CONNECTIVITY

Space = Never Boring

Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched its 11th batch of Starlink internet satellites. Tuesday marked the company’s 14th mission of 2020 and its 99th to date. A reusable Falcon 9 rocket made its sixth landing on SpaceX’s “Of Course I Still Love You” sea drone barge.

The launches are so routine they're almost boring...but who are we kidding, space will never be boring. Now that nearly 600 Starlink satellites are in low Earth orbit (LEO), let’s check up on their mission.

Beaming internet from space

Starlink beta testers’ speed tests suggest the service currently could deliver download speeds of 11-60Mbps and upload speeds of 4.5-17.7Mbps. Latency (i.e. lag) ranged from 20-94 milliseconds. Ookla, which analyzes internet speeds, told PCMag that the tests look legit. 

• Work in progress: SpaceX eventually wants to provide 1Gbps internet speeds and operate as many as 12,000 satellites. 

So what? Let’s add context to that mess of numbers. In rural parts of the U.S., median download speeds were 16-20Mbps in the first few months of 2020. It’s too soon to say whether Starlinks’ speeds would be a consistent improvement over incumbents in rural America. As for latency, SpaceX achieved its goal of staying under 100ms. 

About that goal

The Federal Communications Commission has "serious doubts" that SpaceX and its LEO competitors can reliably deliver sub-100ms latencies. The agency’s assessment matters, because it’s subsidizing companies that help mitigate the U.S. digital divide.  

• The FCC’s $20 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund is open to internet providers that extend broadband deployment in underserved areas.  

Zoom out: Elon Musk’s ventures push the envelope with product innovation. They also creatively leverage government funding, tax credits, and subsidies. SpaceX already has prominent public-sector customers, and it may be able to compete for FCC money. Tesla turned a profit over the last year by selling credits to automakers that need to comply with emission regulations. 

+ While we’re here: SpaceX is maybe upgrading a Texas launch site into a space-themed luxury resort?

EV

Cue DJ Khaled’s Favorite Catchphrase

Another one. 

Yesterday, Los Angeles EV startup Canoo said it would go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). I’ve covered Canoo twice before. The TL;DR—it’s designing a subscription-based, “loft on wheels” EV from scratch.

SPACs EVs 

Nikola, which hopes to eventually sell EV pickups and hydrogen fuel-cell trucks, IPO’d via SPAC in June. EV startups Lordstown Motors and Fisker have also announced plans to IPO via SPAC. 

• “The car industry is so capital-intensive. I’ve done this before. I really didn’t see the possibility of raising a billion dollars in private financing that easy,” Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker told me last month. 

Nikola’s current market cap = $16.2 billion. Lordstown, Fisker, and Canoo are targeting equity merger valuations of $1.6 billion, $2.9 billion, and $2.4 billion, respectively.  

Bottom line: Going public ≠ revenue, production-ready vehicles, or a working business model. Though some of these companies may flame out, more investors are willing to bet on new EV players as Tesla soars.

SPONSORED BY GRAZE

Dad’s True Love Is Revealed

Dad used to say that he loved cutting the grass. It was his favorite “dad thing.” But when he learned he could invest in Graze—the fully autonomous robot lawnmower—his favorite activity became turning fresh cut green into more green.

In fact, he won’t stop talking about how investing in Graze was the best thing he’s done since outsmarting the GPS one time. 

But we gotta hand it to the old man, investing in the electric, autonomous lawn mower disrupting the $53B landscaping industry was quite a move. Case in point, Graze eliminates 100% of the fuel costs incurred from traditional lawn mowing. 

Graze is also way better for the planet than the clunky, fuel-guzzling old thing Dad used to “impress” our neighbors with his “pretty crosshatch”. Graze mowers are 100% electric and solar-powered.  

You too can be like Dad and invest in the mower of the future right now. 

 
Learn more here.

GAMING

“We’ll See You at 30,000 Feet”

Fourteen years ago, Steve Ballmer was Microsoft's CEO. Windows Vista was released. The company was in the middle of a decade where it struck out on mobile, search, and social. On the bright side, the Xbox 360 had been on the market for a year—and Microsoft launched the tenth installment of its Flight Simulator game. 

Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled a new Flight Simulator with all the bell and whistles: 

• A new graphics engine that was first inspired by a HoloLens AR project
• Azure cloud services and AI 
• Bing (!) Maps. Microsoft partnered with Asobo Studio to recreate the entire world in 3D.
• Flight Simulator is available in the Xbox Game Pass bundle.
• VR support is coming in the fall. 

In its latest installment of the 38-year-old franchise, Microsoft seamlessly layered new technologies into a rather obscure product line (Flight Simulator requires a powerful PC to play). Maybe Microsoft has additional use cases in mind for the digital twin of Earth that it’s developed...

+ Throwback: Watch this trailer to see how Flight Simulator’s graphics have progressed over the years.

BITS & BYTES

Stat: We already went down the EV SPAC rabbit hole. Let’s widen the aperture: Blank-cheque companies (a fancy British way of saying SPACs) have raised one in five dollars of all IPOs globally this year, per Refinitiv data shared with the FT.

Quote: “Clever strategy to get teens into ERP [enterprise resource planning] systems while they're young.”—Box CEO Aaron Levie, reacting to news that Oracle is interested in acquiring TikTok. Dancing and databases...just belong together? 

Read: Hayden Field, writing for OneZero, breaks down “the troubled legacy of a biased dataset.” Remember that name...

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• The U.K. ditched algorithmically generated exam results, just minutes after Emerging Tech Brew published a story about them on Monday. 
• Epic Games says Apple will revoke its developer tools next Friday. That means Unreal Engine won’t receive updates on iOS, Mac, or iPadOS, and third-party app developers in the Apple ecosystem can’t use the game engine. 
• China is expanding digital currency/electronic payment trials to Beijing, Tianjin, Hong Kong, Macau, and other regions, the WSJ reports. 
• Brad Porter, Amazon VP of robotics and Distinguished Engineer, is leaving the company to join an AI startup, Business Insider reports. 
• DJI, the world’s top consumer dronemaker, has laid off members of its sales and marketing team, Reuters reports. 
• SoftBank has a new public market portfolio. The top ten stakes? Amazon, Alphabet, Adobe, Netflix, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla, Shopify, Paypal, and DocuSign.
• China Telecom ended H1 2020 with 37.8 million 5G subscribers.

TRIVIA

Oracle is in the headlines because it’s in the running to buy TikTok. I know many of you reading this work at Oracle. For employees and non-employees alike, today’s trivia tests your knowledge of the 43-year-old enterprise software company. 

Take the quiz here.

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For AI + healthcare: Facebook researchers wrote about applying AI to MRI scans. 

For more space stories: The Pentagon established a taskforce to study UFOs. Canadian startup Rocket Lab is planning to launch a private Venus mission in 2023.  

ICYMI

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions: 

• A standardized mess in the U.K.
• Epic Games sues Apple and Google
• SoftBank is back