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This week saw a ton of activity in the space industry, with multiple launches, key preparations for commercial crew missions, robots and much more.
Besides all the real space news, therealso some extreme fan service for Star Wars lovers, courtesy of Disney and Boeing. Now I&m one day closer to my lifelong dream of becoming a real X-Wing starfighter pilot.
Rocket Lab completes key step towards reusable rockets
Launch startup Rocket Lab has been successfully delivering payloads to orbit for a while now, but earlier this year they announced they&d be moving to a launch system in which the booster they use to propel their spacecraft to orbit is reusable.
An Electron rocket launching during a previous test.
During their 10th mission with their Electron rocket, they took a crucial first step & testing the re-entry systems to bring the booster back to Earthatmosphere. Rocket Lab says the test went better than expected, which bodes well from moving to an actual test of properly recovering and refurbishing the thing.
SpaceX launches 19th Space Station resupply mission
The other big launch this week was SpaceX CRS-19 launch, which delivered 5,200 lbs of experiments and supplies to the ISS. This launch used a brand new Falcon 9, which SpaceX recovered with a landing at sea, and it also employed a Dragon cargo capsule that the company has flown twice before. On board, therea load of amazing new equipment for the ISS, like a ‘robot hotel.&
Emotionally intelligent IBM-powered assistant robot is heading to space
You may not have heard, but therean advanced Alexa for astronauts called CIMON, and after a successful first test, itheaded back to the ISS aboard the above SpaceX launch with improvements. One of its key improvements is a new ability to detect and respond to human emotions, which is, you know, HAL territory.
SpaceX completes 7th parachute test
SpaceX is getting closer to a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to its ability to launch astronauts on its commercial crew spacecraft. The company needs to do at least 10 parachute tests in a row to get ship-shape for its crew launch, and itnow pretty close to getting that done before yearend.
Boeing completes dress rehearsal of crew launch
Boeing is also getting closer to its own commercial crew launch, and in fact completed an entire rehearsal of how the mission will go on on launch day when it does its uncrewed launch. This rehearsal including fully feeling the rocket, and next time that happens, it&ll be taking off.
Real X-Wings fly for real (really)
X-Wing starfighters ascended through the night sky over Orlando, Florida this week as Disney celebrated the opening of its new ‘Rise of the Resistance& attraction at Disney World. The X-Wings (2 of them!) were modified versions of a large cargo drone that Boeing has been developing, but both companies are keeping mum on any further details right now.
Herewhatup in the world of space startups and investing
Whatgoing on with space tech, and why is it having a moment? Whatcoming next, and where is the smart money going? The answers to those questions and more lie in Starburst founder and aerospace investor François Chopardinformative deck about space and defense, available exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers.
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Write comment (94 Comments)Snapchat is preparing to launch a big new feature that uses your selfies to replace the faces of people in videos you can then share. Itessentially a simplified way to Deepfake you into GIFs. Snapchat Cameos are an alternative to Bitmoji for quickly conveying an emotion, reaction, or silly situation in Snapchat messages.
Some French users received a test version of the feature today, as spotted by Snap enthusiast @Mtatsis.
Snapchat Cameo makes you the star of videos
TechCrunch reached out to Snap, which confirmed existence of Cameos, and that the feature is currently testing in limited availability in some international markets. The company provided this statement: &Cameos aren&t ready to take the stage yet, but stay tuned for their global debut soon!&
@snapologie Cette fonctionnalité viens d'apparaître sur mon Snap ça s'appelle Caméos pic.twitter.com/F8bIrhbptb
— Arthur
(@gartr268) December 6, 2019
C&est la meilleure invention que snap est jamais faite #cameo #snapchat pic.twitter.com/EcRQmGoFsV
— FiLiPpinHo
QLF (@gregv_) December 7, 2019
How To Make Snapchat Cameos
With Cameo, you&ll take a selfie to teach Snapchat what you look like. Then you choose if you want a vaguely male or female body type (no purposefully androgenous option).
Cameo then lives inside the Bitmoji button in the Snapchat messaging keyboard. Snapchat has made a bunch of short looping video clips with sound that you can choose from. Snapchat will then stretch and move your selfie to create different facial reactions that Cameo can apply to actors& heads in the videos. You just pick one of these videos that now star you and send it to the chat.
Cameo could help Snapchat keep messaging interesting, which is critical since that remains its most popular and differentiated feature. With Instagram and WhatsApp having copied its Stories to great success, it must stay ahead in chat. Though in this case, Snap could be accused of copying Chinese social app Zao which let users more realistically Deepfake their faces into videos. Then again, JibJab popularized this kind of effect many years ago to stick your face on dancing Christmas elves.
Snap is only starting to monetize the messaging wing of its app with ads inside social games. Snap might potentially sell sponsored, branded Cameo clips to advertisers similar to how the company offers sponsored augmented reality lenses.
Cameo could put a more fun spin on technology for grafting faces into videos. Deepfakes can be used as powerful weapons of misinformation or abuse. But by offering only innocuous clips rather than statements from politicians or pornography, Snapchat could turn the tech into a comedic medium.
[Image Credit: Jeff Higgins]
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After more than a year of teasing, Apple finally unveiled the new Mac Pro at WWDC in June. The long wait was finally over — though Apple left out one key detail: when, precisely the high end desktop would arrive, beyond a purposefully vague fall timeframe
Earlier this, however, the company began sending out pre-pre-order notifications to potential consumers (spotted by Marques Brownlee), noting the orders will open December 10. When, precisely, they&ll start shipping is another question entirely, of course, but at the very least, you can get a raincheck for the extremely exepsnive Christmas present.
The system starts at $5,999, plus the $4,999 Pro Display XDR monitor. You should probably also factor in the much ballyhooed stand, which adds another $999 to the price tag. Of course, price has never been Applemain selling point — something that goes double for the Mac Pro line. And the companyclearly not holding anything back with this system, as it recommits itself to creative professionals.
Contrary to earlier rumors, Apple noted back in September that the new Pro will be built in the U.S., like its predecessor.
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Write comment (91 Comments)Itamong the most iconic images of the last few decades — a picture of an unknown man standing before a line of tanks during the protests in 1989 in BeijingTiananmen Square. In just one shot, the photographer, Jeff Widener, managed to convey a society struggling between the freedoms of individual citizens and the heavy hand of the Chinese militarized state.
Italso an image that few within China&great firewall& have access to, let alone see. For those who have read 1984, it can almost seem as if &Tank Man& was dropped into a memory hole, erased from the collective memory of more than a billion people.
By now, itwell-known that Chinasearch engines like Baidu censor such political photography. Regardless of the individual morality of their decisions, itat least understandable that Chinese companies with mostly Chinese revenues would carefully hew to the law as set forth by the Chinese Communist Party. Ita closed system after all.
What we are learning though is that it isn&t just Chinese companies that are aiding and abetting this censorship. ItWestern companies too. And Western workers aren&t pleased that they are working to enforce the anti-freedom policies in the Middle Kingdom.
Take Shutterstock, which has come under great fire for complying with Chinagreat firewall. As Sam Biddle described in The Intercept last month, the company has been riven internally between workers looking to protect democratic values, and a business desperate to expand further in one of the worldmost dynamic countries. From Biddle:
Shutterstockcensorship feature appears to have been immediately controversial within the company, prompting more than 180 Shutterstock workers to sign a petition against the search blacklist and accuse the company of trading its values for access to the lucrative Chinese market.
Those petitions have allegedly gone nowhere internally, and that has led employees like Stefan Hayden, who describes nearly ten years of experience at the company as a frontend developer on his LinkedIn profile, to resign:
The challenge of these political risks is hardly unknown to Shutterstock. The companymost recent annual financial filing with the SEC lists market access and censorship as a key risk for the company (emphasis mine):
For example, domestic internet service providers have blocked and continue to block access to Shutterstock in China and other countries, such as Turkey, have intermittently restricted access to Shutterstock. There are substantial uncertainties regarding interpretation of foreign laws and regulations that censor content available through our products and services and we may be forced to significantly change or discontinue our operations in such markets if we were to be found in violation of any new or existing law or regulation. If access to our products and services is restricted, in whole or in part, in one or more countries or our competitors can successfully penetrate geographic markets that we cannot access, our ability to retain or increase our contributor and customer base may be adversely affected, we may not be able to maintain or grow our revenue as anticipated, and our financial results could be adversely affected.
Thus the rub: market access means compromising the very values that a content purveyor like Shutterstock relies on to operate as a business. The stock image company is hardly unique to find itself in this position; ita situation that the NBA has certainly had to confront in the last few weeks:
Itgreat to see Shutterstockemployees standing up for freedom and democracy, and if not finding purchase internally with their values, at least walking with their feet to other companies who value freedom more reliably.
Unfortunately, far too many companies — and far too many tech companies — blindly chase the dollars and yuans, without considering the erosion in the values at the heart of their own business. That erosion ultimately adds up — without guiding principles to handle business challenges, decisions get made ad hoc with an eye to revenues, intensifying the risk of crises like the one facing Shutterstock.
The complexity of the Chinese market has only expanded with the countryprodigious growth. The sharpness, intensity, and self-reflection of values required for Western companies to operate on the mainland has reached new highs. And yet, executives have vastly under-communicated the values and constraints they face, both to their own employees but also to their shareholders as well.
As I wrote earlier this year when the Google China search controversy broke out, itnot enough to just be militant about values. Values have to be cultivated, and everyone from software engineers to CEOs need to understand a companyobjectives and the values that constrain them.
As I wrote at the time:
The internet as independence movement is 100% dead.
That makes the ethical terrain for Silicon Valley workers much more challenging to navigate. Everything is a compromise, in one way or another. Even the very act of creating value — arguably the most important feature of Silicon Valleystartup ecosystem — has driven mass inequality, as we explored on Extra Crunch this weekend in an in-depth interview.
I ultimately was in favor of Googleengagement with China, if only because I felt that the company does understand its values better than most (after all, it abandoned the China market in the first place, and one would hope the company would make the same choice again if it needed to). Google has certainly not been perfect on a whole host of fronts, but it seems to have had far more self-reflection about the values it intends to purvey than most tech companies.
Itwell past time for all American companies though to double down on the American values that underly their business. Ultimately, if you compromise on everything, you stand for nothing — and what sort of business would anyone want to join or back like that?
China can&t be ignored, but neither should companies ignore their own duties to commit to open, democratic values. If Tank Man can stand in front of a line of tanks, American execs can stand before a line of their colleagues and find an ethical framework and a set of values that can work.
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Raysecur says at least ten times a day someone sends a suspicious package containing powder, liquid, or some other kind of hazard.
The Boston, Mass.-based startup says its desktop-sized 3D real-time scanning technology, dubbed MailSecur, can intercept and detect threats in the mailroom before they ever make it onto the office floor.
Mailroom security may not seem fancy or interesting, but they&re a common gateway into a corporate environment. They&re a huge attack vector for attackers — both physical and cyber. Earlier this year we wrote about warshipping, a &Trojan horse&-type attack that can be used as a way for hackers to ship hardware exploits into a business, break the Wi-Fi, and pivot onto the corporate network to steal data.
Now, the company has raised $3 million in seed-round funding led by One Way Ventures, with participation from Junson Capital, Launchpad Venture Group, and also Dreamit Ventures, a Philadelphia-based early stage investor and accelerator, which last year announced it would move into the early-stage security space.
Raysecurproprietary millimeter-wave scanner, MailSecur. (Image: supplied)
Raysecur uses millimeter-wave technology — similar to the scanners you find at airport security — to examine suspicious letters, flat envelopes, and small parcels. Its technology can detect powders as small as 2% of a teaspoon or a single drop of liquid, the company claims.
The startup said the funding will help expand its customer base. Although still in its infancy, the company has about ten Fortune 500 customers using its MailSecur scanner.
Since it was founded in 2018, the company has scanned more than 9.2 million packages.
Semyon Dukach, managing partner at One Way Ventures, said the funding will help &bring this compelling technology to an even broader market.&
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