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Microsoft’s Seeing AI founder Saqib Shaikh is speaking at Sight Tech Global

Published August 20, 2020

When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella introduced Saqib Shaikh on stage at BUILD in 2016, he was obviously moved by the engineer’s “passion and empathy,” which Nadella said, “is going to change the world.”

That assessment was on the mark because Shaikh went on to co-found the mobile app Seeing AI, which is a showcase for the power of AI applied to the needs of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using the camera on a phone, the Seeing AI app can describe a physical scene, identify persons and their demeanor, read documents (including handwritten ones), read currency values and tell colors. The latest version uses haptic technology to help the user discover the position of objects and people in an image. The app has been used 20 million times since launch nearly three years ago, and today it works in eight languages.

It’s exciting to announce that Shaikh will be speaking at Sight Tech Global, a virtual, global event that addresses how rapid advances in technology, many of them AI-related, will influence the development of accessibility and assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. The show, which is a project for the Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired Silicon Valley, launched recently on TechCrunch. The virtual event is Dec. 2-3 and free to the public. Pre-register here.

Shaikh lost his vision at the age of 7, and attended a school for blind students, where he was intrigued by computers that could “talk” to students. He went on to study computer science at the U.K.’s University of Sussex. “One of the things I had always dreamt of since university,” he says, “was something that could tell you at any moment who and what’s going on around you.” That dream turned into his destiny.

After he joined Microsoft in 2006, Shaikh participated in Microsoft’s annual, week-long hackathons in 2014 and 2015 to develop the idea of applying AI in ways that could help people who are blind or visually impaired. Not long after, Seeing AI became an official project and Shaikh’s full-time job at Microsoft. The company’s Cognitive Services APIs have been critical to his work, and he now leads a team of engineers who are leveraging emerging technology to empower people who are blind.

“When it comes to AI,” says Shaikh, “I consider disabled people to be really good early adopters. We can point to history where blind people have been using talking books for decades and so on, all the way through to OCR text-to-speech, which is early AI. Today, this idea that a computer can look at an image and turn it into a sentence has many use-cases but probably the most compelling is to describe that image to a blind person. For blind people this is incredibly empowering.” Below is a video Microsoft released in 2016 about Shaikh and the Seeing AI project.

The Seeing AI project is an early example of a tool that taps various AI technologies in ways that produce an almost “intelligent” experience. Seeing AI doesn’t just read the text, for example, it also tells the user how to move the phone so the document is in the viewfinder. It doesn’t just tell you there are people in front of you, it tells you something about them, including who they are (if you have named them in the past) and their general appearance.

At Sight Tech Global, Shaikh will speak about the future of Seeing AI and his views on how accessibility will unfold in a world more richly enabled by cloud compute, low latency networks and ever more sophisticated AI algorithms and data sets.

To pre-register for a free pass, please visit Sight Tech Global.

Please follow the event on Twitter @Globalsight.

Sponsors are welcome, and there are opportunities available ranging from branding support to content integration. Please email sponsor@sighttechglobal.com for more information.

Zoom UX teardown: 5 fails and how to fix them

Published August 20, 2020

Valued at over $60 billion and used by millions each day for work and staying in touch with friends and family, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped make Zoom one of the most popular and relevant enterprise applications.

On one level, its surge to the top can be summed up in three words: “It just works.” However, that doesn’t mean Zoom’s user experience is perfect — in fact, far from it.

With the help of Built for Mars founder and UX expert Peter Ramsey, we dive deeper into the user experience of Zoom on Mac, highlighting five UX fails and how to fix them. More broadly, we discuss how to design for “empty states,” why asking “copy to clipboard” requests are problematic and other issues.

Always point to the next action

This is an incredibly simple rule, yet you’d be surprised how often software and websites leave users scratching their heads trying to figure what they’re expected to do next. Clear signposting and contextual user prompts are key.

The fail: In Zoom, as soon as you create a meeting, you’re sat in an empty meeting room on your own. This sucks, because obviously you want to invite people in. Otherwise, why are you using Zoom? Another problem here is that the next action is hidden in a busy menu with other actions you probably never or rarely use.

The fix: Once you’ve created a meeting (not joined, but created), Zoom should prompt and signpost you how to add people. Sure, have a skip option. But it needs some way of saying “Okay, do this next.”

Steve O’Hear: Not pointing to the next action seems to be quite a common fail, why do you think this is? If I had to guess, product developers become too close to a product and develop a mindset that assumes too much prior knowledge and where the obvious blurs with the nonobvious?

Figma CEO Dylan Field discusses fundraising, hiring and marketing in stealth mode

Published August 20, 2020

You’d be hard pressed to hang out with a designer and not hear the name Figma .

The company behind the largely browser-based design tool has made a huge splash in the past few years, building a massive war chest with more than $130 million from investors like A16Z, Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Index.

The company was founded in 2012 and spent several years in stealth, raising both its seed and Series A without having any public product or user metrics.

At Early Stage, we spoke with co-founder and CEO Dylan Field about the process of hiring and fundraising while in stealth and how life at the company changed following its launch in 2016. Field, who was 20 when he founded the company, also touched on the lessons he’s learned from his team about leadership. Chief among them: the importance of empowering the people you hire.

You can check out the full conversation in the video embedded below, as well as a lightly edited transcript.

Raising a Series A a year behind schedule while still in stealth

I actually had approached John Lilly from Greylock in our seed round. For those who don’t know, John Lilly was the CEO of Mozilla and an amazing guy. He’s on a lot of really cool boards and has a bunch of interesting experience for Figma, with very deep roots in design. I had approached him for the seed round, and he basically said to us, “You know, I don’t think you guys know what you’re doing, but I’m very intrigued, so let’s keep in touch.” This is the famous line that you hear from every investor ever. It’s like “Yeah, let’s keep in touch, let me know if I can be helpful.” Sometimes, they actually mean it. In John’s case, he actually would follow up every few months or I would follow up with him. We’d grab coffee, and he helped me develop the strategy to a point that got us to what we are today. And that was a collaboration. I could really learn a lot from him on that one.

When we started off the idea was: Let’s have this global community around design, and you’ll be able to use the tool to post to the community and someday we’ll think about how people can pay us. Talking with John got me to the point where I realized we need to start with a business tool. We’ll build the community later. Now, we’re starting to work toward that.

At some point, John told me, “Hey, if you ever think about raising again, let me know.” A few weeks later, I told him maybe we would raise because I just wanted to work with him. We talked to a few other investors. I think it’s pretty important that there’s always a competitive dynamic in the round. But really, it was just him that we were really considering for that round. He really did us a solid. He really believed in us. At the time, it wasn’t like there were metrics to look at. He had conviction in the space, a conviction in the attack, and he had conviction in me and Evan, which I feel very, very honored by. He’s a dear mentor to this day, and he’s on our board. And it’s been a really deep relationship.

How to recruit while in stealth mode

Report: Apple quietly acquired Israel’s Camerai, formerly Tipit, a specialist in AR and camera tech

Published August 20, 2020

Apple is well known for picking up smaller startups on the hush-hush to augment its business, and today news leaked out about the latest of these… nearly two years after the fact. Sometime between 2018 and 2019, the iPhone giant reportedly acquired and shut down Camerai, an augmented reality and computer vision company based out of Israel, which used to be called Tipit.

The news was first reported earlier today by Israeli newspaper Calcalist, and we have reached out to ask Apple directly about it. In the meantime, Jonathan (Yehonatan) Rimon, who had been Camerai’s CEO and co-founded the company with Moty Kosharovsky, Erez Tal and Aaron Wetzler, declined to comment one way or the other on the report when we contacted him directly about it. A separate source confirmed the story to us. We’ll update as we learn more.

Calcalist said that the startup sold for several tens of millions of dollars. From being founded in 2015, Camerai had raised around $5 million — including a $2.5 million round in 2017 and another unreported $2.5 million in 2018 — with investors including the Atooro Fund and another called the SKO Fund.

It seems that the acquisition came on the heels of multiple approaches from a number of companies at a time when AR was arguably at a peak of hype and many big tech companies wanted a piece of the action. (Recall that 2018 was the year when Magic Leap raised nearly $1 billion in a single round of funding.) Back in 2018, we heard rumors that those approaching and looking at the startup included Apple, Samsung and Alibaba.

The Calcalist report said that Camerai employees joined Apple’s computer vision team, and that the company’s technology has been incorporated into Apple products already. It’s not clear specifically where and when, but recall that both iOS 13 and iOS 14 have featured big software updates to the camera.

Camerai had built an SDK and specifically a range of software-based AR tools to help edit and use camera-made images in more sophisticated ways,

Its tech included the ability to detect different objects in the picture, and outline them with precision to alter them cosmetically; the ability to outline and apply filters across the whole image; a “skeleton tracking” neural network API that could detect and draw body joints in real time overlaid on a picture of a human; and its own version of selective focus for enhanced portrait modes (remember this was 2018 and this was not standard on phones at the time). Camerai’s site is shut down, but here are some screenshots of how it all looked, pulled from the Internet Archive:

Camerai’s acquisition underscores a couple of interesting, and ongoing, trends.

The first of these is in the development of smartphone technology, particularly around cameras. Some of the more interesting innovations in smartphone camera technology have come not out of improvements in hardware, but software, where the application of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence can mean that an existing combination of sensor, lens and on-phone and cloud processors produce a better and more technically dynamic picture than before.

At a time when smartphone replacement cycles have really slowed down and we are seeing also slower innovation on hardware, bolting on talent and tech created outside the phone companies is one way to gain a competitive edge.

(Separately, I wonder if making cutting-edge technology software-based also means that there could be scope in the future for paid updates to older phone models, which could mean more incremental revenues from consumers that don’t want to invest incompletely new devices.)

The second trend that this deal underscores is how Israel remains fertile ground for bigger companies on the hunt to pick up and bolt on technology, and that the secretive approach is likely to remain for some time to come.

“In Israel there are over 350 global corporate companies, from 30 countries, who search for local innovation. Some of them like Apple, MS, Google, even have local R&D [operations],” said Avihai Michaeli, a Tel Aviv-based senior investment banker and startup advisor. “Those global companies look mainly for tech which could serve as its competitive edge. It is not the first time that an acquired startup is asked not to publish it was acquired, nor talk about it.”

Other acquisitions that Apple has made in Israel have included camera module maker LinX, semiconductor startup Anobit and 3D sensor company PrimeSense.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Yalochat, a fast-growing conversational commerce startup, lands $15 million led by B Capital

Published August 20, 2020

Yalochat, a five-year-old, Mexico City-based conversational commerce platform that enables customers like Coca-Cola and Walmart to upsell, collect payments and provide better service to their own customers over WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WeChat in China, has closed on $15 million in Series B funding led by B Capital Group.

Sierra Ventures, which led a $10 million Series A financing for the company in early 2019, also participated.

The round isn’t so surprising if Yalochat’s numbers are to be believed. It says that since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, its platform has seen a tenfold increase in volume, and a 650% increase of message volume as more large enterprises — especially outside of the U.S. — use messaging apps to manage some of their sales operations and much of their customer service.

Yalochat is chasing a fast-growing market, too. According to the 10-year-old, India-based market research company MarketsandMarkets, the conversational AI software market should see $4.8 billion in revenue this year and more than triple that amount by 2025.

Certainly, having conglomerates on board is speeding along the company’s growth.

“With Coca-Cola, we started in Brazil and we helped them run their commerce when it comes to talking with small mom-and-pop shops,” says Yalochat founder and CEO Javier Mata, a Columbia University grad who studied engineering and founded three other companies beginning in 2013 before launching Yalochat.

“They had such success running their ordering process that they then took us to Mexico and Colombia, and we’re talking with [them about entering into the] Philippines and India.” Says Mata, “You try to get fast success in one market, then the conglomerate takes you into other areas of business so they can optimize their workflows around sales and customer service in other countries.”

Mata makes the process sound awfully easy, particularly considering that dozens of startups are also focused on conversational commerce and also raising funding right now.

Still, he argues that if you build your product the right way, it becomes a no-brainer for customers.

In pitching companies like Walmart, for example, he says Yalochat would “start with something super simple but high value that they could launch in a week. We’d say, ‘That process for sales that it has taken you years [to organize], we can get it out for you by Friday.’ Then we’d just do it.

“It was low stakes for them to try us out, and as soon as they saw our conversion rates, we were introduced to other [units] with the corporation.” Says Mata, “I think why a lot of other companies haven’t been successful is that [their tech] is not simple or doesn’t really work. We made ours scalable, easy to launch and capable of running smoothly without passing that complexity to end users.”

B Capital is plainly buying what Yalochat is selling. Firm co-founder Eduardo Saverin — who famously co-founded Facebook — calls Mata and his team “phenomenally strong” and suggests there’s little to stop their trajectory right now. “Yalo is an example of a Latin American business that is already today in Asia. And if you’re building a conversational commerce enablement for large enterprises that redefines the way they touch customers — [meaning] messaging applications, the most engaging medium in the world today — should that really be confined to Latin America or Asia? Absolutely not.”

Saverin compares the startup to B Capital itself, which has offices in LA, San Francisco, New York and Singapore.

The firm has already made bets in the U.S., Europe and Asia, since getting off the ground in 2015. Now, with Yalo, it has its first investment that’s principally headquartered in Latin America, as well. “For us,” says Saverin, who grew up in Brazil, “we didn’t start investing everywhere on day one. But that’s the mission.”

Agtech startup iFarm bags $4M to help vertical farms grow more tasty stuff

Published August 20, 2020

Vertical farming technology provider iFarm has bagged a $4 million seed round, led by Gagarin Capital, an earlier investor in the startup. Other investors in the round include Matrix Capital, Impulse VC, IMI.VC and several business angels.

The Finnish startup is focused on providing software that enables others to carry out vertical farming — targeting sales at food processing companies and FMCG giants, as well as farmers, university research centers and even large corporates with their own catering needs as a result of operating large physical office footprints.

Its software as a service platform automates crop care for plants such as salad greens, cherry tomatoes and berries grown in vertical stacks. The system involves a range of technologies to monitor and automate crop care, applying computer vision and machine learning and drawing on data on “thousands” of plants collected from a distributed network of farms, per iFarm .

At this stage it’s providing technology to around 50 projects in Europe and the Middle East — covering a total of 11,000 square meters of farm. Its platform is currently able to automate care for around 120 varieties of plants, with the goal of getting to 500 by 2025 (it says 10 new crop varieties are being added each month).

“iFarm started three years ago, with three founders. The goal is to build technology… for growing tasty and healthy food that we already eat,” says co-founder and CEO Max Chizhov, who notes the business has grown to 15 employees along the way.

“We started from a greenhouse. First year just looking for technologies — which kind of technologies to use. After one year of experiments we have some pilots and now we are focused on indoor farming, vertical farming.”

Vertical farming is an urban farming technique that involves stacking plants in dense layers in a highly controlled indoor environment, using LED lighting to replace sunlight to power all-year-round agriculture.

Furthermore, iFarm notes that the fully automated approach also means there’s no need for pesticides to grow a range of edible greens, herbs, fruits, flowers and vegetables. There are some natural limits on what can be grown within such systems — taller plants and trees obviously can’t be squeezed into stacks. Deep-root vegetables also aren’t suitable, although iFarm touts baby carrots among its product portfolio.

“We focus on profitable products,” says Chizhov. “Small crops, very fast growing crops, and easy to irrigate and easy to grow in many layers. Many layers is the advantage of indoor farms.”

Photo credit: iFarm

While there are now hundreds of vertical farming startups whose business model is fixed on selling the edible produce they grow, such as to supply supermarkets and other food retailers, iFarm is purely focused on developing technologies to support automated indoor agriculture.

So it might, for instance, be eyeing the likes of Infarm, Bowery and Plenty as potential customers for its vertical farming optimization technologies.

It says its systems can be applied to vertical farms of 20 to 20,000 square meters, supporting scalability.

“Our main advantage is we know how to grow and you don’t need any special technologies to know how to grow. All of our algorithms, all of the data, is based in our software,” says Chizhov, emphasizing the software is hardware agnostic — meaning customers don’t need to use iFarm’s kit for their vertical farms but just can apply its algorithms to their own set-ups.

The company has designed various bits of vertical farm hardware it can supply, or co-develop with customers, per Chizhov, such as fertilizer units and LED lighting. But the software as a service platform isn’t locked to any specific piece of kit.

“The main thing is the software that combines optimization systems like humidity, temperature, CO2 etc; and some business separations — like why, how, when we start growing, which clients,” he says, adding: “It’s like a CRM plus an ERP system that controls all the parameters.

“In this system we use computer vision systems. We use AI for increasing taste [of the edible produce], increasing yield parameters of our growing crops. We also use drones which fly in our farms and observe all of our greens and all of our plants. We optimize all of the processes in the farm using software and some [pieces of hardware] that use the software.”

Chizhov says the seed funding will be used to gradually expand the business into new regions — with a launch into the U.S. market on the cards in two years’ time — but the main priority now is to spend on further software development.

“The main goal is [adding] new type of crops,” he notes. “Research, development, new products.”

On the competitive front, iFarm is not the only technology provider seeking to sell to the burgeoning vertical farming sector. Chizhov says there are around 10 to 15 similar agtech startups. But he contends its tech and approach has the edge over the likes of U.K.-based Intelligent Growth Solutions, Belgium’s Urban Crop Solutions, Switzerland’s Growcer, U.S. “container farms” provider Freight Farms or China’s Alesca Life, to name-check a handful of other players in the space.

“There are some companies in this market that also provide solutions but with less optimization, with less software value and with less product mix/product line,” he argues. “The main difference is the type of crops; it’s software that we provide for our clients — because you don’t need to know how to grow; you don’t need to be a specialist in your company, you just push a button. And we provide excellent services for our clients. Design, installation, operation, help to sell the final product, etc.”

Chizhov also notes iFarm has filed patents to protect some of its technologies.

Photo credit: iFarm

Mikhail Taver, GP of Gagarin Capital, who is the lead investor in iFarm’s seed round, says the startup stood out on account of having a competitive advantage in the sector. Although he also notes that the fund’s agtech strategy is focused on indoor farming rather than mainstream outdoors — which again makes iFarm a good fit.

“We do see a large potential in the sector with the [world’s] rising population. We see the increasing demand for food — it’s only going to continue. We see global warming and general sustainability issues. And iFarm seems to be able to solve most of those,” Taver told TechCrunch.

“I don’t really see much competitors able to grow things other than greens,” he added, elaborating on the competitive edge claim. “You don’t normally get proper tomatoes or edible flowers and things like that grown in vertical farms. They mainly concentrate on a couple of salads at most.

“Plus most of our competitors they focus on competing with actual farmers, whereas we’re trying to augment them. We don’t try to force them off the market — we’re trying to help them get bigger. Which is a totally different approach and it should be working better. At least that’s what I believe.”

This article was updated with a correction: We were originally given the incorrect job title for Max Chizhov; he is in fact CEO, not CBDO.

DoorDash expands with on-demand grocery delivery

Published August 20, 2020

DoorDash is announcing that customers can now order groceries through the DoorDash app from partners including Smart & Final, Meijer and Fresh Thyme. Additional stores like Hy-Vee and Gristedes/D’Agnostino are supposed to be added in the next few weeks.

Through these partnerships, DoorDash says it has a delivery footprint covering 75 million Americans in markets like the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Orange County, Sacramento, San Diego, Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Detroit and Indianapolis.

DoorDash began delivering from a wide range of convenience stores earlier this year. Fuad Hannon, the company’s head of new verticals, also noted that a number of grocery stores are already part of the DoorDash Drive program, a white-label service where DoorDash handles last-mile delivery.

So Hannon said introducing grocery delivery into the DoorDash app itself is a “natural extension” of those efforts. And in contrast to many other grocery services, the company promises to deliver within an hour of your order.

“There’s no scheduling, no delivery slots, no day-long waits,” he said.

To achieve this, Hannon said DoorDash has created “deep partnerships and commercial relationships” with the grocery stores, coordinating on things like inventory management. “Embedded shoppers” hired from a staffing agency handle the shopping in each store, and the groceries are then delivered by DoorDash’s Dashers.

Image Credits: DoorDash

Hannon said these deliveries will be handled by “the same pool of Dashers” as restaurant delivery. Individual Dashers will decide for themselves when and if they want to take on groceries as well, but he argued that this provides a new opportunity for them, particularly between mealtimes when there’s not much demand for restaurant delivery.

Asked whether there’s any tension with grocery stores in the Drive program that may prefer bringing in customers through their own websites and apps, Hannon argued that customers in the DoorDash app represent “largely different users,” and he said the company is “philosophically agnostic” about whether customers are making purchases through the grocery store’s website/app or through DoorDash.

“DoorDash provides another convenient way for customers to get the value, selection and quality that Smart & Final offers, especially at a time when some are looking to limit trips outside their homes,” said Navin Cotton, Smart & Final’s director of digital commerce, in a statement. “DoorDash’s on-demand grocery service is a nice addition to our online shopping options and with delivery in under an hour, we know Smart & Final customers are going to appreciate it.”

Grocery prices are set by the merchant and should be the same as what you’d find in-store, Hannon said, though perhaps without buy-one-get-one-free offers and others in-store deals. These deliveries are also included in the company’s DashPass subscription, which offers free delivery and reduced service fees.

DoorDash is also offering prepared meals from a longer list of grocery partners, including Wegmans, Hy-Vee, Gelson’s, Kowalski’s, Big Y World Class Markets, Food City, Village Supermarkets, Save Mart, Lucky, Lucky California and Coborn’s.

DoorDash launches a convenience store

Airbnb has confidentially filed to go public

Published August 19, 2020

In a turn of fortune, Airbnb today announced that it has filed to go public, albeit confidentially.

The move puts the home-sharing service on a path to a public offering sooner rather than later, and comes after reports that the company was prepping an IPO filing this month. Those same reports indicated that Airbnb could go public as soon as the end of the year.

A Q3 or Q4 Airbnb offering is therefore a distinct possibility.

Airbnb has mounted a comeback since COVID-19-related shutdowns slammed the travel market, tanking its revenues at the same time. Airbnb laid off nearly 2,000 workers, and took on expensive capital from external sources.

With the travel market in tatters, when can Airbnb go public in 2020?

The company promised in 2019 that it would go public in 2020, but that pledge seemed far-off in the middle of the year. Since then, Airbnb has made noise about different parts of its business coming back to life, although changed by new travel and work and vacation patterns from its users.

If Airbnb has filed, we can presume that present results are good enough to get it life, else the firm would have not filed and would have simply gone public later. The question now becomes if its Q2 numbers were good enough to get it out the door, or if the company intends to update its S-1 filing with Q3 numbers, push the filing live and go public with more recovery time in its results.

Of course, such a course of action would put its public debut perilously close to the American election. And, Airbnb’s Q2 numbers are down not only from Q1 in revenue terms, but even more sharply from its year-ago results for the same calendar period. In short, Airbnb’s growth story may not be clear until Q3 numbers are tallied, a month and a half from now.

Airbnb joins other companies that have filed privately, like DoorDash, waiting in the wings for the right moment to go public, or the right set of results.

We’ll see, but the company’s public debut is back to being impending. Now the question becomes whether Airbnb intends to go public in an IPO, as the wording of its filing appears to suggest, or if a direct listing could still be in the cards. We think it’s more likely the former and not the latter, but, hey, in 2020 you never know.

Airbnb, Lyft and Uber: When to call it a comeback

Just what would an enterprise company like Microsoft or Oracle do with TikTok?

Published August 19, 2020

By now you’ve probably heard that under pressure from the current administration, TikTok owner ByteDance is putting the viral video service up for sale, and surprisingly a couple of big name enterprise companies are interested. These organizations are better known for the kind of tech that would bore the average TikTok user to tears. Yet, stories have persisted that Microsoft and even Oracle are sniffing around the video social network.

As TechCrunch’s Danny Crichton pointed out last week, bankers involved in the sale have a lot of motivation to leak rumors to the press to drive up the price of TikTok. That means none of this might be true, yet the rumors aren’t going away. It begs the question: Why would a company like Oracle or Microsoft be interested in a property like TikTok?

For starters, Oracle is a lot more than the database company it was known for in the past. These days, it has its fingers in many, many pies, including marketing automation and cloud infrastructure services. In April, as the pandemic was just beginning to heat up, Zoom surprised just about everyone when it announced a partnership with Oracle’s cloud arm.

In surprise choice, Zoom partners with Oracle for growing infrastructure needs

Oracle isn’t really even on the board when it comes to cloud infrastructure market share, where it is well behind rivals AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba and IBM, wallowing somewhere in single-digit market share. Oracle wants to be a bigger player.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has successfully transitioned to the cloud as well as any company, but still remains far behind AWS in the cloud infrastructure market. It wants to close the gap with AWS, and owning TikTok could get it closer to that goal faster.

Simply put, says Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, if Oracle combined Zoom and TikTok, it could have itself a couple of nice anchor clients. Yes, like the proverbial mall trying to attract Target and Nordstrom, apparently Oracle wants to do the same with its cloud service, and if it has to buy the tenant, so be it.

“TikTok will add plenty of load to their infrastructure service. That’s what matters to them with viral loads preferred. If Microsoft gets TikTok it could boost their usage by between 2% and 5%, while for Oracle it could be as much 10%,” he said. He says the difference is that Oracle has a much smaller user base now, so it would relatively boost its usage all the more.

As Mueller points out, with the government helping push TikTok’s owner to make the sale, it’s a huge opportunity for a company like Oracle or Microsoft, and why the rumors have weight. “It’s very plausible from a cloud business perspective, and plausible from a business opportunity perspective created by the U.S. government,” he said.

Trump calls TikTok a hot brand, demands a chunk of its sale price

While it could make sense to attract a large user base to your systems to drive up usage and market share in that way, Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that just by having a large U.S. tech company buy the video app could make it less attractive to the very users Microsoft or Oracle is hoping to capture.

“An old-guard enterprise tech company buying Tiktok would likely lessen the appeal of current users. Younger people are already leaving Facebook because the old folks have taken it over,” Leary said. And that could mean young users, who are boosting the platform’s stats today, could jump ship to whatever is the next big social phenomenon.

It’s worth pointing out that just today, the president indicated support for Oracle, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The publication also reported that Oracle’s billionaire owner Larry Ellison is a big supporter of the president, having thrown him a fundraiser for his reelection bid at his house earlier this year. Oracle CEO Safra Catz also has ties to the administration, having served on the transition team in 2016.

It’s unclear whether these companies have a genuine interest, but the general feeling is someone is going to buy the service, and whoever does could get a big boost in users simply by using some percentage of their cash hordes to get there. By the way, another company with reported interest is Twitter. Certainly putting the two social platforms together could create a mega platform to compete more directly with Facebook.

You might see other big names trying to boost cloud infrastructure usage, like IBM or Google, enter the fray. Perhaps even Amazon could make an offer to cement its lead, although if the deal has to go through the federal government, that makes it less likely, given the tense relationship between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the president that surfaced during the Pentagon JEDI cloud contract drama.

Apple has already indicated that in spite of having the largest cash on hand of any company, with over $193 billion, give or take, it apparently isn’t interested. Apple may not be, but somebody surely is, even some companies you couldn’t imagine owning a property like this.

Beware bankers talking TikTok

Lucid’s new all-electric sedan will let owners send energy to their homes by mid-2021

Published August 19, 2020

Lucid Motors said Wednesday that its upcoming all-electric Air sedan will have fast-charging capability that will let owners add 300 miles of range to the battery in 20 minutes and a home-charging unit that will allow owners to send energy from their car to their home.

Lucid said it is able to hit this benchmark because the vehicle has a 900-volt electrical architecture when combined with its lithium-ion cells, battery and thermal management system and powertrain efficiency. Most electric vehicles — with the exception of the Porsche Taycan and future Kia EVs — have a 400-volt architecture.

There are limitations to this speedy charging; a driver would need to access the correct DC fast charger, which are not exactly abundant at the moment. However, this capability does check an important box for EV owners. While the Lucid Air will have an eye-popping range of more than 500 miles — if its estimates are verified by the EPA — the fast charging capability helps remove any lingering range anxiety and make long-distance travel more desirable.

The company revealed a number of other details surrounding charging, including that the Air will use the universal CCS (combined charging system) connector standard, which makes it compatible to public chargers. The vehicle will have a peak charging rate of over 300kW and a 19.2kW AC onboard charger that can support AC charging speeds up to 80 miles per hour.

Lucid also announced a partnership with Electrify America, VW Group’s U.S.-based charging network. Owners of the Air will be given three years of free charging at Electrify America chargers, which includes DC fast charging.

Lucid also has built out a number of home-based charging features, including a partnership with Qmerit on installation of its connected home charging station. But perhaps the most interesting feature is that Lucid has built “vehicle-to-everything” charging capabilities into the Air and home charging unit. This means that the vehicle will be able to execute bi-directional charging between vehicles and even from the Air back to the owner’s home. Lucid specifically mentioned that it would allow owners to provide a temporary energy reserve for their homes, including “off grid vacation properties,” a weirdly specific detail that must be popular with the luxury EV owner demographic. Lucid told TechCrunch that this capability will become available in mid 2021.

Lucid said it also plans to repurpose older batteries for energy storage. The first prototype is already installed at Lucid’s Silicon Valley headquarters, where a team is working on producing a range of energy storage products.