The Fan-Out packaging market will grow at 19,4% CAGR 2019-24 to reach $3.8 billion in 2024, forecats Yole Developpment. In 2015, the Fan-Out market was small and consisted mostly of standard devices like BB , RF , and PMU . But after TSMC’s 2016 game-changer with inFO for Apple’s iPhone APE, market value increased 3.5x ...
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Semtech is sponsoring Digital Catapult’s Future Networks Innovation Lab, which opened in London, earlier this week. The Future Networks Innovation Lab drives potential value from networks, such as LPWANs. The opening included a demonstration by Semtech of its LoRa devices and wireless radio frequency technology in a smart building solution. The demo shows how LoRa ...
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Rockwell Automation has acquired Emulate3D whose products digitally simulate and emulate industrial automation systems. By using simulation models to improve systems planning and decision-making, followed by emulation trials that test the control system before installation, Emulate3D’s software enables customers to virtually test machine and system designs before incurring manufacturing and automation costs and committing to ...
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Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, the iconic 47 year-old Silicon Valley VC company, has raised $600 million for its 18th venture fund. “We’re returning to Kleiner’s roots,” says KP, “we believe that venture is a non-scalable, boutique craft. It requires incredibly dedicated practitioners with diverse and complementary backgrounds that span technology, operating, and investing. Above ...
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Amphenol RF has introduced the small form factor AMC4 connector series. This micro-miniature product series features the push-on coupling design and is suitable for IoT applications which require space efficient, economical designs. The AMC4 PCB jack connector offers electrical performance from DC to 6 GHz and operates at 50 ohms. This precision stamped and formed ...
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Broadcom has joined the SIA. Broadcom’s Chief Legal Officer Mark Brazeal is expected to be elected to the SIA board of directors at the association’s next board meeting on April 4. “We are thrilled to welcome Broadcom, a leading player and valued voice in our industry, into the SIA tent,” says SIA CEO John Neuffer, “the ...
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1. Facebook shares shoot up after strong Q4 earnings despite data breach
Facebook managed to beat Wall Street’s estimates in its Q4 earnings despite a seemingly constant beatdown in the press.
The company said it hit 2.32 billion monthly users, up 2.2 percent from 2.27 billion last quarter, speeding up its growth rate. And it earned $16.91 billion off all those users, with $2.38 in GAAP earnings per share.
2. Robert Swan named Intel CEO
Half a year after being named interim CEO, Bob Swan is taking the job full-time. He stepped into the interim role as word emerged of then-CEO Brian Krzanich’s “past consensual relationship” with an employee.
3. New York cracks down on companies that sell fake followers
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James has reached a settlement with Devumi, a company that made millions selling fake followers to unsuspecting customers. The state of New York found that Devumi had engaged in illegal deception and illegal impersonation in the course of fluffing up social media profiles with its automated accounts.
Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
4. Google will stop peddling a data collector through Apple’s back door
It looks like Facebook wasn’t the only one abusing Apple’s system for distributing employee-only apps to sidestep the App Store and collect extensive data on users.
5. Google+ for consumers will shut down on April 2nd
Speaking of Google: It’s no secret that the company planned to pull life support from the consumer version of Google+ in April. Until now, though, we didn’t know the exact date.
6. Cheap Internet of Things gadgets betray you even after you toss them in the trash
It’s not just while they’re plugged in that these slapdash gadgets are a security risk — even from the garbage can, they can still compromise your network.
7. Hulu announces a new ad unit that appears when you pause
Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video.
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An artificial intelligence that is rewarded for exploring unknown situations has played the Atari game Montezuma’s Revenge – learning from mistakes and identifying sub-goals 10 times faster than Google DeepMind, according to RMIT University in Australia, where the algorithm was developed. “A 2015 study showed Google DeepMind AI learnt to play Atari video games like Video ...
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Just to get this out of the way: Yes, Hulu is introducing an ad unit that will show up when you pause a video. But no, the ad won’t be a video.
Hulu says it has 25 million subscribers, the majority of them on an ad-supported plan — so they’re used to seeing TV-style commercial breaks before and during their viewing experience. However, Vice President and Head of Advertising Platforms Jeremy Helfand said the company realizes that playing a similar ad as soon as you hit pause would be bad for both viewers and advertisers.
For the viewer, “It can be jarring — you think you’ve paused the content, but you’re still seeing sight, sound and motion,” Helfand said. As for the advertiser, they don’t want to create a 30-second ad that the viewer doesn’t see because they’ve left for the kitchen or the bathroom, or because they unpause the show five seconds into the ad.
Conversely, he said that during testing, Hulu found that viewers accepted the format “if the ad is subtle and relevant.”
The Hulu Pause Ad is more like a translucent banner — or, as Helfand put it, “a car billboard on the side of the road” — that appears on the right side of the screen. This makes for a better viewing experience, since it’s less distracting than a video and you can still see your TV show underneath. And Helfand argued that it’s also better for the brand, because it allows them to get their message across in a quick and simple way.
Also, Pause Ads won’t appear until several seconds after you pause. That’s in case you’ve paused so that you can rewind or otherwise adjust the video, which isn’t really an ideal time to show an ad. If you start fiddling with the controls, the Pause Ad either won’t appear at all, or if it’s already on-screen, it will immediately disappear. Similarly, it should disappear as soon as you hit play again.
When asked if this might give advertisers another ad placement issue to worry about — say, if their brand shows up next to a risqué sex scene or a gory death scene — Helfand noted that Pause Ads won’t be appearing on episodes that have been rated TV-MA, and that Hulu allows advertisers to target or “anti-target” (explicitly avoid) based on genre. It also sounds like these capabilities will be further refined.
Hulu plans to launch the first Pause Ads in the second quarter of this year, and it’s already announcing two advertisers — Coca-Cola and Charmin. The ads will appear in select on-demand content in the Hulu library.
Helfand said the exact size and placement of the unit could continue evolving over time. In addition, Hulu is still figuring out the exact pricing model, but it’s envisioned as part of a larger package for advertisers.
And while it’s understandable for viewers to get annoyed when they see ads in new places, Helfand suggested that this is part of a broader push towards “non-disruptive formats,” where the ads don’t stop the video and interrupt your viewing experience. In fact, the goal is for these new formats to account for 50 percent of Hulu’s ad revenue within the next three years.
“The whole conversation that we’ve had in this market, should a commercial break be 10 or 15 seconds — it’s all disruptive,” Helfand said. Instead, he argued that the better question is, “How do you help provide the very best storytelling experience for viewers in an ad-supported service?”
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STMicroelectronics has announced a peak current control synchronous buck dc-dc converter that can idle at 500nA, but still deliver 400mA at 92% efficiency and 1mA at 95%. Called ST1PS01, it is aimed at keep-alive point-of-load supplies and IoT devices such as asset trackers, wearables, smart sensors, and smart meters – as well as energy harvesting. Packaging ...
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At this year’s Hannover Messe (1 – 5 April 2019), Schunk will be echoing the theme of human collaboration with robotics with a gripper that, with a gripping force of 600N, is claimed to exceed any other currently available. The company believes that mechantronic grippers that can handle heavier weights will be used in the ...
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Intel has confirmed its interim CEO, Bob Swan (pictured), as its permanent CEO. Swan had served as Intel’s CFO since 2016 and as interim CEO since last June when Brian Krzanich left after being accused of an inappropriate relationship with an employee. “When the board approached me about taking the CEO role, I jumped at the ...
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Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation (VIS) of Taiwan, in which TSMC has a major shareholding, is to buy GloFo’s Fab 3E in Singapore for $236 million. The transaction includes buildings, facilities, and equipment, as well as IP associated with GLoFo’s MEMS business. GloFo will continue to operate the facility through the end of 2019, providing a transition ...
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Mouser has signed a global distribution agreement with Pimoroni, designers and manufacturers of tech accessories for Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and micro:bit boards. Pimoroni offers a selection of Raspberry Pi accessories, ranging from the company’s first product, the Pibow case, to a variety of HATs and pHATs that add almost unlimited functionality to the Raspberry Pi ...
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Renesas has expanded its RX24T and RX24U 32-bit microcontroller groups to include high-temperature types for motor-control – ‘G’ versions of both will operate from −40°C to +105°C. “Through the IoT, home appliances and industrial machinery are attaining greater functionality based on network connectivity and user interface enhancements and effective use of the limited interior space as ...
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Infineon Has added to its 1200V CoolSiC MOSFET family with the CoolSiC Easy 2B power modules which enable engineers to reduce system costs by increasing power density. In addition, they can also lower operational costs significantly. Owing to about 80 % lower switching losses compared to silicon IGBTs, inverter efficiency levels exceeding 99 % can be ...
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Osram has released a green laser for phone-based projectors, capable of delivering 140mW pulses. Although a projector also needs red and blue lasers, green is the colour that poses the greatest challenges in semiconductor laser and LED production. “Up to now, RGB laser projections for smartphones, based on a red, green and blue laser, often ...
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Worldwide silicon wafer area shipments in 2018 increased 8% to a record high, while revenues jumped 31% on year exceeding the US$10 billion mark for the first time since 2018, according to SEMI. Silicon wafer area shipments in 2018 totaled 12.73 billion square inches, up from the previous market high of 11.81 billion square inches ...
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WorldStack raised half a million dollars in seed round investment from angel investors. “This round of funding will be used to evolve WorldStack’s intelligence platform, Providence, and expand the team to bolster the software development, intelligence operations, product support and sales areas of the business,” says COO and co-founder, Eric Flis. WorldStack is an Australian ...
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Foxconn’s plan to build an LCD factory in Wisconsin may be canned, reports Reuter’s. The announcement of the Wisconsin plant was made from the White House in the early months of the Trump Presidency. It supported the new president’s campaign promises that he would repatriate jobs to the USA, and Wisconsin was said to be ...
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In the bidding process for the Israeli datacentre connectivity company Mellanox, Intel is said to have offered $5.5-5.6 billion. Xilinx is also reported to be engaged in the process which is being run by an investment bank. Mellanox’s customers are datacentre owners and the companies which build datacentres. Xilinx is making a bid for datacentre ...
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Today, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is to announce a programme budgeted at up to £30 million to look at how technology could be used to tackle global challenges. The projects include: A partnership between leading conservation charities. Tech Hub and technology experts to reduce the level of illegal trade of wildlife ...
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The Criterion Collection’s streaming service has a launch date: April 8.
The company had previously made its library of classic art-house and international films available through streaming partners — first Hulu, then FilmStruck. However, FilmStruck shut down last fall, apparently a victim of its corporate parent WarnerMedia’s bigger streaming plans.
Criterion subsequently announced that it would both make its movies available through the yet-to-launch WarnerMedia service and launch a streaming service of its own, called The Criterion Channel.
Today, Criterion announced the channel’s launch date and started taking signups from “charter” subscribers. In exchange for signing up early, you’ll get a discounted subscription fee of $9.99 per month or $89.99 annually (compared to the regular price of $10.99 per month or $99.99 annually), and even before the launch, you’ll be able to watch films as part of the channel’s Movie of the Week series.
The Criterion Channel will be available in the United States and Canada, and should work on desktop, Apple TV, Amazon Fire, Roku, iOS and Android devices.
Updated with the correct pricing.
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At the end of last year, Grand Central Tech announced plans to work with the Milstein real estate family to transform a midtown Manhattan high-rise into a tech hub called Company. And startups remain an important part of the mix — in fact, Company is unveiling a list of 20 startups participating in this year’s GCT Startup-in-Residence program.
What does Startup-in-Residence mean? Well, Company CEO Matthew Harrigan said the program will continue to offer what it’s always offered — desk space, as well as access to events and amenities, for a select group of early-stage entrepreneurs. And participants don’t have to give up equity or pay rent.
The deal might seem too good to be true, but Harrigan argued that the startups make Company more appealing to its enterprise tenants: “We are retrofitting this building to look and feel and operate like a brand new building … but the one amenity that cannot be simply rolled out is people.”
He also said the program is only taking up 15,000 square feet of the building’s 150,000 total square feet.
“It sounds like an exceptionally generous offering and it isn’t,” he said. “It sounds like it doesn’t make a ton of business sense but that’s actually wrong … Fifteen thousand square feet of space to great early-stage founders helps establish a truly remarkable program and campus in New York City. Those resources are well spent.”
In the past, we’ve written about Grand Central Tech as an accelerator program, but Harrigan said, “We weren’t and aren’t an accelerator” — it just used “the nomenclature that’s known.” Now the program is taking on a more fitting name, though it sounds like the operations won’t be changing too dramatically.
“We typically have very sophisticated founding teams, giving them an ideal environment in which to work,” Harrigan said. “By and large, our companies are left to their own devices — we don’t presume to create a curriculum or some series of programming. It’s a somewhat passive approach, but we make sure all people in the community are linked up with each other.”
Also worth noting: This year’s class consists of 40 percent women founders and CEOs, and it covers industries like energy, mental health, e-commerce, biotech, adtech and food.
Here’s a list of the companies, with descriptions provided by Company (and edited by me for clarity and length). We’ve also written about a number of them before, so I’m including links to past coverage when possible.
Lolli allows users to receive Bitcoin for their online purchases
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1. Apple bans Facebook’s Research app that paid users for data
In the wake of TechCrunch’s investigation, Apple blocked Facebook’s Research VPN app before the social network could voluntarily shut it down.
The Research app asked users for root network access to all data passing through their phone in exchange for $20 per month. Apple says that yesterday evening, it revoked the Enterprise Certificate that allows Facebook to distribute the Research app without going through the App Store.
2. Foxconn pulls back on its $10 billion factory commitment
In 2017, Foxconn announced the largest investment of a foreign company in the United States when it selected Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin for a new manufacturing facility. In an interview with Reuters, a special assistant to Foxconn’s CEO says that those plans are being scaled back.
3. It’s time to pay serious attention to TikTok
The short-form video app hailing from Beijing’s ByteDance just had its biggest month ever with the addition of 75 million new users in December — a 275 percent increase from the 20 million it added in December 2017, according a recent report from Sensor Tower.
4. Apple’s global active install base of iPhones surpassed 900 million this quarter
It’s not surprising that Apple has a massive active install base of iPhones across the globe, but we now finally have an exact number to put behind it.
5. Amex blocks Curve as the fintech startup vows to fight ‘anti-competitive’ decision
Just 36 hours after Curve, the London fintech that lets you consolidate all of your bank cards into a single Curve card, re-instated support for Amex, the feature has once again been unceremoniously blocked by American Express.
6. AT&T misses on revenue for Q4 2018
AT&T has added 134,000 postpaid phone subscribers over the quarter (analysts had expected more). Revenue is up 15.2 percent year over year, but that’s mostly due to AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner.
7. Sinemia drops ticket subscription prices, adds rollover feature
Beginning this week, one-ticket-a-month plans start at $4 per month — down two bucks from before. The price also includes a new rollover feature, letting subscribers carry over one unused ticket per month.
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It’s been just about a year since the relaunch of WeWork Labs, an accelerator-type program operating under the WeWork umbrella. Since then, it’s grown to 37 locations in 22 cities. And it’s truly international, operating in 12 countries, including Brazil, China, Germany and India.
These Labs offices are often — but not always — housed within a larger WeWork space, and, like an accelerator, they offer mentorship and programming. However, WeWork doesn’t take any equity; instead, it simply makes money by charging rent. (In New York, a desk costs between $450 and $550 a month, but the price varies by location.)
I spoke to Roee Adler, the program’s global head, about how the program has evolved over the past year. Adler actually has a long history with startups — in fact, his company Soluto won the very first Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. He’s held a number of positions at WeWork, including chief product officer, and he said that as his role was evolving, he found himself asking, “What is the next startup we can build inside WeWork?”
The answer: “We decided to reevaluate our level of commitment and investment with the earliest of stages for startups.”
WeWork actually had a startup program called WeWork Labs back in 2011, but it languished in the years since. Adler relaunched the program with its first New York space in January of last year, and he’s been opening locations at a furious pace since then.
Roee Adler
Each Labs office is supervised by a Labs Manager, who Adler said is usually “a former entrepreneur whose life’s mission is to manage startups.” For example, before Mor Barak joined the program last year to launch Labs in Tel Aviv, she was the general manager of Israel’s oldest accelerator program, The Junction.
“I got to a point where I felt like I finally found what I loved to do, which is to work with startups and to support startups and understand how our connections and our network can help them move forward,” Barak said. “And then I wanted to take that and do that on a bigger scale, as part of a company that can reach new geographies and bring forward local entrepreneurs.”
As a Labs Manager, Barak said her main role is to “be that that business connector for the startups,” which means meeting with the entrepreneurs on a weekly basis to understand their needs and challenges. At the same time, she emphasized that Labs is a global program: “As a Labs Manager in Tel Aviv, I can quite easily connect to my colleagues around the world find the people that I need to get to in order to help the startup.”
Adler made a similar point about sharing resources between the different locations.
“A lecture that is at our Najing Xi Lu Road space in Shanghai will get captured, summarized, translated and become available to all of the entrepreneurs around the world,” he said. “Does that mean every piece of information is relevant for everyone? No. But truthfully, who knows?”
Adriana Vazquez of Lilu
To celebrate the one-year anniversary, WeWork Labs held a pitch competition at the company’s New York City headquarters last week, with $250,000 in funding distributed among the winners. The $150,000 grand prize went to Lilu, a startup making a compression bra that helps mothers pump milk. (It’s another Startup Battlefield alum.)
CEO and co-founder Adriana Vazquez told me that Lilu has been working out of the WeWork Labs in Dumbo since August. Vazquez has participated in other accelerator programs and worked out of other coworking spaces, and she said Labs is different from either — it allows you to “get the community of an accelerator without the prescribed schedule,” and it offers a very different feeling from a coworking space.
“There is that understanding and respect everyone’s really busy and has fires to put out,” she said. “We had a brief stay at another coworking space with creatives and small businesses, and there wasn’t that camaraderie, where you see someone that’s working on a weekend and you know you’re not here because they want to hang out on a Friday. It’s almost an unspoken understanding: Yeah, I know what you’re going through.”
As for what Adler has planned for Labs’ second year, he said he wants to do more work connecting startups with larger corporations: “WeWork has really become the only natural nexus in the world where you can have a three-month-old startup entrepreneur bumping shoulders with a senior vice president of Microsoft going to get coffee from the same machine and engaging in a conversation about the future.”
WeWork Labs Dumbo
And of course, he plans to open more offices, with the goal of reaching 100 locations by the end of 2019.
“The three of us are sitting in Manhattan right now, one of the wealthiest cities in the world … but it’s not about here,” Adler said said. “It’s about the people who aren’t sitting in the big tech hubs or bubbles. That is exciting.”
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Researchers at Fraunhofer Umsicht (Fraunhofer institute for environmental, safety and energy technology) have developed a ‘bipolar plate’ (explained below) for bipolar construction batteries (ditto) that is flexible and can be made on a roll-to-roll process. “We manufacture bipolar plates from polymers that have been made electrically conductive,” said Fraunhofer researcher Dr Anna Grevé. “In this way, we ...
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X-FAB, the analogue/mixed-signal and specialty foundry, has begun full volume production of its high temperature galvanic isolation semiconductor process. The technology is fully automotive qualified. Galvanic isolation electrically separates circuits in order to improve noise immunity, remove ground loops, and increase common mode voltage. It can also protect human interfaces from contact with high voltages. An example ...
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Samsung has begun mass producing the industry’s first 1TB embedded Universal Flash Storage (eUFS) 2.1, for use in mobile applications. Phones will have storage capacity comparable to a premium notebook PC, without having to pair their phones with additional memory cards. “The 1TB eUFS is expected to play a critical role in bringing a more ...
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AMD has announced the 7th amendment to its wafer supply agreement with GLOBALFOUNDRIES see this link. ‘AMD remains an important strategic partner as we reshape our portfolio to intensify investment in the technologies that provide the most value to customers,’ says GloFo, ‘we are proud to be a critical supplier of AMD’s current-generation 14nm and 12nm ...
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In Q1, 307 million smartphones will be made down from Q4’s 383 million units, says TrendForce. The top six brands by production volume for Q1 will be Samsung, Huawei, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO, and Vivo. Samsung will ship 70 million units in Q1, says TrendForce. Huawei, the No.2 player, is expected to ship 46 million units. Apple, ...
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Osram Opto Semiconductors is introducing its second-generation blue multi-mode laser diode, which double the range of previous LED solutions up to 600 metres. It also simplifies system design when used in the auxiliary high beam lights of vehicles. Used as a light source for auxiliary high beams, Osram’s PLPT9 450D_E A01 laser makes driving at ...
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ACEINNA today announced its new INS1000 state-of-the-art, high performance dual band RTK INS (Real-Time Kinematic Inertial Navigation System) with built-in inertial sensors for construction, agriculture and automotive applications. The INS1000 embeds ACEINNA’s 9 degree-of-freedom inertial sensor technology to achieve Automotive Dead Reckoning performance in GNSS challenged environments like urban canyons, heavily tree lined roads, tunnels, ...
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With the SPAD2L192, LASER COMPONENTS offers a solid-state CMOS sensor for Flash LiDAR applications. The single photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array has a resolution of 192 x 2 pixels. The in-pixel time-to-digital converter, which features a temporal resolution of 312.5 ps and a scale value of 1.28 μs, enables a nominal range of up to ...
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Knotch announced yesterday that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by New Enterprise Associates, with NEA’s Hilarie Koplow-McAdams joining the Knotch board of directors. Rob Norman, the former chief digital officer of ad giant GroupM is also joining the board.
“Brands have a desire to understand the effectiveness of their digital content across all channels, a gap that hadn’t been filled before Knotch,” Koplow-McAdams said in a statement. “Our conviction around the Knotch platform and team is driven by their impressive traction and comprehensive product offerings. We’re thrilled to partner with Knotch as they continue their growth trajectory, providing transformative marketing intelligence at scale.”
When we first wrote about Knotch back in 2012, it was a consumer product where people could share their opinions using a color scale. It might seem like a stretch go from that to a marketing and data company, but in fact Knotch still collects data using its color-based feedback system — now, it’s using that system to ask consumers about their response to sponsored content.
In addition, Knotch offers a competitive intelligence product, as well as Blueprint, which helps marketers find the best publishers for their sponsored content.
“As [brands are building] their own content hubs and recognizing content as a really key piece of their marketing stack, as they’re turning to this space, there’s not a lot of great options for them to turn to and say, ‘Here’s a way to know in advance which creative themes and topics and formats [are going to resonate].’ Here’s how we optimize this content, here’s a way to benchmark what you’re doing,” founder and CEO Anda Gansca told me.
And it sounds like Gansca’s vision goes beyond sponsored content.
“In this convoluted landscape, you need a partner that is going to be your Switzerland of data, who’s aligned with you, collecting transparent digital performance data across paid and own channels,” she said.
Knotch has now raised a total of $34 million. Customers include JP Morgan Chase, AT&T, Ally Bank, Ford, Calvin Klein and Salesforce.
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1. Apple disables group calling in FaceTime in response to eavesdropping bug
Apple has disabled the group calling feature within its FaceTime calling service while it works on a patch to fix a nasty bug that allows eavesdropping. Apple’s status page shows that group calling via FaceTime is “temporarily unavailable” — that’s a stop-gap move while the company works to deliver a more permanent fix.
We were unable to set up a group call when we tried, having earlier been able to do so and replicate the issue.
2. Huawei ‘disappointed,’ denies charges
The long-simmering battle between the U.S. government and Huawei heated up last night when the U.S. DOJ announced that it is pursuing criminal charges against the Chinese hardware maker. Huawei has, unsurprisingly, denied all wrongdoing.
3. SAP job cuts prove harsh realities of enterprise transformation
While the company tried to put as positive a spin on the announcement as possible, there could be up to 4,000 job cuts as SAP shifts into more modern technologies.
Photo: Adam Gault/Getty Images
4. Petal raises $30M from Valar to bank the unbanked with credit cards
Petal uses a more holistic and comprehensive underwriting model to determine the creditworthiness of credit card applicants compared to traditional banks that rely predominantly on an applicant’s FICO score. The goal is to focus more on cash flows rather than a static score.
5. Casper announces the Glow — a portable, sleep-friendly light
The Casper team sent me a couple of Glows to try out for myself. The result? I found myself getting sleepier as the light dimmed, and I seemed to pass out more quickly and reliably than normal.
6. Home improvement platform Houzz lays off 180, reportedly gears up for public listing
We’ve confirmed that the company laid off around 110 people in the U.K. and Germany this month, along with an additional 70 in its U.S. home market in Q4 of last year.
7. Screen time inhibits toddler development, study finds
A study has found that kids 2-5 years old who engage in more screen time received worse scores in developmental screening tests. The apparent explanation is simple: when a kid is in front of a screen, they’re not talking, walking or playing, the activities during which basic skills are cultivated.
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Korean scientists have found a way to make large near-perfect areas 2d single crystal hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), by using liquid gold as a substrate. This, in turn, could form a substrate for growing other 2d materials – possibly graphene or tungsten disulphide. Synthesising perfect crystalline structures is very challenging, with most methods yielding polycrystals ...
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CUI has announced waterproof USB connectors rated at IP67. Offering protection from moisture and environmental contaminants, USB Micro B and Type C receptacles are available, conforming to either the USB 2.0 or USB 3.1 Gen 2, depending on model. Surface mount and mid-mount SMT types are available in vertical or horizontal orientations, with several models including ...
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ST Microelectronics has introduced a development kit that allows potential users to evaluate all three or its 8pin STM8 microcontroller variants, and the no-frills board is nominally priced at $8.50. The board, called STM8-SO8-DISCO, includes STM8S001J3M3 (1kbyte ram, 128byte data eeprom) 16bit timers with three comparator outputs, three capture-compare channels, a 10bit ADC, and an 8bit ...
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Over the past few years, mattress company Casper has expanded its product lineup to include everything from dog beds to nap pillows. (It’s also opened its own nap store.) The latest addition: the Glow, an $89 light.
While the company has never made this kind of Internet-connected hardware before, Chief Strategy Officer Neil Parikh pitched the Glow as part of Casper’s mission to improve sleep. And although there’s already a whole category of light bulbs designed for the same purpose, the Glow has a couple of smart touches that could make it particularly appealing.
The basic use of the Glow is pretty straightforward. You turn it on by flipping it over, and it fills your room with warm LED light. The light then dims to darkness over a 45-minute period — as Chief Experience Officer Jeff Chapin put it, it’s “mimicking the setting of the sun and it helps you get sleepier as it dims into lower and lower amplitudes.”
You can control and customize the Glow with a smartphone app, but Chapin said, “There are some people who are never going to download the app and that’s fine.” That’s because the Glow can also be controlled by gesture — flipping it to turn it on and off again, twisting it (when it’s set on a flat surface) to adjust the brightness and wiggling it to get a low light.
The Glow is also portable, so if you wake up in the middle of the night and need to get a glass of water or use the restroom, you can just pick it up and carry it with you, rather than turning on a bright kitchen light. You can also set a wakeup time so that the Glow gradually lights up again.
“We’ve leveraged the good and the bad of light so that it would help you fall asleep, stay asleep and go back to sleep into the night,” Chapin said.
In fact, if you’re a frequent traveler who struggles with jet lag, you can even “freeze” the settings, pack the Glow in your suitcase and take it with you to your destination, though Chapin admitted, “We don’t know how many people are going to do that.”
In addition to buying a single Glow for $89, you can also get a two-pack for $169. The light comes with a small base for wireless charging.
The Casper team sent me a couple of Glows to try out for myself. I wasn’t able to download the app, but the Glow was indeed largely controllable by gesture. (My only real complaint is that the wiggle-for-dim-light only worked sporadically for me.)
Keep in mind that I didn’t have a particularly sophisticated or sleep-friendly lighting setup before this, and that it’s hard to know how I would have slept on any given night without the Glow. Still, I can say that I found myself getting sleepier as the light dimmed, and I seemed to pass out more quickly and reliably than normal. And since the Glow is pretty small (five inches tall and three inches wide), it was easy to find room for it in my cluttered bedroom, and to carry it around when necessary.
It sounds like Casper has plans more products that go beyond bedding, addressing broader environmental factors that affect sleep.
“You can expect a lot more from us in the same vein, trying to help people [sleep] across the board, in a multivariate way,” Parikh said. “It’s a very complicated problem.”
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For filtering three-phase and neutral on circuit boards, Schurter is offering the DKIH-4 series of four-line common mode chokes using nano-crystalline ring cores, with ratings from 10A to 40A. “The power section is increasingly being mounted on the printed circuit board with discrete components,” according to the firm. “However, due to the high integration density ...
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To make robot cars and autonomous driving a reality, we will need flexible development models
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Murata’s IR series of dc-dc converters are designed specifically for use in industrial and railway applications. Models include: IRQ100 series 100W single regulated output industry-standard quarter brick IRH150 series 150W single output IRS50 series 50W sixteenth brick IRQ and IRH products deliver regulated outputs of 5, 12, or 24Vdc, from a 3:1 input range ...
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Maxim is claiming simple route to protecting sensitive data in IoT end-nodes with a pair of security supervisor chips. Called MAX36010 and MAX36011, “these make it easier for designers to implement robust tamper detection, cryptography and secure storage while safeguarding sensitive information via logical and physical protections, without having to be security experts themselves – that ...
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Osram has released the second generation of blue multi-mode laser diodes for car headlights, doubling range in auxiliary high beams compared to with its previous lasers, to 600m, it claims. What lasers offer over LEDs as a light source is higher light output per unit area (luminance) – which then allows a slimmer smaller optical ...
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Renesas has introduced two plastic packaged, radiation-tolerant digital isolators that provide the highest isolation protection (2,500VRMS) from high voltage spikes in power supply stages and serial communications interfaces used in low Earth orbit (LEO) Small Satellites (SmallSats). Private “New Space” companies plan to launch thousands of SmallSats forming large constellations that operate in multiple LEO ...
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The latest tests conducted by RootMetrics by IHS Markit, which tests mobile network performance, confirm EE as the UK’s leading mobile operator at the UK-wide level, with the BT-owned company winning all six mobile performance categories tested. EE has now performed best in 11 consecutive rounds of testing, dating back to when RootMetrics first began ...
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This is the fifth in a series of essays from Imec on the future of electronics technology. This one is called: ‘On Martians and telepresence’. It is by Xavier Rottenberg who is scientific director and group leader for wave-based sensors and actuators at Imec. The end of the 20th century was the era when the ...
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Premier Farnell is shipping the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ for same day despatch. Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ delivers the enhanced thermal performance and ease of use of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ in a smaller form factor, with a choice of memory variants suitable for a broad range of embedded applications including ...
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Two criminal lawsuits initiated by US government prosecutors have been brought against Huawei in the USA The lawsuits allege that Huawei violated US sanctions on trade with Iran and with stealing trade secrets from one of its customers – T-Mobile. The lawsuits were brought just a couple of days before trade talks between the USA ...
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Intel is talking to the Israeli government about possible plans to build a $11 billion 10nm fab in Kiryat Gat, reports Globes – the Israeli financial news daily. Intel is said to be asking the Israeli government to cover 10% of the cost. If it goes through, the investment would be in addition to the $5 ...
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The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:
1. Dropbox snares HelloSign for $230M, gets workflow and e-signature
Dropbox’s SVP of engineering Quentin Clark sees this as more than simply bolting on electronic signature functionality to the Dropbox solution. For him, the workflow capabilities that HelloSign added in 2017 were key to the purchase.
“What is unique about HelloSign is that the investment they’ve made in APIs and the workflow products is really so aligned with our long-term direction,” Clark said. “It’s not just a thing to do one more activity with Dropbox, it’s really going to help us pursue that broader vision.”
The complaint — lodged last fall by Dr. Johnny Ryan of private browser Brave; Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group; and Michael Veale, a data and policy researcher at University College London — alleges “wide-scale and systemic breaches of the data protection regime by Google and others” in the behavioral advertising industry.
3. Too few cybersecurity professionals is a gigantic problem for 2019
That’s according to Robert Ackerman Jr., founder and a managing director of AllegisCyber, an early-stage cybersecurity venture firm.
4. Naspers takes full control of Russian classifieds site Avito in $1.16B deal
South African internet conglomerate Naspers is best known for backing Chinese tech giant Tencent, but it also operates a vast network of online classifieds businesses. That network just got a little larger.
5. Contentsquare, the digital experience insights platform, raises $60M Series C
Contentsquare offers cloud-based software that helps businesses understand how and why users are interacting with their app, mobile and web sites.
6. Scribd has more than 1M paying subscribers
The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
7. It’s not Monday without a TechCrunch podcast roundup
This week, the Equity team covers the latest news from scooter startups, while Original Content reviews the dueling Fyre Festival documentaries and Mixtape talks to the team at #builtbygirls.
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Vishay has announced an Rds(on) x Qg figure-of-merit of 3.1 Ω*nC for its latest fourth generation 600V E Series power n-channel mosfet, claiming that “this results in the industry’s lowest gate charge times on-resistance for devices in the same class”, said the firm, where ‘class’ is 600V mosfets used in power conversion applications. Called SiHH068N60E, its on-resistance is 27% ...
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Subscription ebook and audiobook service Scribd says it’s grown to more than 1 million subscribers.
It still has a long way to go before reaching the heights of Netflix (nearly 150 million subscribers) or Spotify (87 million paying subscribers), but the announcement should help put any lingering doubts to rest around whether there’s a sizable audience willing to pay an $8.99 subscription fee for books.
The company also says it’s been profitable since early in 2017, and that it’s currently bringing in $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
Scribd started out as a document-sharing service before moving into the subscription ebook business in 2013, when it signed its first deal with a major publisher — namely, HarperCollins. Since then, the service has added other big publishers and moved beyond older “backlist” titles. In fact, last year HarperCollins released the latest book from “Divergent” author Veronica Roth on Scribd, on launch day.
Chantal Restivo-Alessi has been chief digital officer at HarperCollins for the duration of the Scribd partnership. Via email, she praised the company’s “willingness to monitor, analyze, learn and adjust – something that clearly it has been doing in the past years.”
“We have continued to learn and adapt together,” Restivo-Alessi said. “We expected the digital ebook market to be a bigger part of our and their business now, and we have been positively surprised by the uptake in digital audio. We have continued to calibrate our catalog offer in line with the evolution of Scribd’s platform and customer base. And we continue to be pleasantly surprised by the depth of exposure that the platform provides to our backlist.”
Trip Adler
The adjustments that Restivo-Alessi is alluding to include Scribd’s pricing model — it initially offered subscribers unlimited access to its library, then capped them at three ebooks and one audiobook per month, then went back to a modified version of its unlimited plan last year. (Apparently the most voracious readers and listeners might still encounter a cap.)
Asked whether we can expect the Scribd offering to continue changing, co-founder and CEO Trip Adler said, “I don’t think there will be any big changes. We’re always optimizing … We’re constantly improving the way we find the right balance for readers and for publishers.”
Adler credited audiobooks as a key ingredient to the service’s growth, with engagement growing 100 percent year over year. Surprisingly, he also said Scribd’s old document-sharing business continues to be crucial, because it helps the service attracts between 100 million and 200 million visitors each month (mostly from search engines), who can then be converted into paying subscribers.
“That’s kind of the key thing we’ve figured out,” Adler said. “We use the [user generated content] to attract users and use premium content to retain them.”
Scribd has raised a total of $47.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
Investors include Khosla Ventures, with Khosla’s Keith Rabois on the Scribd board. In an emailed statement, Rabois said, “Scribd has one of the largest libraries of content in the world — which reaches millions of readers every month, giving the company exceptional data and the unique ability to help readers discover content uniquely suited to them. Scribd hitting one million subscribers is just the beginning of Scribd transforming how we choose what books to read and how we read them.”
And now that Scribd has reached the 1 million subscriber milestone, Adler said he’s already thinking about how it can get to 10 million. His plans include further international expansion in markets like Latin America, Europe and India (apparently half of Scribd’s subscriber base is already outside the United States), working with publishers and authors to create original content, and continuing to add new formats.
“We started out by offering documents, then ebooks, and then audiobooks, magazines and sheet music,” he said. “We’re just getting started. There’s going to be a lot more new types of content in the coming years.”
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