Technology

Since first uploading a YouTube teaser video of its tech five years ago, Magic Leap presence in the augmented reality industry has been controversial.

Some have lauded the teamambitions, while others I&ve talked to say the companyposturing has dissuaded investors from taking chances on other AR hardware startups, which has hampered the industryadvance.

Regardless of its impact, Magic Leap carries outsized weight, leading one to question what would happen to other AR companies if the companysituation worsened.

The company announced layoffs today, with reports indicating that it is dismissing around 1,000 employees — about half of the company. Magic Leapadded news of a major pivot to enterprise makes it seem like that wasn&t its primary strategy over the past year. From my perspective, the company looks like it is on a path to a fire sale and will be dependent on executing a dramatic turnaround, which grows tougher under current economic conditions.

Magic Leap has few users, so a theoretical shutdown would likely have a lesser impact than other unicorn flare-outs; still, losing a company on the forefront of a technology lauded by many as the next ubiquitous platform will certainly impact others that are striving to bring this tech to market.

The impact for startups moving forward would be nuanced. Without a substantial software suite of its own, Magic Leap relied heavily on developer partnerships, though in recent months many of those seemed to promote enterprise use cases. AR/VR startups are already in a rough position, and one less developer platform could force more companies to de-prioritize headset-based platforms and shift their focus to mobile.

Google data centers run 24/7 and suck up a ton of energy — so itin both the companyand the planetinterest to make them do so as efficiently as possible. One new method has the facilities keeping an eye on the weather so they know when the best times are to switch to solar and wind energy.

The trouble with renewables is that they&re not consistent, like the output of a power plant. Of course it isn&t simply that when the wind dies down, wind energy is suddenly 10 times as expensive or not available — but there are all kinds of exchanges and energy economies that fluctuate depending on whatbeing put onto the grid and from where.

Googlelatest bid to make its data centers greener and more efficient is to predict those energy economies and schedule its endless data-crunching tasks around them.

Itnot that someone at Google looks up the actual weather for the next day and calculates how much solar energy will be contributed in a given region and when. Turns out there are people who can do that for you! In this case a Danish greentech firm called Tomorrow.

&Organizations are realizing that using electricity at the right time and the right place allows them to reduce both their costs and their carbon footprint,& said Tomorrow CEO in a press release.

Weather patterns affect those energy economies, leading to times when the grid is mostly powered by carbon sources like coal, and other times when renewables are contributing their maximum.

This helpful visualization shows how it might work & shift peak loads to match times when green energy is most abundant.

What Google is doing is watching this schedule of carbon-heavy and renewable-heavy periods on the grid and shuffling things around on its end to take advantage of them. By stacking all its heavy compute tasks into time slots where the extra power they will draw is taken from mostly renewable energy sources, they can reduce their reliance on carbon-heavy power.

It only works if you have the kind of fluid and predictable digital work that Google has nurtured. When energy is expensive or dirty, the bare minimum of sending emails and serving YouTube videos is more than enough to keep its data centers busy. But when itcheap and green, compute-heavy tasks like training machine learning models or video transcoding can run wild.

This informed time-shifting is a smart and intuitive idea, though from Googlepost itnot clear how effective it really is. Usually when the company announces some effort like this, itaccompanied by estimates of how much energy is saved or efficiency gained. In the case of this time-shifting experiment, the company is uncharacteristically conservative:

&Results from our pilot suggest that by shifting compute jobs we can increase the amount of lower-carbon energy we consume.&

Thata lot of hedging for something that sounds like a home run on paper. A full research paper is forthcoming, but I asked Google for more information. Shortly after posting this I received the following response from Ana Radovanovic, technical lead for the project:

Early results for the new system are promising, however, as you note, we are not sharing specific metrics at this time. Our team plans to publish a scientific paper later in the year which will contain a detailed overview of the load shifting methodology and the observed results from our roll out.

How much a single data center facility or an entire fleet can increase its use of renewable energy is dependent on a number of variables. As such, we are taking time to conduct additional analysis before we share specific numbers.

It seems they are holding off in order to better estimate the effect, but today being Earth Day it makes sense to publish the news early and augment it with more data later.

China-based electric car startup Byton has furloughed about half of the 450 employees who work at its North American headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., putting the release date of the automakerupcoming M-Byte vehicle into question.

Byton told TechCrunch the furloughs were the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The intention is to bring these furloughed employees back, the company said without providing a timeline.

&Given the impact of the pandemic on the global economy and the auto industries we, like several companies, have had to take action to face the challenge,& a Byton spokesperson wrote in an email to TechCrunch. &The furloughs have affected all areas within BytonU.S. operations. Employees in China have not been furloughed.&

Electrek was the first to report the furloughs.

The furloughs come as the company is preparing to bring its M-Byte electric SUV into volume production later this year. The vehicle, perhaps best known for its massive 48-inch wraparound digital dashboard, will be produced at Bytonfactory in Nanjing, China. The M-Byte will be sold in China, the U.S. and Europe.

Byton previously said sales will begin in China in the second half of 2020, followed by the U.S. The vehicle will come to the first European markets in the first half of 2021. However, the COVID-19 pandemic — and the ensuing furloughs and cuts — could delay Bytontimeline.

Byton told TechCrunch it is evaluating the impact of COVID-19 on production of the M-Byte. BytonChina factory reopened in mid-February and is now nearly fully operational, according to the company.

Byton has raised about $820 million from investors that include the companyfounding team,FAW Group, Nanjing Qiningfeng New Energy Industry Investment Fund and CATL.

The startup has been working to close a Series C round of fundraising for months now. The company told TechCrunch it is in the &final stage& of the round, which will include investors FAW Group and the industrial investment fund of Nanjing municipal government, Myoung Shin Co. of South Korea, MS Autotech and Japanese enterprise Marubeni Corporation .

SpaceX has launched another big batch of Starlink satellites, the low Earth orbit spacecraft that will provide connectivity for its globe-spanning high-bandwidth broadband internet network. This brings the total number of Starlink satellites on orbit to 422, though the company plans to de-orbit two of those (the first two prototypes launched) shortly.

Already, SpaceX is the largest private satellite operator in existence & by a wide and growing margin. Italso managed to keep up the frequent pace of its Starlink launches despite the global COVID-19 crisis, with its last launch taking place March 18. In total, it has flown four such missions since the start of the year, just four months into 2020.

The company has good reason to want to keep up that aggressive pace: Each launch brings it closer to the eventual launch of the Starlink broadband service that the satellites will provide the network backbone for. SpaceX wants that network to be live with coverage available in Canada and the Northern U.S. by sometime later this year, and because of the way its approach works, with small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than traditional geostationary internet satellites and handing off the connection to one another as they pass the coverage area, they need a whole lot of them to provide stable, reliable, low-latency connections for consumers and businesses.

Starlink aims to expand its service to customers globally next year, which will require even more launches and a much larger constellation. Ultimately, the company has filed documents indicating it could launch between 12,000 and 42,000 small satellites to build out the network to its eventual state, depending on demands and performance.

SpaceX CEO and founder Elon Musk detailed some of the measures that the company is taking to address complaints that its Starlink satellites are interfering with Earth-based observation of the night sky. The satellites produce lights and can present as light streams in astrophotography, and astronomers argue they interfere with stellar observation and research through Earth-based telescopes and observatories.

Todaylaunch also included a recovery attempt for the Falcon 9 booster rocket used, which flew before on SpaceXDemo-1 Crew Dragon mission, as well as twice more in 2019. The Falcon 9 landed as planned on SpaceXdrone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, hopefully marking a return to form after a couple of Falcon 9 booster landings went awry earlier this year.

SpaceX will also attempt to recover the fairing halves used to protect the Starlink satellite cargo during the launch, though not by using nets to catch them as they fall back to Earth slowed by parachutes, due to system upgrades. Instead, it&ll be looking to fish them out of the water, and we&ll update this post with those results, when and if SpaceX makes them available. The company is looking to re-use fairings more frequently, and the net capture process makes it easier to refurbish them for additional use. This is another cost-saving measure as SpaceX continues to strive towards full launch vehicle reusability with its Starship spacecraft, now in development.

Ever since it first started rolling out, 5G skeptics have attempted to link the next-gen cellular technology to all manner of health issues. Most recently, itbecome an easy scapegoat for the global COVID-19 pandemic, given the rapid rise of both.

Conspiracy theories have gained such a foothold that vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands by destroying cell towers in various European countries. In its latest bid to tamp down on the spread of false information pertaining to the novel coronavirus, Twitter today expanded its COVID-19 guidance to include the topic.

&We&re prioritizing the removal of COVID-19 content when it has a call to action that could potentially cause harm,& a spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch. &As we&ve said previously, we will not take enforcement action on every Tweet that contains incomplete or disputed information about COVID-19. Since introducing these new policies on March 18, we&ve removed more than 2,200 Tweets. As we&ve doubled down on tech, our automated systems have challenged more than 3.4 million accounts which were targeting discussions around COVID-19 with spammy or manipulative behaviors.&

The note seems to leave open the possibility of leaving up some share of 5G claims that don&t &potentially cause harm.& Still, the gray area is fairly wide, when considering activities like property destruction seemingly caused in the name of 5G-related conspiracy.

&We have broadened our guidance on unverified claims that incite people to engage in harmful activity,& the company wrote on social media, &could lead to the destruction or damage of critical 5G infrastructure, or could lead to widespread panic, social unrest or large-scale disorder.&

Facebook major bet on Jio Platforms could create a headache for mobile payments services that have amassed tens of millions of users while struggling to find a business model in the worldsecond-largest internet market.

The $5.7 billion investment, Facebooksecond-largest to date, could also further its dominance in India — its biggest market by user count — by expanding the reach of consumer-facing services like WhatsApp and expanding its lead over ByteDanceTikTok, which has amassed more than 250 million Indian users in two years.

But based on what Facebook and Reliance Jio executives have shared — along with feedback from several industry analysts — the companies that need to worry most about this multi-billion-dollar bet are WalmartFlipkart, Paytm and Amazon.

Facebook and Jio executives said their companies will work together to build solutions; their biggest synergy would revolve around JioMart and WhatsApp, given that Reliance Jio is Indiatop telecom network with more than 380 million subscribers.

One of those collaborations may allow users to find local stores around them on WhatsApp, talk to store operators and place orders from within the Facebook-owned instant messaging service, said Ajit Mohan, a Facebook VP who spearheads the companybusiness in India, in an interview with TechCrunch.

&You can browse shops and talk to the shop owner. And ultimately, where we do want to take this flow is for you to be able to place your orders,& he said. Mohan refuted reports that Facebook saw the deal as an opportunity to turn WhatsApp into a so-called &super app,& however.