Behold the robo-berry

If you’ve never picked a raspberry, well, first of all that’s too bad, because a fresh raspberry is a beautiful thing. But second, and more immediately relevant in this case, you would not know that there is a technique to it that, surprisingly, robots aren’t super good at because they tend to be… crushy. But this robo-berry designed by Swiss researchers could usher in a new era of gentle, automated robo-pickers.

The secret to picking a raspberry is to grip it just enough to get purchase and then pull it downwards off the little stem, apparently called the “receptacle,” which seems backwards. Seems simple — and it is, but only our hands are among the most sensitive and finely controlled constructions in the universe, the culmination of a hundred million years of evolution, outdone only by (I suspect) raccoons.

Robots simply don’t have the senses necessary to figure out the perfect technique for picking a berry. But what if it could communicate with the berry to better sense the forces involved and avoid either a a brutal crushing or humiliating failure-to-detach?

That’s what Kai Junge, a PhD student at EPFL in Switzerland, aims to accomplish with this “sensorized raspberry,” a silicone and silicon replica berry that provides feedback to the picking machine, allowing it to learn to pick faster and better — and cleaner.

“It’s an exciting dilemma for us as robotics engineers,” said professor Josie Hughes, who worked with Junge on the project. “The raspberry harvesting season is so short, and the fruit is so valuable, that wasting them simply isn’t an option. What’s more, the cost and logistical challenges of testing different options out in the field are prohibitive. That’s why we decided to run our tests in the lab and develop a replica raspberry for training harvesting robots.”

Apparently the hard part comes just at the moment of detaching, when the force needed to grip the berry on the receptacle suddenly becomes overkill as the object goes from solid to hollow.

The replica berry has a fluidic sensor that tells the system how much compression is being experienced by the silicone drooplets, allowing the control model to learn how to adjust its grip as if the berry itself is telling it how much is too much.

You can see the berry in action below:

The team plans to present their work at RobotSoft in April. And once the raspberry question is decided, they may move on to other berries, tomatoes, grapes… even apricots. The future is looking fresh!

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Co-founders of Ukrainian startup Delfast discuss navigating through a crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic taught the world how to work from home, but Russia’s war in Ukraine has taught the employees at Delfast, a Ukrainian e-bike startup, how to work from bomb shelters, while on the move and under threat of violence. 

The usual priorities of a startup – securing venture funding, researching and developing new products, finding product-market fit – haven’t exactly been put on hold, but they are now much lower on Delfast’s to-do list. Since Russian troops invaded Ukraine in late February, Delfast’s top priority has been to see its Ukrainian team of 30 safely evacuated from the most dangerous parts of the country. 

When not focusing on sales, marketing, R&D and customer support, Delfast’s smaller team of seven employees based in Los Angeles has been pleading with U.S. politicians and the European Commission to supply Ukraine with anti-aircraft missiles and fighter jets that could help Ukraine gain back some control over its air space, and, hopefully, put a stop to this war. 

Delfast’s co-founders, Daniel Tonkopi and Serhiy Denysenko, say they have always believed in safeguarding the future. When they founded Delfast in 2014, originally as a delivery company, Tonkoply and Denysenko knew that providing couriers with green transportation options would be critical to the company’s operations. 

The most important thing for an entrepreneur, and in general for any leader, is to protect the team and be completely honest with them during a tough time. Daniel Tonkopi, co-founder of Delfast

The founders soon realized that a bike with the power, range and battery life their couriers needed didn’t exist, and so they set out to build one. In 2017, backed by a Kickstarter campaign that saw the company raise $165,000, the startup began manufacturing a bike to fit its needs – one that promptly won the Guinness Book of World Records for the greatest distance traveled on an electric motorbike on a single charge.

More recently, the Delfast Top 3.0 e-motorbike won Forbes’ fastest e-bike of the year in 2022 after the company announced some serious upgrades to the vehicle during CES. 

We spoke with Delfast’s co-founders to discuss what it’s like running a startup during a war, how the startup is considering breaking into new business verticals, and the importance of always having a Plan B. 

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity. 

Note: Serhiy Denysenko’s answers were translated from Ukrainian by a member of Delfast’s team for TechCrunch. 

TC: Serhiy, you’re on the ground in Kyiv. What’s your day-to-day like?

Denysenko: Every morning starts with a check-in on Slack with all the colleagues. It’s important to keep in touch and know that everyone is fine, or as fine as is possible right now. 

Besides my work as a COO, I’ve been helping with volunteering, getting supplies and medicine to people, and this is something that pretty much every Ukrainian is now doing. I had my family relocated to Hungary, so I feel more or less safe, and I’m just trying to work as much as possible and do my best in every possible area, whether that’s supporting the company or supporting Ukraine in general. 

How are you managing your team through this crisis? What’s changed?

Denysenko: We got used to working remotely during Coronavirus times, so we have our task tracker, where everyone can see his or her task. Every Monday, we have an online Zoom meeting. Previously we only had these meetings at the executive level, but now during the war, we are gathering all together, just to see each other’s faces and ask how they’re doing, how’s everyone feeling. Just to talk with everybody. 

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Goldman Sachs’ OTC Bitcoin options trade ‘doesn’t mean much,’ but can pave way for more institutional involvement

Goldman Sachs is no stranger to testing the waters with crypto, with institutional clients looking for more exposure in the space.

Last week, Goldman was the first major U.S. bank to execute an over-the-counter crypto options trade with Galaxy Digital, which some market players say is foreshadowing more institutional adoption of digital assets.

“Crypto markets need large, credible and credit-worthy counterparties to grow the space further,” a source who works with digital assets at a major investment bank told TechCrunch. “Goldman and other Wall Street banks will bring that eventually.”

The 153-year-old firm is headquartered in New York City with offices globally and has $2.47 trillion assets under supervision. Galaxy Digital’s trading unit facilitated and executed the transaction with the investment bank in the form of a Bitcoin non-deliverable option.

This means that the firm isn’t directly engaging or holding the underlying crypto, but taking an option with a payoff that’s settled in cash, Tim Grant, head of Europe at Galaxy, explained to TechCrunch.

“The trade itself doesn’t mean much, but the fact that it happened and opens the ability for Goldman Sachs to trade this risk is massively significant, and this is just the beginning,” Grant said. “As soon as you get into that part, that set of hurdles, you’re intellectually and operationally free to do other things. It’s not the trade itself, it’s that this will allow us to go in a multitude of directions.”

Goldman did not provide additional information requested by TechCrunch before publication.

The firm is no stranger to crypto, or Bitcoin more specifically. It first set up a cryptocurrency trading desk in 2018, but shut it down for three years, only to restart it in early 2021. Since then, the bank dipped further into the crypto world by allowing investors to trade Bitcoin derivatives through block trades on CME Group in May 2021 and providing clients access to an ether fund through Galaxy Digital, among other offerings.

“I expect the [crypto] space to be a lot more institutionalized in the coming months [and] every investment bank will be involved in the space in the next year or so,” Kevin Kang, a founding principal at BKCoin Capital, said. “Crypto will become a part of any bank’s offerings and trade like another asset class.”

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Microsoft acquires process mining vendor Minit to grow its automation offerings

Signaling its ambitions in the process automation market, Microsoft has acquired Minit, a Bratislava, Slovakia-originated process mining technology vendor, for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced today. Microsoft says that the purchase will “further empower” it to “help … customers digitally transform” by creating a more complete picture of their processes — and identifying which of those processes are ripe for automation.

“Minit currently enables businesses to transform the way they analyze, monitor and optimize their processes. Minit’s solutions have helped businesses gain deep insights into how processes run, uncover root causes of operational challenges and help mitigate undesired process outcomes,” Justin Graham, Microsoft’s general manager of process insights, wrote in a post on Microsoft’s corporate blog. “[With Minit, our] customers will be able to better understand their process data, uncover what operations look like in reality, and drive process standardization and improvement across the entire organization to ensure compliance at every step.”

Microsoft dipped its toes into process mining with the launch of new features in Power Automate in 2019 and the acquisition of Softomotive, an RPA software provider, a year later. But with Minit, the tech giant is doubling down on a software category that could be worth over $11 billion by 2030, according to a report from Polaris Market Research.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the whole of the Minit team will join Microsoft — or, indeed, whether the company will remain spread across its current locations. (Minit is now headquartered in Amsterdam, with satellite offices in London and New York.) But CEO James Dening said that customers shouldn’t expect a change in the level of support they’re currently receiving.

“We are looking forward to what it means to become part of an industry leader like Microsoft and what that brings us ––how we can use that scale and excellence to continue to deliver great solutions to our customers,” Dening wrote in a blog post on Minit’s website. “It has been a privilege to lead the company for the last year, and I’m excited to continue my journey with the team, as part of what I consider to be the world’s leading software company.”

In a statement, Microsoft spokesperson Zara Huang told TechCrunch that the Minit team will move into the Microsoft Process Insights team and that there will be “no change” change to the current work location of Minit team members. Microsoft is in early stages of determining how Minit will be integrated into its offerings, she said, and the companies will share more details when they’re available.

Minit, which was founded in 2015 by Rasto Hlavac and had raised €10.3 million (~$11.40 million) prior to the acquisition, is one of an expanding number of startups developing process mining tools aimed at enterprise clientele. Process mining, also known as task discovery, involves spotting root cause workflow issues and bottlenecks by pulling data from systems including desktop, email apps, and workflows. It’s a key part of robotic process automation (RPA), a technology that promises to automate monotonous, repetitive tasks traditionally performed by human workers while at the same time generating logs to identify potential cost savings.

As Protocol’s Aisha Counts notes, process mining has traditionally been done by system integrators who map out processes by analyzing manual workflows. Process mining software is designed to digitize the approach in a way that reduces the expense, time, and effort involved.

Underlining the appetite for process mining technologies, Celonis, a data processing company, earlier this week acquired Minit competitor Process Analytics Factory, which coincidentally integrates with Microsoft’s Power BI analytics platform. Just in the past several years, RPA vendor Automation Anywhere acquired process discovery and mining startups FortressIQ, Process Gold, and StepShot; Blue Prism released a task mining solution called Capture; and rivals including ABBYY and Kryon have expanded their process mining offerings.

“You know the process space is hot when even Microsoft, with its vast resources, has to buy its way in. I’m sure Microsoft is seeing the same trends that we saw, which drove the combination of FortressIQ and Automation Anywhere,” Pankaj Chowdhry, EVP of discovery at Automation Anywhere and formerly CEO of FortressIQ, told TechCrunch via email. “Customers are starved for process data to help them navigate their transformation journeys and any vendor that doesn’t have best-in-class process capabilities will find itself challenged to offer a compelling solution to their customers.”

Microsoft’s Minit acquisition comes at a time when the broader business process automation industry, which remains flush with cash, heads toward general consolidation. SAP acquired German process automation company Signavio in January 2021, just before ServiceNow got into the RPA segment with the buyout of India-based Intellibot.io. IBM acquired process mining software company MyInvenio in April. And Salesforce’s MuleSoft and Microsoft followed suit with the purchases of automation tech providers Servicetrace and Clear Software, respectively.

“Process mining, discovery and task mining has seen a lot of transformation with many acquisitions in the last year. [It] now appears to be maturing as a market and becoming commoditized under major automation platforms,” Saikat Ray, Gartner senior research director, told TechCrunch via email. “Gartner sees an emergence of automation platform vendors offering process mining and task mining as embedded capabilities, along with RPA.”

Updated at 4:15 p.m. ET, March 31, with quotes from Microsoft and Automation Anywhere.

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All eyes are on Swvl as it starts trading on a SPAC combination

Mass transit and shared mobility provider Swvl went public today in a landmark moment for Egyptian and Middle Eastern tech ecosystems. It’s also a test for the company going public despite a market that’s been unfriendly toward combinations with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, of late. 

The Egypt-born and Dubai-based company has listed its shares at $10 on the Nasdaq through a merger with U.S. women-led blank check company Queen’s Gambit Growth Capital. The planned merger, which will see Swvl offer 20-30% of its total shares, was announced last July.

Following closing, the combined company, now “Swvl Holding Corp,” will trade under GMBT and GMBTW today before switching to SWVL and SWVLW on April 1.

Swvl is the first company launched from Africa and the second Middle Eastern company to list on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger. Anghami, an Abu Dhabi-based music streaming platform, did so last February when it listed with Vistas Media Acquisition at a $220 million valuation.

Egyptian ride-sharing company Swvl plans to go public in a $1.5B SPAC merger

Swvl raised $121.5 million in private investment in public equities (PIPE) for this transaction. The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), Teklas Ventures, Chimera, Agility, and Luxor Capital Group are some of its other investors. The company is currently valued at $1.5 billion.

In February, one of its investors, Atalaya Capital, pulled out of the transaction. And in a filing, Queen’s Gambit announced the termination of forward purchase agreements worth $100 million in SPAC shares and an extra $2 million via a private placement.

“The forward purchase agreement was done with a group, and it was just access to additional capital,” Queen’s Gambit Capital founder and CEO Victoria Grace told TechCrunch when asked if the termination affects the deal.

“Its termination doesn’t affect the valuation of the company or anything around our fundamental deal, which is Queen’s Gambit merging with SWVL, so the valuation [stays] the same,” she said.

Investors withdrawing their interests and dollars from SPACs is not peculiar to Swvl. It’s a usual occurrence — for instance, when BuzzFeed went public last December, 94% of the $287.5 million raised by the SPAC was withdrawn — particularly as the SPAC hype gives way in the face of an underperforming market and tighter regulation.

Despite the seeming setback, there’s good news for Swvl. According to CFO Youssef Salem, the company has an additional $160 million from proceeds and a $470 million committed equity facility with B. Riley Principal to access over the next few weeks if certain conditions are met, he said.

Swvl was founded by Mostafa Kandil, Mahmoud Nouh and Ahmed Sabbah in 2017. The trio started the company as a bus-hailing service in Egypt and other ride-sharing services in emerging markets with fragmented public transportation.

Its bus-hailing services enable users to make intra-state journeys by booking seats on buses running a fixed route. Swvl offerings have expanded beyond bus-hailing services, though. Now, the company offers inter-city rides, car ride-sharing, and corporate services in the 10 cities it operates in across Africa and the Middle East.

The partnership between Swvl and Queen’s Gambit came from a mutual interest from both parties.

While searching for a company to acquire, Swvl fit the blank-check company’s criteria: strong business fundamentals, mobility and logistics (one of its core verticals), and an ESG ethos around women and affordable transportation.

On the other hand, Swvl — off the back of raising over $170 million in venture capital, expanding to over 16 countries across Latin America, Asia and Africa; hiring executives from Facebook, Uber and Optimus; and acquiring Shotl, Viapool and door2door — was on a quest for global dominance in the mobility space.

A SPAC with Queen’s Gambit was the most suitable option for it from a financial standpoint, and both parties feel strongly about the sustainability angle around transport — Swvl claims it has prevented approximately 289 million pounds of carbon emissions since its inception.

The company plans to expand into several countries over the next six months, including Colombia, Mexico, South Africa, and the U.S.

In the meantime, all eyes will be on the company’s performance as it officially starts trading tomorrow in a cooling SPAC market and a generally unsettled public market. 

“There’s a softness in the market, but as long as the company operates and delivers results, maybe today, people don’t pay attention to it, but they will in months ahead,” Grace said about the worrying SPAC and public markets.

“I think the market will change just like it always does and people go back to fundamentals at how we look at company’s performances. For Swvl, they have been beating every single number that was ever presented to us. And that’s what makes me super excited about this. And that’s the type of target you want to partner with.”

Almost everything you need to know about SPACs

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Hiveminded

Earlier this week, a video surfaced of a robot dog walking down the streets of Shanghai with a bullhorn strapped on its back. There are those who will, no doubt, view it as a kind of apocalyptic vision. I’d be lying if the thought hadn’t crossed my mind. It’s a strange thing, living through history and imagining yourself traveling back in time as recently as 2019 and attempting to describe the scene.

A quadrupedal robot bounding along down empty streets in a city with a population topping 26 million. The voice emerging from its back is warning citizens to stay inside, as China begins its largest lockdown in two years, as the country is seeing another spike in the ongoing pandemic.

The less cynical part of me (it exists! really!) sees a fascinating little microcosm. We can debate lockdown measures (and certainly China’s specific approach to them) another day. But the image of a robot doing a job designed to curb the spread of the virus’s transmission distills a lot of what I’ve been writing about for the past two years and change.

We’ve been waiting decades for robots to have their moment. Truly that moment is right now — because it has to be. After years of discussing automation like some far-off luxury, it’s suddenly a necessity. We put on our flood pants, opened the door, the water’s closing in and suddenly everything’s coming up Milhouse. The act of strapping a bullhorn to the back of the robot may not be the exact application its creators intended, but it’s a time to be nimble and clever. It’s a time to see what these robots can do.

I’m not going to tell you that the interest level in robotics and automation is going to remain at a fever pitch once (knock on wood) things go back to whatever form of normal we head into. But plenty of industries are going to be permanently changed by the seeds that have been planted. Much of it will be for the better — as robots improve quality of jobs and life and move people out of harm’s way.

But I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as a full-throated techno-optimist, either. The sooner we address the eventual issues, the better. I’ve heard it described as “growing pains,” but I think the phrase does a disservice to very real people who stand to lose very real jobs. Even if, as Dean Kamen recently told me in this newsletter, automation stands to create more jobs than it displaces, how do we help the people impacted in the immediate term? Employee education initiatives like the one recently announced by Apple are, at least, a good starting point.

This topic has been weighing fairly heavily on me in recent weeks as I explore pieces about chip shortages and the supply chain. Conversations around offshoring manufacturing jobs took a similar form. Long run, if we play our cards right, we can create more higher-paid, less back-breaking work. But do you want to be the one to tell undervalued workers that suddenly their services are no longer needed or that they should have learned to code with resources that may or may not have been available to them? In much the same way I believe that startups should focus on having a net positive environmental impact, tech companies that are potentially displacing jobs need to determine how we ensure that a technology making life better for some isn’t actively immiserating others.

Let’s have that conversation. I plan to keep discussing it here and onstage at our upcoming robotics event. I expect to discuss it with the startups I speak to going forward and hope my VC readers will do the same. Technology’s role should be improving the sum total happiness for life on Earth. It has the potential, but often lacks the followthrough.

This week’s robotics news hits offer myriad ways we can do this, from forestry to factories to bees, which, yes, are good.

Image Credits: RE2

The biggest news of the week is Sarcos’ big-ticket purchase of RE2. The $100 million deal includes $30 million in cash (that’s why you do a SPAC) and $70 million in stock. As I noted before, there’s definitely some redundancy here, with Sarcos’ existing tech and RE2’s teleoperation systems. There’s likely to be some consolidation there, but the new acquisition adds some verticals to the fold, including underwater applications and the medical market.

Here’s Sarcos’ CEO:

This transaction brings an innovative company with a complementary but additive suite of products into the Sarcos family, allowing us to offer a much wider range of solutions to address our customers’ needs. It will also allow us to expand our offerings to new industries such as medical and subsea, deepen our team of robotics experts, and advance the development of AI and machine learning technologies for use in unstructured environments.

Image Credits: Treeswift

As I noted on Twitter recently, I’ve been saying “Treewise” all week as a weird byproduct of covering a pair of startups doing some really interesting work in the natural world.

First off is Treeswift, fittingly named after a family of forest-dwelling birds. The company hopes to replace existing satellite and plane imaging with a swarm of drones designed to track deforestation, give carbon capture readings and help prevent forest fires (as only you and a drone can do). It just raised a $4.8 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $6.4 million.

Image Credits: Beewise

From drones to drones — founded in 2018, Israeli firm Beewise is hoping to help “colony collapse disorder” (CCD), which has led to a 30% annual reduction in bee colonies every year. The company, which just raised an $80 million Series C, builds what amount to robotic hives, designed to protect their tenants from habitat destruction, population, pets and other intrusions. Says the Beewise CEO:

Our Beewise team is thrilled to be supported by an incredible roster of investors for our Series C who understand our dedication, tenacity, and passion towards succeeding in saving the bees and reversing the trend of the bee colony collapse. With thousands of orders placed in the U.S. in just the last few months, and with this funding, Beewise will be able to meet incredible market demand through increased manufacturing, develop additional product iterations, and further improve pollination.

Image Credits: Flytrex

One more bit of drone talk. FlyTrex just announced that it’s expanding delivery service to Texas. Specifically, it will be arriving in Granbury, a town of around 10,000 in the greater Dallas/Forth Worth metroplex. Partners include the restaurant conglomerate behind Chili’s and Maggiano.

Some news from Boston Dynamics to close us out this week. The Hyundai-owned firm announced the availability of its second commercial robot, Stretch. Deliveries for the warehouse robot are set to occur in 2023 and 2024. Meantime, the company has been working with a number of clients, including DHL (which recently made a massive purchase) and clothing retailers Gap and H&M.

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

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The how and why of raising OT security capital

Matt Gatto Contributor

Matt Gatto is a managing director at Insight Partners. He focuses on high-growth software and SaaS businesses across infrastructure, healthcare and enterprise applications, and also has experience with leveraged buyouts.

Last year was huge for the cybersecurity market, fueled by rising incidents of cyberattacks, particularly ransomware that disrupted services and held companies hostage.

The numbers are striking: Investments in the space more than doubled from the year before to $29.3 billion, according to a recent report by investment bank Momentum Cyber. Two recent funding rounds, in November and February, even exceeded $1 billion. A record 286 M&A deals, worth $77.5 billion, were made, and 14 deals of those were over $1 billion each. This year is off to a promising start with Google’s $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant in March.

The market is responding to the evolving threat landscape. As new types of attacks arise, security vendors respond with new tools in what has become a cat-and-mouse game. This dynamic has driven the market for decades, but things are heating up now that the stakes are higher with hits on critical infrastructure and the U.S. supporting Ukraine in the Russian invasion.

One security area that has been seeing particular interest of late is operational technology.

Many attacks last year targeted companies that provide basic necessities of life, and consumers felt the pain. In February 2021, someone gained unauthorized access to the water treatment system in Oldsmar, Florida, and tried unsuccessfully to add more lye to the water supply.

And last May, drivers on the East Coast panicked when they couldn’t get gasoline after a ransomware attack disrupted Colonial Pipeline’s distribution network. That month, a ransomware attack on Brazilian meat supplier JBS resulted in beef shortages in South America, North America and Australia. JBS ended up paying $11 million in ransom.

The transportation industry has also been hit hard in recent years, seeing a 186% increase in weekly attacks from 2020 to 2021, and a 900% increase in maritime attacks since 2017. Recent incidents include attacks on the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the CSX Class I freight railroad.

Critical infrastructure attacks and regulation

All these attacks on critical sectors have led to a slew of federal action plans and regulations affecting the water sector, pipeline operators and other critical industries.

In one example, the Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Systems Sector-Specific Plan cites a number of elevated risks, including cyber and aging equipment, in guiding industry efforts to strengthen infrastructure security and resilience.

As Russian attacks on Ukraine have intensified, the U.S. government is increasingly concerned about Russia launching cyberattacks on American businesses, especially critical infrastructure. On March 15, President Joe Biden signed into law the Cyber Incident Reporting Act, which requires critical infrastructure providers to report cyberattacks to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within 72 hours and ransomware payments within 24 hours.

Then, on March 21, the president reiterated earlier warnings, citing “evolving intelligence that the Russian government is exploring options for potential cyberattacks.”

Then the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed indictments on March 24, charging four Russians who worked for the Russian government with hacking operational technology (OT) of companies in the energy sector around the world over six years.

Legacy equipment in a modern world

For decades, cybercriminals focused on stealing information they could monetize, but now that OT environments are increasingly connected to the Internet, bad actors are trying to shut down infrastructure and conduct cyber-physical attacks like in Oldsmar.

The advent of ransomware and targeted attacks on critical infrastructure have changed the game and are putting operational technology security in the spotlight. At the end of the day, OT security is a national security issue.

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Apple to now allow ‘reader’ apps to use external links, if approved

Apple today announced it will begin to allow a subset of applications sold on its App Store to link to an external website where users can create or manage their accounts with the app developer. The change to Apple’s App Store Review guidelines only applies to what Apple calls “reader” apps — meaning, apps designed primarily to provide access to some sort of digital content, like magazines, books, audio, music, or video. Apple’s plans were first announced last September in the context of the tech giant’s settlement with a Japanese regulator, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC), and had been set to arrive sometime in early 2022.

The company had earlier said the changes would apply globally to all reader apps on the App Store when they went live, but had not provided an exact launch date.

Apple announces new settlement with Japan allowing developers to link to external websites  

Today, Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines have been updated with a new reference that explains how Reader apps can implement this feature.

Specifically, Apple instructs developers to apply for something it calls the External Link Account Entitlement in order to provide this functionality in their own apps. An entitlement is something Apple uses when it wants to still have control over the situation in terms of which developers can implement a certain feature. That is, instead of just changing the App Store rules so this type of behavior is broadly permitted for apps in the supported category, the entitlement process requires developers to ask and then receive approval for this special use case. This way, Apple can very carefully vet the apps being allowed to add the links instead of leaving it up to its App Review team.

The company also published usage guidelines and implementation details for developers who are approved to use the external link option. Here, Apple explains that apps that not all apps that offer access to digital content will be approved — the access to digital content has to be the app’s “primary functionality,” Apple states. For instance, a social networking app (ahem, Facebook) where users can also stream videos would not be eligible.

Apple also says that, in order to be eligible, the apps must allow the users to access content or services they had previously purchased outside the app; they must allow people to sign in to their account; and they cannot facilitate real-time, person-to-person services — like live tutoring, fitness instruction, real estate tours, or medical consultations.

Image Credits: Appl

Notably, Apple says apps that choose to use the External Link Account Entitlement cannot offer in-app purchases on either iPhone or iPad devices. It’s an either/or situation.

Apple’s instructions detail how the links should work, too, including how they must open up in a new browser window and not a web view, for instance, and how the links should appear. The developer’s web page also can’t advertise the pricing offered outside the App Store. It can only say something very simple like: “go to example.com to create or manage your account.” There are several other more technical requirements, as well.

It’s worth pointing out that these changes have only come about due to governmental regulations and not because Apple believes this is the right thing to do for its App Store. It’s clear from the heavy-handed way it’s implementing this support — and the rules around its use — that the company views this change as a slippery slope that could ultimately lead to App Store revenue loss.

The changes come at a time when lawmakers and regulators alike have been putting pressure on the app store providers, Apple and Google, in the wake of anti-competitive complaints. The platforms are also battling this out in the courts, as Apple and Google are doing now with Fortnite maker Epic Games, whose antitrust case with Apple is now under appeal. Another class-action lawsuit pushed Apple to agree that developers were allowed to contact their customers about payment methods using the contact information they collected in their apps.

In addition to today’s change for reader apps, South Korea has passed legislation that bans Apple and Google from requiring that developers use their respective payment systems. More recently, a bipartisan App Store bill targeting Apple and Google was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggesting that U.S. legislation is on the horizon, too. But instead of getting ahead of the changes with an overhaul of how the App Store operates, Apple has been clinging on to every last bit of control it has even as it attempts to adhere to the regulations. This stance has gotten so bad that, in the Netherlands, Apple has been now fined ten times by the local regulatory authority for non-compliance with new rules around third-party payment support for dating apps.

Though Apple has opened up access to request the External Link Account Entitlement today, it notes the API will be available for reader apps to build and test in an “upcoming beta release of iOS and iPadOS.”

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OpenStack launches Yoga, its 25th release

OpenStack, the massive open source infrastructure-as-a-service project that allows enterprises and public hosting services to run their own on-premise clouds, today released version 25 of its software, dubbed Yoga. Like all large open source projects, OpenStack has gone through its ups and downs, but as the Open Infrastructure Foundation, the organization behind OpenStack and a number of other projects like Kata Containers, recently announced, OpenStack now manages over 25 million CPU cores in production and nine out of the top 10 telcos now run OpenStack, as do large enterprises like Bloomberg, Walmart, Workday and TechCrunch parent Yahoo. China Mobile alone runs an OpenStack deployment with 6 million cores, and more than 180 public cloud data centers now run OpenStack.

Even after 25 releases in 12 years, the OpenStack community is still adding new features, in addition to the usual bug fixes and maintenance updates. As with most recent releases, this means increased support for additional hardware, for example. With Nvidia now a major contributor to OpenStack, there is new support for SmartNIC DPUs, that is, the ability to offload network processing to specialized cards, in OpenStack’s core networking and compute services. The OpenStack Cinder storage service now also supports LightOS for new storage types like NVMe/TCP and NEC V Series Storage. Not something you’d need for a small deployment, but features that will matter to some of OpenStack’s largest users.

“It’s great to see all of those hardware manufacturers getting involved directly in OpenStack to make sure that we correctly support and expose the features in their hardware,” said the Open Infrastructure Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez. It’s worth noting that the general manager position is still quite new, with Carrez moving to the job in January of this year after being the VP of Engineering for the OpenStack/Open Infrastructure Foundation for many years. In this new role, he now oversees the foundation’s operations, covering engineering, product, community and marketing.

Other major updates in this release include a new soft delete scheme for OpenStack Manila, the project’s shared file system service. Kendall Nelson, the senior upstream developer advocate for the Open Infrastructure Foundation, likened this to the recycle bin on your desktop. “It’s one of those things where it’s like, you know, why don’t we do that? We could have been doing this the whole time and I think that Manila has been pretty stable for a while, so [the developers were] like, ‘Oh, well, let’s go and do the obvious things that we could have done all along’,” she said.

With this release, OpenStack is also expanding its support for a number of cloud-native infrastructure projects like the popular Prometheus monitoring system and Kuryr and Tacker Kubernetes tools, and welcoming two new projects, the Skyline dashboard and Venus log management module.

As for the Foundation itself, it’s worth noting that 12 new companies recently joined the organization. These new members are mostly in the lower silver tier, like B1 Systems, Okestro, OpenMetal and TransIP, but Vexxhost, for example, is joining as a gold member. Overall, the organization’s corporate membership is up 20% since November 2021.

Later this year, the Open Infrastructure Foundation will also host its first in-person conference again, the OpenInfra Summit in Berlin, Germany, in early June. “When we launched the Open Infra Foundation, we said we were going to bring together a community to build the next decade of open infrastructure after 10 years of OpenStack and related projects,” Open Infrastructure Foundation CEO and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce said. “We’re a year into it and it’s been really exciting to see this coalition of companies who are joining across vendors, new tech leaders like Nvidia, new users like BBC and others, along with the projects that are coming in. I’m really excited to finally get all of these people back together for the first time since the pandemic.”

Soon, the OpenStack project will also change its release cadence. Currently, the community is publishing two releases a year. Starting in 2023, it’s moving to a “tick-tock” schedule, with one major and one minor release on the same six-month cadence as today. In part, this is because of feedback from operators who don’t want to have to upgrade their environments every six months.

“This really helps the smaller OpenStack clouds, because you can reliably like ‘okay, well, we have a year to breathe now before the next one,’ as opposed to every six months,” Bryce said. “There’s much less risk than there used to be in terms of upgrading, but it’s still a lot of work, so for those companies that use OpenStack that are a little bit smaller and have smaller teams or maybe are newer to it, this like long-term support cadence should really help them get off the ground and get moving. And then, the bigger companies that are used to the six-month release cadence like Red Hat are still going to be able to get their features right when they’re coming out.”

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Mojo Vision takes another step toward AR contact lenses with new prototype

We’ve known Mojo Vision’s journey to market was going to be a long and deliberate one since we saw an early prototype in Las Vegas a number of CESes ago. You can multiply all of the talk of hardware being hard a few times over when attempting to execute something novel and tiny that’s designed to be worn on one of the more vulnerable parts of the human anatomy.

Today the Bay Area-based firm announced a new prototype of its augmented reality contact lens technology. The system is based around what Mojo calls “Invisible Computing,” its heads up display technology that overlays information onto the lens. Essentially it’s an effort to realize the technology you’ve seen in every science-fiction movie from the past 40+ years. The set-up also features an updated version of the startup’s operating system, all designed to reduce user reliance on screens by — in a sense — moving the screen directly in front of their eyes.

The system is building around a 0.5 millimeter microLED display with a remarkably dense 14,000 pixels per inch. The text overlays are highlighted through micro-optics, while data is transferred back and forth via a 5GHz band. All of that is powered by an ARM Core M0 processor. An eye-tracking system is on-board, utilizing acceleromter, gyroscope and magnetometer readings to determine the motion of the wearer’s gaze. That, in turn, forms the foundation of the system’s hands-free control.

The company writes:

Since we first revealed Mojo Lens to the world in January 2020, we’ve been innovating and building, and integrating systems that many people thought couldn’t be built, let alone operational in a contact lens form factor. The most common thing we hear as we share this latest prototype is, “I knew there would be smart contact lenses, but I thought they were 10 or 20 years out, not now.” This is happening and I’m excited about our next milestones and realizing the promise of Invisible Computing.

Of course, things are still in the prototype phase — so “now” isn’t now, exactly. The company continues to work with the FDA to help bring the tech to market as part of its Breakthrough Devices Program. The company also announced previous partnerships with fitness brands like Adidas Running to develop workout applications for the tech.

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Legendary hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek talk cybersecurity and autonomous vehicles at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022

Security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek shook the automotive industry in 2015 by remotely hacking a Jeep Cherokee driven by Wired reporter, and willing participant, Andy Greenberg. The notorious hack caused Fiat Chrysler, Jeep’s parent company, to recall 1.4 million vehicles and pay $105 million in fines to the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration.

The warning might have been a wake-up call to the industry, but it didn’t slow the rise of the connected car. 

Today, the “connected car” is commonplace and delivers a long list of services to the driver and passengers, from internet connectivity and vehicle monitoring to safety warnings and the ability to buy goods and services while on the go. And it has crept beyond the passenger vehicle into the emerging autonomous vehicle industry, too. 

Perhaps it’s not surprising then that automotive cyberattacks have grown in frequency — up more than 225% in 2021, compared to 2018. It’s a trend that has caused a boon in the automotive cybersecurity market, which is predicted to reach $5.3 billion in 2026. 

This is why we’re thrilled to announce that Miller and Valasek — undisputed leaders in the industry who both hold top security roles at GM’s self-driving vehicle subsidiary Cruise — will join us onstage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 to discuss the dynamic and rapidly changing realm of automotive cybersecurity. The two-day event is scheduled for May 18 and May 19 in San Mateo, California, and will feature the best and brightest minds building and investing in the future of transportation. 

A distinguished security engineer, Miller — whom Foreign Policy called “one of the most technically proficient hackers on Earth” — designs and implements cybersecurity features for the company’s autonomous vehicles. 

Prior to joining Cruise, Miller served as a computer hacker at the National Security Agency, and he consulted and worked for the computer security teams at Twitter, Uber ATG and Didi Chuxing.

As the director of security engineering at Cruise, Valasek oversees vehicle, infrastructure and application security. He also has extensive experience in reverse engineering and exploitation research. Prior to joining Cruise, Valasek served as security lead at Uber and earlier as the director of vehicle security research at IOActive.

Don’t miss a wide-ranging conversation about the road that led Miller and Valasek from that Jeep Cherokee to Cruise, what needs to happen before the public trusts driverless vehicles, the type of threats they’re seeing, industry trends and what they’ve learned since 2015.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2022 breaks through the hype and goes beyond the headlines to discover how merging technology and transportation will affect a broad swath of industries, cities and the people who work and live in them. Register today before prices increase April 1!

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YouTube may be getting a dedicated podcasts homepage

There were already several hints that YouTube was getting more serious about podcasts, after reports indicated the company hired a podcast executive, Kai Chuk, to lead its efforts in the space and had even begun offering cash to popular podcasters to film their shows. Now, a leaked document has unveiled more about YouTube’s plans in this area, pointing to a future podcasts homepage on YouTube.com and other monetization features.

The details were published by Podnews, which recently got its hands on an 84-page presentation where YouTube described its podcasts roadmap. Here, the company says it will improve podcast ingestion by piloting the ability to pull in podcast RSS feeds. It also noted it plans to centralize podcasts on a new homepage at YouTube.com/podcasts. The URL doesn’t yet work; but it also doesn’t automatically redirect to the YouTube homepage — which is what it does if you put other random words after the slash.

Not surprisingly, Google sees podcasts as a way to expand its advertising business on YouTube. The document suggests YouTube will feature audio ads sold by Google as well as other partners. It mentions the support of “new metrics” designed for audio-first creators and the ability to integrate YouTube data into industry-standard podcast measurement platforms. One page shows brands like Nielsen, Chartable, and Podtrac listed as partners.

The addition of a new “podcasts” vertical to YouTube would be a logical next step for the company.

Over the years, YouTube has highlighted the service’s larger content categories by giving them their own homepages, as it did with YouTube Gaming back in 2015 and with YouTube Fashion (now Fashion & Beauty) in 2019. Plus, YouTube content helps to power Google’s music streaming service, YouTube Music, which competes with other services like Spotify, where podcasts are a competitive advantage.

Spotify has been looking to dominate the podcast advertising market and has made several acquisitions to bring related adtech in-house. As a result, Spotify has since been able to sell its own ads, introduce streaming ad insertion technology, launch its own audio ad marketplace, and is trying out new ad formats. Meanwhile, as a video-centric platform, YouTube has been left out of much of this ad market growth.

Podnews didn’t publish the full document and it’s not clear when the document was first produced or distributed, given references to launches that are listed as coming “in 2022” and the mention of Chartable, a company Spotify acquired last month. YouTube didn’t comment to Podnews, per its article. We’ll update if a comment is provided to us.

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Jan 6 Conspirator Navarro Calls Trump 'The American Caesar' Betrayed By Pence

Former Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro called former Vice President Mike Pence a traitor for refusing to be part of the coup to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy.

Navarro, who refuses to testify to the January 6 committee over his involvement in the plot, explained Trump's "Green Bay Sweep" strategy to overturn six battleground states' certified results, in order for Trump to remain in power.

Ranting to Newsmax TV, Navarro then implicated Ted Cruz as the key Senator they needed to help with the coup.

Navarro explained the plot.

"We had 100 Senators and Congressmen on board. It started flawlessly with Ted Cruz, basically challenging the results in Arizona," Navarro explained.

Navarro included white nationalist Paul Gosar, who in the House also challenged Arizona's votes.

Navarro claimed everything they did was fine and only the votes Republicans consider legal should count.

Then he focused on Vice President Mike Pence and his refusal to be party to a treasonous plot.

"It was a tragedy that Mike Pence decided to be a traitor to the American Caesar of Trump." Navarro said.

Navarro then ranted about the six battleground states they tried to hijack.

"I can show you the very thin margin that Biden allegedly won by would be wiped out if you counted only the legal votes," Navarro explained, with an underlying suggestion that only Republican votes were legitimate.

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Why Nigeria leads the way in YC’s participation in Africa

It’s not a coincidence that TechCrunch has covered more African startups in the last year than any period in our history. Many of those companies are Nigerian, and when we look at venture capital data, we can see why. The country had an incredible 2021 as the most active venture capital scene in Africa, collecting more than $1.8 billion, or 34% of the $5 billion raised across the continent, according to Partech, a pan-African VC firm that also tracks investments.

The country has posted steady progress in the last three years as the leading African startup market. In 2019, startups based in Nigeria attracted $747 million, or 37% of Africa’s total VC investment. Those numbers decreased to $307 million, or 21% of the continent’s total, the following year, though 2020 was a venture capital year much impacted by outside forces.

YC W22 batch nets 24 African startups, including 18 from Nigeria

Thanks in part to a global boom in venture capital activity last year, Nigeria became the first African country to singlehandedly cross the billion-dollar mark while also collecting bragging rights as the preferred destination for mega-investors like Tiger Global and SoftBank.

Y Combinator is paying attention

The ample optimism in Nigeria’s tech community and belief that better days are ahead are unsurprising, despite questions around investors’ due diligence and the eyebrow-raising valuations of some of the nation’s startups.

Speaking of valuations, no seed-stage company in the country is better priced than those in the Y Combinator club. Yesterday, the accelerator graduated its first startup batch featuring its newly revamped terms. The new “standard deal” at YC now features more capital, and prices for Y Combinator graduates are reportedly greater than ever. (Keep in mind that only 10% of the current Y Combinator batch had monthly revenue of more than $50,000 when they were accepted into the program.)

Apart from revenue thresholds, the accelerator shared another interesting statistic concerning Nigeria. With 18 startups, it is the first African country to have the third-largest representation when categorized by country. That’s a milestone for Nigeria, yes, but also an indication of how quickly the African startup scene has developed in a short period of time.

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This startup’s novel tech promises to boost battery capacity for EVs

Five years ago, Jonathan Tan and Roger Basu were on the hunt to find an industry where they could take their expertise in thin-film technology and make the biggest and fastest impact possible. They chose batteries — or more specifically, battery degradation and lifespan.

It wasn’t — and still isn’t — an industry lacking in investment, research or companies claiming to have struck battery breakthrough gold. But the pair contend they have zagged where everyone else has zigged.

Tan and Basu, who co-founded California-based startup Coreshell in 2017, said they steered clear of trying to develop a new battery from scratch, an expensive and lengthy undertaking that numerous companies were already working on.

Instead, they focused their efforts on nanolayer coating technology that can be added to a battery cell manufacturer’s existing production system. This coating increases usable battery capacity by 30% or more and increases heat tolerance by 200%, all while lowering costs and improving safety, according to the Coreshell founders. It can also be applied to batteries with different chemistries and applications, including consumer electronics and electric vehicles.

“We want to be the ‘Intel Inside’ of batteries,” Coreshell CEO Tan told TechCrunch. “We want to apply this coating technology directly on the most challenging surfaces inside the battery, which is the surface of the anode and the surface of the cathode, where it meets the electrolyte.”

Coreshell has found support for its novel approach from several investors, battery manufacturers and even iconic dune buggy company Meyers Manx. Its quiver of advisers has also been loaded up with experts, including Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning; Chunmei Ban, a professor at the University of Colorado known for her work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory; and Judith O’Brien, who has made a career out of helping companies IPO.

The pair initially bootstrapped the company, then went through the Alchemist Accelerator in 2020 and raised some seed money.

Since then, Coreshell has begun a collaboration with BASF to work on several different coatings for advanced cathode materials, as well as demonstrations with other battery cell manufacturers that Tan could not name. The company also recently raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Trousdale Ventures, Industry Ventures and Helios Capital Ventures. Existing investors Entrada Ventures, Foothill Ventures and Asymmetry Ventures also participated in the round. Coreshell has raised $19 million to date.

Coreshell’s relationship with Trousdale Ventures and, more specifically, managing partner Phillip Sarofim also led to a partnership with Meyers Manx. A prototype Meyers Manx electric beach buggy will be the first vehicle to have the Coreshell technology “inside.”

Sarofim, who is also chairman of Meyers Manx, said the partnership fits into the Meyers Manx mission to “continue bringing adventure and fun to the world, but with even more performance capabilities to match the expectations of modern-day consumers.”

The Meyers Manx demonstration, plus collaborations with other battery cell manufacturers and automakers, allows Coreshell to show off the full capabilities both at the cell level and at the device level, as well as the speed at which it can be applied to vehicles, said Tan, a chemical engineer turned technical business development executive.

The company is also working with New Era Converting Machinery to demonstrate how its thin-film coating technology can be used in roll-to-roll processing. If successful, Coreshell could convince automakers and cell manufacturers to adopt its technology.

Battery producers use a continuous process called roll to roll. Cut open a cylindrical cell and you’ll see what looks like a jelly roll of electrodes, Tan explained. Before they’re put into the battery shell, these are essentially large rolls of electrodes on foil.

“Obviously, it’s much smaller to start off with, but even just showing off that capability is a key step toward being able to show that, ‘Hey, you can slot us right in and get the performance enhancements of solving battery degradation and having increased capacity, while lowering manufacturing costs,'” Tan said.

It’s this progress that caught Tarpenning’s attention.

“It seemed like every six months there was some breakthrough announced that was gonna have some big step in battery capacity or price reduction or whatever the metric is — and that just never happens,” Tarpenning said. “Part of it is that a lot of these techniques that work in the lab don’t scale very well, or at all, or they require an enormous change in the process.”

Coreshell appealed to him because it can be added to a cell manufacturer’s existing operation.

“You can actually slot it in and see see how it scales in an existing factory — and that to me was huge,” he said. “I was like, wow, OK, that that’s one of those big sort of chicken-and-egg things that just got solved.”

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Trump Begs Putin To Dig Up Dirt On The Bidens While Invading Ukraine

Donald Trump continues to court Vladimir Putin, even as Putin is murdering Ukraine civilians, by asking the Russian president to release (or more likely, manufacture) negative information about Hunter Biden.

On Just The News, the disgraced former president Donald Trump asks a hostile foreign leader who just invaded a neighboring country to help him smear Joe Biden and his family.

Extorting Ukraine while he was in office that got him impeached wasn't enough?

"Why did the mayor of Moscow's wife give the Bidens, both of them, 3 1/2 million dollars, that's a lot of money," Trump asked. This assertion is a lie, long debunked. There is no evidence of any such payment.

Repeating the lie, Trump said, "She gave them 3 1/2 million dollars, so now I would think Putin would know the answer to that. I think he should release it. I think we should know that answer."

It's unconscionable that Trump would ask Vladimir Putin, who is busily butchering innocent Ukraine civilians as we speak, for a favor so he can blackmail his political rival.

Trump is also asking every Russian hacker to get to work. There's always a Roger Stone around as an intermediary.

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Apple and Major League Baseball to livestream 12 weeks of Friday night games for free

Earlier this month, Apple announced its first live sports deal with Major League Baseball to bring a number of games and other MLB content to the Apple TV+ service for the 2022 season. Today, Apple unveiled the first 12 weeks of its “Friday Night Baseball” doubleheader schedule, which it now says will be freely available to anyone with internet access — without the need for an Apple TV+ subscription.

Previously, Apple had hinted some of its Friday Night games would be available for free for a “limited time,” but didn’t detail how many. The offering could entice more users to try out Apple TV+ before committing to a subscription. Apple confirmed to TechCrunch consumers won’t need to sign up for a TV+ subscription, nor a free trial, in order to stream the games for free.

Apple says the first half of its “Friday Night Baseball” schedule is set to premiere on April 8. The first game in the schedule will see the New York Mets facing off against the Washington Nationals, live from Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., at 7 PM ET. After that, Apple TV+ will broadcast the Houston Astros versus the Los Angeles Angels live from Angel Stadium at 9:30 PM ET.

The “Friday Night Baseball” doubleheader will then continue to be available to baseball fans across eight countries on Apple TV+ throughout the regular season. The first half of the schedule, which runs through June 24, can be found here. There’s no word yet on if Apple plans to make the Friday night games running in the second half of the season free, as well.

The start of the MLB season had been postponed due to a labor dispute, but that’s now resolved.

U.S. fans will also be able to tune in to a new live show called “MLB Big Inning,” which will feature highlights and look-ins and will air every night during the regular reason. And fans in both the U.S. and Canada will gain access to a new 24/7 livestream with MLB game replay, news, analysis, highlights, classic games and more, as well as on-demand programming that includes highlights and other original MLB content. The games and shows will stream across the Apple TV+ service, where they won’t be subject to local broadcast restrictions.

Apple also noted that the MLB will commemorate Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Hall of Famer’s Major League debut.

On that night, Apple’s “Friday Night Baseball” will run special coverage featuring former American League Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Randy Arozarena, the Tampa Bay Rays visiting All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson and the Chicago White Sox. In addition, last season’s National League Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Jonathan India and the Cincinnati Reds will be hosted by 2020 National League MVP Freddie Freeman and his new Dodger teammates, as part of the celebration.

Apple says that other presentation details, including additional game schedules throughout the regular season, broadcast teams, production enhancements and pre- and post-game coverage will be announced at a later date.

The streaming service’s “Friday Night Baseball” offering will include live pre- and post-game shows.

Games will be available for streaming in the following countries:

• United States
• Canada
• Australia
• Brazil
• Japan
• Mexico
• Puerto Rico
• South Korea
• U.K.

The new “Friday Night Baseball” schedule will mark Apple’s first foray into live sports, which is something it was reportedly looking to add to its streaming service for quite some time. However, the launch is also an example of how Apple is able to leverage its market position and sizable coffers to do something that other streamers could struggle with: offering free live sports as a means of marketing its service to potential subscribers.

The games can be accessed across devices where Apple TV+ is found, including on Apple’s TV app on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, along with select smart TVs, gaming consoles and cable set-top boxes.

Apple TV+ to stream weekly Major League Baseball games in its first live sports deal

Additional reporting: Sarah Perez

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No One Ever Asks Pentagon, 'How We Gonna Pay For It?'

The leadership of the Congressional Progressive Caucus voiced opposition to President Joe Biden's $813 billion military budget request on Monday and lamented that the question so often asked of critical social spending measures—"how will we pay for it?"—is never applied to soaring Pentagon outlays.

"As Pentagon spending has exploded, the federal government has been forced to pinch pennies for decades when it comes to investments in working families," Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), and Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) said in a joint statement.

"Appropriators and advocates are constantly called to answer for how we will afford spending on lowering costs and expanding access to healthcare, housing, child care services, on fighting the Covid-19 pandemic, and on combating climate change—but such concerns evaporate when it comes to the Pentagon's endlessly growing, unaudited budget," the trio continued. "We will continue to vigorously advocate against this military spending proposal, as we have in years past."

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