Tesla’s profitable Supercharger network is in limbo after Musk axed the entire team | TechCrunch
Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Here’s what one insider said happened in the days leading up to the layoffs.
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.
Hubble Network has become the first company in history to establish a Bluetooth connection directly to a satellite — a critical technology validation for the company, potentially opening the door to connecting millions more devices anywhere in the world.
The Seattle-based startup launched its first two satellites to orbit on SpaceX’s Transporter-10 ride-share mission in March; since that time, the company confirmed that it has received signals from the onboard 3.5mm Bluetooth chips from over 600 kilometers away.
The sky is truly the limit for space-enabled Bluetooth devices: the startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring. Haro said the low-hanging fruit is those industries that are desperate for network coverage even once per day, like remote asset monitoring for the oil and gas industry. As the constellation scales, Hubble will turn its attention to sectors that may need more frequent updates, like soil monitoring, to continuous coverage use cases like fall monitoring for the elderly.
Once its up and running, a customer would simply need to integrate their devices’ chipsets with a piece of firmware to enable connection to Hubble’s network.
Hubble was founded in 2021 by Life360 co-founder Alex Haro, Iotera founder Ben Wild (who sold his startup to Ring), and aerospace engineer John Kim. Haro said the first time Wild presented the idea of connecting a Bluetooth chip to a satellite, his initial reaction was, “No freaking way.” And it does sound crazy, especially as consumer electronics can struggle to connect to other Bluetooth-enabled devices that are just a few feet away.
But the demand is there: existing IoT device are power hungry, are costly to operate, and lack global connectivity, the company says. These are fundamental limitations related to Bluetooth-enabled devices today, and they prevent many industries from leveraging IoT for their businesses.
The company joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 cohort and closed a $20 million Series A last March. Hubble’s first innovation was to develop software enabling off-the-shelf Bluetooth chips to communicate over very long ranges with low power.
On the space side, the company also patented a phased array antenna that can launch on a small satellite. The antennas work almost like a magnifying glass, and it’s what enables an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chip to communicate with the Hubble satellite. The team also had to solve Doppler-related problems, frequency mismatches occur between fast-moving objects exchanging data via radio waves.
One of Hubble’s satellites in a terrestrial test chamber.
Hubble is aiming to launch a third satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 mission this summer and a fourth on Transporter-13. Those four satellites will compose what Haro called the “beta constellation,” and pilot customers are starting to turn their integrations on even today, he said. The startup plans to launch the following 32 satellites all at once in the fourth quarter of 2025 or the beginning of 2026, though the launch provider has not been selected yet.
Those 36 satellites will compose Hubble’s first “production constellation,” and they’ll enable connection with a Hubble satellite roughly 2-3 hours per day from anywhere in the world.
xAI, Elon Musk’s 10-month-old competitor to the AI phenom OpenAI, is raising $6 billion on a pre-money valuation of $18 billion, according to one trusted source close to the deal. The deal – which would give investors one quarter of the company – is expected to close in the next few weeks unless the terms of the deal change.
The deal terms have changed once already. As of last weekend, Jared Birchall, who heads Musk’s family office, was telling prospective investors that xAI was raising $3 billion at a $15 billion pre-money valuation. Given the number of investors clamoring to get into the deal, those numbers were quickly adjusted.
Says our source, “We all received an email that basically said, ‘It’s now $6B on $18B, and don’t complain because a lot of other people want in.”
Investors who’ve been lobbying to get into the deal for months hardly minded. Sequoia Capital and Future Ventures, the venture fund co-founded by Musk’s longtime friend Steve Jurvetson, are participating in the round.
Other participants are likely to include Valor Equity Partners and Gigafund, whose founders are also part of the inner circle of Musk, who famously blends the personal and the private. (Outreach to these investors went unreturned; xAI does not have a press function.)
Jurvetson sits on the board of SpaceX and was a director at Tesla until 2020. Gigafund co-founder Luke Nosek, who previously co-founded Founders Fund with investor Peter Thiel, was the first venture investor to write a check to SpaceX and has sat on its board since. Valor founder Antonio Gracias was among the earliest investors in Tesla; like Jurveston, he’s a former Tesla director and is also on the board of SpaceX.
Our source said it’s not entirely clear to every other investor who is in the deal because of the way the commitments were garnered. “It’s a Zoom call and it’s just you and Elon and Jared [on the other side] at a table with some engineers.”
The pitch, says this individual, is captivating.
xAI’s marketing literature already makes clear that the outfit’s ambition is to connect the digital and physical worlds, but it may not be widely understood that Musk plans to do this by pulling in data from each of his companies, which include Tesla, SpaceX, his tunneling outfit Boring Company, and Neuralink, which develops computer interfaces that can be implanted in human brains.
Of course, another of Musk’s companies is X. The social media platform has already incorporated xAI’s months-old chatbot, Grok, into the platform as a paid add-on.
It’s just one piece of what Musk tells investors will become a sprawling virtual cycle. With Grok, for example, X is both a customer and provides Grok with massive distribution. Eventually (goes the pitch), Grok will be fed data from Musk’s other companies, helping it to master the physical world in potentially endless ways, starting with truly self-driving cars.
Another likely beneficiary would be Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus. Today the Tesla robot is still in the lab, but Musk told analysts on a call earlier this week that Optimus will be able to perform tasks in Tesla’s factories by the end of this year. Even if that timeline proves ambitious, these slick assistants may be able to do more — and faster than previously imagined — if Musk’s overarching vision plays out.
In the meantime, the most immediate beneficiary of xAI’s burgeoning momentum may be X itself. Though the platform has become something of a toxic cesspool in the 1.5 years since Musk bought it and subsequently lost much of its value, Musk had already seen to it that X owns a stake in xAI, so it will benefit from whatever upside the AI outfit sees.
What it all means for OpenAI — which became the fastest growing startup in history last year — is an open question. Musk has had OpenAI in his crosshairs since the outfit’s surge began, following the release of its ChatGPT chatbot.
Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015 and left its board in 2018 over disagreements about the direction of the outfit, which began life as a nonprofit and later evolved into a for-profit entity. Musk has since publicly harangued OpenAI cofounder Sam Altman and poked fun at the brand, proposing that it instead call itself ClosedAI.
Last month, when Musk open sourced the architecture of xAI’s earliest chatbot “Grok-1,” meaning that anyone can now download and alter it, the move was another part of his ongoing campaign to distinguish his efforts from OpenAI, which has not shared its secret sauce with the world, and which Musk is now suing.
Social networks Bluesky and Mastodon may soon be accessible from within a single app — at least, that’s what Bluesky hopes. The new decentralized social network, originally incubated inside Jack Dorsey-run Twitter, is backing a project that would connect — or “bridge” — Mastodon requests into Bluesky requests so that consumer apps, like Ivory, would be compatible with Bluesky, too.
The project, dubbed SkyBridge, was among the recipients of a small distribution of $4,800 in grant funding from Bluesky, distributed across projects. SkyBridge was the second-largest recipient in this current cohort, with $800 of the total.
Bluesky had announced last month that it would use some portion of its funds to fuel efforts in the developer ecosystem via the AT Protocol Grant program. From a financial standpoint, the program is fairly insignificant, as it’s only doling out $10,000 in grants, with $4,800 already distributed. That’s not enough to found a new company in this space, but it represents a way to encourage developers who may have wanted to dig into the new AT Protocol anyway. It also serves as an early signal of the kind of development work Bluesky supports — something that could help drive adoption among developers who have been previously (and repeatedly) burned by Twitter and its changing priorities.
Other program recipients are doing valuable work as well.
For example, Blacksky Algorithms is building a suite of services to provide custom moderation services for Bluesky’s Black users. Others are building Bluesky consumer apps, developer tools, analytics resources and more.
But SkyBridge is particularly interesting because it could potentially open up the small startup to a wider audience.
Unlike Mastodon and other decentralized apps powered by the older ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky is developing a new, decentralized social networking protocol. Unfortunately, for end users who have begun exploring the open-source social networks broadly known as the “fediverse,” Bluesky’s decision to build on a different protocol means users have to switch apps to access Bluesky’s network. They can’t use their preferred Mastodon app to browse Bluesky content, that is.
If successful, SkyBridge could change that as it would be able to translate Mastodon API calls to Bluesky API calls. The bridge is currently being tested on Ivory on iOS and Mac; it’s the Mastodon app from the company that previously developed a popular third-party Twitter app, called Tweetbot. Notes SkyBridge’s developer @videah.net on Bluesky, the project is currently undergoing a significant rewrite from Dart to Rust, which is why its GitHub repo hasn’t seen much activity lately.
Still, he thinks the work is promising.
“It’s already proving to be much more stable, hoping to show it off soon,” videah posted on Bluesky when sharing the news of the grant.
Today, Bluesky has nearly 5.6 million users, while the wider ActivityPub-backed fediverse has over 10 million users. Instagram Threads (which is integrating with ActivityPub) now has more than 150 million monthly active users, Meta announced this week during earnings.
The move to bridge Bluesky and Mastodon has been the subject of some debate as of late. People have disagreed about how bridging should be done, or whether a bridge should be built at all. Another software developer, Ryan Barrett was the recipient of some backlash on GitHub when building another bridge called Bridgy Fed, which would be opt-out by default — meaning Mastodon posts would show up on Bluesky even if the post’s author hadn’t opted into this. He readjusted his plans to build a discoverable opt-in instead, which would allow users to request to follow accounts on the different networks.
With its backing of SkyBridge, Bluesky is signaling a desire to blur the lines between Mastodon and Bluesky.
Eventually, people may not need to think about what protocol an app runs on, just like no one thinks about their email client using SMTP, POP3 or IMAP. And in an ideal outcome, people could connect to friends on any social network, regardless of its underpinning, and see their friends’ replies in return, too.
Google is launching its upgraded Find My Device network in the U.S. and Canada, the company announced on Monday. The network will be coming to Android users around the globe soon. Find My Device’s crowdsourced network of more than a billion Android devices can help users find their misplaced Android devices and everyday items. The Find My Device network, which is similar to Apple’s Find My network, works with devices running Android 9+.
With the Find My Device network, users will be able to locate their Android phones and tablets — even when they’re offline — by ringing them or viewing their location on a map. Google’s previous Find My Device service required lost phones to have an internet connection in order to be located. The upgraded network will also allow Pixel 8 and 8 Pro users to find their devices even if they’re powered off or if the battery is dead.
Image Credits: Google
Starting in May, Android users will be able to locate everyday items like their keys or wallet; Google is integrating Bluetooth tracker tags from Chipolo and Pebblebee in the Find My Device app. These tags will be built specifically for the Find My Device network and will be “compatible with unknown tracker alerts across Android and iOS to help protect users from unwanted tracking,” Google says. Users can expect to see compatible tags from Motorola, Jio and Eufy later this year. Monday’s announcement comes as Apple and Google said last year that they would work together to lead an industry-wide initiative to alert users in the case of unwanted tracking from Bluetooth devices.
The new Find My Device network also integrates with Nest smart home gadgets and shows a lost device’s proximity to home Nest devices.
“Find My Device is secure by default and private by design,” Google’s VP of Engineering, Erik Kay, wrote in a blog post. “Multi-layered protections built into the Find My Device network help keep you safe and your personal information private, while keeping you in control of the devices connected to the Find My Device network. This includes end-to-end encryption of location data as well as aggregated device location reporting, a first-of-its-kind safety feature that provides additional protection against unwanted tracking back to a home or private location.”
Google says the Find My Device network will soon work with headphones from JBL, Sony and others.
When Alex Katz founded Two Chairs in 2017, he firmly believed that in-person therapy is the most effective for behavioral health.
Two Chairs used technology — a proprietary matching algorithm — to find the best possible therapists for its clients, but treatments took place primarily inside one of the startup’s half a dozen stylishly designed clinics located in prime locations throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
But when COVID-19 erupted and the whole world moved online, the company was forced to reconsider its face-to-face approach. While Two Chairs now operates at least one brick-and-mortar site in each of the three states — California, Washington and Florida — it serves, the majority of the company’s more than 500 therapists treat clients virtually.
The adaption of the remote-first treatment model has likely helped the company to grow faster (and certainly less expensively) than it would have had it continued to emphasize seeing patients in person. Two Chairs says its revenue expanded eight-fold over the last three years.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $72 million Series C equity and debt financing led by Amplo and Fifth Down Capital, bringing Two Chairs total funding to $103 million. Amplo also led the company’s $22.5 million Series B in August 2019. The debt portion, which comprised the minority of the latest capital, was provided by Bridge Bank.
Two Chairs is one of the latest therapy startups to raise substantial funding rounds. Last week, Grow Therapy, a three-sided mental health platform for therapists, payers and patients, raised an $88 million Series C round led by Sequoia.
Katz says that the primary difference between his company and other virtual behavioral health platforms, including Talkspace and Teladoc-owned BetterHelp, is that Two Chairs employs the “vast majority” of its therapists while most competitors contract with their clinicians. “That enables us to select therapists that we think are really high quality, and then we can train them on how to use measurement-based care,” he explained. Clinicians who use measurement-based care (MBC) could improve outcomes and reduce costs by assessing patients’ progress against standard metrics, but only a small portion of therapists use MBC in their practice, according to Katz.
Availability of remote therapy from independent clinicians, established institutions and startups like Two Chairs has been helping solve the shortage of mental health professionals in the U.S., but Katz says that online psychotherapy is not the panacea.
“While it has gotten easier to find a therapist because of different digital platforms, it’s still just as hard to find the right therapists and really high-quality care, and that’s the problem we’re trying to solve,” he said. “We still have far more demand than we can serve.”
Two Chairs will use its new capital to hire more therapists, expand into new states and improve its technology. The company currently offers its services for the price of a co-pay to Aetna and Kaiser Permanente health insurance holders and charges $226 a session for other individuals.
As for whether AI could one day replace mental health professionals, and therefore make a business like Two Chairs even more effective, Katz wasn’t so sure it’s possible anytime soon. “It is such a human, emotionally driven job, and that’s only possible [to do well] with a great therapist in the room,” he said.
Social networking platform Bluesky lifted its ban on sign-ups for heads of state over the weekend. This means various office holders can join the platform. Bluesky’s move comes ahead of major general elections in countries like the U.S. and India scheduled to be held this year.
Last year, during Bluesky’s invite-only period, the company stated that it didn’t allow heads of state to sign up and asked users to contact the startup before inviting prominent figures.
“We appreciate everyone’s enthusiasm in sending invitations, but our current policy is that we cannot accommodate heads of state to join us in our beta yet. This applies to recent/prominent heads of state as well,” the company had said at that time.
Notably, in February, the company opened up the platform for anyone to sign up for the service after staying in an invite-only mode for almost a year.
Bluesky faced moderation challenges early in its lifespan and battled issues like allowing racial slurs in handles. Separately, users have continuously pushed the platform to clamp down on hate speech.
Last December, Bluesky added moderation lists along with automated moderation tools. Last month, it announced the Ozone tool, which allows users to build their own moderation and labeling services.
With the social network now allowing political heads to join the platform, there could be new types of moderation issues that it hasn’t faced yet. And it will need to be prepared for different possibilities.
Bluesky’s rival Threads has distanced itself from actively recommending political content. However, Bluesky users don’t have to rely on a central algorithm to look at different kinds of political content, as they can subscribe to different feeds.
When you sign up to a new social network, you have zero friends, zero followers, zero likes. But as you start posting content, you might get more and more likes and comments. That could lead to new followers. And that dopamine boost will encourage you to post even more. A new app called Palmsy is trying to act as social media methadone by letting you post anything and getting likes on them.
But the catch is that no one can see the posts.
You can publish as many posts as you like. The app even lets you add photos to your posts. But you’re sending those posts into the void. Developer Pat Nakajima said on Threads that no post leaves your device and all likes are fake.
Image Credits: Palmsy
The free app — which works on both iPhone and iPad — essentially reads your contact list to assign pretend likes to posts. While the app is reading your contact details, because all posts are local, contact information is not sent to a server.
“It can be fun to see Likes coming in from folks you haven’t thought about in years. It can also be useful in maybe deleting some contacts you might not need anymore,” Nakajima writes in the FAQ section of the app.
Palmsy shows you the contact who “liked” your post. Image Credits: Palmsy
Beyond looking at contacts, you can treat the app as a personal diary or even a place to get bad puns out of your system — nobody is going to judge you. It’s up to you.
The developer recently updated the app with some advanced options that let you limit the number of likes on a particular post and for how long you want those likes to come in: a few seconds, a few minutes, a few hours or a few days.
There have been multiple time-limiting apps that try to help when it comes to reducing social media addiction. Some developers have also released very basic apps to post dumb posts without consequences.
In 2017, developer Dan Kurtz released Binky, which generated a fake feed for you to interact with. In 2018, former Google Reader product manager Jason Shellen relaunched Brizzly as a website, which lets you put anything in a text box and hit send. The posts go nowhere and you can’t even see them once you hit send.
Founded in 2017, Atoms Lanka Solutions is a provider of IT consulting and software development services. Throughout the company’s history, we have worked with over 160 customers from 5+ countries..
