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Tech isn’t as collegial as it used to be. Rocket ships are being unveiled as sputtering messes, mission-driven startups don’t feel so mission-oriented when responding to investor pressure, and widespread layoffs offer a loud reminder that jobs are breakable contracts, not sacrosanct vows.

Over the past few months, thousands of employees from Meta, Twitter, Stripe, Amazon, DoorDash and countless other companies that don’t have the privilege of being household names are back on the job market. A job market that includes hiring freezes, salary cuts and a general malaise that industry experts warn won’t be over this year.

So where does tech’s talent go from here?

The answer is complicated, and it’s too early to have definitive labor data. VCs want to fund the newest tech mafia startups before banks do, top MBA programs want laid off workers to join so badly that they’re waiving standardized test score requirements, and the tech companies that are in a position to hire really want you to know it.

TechCrunch spoke to laid-off employees about how they’re approaching their careers differently in 2023. Pseudonyms have been used in cases where names are included to protect current and future employment prospects, per the requests of the individuals quoted. The common thread between all the answers includes a reframing of how “safe” it is to work in tech, and, perhaps more importantly, what it takes to jump back into the sector after getting burned.

‘I’m taking my control back’

Aaliyah was laid off from her tech job in the spring. Just one month earlier, she had a positive review with her boss and was promised a raise with more stock options.

The layoff thus came as a surprise. And unlike some of her colleagues, who put their names in spreadsheets and jumped back into the job hunt, Aaliyah took a few weeks to think. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in tech, I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for anyone,” she said.

“I had to make a decision in terms of what I want my day-to-day life to look like financially; am I going to hustle or do I just want to take what falls into my lap?” she said on the phone. “After a couple of weeks, I felt like I’m ready to take more control back as opposed to just letting people kind of sway me one way or another.”

Currently, Aaliyah works two full-time tech jobs – neither company knows – and she runs a consultancy business on the side. While many people work multiple jobs to make ends meet, the opportunity to work multiple full-time jobs in tech has been amplified by remote work and layoffs. In fact, over 39,000 people are in the “Overemployed” Discord community, which is self-described “as a community of professionals looking to work two remote jobs, earn extra income, and achieve financial freedom. Be free from office politics and layoffs.”

“Never again am I going to put myself into a position where I’m dependent on one stream of income from one company that may or may not do what’s in my interest,” Aaliyah said. “They’re gonna do what they want, and I’m going to do what’s mine.”

It’s also a hedge against the bias she says she faces as a Black woman in tech.

“As a Black woman, sometimes I feel slighted by being overlooked and not feeling like anyone thinks I’m capable of doing more,” she said. “So you may not have thought that I was capable of doing a lot more but I actually do – and you don’t know what’s in my bank account.”

Some see over-employment as their next step, while others are still reflecting on how their job title evolves in this new environment.

The two-time second hire

Sam has noticed an odd pattern in his work. He’s been the second finance hire, twice, by two venture-backed startups. And he’s been laid off by both of those companies over the past year.

“It’s been odd, because I chose accounting and finance as my major back in undergrad 15 years ago because I was told it was the backbone of business, that they needed it in order for a business to function,” Sam said. He turned to mentors in the space, and says that “their first reaction is that typically finance isn’t a function that is affected in these layoffs.” While the tech worker says that “accounting is an afterthought in tech,” the reality is a bit more complicated.

While it seems that every other chief executive attributes “a need to be more disciplined” as a reason for conducting company-wide layoffs, even a strong financial runway isn’t enough to keep people hired. In Sam’s case, he was first let go by a Series B software-as-a-service product after a funding round fell through, so he began looking for new jobs that promised more financial stability. He eventually began interviewing with a number of companies, and ended up choosing an ed-tech marketplace that had promised they had a large cash position from a recent fundraising spree. Then, when that company laid him off, he realized that good books aren’t enough to justify job stability.

Today, Sam is doing part-time work, which he set up when he began hearing rumors of the second round of layoffs, and interviewing for full-time gigs. There’s a clash between what he wants, which is a stable, reliable job, and what he naturally cares about as someone who has spent time working in scrappy startups on small teams.

“It’s kind of a dilemma I have right now, where I’m going through every process with a company that is much healthier on their bottom line, they have 401(K) match…. if an offer ever does come from [those] companies, can I bring myself around enough to be interested? It’s hard to know what you care about.”

He’s still frustrated over losing his job at the edtech company.

“They’re out here building an edtech marketplace. And here I am, with all of the experience and skills and knowledge to help the company do that and I won’t be able to see that through,” he said. “I felt like it’s their missed opportunity. That’s what I still like struggle with.”

‘Not everybody is walking away with a year’s worth of runway in their pockets’

Not long before Mary was fired from an HR tech company, she was given an award that recognized her contributions to the team. The trophy was still being engraved with her name when she got the call, just weeks later, that her job had been terminated due to the macroeconomic climate.

Even worse, it was the second time this company laid her off. The first time, Mary reflects, was in March 2020 when “the world was falling apart.”

“It didn’t feel like corporate irresponsibility or anything, it was just like, everything is on fire and we’re so sorry,” she said “Then a few months later, they called me back, saying that things are not as bad as we thought.” Because the job market was tough – and she didn’t sense any poor management issues – she rejoined, got a small raise, her equity was reinstated, and so the job continued for the next two years, until she was laid off again this summer.

Mary went back on the job hunt again, this time ending up at a venture-backed early-stage startup. Then, a few weeks into the job, she got laid off. This time, it stung even more – because this was the first job where she earned a six-figure salary since joining the tech world years ago.

“I had just broken six figures and I had that for only five weeks,” Mary said. “I was really excited to max out my 401(k) and now I’m thinking I should have kept that extra two grand in cash.” Right now, she has five weeks of pay, one month of Cobra healthcare insurance, and plans to sign up for Medicare.

“Not everybody is walking away with a year’s worth of runway in their pocket,”Mary said. “When people had really high salaries and enjoyed really high salaries for the majority of their career – they assume other people have personal savings to guard against this[…] but life is really expensive.”

Despite being burned, Mary isn’t leaving the tech world because she’s inspired by “the incredibly bright, talented, capable people who are just trying to build something.” Next year, she plans to ask her network for help with the job hunt, adding that no one is looking at cold job applications while Stripe and Twitter talent is getting laid off.

She plans to be direct. “It’s a question of how profitable is enough?” she said, at one point during the interview. “When is it enough to sustain your workforce – what math is happening here?”

But she also is aware that, ultimately, what happened to her over the past twelve months may happen again.

“You can ask all the right questions, you can do all the research, you can ask about burn and runway and all these things – and even if they say all the right things, if something changes in the market, there’s just very little power that you have as an individual,” she said. “Other than to, you know, save as much as you possibly can for a rainy day.”

Burned by layoffs, tech workers are rethinking risk by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

When Apple’s AirTag came onto the scene in 2021, competitors like Tile were quick to bash the tech giant for antitrust issues, saying smaller companies had no chance of competing with Apple’s massive network of a billion iPhones. As it turns out, that’s not how another rival sees the situation. Chipolo, the 10-year-old maker of similar lost item location devices, has remained self-funded all these years, having sold 3.5 million devices and growing its revenue to the double-digit millions.

Instead of fighting Apple, Chipolo has opted to work with the Cupertino tech giant — and even credits Apple for helping further grow the item tracker industry. The team also sees the opportunity to integrate with the Find My app as a better consumer experience compared with its much smaller first-party finding network, which today is around 1 million monthly active users.

Without a large network, explains the company, it may take much longer for a device to alert its owner to its location when it’s misplaced and outside of Bluetooth range.

“It just comes down to do you want the customer to be happier with the bigger network?… We decided this is better,” said Chipolo co-founder Domen Barovic, in a conversation with TechCrunch at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. “It’s easier to replace this,” he said, referring to Chipolo’s original non-Find My-integrated product, “than to try to build a huge network. We’ve seen that, actually, it’s really hard to do,” he added.

Tile, for comparison, is going a different route — it teamed up with Life360 by way of an acquisition — to combine their respective networks in order to compete more directly with Apple. Tile also sat down with the Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers, who are now building an antitrust case against Apple, to register its complaints about Apple’s entry into this market.

Tile repeatedly stressed how Apple has the advantage of its sizable customer base and platform. Meanwhile, Tile would have to give up its direct relationship with its customers through its own app, as well as pay a commission on any subscription sales or other services made through in-app purchases. In addition, Apple hasn’t yet allowed third parties to access its U1 chip (ultra-wideband) chip for precision finding, giving AirTag a competitive advantage on that front.

Chipolo, however, feels much differently about this situation. Though the company has had ultra-wideband (UWB) prototypes on hand for a few years, it doesn’t feel it’s at a loss for the lack of support.

“We’re not seeing that ultra-wideband is actually needed for these use cases,” noted Chipolo co-founder Primoz Zelensek — Chipolo’s algorithm focuses on delivering quicker reminders when you leave an item behind, then customers can ring the device to see where their item is located. “The sound is much more important,” he said.

If anything, Chipolo sings Apple’s praises for creating more consumer awareness about the lost item finder market in general with the launch of AirTag. Plus, the company believes Apple has a shared mission.

“They’re solving the problem that we wanted to solve,” said Barovic. “We’re not building a company because we want to build a company, right? We’re building the company because we want to help people. And that’s what Apple is also doing. So actually, it’s good.”

Interestingly, Chipolo shared these same sentiments with the DoJ’s lawyers last year, the co-founders told TechCrunch. The company had a couple of meetings over Zoom about the matter of AirTag and its impact on Chipolo’s business. Its comments, seemingly, could complicate the DoJ’s ability to effectively prosecute Apple. After all, here is a competitor happy to be offered access to Apple’s Find My platform — and one that says its own sales have grown as a result.

The co-founders told TechCrunch that Chipolo’s 2022 revenue topped that of the revenue it generated in its pre-Find My days — though the company clarified it’s not what you’d call “hockey stick” growth.

Still, said Barovic, “it’s going up.”

The device maker is at the Las Vegas trade show to promote its current line of lost item trackers and to celebrate its 10-year anniversary. Today, Chipolo sells two versions of a keychain dongle ($28) that work either with its own app or with Apple’s Find My Network, and a wallet card ($35) that is slim enough to fit into a credit card slot. Unlike AirTag, Chipolo fully supports Android phones.

The company differentiates its products by the nature of the form factor — it’s plastic, comes in many colors, and its keychain dongle has a hole in the top so you don’t have to buy a separate accessory. It also costs a little less. The device also has baseline functions –like beeping to help you find your lost item, if nearby, and a finding network of some sort, when the item is out of Bluetooth range. (The non-Find My version, however, will not alert you if someone is trying to use the device for stalking purposes. But with its smaller network, its GPS updates are not as quick or as effective.)

Chipolo believes its feature set, along with what it believes are its better alerts, are what will help it to remain competitive with AirTag in the long term.

The company is also not slowing down development, either, but rather sees Apple’s lack of variety with AirTag as a niche to exploit. In addition to the multiple form factors and colors, it has built prototypes for two more form factors, including a location tracker designed for luggage and a screw-on tracker for bikes. It’s hoping to launch those next year.

Chipolo funds its new products with sales from its existing trackers, despite offers of outside funding.

“We’ve had a few [investors approach], but we didn’t find anyone who actually fits our culture,” said Zelensek. “But, of course, we are always open for new opportunities,” he added.

10-year old Chipolo explains why it’s not worried about Apple’s AirTag by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch

I’ve written a fair bit about exoskeletons on these pages. They’re a fascinating subset of the robotics industry designed to improve mobility and assist with manual labor that can be taxing on the body. The FX Stick is a lower tech version, lacking the sorts of battery powered systems that drive those products.

If anything, it probably has more in common with some of the “wearable chair” you can find around the internet. Though the product is less about grabbing a seat and your desk and more for people who work on their feet and could benefit from taking a load off from time to time.

Announced at CES this week, the FX Stick is a follow up to the ArchelisFX system that we discussed a bit at last year’s show. It’s more flexible, 15% lighter and designed to be put on (16 seconds) and taken off (nine seconds) significantly quicker.

At ~$3,000, it’s pretty pricey. That’s significantly less than most of the powered suits out there, but my guess is that most nurses and factory workers aren’t going to shell out that much for a product like this, regardless of how much it purports to alleviate (40% says the company).

I suspect employers – rather than employees – are the likely target here, especially if the company can accurately demonstrate that such a technology could help keep people on their feet longer and avoid potential medical issues.

Archelis’ exoskeleton is basically a chair you can wear by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

A federal bankruptcy judge ruled cryptocurrencies deposited into interest-bearing accounts at Celsius Network, a now-bankrupt cryptocurrency lending platform, 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.

With the Earn program, Celsius allowed users to deposit cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, ether and tether and receive weekly interest payments. Depending on the time horizon and token, the platform offered as much as 18% interest annually.

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. But all of that is now property of the estate, aka Celsius, the judge ruled.

Thanks to Celsius’ “unambiguous” terms and conditions, any cryptocurrency assets – including stablecoins – that were deposited into Earn Accounts, became Celsius’s property, the filing stated.

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 was never lifted. Now, the crypto assets held in those accounts are property of Celsius, the judge ruled.

This decision is a stark contrast from the argument thousands of Celsius customers have had in claiming that their deposited funds were, in fact, theirs. Last month, Celsius fought with customers in court over ownership of deposited funds as it wanted to sell about $18 million worth of stablecoins from Earn accounts to fund its organization. Now, Celsius can sell those assets.

And for those looking to fight the court ruling and get their funds back, it seems unlikely because “there simply will not be enough value available to repay all Account Holders in full,” the filing stated.

With bankruptcy proceedings, priority to receiving frozen funds is often given to secured creditors. But the filing deems account holders with the Earn program as unsecured creditors of Celsius, which means their recovery depends on the distributions to unsecured creditors under a Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan.

“If only some Account Holders prevail with their arguments that they own the cryptocurrency assets in their accounts, they hope to recover 100% of their claims, while most of the Account Holders are left as unsecured creditors and may recover only a small percentage of their claims.”

Going forward, this verdict can set a precedent for investors across the crypto industry and what one’s terms of use really means for people who deposit onto platforms. This could also point to what may happen with other Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings transpiring in the crypto space like FTX, Voyager and BlockFi, to name a few.

Bankruptcy judge rules Celsius Network owns users’ interest-bearing crypto accounts by Jacquelyn Melinek 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.

Hello, and welcome to the middle of the week. CES is starting tomorrow, so bookmark TechCrunch’s dedicated CES page to catch up on all the happenings. Now, onto the news! — Christine

The TechCrunch Top 3

Another round of layoffs: Paul has the latest on what’s happening over at Salesforce. The company said it had to cut its workforce by 10% — approximately 7,000 people — and will close offices in several markets. He checked out Salesforce’s SEC filing related to the matter and reported that CEO Marc Benioff stated the layoffs were a result of hiring “too many people leading into this economic downturn we’re now facing.”
Not so happy new year: More privacy fines and corrective measures greeted Meta as the calendar flipped to a new year. The company was hit with over $410 million in new fines from the European Union due to the number of “General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) complaints over the legal basis [Meta] claims [it has] to run behavioral ads,” Natasha L writes.
Get food, mail your packages: Now you can have your food and your packages too. DoorDash is launching a new service that will pick up prepaid packages and drop them off at a UPS, FedEx or USPS location, Aisha reports.

Startups and VC

It’s Autodesk’s turn for a competitor, and Snaptrude wants to be it. The startup took in some fresh venture capital to take on the design giant in the building design space, Jagmeet writes. Snaptrude wants to infuse better interoperability and cloud-based collaboration where others, like Autodesk, have lagged.

And we have four more for you:

App-solutely too slow: If your mobile app can’t keep up, customers may keep away. Product Science, which develops mobile app performance monitoring tools, landed $18 million to find flaws in execution to minimize app freezes and errors, Kyle writes.
It’s all so surreal: Also by Kyle, SurrealDB joins a crowded managed database service industry, raising $6 million for its database-as-a-service approach.
IP oh no: The market uncertainty that has plagued the online grocery delivery industry has caught up with South Korean grocery startup Kurly, which scrapped its IPO, Kate reports.
“There’s a great future in plastics”: Singapore-based AlterPacks took in $1 million in pre-seed funding to turn food waste into food containers, Catherine writes.

5 failure points between $5M and $100M in ARR

Before Tracy Young was co-founder and CEO of TigerEye, she held identical roles at construction productivity software startup PlanGrid.

Even though she led the company to $100 million in ARR before its acquisition by Autodesk, “I’ve had years to dissect the mistakes I made with my first startup,” she writes in TC+.

Young looks back at “five key failure points” that are common potholes on every founder’s path and shares tactical advice for addressing internal conflict, losing product-market fit, and other stumbles.

“If these reflections help even one founder make one less mistake, I would consider this effort worthwhile.”

Two more from the TC+ team:

No, no, not guilty was a good thing: Jacquelyn spoke to some legal experts who say Sam Bankman-Fried was smart to plead not guilty.
Hype or ripe?: Becca queried 35 investors to get their 2023 predictions on a number of VC-related topics, including capital deployment strategies, web3/crypto and what will happen with valuations.

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.

Roku is expanding its product line to include a range of 11 smart televisions that the company says it designed and built with its own services in mind, Sarah writes. And you won’t have to wait very long to get them — they will be available beginning in the spring.

Meanwhile, the TechCrunch team at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas filed 16 stories since yesterday evening. You can find all of them here, but I wanted to point out a few I’ve enjoyed reading so far:

Bird-watching fans can get their fill of hummingbird species sightings with Bird Buddy’s new smart hummingbird feeder.Sarah reports it can photograph and identify 350 different bird species.
“Urine” for a special treat with Haje’s look at Withings’ U-Scan, which puts a urine analysis lab in your toilet.
If you’re looking for some toy nostalgia, WowWee returns to robots with a dog named ‘Dog-E.’Brian has more.
Who needs to just sit in cars staring out the window when you can pretend to be somewhere else? Holoride launches a new device to bring VR entertainment to any vehicle, Kirsten writes.

And we have five more for you:

Something going down Down Under: In Twitter news, Manish reports that a lot of users in Australia are experiencing service issues. Meanwhile, the social network is said to be reversing a political ad ban to bolster up its revenue, Ivan reports.
Up up and away: Stellantis is set to mass produce Archer’s electric aircraft in an expanded deal that will give the company access to up to $150 million over the next two years, Kirsten reports.
Time is on your side: Musical tastes change, so to document it, Spotify’s new time capsule feature will let you revisit your musical taste a year from now, Aisha writes.
And yet some more layoffs: The new year was also not good for Vimeo, which had another round of layoffs said to impact 11% of employees, Lauren writes.
Settlement reached: New York financial regulators settled with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase for a $100 million fine after finding it violated anti–money laundering laws by failing to conduct adequate background checks, Amanda reports.

Daily Crunch: Salesforce CEO admits ‘we hired too many people’ as company lays off +7,000 employees by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

In-space transportation startup Impulse Space will head to orbit aboard a SpaceX rideshare mission later this year, as it seeks to prove out its orbital maneuvering and servicing technology for the first time.

While there’s always major pressure before an inaugural demonstration, there will likely be more eyes on Impulse’s mission than usual. That’s not least because the startup is headed by Tom Mueller, SpaceX’s former head of propulsion, a formidable engineer who led the development of the Merlin engine that powers the Falcon 9 rocket – the very rocket Impulse will use to reach space.

Impulse has also raised a notable amount of capital – including $20 million from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and $10 million from Lux Capital – and has swelled to about sixty employees, with nearly a third joining in the past six months. To top it all off, the company announced last summer that it was teaming up with Relativity Space for a very ambitious mission to Mars – yes, Mars – as early as 2024.

But before Mars, Impulse will first send its first orbital service vehicle to space to test its propulsion, payload delivery and hosting, software, communications, and maneuvering capabilities. That spacecraft, called Mira, will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 rideshare mission in the fourth quarter of this year, the company announced today.

“Our vehicle has more capability than is typical,” Mueller said. For context, Impulse is targeting a Delta-V of 1,000 meters per second at 300 kilograms. The company hasn’t decided how long Mira will spend in space, but it’s planning on demonstrating atmospheric re-entry at the end of mission life. The company is currently signing the primary payload customer and is soliciting additional customers, though they don’t intend on filling up capacity for this first mission.

Designing Mira hasn’t been without its difficulties. Minimizing the mass of the chassis has been the company’s biggest challenge, Mueller said. It’s a particularly important metric as every gram sent to space has a dollar amount attached to it – and that dollar amount can add up quickly.

“It’s six dollars a gram to fly,” Mueller said, referring to SpaceX Transporter mission costs. “Even though SpaceX has brought the cost of access so quickly down, that low cost is still six dollars a gram.”

Mueller described Mira as a “stepping stone” – he likened it to SpaceX’s Falcon 1, the precursor to the Falcon 9 – to future orbital vehicles Impulse is planning. Those future vehicles will be capable of considerably more propulsive capability, which means the ability to move more mass in the space – like what might be required for in-space manufacturing or space habitats. Those markets don’t exist yet, Mueller said, but this mission, dubbed LEO Express-1, will nevertheless inform these future aspirations.

Data from LEO Express-1 will also be useful for the future Mars mission. Both missions will use the same thrusters; they’ll also utilize the same propellants and some components, as well as the same guidance and control systems and other software.

Mueller acknowledged that the 2024 target was tight, particularly on the launch vehicle side. Relativity Space said it would use its heavy-lift Terran R rocket for the Mars mission, but it has yet to even fly its smaller Terran 1. If the companies don’t make 2024, they’ll have another opportunity two years later.

In addition to preparing for the LEO Express-1 mission and the Mars mission, Impulse is also gearing up to move into a new building that will give the company a 700%+ footprint increase. So far, the company has been working out a 7,000 square-foot building in El Segunda, California, one that only has 24 parking spots for 60 employees. (Mueller joked that people were riding bikes and carpooling to compensate.) But next month, they’ll be moving into a 60,000 square foot space. Plenty of room to grow for a startup that continues to move fast.

Impulse Space will hitch a ride on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 for first mission later this year by Aria Alamalhodaei originally published on TechCrunch

As lidar company Luminar pushed ahead to meet its goals for 2022 — milestones that included locking in new commercial contracts with unnamed automakers and shipping production-ready sensors to SAIC — it also snapped up a small HD mapping startup called Civil Maps.

The acquisition, which was disclosed Wednesday during Luminar founder and CEO Austin Russell’s presentation at CES 2023, is more than just a large publicly traded company taking advantage of a consolidating industry. Although the timing couldn’t have been better due to the current economic environment, according to Russell.

For Russell, the acquisition is part of Luminar’s longer term vision to be more than just a lidar supplier. Mapping, specifically the mapping tech that Civil Maps created, is foundational to that goal, Russell said.

Why maps? Russell believes that the company’s lidar sensor coupled with its perception software and HD maps will be essential to improving safety and capability of advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving features in vehicles.

“We have a visionto be able to create the first accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date map of the world in 3D,” Russell said Wednesday at CES 2023. “Civil Maps has leveraged lidar data to be able to collectively put together a very specific kind of compressed map that’s able to leverage crowdsource capabilities from multiple vehicles and put it together into a singular map solution. This is something that we believe will be hugely accretive to the foundation of what we built on the lidar.”

Integrating Civil Maps’ tech into Luminar’s lidar sensor, which also includes perception software, could be hugely valuable if deployed at scale, Russell contends. Luminar has announced a number of commercial wins in the past year. Its lidar sensor is going into production models made by SAIC and Volvo. It has also landed contracts with Nissan, Mercedes and Polestar. Based on its internal estimates, the company expects that by the second half of the decade (so after 2025) there will be more than 1 million Luminar-equipped vehicles out on the road.

“This is something, that for the first time, we’re going to get a truly comprehensive view of everything going on, an up-to-date map from around the world with vehicles contributing towards this holistic map,” Russell said on stage.

The acquisition, along with Luminar’s other 2022 purchase of laser chip company Freedom Photonics, is part of Luminar’s strategy to continue to “move up the stack,” according to Russell. In other words, Luminar wants to provide it all — or at least a lot — of what automakers need to sell vehicles equipped with next-generation automated driving features.

And based on today’s economics, Russell expects more acquisitions in 2023.

“In some cases, we’re talking about deals that are at 1/10 or the 1/20 of the price that people were hoping for in the prior year,” he said. Still, Russell cautioned that Luminar isn’t going to buy just any lidar or related tech company.

“It’s all about relative value, right?” he added. “Obviously, we have to be very smart about this in this kind of market and be very conservative about what we do. So that’s why I really have that strict adherence to the 10x rule. If we think we’re only going to get a 2x value added something, we don’t do it.”

What Luminar’s acquisition of startup Civil Maps means for its lidar future by Kirsten Korosec originally published on TechCrunch

Canon has a long and deep history of being a hardware manufacturer. Most consumers know it best as a camera manufacturer, but the company has a long, deep and illustrious history in medical, office equipment, and other imaging applications.

During the pandemic, a lot of its business shifted. People stopped going to offices. Sporting events were shut down. And while the medical industry was booming, Canon as a company needed to rethink its mission and vision: What does an imaging company do in a world where people have a desire to connect, but are unable to leave their homes while a deadly virus rages around the world?

At CES 2023, the company showed off its vision for the future — a vision that seems a lot less hardware-y than you would expect from the 85-year-old company that has traditionally made all of its money from making things with buttons.

A rag-tag bunch of Canon veterans took on the challenge and created Kokomo, a VR meeting software package that, in essence, makes real-time 3D video calling a reality.

Users don a VR headset and point a smartphone at themselves. The software scans your face, and creates a photo-real 3D avatar of you and the person you are calling. It uses the motion sensors in the headset and the camera to capture your avatar, moving you into a photo-realistic space, and boom, you are virtually present with a colleague, family member or friend. The technology to scan your face is similar to the tech used by iOS’s face ID, doing a brief pre-capture process. From there, your face’s shape and texture can be shown off inside the video calls.

The most interesting thing to note about the above paragraph is the lack of Canon products. Traditionally, Canon’s software solutions have focused on enhancing and facilitating the use of its hardware products. The company makes neither smartphones nor VR headsets, however, so this move represents a major departure from its roots.

TechCrunch sat down with the team that led the development of Kokomo to figure out how it came about, and where Canon is going as it re-imagines its own future.

“This is representing a very exciting new innovation for Canon – but also a very new business direction for Canon, as well,” said Jon Lorentz, one of the co-creators of the Kokomo solution. “As you know, traditionally, Canon is very much tied to our hardware products. When we announced AMLOS at CES last year, it was about innovating work from home. Our task [with Kokomo] is to innovate life at home, and that is where this project came from. When we started, we were in the thick of COVID, and there were not a lot of ways for people to get connected. The underlying premise for what we created was to be a solution to that. Kokomo is a way to enable people to be there when they couldn’t.”

The team’s goal was to create a solution that takes the experience beyond a phone call, a FaceTime call or a Zoom call – to feel present rather than to just look at each other on a screen. A worthy pursuit in a world where travel is limited and screen fatigue is real. But how is Canon’s solution for bringing people into a virtual world going to accomplish that?

“We support most of the popular consumer VR headsets in the market to enable people to engage in immersive calls, as we are calling them. In these calls, people can engage. They are dynamic, in living, breathing environments. You can download a companion app on a mobile phone, which lets the person you talk to see you from head to toe,” explains Lorentz. “No more legless avatars. No more wondering what someone is actually gesturing. And you can actuallysee the other person. You can be in the call, rather than on the call.”

Below is an in-depth interview with Kokomo co-creators Jon Lorentz, Ray Konno and Jason Williams. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

TechCrunch: Why is Canon excited in software? Isn’t that a step away from its hardware roots?

Jon Lorentz (JL): At our core, Canon is an imaging company, and that’s really our specialty. Kokomo is applying that specialty to the software rather than starting with our hardware first. We see that the ability to step into a call is really stepping into an imaging sensor. It’s about taking that image sensor data, and then applying it to someone else’s visual field.

Obviously, there are a lot of details behind that, but our core is imaging excellence. As you bring in mesh reality and virtual reality, you need to have a certain level of meshing: it really needs to match up. Otherwise, you’re going to feel disconnected – it’s not going to feel natural. The same goes for the environments; they are not static, from another virtual place. We’ve captured real-life environments, and brought them into VR. You really feel like you’re in the dynamic, living places.

With Kokomo VR meeting software, Canon takes a step away from its hardware roots by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Or maybe it’s a smart home hub with wireless charging built in. Either way, this is the SmartThings Station, which debuted on stage at CES this afternoon. The hub is a bit of an unsung lynchpin in the smart home ecosystem. It isn’t especially flashy as these things go, but it can be quite useful when it comes automating your setup.

Matter is, of course, the big buzz word of this year’s show, and the new hub supports the standard, naturally, letting users integrate a broad range of different products from a broad range of different companies – thermostats, lights, plugs, etc. From there, you can automate different tasks, using Samsung’s SmartThings.

The first time you turn the pad on, you’ll see a pop-up on your Samsung device, walking you through the setup process. You can also just scan the QR code on your phone. The hub features a built-in 15-watt wireless charger that will send you a notification when it’s finished. You can also double-tap the pad to help locate a misplaced phone with a ring. A built in “Smart Button,” meanwhile, can fire up different routines with a tap.

It’s a clever little combo device. As the Matter standard continues to roll out, more users will likely be looking toward these sorts of hubs. And hell, you can never have enough wireless charging surfaces around the house.

The product is due out next month in the U.S. and Korea. No pricing has been announced as of yet.

Samsung’s new wireless charger has a smart home hub built-in by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Twitter is finally making a feature update that people actually want. According to social media analyst Matt Navarra, Twitter’s advanced search filters for mobile are coming soon.

Here’s what they look like in practice:

The feature makes it easier to find specific tweets you’re looking for by filtering based on date, user, retweet count, hashtags and more. Sure, this technically has existed on Twitter for a long time, but figuring out how to pull up advanced search is pretty unintuitive and clunky. On the web, you have to type in your search term, then click the three dot menu to the right of the search bar to open up advanced search. On mobile, this wasn’t even an option until now, when this feature release seems to be imminent.

These changes could come courtesy of George Hotz, the security hacker known for developing iOS jailbreaks and reverse engineering the PlayStation 3. He later founded Comma.ai, a driver-assistance system startup that aims to bring Tesla Autopilot–like functionality to other cars.

But in his most recent role, Hotz was a Twitter intern. Yes, an intern. Hotz tweeted his support for a controversial memo in which Elon Musk told employees to get “extremely hardcore” or leave. When his followers pushed back on this, he stated, “I’ll put my money where my mouth is. I’m down for a 12 week internship at Twitter for cost of living in SF.”

So Musk put his frenemy to work — according to Hotz’s own tweets, Musk told him that his job was to fix Twitter’s bad search system. In late November, he polled his followers to see what they wanted from Twitter search. Some common answers included searching within “liked” and “seen” tweets, more accessible advanced search and moving away from exact text search.

Even Musk himself complained about Twitter’s search feature within a week of taking control of the company. “Fixing search is a high priority,” he tweeted.

It’s not clear when this feature will roll out, but typically, when a feature can be reverse engineered by an app researcher — as is the case here — it’s almost ready for the public eye.

We’ll have to wait and see how good this feature is in practice, but truly, the only way for Twitter’s search function to go is up.

Twitter’s advanced search filters for mobile are on their way by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch