Month: December 2022

The conversation around widespread electric vehicle adoption has been inherently linked with charging: Are the chargers plentiful? Will they charge my car fast enough? Are they plugged into a grid that’s not entirely run by coal?

Billions of dollars have gone into developing batteries that can handle fast charges as well as chargers that can top up a vehicle in as little as 20 minutes. Few, at least in the U.S., are really talking about battery swapping for cars and trucks.

Ample happens to be among the few leading that charge.

Ample, which rose from the ashes of its unsuccessful predecessor, Better Place, has brought battery swapping to Los Angeles and soon will introduce the tech to Japan and Madrid through a series of partnerships with fleet partners like Uber and Eneos. Unlike its predecessor, Ample doesn’t try to deploy battery-swapping stations until it knows it’ll have the customers to use them.

Since we last checked in with Ample’s co-founder and president John de Souza a year ago, the San Francisco-based startup has quietly grown, building new swapping stations and signing on additional fleet partners around the globe.

Meanwhile, battery-swapping tech for cars has gained footing in China. Beijing is throwing its weight behind a few companies advancing the technology as part of its broader plan to ensure 25% of all cars sold are electric by 2025. Automakers Nio and Geely, battery-swapping tech developer Aulton and oil producer Sinopec said this year they plan to build 24,000 swapping stations across China by 2025. Today there are 1,400.

We caught up with de Souza to talk about the implications of China’s investment in battery swapping, why scaling fast-charging infrastructure is a lot harder than we think and sought his advice on how hardware startups can scale while staying lean.

(Editor’s note: The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.)

You’re calling me from Madrid, which you had said Ample was targeting as its next launch city.

Yes, we are deploying in Madrid as we speak. We’re partnering with Repsol to quickly deploy a wide network; Uber to work with ride-sharing fleet managers; and automakers (which we haven’t announced publicly yet) to deliver vehicles with the Ample solution.

From a customer standpoint, our partnerships focus on ride-sharing, car-sharing and last-mile delivery.

Battery swapping can be difficult to pull off because it requires some standardization of the battery. Ample provides modular battery swapping, which means you don’t swap the entire battery pack. Can you explain why that’s significant?

There are two aspects to Ample’s modular battery swapping that are significant. Firstly, it allows the flexibility to fit our packs into vehicles of different sizes and shapes by rearranging the modular batteries. That means we can allow for different capacities by varying the number of modules. It also makes our stations, which are run robotically, more cost-effective, because you’re moving lighter modules instead of traditional packs.

Secondly, Ample’s patent to allow modules to adjust to electrical characteristics of vehicles means we can work with OEMs without requiring any changes to the vehicle. We can also use the same modules in different vehicles, which makes it easy to introduce new chemistries into cars.

You say Ample’s batteries are vehicle agnostic, but you still need to work with automakers in some way to ensure they don’t put their own batteries in the vehicle, right?

We work with automakers on being able to purchase cars without batteries. As we work with them more closely, it’s to give them a replacement battery. They might get their batteries from Samsung, LG or CATL, but we can give them a battery that’s a drop-in replacement. So just as a customer might choose the type of tires or seats they want in the car, they can one day choose which batteries they want to use. If they put our batteries in, it’s swappable. If they put their own, they’re not.

Ample’s founder explains what it takes to scale EV battery swapping by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

Amazon is developing a standalone app for watching sports, according to a new report from The Information. The move signals Amazon’s continued push toward investing in Prime Video and live sports content. If released, the standalone app would better highlight Amazon’s sports content, which is currently included in the company’s main Prime Video platform.

The report comes as Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently called live sports “a unique asset” that Amazon will continue to invest in. Amazon’s current live sports offerings include exclusive rights to the NFL’s Thursday Night Football, along with some Premier League soccer matchesand Yankees baseball games. Amazon has also invested in other sports content to complement the live games, as the company launchedoriginal sports talk shows on both Prime Video and its ad-supported streaming service Freevee.

It’s unknown when Amazon plans to launch the standalone sports app. It’s also possible that the company may decide to shelve the plans altogether.

Amazon did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Amazon’s plans for a standalone sports app suggest that the company is exploring new ways to tap its live sports investments into additional revenue streams. Considering the steep costs of streaming rights, it wouldn’t be surprising if the company plans to charge a separate subscription fee for sports content with this standalone app. It’s also possible that Amazon may decide to offer a separate subscription tier that includes its sports content.

The new report comes as Amazon has been reviewing parts of its unprofitable divisions, which led to the elimination of numerous roles. Even amid these cost-cutting efforts, Amazon appears to be committed to building out Prime Video and its live sports streaming content.

Amazon isn’t the only major company looking to continue investing in live sports content, as the company faces increasing competition from other tech giants who have also inked sports streaming deals. Last week, Google’s YouTube secured the NFL Sunday Ticket in a landmark streaming deal. On the other hand, Apple has gained the rights toMajor League BaseballandMajor League Soccer games.

Amazon is working on a standalone app for sports content, new report claims by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

It takes a special kind of boldness to raise a wad of cash, claim to have $90 million worth of preorders, then pivot away from passenger ferries and light container ships, and instead start selling $59,000 personal watercraft. Bold, yes, but the tactic seems to be working. Boundary Layer’s CEO and founder, Ed Kearney, told me the company has more than $1 million worth of preorders.

“After being live for just three weeks we have slightly over $1 million worth of vehicles reserved, mostly to folks in the U.S., and one customer in Kuwait,” Kearney tells me, adding that the company is “on track to demonstrate the prototype in early February.”

The company charges a $1,000 refundable deposit for a place on the waiting list. It remains to be seen when the company will be ready to start shipping the personal watercraft to its customers and whether the company’s investors are enthused about a B2B to B2C pivot in the middle of a complicated world of global financial instability.

One thing is for certain: There’s a lot of activity in the world of hydrofoiling electric boats at the moment. Navier is in the process of preparing for production as well, and Candela raised $24 million for its bid for the hydrofoiling crown.

In the electric non-hydrofoiling boat space, Flux Marine recently landed a $15 million round, Arc raised $30 million and GM snagged a 25% stake in Pure Watercraft about a year ago.

$60K personal water toy lands $1M worth of preorders by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

The U.S. House of Representatives has ordered its staff and lawmakers to delete TikTok from any government-issued mobile devices due to “security issues” with the popular video-sharing app.

The order to delete the app was issued by Catherine Szpindor, the chief administrative officer of the House, whose office warned in August that the app represented a “high risk to users” citing a “number of security concerns.”

“House staff are NOT allowed to download the TikTok app on any House mobile devices,” said a memo sent by Szpindor on Tuesday seen by NBC News. “If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it.”

The new ban follows a series of moves by U.S. state governments to remove TikTok, developed by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, from government devices, amid fears that collected data could allow the Chinese government to spy on Americans, or that the app’s algorithm could influence and censor what users watch on the app.

As of last week, 19 states — including Texas, Georgia, Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Nebraska — had at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app to track Americans and censor content. The U.S. military also banned its service-members from using TikTok on government devices, fearing the app could potentially expose personal data to “unwanted actors.”

A broader measure aimed at banning the app on all federally-managed devices was included in the $1.66 trillion federal omnibus spending bill passed last week, which takes effect once President Joe Biden signs the legislation into law.

In response to the spending bill, TikTok said the move was a “political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests.” TikTok did not immediately return TechCrunch’s request for comment.

There are also parallel efforts to ban TikTok from consumer devices across the United States.

Earlier this month, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) also proposed legislation that would ban TikTok nationally. When introducing the bipartisan bill, Rubio said that the app allows the Chinese government “a unique ability to monitor more than 1 billion users worldwide, including nearly two-thirds of American teenagers.”

“Unless TikTok and its algorithm can be separated from Beijing, the app’s use in the United States will continue to jeopardize our country’s safety and pave the way for a Chinese-influenced tech landscape here,” he said in a Washington Post article.

TikTok has been a source of security and privacy concerns for several years. ByteDance last week admitted that its employees had accessed the user data of journalists to find the source of leaked company information.

US House bans TikTok on lawmakers’ official phones by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

The most important asset early-stage companies possess is their intellectual property. But IP can be difficult to protect during fundraising, because venture firms reviewing confidential pitch materials do not regularly sign NDAs as is traditional in other industries, and applicants lack leverage to push for them.

Venture firms are often involved in multiple deals, so the need to protect one’s IP during early fundraising is far from theoretical. Let’s say that Company A pitches a healthcare-focused fund for pre-seed or seed funding and the fund declines to invest. The fund later receives a pitch from Company B, a healthcare company in a similar space, and this time decides to invest.

Because Company A and Company B do similar things, the fund might be incentivized to provide some of Company A’s ideas to Company B. This leaves Company A with the difficult choice of fighting a competitor in the marketplace or courtroom.

What steps can startups take to protect their IP during fundraising so that they do not end up like Company A? Below is a broad strokes overview of the legal landscape as well as a few considerations and strategies to mitigate the risk of IP theft.

What material is protectable

Not all concepts developed by startups are legally protectable, even if a founder would consider them confidential or proprietary.

Trade secrets are the most well-recognized category of protectable information. These are defined under federal law and many state laws as tangible and intangible “financial, business, scientific, technical, economic, or engineering information, including patterns, plans, compilations, program devices, formulas, designs, prototypes, methods, techniques, processes, procedures, programs, or codes.”

While the trade secret definition captures many types of information, that information must be relatively concrete.

Some jurisdictions, most notably New York and California, additionally protect more abstract business “ideas.” Generally speaking, a startup’s business ideas will be protected if it has any operations or engages in fundraising activities in these jurisdictions. While New York requires a business idea to be “novel,” California does not.

How to protect your IP during fundraising so you don’t get ripped off by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Pakistan’s markets regulator issued new guidelines for digital lending in the country, cracking down on several sketchy practices that it said have become prevalent in the South Asian market.

The Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan said Wednesday evening that non-banking finance companies that disburse loans through digital channels including mobile apps will be required to disclosure key fact statements such as the credit amount they are granting to consumers, annual percentage rates, duration of the loan, and “all fee and charges.”

The non-banking finance firms will be required to share these key facts with consumers through audio or video and emails and text messages in both English and Urdu languages. “Any fee not included in key fact statement will not be charged to the borrower,” the regulator said (PDF) in a press release.

These firms will also not be able to access borrower’s phone book or contacts lists or pictures on the device “even if the borrower has given consent in this regard,” the regulator said. (You can read the full-guidelines here {PDF}.)

“The lender shall also not be allowed to contact the persons in the borrower’s contact list, other than those who have been specifically authorized by the borrower as guarantors and who have also provided their consent to the digital lender at the time of loan approval,” it added.

The move follows the regulator noticing rise in mis-selling, breach of data privacy and “coercive” recovery practices of licensed digital lending companies” and to safeguard public interest, it said.

Neighboring nation India also introduced strict rules surrounding digital lending in a move that has toppled the local fintech industry.

Pakistan cracks down on sketchy digital lending by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter is a mess, but it’s still addictive. While some folks might have headed to Mastadon, those who stick around might still want to get the best out of the bird site. If you feel that your timeline is very cluttered, a new tool named Prune your follows can really help you with that.

The app shows you the people you follow in largely four categories: Overpopular (most followed), Underpopular (least followed), Overactive (accounts that tweet a lot), and Unactive [sic] (accounts that tweet only a few times a year). You can quickly unfollow accounts that you think are not worth following anymore. The app also lets you see all accounts you unfollowed through the app via a side menu.

The tools are made by Norway-based developer Queen Raae, who told TechCrunch over Twitter DM that she built Prune your follows because she was reaching the follow limit on the platform.

“I hit the 5000 followers limit (after almost 16 years on Twitter) and had a hard time finding an account to unfollow. Twitter has only one view of the accounts you follow, with the most recently followed on top. So I got the idea to build something for myself,” she said.

The tool is pretty neat but Twitter enforces its own API limitations. An app can facilitate 50 unfollows per 15 minutes, and 500 unfollows in total for a day. If the app hits the limit, you can still click on the individual profile and unfollow them on Twitter.

Raae said to overcome this limit, she is experimenting with multiple features. One possibility is to display a total counter on the website or stagger the access to the tool. She’s also contemplating a feature that lets people add Twitter accounts to a list. Later, they can open that list on Twitter, and unfollow the accounts in one go.

She added that early users have demanded that they want to see more filters like the number of interactions with that account and a list of accounts that don’t follow them back. What’s more, Raae said another idea for future development is to introduce a customized filter so users can search for something like “Show me all web3 accounts with less than 3000 followers.”

Some of these problems could be easily solved if Twitter tweaked its API, but the Elon Musk-led company has already shut down multiple developer-related initiatives including Twitter Toolbox. Earlier this month, the company’s former head of developer platform, Amir Shevat, wrote a story for TechCrunch detailing the state of affairs at Twitter. He said only two out of 100 people team are still at Twitter when it comes to developer platforms. So, rather than improvements for developers, it’s reasonable to expect more tightening of platform rules – meaning it might be best to use this app while you can.

This tool helps you trim your follow list on Twitter by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Climate became an increasingly popular topic in 2021, perhaps best showcased in pieces like this interview with Eric Dean Wilson on why air conditioning, one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century, is killing the 21st, which we featured in our Best of TechCrunch 2021 list. But this year came in waves — heat waves, that is. New records were chalked on the board as hotter-than-normal summer days led to power grids failing and disastrous hurricanes devastated coastlines.

Take a look at some of our hottest TechCrunch+ climate 2022 coverage:

Manchin’s ultimatum may turn the US into a battery powerhouse

In August 2022, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin spoke with the automotive industry to ensure that the lucrative tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act that made EVs more affordable for U.S. consumers go toward the purchase of cars manufactured in the United States.

EV battery leases could be a boon for manufacturers, a bust for consumers

Did you know that you could lease an EV battery? Vietnamese automaker VinFast tested the waters of selling EVs and leasing their batteries. Our own Tim De Chant noted that this model could help lower the barriers to EV ownership.

Meet 5 startups working to harness the Earth’s heat to save the planet

Name five geothermal startups. You probably can’t, but Tim can. Geothermal energy is being harnessed as a carbon-free source of power, and startups are looking to take it from a niche market to one that could transform the way we think of energy. I’ve been captivated by geothermal energy and its uses since being part of a research project about two-phase flow in a hydrothermal (a subset of geothermal) vent system. In this article, Tim highlights five startups working to unlock geothermal’s potential, including QHeat, which aims to use geothermal energy for heating and cooling in dense urban areas.

EV charging sucks because it hasn’t found the right business model

While I don’t drive an EV, I do imagine that road trips with one must be quite difficult — finding charging stations and taking the time to charge instead of just filling up your tank — but that may soon no longer be the case. Tim says, “Today’s EV charging business models fall into three main categories — networks run by manufacturers to spur EV sales, networks that focus on consumers directly and networks run as a service for property owners or managers. (That’s a bit of an oversimplification since some use elements of all three, but it’s close enough. There are also attempts to use advertising to support EV charging, but I’m skeptical that’s a standalone model — advertising is a cutthroat business and highly cyclical, a combination that doesn’t jibe with long-term infrastructure investments.)” (Tim then rented a Tesla over the Thanksgiving holiday period and accepted the EV road-trip challenge.)

Laid off? Climate tech is looking for talent and founders

Looking for a job? The paywall is below the key links in this article. Best of luck with your job hunt!

While layoffs swept across the tech industry this year, it could be climate tech’s chance to grow. In the first half of this year, climate tech raised $5.6 billion. “Five years from now, PitchBook expects the climate tech market to be worth $1.4 trillion, a compound annual growth rate of 8.8%,” Tim writes.

Hot takes: How TechCrunch+ covered climate tech in 2022 by Miranda Halpern originally published on TechCrunch

A recent study finds that software engineers who use code-generating AI systems are more likely to cause security vulnerabilities in the apps they develop. The paper, co-authored by a team of researchers affiliated with Stanford, highlights the potential pitfalls of code-generating systems as vendors like GitHub start marketing them in earnest.

“Code-generating systems are currently not a replacement for human developers,” Neil Perry, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford and the lead co-author on the study, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Developers using them to complete tasks outside of their own areas of expertise should be concerned, and those using them to speed up tasks that they are already skilled at should carefully double-check the outputs and the context that they are used in in the overall project.”

The Stanford study looked specifically at Codex, the AI code-generating system developed by San Francisco-based research lab OpenAI. (Codex powers Copilot.) The researchers recruited 47 developers — ranging from undergraduate students to industry professionals with decades of programming experience — to use Codex to complete security-related problems across programming languages including Python, JavaScript and C.

Codex was trained on billions of lines of public code to suggest additional lines of code and functions given the context of existing code. The system surface a programming approach or solution in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish (e.g., “Say hello world”), drawing on both its knowledge base and the current context.

According to the researchers, the study participants who had access to Codex were more likely to write incorrect and “insecure” (in the cybersecurity sense) solutions to programming problems compared to a control group. Even more concerningly, they were more likely to say that their insecure answers were secure compared to the people in the control.

Megha Srivastava, a postgraduate student at Stanford and the second co-author on the study, stressed that the findings aren’t a complete condemnation of Codex and other code-generating systems. The study participants didn’t have security expertise that might’ve enabled them to better spot code vulnerabilities, for one. That aside, Srivastava believes that code-generating systems are reliably helpful for tasks that aren’t high risk, like exploratory research code, and could with fine-tuning improve in their coding suggestions.

“Companies that develop their own [systems], perhaps further trained on their in-house source code, may be better off as the model may be encouraged to generate outputs more in-line with their coding and security practices,” Srivastava said.

So how might vendors like GitHub prevent security flaws from being introduced by developers using their code-generating AI systems? The co-authors have a few ideas, including a mechanism to “refine” users’ prompts to be more secure — akin to a supervisor looking over and revising rough drafts of code. They also suggest that developers of cryptography libraries ensure their default settings are secure, as code-generating systems tend to stick to default values that aren’t always free of exploits.

“AI assistant code generation tools are a really exciting development and it’s understandable that so many people are eager to use them. These tools bring up problems to consider moving forward, though … Our goal is to make a broader statement about the use of code generation models,” Perry said. “More work needs to be done on exploring these problems and developing techniques to address them.”

To Perry’s point, introducing security vulnerabilities isn’t code-generating AI systems’ only flaw. At least a portion of the code on which Codex was trained is under a restrictive license; users have been able to prompt Copilot to generate code from Quake, code snippets in personal codebases and example code from books like “Mastering JavaScript” and “Think JavaScript.” Some legal experts have argued that Copilot could put companies and developers at risk if they were to unwittingly incorporate copyrighted suggestions from the tool into their production software.

GitHub’s attempt at rectifying this is a filter, first introduced to the Copilot platform in June, that checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public GitHub code and hides suggestions if there’s a match or “near match.” But it’s an imperfect measure. Tim Davis, a computer science professor at Texas A&M University, found that enabling the filter caused Copilot to emit large chunks of his copyrighted code, including all attribution and license text.

“[For these reasons,] we largely express caution toward the use of these tools to replace educating beginning-stage developers about strong coding practices,” Srivastava added.

Code-generating AI can introduce security vulnerabilities, study finds by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch