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Technology
Sameer Qureshi has left his role as a senior manager of Tesla Autopilot Programs and has joined Lyft, according to his LinkedIn. We first saw the news over on Electrek.Tesla declined to comment, but Lyft confirmed Qureshi joined the team this week.
At Lyft, Qureshi is now director of product for autonomous driving, specifically focused on LyftLevel 5 self-driving car efforts. To be clear, Level 5 is when a car requires no human to be at the wheel. In fact, Level 5 prohibits humans from intervening, even if they want to.
At Tesla, Qureshi was &responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Teslacars and platforms& for more than one year, he wrote on his LinkedIn. To be clear, Qureshi was not an executive, VP or director, but one of 4,000 managers at Tesla. Prior to his most recent role at Tesla, Qureshi served as senior manager for software and firmware programs at Tesla for more than two years.
Lyft first launched its self-driving car division in July 2017. Since then, Lyft has partnered with tier-one automotive industry supplier Magna on autonomous vehicle technology. Magna also invested $200 million in Lyft in exchange for an equity stake.
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Write comment (100 Comments)Oh my god, someonedoing Blippy again. If you&ve been around the internet as long as I have (too long), you&ll probably remember the meteoric rise of the social network for sharing your purchases, Blippy, which was hyped up to a $46.2 million valuation back in 2010 before the world realized that almost nobody wanted a dedicated network for sharing and viewing each others& purchases. Well, guess what Someonetrying a Blippy-like thing again — this time, in the form of a new app called Vota, which automatically records your credit card purchases and the places you visit so you can share them with friends or family, or view them privately for your own reference.
As a byproduct of this data collection, you may spot credit card fraud or other errant charges, too, or just get a handle on your spending.
But why revisit this concept now, when it failed before
Well, therethe argument that some startups are just &too early,& or that they could have succeeded if they had done X instead of Y. Thatcoming into play here, a bit.
Plus, the younger generation is alittlemore comfortable with sharing financial data, as evidenced by the popularity of Venmo, where a feed shows your friends& payments for seemingly no other reason beyond the fact that someone had to the idea to&make payments social.&(I mean, really — does anyone actually browse their Venmo feed for recommendations)
Venmo, however, is largely a utility, and a useful one at that. It lets you pay back a friend when you&re splitting the check, the cab fare or anything else, as well as quickly move money back to and from bank accounts.
Vota, on the other hand, is like turning your credit card transactions into check-ins.
Thankfully, itnot publicizing them for the world to see, nor is it sharing dollar amounts, as Blippy had done.
The concept for Vota comes from Kiyo Kubo and Nick Farina, the founders of Meridian — a location-based technology company acquired by Aruba Networksfive years ago, which then became a part of HP.
The two left HP in 2016 with the goal of building something meaningful.
&One of the things that we came across [was that] nobody knows anything about personal finance, and so we thought, ‘well, maybe we can help with that,'& explains Kubo.
The app lets you connect your bank cards fromChase, Capital One, Wells Fargo, US Bank, Citi and other Visa cards, to get an easy-to-read feed of what and where you&re spending — information you can opt to share with individual friends or family members. And because it pulls in data in real time, Vota can help you quickly spot fraud.
But Kubo admits that, in its current form, Vota could be a hard sell.
&The very first thing we learned was that people are not comfortable sharing their finances,& he says.
Thatwhy the app removes the dollar amount, makes sharing opt in and allows you to selectively show or hide individual purchases. It also won&t share some transactions, like online purchases.
But that may not be enough.
There is, arguably, value in seeing a cleaned-up, pretty feed of users& check-ins. FoursquareSwarm does this with some success, for example, as ita way of keeping up with friends, and learning about cool places to visit in a sort of indirect way.
But linking a credit card and automating the process will likely give users pause, especially at a time when our personal data has been slurped up repeatedly for unscrupulous reasons. To get regular folks to try an app like this, they&ll need a better reason than it being a &useful journal of transactions& or a way to explore what friends are doing.
The company is considering those other paths. In fact, Kubo says the original idea was to develop a personal finance insights app, but user behavior during the beta led them to focus more heavily on the social portion.
Ita case of following the data instead of your gut.
However,Vota aims to roll out other features that could broaden its appeal. For example, it may work on features to help people find ways to save — like by highlighting subscriptions you forgot about; or it may automate expense reports for businesses.
The goal is to roll out a set of premium features like this, rather than use the data to target you with ads or offers to monetize Vota (which is bootstrapped and not making money today).
These actually sound like better ideas.
An app that shows me all the iTunes subscriptions I forgot about, or helps me to cancel HBO NOW when Game of Thrones ends would be handy — especially if it also alerted me to suspicious transitions and fraud, while helping me budget and track trends. Selective private sharing could also be useful for spouses or partners who are pooling their finances, or need a way to coordinate their spending.
But much of what could make Vota interesting or mainstream-friendly isn&t built yet. And that makes Votalaunch feel a little early, too.
Vota is a free download on iOS and Android.
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Write comment (95 Comments)In my endless quest to get geeks interested in watches I present to you the Bell - Ross BR V2-93 GMT 24H, a new GMT watch from one of my favorite manufacturers that is a great departure from the companytraditional designs.
The watch is a 41mm round GMT, which means it has three hands to show the time in the 12-hour scale and another separate hand that shows the time in a 24-hour scale. You can use it to see time zones in two or even three places and it comes in a nice satin-brushed metal case with a rubber or metal strap.
B-R is unique because itone of the first companies to embrace online sales after selling primarily in watch stores for about a decade. This means the watches are slightly cheaper — this one is $3,500 — and jewelers can&t really jack up the prices in stores. Further, B-R has a great legacy of making legible, usable watches, and this one is no exception. It is also a fascinating addition to the line. B-R has an Instrument series, which consists of large, square watches with huge numerals, and a Vintage series that hearkens back to WWII-inspired, smaller watches. This one sits firmly in the middle, taking on the clear lines of the Instrument inside a more vintage case.
Ultimately watches like this one are nice tool watches — designed for legibility and usability above fashion. Ita nice addition to the line and looks like something a proper geek could wear in lieu of Apple Watches and other nerd jewelry. Herehoping.
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Write comment (99 Comments)Facebook next money-maker could be this tool for connecting marketers to social media creators so they can team up on sponsored-content Facebook ad campaigns. The Branded Content Matching search engine lets advertisers select the biographical characteristics of creators& fans they want to reach, see stats about these audiences, and contact them to hammer out deals.
Leaked screenshots of Facebookpromotional materials for the tool were first attained and published in German by AllFacebook.de. TechCrunch has now confirmed with Facebook the existence of the test of the search engine. Facebook first vaguely noted it would build a creator-brand tool in March, but now we know what it looks like and exactly how it works.
Even though Facebook will not actually broker or initially take a cut of the deals, the tool could equip brands with much more compelling and original marketing content. That could in turn encourage them to spend more on Facebook ads to spread that content, while also making more entertaining and tolerable the ads users see so they spend longer on the social network. By getting creators paid, even if not directly by Facebook, they&ll invest more in the quality of their content and size of their following on the app instead of with competitors.
How Facebookinfluencer marketing search engine works
A Facebook spokesperson explained the motive behind the tool like this. Facebook wants to help businesses find creators who can reach their target audience in an authentic way, while allowing creators a path to monetizing their Facebook content and fan base. Creators opt in to participating in the test and set up a portfolio showcasing their audience size and metrics plus their best branded content.Facebook is starting the program primarily with a set of lifestyle brands and creators.
Advertisers in the test can search for creators with specific audience demographics using a wide range of targeting options. Those include both general and industry-specific parameters, like:
- Top countries where they&re popular
- Interests
- Gender
- Education history
- Relationship status
- Life events
- Home ownership status
- Home type
The search engineresults page shows a list of creators with eachaudience match percentage to the search terms, percentage of their followers they reach, engagement rate, follower count and video views. Advertisers can save their best matches to private lists, and reach out to contact the creators, though Facebook is still figuring out if itbest to connect them through their Facebook Page or traditional contact info. One question is how Facebook will ensure itonly connecting businesses to brand-safe creators who won&t get them in trouble by posting racist, sexist or objectionable content the way star YouTuber PewDiePie did.
The deals for product placement or sponsored content creation and sharing are then worked out between the brand and creator without Facebookinvolvement. The platform is not taking any revenue cut during the testing phase, but longer-term will evaluate whether it should. The only thing Facebook doesn&t allow is pure re-sharing deals where influencers are paid to just post the brandpre-made content they didn&t help create.
The crowdsourced future of advertising
Foreshadowed in the launch of its dedicated Facebook Creator app in November, this is the companyfirst serious foray into influencer marketing. This emerging industry holds the potential to overhaul the way advertising content is produced. In days of old, brands couldn&t target very narrow segments of their customers because they were using broadcast mediums like TV commercials, magazine ads and billboards, or endorsements from mainstream celebrities like movie actors. They might only make a few separate styles of marketing campaigns that would appeal to wide swaths of their target audience.
With the internet and targeting data-rich social networks like Facebook, they can reach extremely specific subsets of their customers with marketing messages tuned to their identity. But reaching these niche audiences with corporate content that feels authentic rather than fake and smarmy is difficult. Thatwhere social media creators come in. Not only do they have a pre-existing and intimate relationship with their fans who&ll take their endorsements to heart, they&ve also already spent years figuring out exactly what type of content appeals to these specific people. When they team up with brands, the businesses get their products recontextualized and interpreted for that audience with content they could never come up with themselves.
Twitter realized this early, which is why it acquired creator-brand deal broker Niche for a reported $50 million back in 2015. [Disclosure: I got fascinated with this industry because my cousin Darren Lachtman is one of the co-founders of Niche.] But now as Facebook seeks to attract influencers and their audiences to its social network, ittrying to find ways to get them paid. Otherwise, they&re likely to stray to YouTubead revenue shares and Patreonsubscription payments. So far Facebook hastested tipping and subscriptions from fans, as well as letting creators host ad breaks — essentially commercials — during their videos. But brands want the creators& help designing the content, not just distributing it.
But what about Instagram and YouTube influencers
The Branded Content Matching search engine will help brands find those creators… but only on Facebook for now. The tool doesn&t pull in their audience sizes and metrics from other important platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat or Twitch. Brands don&t get a holistic view of the value and reach of a creator, who might be way more popular on another platform than Facebook.
Therealready a whole industry of independent creator search engines and databases for marketers likeHypr, Whalar, Fohr Card, Tap Influence and Creator IQ. If Facebook built one with first-party data from across its properties, or even pulled stats from competing platforms, it might squash these startups. Alternatively, it might buy one to ramp up its efforts here like how Twitter bought Niche.
Facebook is running out of ad inventory in the News Feed. It needs to make each ad better and more watchable so it can grow revenue by charging more per ads rather than selling more ads. Meanwhile, yesterday it started testing ads in Facebook Stories, where brands will need help navigating the more personal, vertical video format. Awesome content made by creators could be the answer. And Facebook could finally start helping more of these artists, comedians and storytellers turn their passion into a profession.
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Fortnite is finally coming to Android…in a matter of months. After dominating the iOS gaming charts since March, the wildly popular sandbox survival game will be hitting the worldtop mobile operating system at some point this summer.
Creator Epic Games buried the news in the middle of a larger blog post titled, &The State of Mobile,& noting, vaguely, &We know many of you are excited for this release, and we promise that when we have more information to share, you&ll hear it from us first.&
That news comes amid a flurry of other Fortnite-related announcements this week. Earlier this morning, Epic unveiled a Battle Royale competition with a large in-game cash prize. This morning, the company also laid out plans to bring voice chat and improved gameplay and controls to the mobile side of things. Stats are coming to mobile, as well, along with a reduced install size.
Not that any of those issues have hampered the gamesuccess, of course. Earlier this year, the game was reportedly bringing in $126 million in monthly revenue — even before it arrived on iOS. With its imminent release on Android, that numberlikely to get a whole lot larger.
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Write comment (95 Comments)Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden, who oversaw Uber Elevate, has left the company, Recode first reported. His last day was yesterday, TechCrunch confirmed.
On a day-to-day level, Holden was not that heavily involved. Manik Gupta, for example, is in charge of product, maps and marketplace at the VP level. There was also Uber Head of Product Daniel Graf, who left the company in March but was quickly replaced by former Amazon Alexa shopping lead Assaf Ronen.
Holden, instead, was more of a big-picture kind of executive, which entailed him taking ownership over Uber Elevate. Under his leadership, Uber brought on the CEO of flying taxi startup Zee Aero, Eric Allison.
Eric Allison at Uber Elevate in May 2018. (Photo by MRD)
&As demonstrated by last weekUber Elevate Summit, we&re incredibly bullish on the future of aerial ridesharing,& an Uber spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. &Under the leadership of Eric Allison, the Elevate team is set up for success and will continue to chart the course for this growing industry.&
But itworth pointing out that Holden had a lengthy conversation with Federal Aviation Administration Acting Administrator Dan Elwell about regulation for uberAIR, the companyupcoming aerial taxi service. That was just last week at Uber Elevate, the companytwo-day summit on aerial transportation. It seems odd that Holden was tasked with leading a conversation with the head of the FAA regarding what will arguably be the biggest hurdle uberAIR will face: regulation.
Prior to joining Uber, Holden served as Grouponsenior vice president. Itnot clear what Holdennext move is, but a source says Holden is pursuing another opportunity somewhere.
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Read more: Uber’s chief product officer is out
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