Early bird extension gives you more time to save on passes to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising

Startup life, especially in the early innings, is nothing short of hectic. Who wouldn’t love a clone or two to help get everything done? Well, we can’t clone you, but we can give you more time to sign up and save on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9.

We’re extending the early bird deadline to Friday, June 4 at 11:59 pm (PT). Sweet! That should help calm the cray-cray and save you $100 on admission to our virtual two-day bootcamp experience. Of course, you don’t need to wait. Buy your pass now while it’s top-of-mind and feel the joy of having one less task on your to-do list.

Not familiar with TC Early Stage? It’s specifically designed to help new startup founders learn essential entrepreneurial skills to build a successful startup. We tap the very best experts in the startup ecosystem, and they deliver actionable insights you can put in place now, when you need them most.

At TC Early Stage 2021, top-tier investors, veteran founders and respected subject-matter experts will lead highly interactive sessions on topics ranging from fundraising and marketplace positioning to growth marketing and content development. Get answers to your burning questions.

Here’s just one example. Rebecca Reeve Henderson, founder and CEO of Rsquared Communication, will hold forth on how to create an effective earned media strategy for your startup. Talk about an essential skill. Want more examples?

• Mike Duboe, general partner at Greylock will share the latest growth trends in consumer and B2B technology.
• Sarah Kunst, founding partner at Cleo Capital, will focus on best practices and offer solid advice on how to get ready to fundraise.

We’re announcing more speakers every week, and we’ll share the event agenda soon, so stay tuned.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place on July 8-9, and now you have an extra month to save $100. Calm the cray-cray and take one important, business-building task of your to-do list. Buy your early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2021 before June 4. We can’t wait to see you there!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Ahead of the Epic vs. Apple trial, which starts on Monday, a look at what is at stake, how the trial will work, key witnesses who will testify, and more (David Pierce/Protocol)

David Pierce / Protocol:
Ahead of the Epic vs. Apple trial, which starts on Monday, a look at what is at stake, how the trial will work, key witnesses who will testify, and more  —  On Monday, Apple and Epic Games will meet in court to decide one of the most consequential antitrust arguments in the history of the tech industry.

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CA appellate court rules Amazon is responsible for the safety of third-party products it sells, rejecting Amazon's claim of merely connecting buyers and sellers (David Lazarus/Los Angeles Times)

David Lazarus / Los Angeles Times:
CA appellate court rules Amazon is responsible for the safety of third-party products it sells, rejecting Amazon's claim of merely connecting buyers and sellers  —  Should Amazon, which accounts for roughly half of all online sales, be legally and financially responsible for the safety …

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China says 33 apps, including apps made by Baidu and Tencent, violate rules in gathering personal information, which must be rectified within 10 working days (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg:
China says 33 apps, including apps made by Baidu and Tencent, violate rules in gathering personal information, which must be rectified within 10 working days  —  - Violators include software provided by Baidu and Tencent  —  China said thirty-three applications, including map navigation software provided …

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IDC: global tablet shipments grew 55.2% YoY, most since 2013, to reach 39.9M units in Q1; Apple led with 12.7M shipments, up 64.3% YoY; Samsung 8M, up 60.8% YoY (Mike Peterson/AppleInsider)

Mike Peterson / AppleInsider:
IDC: global tablet shipments grew 55.2% YoY, most since 2013, to reach 39.9M units in Q1; Apple led with 12.7M shipments, up 64.3% YoY; Samsung 8M, up 60.8% YoY  —  Apple's iPad retained the dominant share of the tablet industry in the first quarter of 2021 as the product segment grew more than 50% year-over-year.

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UK security firm says around 345K sensitive legal documents from the Philippines government related to ongoing cases were exposed online for at least two months (Vittoria Elliott/Rest of World)

Vittoria Elliott / Rest of World:
UK security firm says around 345K sensitive legal documents from the Philippines government related to ongoing cases were exposed online for at least two months  —  The security firm that discovered the files says the leak could disrupt ongoing judicial proceedings.

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Cloud infrastructure market keeps rolling in Q1 with almost $40B in revenue

Conventional wisdom over the last year has suggested that the pandemic has driven companies to the cloud much faster than they ever would have gone without that forcing event with some suggesting it has compressed years of transformation into months. This quarter’s cloud infrastructure revenue numbers appear to be proving that thesis correct.

With The Big Three — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reporting this week, the market generated almost $40 billion in revenue, according to Synergy Research data. That’s up $2 billion from last quarter and up 37% over the same period last year. Canalys’s numbers were slightly higher at $42 billion.

As you might expect if you follow this market, AWS led the way with $13.5 billion for the quarter up 32% year over year. That’s a run rate of $54 billion. While that is an eye-popping number, what’s really remarkable is the yearly revenue growth, especially for a company the size and maturity of Amazon. The law of large numbers would suggest this isn’t sustainable, but the pie keeps growing and Amazon continues to take a substantial chunk.

Overall AWS held steady with 32% market share. While the revenue numbers keep going up, Amazon’s market share has remained firm for years at around this number. It’s the other companies down market that are gaining share over time, most notably Microsoft which is now at around 20% share good for about $7.8 billion this quarter.

Google continues to show signs of promise under Thomas Kurian, hitting $3.5 billion good for 9% as it makes a steady march towards double digits. Even IBM had a positive quarter, led by Red Hat and cloud revenue good for 5% or about $2 billion overall.

Image Credits: Synergy Research

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy says that even though AWS and Microsoft have firm control of the market, that doesn’t mean there isn’t money to be made by the companies playing behind them.

“These two don’t have to spend too much time looking in their rearview mirrors and worrying about the competition. However, that is not to say that there aren’t some excellent opportunities for other players. Taking Amazon and Microsoft out of the picture, the remaining market is generating over $18 billion in quarterly revenues and growing at over 30% per year. Cloud providers that focus on specific regions, services or user groups can target several years of strong growth,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

Canalys, another firm that watches the same market as Synergy had similar findings with slight variations, certainly close enough to confirm one another’s findings. They have AWS with 32%, Microsoft 19%, and Google with 7%.

Image Credits: Canalys

Canalys analyst Blake Murray says that there is still plenty of room for growth, and we will likely continue to see big numbers in this market for several years. “Though 2020 saw large-scale cloud infrastructure spending, most enterprise workloads have not yet transitioned to the cloud. Migration and cloud spend will continue as customer confidence rises during 2021. Large projects that were postponed last year will resurface, while new use cases will expand the addressable market,” he said.

The numbers we see are hardly a surprise anymore, and as companies push more workloads into the cloud, the numbers will continue to impress. The only question now is if Microsoft can continue to close the market share gap with Amazon.

The cloud infrastructure market hit $129B in 2020

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Computer vision inches towards ‘common sense’ with Facebook’s latest research

Machine learning is capable of doing all sorts of things as long as you have the data to teach it how. That’s not always easy, and researchers are always looking for a way to add a bit of “common sense” to AI so you don’t have to show it 500 pictures of a cat before it gets it. Facebook’s newest research takes a big step towards reducing the data bottleneck.

The company’s formidable AI research division has been working on how to advance and scale things like advanced computer vision algorithms for years now, and has made steady progress, generally shared with the rest of the research community. One interesting development Facebook has pursued in particular is what’s called “semi-supervised learning.”

Generally when you think of training an AI, you think of something like the aforementioned 500 pictures of cats — images that have been selected and labeled (which can mean outlining the cat, putting a box around the cat, or just saying there’s a cat in there somewhere) so that the machine learning system can put together an algorithm to automate the process of cat recognition. Naturally if you want to do dogs or horses, you need 500 dog pictures, 500 horse pictures, etc — it scales linearly, which is a word you never want to see in tech.

Semi-supervised learning, related to “unsupervised” learning, involves figuring out important parts of a dataset without any labeled data at all. It doesn’t just go wild, there’s still structure; for instance, imagine you give the system a thousand sentences to study, then showed it ten more that have several of the words missing. The system could probably do a decent job filling in the blanks just based on what it’s seen in the previous thousand. But that’s not so easy to do with images and video — they aren’t as straightforward or predictable.

But Facebook researchers have shown that while it may not be easy, it’s possible and in fact very effective. The DINO system (which stands rather unconvincingly for “DIstillation of knowledge with NO labels”) is capable of learning to find objects of interest in videos of people, animals, and objects quite well without any labeled data whatsoever.

Image Credits: Facebook

It does this by considering the video not as a sequence of images to be analyzed one by one in order, but as an complex, interrelated set,like the difference between “a series of words” and “a sentence.” By attending to the middle and the end of the video as well as the beginning, the agent can get a sense of things like “an object with this general shape goes from left to right.” That information feeds into other knowledge, like when an object on the right overlaps with the first one, the system knows they’re not the same thing, just touching in those frames. And that knowledge in turn can be applied to other situations. In other words, it develops a basic sense of visual meaning, and does so with remarkably little training on new objects.

This results in a computer vision system that’s not only effective — it performs well compared with traditionally trained systems — but more relatable and explainable. For instance, while an AI that has been trained with 500 dog pictures and 500 cat pictures will recognize both, it won’t really have any idea that they’re similar in any way. But DINO — although it couldn’t be specific — gets that they’re similar visually to one another, more so anyway than they are to cars, and that metadata and context is visible in its memory. Dogs and cats are “closer” in its sort of digital cognitive space than dogs and mountains. You can see those concepts as little blobs here — see how those of a type stick together:

Image Credits: Facebook

This has its own benefits, of a technical sort we won’t get into here. If you’re curious, there’s more detail in the papers linked in Facebook’s blog post.

There’s also an adjacent research project, a training method called PAWS, which further reduces the need for labeled data. PAWS combines some of the ideas of semi-supervised learning with the more traditional supervised method, essentially giving the training a boost by letting it learn from both the labeled and unlabeled data.

Facebook of course needs good and fast image analysis for its many user-facing (and secret) image-related products, but these general advances to the computer vision world will no doubt be welcomed by the developer community for other purposes.

WTF is computer vision?

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The second shot is kicking in

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

First and foremost, Equity was nominated for a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate it. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each other laugh. (Note: we are in last place, which is, well, something.)

Regardless, the Equity team got together once again this week to not only go over the news of the week, but also to do a little soul searching. You see, some news broke yesterday, so we figured that we had to talk about it in our usual style. So, here’s the rundown:

• Do you want to buy TechCrunch? Apparently you can? Albeit probably along with a few billion dollars worth of other assets — whatever is left of Yahoo and AOL — you can now own an NFT. A non-fungible TechCrunch. What is ahead for us? We don’t know. So if you do know, tell us. Until then we’ll just yo-yo gently between panic and optimism, as per usual.
• We also dug into the latest All Raise venture capital data, and the results were abysmal. 
• Next up was the news that fintech startups are setting records in 2021, raising more capital than ever before. That brought us to the latest from Brex.
• And then there was a suspicious trend when three fintech companies focused on teen banking raised in one exhale. We talk Step, Greenlight, and Current.
• Natasha talked about her last Startups Weekly post, in which she unpacked The MasterClass effect’s impact on edtech.
• And to close, we discussed the latest cool-kid venture capital funds. Sure memes are cool, but did you know that they can help you raise a $10 million fund? They can!

We are back Monday morning with our weekly kick-off show. Have a great weekend!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

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Geothermal technology has enormous potential to power the planet and Fervo wants to tap it

Tapping the geothermal energy stored beneath the Earth’s surface as a way to generate renewable power is one of the new visions for the future that’s captured the attention of environmentalists and oil and gas engineers alike.

That’s because it’s not only a way to generate power that doesn’t rely on greenhouse gas emitting hydrocarbons, but because it uses the same skillsets and expertise that the oil and gas industry has been honing and refining for years.

At least that’s what drew former the former completion engineer (it’s not what it sounds like) Tim Latimer to the industry and to launch Fervo Energy, the Houston-based geothermal tech developer that’s picked up funding from none other than Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures (that fund… is so busy) and former eBay executive, Jeff Skoll’s Capricorn Investment Group.

With the new $28 million cash in hand Fervo’s planning on ramping up its projects which Latimer said would “bring on hundreds of megawatts of power in the next few years.”

Latimer got his first exposure to the environmental impact of power generation as a kid growing up in a small town outside of Waco, Texas near the Sandy Creek coal power plant, one of the last coal-powered plants to be built in the U.S.

Like many Texas kids, Latimer came from an oil family and got his first jobs in the oil and gas industry before realizing that the world was going to be switching to renewables and the oil industry — along with the friends and family he knew — could be left high and dry.

It’s one reason why he started working on Fervo, the entrepreneur said.

“What’s most important, from my perspective, since I started my career in the oil and gas industry is providing folks that are part of the energy transition on the fossil fuel side to work in the clean energy future,” Latimer said. “I’ve been able to go in and hire contractors and support folks that have been out of work or challenged because of the oil price crash… And I put them to work on our rigs.”

Fervo Energy chief executive, Tim Latimer, pictured in a hardhat at one fo the company’s development sites. Image Credit: Fervo Energy

When the Biden administration talks about finding jobs for employees in the hydrocarbon industry as part of the energy transition, this is exactly what they’re talking about.

And geothermal power is no longer as constrained by geography, so there’s a lot of abundant resources to tap and the potential for high paying jobs in areas that are already dependent on geological services work, Latimer said (late last year, Vox published a good overview of the history and opportunity presented by the technology).

“A large percentage of the world’s population actually lives next to good geothermal resources,” Latimer said. “25 countries today that have geothermal installed and producing and another 25 where geothermal is going to grow.” 

Geothermal power production actually has a long history in the Western U.S. and in parts of Africa where naturally occurring geysers and steam jets pouring from the earth have been obvious indicators of good geothermal resources, Latimer said.

“Fervo’s technology unlocks a new class of geothermal resource that is ready for large-scale deployment. Fervo’s geothermal systems use novel techniques, including horizontal drilling, distributed fiber optic sensing, and advanced computational modelling, to deliver more repeatable and cost effective geothermal electricity,” Latimer wrote in an email. “Fervo’s technology combines with the latest advancements in Organic Rankine Cycle generation systems to deliver flexible, 24/7 carbon-free electricity.”

Initially developed with a grant from the TomKat Center at Stanford University and a fellowship funded by Activate.org at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s Cyclotron Road division, Fervo has gone on to score funding from the DOE’s Geothermal Technology Office and ARPA-E to continue work with partners like Schlumberger, Rice University and the Berkeley Lab.

The combination of new and old technology is opening vast geographies to the company to potentially develop new projects.

Other companies are also looking to tap geothermal power to drive a renewable power generation development business. Those are startups like Eavor, which has the backing of energy majors like bp Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Temasek, BDC Capital, Eversource and Vickers Venture Partners; and other players including GreenFire Energy, and Sage Geosystems.

Demand for geothermal projects is skyrocketing, opening up big markets for startups that can nail the cost issue for geothermal development. As Latimer noted, from 2016 to 2019 there was only one major geothermal contract, but in 2020 there were ten new major power purchase agreements signed by the industry. 

For all of these projects, cost remains a factor. Contracts that are being signed for geothermal that are in the $65 to $75 per megawatt range, according to Latimer. By comparison, solar plants are now coming in somewhere between $35 and $55 per megawatt, as The Verge reported last year. 

But Latimer said the stability and predictability of geothermal power made the cost differential palatable for utilities and businesses that need the assurance of uninterruptible power supplies. As a current Houston resident, the issue is something that Latimer has an intimate experience with from this year’s winter freeze, which left him without power for five days.

Indeed, geothermal’s ability to provide always-on clean power makes it an incredibly attractive option. In a recent Department of Energy study, geothermal could meet as much as 16% of the U.S. electricity demand, and other estimates put geothermal’s contribution at nearly 20% of a fully decarbonized grid.

“We’ve long been believers in geothermal energy but have waited until we’ve seen the right technology and team to drive innovation in the sector,” said Ion Yadigaroglu of Capricorn Investment Group, in a statement.  “Fervo’s technology capabilities and the partnerships they’ve created with leading research organizations make them the clear leader in the new wave of geothermal.”

Fervo Energy drilling site. Image Credit: Fervo Energy

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