By BEN KENIGSBERG from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2HRr3wu
Thursday, 31 January 2019
‘They Shall Not Grow Old’ Review: World War I, in Living Color
By BEN KENIGSBERG from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2HRr3wu
‘The Unicorn’ Review: Two’s Company, Three’s a Comedy
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2Sa9yvF
‘Daughter of Mine’ Review: Lessons in Imperfect Parenting
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2G0CsZl
‘Braid’ Review: Childhood Friends Play a Dangerous Game in This Jumpy Thriller
By GLENN KENNY from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2SeOsfw
‘Arctic’ Review: Madness in a Frozen Wasteland
By BEN KENIGSBERG from NYT Movies https://nyti.ms/2TnwbtR
U.K. Auto Industry Already Feeling the Brexit Pinch
By AMIE TSANG from NYT Business https://nyti.ms/2MInis5
Dadi brings in $2M to democratize sperm storage
The founders of Dadi — pronounced daddy — think men are in need of a wake-up call.
“Men [have] a biological clock just like women, which is something that people don’t talk about,” Dadi co-founder and chief executive officer Tom Smith told TechCrunch. “Infertility isn’t a women’s issue; It’s both a men’s and women’s issue.”
Smith believes Dadi, the provider of a temperature-controlled at-home fertility test and sperm collection kit, will encourage men to contribute to family planning conversations and become more aware of their reproductive health. The startup is officially launching its kit and long-term sperm storage service today with nearly $2 million in venture capital funding from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital.
“Our mission is to normalize the conversation around male fertility and reproductive health, and empower men with knowledge of fertility so they can have that conversation with their family,” Smith said.
Here’s how it works: Dadi customers order a kit online, masturbate and collect their sperm within the comfort of their own homes, drop it off with FedEx and wait for a full fertility report, which comes with a microscopic video of the each man’s actual sperm. To survive the trip to the startup’s laboratory — the New England Cryogenic Center — the Dadi-designed container injects preservatives, which are nested in the lid of the cup, into the sperm sample.
Headquartered in Brooklyn, Dadi’s service is FDA-licensed in all 50 states and costs a total of $198, including a test and one-year of sperm storage.
Dadi’s co-founding team includes Mackey Saturday, a graphic designer who created Instagram’s logo, and Gordon von Steiner, a former creative director in the fashion industry. The team has prioritized design and messaging of the product, in addition to security, privacy and high medical standards.
“We aren’t trying to sell hair pills, we are actually interacting with customers at a very vulnerable part of their life,” Smith said. “We feel like our value set, approach and thoughtfulness really differentiate us from anyone else in the space.”
One in 6 U.S. couples struggles with fertility, with male factor infertility a cause of 30 percent of those cases, per ReproductiveFacts.org. Startups want to improve these statistics, targeting an industry that’s trapped in the 1980s.
“We are in the direct-to-consumer era,” Smith said. “We reached peak app a couple years ago and I think a lot of the innovation that’s happening in the space comes down to individualized services.”
Dadi joins a cadre of privately-funded male fertility or men’s health businesses. Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, leads the pact. The 2-year-old business entered the unicorn club last week with a $100 million investment. Ro, formerly known only as Roman, sells ED medication online, too, and has raised a total of $91 million. Legacy, which freezes men’s sperm, recently won TechCrunch’s very own Startup Battlefield competition in Berlin. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round earlier this month from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.
It’s clear that VCs have woken up to the opportunity to disrupt fertility with tech-enabled solutions to age-old issues and now, entrepreneurs passionate about helping men broach sensitive topics, from infertility to erectile dysfunction to hair loss and more, are able to gain ground.
Here’s to more funding for women’s health businesses, which are in dire need of innovation, too.
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Uber driven out of Barcelona again
Uber is suspending its professional taxi service in Barcelona from tomorrow almost a year after it re-entered the Catalan capital.
The move follows the regional government agreeing new regulations for the vehicle for hire (VTC) sector aimed at making sure they do not compete directly with taxis.
“The new restrictions approved by the Catalan Government leave us with no choice but to suspend UberX while we assess our future in Barcelona. We are committed to being a long term partner to Spanish cities and hope to work with the Catalan Government and the City Council on fair regulation for all,” an Uber spokesman told us.
We’ve reached out to Cabify to ask whether it will also be suspending service in the city tomorrow.
The ride-hailing company also said previously that it would have no choice but to leave if the decree was approved. And local press is reporting it will also suspend services across the region tomorrow.
The new regional VTC rules, which also come into force across Catalonia from tomorrow, require a minimum 15 minute wait between a booking being made and a passenger being picked up.
The decree also bans VTCs from circulating in the streets between jobs, requiring they go back to a base such as a parking lot or garage to wait for the next pick up.
VTC companies using apps for ride bookings are also prohibited from displaying the real-time location of bookable vehicles prior to a reservation being made.
Achieving compliance would clearly require major changes to how ride-hailing companies like Uber and Cabify operate. The decree also provides for fines of up to €1,400 (~$1,600) for any VTC drivers caught infringing the provisions. So Uber’s announcement of a service suspension is not a surprise.
Nor does the company appear prepared to return unless the decree is reversed, saying it needs a “fair” regulation — echoing its messaging when it pulled out of Denmark back in 2017.
“The obligation to wait 15 minutes to travel in a VTC does not exist anywhere in Europe and is totally incompatible with the immediacy of on-demand services, such as UberX,” it writes now in a blog post entitled ‘see you later, Barcelona’.
“Barcelona, we hope to see you soon,” it adds, claiming the relaunched service was used by more than half a million people over its run, relying on “thousands” of drivers to deliver it.
Uber’s original p2p service was also forced out of Barcelona, back in 2014, following legal challenges from the taxi sector that eventually went all the way up to Europe’s top court.
At the end of 2017 the court judged Uber to be a transport company, not a neutral platform — enforcing compliance with local VTC rules and rendering the Uber’s early regulation-dodging playbook a dud in Europe.
Since then, taxi associations in Barcelona and other major Spanish cities have been keeping up the pressure for regulation on the VTC sector by holding a series of strikes — including one earlier this month in which some strikers were caught on camera attacking a Cabify driver’s car.
The driver was reported to have suffered a panic attack during the attack.
An ‘indefinite strike’ was also called last summer and only ended after the Spanish government agreed to devolve regulatory power to autonomous regions and local authorities.
Uber and Cabify temporarily paused services in Barcelona during that strike after reports of violence, including attacks on drivers. Although taxi associations organizing the protests were quick to distance themselves from any violent acts, urging their members to protest peacefully.
The most recent strike in Barcelona also saw some VTC drivers take to the streets to try to apply the brake to regulation, parking their vehicles along a major road and demonstrating outside parliament.
There’s still a chance that the Catalan parliament could refuse to back the decree. Though the current regional government is committed to a full restructuring of the law to ensure VTCs and taxis do not compete for the same work.
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DealBook Briefing: The Fed’s Reversal Soothes Wall St.
By Unknown Author from NYT Business https://nyti.ms/2sWLM7R
The Perils of Reporting on an Investigation of the President
By Unknown Author from NYT Podcasts https://nyti.ms/2DMiNdl
Julia Hartz Founded Eventbrite With Her Fiancé. Then She Took His Job.
By DAVID GELLES from NYT Business https://nyti.ms/2sXaQf3
On Jackie Robinson’s 100th Birthday, 100 Photos of an Icon
By Unknown Author from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2Sa1afF
Saudis Executed Maid From Philippines Despite Protests, Officials Say
By JASON GUTIERREZ from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2MHMmj7
New Zealand Vowed 100,000 New Homes to Ease Crunch. So Far It Has Built 47.
By CHARLOTTE GRAHAM-McLAY from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2ToOqPw
Can Big Global Sports Come Around to Human Rights Advocacy?
By HANNAH BEECH from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2WyEEMv
Massaging Away a Potential Complication of Birth?
By JEN GUNTER from NYT Well https://nyti.ms/2DIXZ6k
A Secret Tunnel Leading Toward a Florida Bank Puzzles the F.B.I.
By JULIA JACOBS from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2UsUR47
He Says ‘Wall,’ They Say ‘Border Security’: A Glossary of the Border Debate
By GLENN THRUSH from NYT U.S. https://nyti.ms/2FX6UUl
On Jackie Robinson’s 100th Birthday, 100 Photos of an Icon
By ERIC MOSKOWITZ from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2HUfjK3
Was C.T.E. Stealing His Mind? A Gunshot Provided the Answer
By JOHN BRANCH from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2CTl2Ki
From The Times’s Photo Vault, the Many Dimensions of Jackie Robinson
By TERENCE McGINLEY from NYT Corrections https://nyti.ms/2S24JoT
Does ‘Creative’ Work Free You from Drudgery, or Just Security?
By JODY ROSEN from NYT Magazine https://nyti.ms/2RZ5lM2
How Iran’s Greatest Director Makes Art of Moral Ambiguity
By GILES HARVEY from NYT Magazine https://nyti.ms/2D66mYr
Locast, a Free App Streaming Network TV, Would Love to Get Sued
By EDMUND LEE from NYT Business https://nyti.ms/2CURADK
As Chances of No-Deal Brexit Rise, British Companies Scramble to Prepare
By PETER S. GOODMAN from NYT Business https://nyti.ms/2sZzJH7
As a Reporter, She Wrote About Business. As a Novelist, She Writes About Murder.
By AMELIA LESTER from NYT Books https://nyti.ms/2RZ5uiy
Nintendo posts $958M profit but cuts Switch target despite strong Christmas sales
Nintendo has cut its ambitious annual Switch sales forecast despite enjoying a strong Christmas Q3 quarter.
The Japanese games giant recorded a 104.21 billion JPY ($958 million) net profit on revenue of 608.39 billion JPY ($5.59 billion) between October and December 2018. Revenue was up 26 percent year-on-year, which is an impressive feature given that quarter was a successful one for Nintendo, yielding its biggest operating profit in a Q3 for eight years.
The Nintendo Switch is now closing down on lifetime sales of the N64. Nintendo shifted a record 9.41 million consoles during the three-month period, up 30 percent annually, to take it to 14.49 million this financial year, which began in April 2018. However, despite a success last quarter, likely helped in no small amount by Christmas, Nintendo has trimmed its ambitious goal to sell 20 million Switch units this financial year. Instead, the target is 17 million, which means it is estimating around 2.5 million sales during January, February and March.
In terms of games, a bunch of new releases performed well in the last quarter. Pokémon: Let’s Go sold million titles since its November release, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate sold 12.08 million since its December launch and Super Mario Party, released in October, reached 5.3 million sales. Total game sales jumped by 101 percent to reach 94.64 million sales during the period.
Nintendo’s retro consoles — the NES Classic and Super NES Classic — sold 5.83 million. But there is bad news for Nintendo loyalists, the upcoming Mario Kart Tour mobile game won’t ship in March — its revised launch date is this summer.
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Sencrop is a data platform to help farmers manage their lands
Meet Sencrop a French startup that wants to empower farmers using sensors, a data platform and a service marketplace. The company recently raised a $10 million funding round.
The Series A round was led by Bpifrance with NCI Waterstart, Nord Capital and The Yield Lab also participating. Existing investors Demeter and Breega Capital also reinvested.
If you’re a farmer and are getting started when it comes to leveraging data, Sencrop wants to be a one-stop shop for all your digital needs. The company sells connected stations that can measure temperature, humidity, rainfall, windspeed, etc.
Each station costs between $340 and $570 (between €300 and €500) and you can have as many as you want. You can install the station yourself — it’s as easy as planting a post.
After that, you pay a subscription to access the platform. It costs around $170 to $340 per year (€150 to €300). In addition to live readings of your sensors, Sencrop can help you predict the next steps.
“On the other side of the platform, there are people broadcasting services to farmers,” co-founder and CEO Michael Bruniaux told me. “For instance, we can predict a disease and the farmer knows whether they need a product or not to prevent the disease.”
You can imagine a full-fledged marketplace in the future. For instance, it could be a good way to subscribe to an insurance product, order seeds or contact companies and cooperatives corporations willing to buy your output.
5,000 farmers, winemakers and arborists are already using the platform to monitor their farms. Most of them are currently based in Europe.
Sencrop is slowly building a community of farmers by combining all data points together. For instance, if other people living not far from you are also using Sencrop, you’ll get better forecasts and insights on what to expect.
The company first started with potato crops, vineyards and cereals. But now, you can find all kinds of profiles on Sencrop. Some farmers have a tiny piece of land of less than 100 acres while others have gigantic farms.
With today’s funding round, Sencrop wants to scale the community and expand to new markets.
from TechCrunch
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Afghan Government Control Over Country Falters, U.S. Report Says
By ROD NORDLAND from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2SiNnDp
Jackie Robinson Showed Me How to Fight On, Not Fight Back
By CLAIRE SMITH from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2Rojg9b
Whether They Wanted it or Not, Jackie Robinson Raised Americans’ Consciousness
By GEORGE VECSEY from NYT Sports https://nyti.ms/2G4bq3t
Trevor Noah Doesn’t Think Weather Reporters Ought to Freeze in the Cold
By GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2G0nPp2
Could You Last 11 Days Without the Internet? Tonga Finds Out the Hard Way
By DANIEL VICTOR from NYT World https://nyti.ms/2Rv8pdq
The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix Australia in February
By NOEL MURRAY from NYT Watching https://nyti.ms/2MMcPw4
Frida Kahlo Was a Painter, a Brand Builder, a Survivor. And So Much More.
By REBECCA KLEINMAN from NYT Arts https://nyti.ms/2sYCybg
Nintendo’s Mario Kart mobile game won’t launch until the summer
It’s been a long year for Nintendo fans waiting on Mario Kart to come to mobile and, unfortunately, more patience is required after the game’s launch was moved back to this summer.
Nintendo announced plans to bring the much-loved franchise to smartphones one year ago. It was originally slated to launch by the end of March 2019, but the Japanese games giant said today it is pushing that date back to summer 2019.
The key passage sits within Nintendo’s latest earnings report, released today, which explains that additional time is needed “to improve [the] quality of the application and expand the content offerings after launch.”
It’s frustrating but, as The Verge points out, you can refer to a famous Nintendo phrase if you are seeking comfort.
Shigeru Miyamoto, who created the Mario and Zelda franchises, once remarked that “a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”
There’s plenty riding on the title — excuse the pun. Super Mario Run, the company’s first major game for the iPhone, showed its most popular IP has the potential to be a success on mobile, even though Mario required a $9.99 payment to go beyond the limited demo version. Mario Kart is the most successful Switch title to date, so it figures that it can be a huge smash on mobile if delivered in the right way.
from TechCrunch
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Learning With: ‘A Merciless Cold Lingers in the Midwest’
By KATHERINE SCHULTEN from NYT The Learning Network https://nyti.ms/2GcDKj6
Colbert Shows What Else Is On John Bolton's Notepad
John Bolton revealed troop movement discussions via a notepad.
Open thread below...
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Eric Trump Gets Special Hannity Time To Look Tough On Immigration
While Eric Trump ranted tonight about the evils of illegal immigration and how his father will protect us all from them, Sean Hannity couldn’t dislodge his nose from Donald Trump’s rear end enough to ask even one question about why the Trump Organization only just found out that many long-time employees are undocumented.
In case you missed it, The Washington Post reported on January 26 that about a dozen employees, about half the winter staff, at Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, N.Y., many of whom had worked there for years, were suddenly fired on January 18 after a company audit revealed their immigration documents were not genuine. The Washington Post story followed one in The New York Times about undocumented workers at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
from Latest from Crooks and Liars
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A Simple Lesson For Pat Robertson About Climate Change
This is a precious minute on the Christian Broadcasting Network, where renowned climate change denier and weather guy Joe Bastardi lied to viewers about climate change and the extreme weather moving through the Midwest right now. Nothing to see here, Bastardi tells Pat Robertson. Climate change? Feh.
I'm more or less over that attitude, are you? We are dealing with a crisis that is as serious as if we were attacked by a hostile foreign power. The only people with a vested interest in continuing to deny climate change are fossil fuel addicts and shills. I'm not sure why self-proclaimed "Christians" think it's a good idea to keep lying to people about what is happening, other than possibly they stupidly see it as a political obligation they have in trade for abortion politics.
At any rate, let's just set the record straight here, even for Pat Robertson. (We can pipe it into his crypt, perhaps)
As Kendra Pierre-Louis explains in a New York Times column today, “A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, any more than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.”
from Latest from Crooks and Liars
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Franklin Graham Lies About Lying For Trump
Rev. Franklin Graham insisted on Wednesday that he had never heard a lie from President Donald Trump.
In an interview on MSNBC, host Craig Melvin pointed out to Graham that The Washington Post counted 8,158 false or misleading claims made by the president during his first two years in office.
“Well, I don’t know how to reconcile that, because I don’t know,” Graham replied. “You have a fact checker for the president but I don’t know if you have a fact checker for the media at the same time.”
“Pastor Graham, you and I both know this president has said things over and over that aren’t true,” the MSNBC host pressed.
“No, I don’t know that,” Graham insisted. “I don’t sit around and try to find every fault in the president every day, looking for everything that he might have misspoken or mis-said. I don’t do that.”
“But you can acknowledge that the president has said things that aren’t true,” Melvin asked.
“I don’t think the president is sitting there behind the desk trying to make up lies,” Graham said. “I don’t believe that for a second. Has he misspoken on something? Sure, all of us do that, you do it, I do it.
from Latest from Crooks and Liars
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Majority Of Clemson Tigers Boycotted Trump's Fast Food Party
Nestled in the story of Clemson's Championship Tigers football team visiting the White House and being served cold fast food on silver platters, was the quieter story of the players who did not attend. No, the story is not that they missed out on HAMBERDERS and cold pizza.
Credit goes to The Root for their exclusive report about the fact that, indeed, a majority of Black players on the team declined the invitation to visit the White House and meet with President Prince-of-Elegance-and-Wit. Their reason? His racism and their revulsion at his politics. To be clear, the group of players who declined the invitation were both Black AND white. But there are at least 57 Black student-athletes on the roster, and only 15 of them attended the White House "dinner," most of them freshmen. So 74% stayed back.
Thankfully, no one seemed to feel pressure to attend, nor to stay quiet about their reasons. According to Michael Hariot's article,
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