AV

The Argonauts Go Global

Besides churning out vehicles, what does a Dearborn, MI carmaker have in common with a Wolfsburg, Germany wagenmaker?

As it turns out: A three-comma investment in a Pittsburgh-based self-driving startup. Yesterday, Volkswagen finalized its $2.6 billion investment in Argo AI, a deal first announced last July. Argo came out of stealth in 2017 with $1 billion in backing from Ford. 

Broken down, the VW deal includes $1 billion in cash and a $1.6 billion valuation from the contribution of VW’s Autonomous Intelligent Driving (AID) unit. 

With the deal closed…

“Our primary focus is onboarding the Munich team and creating a global organization,” Argo CEO Bryan Salesky told the Brew. With the addition of AID, Argo now has more than 1,000 employees and a new European HQ in Munich. 

Back to the U.S.: Argo has engineering centers in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Palo Alto, and Cranbury, NJ. Argo has additional offices in three cities—Austin, Miami, and Washington, D.C.—where it's partnered with Ford to launch an autonomous ride-hailing and delivery service. Ford recently pushed back the launch to 2022, citing the pandemic.  

• Ford plans to spend $4 billion on its self-driving division through 2023 (including the Argo investment). 

Two-way street

While Ford and VW are Argo's two financial backers, they're also customers for the long haul. Argo likes to emphasize self-driving isn't a winner-take-all race or solely a tech problem. “We understand that we cannot just deliver technology at the end of the day to be successful. It has to be trusted and accepted by the communities where we operate,” Salesky said. 

The company hopes to begin testing on European roads toward the end of 2020. One example of the European learning curve = sharing the road with more cyclists. 

Zoom out: Argo has raised $3.6 billion to date. And this year alone, Alphabet's self-driving arm Waymo has raised around $3 billion in outside investment. Both companies are well-capitalized to make autonomous vehicles commercially viable, while many competitors are not.

EVENTS

Canceled

As protests continue across the U.S., companies have postponed most of the events I included in "What's Brewing This Week" in Monday's newsletter.

Cisco postponed Live, its major customer event scheduled to begin yesterday. "We want to give you space this week to go do what you need to do within your own organizations and communities," CEO Chuck Robbins said on YouTube. 

On Monday, Sony said it will postpone Thursday’s big PlayStation 5 event. The company was planning on previewing titles for its forthcoming PS5, set to launch this holiday season. Elsewhere in the gaming world, Electronic Arts delayed an event related to Madden NFL 21, and Activision paused updates to Call of Duty seasons.

Google pushed back its Android 11 beta launch event. "We are excited to tell you more about Android 11, but now is not the time to celebrate," Google said. 

Zoom out: Postponing events is just one way tech companies have responded to the conversations about racism sweeping the country. 

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Be Intelligent About Smart TV

Whether it's the content we're consuming or the tech we're watching it on, TV has fascinated humans since the dawn of the tube.

Today, Integral Ad Science (IAS) is at the forefront of understanding consumer behavior and how it relates to the flat-screen friend we all know and love: Connected TV (CTV).

According to the experts at IAS, 90% of consumers report that they now have access to a CTV device. And as CTV viewership increases, so does competition for consumer attention (ahem, just look at the number of streaming services launched this year alone).

In their latest study, “The State of CTV,” IAS aims to capture the promise—and the pitfalls—of the CTV space, as well as what’s driving advertisers’ interest, innovations, and success across their CTV campaigns. 

Read more about their findings

5G

Another Snub for Huawei

Yesterday, two of Canada's three largest telecoms said they would source 5G equipment from European suppliers instead of China’s Huawei. 

• Bell Canada picked Ericsson as its second supplier of 5G network equipment. In February, the telecom said it would buy parts from Nokia. 
• Telus also said it was going with Ericsson and Nokia. The decision is notable because Telus has a significant amount of Huawei gear in its 4G network. 

Rogers Communications, the other top Canadian carrier, is a longtime customer of Ericsson.

Behind the scenes, the U.S. has heavily pressured its "Five Eyes" intelligence-sharing partners—the U.K., Canada, New Zealand, and Australia—to rip up and replace Huawei gear from their wireless networks. 

Probably related: The relationship between Canada and Huawei has sharply deteriorated since December 2018, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou at the request of the U.S. Justice Department. 

+ For more on 5G, check out our guide.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Amazon is the fourth largest U.S. delivery service, per Bank of America Global Research. The e-commerce company has invested $60 billion in logistics since 2014, and there's lots more to come.

Quote: Saturday "was the saddest day in the history of Twitter."—Hedonometer, which tracks levels of happiness (or lack thereof) on social media. 

Read: An MIT team looked under the hood of "state of the art" neural nets, and many of the so-called advances in efficiency fell apart under scrutiny.

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WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Italy will soon begin piloting Immuni, the country's contact tracing app based on Google/Apple tech, in the Liguria, Abruzzo, Marche, and Puglia regions. 
• India announced $6.6 billion in financial incentives to lure smartphone manufacturers to the country. 
• Google rolled out new features to the Pixel phone. 
• Stitch Fix, an AI-focused stylist, plans to lay off 1,400 California-based employees and hire in cities with lower costs of living. 
• At least 45 companies are selling real-time facial recognition technology in the U.S., according to a OneZero tally. 
• AT&T will exempt HBO Max from mobile data caps, but not streaming services from other companies. 
• A Tesla Model 3 drove straight into an overturned truck on a Taiwan highway. Autopilot was reportedly engaged. 

TRIVIA

Given all the events happening on Earth, the newsletter hasn't dedicated much real estate recently to space. Piggybacking on Saturday's SpaceX and NASA launch, let's test your knowledge. 

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TECH THINGAMABOBS

For an interesting product that few will buy: The Sero, Samsung's $2,000 rotating TV, went on sale in the U.S. and U.K. 

For Bay Area residents: Rent prices in Silicon Valley are dropping steeply. 

For black makers: Product Hunt posted a Twitter thread celebrating apps and tools built by black designers and engineers.