Technology

Epic Games is finally settling its feud — kind of — with Google and putting Fortnite onto the Google Play Store, but the studio sounds pretty pissed about it.

When Fortnite launched on mobile in 2018, Epic Games very notably sidestepped the Google Play Store and pushed users to download the title directly from their website, an effort made to avoid the substantial revenue cuts that Google takes from in-app purchases of Play Store downloads. At the time, the move was understandable for Epic, which was sitting on the hottest free-to-play game of the year that was pulling in substantial revenues from in-app purchases.

After 18 months of harsh rhetoric regarding platform gatekeeping, Epic Games says that Fortnite is now available for download on the Google Play Store, though it will still be downloadable from fortnite.com moving forward.

&Google puts software downloadable outside of Google Play at a disadvantage, through technical and business measures such as scary, repetitive security pop-ups for downloaded and updated software, restrictive manufacturer and carrier agreements and dealings, Google public relations characterizing third party software sources as malware, and new efforts such as Google Play Protect to outright block software obtained outside the Google Play store,& an Epic Games spokesperson said in a statement. &Because of this, we&ve launchedFortnite for Android on the Google Play Store.&

Epic Games withholding Fortnite from the Play Store was a very clear threat to Googleapp profits, though Google argued that downloading Android software outside of the Play Store presented a clear security threat to users who could unknowingly download malware from less reputable sites.

Epic Games clearly isn&t happy with the roadblocks Google has put up to dissuade users from downloading software from the web as well as the blanket warnings Android delivers regardless of whether the publisher is considered a trusted one.

For now, it seems Google has maintained the upper hand, though Epic Games clearly isn&t satisfied with their dealings with Google.

&We hope that Google will revise its policies and business dealings in the near future, so that all developers are free to reach and engage in commerce with customers on Android and in the Play Store through open services, including payment services, that can compete on a level playing field,& Epic Gamestatement further read.

We&ve reached out to Google for comment.

BoostVC has been an accelerator known for the unconventional bets it has chased — and is still chasing — trends like blockchain and AR/VR that other investors have long sworn off. Its accelerator program has been as classical as it comes, offering perks like office space and living quarters for a relatively tight group of admitted founders.

With the pandemic crisis, BoostVC founder Adam Draper has had to make some adjustments to his latest batch, including a digital demo day taking place next week. Venture capital firms have proven reticent in the past to invest in founders they hadn&t met in person, but the quarantine has forced early-stage investors to step out of comfort zones. Draper hopes that a Zoom-based Demo Day focused on allowing the 13 companies to present and then break off into their own smaller Q-A subgroups will allow investors to feel more comfortable backing the startups remotely.

BoostVCdigital demo day takes place on April 28.

A smaller group of 13 startups will certainly make logistics easier for Boost; Y Combinatorlatest batch tapped out at 240 companies. The current class is BoostVCsmallest in recent memory, the result of a format change last year that boosted individual investments to $500K per startup (for a 15% equity chunk) and shrunk the total pool. The change was an attempt by Draper and his team to differentiate the acceleratoroffering and attract founders solving more capital-intensive problems.

The pandemic threw them a curveball, but Draper hopes their tighter group can sell investors next week.

&I can&t say itall gone according to plan, we&re a very physical accelerator and we&ve had to completely adapt,& Draper says. &But we&ve gotten the value of getting to see how Y Combinator and 500 Startups did their demo days.&

The latest group includes plenty of bets in Boostfamiliar zones — blockchain, AR/VR, hardware and logistics. Boost has invested more than $50 million in startups since its founding in 2013.

An ebullient Draper tells TechCrunch that BoostVC has just closed a $40 million fund — its fourth and largest to date — to bankroll future batches of startups going through its accelerator. The new fund is backed by Devonshire Investors and ECMC. The firmlast fund, which clocked in at around $38 million, closed in 2018.

Draper is hopeful that Boostnext &tribe& can shift back to its in-person format when in kicks off in late August. If not, he hopes his team can apply what they&ve learned to help incubate a new class of startups and ready them for an uncertain market.

Astronauts may make a second home of space, but even they have a first time going up. NASA is hoping to better prepare its crews for the challenges of space by sending them on suborbital flights from the likes of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin — suggesting a potentially huge new market for the nascent private spaceflight industry.

Speaking at the Next Generation Suborbital Researchers conference in March, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine explained that the agency was considering private carriers now mainly because previously the possibility simply didn&t exist.

&Thata capability we as a nation have not had until recently,& he said, in remarks reported by Space.com.

Indeed, it is not entirely clear we have it even now. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin have both demonstrated suborbital flights that have skimmed the very verge of space, but test flights and commercial flights to order are very different.

While Virgin is already selling tickets, thereno date set for the first flight with passengers. That flight will likely be this year, but without a reliable schedule and record of successful missions ithard to say that the capability is anything but aspirational at present. Thatthe nature of space travel — 99% of the way is still nowhere.

Still, it seems inevitable that Virgin, Blue or another provider will, some time in the next few years, offer suborbital flights with space for payloads and passengers. Thatsomething NASA seems hot to take them up on.

Itrather strange, but equally inescapable, that astronauts have to do all their training here on Earth. They can do all the simulators, &vomit comet& flights and pool training they like — but in the end, the only way to experience space is to go there.

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, who will fly in the first Commercial Crew demo mission to the ISS, operate a simulator of the Crew Dragon capsule.

Until quite recently that meant getting on top of a hundred-million-dollar rocket and going up to the ISS, or in earlier days to the Moon in an orbiter or lander.

Therevery little one can do to prepare for that, but among those few things is going to space more cheaply and temporarily. Thatwhat suborbital flights make possible.

The rocket-powered ascent out of the atmosphere and resulting minutes of weightlessness are a suitable venue for training, testing and other operations that might otherwise have had to take place in orbit. And thatwhat NASA is hoping will take place — though no contracts have been signed just yet.

Although the first few suborbital flights from these providers were practically guaranteed to sell out, space tourism isn&t a proven industry and events like the present pandemic and inevitable economic downturn afterwards may in fact have a serious impact on such high-ticket items (or the ability to provide them). So the prospect of regular government contracts is almost certainly a huge relief to any company aiming to provide or support suborbital flights.

&This is a big shift for NASA, but itan important shift,& Bridenstine said. The shift is not simply relying more on private industry, which government programs have done lately, but using private flights as official training. He indicated that the flights would need to be extremely safe, though not quite to the same standards as flights to the ISS.

More training and testing, but on flights not actually run by NASA, would increase preparedness for new missions, speed up readiness and reduce complexity of existing programs that rely on NASA-flown missions for those capabilities. I&ve asked the agency for more information on this topic and will update the post if I hear back.

Seattle-based Pulumi has quickly made a name for itself as a modern platform that lets developers specify their infrastructure through writing code in their preferred programming language — and not YAML. With the launch of Pulumi 2.0, those languages now include JavaScript, TypeScript, Go and .NET, in addition to its original support for Python. Italso now extending its reach beyond its core infrastructure features to include deeper support for policy enforcement, testing and more.

As the company also today announced, it now has over 10,000 users and more than 100 paying customers. With that, itseeing a 10x increase in its year-over-year annual run rate, though without knowing the exact numbers, itobviously hard to know what exactly to make of that number. Current customers include the likes of Cockroach Labs, Mercedes-Benz and Tableau .

When the company first launched, its messaging was very much around containers and serverless. But as Pulumi founder and CEO Joe Duffy told me, today the company is often directly engaging with infrastructure teams that are building the platforms for the engineers in their respective companies.

As for Pulumi 2.0, Duffy says that &this is really taking the original Pulumi vision of infrastructure as code — using your favorite language — and augmenting it with what we&re calling superpowers.& That includes expanding the productoverall capabilities from infrastructure provisioning to the adjacent problem spaces. That includes continuous delivery, but also policy-as-code. This extends the original Pulumi vision beyond just infrastructure but now also lets developers encapsulate their various infrastructure policies as code, as well.

Another area is testing. Because Pulumi allows developers to use &real& programming languages, they can also use the same testing techniques they are used to from the application development world to test the code they use to build their underlying infrastructure and catch mistakes before they go into production. And with all of that, developers can also use all of the usual tools they use to write code for defining the infrastructure that this code will then run on.

&The underlying philosophy is taking our heritage of using the best of what we know and love about programming languages — and really applying that to the entire spectrum of challenges people face when it comes to cloud infrastructure, from development to infrastructure teams to security engineers, really helping the entire organization be more productive working together,& said Duffy. &I think thatthe key: moving from infrastructure provisioning to something that works for the whole organization.&

Duffy also highlighted that many of the companylarger enterprise users are relying on Pulumi to encode their own internal architectures as code and then roll them out across the company.

&We still embrace what makes each of the clouds special. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes,& Duffy said. &We&re not trying to be a PaaS that abstracts over all. We&re just helping to be the consistent workflow across the entire team to help people adopt the modern approaches.&

GMexperiment with car sharing is over. The automaker Tuesday said its Maven car-sharing service, which launched in 2016, will shut down for good.

Maven had paused service due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company sent an email to customers Tuesday that after examining the business, the car-sharing industry and COVID-19, it decided to shutter the service permanently. The Verge was the first to report the story.

The car-sharing service has struggled for months, long before COVID-19 upended the &shared& mobility sector. Last year, Maven scaled back and stopped service in nearly half of the 17 North American cities in which it operated. Maven continued to operate in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Toronto. However, two programs within Maven, its consumer car-sharing and peer-to-peer service, also stopped in Washington, D.C. Only a program directed at gig workers was still operational in that city.

GM confirmed to TechCrunch that it has started to wind down Maven. All assets andresources will be transferred to GMGlobal Innovation organization, as well as the larger enterprise, according to a GM spokesperson.

The company confirmed that all operations should be concluded by later this summer. Maven had already suspended its consumer car-sharing and a peer-to-peer service due to COVID-19. A separate program directed at gig economy workers has been &very limited and will continue to wind down,& a GM spokesperson said.

&We&ve gained extremely valuable insights from operating our own car-sharing business,& Pamela Fletcher, GMvice president of global innovation, said in an emailed statement. &Our learnings and developments from Maven will go on to benefit and accelerate the growth of other areas of GM business.&

Below is a screenshot of the email sent Tuesday morning to Maven customers.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Maven email

The company doesn&t have plans to re-enter the car-sharing business. The company told TechCrunch that it &will take the great insights we&ve gained from Maven and leverage its car-sharing technology to provide new GM fleet services, and explore other new service offerings.&

Maven was designed to bring and expand several of GMexisting test programs under one brand.At the time of its launch, Maven was essentially three car-sharing services in one that included a city-based service that rented GM vehicles by the hour through an app and another for urban apartment dwellers in Chicago and New York.

Maven developed and launched a smartphone app, which was used by customers to search for and reserve a vehicle, unlock the door and remotely start, cool or heat the car.

It was an important launch for GM and its Chairman and CEO Mary Barra, who used a study commissioned in the wake of the ignition switch engineering scandal to accelerate her plans to transform the culture and operations at the automaker. Dozens of executives participated in transformational leaders programs; Maven was one of the fruits that spun out of that.

A wave of other initiative and investments were announced in 2016 that showed GMshift in interest toward unconventional transportation businesses that were adjacent to its core business of producing, selling and financing cars, trucks and SUVs to consumers.

But Maven never quite settled on one business model. The car-sharing service continued to evolve, leaving and entering cities or tweaking where it offered certain programs. For instance, thecompany launched in 2017 Maven Reserve in Los Angeles and San Francisco to allow customers to rent its GM-branded vehicles for a month at a time. It also started Maven Gig in hopes of tapping into a growing demand from rideshare and delivery app drivers.

Maven then launched a service in summer 2018 in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor that let owners rent out their personal GM-branded vehicles through its Maven car-sharing platform. The peer-to-peer car rental service was designed to operate in a similar fashion to how Turo and Getaround work.

The servicedemise seemed to begin after the company lost its CEO Julia Steyn in January 2019. It scaled back a few months later and was only operating in a handful of cities up until the COVID-19 pandemic put further pressure on the business.

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the tech industry has yet again found itself in a vulnerable state.

As we saw in the dot-com era, when the economy takes a hit, so do companies, and they need to make critical decisions — whether itlaying off or furloughing employees, pausing operations in select markets, taking on additional debt or some combination of all four.

Given the disproportionate impact the coronavirus has on people of color and low-income communities, the tech industry — a predominantly white male ecosystem that struggles to foster diversity and inclusion — has an opportunity to approach this new reality through an equitable lens.

Kapor CapitalFreada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor

As part of Extra Crunch Live, our new virtual speaker series with trusted tech experts, I&ll talk to Kapor Capital Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor on Tuesday, April 28 at 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern. Full details are at the bottom of this post.

Freada Kapor Klein, a founding partner at Kapor Capital, has advocated for diversity and inclusion in the tech industry for more than a decade. Through Kapor Capital, she invests in startups focused on social impact and closing gaps for people of color, as well as folks in low-income communities. Kapor Klein is also a founding member of Project Include, which works to help founders and investors implement effective diversity and inclusion strategies.

Mitch Kapor, also a founding partner at Kapor Capital, similarly invests in startups geared toward social good. Prior to Kapor Capital, he co-founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that protects digital rights and civil liberties. Together, Mitch and Freada also lead the Kapor Center for Social Impact to remove barriers in education and in the workplace.

I&m looking forward to chatting with Freada and Mitch about how startups should approach this ever-changing new reality, strategies for helping companies eliminate inequities and the differences and similarities between how the recent pandemic and the dot-com era are shaping the tech industry.

During the call, audience members will be able to ask questions, but to join the conversation, you&ll need to be an Extra Crunch member — if you&re not already a subscriber, you can sign up here.