Pokémon GO creator Niantic buys Escher Reality AR startup

Pokémon GO creator Niantic buys Escher Reality AR startup

The company behind Pokémon GO, Niantic, has announced that it is acquiring augmented reality startup Escher Reality.

Escher Reality builds backend services for cross-platform mobile AR so users can interact with each other and objects in the environment. The startup offered functionality for shared experiences that was absent in both Google’s ARCore and Apple’s ARKit.

Persistent experiences mean that the AR system remembers where you placed objects in your AR home or can tell when another person is moving them around and keep you updated accordingly; it extends much deeper than that, but foundationally it makes interactive environments capable of being shared.



The startup was one of the clear standouts from its Y Combinator class and we even highlighted it in our list of favorites. What made it so appealing was that it delivered less-sexy backend services to a platform everyone was talking about but nobody (still) really understands.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. The startup’s investors include Uncork Capital, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Webb Investment Network, iRobot Ventures, Presence Capital, Into Ventures and others.

Niantic has been one of the major powerhouses in AR gaming, so this one isn’t too surprising. In a blog post, Niantic highlighted just how quickly it intended to put Escher Reality’s technology to use:

The addition of the Escher AR technology is incredibly exciting to us at Niantic as it significantly accelerates our work on persistent, shared AR as part of the Niantic real-world application platform. It’s our intention to make our cross-platform AR technology available more widely to developers later this year. Stay tuned for information on developer availability.

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Apple Watch shipments jumped in 2018

Apple Watch shipments jumped in 2018

Other than its iPhones and computers, Apple sells a bunch of other products, like the AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Beats products, iPod Touch and, most recently, the HomePod. In Q1 2018, Apple saw $5.5 billion in revenue for these other products, an increase of 36 percent year over year.

That increase suggests Apple’s Watch Series 3, which it launched this past September, and its AirPods are selling well.

In Q4 2017, Apple sold just $3.2 billion worth of other products. To be clear, these revenues do not include pre-sales for the HomePod, which starts shipping February 9 for $349.

Apple’s revenue in Q1 2018 was $88.3 billion, so sales from other products make up a small portion of the company’s overall revenue. Still, $5.5 billion is not a small amount of money.

Apple’s biggest revenue-driver this quarter was, unsurprisingly, the iPhone, followed by services, which includes AppleCare, Apple Music and other services. In Q1 2018, Apple sold $61.6 billion worth of iPhones and $8.5 billion worth of services.

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Apple saw $5.5 billion in revenue from Air Pods 2018

Apple saw $5.5 billion in revenue from Air Pods 2018

Other than its iPhones and computers, Apple sells a bunch of other products, like the AirPods, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Beats products, iPod Touch and, most recently, the HomePod. In Q1 2018, Apple saw $5.5 billion in revenue for these other products, an increase of 36 percent year over year.

That increase suggests Apple’s Watch Series 3, which it launched this past September, and its AirPods are selling well.

In Q4 2017, Apple sold just $3.2 billion worth of other products. To be clear, these revenues do not include pre-sales for the HomePod, which starts shipping February 9 for $349.

Apple’s revenue in Q1 2018 was $88.3 billion, so sales from other products make up a small portion of the company’s overall revenue. Still, $5.5 billion is not a small amount of money.

Apple’s biggest revenue-driver this quarter was, unsurprisingly, the iPhone, followed by services, which includes AppleCare, Apple Music and other services. In Q1 2018, Apple sold $61.6 billion worth of iPhones and $8.5 billion worth of services.

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Google’s Diane Greene says billion-dollar 2018

Google’s Diane Greene says billion-dollar 2018

It has long been believed that the big three in the cloud consisted of AWS, Microsoft and Google, with IBM not doing too badly either. But in its earnings call with analysts today, the company revealed it’s pulling in a billion dollars a quarter in combined cloud revenue. That’s a figure that Google’s Diane Greene says already puts her company on elite footing, but which is substantially below what competitors have been reporting.

“We are saying we crossed a billion a quarter in 2017 and according to publicly available numbers, we are the fastest growing cloud. If you step back and think about someone offering services and that’s revenue, that’s pretty darn impressive. Not too many companies can make a claim like that. It already puts you in the elite of companies,” Greene told TechCrunch.

It’s worth noting that in Q4, Canalys reported that Microsoft had grown the fastest with 98 percent growth with Google second at 85 percent growth; still quite brisk, but not the fastest. While Greene wouldn’t share specific data on how they came up with their number, she did say the company compared a range of publicly available data with their own internal numbers to come up with the “fastest growing cloud” label.

That may be so, but it’s hard to ignore that a $4 billion run rate is not even equal to a quarter of revenue for any of Google’s main cloud competitors. While it’s hard to do a pure comparison of cloud revenue because there is no standard way of measuring it, we do know that Amazon reported AWS revenue today of $4.331 billion. Meanwhile, Microsoft passed a $20 billion total cloud run rate last year and IBM reported revenue of $17 billion in total cloud revenue for the year in its most recent earnings report, which breaks down to more than $4.25 billion a quarter.

In spite of this, John Dinsdale of Synergy Research, a firm that has been tracking the cloud market for some time says the number did not surprise him. “Absolutely no surprise on the $1B disclosure and it’s in line with the size and trend of Google’s cloud business that we have been reporting for a long time.” Dinsdale told TechCrunch.

For her part, Greene sees progress. Besides the the rapid growth she cited, Google Cloud has passed major milestones like 4 million customers paying for G Suite and it has tripled the number of sales of a million dollars or more since 2016. All progress, she says, that points to a company that’s growing more quickly than the billion-dollar revenue number would suggest in isolation.

Google has spent $30 billion in infrastructure investments over the last three years to build its data center presence around the world. It also has made a concerted effort to be a more developer-friendly cloud vendor and has contributed key software like Kubernetes to open source, a technology that surged in popularity in 2017.

Greene says this has removed a lot of market obstacles for Google, but that it takes some time for revenue to catch up with customers. “Think about how the cloud works and they start moving over and the revenue takes awhile to start coming in,” she explained.

She cited a long list of big-name customers who have come on board during her tenure, from enterprise technology players Salesforce, Cisco and SAP to a range of other industries, including Disney, Rolls Royce and PayPal.

It’s also worth pointing out that customers don’t typically choose a single cloud vendor, which means that each one can share the same customer. This is not necessarily a zero sum game for any of these vendors.

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John Hennessy as new board chair 2018

John Hennessy as new board chair 2018

Google parent company Alphabet’s big run over the past few months came to a screeching halt today after it came out with its fourth-quarter results, which fell beneath expectations set by Wall Street for the advertising giant — sending the stock down around 5 percent and shaving off billions in market cap.

While Google owns a massive chunk of the advertising system — and it still continues to print money — it’s found itself trying to diversify itself away from that with a series of other big bets on products like hardware and cloud computing. That’s starting to pay off as growth in its “other revenues” and “other bets” continues to rise year-over-year, but there are still a couple of signs that point to a potentially rocky future for Google.

Like other big tech companies reporting this quarter, Google logged a $9.9 billion charge related to changes in U.S. tax law. Here’s the scorecard:

Revenue: $32.32 billion, compared to $31.87 billion Wall Street estimates, up 24 percent year-over-year
Earnings: $9.70 per share, compared to estimates of $9.98 per share
Other revenues: $4.7 billion
Other bets: $409 million
TAC as a % of revenue: 24 percent
YoY paid clicks: 43 percent
YoY cost-per-click: -14 percent
QoQ cost-per-click: -6 percent
Google is also naming John Hennessy, who’s been on its board since 2004, as its chair following Eric Schmidt departing in December last year.

In particular, Google’s last quarters have been marked with the creeping shadow of increasing costs for its traffic acquisition as a percentage of Google’s revenue, or TAC. While for the past several quarters it hasn’t raised any massive alarm bells, it could represent a potential problem for Google in the future as more and more activity shifts to mobile devices. It’s something that’s come up a couple of times from analysts poking around at the subject on quarterly calls to discuss the earnings results, and it is still continuing to creep up.


Today is a surprising slip-up for Google, which, while it continues to print money and beat Wall Street’s expectations on the revenue front, found itself tumbling after its fourth-quarter earnings came out. In the past year, Google’s stock has risen nearly 50 percent:

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Elon Musk says SpaceX to focus on BFR following 2018

Elon Musk says SpaceX to focus on BFR following 2018

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said at a press event for the just-launched Falcon Heavy that SpaceX will now begin focusing in earnest on “BFR,” the code name for its next big space launch vehicle. BFR (aka “big f*cking rocket,” in case you lack imagination) will be designed to be a vehicle capable of using a single stage to make it all the way to orbit, with fully loaded tanks.

Musk said that BFR might be ready for “short hopper flights with the spaceship part” of the rocket by maybe next year. These will essentially be flights of “increasing complexity,” with the intent being to go out of Earth’s atmosphere and then “come back in hot to test the heat shield,” because BFR’s primary purpose will require it to survive planetary entry, on Earth, Mars and beyond.

“There are a lot of uncertainties around this program, but it is going to be our focus,” Musk said on a press call following Falcon Heavy’s launch. “We’re almost done with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. After block 5 [the current revision of the Falcon 9] we won’t be doing any more with Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, and with Dragon probably after Dragon Two [the Crew capsule currently being developed].”

Musk added that of BFR’s design challenges, “the ship part is by far the hardest, because that’s going to come in from super-orbital velocity” around planets including Mars, which is “way harder than coming in from orbit.”

It might be surprising to learn that Musk considers the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy essentially fixed in terms of their design and development at this stage, but he clarified later that their booster-based tech is essentially something that SpaceX understands well now.

“The booster, I think — I don’t want to get complacent, but I think we understand reusable boosters,” Musk said. “Reusable spaceships, that’s the hard part. We’ll go to low-Earth orbit first, but we can go to the moon shortly after that.”

What kind of time frame are we talking about here? Well, according to the SpaceX CEO, we should expect a “full-scale test” of BFR within the next three to four years — meanwhile, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy will continue to serve customers and bring in revenue.

It’s perhaps counter-intuitive that Elon Musk is talking about the next iteration of his company’s rocket on the evening following his latest design’s very first flight, but the company has always had its eye on what comes next, and BFR is the real key to unlocking Mars and interplanetary transportation.

“Most of our engineering resources will be dedicated to BFR,” Musk said about next steps. “I think this will make this go quickly.”

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Snap shares skyrocket on first earnings 2018

Snap shares skyrocket on first earnings 2018

Snapchat doubled its Rest of World revenue this quarter. That’s a surprise, considering CEO Evan Spiegel never seemed to care about anyone but U.S. teens. Snapchat’s Android app was buggy. Its videos loaded too slowly on weak connections. And Spiegel even admitted “Historically we’ve really focused our efforts on markets where [high-end phones and broadband mobile networks] are available.”

That left the door wide open for Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status to steal the international market before Snap could arrive. In Q4 2016, Snapchat total users in the Rest of World stayed worryingly flat at 39 million.

But Spiegel changed his tune this year with a massive set of strategy flip-flops. Three months ago he admitted that “In order to further scale our user base, we need to accelerate the adoption of our product among Android users . . . and users in the Rest of World markets.” This acknowledgement that more than California cool kids like him mattered now appears instrumental to the Second Coming of Snapchat.

Today, Snap Inc. recorded a blockbuster quarter, reviving its growth rate from 2.9 percent to 5 percent as it reached 187 million daily users. Revenue blew away expectations and losses shrank. And the share price soared up 21 percent in response.

Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s clear where Snapchat’s renewed strength came from. The developing world.



The Rest of World region added 3 million daily users to reach 47 million, just as many as the European and North American markets despite their larger size. That’s more developing world users than it’s added in any quarter since the frothy growth days of Q1 2016.


The Middle East was a top contributor to Snap Inc’s revenue this quarter

How did it add so many in countries across South America and Asia? First, Snapchat got serious about improving its Android app’s performance. Back in its IPO filing, Snap wrote that “although our products work with Android mobile devices, we have prioritized development of our products to operate with iOS.” But engineering advances led to a 20 percent increase in Android user retention, as fewer bugs kept users aboard. Spiegel said Snapchat now has its lowest crash rate ever.

Meanwhile, Snapchat launched partnerships with wireless carriers over a dozen markets to reduce the cost of all the data Snapchat scarfs up. “This is important because Snapchat can be more fun to use out in the world rather than at home on Wi-Fi,” Spiegel said. Though these “zero-rating” deals can be controversial for net neutrality reasons, they can make it much easier to recruit users. Engineering improvements also made video Snaps and ads easier to stream.

All this extra usage in the developing world was paired with much stronger monetization. Average Revenue Per User in the developing world nearly doubled, from $0.30 to $0.56, with total revenue from the region doubling quarter-over-quarter, from $13 million to $26 million. Year-over-year, Snap grew Rest of World revenue a staggering 333 percent.

That’s in part because 90 percent of Snapchat’s ads are now bought through the programmatic Ads API and self-serve Ads Manager interfaces rather than through sales people, versus 10 percent a year before. That eradicates the language barrier.

COO Imran Khan explained that “Our self-service tools have also enabled us to quickly scale in international markets. For example, in the Middle East, we made the strategic decision to rely exclusively on our self-serve tools for Snap Ads . . . and out of all our international offices, this region was our top contributor to overall revenue growth in Q4.” Code is the universal language, after all.



What we’re seeing is Snapchat International. While U.S. teens still might monetize better than those abroad, there’s a lot more scattered around the globe than here at home. It turns out kids everywhere want to chat and share without a permanent record. They weren’t opposed to Snapchat. They just wanted it to work right.

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Snap chat wins in the developing world 2018

Snap chat wins in the developing world 2018

Snapchat is starting to turn things around, boosting its sluggish user growth rate and beating Wall Street’s expectations for the first time with today’s blockbuster Q4 2017 earnings report.

It added 8.9 million daily active users, to reach 187 million, with a quarter-over-quarter growth rate of 5.05 percent percent in Q4, compared to 2.9 percent in Q3. That translates to a DAU growth of 18 percent year-over-year, compared to Facebook’s 14 percent. Revenue was $285.7 million, up 72 percent year-over-year, with earnings per share of -$0.13 adjusted compared to estimates of $253 million and a -$0.16 adjusted.

The source of its growth? After years of neglect, Snapchat won in the developing world.



Snap lost $350 million compared to $440 million last quarter as operating expenses grew to $261 million, but cash burn dropped to $225 million, down 49 percent from last quarter. That brings 2017 losses to a total of $3.45 billion. Still, Snap Inc. shares closed up about 1.52 percent, to $14.06 earlier today.

In after-hours trading, shares skyrocketed 26 percent immediately following the earnings release before settling at 19 percent up. Wall Street apparently loves to see Snapchat’s growth rate recovering after a long decline since Instagram Stories launched. Snap currently has $2 billion in cash left for hiring, expenses and acquisitions.

The rocky redesign shows potential
Snapchat’s big redesign will reach all users during Q1 2018, up from 40 million users currently. It was due to be fully rolled out by now but that has been delayed following poor reception in countries like the U.K., Australia and Canada. Amongst some of the first users to review the update, 83 percent of App Store reviews were negative, citing a confusing interface, ads mixed into the message inbox via Stories and people who don’t follow you back getting pushed into the Discover section. We’ll hope to hear more about Snapchat’s big redesign in the Q&A.



In the earnings report’s prepared remarks, Evan Spiegel acknowledges “it will take time for our 5 community to get used to the changes” from the big redesign. However, he says publisher Stories on Discover grew 40 percent compared to the old design, and core metrics are up disproportionately for users older than 35, showing the navigation simplification may be a success.

Ninety-seven percent of all Snaps sent on Snapchat are now created using the company’s camera. And each week more than half of all 13- to 34-year-olds in the U.S. play with Snapchat’s AR lenses. These stats prove Snapchat’s potential to monetize via sponsored creative tools for editing and adding augmented reality to their photos and videos. Meanwhile, Snap says it earned $100 million for its content partners in 2017.

Spiegel explained that improvements to Snapchat’s Android app performance boosted retention by nearly 20 percent compared to a year ago, showing a solid increase after the company neglected Android in its first few years. Snap is also working wireless carriers in a dozen markets to reduce the costs of using Snapchat via data discounting programs. Next, Snapchat wants to expands its embed system for bringing Stories out of its app so that Snaps can appear on stadium Jumbotrons and elsewhere.

Snap becomes a real business
Investors are surely excited to hear that more than 90 percent of Snap Ads were bought programmatically, so the shift to an auction system that hurt ad prices is largely behind the company now. Snap is also getting more efficient, as average revenue per user grew 46 percent year-over-year to $1.53 as costs per user grew only 2 percent to $0.98.



Notably, ARPU in the Rest of World region of developing nations nearly doubled from $0.30 to $0.56. That shows Snapchat is figuring out how to serve ads over slower connections to older phones even though the app depends on data-heavy video. Total revenue in the Rest Of World region doubled just this quarter.

Snap Ad impressions were up 575 percent year-over-year and 90 percent quarter-over-quarter. App install ads performed especially well, showing Snapchat can deliver mobile gamers who keep playing rather than downloading and forgetting. Back in 2013, app install ads let Facebook build a monster mobile business, and now they’ve given Snapchat a big boost.

One blemish on the earnings was that Snap was mum on Spectacles sales in Q4 despite aggressive display advertising for the video glasses across the web. It warned that sales would be substantially down in Q1 2018 from the $8 million it sold in Q1 2017 — which was still disappointing. It appears Snap will have to win with software, or an augmented reality hardware device that does much more than put a camera on your face.

Hiring pace slowed significantly for Snap, with it adding just 100 employees at one-third the rate of recent quarters thanks to improved efficiency. Now that the business engine is purring, it needs fewer workers to drag it along.

Building Snapchat for everyone
Q4 was when Snapchat finally patched the hole in the bucket, improving app performance and retention, monetizing the developing world and changing its app to attract older users.

Looking back, Snapchat acquired adtech startup Metamarkets for less than $100 million in Q4, which could help it squeeze more revenue out of its existing users since the total number isn’t growing quickly any more. Snap also launched a new “hands-on augmented reality” ads where you can interact with a brand’s products. But we might need to wait until Q1 to see the impact of these on revenue. Snapchat is expected to generate $1.18 billion in U.S. ad revenue in 2018, up 83 percent over last 2017. That would give Snapchat a 1.3 percent share of the U.S. digital ad market.


Snapchat’s new augmented reality ads let you interact with products

In the meantime, Snapchat has been racing to release new features to keep users loyal despite the onslaught of competition from Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp. Snapchat launched Bitmoji 3D world lenses where your personalized avatar dances in your Snaps, and an augmented reality platform for geolocated art in Q4. Snapchat’s new Lens Studio for creating AR experiences has seen 30,000 Lenses created in the six weeks after launch.

Making Snapchat more competitive with its army of clones could be difficult as top talent keeps leaving the company. VP of product Tom Conrad, one of CEO Evan Spiegel’s top lieutenants left in January following TimeHop founder Jonathan Wegener and others. Today’s share price boost could make it more interesting to sought-after tech workers.

Overall, Snapchat is finding ways to become indispensable to users in the face of Instagram’s convenience. The momentum from this quarter could help it make the hires, acquisitions and confident product changes needed to entrench itself as the teenage messaging app while becoming appealing to those who grew up on Facebook.

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The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on all of Amazon this holiday season

The Echo Dot was the best-selling product on all of Amazon this holiday season

The Christmas shopping season is at last finished, and that implies Amazon makes them shop information for us. This Christmas season, Amazon's Echo Dot was the best offering Amazon gadget, and in addition the best offering item accessible from any maker over all classifications on Amazon.com, with millions sold.

In the interim, Amazon's fresher Alexa-empowered gadgets, the Echo Spot, Echo Dot and Echo Buttons, sold out this Christmas season. Be that as it may, clients can pre-arrange those gadgets to hold a place in line. Amazon's Alexa application additionally beat the outlines for Apple and Google Play on Christmas day, proposing a deluge of new clients setting up their gadgets. Altogether, Amazon said it sold "many millions" of Alexa-empowered gadgets around the world.

Alongside the Echo Dot, the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote was another best offering Amazon gadget and extraordinary compared to other offering items over all of Amazon. This Christmas season, clients purchased more than twice the same number of Amazon Fire TV Sticks than they did amid a year ago's vacation season. Contrasted with a year ago's vacation season, Amazon sold "millions more" Amazon gadgets amid the current year's vacation season.

This was Amazon's greatest Christmas season to date, "with clients all around the globe shopping at record levels," the organization said in a public statement. Amazon likewise touted how finished the traverse of one week, more than four million individuals wound up plainly Prime individuals, or began a free trial.

Since Amazon now possesses Whole Foods, the organization likewise tossed in some fun certainties about the basic supply chain. This Christmas season, for instance, Whole Foods Market sold more than 500,000 pounds of sweets at the treat bars in its U.S. stores.

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Open Garden wants to give you tokens for sharing your internet connection

Open Garden wants to give you tokens for sharing your internet connection

Open Garden propelled its work organizing stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012. From that point forward, the organization has experienced a couple of cycles and discovered unforeseen accomplishment in its Firechat disconnected informing administration. Presently, it's prepared for the following stage in its advancement. The organization now needs to make it less demanding for anyone with an Android telephone to share their Wi-Fi associations with any individual who is adjacent. What's more, to boost individuals to do as such, the organization intends to dispatch its own particular Ethereum token (called OG… ) in mid 2018.

The organization charges this as the dispatch of a "decentralized Internet Service Provider (ISP)." despite everything you require a consistent ISP to wind up noticeably an Open Garden ISP, so I concede that the entire idea doesn't exactly appear to be on the whole correct to me. Obviously, Open Garden CEO Paul Hainsworth (who assumed control from the organization's established CEO in mid 2016) doesn't see it that way. "The idea of a decentralized ISP is completely new," he let me know. "The conventional, brought together ISP is a one-to-numerous connection amongst supplier and client. A decentralized ISP is the mix of a large number of unique individuals, organizations and items making another sort of system. These a huge number of individuals sharing their web are ISPs, little or substantial, and in total they frame a decentralized ISP."

The contention here is that a great many people just utilize a little measure of their broadband association's data transmission top. So for what reason not impart this entrance to others and gain some OG all the while? While Open Garden contends this is an absolutely new idea, any semblance of Fon and others have since a long time ago empowered WiFi sharing without the requirement for Ethereum tokens and work systems. Most have done as such with blended achievement, likely in light of the fact that few individuals really need to share their web get to.

A decentralized system like this can likewise just work if enough individuals take an interest. Open Garden is endeavoring to kick off this procedure by utilizing its FireChat application to bootstrap this procedure. The organization says its informing administration has more than 5 million enrolled clients and they will shape the reason for seeding this system. After some time, Open Garden likewise plans to include applications for iOS, Mac, Windows and set-top spilling boxes. "Venture Open Garden, our open source venture, will empower designers to incorporate OG with their own particular applications and equipment arrangements," the organization contends. "OG can be utilized by existing WiFi foundation proprietors –, for example, city WiFi, shopping centers, stadiums, air terminals, eateries, and independent companies – to adapt their current capital speculation."

Furthermore, why utilize tokens (additionally, I expect, this is clearly a hip activity at the present time)? "Our purpose is to empower normal shoppers to purchase web access without understanding anything about crypto, blockchains or anything specialized," Hainsworth let me know. He additionally contends that tokens are a decent method to boost development. "By issuing our own token, rather than simply utilizing Bitcoin or Ethereum, we can give away a substantial level of the aggregate tokens (or coins) in our economy to members," he noted. "We do this to boost organize development, client procurement and maintenance. Impetuses work at an individual level. Early adopters can procure extra reward OG for being first to showcase, for instance."

So if all the motivating force you at any point expected to impart your web association with arbitrary outsiders was a touch of Ethereum OG, at that point your fantasies have worked out as expected. The Open Garden application is presently accessible for download in the Google Play store.

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