdge; the personal finance startup Clarity Money, which sold to Goldman Sachs last year; the wardrobe tech company Finery, which sold to Stitch Fix in September; and the smart oven maker Brava, which just yesterday disclosed that itbeing acquired by Middleby, an industrial equipment company.
We were in touch yesterday with Smerklo to learn how Next Coastnew and bigger fund might differ from its predecessor, and the answer seems to be: not much. He said check sizes will increase, from a range of $3 million to $7 million into Series A-stage companies to more like $5 million to $10 million at the upper end.
He also suggested that Next Coast remains as committed as ever to uncovering and funding talent regionally, something thatgetting easier all the time, evidently. &Austinentrepreneurial and startup ecosystem is absolutely booming,& Smerklo wrote us via email. &Itnever been cheaper to start a company, and places like Austin with a high quality of life, growing available capital and a strong entrepreneurial spirit will continue to be a hotbed for founders and tech talent.&
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The highest court in Pennsylvania has ruled that the statelaw enforcement cannot force suspects to turn over their passwords that would unlock their devices.
The stateSupreme Court said compelling a password from a suspect is a violation of the Fifth Amendment, a constitutional protection that protects suspects from self-incrimination.
Itnot an surprising ruling, given other state and federal courts have almost always come to the same conclusion. The Fifth Amendment grants anyone in the U.S. the right to remain silent, which includes the right to not turn over information that could incriminate them in a crime. These days, those protections extend to the passcodes that only a device owner knows.
But the ruling is not expected to affect the ability by police to force suspects to use their biometrics — like their face or fingerprints — to unlock their phone or computer.
Because your passcode is stored in your head and your biometrics are not, prosecutors have long argued that police can compel a suspect into unlocking a device with their biometrics, which they say are not constitutionally protected. The court also did not address biometrics. In a footnote of the ruling, the court said it &need not address& the issue, blaming the U.S. Supreme Court for creating &the dichotomy between physical and mental communication.&
Peter Goldberger, president of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, who presented the arguments before the court, said it was &fundamental& that suspects have the right to &to avoid self-incrimination.&
Despite the spate of rulings in recent years, law enforcement have still tried to find their way around compelling passwords from suspects. The now-infamous Apple-FBI case saw the federal agency try to force the tech giant to rewrite its iPhone software in an effort to beat the password on the handset of the terrorist Syed Rizwan Farook, who with his wife killed 14 people in his San Bernardino workplace in 2015. Apple said the FBIuse of the 200-year-old All Writs Act would be &unduly burdensome& by putting potentially every other iPhone at risk if the rewritten software leaked or was stolen.
The FBI eventually dropped the case without Applehelp after the agency paid hackers to break into the phone.
Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney at the ACLUCenter for Democracy, said the Pennsylvania case ruling sends a message to other courts to follow in its footsteps.
&The court rightly rejects the governmenteffort to create a giant, digital-age loophole undermining our time-tested Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination,& he said. &The government has never been permitted to force a person to assist in their own prosecution, and the courts should not start permitting it to do so now simply because encrypted passwords have replaced the combination lock.&
&We applaud the courtdecision and look forward to more courts to follow in the many pending cases to be decided next,& he added.
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Two-factor authentication is good! SMS-based two-factor authentication? Not the best option. After countless tales of people having their phone numbers and inbound SMS hijacked by way of SIM swapping, itclear that SMS just isn&t the right solution for sending people secondary login codes.
And yet, for many years, itbeen the mandatory go-to on Twitter . You could switch to another option later (like Google Authenticator, or a physical Yubikey) — but to turn it on in the first place, you were locked into giving Twitter a phone number and using SMS.
Twitter is getting around to fixing this, at long last. The Twitter Safety team announced that you&ll be able to enable two-factor authentication without the need for a phone number, starting sometime today.
This news comes just a few months after Jack Dorseyown Twitter account was hacked (seemingly by way of a SIM swap) and a few weeks after Twitter had to admit it was using phone numbers provided during the two-factor setup process for serving targeted ads.
Some users are reporting that the setup process still requests a phone number, so it seems like this change is being rolled out rather than launching for everyone immediately.
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Prolific startup accelerator Y Combinator has abandoned plans to establish a branch of the program in China. The company cites a general change in strategy, but a deafening silence on the complexity and controversy of working with China right now suggests theremore at play.
In a short blog post, YC leadership explained that &as we worked to establish YC China, we had a change in leadership,& viz. the replacement of CEO Sam Altman with Geoff Ralston in May. This apparently led to a complete about-face on YCChina strategy.
Qi Lu, hired a little more than a year ago to lead the YC China effort, is departing to run his own program, MiraclePlus. And Chinese companies will still be welcome at Y Combinator &— but as part of our U.S. program.&
A Y Combinator representative confirmed that it has no involvement with MiraclePlus or Qi Lu whatsoever, and that the company will no longer have any local presence in China at all.
Ithard to accept at face value this vague explanation for such a costly, high-profile retreat.
Altman said when announcing Qihiring that he had been trying to recruit him &for years.& As for the program itself, Altman said that &China has been an important missing piece of our puzzle& and that they would be building &a long-term local organization that will combine the best of Silicon Valley and China.&
That there is no mention of the uncertain international politics and U.S.-China relations right now, nor the explosive situation in Hong Kong, or ongoing human rights issues elsewhere in the country, seems a deliberate choice to make this move seem as ordinary as possible. But those things are major questions for anyone looking to do business in China, and ithard to believe none had any bearing on the decision to abruptly pack up and leave a major enterprise behind.
It seems like with a company like Y Combinator, it would be easy enough to provide a modicum of transparency and say that there was a mismatch in culture, or the logistics weren&t working out, or they ended up forwarding too many of the companies to the YC prime location anyway.
Perhaps that information was not deemed material for a public statement, but it only leaves inquiring minds to speculate. Was there pressure from this or that quarter? Is the culture at YC changing? Are other Altman-era projects being abandoned? Did the company gain anything at all by this boondoggle?
For such a major endeavor by one of the most prominent tech communities in Silicon Valley, this highly guarded and obviously incomplete account of its total abandonment seems strange and inadequate. We&ll be looking into it further.
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OutVoice, a startup that allows editors to pay freelancers with the click of a button, has officially left beta testing and is open to any publication.
The company is also announcing that it has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from content monetization startup Coil.
OutVoice was founded by Matt Saincome and Issa Diao (pictured above). When the product was still in beta last year, Saincome told me it was created to solve &a horrible problem for everyone& involved in publishing freelance work: When he was a freelance writer, he&d have to constantly bug editors so that he could get paid, but then as the founder of the satirical sites The Hard Times and Hard Drive, he realized that managing payments was a huge headache.
OutVoice simplifies the whole process by integrating directly into WordPress and other content management systems. When editors load a story into the CMS, they can also identify the contributor and the payment amount. Then once they hit publish, the payment is sent and should arrive in the freelancerback account within a few days.
This means freelancers don&t have to worry about payment delays, while publications don&t have to worry about tracking invoices and writing checks (or losing their best writers and photographers if they don&t stay on top of this).
OutVoice also handles the initial on-boarding paperwork that the freelancers need to fill out, and it creates monthly reports for accounting and taxes.Publications can pay for the service on either a per-transaction basis (5% of payments plus $1 per transaction) or through a monthly subscription, which starts at $29 per month.
And by working with Coil, OutVoice says it can take advantage of new payment technologies like Interledger.
&Our goal at Coil is to make it easy and effortless for content creators to get paid,& said Coil CEO Stefan Thomas in a statement. &During their beta, OutVoice has already erased hundreds of years of lag time between freelance content creators and their paycheck. We&re excited to partner with OutVoice to promote more efficient payment solutions and processes, giving creators more time and money to create.&
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