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The Indian central bank’s governor said on Wednesday that it’s not at war with crypto, but asserted that cryptocurrencies have no underlying fundamentals and their usage should be prohibited.

RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das told a room packed with banking executives and lawmakers that crypto has a huge inherent risk to the macroeconomic and stability of the nation. “After the development of the last one year, including the latest episode surrounding FTX, I don’t think we need to say anything more. Time has proven that crypto is worth what it’s worth today.”

“Change in value in any so-called product is the function of the market. But unlike any other asset or product, our main concern with crypto is that it doesn’t have any underlying whatsoever. I think crypto or private cryptocurrency is a fashionable way of describing what is otherwise a 100% speculative activity,” said Das.

Das said crypto owes its origin to the idea that it bypasses or breaks the existing financial system. “They don’t believe in the central bank, they don’t believe in a regulated financial world. I’m yet to hear a good argument about what public purpose it serves,” he said, adding that he holds the view that crypto should be prohibited.

“It should be prohibited because if it is allowed to grow … say it’s regulated and allowed to grow … please mark my words that the next financial crisis will come from private cryptocurrencies,” he said.

India is among the nations that has taken a stringent approach at handling cryptocurrencies. Earlier this year, it began taxing virtual currencies, levying a 30% tax on the gains and a 1% deduction on each crypto transaction.

The nation’s move, alongside the market downturn, has severely depleted the transactions local exchanges CoinSwitch Kuber, backed by Sequoia India and Andreessen Horowitz, and CoinDCX, backed by Pantera, process in the nation.

Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, founder and chief executive of the world’s largest crypto exchange Binance, told TechCrunch in a recent interview that the firm doesn’t see India as a “very crypto-friendly environment.” He said the firm is attempting to relay its concerns to the local authority about the local taxation, but asserted that tax policies typically take a long time to change.

“Binance goes to countries where regulations are pro-crypto and pro-business. We don’t go to countries where we won’t have a sustainable business — or any business, regardless of whether or not we go,” he said.

Coinbase, which has backed both CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, launched its crypto platform in the country earlier this year butquickly rolled back the service amid a regulatory scare. Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong said in May that the firm disabled Coinbase’s support for local payments infra UPI “because of someinformal pressure from the [central bank] Reserve Bank of India.”

“Crypto closed 2021 with the narrative that finance as we know it was slow, inefficient and clumsy. Defi and DAOs were the path forward. Crypto prices, in their own jargon, were mooning and investors were HODLing. Since May 2022, cryptos have lost some of the shine — two-thirds of the value. Failure of some entities have caused the ecosystem to unravel,” T. Rabi Sankar, Deputy Governor of RBI, who once likened crypto to tulip and Ponzi scheme, said Wednesday.

“The technology that was heralded as the end of government, and regulators and intermediaries — the underlying philosophy of crypto — is now frantically seeking to be regulated,” he said.

India central bank chief warns crypto will cause the next financial crisis if permitted to grow by Manish Singh originally published on TechCrunch

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, foreigners have been leaving China in droves to escape the country’s strict “zero-COVID” restrictions, which had limited people’s domestic and overseas travel for nearly three years until rules began to relax recently. So when NetEase, the second-largest gaming company in China, said it had an expats-led studio working on a game out of Shanghai for the last three years, I was a bit surprised.

Helmed by lead producer Oscar Lopez and creative director Eve Jobse, Miaozi launched its first title globally on Steam last Friday. Called Cygnus Enterprise, the game, in the studio’s own words, is a “cross-genre single-player sci-fi game for PC that puts the player in charge of an outpost on an alien planet” and “alternates between small-scale city management and action RPG gameplay.”

Both NetEase and its rival Tencent have been placing more focus on overseas expansion as regulatory clampdowns hamper their domestic success. Aside from acquiring small Western studios, the two Chinese titans have been recruiting international talent. Tencent’s most lucrative studio TiMi kicked off its North America operation in early 2020 and its internal rival (the firm is known for encouraging in-house competition) Lightspeed similarly set up shop in LA this year. NetEase also opened its first US studio in Austin this May.

While the months-long lockdown in Shanghai this spring drove many foreigners to exit China, Miaozi’s international employees stayed put and found the situation had little impact on their work.

“Luckily for us, it worked really well,” Lopez said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We didn’t leave China during COVID times. China was a really safe environment to be in, and we basically focused on our development. The company and our team had all the infrastructure needed to develop from home in case it was needed at some point.”

“You can develop anywhere in the world,” he continued. “It’s better if you’re face to face, of course; it’s always easier to engage in communication and solve problems. But the truth is that [the pandemic] didn’t affect us much.”

The naming of the studio speaks to the team’s affinity for China. Miaozi is short for the sound of cats, “meow”, and “baozi”, a type of soft, fluffy, filled bun that’s common in China — two things that the team of 50 employees loves.

“Downstairs around the office, there’s a convenience store FamilyMart, and what people often get during lunchtime are these baozi, and everyone love these baozi,” Jobse explained affectionately the daily routine familiar to those who have worked in Shanghai. “But they also love cats. There’re a lot of street cats there outside and people pat them and feed them food.”

“We wanted to have something that is kind of cross-culture and loved by everyone, and something that Chinese and the rest of the people in the team would understand,” Jobse added.

In designing the game, the creative director sought inspiration from Chinese science fiction, which generally conveys a more uplifting message than their Western counterparts — the government has been encouraging “positive energy” in news, arts, and culture rather than cynical, negative sentiments in recent years.

“We’ve been able to make a science fiction game that is both innovative and also positive,” noted Jobse. “Science fiction IPs right now are very, very focused on the negative and the dangers of space or the dangers of alien creatures.”

She went on to reference the influence of The Wandering Earth, a blockbuster Chinese sci-fi film loosely based on a short story by Liu Cixin, the author of The Three-Body Problem.

“It’s actually quite a lot of inspirational little details that [we] could take from. For example, The Wandering Earth really has this whole spirit of collaboration and working together [to] overcome this obstacle… Even if they’re from different cultures or different backgrounds, they want to work together to achieve a common goal.”

As with a lot of other industries, the development of China’s gaming sector is shaped by foreign investments and partnerships. International gaming publishers coveted China’s rapidly growing internet population, and Chinese gaming firms were eager to learn from their more established Western peers. NetEase itself has a long history of working with foreign publishers — last month marked the end of its 14-year licensing deal with Blizzard Activision to operate the latter’s games in China.

Cutthroat competition in the Chinese market has given rise to a generation of internet firms that puts emphasis on short-term earnings over long-term innovations. It’s a delicate balance. Lopez reckoned that his team has a high degree of creative freedom as long as certain expectations are met. “Within our studio where we produce games, we are objective-oriented. We are meant to produce a game within time and budget. In those boundaries is where our freedom lies,” he said.

As expats fled China’s zero-COVID, this developer built a sci-fi game for NetEase by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Isn’t it wonderful that there are researchers out there whose job is quite simply to make a robotic bird? That’s certainly the goal of this lab, whose flapping-wing drone, or ornithopter, has now been equipped with a grasping claw to let it take a rest on a nearby branch or perhaps even a finger — a capability that could make it a much more practical tool.

There’s a good reason flight evolved over time, making use of flapping wings — they’re a lot simpler for a bird or insect to grow than rotors or jets, for one thing. Elegance is a hallmark of nature’s designs, and winged creatures fly or glide with a minimum of energy and a great deal of grace.

It should be no surprise that scientists have been at pains to re-create winged flapping flight in robotic form for decades, though, like all biomimetics research, meeting with mixed success. But the École Polytechnique Fedérale de Lausanne — one of Switzerland’s famous technical universities — and the University of Seville are doing quite well.

The European multi-institutional GRIFFIN project, let us admit first, has the most far-fetched backronym I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve encountered a lot: General compliant aerial Robotic manipulation system Integrating Fixed and Flapping wings to INcrease range and safety. My goodness!

The winged flight bit of the project has been underway for years, with various successes noted on the project’s YouTube page and site. You can see it flapping around in this recent video.

But the problem for this method, as with much flight, is energy. Not enough power and you can’t fly for long — but too big a battery and you can’t fly at all! (Incidentally, it gives one a new respect for eagles carrying off livestock.) In the lab, a balance must be struck between size and capacity. But the recent addition of a grasping claw could help make that less of a concern.

The claw (just one, to save weight), like the rest of the ornithopter, needed to be strong but light, able to grasp perches of varying size and work in communication with the perceptive engine of the GRIFFIN. The one they designed synchronizes with the motion of the flapping, and its design, with a sort of silicone band as a first contact, grips softly yet firmly and without jarring the robot.

“Once an ornithopter can master landing autonomously on a tree branch, then it has the potential to carry out specific tasks, such as unobtrusively collecting biological samples or measurements from a tree. Eventually, it could even land on artificial structures, which could open up further areas of application,” said Raphael Zufferey, a postdoctoral fellow at EPFL currently working on GRIFFIN at Seville.

It’s not just that it can land on a branch and do something; it’s that it doesn’t have to go all the way back to the surface. If you’re using half your energy just to go from ground level to 10 meters up, that really limits what you can do. But if you can land on a branch, charge up a bit (why not have a little solar cell on there?), do some work like taking a picture or sample, then hop to another branch across the way and do the same thing…it starts to look less like a tech demo and a lot more like a capable robot bird.

Zufferey hopes to continue development along these lines; the gripper really opens things up for the project. But they’re not the only ones out there: hummingbird-inspired drones, dragonfly-inspired drones, even bee-inspired drones are being developed for different purposes and are at varying stages of readiness. Just don’t tell the “birds aren’t real” people about it.

This autonomous ornithopter lands and perches on a single claw by Devin Coldewey originally published on TechCrunch

Carl Eschenbach, a longtime enterprise software executive who joined Sequoia Capital in 2016 and went on to lead a number of lucrative deals for the venture firm, is going back to an operating role.

As the new co-CEO of Workday, Eschenbach will co-lead the enterprise cloud applications giant with its co-CEO, cofounder and company chair Aneel Bhusri, until 2024, at which point Eschenbach will take over as sole CEO.

Chano Fernandez, a former SAP executive who joined Workday in 2014 and has served as its co-CEO since 2020, has “stepped down” as co-CEO and relinquished his seat on the company’s board, “effective immediately,” says Workday.

Before joining Sequoia, Eschenbach spent his career with a variety of software companies. Most notably, before diving into VC, he was the president and COO of VMware, the cloud computing and virtualization technology company, where he spent more than 14 years. Before joining VMware, he served as a VP at Inktomi, a dot-com era company that was acquired in 2002 by Yahoo.

Eschenbach will remain a venture partner at Sequoia Capital, but he isn’t expected to lead new deals. While at Sequoia, he struck a number of deals that ultimately produced huge returns for the firm, including persuading Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan to accept $100 million in Series D funding entirely from Sequoia in 2017.

The venture firm owned 11.4% of Zoom at the time of its 2019 IPO; Zoom’s shares skyrocketed afterward as COVID-19 gained traction the following year, shutting down much of the world, which turned largely to Zoom’s video communication’s platform.

Thanks largely to Eschenbach, along Sequoia partner Pat Grady, Sequoia also owned an 8.4% stake in Snowflake heading into its 2020 IPO (it was the biggest software IPO ever).

Eschenbach joined the board of Workday in 2018. It is not a Sequoia portfolio company, but Sequoia’s partners are often asked to take outside board seats and on rare occasions, the firm green-lights these moves. (Longtime partner Jim Goetz — who persuaded Eschenbach to join Sequoia — is on the board of Intel, as another example.)

The co-CEO role can be controversial. Oracle seemed to pull off such a pairing successfully with top executives Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, until his death last year. SAP, meanwhile, tried a co-CEO setup and abandoned it fairly quickly.

Salesforce’s experiments with co-CEOs have also not been successful. Earlier this month, almost a year to the day after becoming co-CEO of the CRM giant, Bret Taylor stepped down in a stunning announcement that appeared to come out of the blue.

Taylor wasn’t the first co-CEO of Salesforce to throw in the towel for one reason or another. In 2018, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff named Keith Block co-CEO. Block lasted in the position slightly longer than Taylor, stepping down in 2020.

Possibly, Eschenbach and Bhusri will understand one another better than most given they have similar histories. Before cofounding Workday in 2005, Bhusri was himself a venture capitalist with the firm Greylock Partners, investing on the firm’s behalf for more than 23 years.

Sequoia’s Carl Eschenbach, who led deals for Zoom and Snowflake, to run Workday as co-CEO by Connie Loizos originally published on TechCrunch

Tesla shares fell 8.12% Tuesday after Wall Street downgraded price targets on the electric vehicle maker’s stock. Analysts fear that CEO Elon Musk is distracted by his hostile takeover and micromanagement of Twitter, and that China sales will be affected by the Chinese government allowing COVID-19 to spread after ending its stance on harsh restrictions.

Tesla’s shares hit a more than two-year low of $138 at the time this article was published.

Analysts say investors are concerned Musk will sell more shares of Tesla to fund Twitter, and that his antics on the social media platform are hurting the EV maker’s brand. Last week Musk sold around $3.5 billion worth of shares, one of many stock dumps the CEO has done this year.

Some investors are calling on Tesla’s board of directors to replace Musk as CEO, to step in and protect shareholders from the stock drop.

“Tesla stock price now reflects the value of having no CEO. Great job tesla BOD – Time for a shake up,” tweeted Ross Gerber, a portfolio manager at Gerber Kawasaki.

It’s not yet clear if Tesla EV sales have been affected by consumer sentiment about Musk’s Twitter involvement — after all, Teslas are still widely considered to be good automobiles by all metrics of battery range, performance, technology and safety. We’ll have to wait for January to see 2022’s fourth-quarter numbers.

The worries about China sales are warranted though, says Gordon Johnson, CEO and founder at GLJ Research and Tesla bear. During a Twitter Spaces event Tuesday, Johnson noted that China is Tesla’s largest and most profitable market.

It’s difficult to find regional breakdowns of Tesla units sold per quarter, but the China Passenger Car Association (CPCA) keeps track of monthly sales. The CPCA reported that Tesla delivered 28,217 EVs from its Shanghai plant in July (a low number due to factory line upgrades); 76,965 in August; and 83,135 in September, totaling 188,317 units sold in China in the third quarter. That’s a little more than half of all units sold worldwide — or 343,830 units — in Q3.

China’s rates of EV adoption are higher than in the U.S. and Europe, so it naturally makes up a larger portion of Tesla’s global sales. Investors fear a drop in those sales in the coming months as COVID-19 threatens to ravage the country following the Chinese government’s complete reversal on its previous draconian restrictions. If that happens, Tesla will need to rely more on its Western markets, where the Twitter dilemma could cause problems.

“Is the Tesla EV brand being impacted by all this Twitter drama, meaning all the controversy?” said Gary Black, a managing partner of the Future Fund during a Twitter Spaces session Tuesday. Black, who owns about $50 million in Tesla stock, said in August that Tesla is the fund’s largest position.

“Is it causing people to either cancel their orders or not order Teslas or, you know, just causing the brand to fall out of favor among people who buy EVs? I don’t see it, but that’s one of the worries that institutional investors are asking me.”

Black said he does believe eventually Musk’s personality, in particular his political rhetoric that rants about the “woke mind virus,” will have an impact on the brand “if [Musk] doesn’t stop.” He went on to say he’d advise the board to “pull Elon aside and say, look, you may have these political views, but you’re not helping the Tesla brand by articulating them.”

“I don’t know what he gets out of insulting his client base on the left,” said Black.

Musk recently posted a Twitter poll asking if he should step down as CEO of the social media platform, and said he would abide by the results of the poll. Voters voted in favor of him leaving, prompting Musk to say he believes bots rigged the poll. There have been reports that Musk is looking for a new CEO, but he has not yet affirmed this.

Black said the uncertainty around whether Musk will make good on his word is one of the reasons investors are selling Tesla stock.

Like many other investors, Black also called on Musk and Tesla to buy back some of the stock, saying there’s no better way to demonstrate that he believes the stock is too cheap.

Johnson said the stock, which is priced higher than General Motors, Ford and Stellantis combined, is overvalued largely due to advancements Musk has promised but has not yet delivered.

“I believe the reason why Tesla went so high is because Musk said that he would have cars that can drive with optical cameras. He has not done that,” said Johnson. “He said he would have a [battery technology] that would deliver a $25,000 car. He has not done that. He said he was a silicon innovator. He’s not. He said he was the world leader in biped robotics. He’s not. I believe these promises combined with quantitative easing is what drove the stock higher, not Tesla’s execution.”

Now that the stock price is coming down, Johnson implied it’s possible investors are not just spooked by the current situations with Twitter and in China, but they’re realizing that Tesla is an automaker like any other at the end of the day, and its stock should reflect that.

Tesla stock plunges as investors fear Twitter dramas, loss of China sales by Rebecca Bellan originally published on TechCrunch

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

We’ve been working on a series of gift guides over the past month or so. Today, Devin’s guide to gaming headphones is up! If you missed any of our gift guides, here’s our full set of themso far!

Our favorite gift would be “more hours in the day” and “a week of sleep,” but failing that, perhaps some hot chocolate and a three-hour uninterrupted block of time to read books would be magnificent. — Christine and Haje

The TechCrunch Top 3

Making 3D out of text: That’s OpenAI’s new thing as it releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models. And not just any models, Kyle writes — it “generates point clouds, or discrete sets of data points in space that represent a 3D shape — hence the cheeky abbreviation.”
Somebody call 911: There’s a Porsche 911 running with synthetic fuel from the carmaker’s Chilean pilot plant. The move comes after years of just talking about it, Tim Stevens writes.
More AI: Kyle had another top-read story on artificial intelligence, this time about Petals creating a free, distributed network for running text-generating AI.

Startups and VC

It’s been a year, y’all. Brian, Kyle, Mary Ann, and Natasha M reflect that this year’s roundup was not a particularly fun one to write. No one wants to see startups fail, but we’re all keenly aware that most ultimately do. A commonly cited figure suggests that 90% of these companies will ultimately fail. But even with that in mind, 2022 just hit different…Here’s “Remembering the startups we lost in 2022.”

Apropos year in review, Miranda collected the top takes from the TechCrunch+ team, including Amazon buying One Medical, interesting startup theses, and whether or not the TC team would be sad if Twitter vanished from our very screens.

And, of course, we lift our gaze to the future, with Connie’s reporting on Bradley Tusk from Tusk Ventures and the three counterintuitive 2023 predictions about Musk, SFB, and even Kraft.

Okay, that’s enough about the past and the future. Here are five stories from the right here, right now.

Hey, you look opinionated: Kyle reports that User Interviews, which helps companies recruit survey participants, raises $27.5 million.
Tossing another $0.4 billion on the pile: Kate reports on the South Korean financial super app Toss, as it closes a $405 million (!) Series G, with a 7% valuation bump.
TuSimple lifts off the gas: Rebecca takes a look at reports that layoffs may be around the corner for self-driving truck company TuSimple.
It’ll give a wine return, I’m sure: Anna explores how Fintech Vint hopes to turn wine and spirits into a mainstream asset class.
Hello? Is that the bank?: Early-stage Mexico fintech Aviva is making loans as easy as a video call, reports Christine.

Banish vanity metrics from your startup’s pitch deck

It’s legitimately nice to give your hardworking team targets they can work toward, but vanity metrics (e.g., X email signups in Y days, 20% more retweets) are like a Little League awards dinner. Everyone goes home a winner!

“The truth is, investors know what traction looks like,” writes Haje Jan Kamps, which means feel-good stats have no place in a pitch deck.

“Don’t confuse fluffy numbers and vanity metrics with your go-to-market strategy.”

Three more from the TC+ team:

Retrofuturism in NFT land: Magic Eden exec sees NFT gaming like the ‘early days of mobile gaming,’ by Jacquelyn.
Simpler debugging, simpler development:Simplify debugging to reduce the complexity of embedded system development, advises Nicolas Rabault.
With friends like these, you don’t need enemies: Dominic-Madori reports on the continued #MyTechBestfriend fallout.

TechCrunch+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription!

Big Tech Inc.

You’ve seen the video in your feed, but now TikTok is going to tell you why its algorithm chose it for you, Aisha writes. “This feature is one of many ways we’re working to bring meaningful transparency to the people who use our platform, and builds on a number of steps we’ve taken towards that goal,” the company said.

And we have four more for you:

Bird, bird, bird is the word: Scooter company Bird said it is merging with Bird America in an effort to keep it rolling. Harri and Rebecca have more.
This channel’s on fire: Amazon unveiled some new content to Fire TV, including free music videos, viral videos and more ad-supported content, Aisha reports.
Tell them how you really feel: Vercel’s new commenting feature makes it easier to collaborate on preview deployments, Frederic writes.
Get your game on: Amazon’s subscription-based gaming service Prime Gaming is now live in India, Manish reports.

Daily Crunch: New Point-E AI allows users to generate 3D objects from detailed text prompts by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

Another Mars robot is settling in for a long, long sleep.

With dust caking its solar panels, InSight has been losing the ability to recharge for months — in the spring, it was operating at just one-tenth of its landing power. Now, the thick layers of dust might have doomed InSight for good. NASA announced on December 19 that its InSight lander had not responded to communications from Earth, and “it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations.”

InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018. Its mission was to study the interior structure and composition of Mars over a period of 709 Martian sols, or 728 Earth days, primarily through seismographic recordings. Like many of NASA’s other Mars robots, the lander has far exceeded the planned mission duration — as of December 20, 1,445 sols (local Martian days) have elapsed.

InSight’s demise by dust was not unexpected. Because of space and weight considerations, the lander was not equipped with dust-removing instruments, relying upon the capricious Martian wind to clean its solar panels.

In an April 22 press release announcing the extension of eight planetary science missions, including InSight, NASA wrote of the Mars lander: “The extended mission will continue InSight’s seismic and weather monitoring if the spacecraft remains healthy. However, due to dust accumulation on its solar panels, InSight’s electrical power production is low, and the mission is unlikely to continue operations for the duration of its current extended mission unless its solar panels are cleared by a passing ‘dust devil’ in Mars’ atmosphere.”

Less than a month after extending InSight’s mission, NASA announced the anticipated timeline of the lander’s slowdown and eventual end of mission: December of 2022, a very accurate prediction. “InSight has transformed our understanding of the interiors of rocky planets and set the stage for future missions,” Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division said in the press release. “We can apply what we’ve learned about Mars’ inner structure to Earth, the Moon, Venus, and even rocky planets in other solar systems.”

Because power levels were so low this summer, the InSight team turned off all science instruments except for its seismometer, which collected data through at least Oct. 22.

NASA intends to attempt to contact InSight again, but if the lander misses two consecutive communications, the team will officially declare the end of mission. “After that, NASA’s Deep Space Network will listen for a time, just in case,” wrote NASA in a November 1 statement.

Before we say our last goodbyes to the lander — you can even send a virtual postcard to InSight and its team to celebrate their success — we’re taking a look back at the mission’s highlights.

Cubesats

When InSight launched atop an Atlas V rocket on May 5, 2018, there were two other robots onboard: CubeSats nicknamed “WALL-E” and “EVE.” Part of the Mars Cube One (MarCO) mission, these briefcase-sized satellites demonstrated the ability of CubeSats to survive deep space. They successfully relayed data from InSight as it landed on Mars back to Earth, then ceased contact shortly after.

The sound of Mars

Shortly after landing, InSight collected what its researchers called an “unplanned treat”: using the lander as a giant microphone to listen to the sound of the Martian surface. It’s very quiet (as expected in a thin atmosphere) and mostly just wind (also as expected) but it was thrilling just to hear the surface of another world. Since then we’ve also heard recordings made by the Perseverance rover of the Ingenuity helicopter. You can listen to the InSight-captured wind below:

https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/mars-sound-from-insight-1.mp3

Marsquakes

On April 6, 2019, InSight took the first-ever recording of a marsquake — the Mars version of an earthquake — using its Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument. Since then, it’s measured more than 1,300 marsquakes, including a magnitude 5 temblor on May 4, 2022, which is the largest ever recorded. In studying the marsquake, researchers have established the composition of Mars’ interior to include 12 to 23 miles (20 to 37 kilometers) of crust, a 969-mile (1,560-kilometer) thick mantle, and a molten core with a radius of 1,137 miles (1,830 kilometers). Useful if we ever plan on doing any mining operations there.

Magnetic “ghosts”

InSight carried the first magnetometer to Mars, using it to study rocks both at the surface and several miles beneath it. In them, it discovered traces of the planet’s former magnetic field, which no longer exists. Those rocks demonstrated powerful magnetism some 10 times stronger than scientists expected based on previous satellite data.

Martian weather

Insight also served as a little Martian weather station, recording all kinds of atmospheric phenomena. It took the first audio recording of Martian wind on December 1, 2018, and it recorded numerous pressure drops from passing “dust devils,” or whirlwinds. The public could even read InSight’s daily weather reports, which were published online until October 25, 2020.

Fighting till the end

Even though InSight was operating at extremely low power levels due to the dust accumulations on its solar panels, the lander continued to monitor Mars’ seismic activity throughout the summer and into the fall. The SEIS instrument was the last operational instrument on the lander, collecting data through at least October 22. From that date, InSight still had enough power to continue communications with Earth, but now, it has gone silent.

“The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations,” wrote NASA in an update.

On December 19, a NASA Twitter account for the lander posted what might be the robot’s last photograph with the following message: “My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”

After two or three decades of collecting more and more dust, perhaps InSight will once again meet humans, as astronauts land on Mars.

NASA’s InSight mission is winding down — look back at the Mars lander’s many accomplishments by Stefanie Waldek originally published on TechCrunch

We’re going to have to wait a little longer for Rocket Lab’s American debut. The company, which is headquartered in Los Angeles, was due to launch a trio of satellites for radio-frequency analytics customer HawkEye 360 to orbit from the company’s new site at Virginia Space’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. It would’ve marked the first time a Rocket Lab vehicle has taken off from U.S. soil. But the company said late yesterday that strong upper-levels winds made today — the final day in the launch window — a no-go, pushing the launch to January.

It’s certainly a bummer. The mission was due to have a handful of firsts: Not only marking the first time Electron takes off from U.S. soil, but also the first time a rocket flies with novel flight safety software that Rocket Lab and NASA say is a gamechanger for American launch plans. That software, an autonomous flight termination system, will reduce range costs and prime Rocket Lab to serve the launch needs of the U.S. defense agencies.

“This flight just doesn’t symbolize another launch pad for Rocket Lab,” CEO Peter Beck told reporters in a media briefing last Wednesday. “It’s a standing up of a new capability for the nation.”

That capability is called the NASA Autonomous Flight Termination Unit (NAFTU), a key component of the Pegasus software, which was jointly developed by Rocket Lab and the space agency. Autonomous flight termination capabilities will be required on all Department of Defense launches by 2025.

It took a number of years — and more than a few delays — to get NAFTU certified, David Pierce, director of NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, told reporters. He said that NASA discovered “a number of errors in the software code” in 2020, but even after they were fixed, the unit had to undergo a lengthy independent testing and certification process. These delays prevented Rocket Lab from conducting launches from the new launch complex, LC-2, until now.

“I can’t stress enough how significant this moment is in time for launch ranges and the launch industry,” Pierce said. He estimated the unit could reduce launch range cost by as much as 30% and help providers boost launch cadence.

Once the rocket returns to the pad in January, it will carry three HawkEye 360 satellites to orbit, where they will eventually fly in formation and collect radio-frequency data; HawkEye downlinks the data and analyzes it for customers. This is the first of three launches the company has purchased from Rocket Lab, and it will bring the total number of HawkEye satellites in orbit to 18.

Rocket Lab will not attempt a booster recovery for this mission, Beck said. The company has developed a technique to catch a booster returning to Earth using parachutes and a helicopter, which snatches the drifting parachute in mid-air. Beck said there was no fundamental reason why the company wouldn’t attempt a booster recovery at the Virginia launch site, but he added, “We need to get it right, and using our own range in New Zealand to do that is by far the most efficient way to do that.”

Rocket Lab isn’t just using Virginia as a launch site. The company is also pouring significant capital into the development of the heavier-lift Neutron rocket, including a launch site and manufacturing and refurbishing facility. The company’s investment in Wallops is a departure from other launch companies, like SpaceX, Relativity and Blue Origin, which have all set up shop at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida.

Beck said it was “the quietness of the range and the ability of the range to increase capacity” that drew Rocket Lab to Wallops over the sites in Florida.

“KSC is an amazing range but I think everybody has to agree, it’s pretty busy,” he said. “The [Wallops] range is not nearly as busy and there’s a lot of room to grow.”

Wallops is working with the FAA to accommodate an increased launch cadence from the mid-Atlantic region, Pierce said. For Rocket Lab’s part, Beck added that the company has the flexibility to switch between the two launch sites — LC-2 and LC-1 in Mahia Island, New Zealand, which is a fully private launch facility — to meet customer needs.

Rocket Lab’s first mission from Virginia delayed until 2023 by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

When Broadcom announced it was spending an eye-popping $61 billion for VMware in May, it seemed only a matter of time before the deal caught the attention of regulators, especially in Europe and the U.K.

And sure enough this week, the EU announced that it was officially investigating the deal. In an official statement, EU’s executive VP in charge of competition policy, Margrethe Vestager worried that the deal would have an adverse impact on competition:

“Broadcom, a major supplier of hardware components, is acquiring VMware, a key server virtualization software provider. Our initial investigation has shown that it is essential for hardware components in servers to interoperate with VMware’s software. We are concerned that after the merger, Broadcom could prevent its hardware rivals to interoperate with VMware’s server virtualization software. This would lead to higher prices, lower quality and less innovation for customers and consumers,” Vestager said in an official statement kicking off the the deal.

It’s an interesting concern. Broadcom is a chip company, but it’s also spending a lot of money to get the company. It would seem that limiting the market for VMware’s services would not be in the company’s best interest, and leaving it independent would be the smartest way forward (similarly to the way IBM and Red Hat operate).

Certainly this is something that Dell recognized when it bought the company as part of the$58 billion EMC acquisition (which was announced as $67 billion) in 2015. VMware operated as a separate company as part of EMC when it was acquired. And Dell continued that way of running, allowing VMware sell to a broad variety of customers instead of limiting it to its own hardware offerings because it understood that the company operated best as an independent and neutral vendor.

Dell eventually spun out VMware as a separate company in 2021, a move that left it more vulnerable to acquisition overtures. In fact, at the time we speculated who might buy the company. Broadcom was not on our radar, although another chip company, Intel, was. We speculated that one of the cloud companies could buy it or an old school company like IBM or Oracle. But when the news came down, it was Broadcom, and for a hefty amount of money.

The EU isn’t the only one looking at this deal. Just last month, The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced that it was beginning an investigation into the deal too. The U.S. FTC is also reportedly probing the acquisition, per CRN.

Deals of this size are facing increasing stringent review, and we have seen some large deals break down over this kind of investigation in recent years. Visa scuttled the deal to buy Plaid at the beginning of 2021 after the Justice Department took a close look at the transaction and the companies decided that a protracted legal battle wasn’t worth the effort.

Nvidia walked away from a $40 billion deal to buy ARM earlier this year for similar reasons. If it looks like these watchdog organizations are going to have a closer look that could get expensive to fight, sometimes the easiest thing to do is call the whole thing off.

We’ll see if that what happens with this deal, or if it’s just a bump in the road before the two companies come together next year.

EU to probe $61B Broadcom-VMware deal over competition concerns by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

In August, Drop announced its first new in-house mechanical keyboard in quite a while: the 75% Drop Sense75. On paper, the $349 gasket-mount keyboard looked like a winner, with an understated but classy design, Drop’s DCX keycaps, in-house stabilizers and its Holy Panda X tactile switches. The final result is a bit of a disappointment, though.

Early reviews of the prototypes that Drop sent out after the first announcement were rough. Those prototypes sounded hollow, the stabilizer rattled and both the switches and the board itself had issues with ping noise. Drop took some of that feedback to heart and made some changes.

The company recently sent me a pre-built review unit (there is also a $249 bare-bones option). I did not experience any case ping, and, while the board still sounds a bit hollow, the company added a second layer of thin foam that seems to have helped. But I also don’t understand how in 2022, Drop can ship a pre-built board with rattling, dry stabilizers. To make this board sound anything like what you’d expect from a modern mechanical keyboard, you have to completely disassemble it, lube the stabilizers and reassemble. But if you have to go through all of that, what’s the point of buying an expensive pre-built? Who is the audience for this?

The Holy Panda X switches are also a bit scratchy out of the box. Some Krytox and break-in time can fix that, but I’m not a huge fan of tactiles and I prefer a slightly lower sound, but that’s my personal preference. A lot of people love these switches.

In its pre-built version, the aluminum board come with an aluminum plate and an aluminum weight underneath (with a small Drop logo on it). If that’s too much aluminum for you, Drop also sells a $39 carbon fiber plate and a $25 FR4 plate is currently available as a preorder. Both should make the board a bit more bouncy, something it could use, because despite the gasket-mount system, this felt like a pretty stiff board. Drop says that “it took painstaking care to choose the perfect materials, proportions, and placement areas to create a typing feel that was neither too mushy nor too stiff — but just right.” I’m not sure that worked out as planned.

As for the RGB, the south-facing sockets are pretty standard at this point and the addition of the diffuser should make for a nice underglow. In reality, you can see exactly where each LED sits — and if there’s one thing that really feels cheap about the Sense75, it’s that diffuser layer, which I was always afraid I’d break every time I opened the board.

All of this comes down to the fact that I can’t recommend this board. Sure, after a bunch of work you can make it sound quite nice, but there are plenty of other options on the market that are more affordable. The Keychron Q1 is well under $200, fully assembled. A bare-bones Akko Mod 007 will set you back less than $150. A black Sense75 is $350 and a white one $400, with the bare-bones $100 less. But it doesn’t offer the premium typing experience you’d expect at that price.

Drop has been listening to feedback from the community and I hope they opt for a v2 of the Sense, because with some work, it can be a good board — just not in its current state and not at this price.

The Drop Sense75 is not the keyboard you’ve been waiting for by Frederic Lardinois originally published on TechCrunch