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Technology
Boeing might be taking the last crucial steps to prepare for its first crewed Starliner capsule spaceflight, but italso busy turning sci-fi into reality right here on Earth & by helping Disney build X-Wing large-scale starfighters to celebrate the opening of the ‘Rise of the Resistance& ride at Disney World in Florida.
Earlier this week when the ride opened during an evening ceremony, X-Wings &roughly the size of a family van& flew over the event, as described by The Drive, which first identified earlier spy shots of the vehicles as potentially being based on Boeingaerial cargo drone. Boeing has since confirmed its involvement, but they aren&t providing more info than that the X-Wings were indeed their aircraft.
In the clip below, you can see the X-Wings ascend vertically into the night sky, then hover and rotate before heading out. Don&t go squinting to see if you can spot Poe Dameron at the controls, however & these are unpiloted drones based mostly likely on the Cargo Air Vehicle design Boeing has recently shown off, which sports six rotors (you can see them in close-ups of the X-Wing included in the gallery at the end of this post).
Astute observers and Star Wars fans will note that the X-Wings feature the split-engine design introduced in the T-70 variant that are flown by the Resistance in the current trilogy, as opposed to the full cylinder engine design on the T-65 from the original trilogy. That makes perfect sense, since the Rise of the Resistance ride takes place during an encounter between the Resistance and the First Order during the current trilogy timeline.
As for BoeingCAV, it recently completed a three-minute test flight during which it demonstrated forward movement, after flying outdoors during a hover test for the first time earlier this year. The cargo drone is designed for industrial applications, and can carry up to 500 lbs of cargo, but itstill in the testing phase, which makes this Star Wars demonstration even more interesting.
[gallery ids="1921346,1921347,1921348,1921349"]
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Write comment (100 Comments)Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the weeknoteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into todaytopic, letcatch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Chinese investor activity in Africa. Before that, I noted Airbnbissues.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or on Twitter@KateClarkTweets. If you&re new, you can subscribe to Startups Weekly here.
Europeappeal
This week I want to talk about Europe and not just because I&m in Europe prepping for TechCrunchannual conference, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin. But because of a new trend we&re seeing in which U.S. venture capital funds strike deals overseas—more than ever.
Forbes wrote a piece on this trend this week alongside the release of their annual European Midas List, which ranks the top VCs on the continent. More and more, top funds, including the likes of Sequoia and Benchmark, are writing checks to companies in London, Dublin, Amsterdam, Stockholm and more.
Sequoia, for example, funded a teenager in Dublin, Ireland this year. Evervault is building a data protection solution aimed at developers, by way of an API, which aims to bake data protection into the app from the start. We hear a number of other top firms are sending partners over seas, too, or considering making such moves. Why? To search for companies to add to their global portfolios (in a region where they may also see a nice discount). As we prep for a new year, this is one of several trends in VC I&ll be keeping an eye on.
Workplace toxicity
If you didn&t log on to Twitter this week, you may have missed The Vergeinvestigation into workplace toxicity at Away, a ‘unicorn& travel company known for its lightweight, compact suitcases (full disclosure: I have an Away bag). Read that story first, then check out Winnie co-founder and chief executive officer Sara Mauskopfpiece from this week, &The inevitable takedown of the female CEO,& in which she questions why we celebrate female-founded companies, until they rise too far. Herea passage:
Aggressive.Blunt.Furious.These are words that have been used to criticize the behavior of female CEOs of prominent companies likeThinx, Cleo, Rent the Runway andThirdLove, to name a few. Away is the latest female-led company to come under fire, in an article in The Verge on Thursday.
First, let me be clear:A toxic work culture is never acceptable. Regardless of who started a company or what kind of stress the company is under, itnever okay to mistreat employees. Some of the things that came to light in these pieces are particularly abhorrent: sexual harassment, lying about onecredentials, creating an unsafe space for underrepresented groups, overworking employees. These are dynamics that need to be called out and eliminated at all companies, whether female or male-led. The Away example is no exception.
The top VC deals of the week:
- Vroom nabs $254M to take its growth up a gear
- Flipkart leads $60M investment in logistics company Shadowfax
- Autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility gets $50M
- Fashion rental company Style Theory nabs $15M
- GitGuardian nabs $12M to help developers write more secure code
- Uniform Teeth gets $10M for its teeth-straightening operations
- Brazilian fintech startup Cora raises $10M
- Meatable, the startup developing tech for manufacturing cultured meat, raises $10M
- Reelgood raises $6.75M for its universal streaming guide
- Apostrophe secures $6M to let you see a dermatologist from your phone
Plus, read my profile of VSCO, the photo-sharing and editing app you may have never heard of. That is, until the &VSCO girl& meme craze of 2019.
Disrupt Berlin
Ithard to believe italready that time of the year again, but Disrupt Berlin is this week! I&m in Berlin this week to meet with Europetop VCs and some of the most promising founders in the region. If you&re here too, make sure to say hi. Here are a few things you can expect to hear about at the event:
- Learn how to win customers and influence consumers
- Three of the best tackle the thorny issue of Brexit for startups
- Learn how to raise your first Euros
#Equity
If you like this newsletter, you will definitely enjoyEquity, which brings the content of this newsletter to life — in podcast form! Join myself and Equity co-host Alex Wilhelm every Friday for a quick breakdown of the weekbiggest news in venture capital and startups.
This week, we discussed Harlem Capitaldebut fund, a $40 million effort that will back minority entrepreneurs. On top of that, we shared thoughts on Figurelatest funding, European venture capital activity and more.
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Write comment (98 Comments)Reddit has linked account activity involving the leak and amplification of sensitive UK-US trade talks on its platform during the ongoing UK election campaign to a suspected Russian political influence operation.
Or, to put it more plainly, the social network suspects that Russian operatives are behind the leak of sensitive trade data — likely with the intention of impacting the UKGeneral Election campaign.
The country goes to the polls next week, on December 12.
The UK has been politically deadlocked since mid 2016 over how to implement the result of the referendum to leave the European Union . The minority Conservative government has struggled to negotiate a brexit deal that parliament backs. Another hung parliament or minority government would likely result in continued uncertainty.
In a postdiscussing the &Suspected campaign from Russia&, Reddit writes:
We were recently made aware of apost on Redditthat included leaked documents from the UK. We investigated this account and the accounts connected to it, and today we believe this was part of a campaign that has been reported as originating from Russia.
Earlier this year Facebook discovered aRussian campaignon its platform, which was further analyzed by the Atlantic Council and dubbed &Secondary Infektion.& Suspect accounts on Reddit were recently reported to us, along with indicators from law enforcement, and we were able to confirm that they did indeed show a pattern of coordination. We were then able to use these accounts to identify additional suspect accounts that were part of the campaign on Reddit. This group provides us with important attribution for the recent posting of the leaked UK documents, as well as insights into how adversaries are adapting their tactics.
Reddit says that an account, called gregoratior, originally posted the leaked trade talks document. Later a second account, ostermaxnn, reposted it. The platform also found a &pocket of accounts& that worked together to manipulate votes on the original post in an attempt to amplify it. Though fairly fruitlessly, as it turned out; the leak gained little attention on Reddit, per the company.
As a result of the investigation Reddit says it has banned 1 subreddit and 61 accounts — under policies against vote manipulation and misuse of its platform.
The story doesn&t end there, though, because whoever was behind the trade talk leak appears to have resorted to additional tactics to draw attention to it — including emailing campaign groups and political activists directly.
This activity did bear fruit this month when the opposition Labour party got hold of the leak and made it into a major campaign issue, claiming the 451-page document shows the Conservative party, led by Boris Johnson, is plotting to sell off the countryfree-at-the-point-of-use National Health Service (NHS) to US private health insurance firms and drug companies.
Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, showed a heavily redacted version of the document during a TV leaders debate earlier this month, later calling a press conference to reveal a fully un-redacted version of the data — arguing the document proves the NHS is in grave danger if the Conservatives are re-elected.
Johnson has denied Labouraccusation that the NHS will be carved up as the price of a Trump trade deal. But the leaked document itself is genuine.
It details preliminary meetings between UK and US trade negotiators, which took place between July 2017 and July 2019, in which discussion of the NHS does take place, in addition to other issues such as food standards.
Although the document does not confirm what position the UK might seek to adopt in any future trade talks with the US.
The source of the heavily redacted version of the document appears to be a Freedom of Information (FOI) request by campaigning organisation, Global Justice Now — which told Vice it made an FOI request to the UKDepartment for International Trade around 18 months ago.
The group said it was subsequently emailed a fully unredacted version of the document by an unknown source which also appears to have sent the data directly to the Labour party. So while the influence operation looks to have originated on Reddit, the agents behind it seem to have resorted to more direct means of data dissemination in order for the leak to gain the required attention to become an election-influencing issue.
Experts in online influence operations had already suggested similarities between the trade talks leak and an earlier Russian operation, dubbed Secondary Infektion, which involved the leak of fake documents on multiple online platforms. Facebook identified and took down that operation in May.
In a report analysing the most recent leak, social network mapping and analysis firm Graphika says the key question is how the trade document came to be disseminated online a few weeks before the election.
&The mysterious [Reddit] user seemingly originated the leak of a diplomatic document by posting it around online, just six weeks before the UK elections. This raises the question of how the user got hold of the document in the first place,& it writes. &This is the single most pressing question that arises from this report.&
Graphikaanalysis concludes that the manner of leaking and amplifying the trade talks data &closely resembles& the known Russian information operation, Secondary Infektion.
&The similarities to Secondary Infektion are not enough to provide conclusive attribution but are too close to be simply a coincidence. They could indicate a return of the actors behind Secondary Infektion or a sophisticated attempt by unknown actors to mimic it,& it adds.
Internet-enabled Russian influence operations that feature hacking and strategically timed data dumps of confidential/sensitive information, as well as the seeding and amplification of political disinformation which is intended to polarize, confuse and/or disengage voters, have become a regular feature of Western elections in recent years.
The most high profile example of Russian election interference remains the 2016 hack of documents and emails from Hillary Clintonpresidential campaign and Democratic National Committee — which went on to be confirmed by US investigators as an operation by RussiaGRU intelligence agency.
In 2017 emails were also leaked from French president Emmanuel Macroncampaign shortly before his election — although with apparently minimal impact in that case. (Attribution is also less clear-cut.)
Russian activity targeting UK elections and referendums remains a matter of intense interest and investigation — and had been raised publicly as a concern by former prime minister, Theresa May, in 2017.
Although her government failed to act on recommendations to strengthen UK election and data laws to respond to the risks posed by Internet-enabled interference. She also did nothing to investigate questions over the extent of foreign interference in the 2016 brexit referendum.
May was finally unseated by the ongoing political turmoil around brexit this summer, when Johnson took over as prime minister. But he has also turned a wilfully blind eye to the risks around foreign election interference — while fully availing himself of data-fuelled digital campaign methods whose ethics have been questioned by multiple UK oversight bodies.
A report into Russian interference in UK politics which was compiled by the UKintelligence and security parliamentary committee — and had been due to be published ahead of the general election — was also personally blocked from publication by the prime minister.
Voters won&t now get to see that information until after the election. Or, well, barring another strategic leak…
Update: Corbyn has now responded to Reddit linking the trade talks leak with Russia — but has declined to specify how Labour obtained the document, per the Guardian.
Asked to respond to whether the Labour party had benefited from Russian election interference he said: &This is such nonsense. This is such an advanced state of rather belated conspiracy theories by the prime minister. When we released the documents, at no stage did the prime minister or anybody deny that those documents were real, deny the arguments that we put forward.
&And if there has been no discussion with the US about access to our health markets, if all of that is wrong, how come after a week they still haven&t said that? The issues are that those documents show exactly what the British government is doing in discussions with Donald Trumpadministration in the US and also why the prime minister has refused to release the report on Russian interference in British politics, which hebeen sitting on for a very long time.&
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Facebook is selling Oculus Medium — a 3D virtual reality sculpting tool for creatives — to Adobe. The team was an expensive effort for Oculus and its sale signifies a broader rethinking within Facebook in what virtual reality projects they tackle in-house.
Itclear that Oculus pumped an awful lot of money into Medium over the years and the sale probably isn&t great for the Oculus Medium team, if only because there is now a proper price tag attached to the effort that will be looming for the fairly niche software. Terms of the deal weren&t shared so who knows what kind of deal Adobe got.
What is nice is that Facebook went to the trouble of properly spinning out Medium. When Facebook shut down Oculus Story Studio, the company quietly laid off its employees. Medium is well-liked by a small community and it makes plenty of sense at Adobe where first-party integration with other products will undoubtedly make it better software. Itnice to see it live on.
The sale of Medium after the purchase of Beat Saber-maker Beat Games really encapsulates the VR content strategy of Oculus at the moment. Non-gaming creative tools aren&t getting new investment, cinematic VR content isn&t being prioritized, and Facebook is preparing to buy more game studios with the goal of scaling their titles. For a division that has been talking only about the distant future for years, ita pragmatic strategy that probably signifies broader contentment with how things are looking on the hardware front.
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Write comment (94 Comments)So what AJ are we going to see after the shock and humiliation of losing his crown to the unfancied Andy Ruiz Jr back in June? He's promising more focus, more intelligence, more fight - but will it be enough? We can't wait for this epic rematch to get started and, luckily, we don't have to much longer. We'll give you all the tools to watch a Ruiz
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This week hasn’t been kind to the genre. Earlier in the week, CD Projekt announced that as of December 9, it will “discontinue support of console versions of the game.”
Is The Elder Scrolls: Legends officially dead? Well, no. Not yet anyway. However, Bethesda just recently announced that it will no longer be working on any new content for the
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