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https://www.blackplanet.com/woolnickel3/message/22011398
https://telegra.ph/h1Feliz-Ano-Nuevo-Images-Stock-Photos–Vectorsh1-09-20
http://rayhead6.eklablog.com/h1-the-julian-calendar-takes-effect-for-the-first-time-on-new-year-s-d-a202149982
http://callesenmcleo.kazeo.com/h1-why-do-we-celebrate-new-year-s-on-jan-1-h1-a202149984
http://pillowtennis6.nation2.com/why-do-we-celebrate-new-years-on-jan-1
http://olivelute1.bravesites.com/entries/general/h1-holi-h1
https://zenwriting.net/weeknickel7/happy-new-year-messages-for-an-amazing-2019
http://b3.zcubes.com/v.aspx?mid=5168852
http://dogbobcat5.booklikes.com/post/3242113/feliz-ano-nuevo-images-stock-photos-vectors
https://colondesign4.livejournal.com/319.html
https://squareblogs.net/spacetext8/ninety-two-feliz-ano-nuevo-posters-and-art-prints
https://blogfreely.net/findwillow3/new-years-eve

https://crablute5.tumblr.com/post/629756153769967616/h1-17-feliz-ano-nuevo-balloon-h1

http://pillowtenor5.unblog.fr/2020/09/20/feliz-ano-nuevo/
https://glovemoon4.webgarden.cz/rubriky/glovemoon4-s-blog/h1-feliz-ano-nuevo-clip-art-h1
https://penzu.com/p/1ec381cd
https://pastemind2.over-blog.com/2020/09/h1-feliz-ano-nuevo/h1.html
https://gumroad.com/8549941439371/p/h1-feliz-ano-gifs-h1
https://pbase.com/topics/zebradeath6/h1feliz_ao_nuevoh1
https://weekskin8.bravejournal.net/post/2020/09/20/Feliz-Ano-Nuevo-Means-Something-Totally-Different-If-The-N-Doesn-T-Have-The-~#pings
https://www.openlearning.com/u/glovestove9/blog/H1HindiNewYearInHinduCalendarH1
https://pillowrun7.webgarden.at/kategorien/pillowrun7-s-blog/h1-happy-new-year-new-year-s-or
http://colonkick3.xtgem.com/__xt_blog/__xtblog_entry/__xtblog_entry/17461444-h1-feliz-ano-nuevo-clip-art-h1?__xtblog_block_id=1#xt_blog
http://flaxtennis7.jigsy.com/entries/general/h1Feliz-Ano-Nuevo-Free-Vector-Arth1
https://ourdoings.com/callesenmcleod78szmrsj/
https://mariabobcat7.doodlekit.com/blog/entry/10751407/h111-cultures-that-don8217t-celebrate-new-year8217s-day-on-jan-1h1
https://pillowtennis2.podbean.com/e/vikram-samvat-new-year-day-in-india-calendar/
https://csgrid.org/csg/team_display.php?teamid=586140
https://writeablog.net/slipgrey1/feliz-ano-gifs
http://gravgaardhead6319.fikket.com/
https://postheaven.net/yamfoam7/happy-new-year-messages-for-an-amazing-2019
https://pattersondowney766.shutterfly.com/21

Blue Origin’s human lunar lander team delivers full-scale engineering mockup to NASA

Blue Origin and the members of its “national team” – Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper – have delivered a full-scale engineering prototype of their human lunar lander to NASA for the agency to examine and review as it readies to build the real thing for eventual use in NASA’s Artemis program Moon missions.

The Blew Origin crew lander is now ready to undergo testing at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. This mock-up is not a functional version of the lander, but it does include full-sized components of the planned lander system, including the descent element that will be built by Blue Origin, and the ascent element that partner Lockheed Martin will be producing. Overall, the entire mock-up article measures just under 40-feet high.

The purpose of this engineering prototype is to allow for testing and simulation of crew interactions. Starting this early with the mock-up means that as they develop the eventual production lander, Blue Origin and its partners can gain valuable insights about aspects of the design including instrument and component layout, visibility through windows from the cabin, ergonomics of seating and entry and exit points and much more.

Simulation can help with a lot of the elements of spacecraft design, as can leveraging previous designs – both of which are things that Blue Origin and the national team are doing. But there’s a lot to learn that can only be gleaned through actual humans pretending to really use the spacecraft as they would on a mission, and many of those wouldn’t be caught by computer simulation or history lessons alone.

Blue Origin and its national team are one of three companies that won a first round of Human Lander System (HLS) contract awards from NASA. It’ll continue to flesh out this engineering mock-up over time, adding elements that will make it ever-closer to the final production model as development continues. Ultimately, it hopes to support NASA with its ambitious goal of landing the next American man and the first American woman on the surface of the Moon by 2024.

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Join Female Founders Fund’s Anu Duggal for a live Q&A today at 11am PT/2pm ET

Startups are rebounding. Venture capitalists are open for business. And during the pandemic, the pace of dealmaking has not slowed down.

But how is this new era of uncertainty impacting underrepresented founders? Has startup-land become more inclusive, or do warm intros still dictate who gets a meeting and the way a deal closes?

To talk about all this and more, we’re bringing on the woman behind Female Founders Fund, Anu Duggal, to the virtual Extra Crunch Live stage today.

Join us at 11 a.m. PT/2 p.m. EST/6 p.m. GMT for tips, tricks and advice from Duggal. Those tuning in and taking notes are encouraged to ask questions, but you have to be an Extra Crunch member to access the chat. If you still haven’t signed up, now’s your chance! With the subscription, you’ll also be able to check out all of our stellar previous guests on-demand (watch those episodes here).

Female Founders Fund has provided seed institutional capital to entrepreneurs with more than $3 billion in enterprise value. The firm has cut checks into women-led companies such as Rent the Runway, Billie, Tala, Peanut, Thrive Global and Zola . The fund has also attracted limited partners like Melinda Gates and Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani.

Duggal herself has a fascinating trajectory into technology investing: at 25, she started The Tasting Room, a wine bar in Bombay. She went on to get an MBA from London Business School and co-founded Exclusively.in, an e-commerce company acquired by Indian fashion e-commerce company Myntra in 2011.

Hear from Duggal about how the investment landscape has changed for female founders, what she thinks of as a success story and if 2020 feels different than 2014. And Extra Crunch fam, make sure to bring your thoughtful questions for me to ask her live on air.

You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.

Startups are rebounding. Venture capitalists are open for business. And during the pandemic, the pace of dealmaking has not slowed down.

But how is this new era of uncertainty impacting underrepresented founders? Has startup-land become more inclusive, or do warm intros still dictate who gets a meeting and the way a deal closes?

To talk about all this and more, we’re bringing on the woman behind Female Founders Fund, Anu Duggal, to the virtual Extra Crunch Live stage today.

You can find the full details of the conversation below the jump.

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Report: Apple quietly acquired Israel’s Camerai, formerly Tipit, a specialist in AR and camera tech

Apple is well known for picking up smaller startups on the hush-hush to augment its business, and today news leaked out about the latest of these… nearly two years after the fact. Sometime between 2018 and 2019, the iPhone giant reportedly acquired and shut down Camerai, an augmented reality and computer vision company based out of Israel, which used to be called Tipit.

The news was first reported earlier today by Israeli newspaper Calcalist, and we have reached out to ask Apple directly about it. In the meantime, Jonathan (Yehonatan) Rimon, who had been Camerai’s CEO and co-founded the company with Moty Kosharovsky, Erez Tal, and Aaron Wetzler, declined to comment one way or the other on the report to us when we contacted him directly about it. A separate source confirmed the story to us. We’ll update as we learn more.

Calcalist said that the startup sold for several tens of millions of dollars. From being founded in 2015, Camerai had raised around $5 million — including a $2.5 million round in 2017 and another unreported $2.5 million in 2018 — with investors including the Atooro Fund and another called the SKO Fund.

It seems that the acquisition came on the heels of multiple approaches from a number of companies at a time when AR was arguably at a peak of hype and many big tech companies wanted a piece of the action. (Recall that 2018 was the year when Magic Leap raised nearly $1 billion in a single round of funding.) Back in 2018, we heard rumors that those approaching and looking at the startup included Apple, Samsung, and Alibaba.

The Calcalist report said that Camerai employees joined Apple’s computer vision team, and that the company’s technology has been incorporated into Apple products already. It’s not clear specifically where and when, but recall that both iOS 13 and iOS 14 have featured big software updates to the camera.

Camerai had built an SDK and specifically a range of software-based AR tools to help edit and use camera-made images in more sophisticated ways,

Its tech included the ability to detect different objects in the picture, and outline them with precision to alter them cosmetically; the ability to outline and apply filters across the whole image; a “skeleton tracking” neural network API that could detect and draw body joints in real time overlaid on a picture of a human; and its own version of selective focus for enhanced portrait modes (remember this was 2018 and this was not standard on phones at the time). Camerai’s site is shut down, but here are some screenshots of how it all looked, pulled from the Internet Archive:

Camerai’s acquisition underscores a couple of interesting, and ongoing, trends.

The first of these is in the development of smartphone technology, particularly around cameras. Some of the more interesting innovations in smartphone camera technology have come not out of improvements in hardware, but software, where the application of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence can mean that an existing combination of sensor, lens, and on-phone and cloud processors produce a better and more technically dynamic picture than before.

At a time when smartphone replacement cycles have really slowed down and we are seeing also slower innovation on hardware, bolting on talent and tech created outside the phone companies is one way to gain a competitive edge.

(Separately, I wonder if making cutting edge technology software-based also means that there could be scope in the future for paid updates to older phone models, which could mean more incremental revenues from consumers that don’t want to invest incompletely new devices.)

The second trend that this deal underscores is how Israel remains fertile ground for bigger companies on the hunt to pick up and bolt on technology, and that the secretive approach is likely to remain for some time to come.

“In Israel there are over 350 global corporate companies, from 30 countries, who search for local innovation. Some of them like Apple, MS, Google, even have local R&D [operations],” said Avihai Michaeli, a Tel Aviv-based senior investment banker and startup advisor. “Those global companies look mainly for tech which could serve as its competitive edge. It is not the first time that an acquired startup is asked not to publish it was acquired, nor talk about it.”

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Camerai had built an SDK and specifically a range of software-based AR tools to help edit and use camera-made images in more sophisticated ways,

Camerai’s acquisition underscores a couple of interesting, and ongoing, trends.

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

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Overlooked teams up with college newspapers to build a news-focused social network

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online.

“My goal has always been make an impact on the 2020 election,” Sehremelis told me — a tall order, particularly when the big social networks are struggling to solve these same problems. And as if that wasn’t enough, Meheris is hoping to revitalize student and local newspapers at the same time.

To do that, he’s launched Overlooked, an app currently being piloted with newspapers at the University of Southern California, Dartmouth, West Virginia University and elsewhere.

“We didn’t want to build a news aggregator, and we didn’t want to build a social network,” Sehremelis said. “We wanted to combine them.”

So Overlooked is an app where users — initially college students — can post and share articles. And that’s basically all they can do. They won’t be able to post any comments or content of their own, which Sehremelis said already “eliminates the possibility of a deepfake” video or image that’s been edited to mislead.

Image Credits: Overlooked

Of course, misinformation doesn’t just come from individual posts, but also from articles posted by publishers across the web. Those kinds of articles might still be shared on Overlooked, but Sehremelis argued that by eliminating user-generated content, the startup “drastically reduces the amounts of data that we have to vet.”

“Instead of posts, videos, memes, all of the above, there’s only news articles,” he continued. “One day in the future, our content moderators will be able to actually vet all the content on our system.”

But without those social posts and memes, what’s going to bring readers to the app? For one Sehremelis said Overlooked is the “fastest way and the easiest way to share a news article with your friend.” This is also where the partnerships with student newspapers come in.

Sehremelis is a recent USC alum, and he participated in the school’s Blackstone LaunchPad powered by Techstars. He recalled visiting the offices of the USC newspaper, the Daily Trojan, and seeing printed newspapers stacked to the ceiling — which seemed like a wasted expense that’s disconnected from the way students actually get their news. This, in turn, led him “down the rabbit hole of the newspaper industry as a whole,” where he learned about broader circulation and revenue challenges.

“The newspaper, it needs a superhero,” Sehremelis said.

Image Credits: Overlooked

And in fact, Overlooked has created a superhero mascot of sorts called Article Man, who represents the profile that newspapers can create on Overlooked, allowing them to communicate and share content directly with readers. They also get a share of the revenue from any Overlooked advertising that targets the newspaper’s readers.

Sehremelis argued that this approach addresses the issues that arise from an individual newspaper app (which can have a hard time getting downloads) or a profile on social media (where a newspaper gives up control and rarely monetizes in a significant way). He suggested these issues are only going to be more acute this fall, with many colleges sticking to remote learning or bringing students back to campus in a reduced capacity.

“Students aren’t going to be on campus to pick up the newspaper,” he said. “Many students weren’t picking up newspapers, anyway. Many of these student newspapers instead are on social media — it’s just that social media wasn’t compensating them.”

In addition, he’s hoping to get Overlooked in classrooms (virtual or otherwise), with professors inviting their classes to join the app and discuss the news.

Flipboard expands local news coverage to reach 50 cities across US and Canada

George Sehremelis is building what he calls a “social news network,” with the aim of combatting the spread of misinformation and fake news online.

To do that, he’s launched Overlooked, an app currently being piloted with newspapers at the University of Southern California, Dartmouth, West Virginia University and elsewhere.

“We didn’t want to build a news aggregator, and we didn’t want to build a social network,” Sehremelis said. “We wanted to combine them.”

Image Credits: Overlooked

“The newspaper, it needs a superhero,” Sehremelis said.

Image Credits: Overlooked

In addition, he’s hoping to get Overlooked in classrooms (virtual or otherwise), with professors inviting their classes to join the app and discuss the news.

Flipboard expands local news coverage to reach 50 cities across US and Canada

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Students get 60% off passes to Disrupt 2020

Budget-strapped students, this post is for you. We have a limited number of discount passes to Disrupt 2020 for $125 a pop. Buy your student pass now, before one of two things happen. One, we run out of tickets. Two, the price on any remaining passes increases on September 13. Insert sad face emoji here.

Your pass may come at a discount, but there’s nothing discounted about your Disrupt 2020 experience. You’ll have total access to five full days of programming across all the Disrupt stages. You’ll hear from some of the most influential people in technology, investing and business — we’re talking movers, shakers and makers like CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna, Sequoia Capital’s Roelof Botha and Zoom founder Eric Yuan. Check the agenda and plan your schedule now.

If you’re a budding founder, be sure to attend one of our Pitch Deck Teardown sessions. In these sessions, a new addition to the Disrupt lineup, top venture capitalists will critique an early-stage startup’s pitch deck and provide tips to improve it. Want to be considered for the teardown treatment? Submit your pitch deck here.

Mosey on over to the Extra Crunch Stage where seasoned veterans hold forth on subjects that every early-stage startup founder needs to learn. Topics like how to craft a pitch deck or how to raise money in an economic downturn. Join the interactive Q&As and glean real-world tips from experts in marketing, business development and investing.

Explore Digital Startup Alley and discover hundreds of exciting new startups. Use CrunchMatch, our free AI-powered networking platform to find and connect with likeminded attendees around the world — discover employment opportunities, schedule 1:1 virtual meetings to meet founders, pitch investors or highlight your expertise. The platform is live right now, which gives you weeks to master your networking mojo.

Don’t miss Startup Battlefield — our always-epic pitch competition — as an international cohort of extraordinary startups competes virtually for glory, massive media attention, investor affection and, of course, $100,000 in equity-free cash.

Disrupt 2020 takes place September 14 -18. Students, buy your 60% off pass to the full Disrupt experience before they’re gone. No one wants a sad emoji face.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Disrupt 2020 takes place September 14 -18. Students, buy your 60% off pass to the full Disrupt experience before they’re gone. No one wants a sad emoji face.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Airbnb declares all parties over indefinitely at its listings

Airbnb has been implementing measures to help limit hosting of unauthorized parties at listings booked through its platform, and today it implemented the strictest of all: A global ban on all parties and events. This includes an occupancy cap of 16 guests max at even the largest of the listings available on its platform, and the ban is “in effect indefinitely until further notice” according to the company.

The company notes that “unauthorized parties” have always been against its rules, even though it previously allowed hosts on its platform to selectively authorize small parties depending on their own assessment of whether they would be okay with that given the size of their house, and the comfort level of the surrounding neighborhood.

In its posted explanation of the rule change, Airbnb cites the global COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing as a contributing factor to updated rules around group gatherings, including removing specific flags encouraging use of listings as party venues from its search tools. Simultaneously, they also added a policy that requires both hosts and guests to follow local health agency guidelines around COVID-19 prevention measures, which the company says amounted to what was “effectively […] a form-fitting, patchwork ban on parties and events.”

Airbnb says that while that seemed to be sufficient at the time to encourage responsible and safe behavior, changing regional guidelines have meant that they’ve seen an increase in some individuals on their platform to turn listings into defect bars and clubs – hence the introduction of this new global ban, which is designed “in the best interest of public health.”

In terms of specifics, the guideline explicitly profits parties on all future bookings, and adds the 16 occupant cap. Airbnb is working on creating some kind of exception process for boutique hotels and other similar properties that make use of its platform for bookings. Meanwhile, Airbnb is working on process for informing guests of the party rules and that they open themselves up to potentially legal action if found to be in violation of the restriction.

Airbnb does not mention recent killings at rentals arranged through its platform, including one in Toronto in February in which three people were killed, and the California shooting last Halloween in which five people died. That incident in October 2019 prompted the ‘party house’ ban that Airbnb then implemented, while the incident from February prompted calls for further action.

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Target grocery pickup service expands nationwide

Target announced today its grocery pickup service is available nationwide, First introduced earlier this summer in the Midwest, Target said it would soon roll out grocery pickup services across the U.S., reaching 1,500 stores in a matter of months. Today, Target says it has reached that goal, which equates to nearly 85% of its locations.

Though the retailer had already offered grocery delivery through Shipt and both online Order Pickup and a same-day curbside service called Drive Up, it hadn’t yet offered the ability to pick up groceries due to issues with storing cold foods. But store remodels and more recent expansions to the pickup area inside some Target stores addressed the problem.

To move forward with its plans, the retailer had to work around issues related to the coronavirus outbreak that had delayed Target’s plans to fully remodel hundreds of stores. In stores that hadn’t yet been remodeled, a small construction project allowed the order pickup area to accommodate temperature-controlled storage.

The new grocery pickup service doesn’t offer all of Target’s fresh and frozen items at launch. Instead, Target has made available the most popular 750 fresh and frozen items on top of thousands of non-perishables that were already available to order. These newly added items include produce, dairy, bakery, meat and frozen products. The company said it imposed the limitation based on how it saw customers were using grocery pickup services to shop for essentials between larger trips to the store. It’s unclear, however, if that will remain true in the coronavirus era, when shoppers are now visiting stores less frequently, but stocking up in greater quantities when they do.

In both Target and Walmart’s earnings, announced this week, the retailers reported basket size increases related to this trend. Target, for example, reported customer basket size grew 18.8% in Q2 as people shopped for more items on their Target runs.

If this trend continues beyond the pandemic, retailers may need consider making online order pickup equivalent to shopping inside the store, in terms of product selection.

In addition to fresh and frozen groceries, Target shoppers can also pick from the over 250,000 general merchandise items available for pickup across categories like home, apparel, essentials, and more within their same grocery order. Shoppers don’t have to create separate “carts” in the Target app, nor does the Target website or app separate grocery shopping from other online shopping the way Walmart.com and its app do.

However, the option to build a “Drive Up” order is only available within the mobile app, as before. From the web, you can only create a order you pick up inside the store or choose delivery.

Target is ahead of schedule with its grocery pickup expansions. Originally, the retailer said it would reach 1,500 stores by the U.S. holiday season. The company didn’t offer a timeframe for when it expects to offer grocery pickup at every store.

Online grocery helped fuel both Target and Walmart’s quarterly sales, both retailers reported this week. In Target’s case, same-day services accounted for a majority of its digital growth, with growth of 273% across all services. Curbside pickup grew 734% while Shipt grocery delivery grew 350% during the quarter.

If this trend continues beyond the pandemic, retailers may need consider making online order pickup equivalent to shopping inside the store, in terms of product selection.

However, the option to build a “Drive Up” order is only available within the mobile app, as before. From the web, you can only create a order you pick up inside the store or choose delivery.

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Why is cloud revenue growth so slow if the digital transformation is accelerating?

So far, 2020 has been mostly a garbage year, but it has also been consistently interesting in terms of the amount of change that it has brought.

Venture capital? Changed. Public markets? Very changed. How to go public? How about a SPAC? E-commerce? Going through a once-in-a-generation step-change. E-commerce venture investment? Down. Fintech investing? More nine-figure rounds than ever. Fintech losses? New records.

The list goes on. But amidst the signals and noise, there has been a notable theme struck by some public companies in their earnings reports, and private companies’ investors in interviews: the digital transformation is accelerating.

This concept is something that TechCrunch has covered at length this year, including this column, where we’ve chatted with folks from Twilio and Qualtrics to collect their in-market observations.

But if companies of all stripes are racing to modernize operations with more software and more cloud, why aren’t we seeing more revenue acceleration amongst public SaaS companies?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

That’s a question Redpoint’s Jamin Ball asked the other day on Twitter, posting a chart showing that most SaaS and cloud companies posted revenue deceleration in Q2 2020 compared to Q1 2020. Less revenue growth during a longer period of supposedly COVID-led digital acceleration? Odd, given what you’ll hear talking to any booster of public or private cloud companies.

Indeed, the narrative in mid-Q2 was that things were looking better than expected amongst startups, at least, and by late Q2 that many were actually catching a COVID tailwind. But if their public brethren are any indication, things could be slower among private companies than anticipated.

So far, 2020 has been mostly a garbage year, but it has also been consistently interesting in terms of the amount of change that it has brought.

This concept is something that TechCrunch has covered at length this year, including this column, where we’ve chatted with folks from Twilio and Qualtrics to collect their in-market observations.

But if companies of all stripes are racing to modernize operations with more software and more cloud, why aren’t we seeing more revenue acceleration amongst public SaaS companies?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

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Google brings emergency alert tools to Search and Maps as fires rage in Northern California

Lightning and a massive heatwave have contributed to raging wildfires in Northern California. By last count, some 11,000 lighting strikes caused hundreds of blazes n a 72 hour period — 26 of which have been classified as major fires, according to officials. The fires have grown to around 124,000 acres, threatening some 25,000 structures in the process.

Google this week has unveiled a tool it’s been working on for some time, aimed at delivering easily accessible information to the impacted areas. Through Search and Maps, the company has started offering up information relevant to the specific region.

Image Credits: Google

At the heart of it is a digital polygon — a red border that encircles a rough approximation of the active blaze. The object is drawn using data gathered from NOAA’s GOES (Geostationary Satellite Server) system. There’s a full Medium post from the team detailing how that information is gathered and processed if you’re interested in reading it. It’s interesting and pretty technical.

All you need to know as a consumer is that the information will be presented to you through Google Search. A floating notification will also pop up when you search for a location at or near the affected region in Maps. In addition to the name and location of the fire, Google will also offer up an SOS alert offering up relevant news articles and resources from local emergency services.

The information follows a pilot program in 2019 that found the company working with first responders like e California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) and Boulder, Colorado’s Office of Emergency Management in order to collect the most relevant information for an emergency scenario.