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Toyota has been taking a beating in the press these days. The new Prius, arguably the company’s standard bearer, has been damned with faint praise. One review called it “the best CD player in a download world.”

Beyond that, the company has been called out for lobbying against California’s right to set emissions standards and more generally to slow the transition to electric vehicles. That’s probably because its EV strategy is in shambles.

The automaker, once viewed as a leader in low-emissions motoring, has fallen from its perch.

Now, that may not matter much in the short term. The company is still profitable, netting $3.79 billion in the third quarter.

But the danger to the company lies in its long-term prospects. Investors have pressed the company on its EV plans, which are anemic enough to endanger its status as one of the world’s largest automakers. Those concerns are undoubtedly reflected in its stock price, which today hovers just a few dollars above where it traded 16 years ago when it was riding the Prius wave.

It’s possible that Toyota can pull a rabbit out of the hat and roll out a killer set of EVs. Or maybe the company is right about hydrogen, and it’ll achieve a breakthrough in fuel cell technology while simultaneously building an extensive network of green hydrogen stations. Maybe.

Toyota stumbled as Hyundai was stealing the successful Prius playbook by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

WhatsApp is launching proxy support for its users all over the world, the company announced on Thursday. The support will allow users to maintain access to WhatsApp if their connection is blocked or disrupted.

Choosing a proxy enables users to connect to WhatsApp through servers set up by volunteers and organizations around the world dedicated to helping people communicate freely. WhatsApp says connecting via proxy maintains the same level of privacy and security the app provides, and that personal messages will still be protected by end-to-end encryption. The company says messages will not be visible to anyone in between, not the proxy servers, WhatsApp or Meta.

“Our wish for 2023 is that these internet shutdowns never occur,” WhatsApp wrote in a blog post. “Disruptions like we’ve seen in Iran for months on end deny people’s human rights and cut people off from receiving urgent help. Though in case these shutdowns continue, we hope this solution helps people wherever there is a need for secure and reliable communication.”

The new option is available in the settings menu for all users running the latest version of the app. WhatsApp says if you have internet access, you can search through social media or search engines for trusted sources that have created a proxy. To connect to a proxy, you need to go into your WhatsApp settings and tap “Storage and Data” and select “Proxy.” Then, you need to tap “Use Proxy” and enter the proxy address and tap “Save” to connect.

If the connection is successful, you will see a checkmark. If you are still unable to send or receive WhatsApp messages using a proxy, that proxy may have been blocked. In this case, you can try again using a different proxy address. WhatsApp notes that the use of a third-party proxy will share your IP address with the proxy provider.

WhatsApp launches official proxy support for users globally by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit against Alex Mashinsky, co-founder and former CEO of Celsius Network, according to an announcement on Thursday.

James alleged that Mashinsky defrauded “hundreds of thousands of investors…out of billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency.” The lawsuit also claims that Mashinsky “repeatedly made false and misleading statements about Celsius’s safety to encourage investors to deposit billions of dollars in digital assets onto the platform.”

Celsius, which was once one of the world’s largest crypto lenders, filed for bankruptcy protection in mid-July 2022. At the time, Celsius said it had anywhere between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and liabilities and more than 100,000 creditors.

Prior to filing for bankruptcy, Celsius froze withdrawals for customers in June citing “extreme market conditions.” That freeze never lifted.

Celsius lost hundreds of millions of dollars of assets through risky investments and Mashinsky misrepresented and hid Celsius’ financial condition, the AG office stated. Additionally, Mashinsky failed to register as a salesperson for the platform and as a securities and commodities dealer, it added.

“The law is clear that making false and unsubstantiated promises and misleading investors is illegal,” James said in the release.

The NYAG lawsuit aims to ban Mashinsky, a New York resident, from doing any business in the state and require him to pay damages, restitution and disgorgement, for an undisclosed amount.

This legal action follows a number of suits by James. Last year, the attorney general sued Nexo for operating illegally and defrauding investors and reached a $1 million settlement with now-bankrupt BlockFi for offering unregistered securities, among other things.

This announcement follows a federal bankruptcy judge ruling from Wednesday that cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network, actually belong to the firm – thanks to the fine print.

The verdict gives Celsius ownership of the $4.2 billion in cryptocurrency that users deposited into its high-interest Earn program, according to a 45-page filing from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York on Wednesday.

Celsius had approximately 600,000 accounts in its Earn program, and the accounts held a collective value of approximately $4.2 billion as of July 10, 2022, the filing noted. About $23 million of that value consisted of stablecoins.

New York Attorney General sues former Celsius CEO for defrauding crypto investors by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Apple announced today that its Fitness+ service is getting a new kickboxing workout type, sleep meditation theme, artist spotlights and more for the new year. The company is adding kickboxing starting January 9. Each workout will consist of a distinct round of moves followed by one final round, which will combine the moves users just learned into a one-minute interval. No equipment is required for these sessions, and workouts will be 10, 20, or 30 minutes long.

As for the new sleep meditation, Apple says the theme is designed to help users release tension and anxiety. Apple will add new sleep meditations every week, and each practice can be done as part of a wind-down routine or while drifting off. To help users get started with sleep meditations, Apple is launching a new program called Introduction to Meditations for Sleep, which will use different techniques to help users slow down and rest.

In addition, Apple is adding a new artist spotlight series with workouts featuring music from Beyoncé. Starting January 9, seven new workouts featuring the singer’s music will be available across Cycling, Dance, HIIT, Pilates, Strength, Treadmill, and Yoga. Apple is also adding two additional Artist Spotlight offerings: the Foo Fighters on January 16 and Bad Bunny on January 23.

Fitness+ is also introducing new episodes of Time to Walk, beginning with actor Jamie Lee Curtis. New guests will be added each week, including Amber Ruffin, Jason Segel, Nina Hoss, Colman Domingo, Nathen Chen and more.

Last, Apple is adding two new Collections, curated content from the Fitness+ library to help users go after their goals or find inspiration. The first new collection is called “6 weeks to restart your fitness” and is designed to motivate users to build a new habit of working out every day. The collection features a blend of workouts to help users get back into fitness, and will launch on January 9. The second new collection, which is called “Level up your core training,” features short core workouts taken to the next level with dumbbells and will launch on January 23.

ApplelaunchedFitness+ in December 2020 and has since worked to compete with other subscription fitness offerings. Fitness+ is available as astandalone subscriptionfor $9.99 per month, or as a part of theApple One Premier plan for $32.95 per month, which gives users access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+ and iCloud+ with 2 TB of storage.

Apple Fitness+ to add kickboxing workouts, sleep meditation and more by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Through a partnership with online movie database IMDb, TikTok launched a new feature that allows users to tag a movie or TV show in their video. The link directs viewers to a dedicated in-app page with IMDb-provided information about the specific title as well as a collection of related TikTok videos. TikTok creators can also save a title to the “Favorites” tab on their profiles.

Rolled out today, the IMDb-powered feature is currently only available to TikTok users in the U.S. and the United Kingdom.

When a creator makes a video, they can select “Add Link,” then “Movie and TV,” which brings them to IMDb’s selection of over 12 million movies and TV series. Once the video is published, the selected title will appear above the caption.

TikTok’s new IMDb feature will likely be helpful for users that want to search for content related to their favorite film or TV series. There’s already a large community of movie and TV fans on TikTok, with a combined total of 25 billion views for hashtags like #FilmTok, #MovieTok, and #TVTok, Grace Li, director of strategic partnerships at TikTok and ByteDance, according to today’s announcement.

“We’re excited to welcome TikTok as the latest major company to rely on IMDb data to power new experiences for their customers,” Nikki Santoro, chief operating officer of IMDb, said in remarks. “This innovative collaboration enables TikTok creators to showcase and share the movies and shows they love, further extending the IMDb mission to help customers discover and decide what to watch and listen to, wherever they are.”

The new feature could also help media and production companies promote their titles more efficiently. Warner Bros., A24, Netflix and Paramount+ are just a few examples of companies using TikTok to urge more viewers to watch its newly released titles.

The announcement comes on the heels of TikTok’s “Why this video” feature, which tells users why a certain video was recommended to them. The company is also testing a horizontal full-screen mode.

TikTok users now have access to in-app movie and TV pages powered by IMDb by Lauren Forristal originally published on TechCrunch

Media streamer Plex was promising to expand its free streaming service to include rentals years ago, but that announcement arrived just ahead of the pandemic — at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. The company then also faced a host of other issues, including technical concerns, that required the company to reprioritize its plans. Now, Plex says it’s finally nearing the launch of a marketplace that will allow consumers to find movies and TV shows for rent or purchase, making Plex even more of a one-stop-shop for all your media content.

The company said it expects to launch its TVOD store (transactional video on demand, aka rentals) by the second quarter of this year, if not sooner.

Asked what the holdup was, Plex admitted the project was more challenging than it first anticipated.

“It was a lot harder than we thought,” said Plex co-founder and Chief Product Officer Scott Olechowski. “Getting all the DRM stuff working everywhere — we switched DRM providers. And we had to get approval from all the studios,” he explained. Plex also decided to move away from another third-party partner it had been working with to power its AVOD service (ad-supported video on demand) — a hurdle it decided needed to be completed before launching its rentals marketplace.

And then the company was hit with something they’ve now internally dubbed “Androidgeddon.” This was essentially an all-hands-on-deck nightmare technical snafu that was causing streams to randomly stop at ad breaks on Android TV, Android mobile and Amazon Fire TV platforms. The problem was eventually tracked down to a change in an SDK (software development kit) provided by Google, but it took several months to fix, using up all engineering resources in the process.

In addition to this combination of factors delaying the launch of its rentals marketplace, Plex over the past year chose to focus on another popular product: its FAST channels, or free ad-supported streaming TV. FAST channels are basically anything that looks like the same kind of TV guide a cable provider offers, similar to something like Pluto TV or Xumo. (Roku and Amazon offer FAST channels as well, via The Roku Channel’s Live TV Guide and Amazon Freevee, respectively.) This is a growing area of the streaming market and serve as a way for advertisers to reach consumers as cable TV viewership declines.

FAST channels have been a big area of growth for Plex’s business, consumer engagement, and revenue. The company announced during CES this week it doubled its FAST programming over the past year to reach over 300 channels, including A+E’s Crime 360, Hallmark Movies & More, and The Walking Dead on Stories by AMC. In addition, it grew its user base to 16 million monthly active users who have streamed billions of minutes of content, including through FAST programming and ad-supported content, allowing Plex to nearly triple its annual ad revenue. Ad-supported video, however, still outpaces FAST, in terms of ad revenue, but both are growing.

While Plex doesn’t publicly disclose its revenue, it’s in the double-digit millions. The company now has 175 employees and, unlike many in the tech industry, hasn’t had to resort to layoffs.

In addition, the tightening of ad budgets hasn’t yet hurt its business.

“It’s been healthy,” remarked Olechowski. “We haven’t seen from year to year any huge shift in the programmatic market that’s impacted us…we’re pretty happy with where we are,” he said.

Video rentals aren’t the only thing on Plex’s roadmap this year. The company is still hoping to launch a subscriptions offering — another idea it’s been kicking around for some time — which would allow users to subscribe to paid streamers through Plex. And it aims to introduce recommendations in its “Discover” section launched earlier this, offering users a Universal Watchlist and its first social experiences — the latter of which will roll out to all Plex users later this year, all well, instead of just Plex Pass premium subscribers.

The company says it wants to introduce a way for users to leave reviews of the shows and movies they watched instead of just leaving a star rating, too, but the timing on that feature isn’t quite as set. All these changes will also include some UX updates (design changes to the user experience), as well.

Streamer Plex finally ready to launch a TV and movie rentals marketplace by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

Ossia’s wireless power tech, Cota, has been kicking for a long time now. In fact, we wrote about the thing nearly a decade ago. Certainly the promises attached to the technology are intriguing: over-the-air power at a distance, without a line of sight. So, where does one sign up?

Today at CES, the Pacific Northwestern firm announced a step toward bringing it to more users. It’s taking the form of the Universal Base, a white labeled product that receives power from a nearby Cota Home node. The technology can be built into a new product or added to an existing one.

“Cota is unique in that it automatically sends wireless power over the air safely and reliably, even with people in the room or on the move,” says Ossia CEO Doug Stovall. “Ossia works with companies to license the Cota technology and complete rapid integrations, like this one, which helps expedite time to market. The Cota Universal Base is a springboard for organizations that wish to cut the cord on plug-in charging pads and surfaces and move to Real Wireless Power.”

The first commercially available product to utilize the set up will be the universal charging base for the ARCHOS Cota Wireless Power Security Camera. The home security camera can be used untethered, receiving power from the Home node, rather than relying on just battery power. As far as applications go, security cameras make sense. They’re always on and can be a bit tough to wire. Otherwise you have to change the thiing.

Per the company,

It comes with a Cota transmitter that plugs into a wall outlet and continuously charges up to five cameras within a 30-foot range of the Ossia transmitter. Homeowners can monitor power levels and camera footage from a mobile app. This is a seamless user experience that requires no management. An event captured on the security camera can trigger the camera app with nothing extra to download.

Pre-orders for the Cota Universal Base will open early this year. It will start shipping closer to the end of the year.

Ossia is taking its wireless power tech to consumers with a new charging base by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

There isn’t much hope that 2023’s fundraising environment will be better for startups than last year’s. It seems likely that it will get worse before it gets better — even at the earliest stages, which have largely been insulated thus far.

But for burgeoning companies capable of building business models that reflect current conditions and rely less on venture capital to grow, the frosty environment could wind up being a good thing down the line.

While some sectors need to raise a lot of capital to build a viable business, like space and defense or manufacturing, most don’t — but that didn’t stop companies from collecting oodles of dollars during the past few record-breaking years. But it’s better to just raise the smallest amount you need, which many startups are now discovering.

“I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve spoken to that are in a tough environment because they painted themselves into a corner because of their fundraising history and valuation,” Rachel ten Brink, a general partner at pre-seed-focused Red Bike Capital, told TechCrunch. “They started in 2017 and raised at 100x revenue. It’s a SaaS company; what are they doing from here?”

But now that funding isn’t as easy to come by, early-stage founders may have the opportunity to avoid some of those pitfalls.

Frosty fundraising environment may change early startups’ DNA for the better by Rebecca Szkutak originally published on TechCrunch

At CES, Amazon today announced that a number of new devices from four manufactureres will soon join its Sidewalk network. Sidewalk, Amazon’s long-range, low-bandwidth IoT mesh network that is powered by sharing a small portion of a user’s bandwidth from devices like the company’s Echo speakers and Ring cameras, currently supports the Tile tracker, Amazon’s own Ring cameras and sensors, as well as Level smart locks and CareBand’s senior-care systems. Now, you can add sensors from Browan and New Cosmos, Meshify and Deviceroy’s Aria to this list, though only the Deviceroy system, which will connect solar inverters to the internet, is currently available, with the rest launching later this year.

For the most part, these four new partners are not exactly household names. Amazon’s Tanuj Mohan, the company’s GM and CTO for Sidewalk, however, told me that a number of new partners will launch over the course of this year. More importantly, he also said that Amazon plans to open up the Sidewalk network to developers in the first half of this year. This, he noted, will enable virtually anyone who wants to get started with building IoT products to order a reference kit from Amazon’s partners and get going in days, all without having to worry about connectivity.

“Anybody who has an idea should be able to go to an AWS website, find a hardware kit from Silicon Labs, TI or from somebody, order the kit and be able to get this kit flowing data via AWS into an application,” he explained. “They can start writing literally as soon as the kit is in their hands. So that is what we expect [when we] open for developers. My vision is that with some of these kits and devices, they could actually try building something real out of it and maybe even in low numbers for proof of concepts to prove their business case in a timespan that was never before possible.”

As Mohan noted, one of the major challenges for the Sidewalk team is to get people to change the way they think about IoT connectivity. “The market doesn’t fully appreciate why sidewalk is different,” he said when I asked him what his team’s hardest challenge is. “They have heard that, oh, Matter solves everything, or ZigBee solves everything, or we have had this forever. But not really. You haven’t had a network that’s just there and a device that ships to your house that you power on and it’s on. Yes, maybe a cell phone with a SIM card does that. But nothing else.”

Some manufacturers may have gotten started with ZigBee or WiFi to add smarts to everyday devices like a faucet, he noted, but then learned that people didn’t have a ZigBee hub or just wouldn’t configure it. “It was an investment that wasn’t worthwhile,” he said. “If you look at the percentages of some of these smart things that smartness was forced on, a very low percentage of them got ever got connected.”

Ideally, that’s not a problem with Sidewalk and while Matter is trying to solve some of these problems, Mohan argued that Sidewalk may actually help Matter to grow because it can provide the initial networking capabilities for the Matter network to allow for setting up new devices.

Amazon Sidewalk adds new partners, plans to open to developers soon by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch

I first met with the team at Labrador Systems in a hotel suite several CESes ago. What immediately stood out about the firm is its focus on the long-standing promise of eldercare robotics. Various systems have existed in Japan for decades now, aimed at that nation’s aging population. But for the most part, it’s a category that’s been lacking here in the States – especially in terms of actually bringing products to market.

Toward the end of last year, the California-based startup announced that it was beginning to deliver its first systems to clients in the U.S. It also announced new backing from the Alexa Fund. Included in that news, was the promise of compatibility with Amazon’s voice assistant. While it’s certainly true that voice computing doesn’t make sense for every scenario, it really does here.

Labrador is showing off the feature at CES this week. The demo utilizes an Echo Show 10. The smart screen is mounted on top of the robot – serving as a tablet similar to the kind found on teleconferencing systems. The Echo’s built-in swivel means it can turn to face to the user. To, for example, get a beverage, you would say, “Alexa, ask Lab 1 to get me a drink.” It’s all still an early proof on concept, but Labrador plans to start piloting the set up with its customer base soon.

“The proof-of-concept demo with the Echo Show 10 is a preview of what we will be testing in our next rounds of pilots with care providers,” says CEO Mike Dooley. “Capabilities like this can make a dramatic difference in the quality of people’s lives and their ability to live independently while staying connected with others, and we’re grateful to Amazon’s team for their support on this project.”

The set up makes sense for Laborador. It’s a relatively inexpensive way to add functionality to its systems using off-the-shelf consumer hardware. For Amazon, it aligns nicely with the company’s consumer robotics play, which puts Alexa at the heart of its various consumer robotics offerings, from Astro to (potentially) Roomba.

Labrador taps the Echo Show to expand functionality for its eldercare robot by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch