GAMING

Battle Royale

Epic Games has no love lost with tech giants. Yesterday, the gamemaker threw down the gauntlet. 

What happened: Epic shipped an update to its iOS and Android Fortnite apps, instituting a direct payment system that bypassed the mobile marketplaces’ 30% cut of in-app sales. Using direct payments, players could buy Fortnite’s in-game currency discounted up to 20 percent. 

The update violated both marketplaces’ terms of service, so Apple and Google booted Fortnite from their stores.

A carefully choreographed coup

This was clearly a premeditated PR campaign, with yesterday’s succession of Epic salvos popping off like clockwork. Following its App Store expulsion, Epic filed a 65-page lawsuit against Apple, suing to classify the App Store as a monopoly and to allow “fair competition” in mobile app marketplaces. It filed a similar lawsuit against Google. 

• One of Epic's attorneys, Christine Varney, headed the antitrust division of Obama’s Justice Department. 
• Epic has a war chest: It raised $1.8 billion at a $17.3 billion valuation earlier this month. 

Full circle: In its in-game movie theater, Epic screened Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite, a jab at Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial: “Epic Games has defied the App Store Monopoly. In retaliation, Apple is blocking Fortnite from a billion devices.”

What comes next? 

Epic Games is rallying its young, engaged fanbase against Apple. Tinder parent Match Group and Spotify, which have their own App Store beefs, applauded Epic’s actions against Apple.  

Overnight, the App Store debacle was elevated from antitrust wonks and developer circles to the public square. Apple now has ongoing feuds with Epic, Google, and Microsoft (because it won’t allow cloud gaming services on the App Store). 

The Android situation is somewhat more fluid, because you can sideload apps, i.e. download Fortnite directly from Epic or other mobile marketplaces. But it’s still a difficult process with security risks. Play Store is key for app discoverability. And Google doesn’t provide the same levels of support for sideloaded apps. 

Possible futures: Epic backs down. iOS teens jailbreak their iPhones and Android users get really good at sideloading. Or Fortnite players just triple down on consoles, where the vast majority of gameplay already happens.

AUTO

Get In, We’re Going Shopping

Goldman Sachs and Barclays are bidding to acquire GM’s credit card business currently operated by Capital One, the WSJ reports. Goldman is the frontrunner. 

What’s the rationale? GM’s suitors are pitching the concept of cars as e-commerce portals, sources told the WSJ...so, basically, bundling credit cards, cars, and e-commerce. GM was the first major automaker to let drivers buy gas, book travel, and get their coffee fix from the touchscreen. 

As connected car tech and digital payments gain greater penetration in the U.S., theoretically, the car-as-payment-portal idea could work. It sounds a bit weird to me, but hey, I don’t own a car so what do I know.

• The bull case: This idea seems especially well-suited for America, land of the drive-thru (which generates 70% of sales for some fast food chains). Personally owned cars are having a renaissance during the pandemic, while curbside pickup gets more commonplace. 

Big picture: From the Apple ecosystem to GM connected cars, Goldman is looking for new digital channels to grow its nascent consumer banking business.

SPONSORED BY VOICE

The Future Of Social Media Is Human

You may have heard through the grapevine about a new social media platform called Voice. They’re doing things the right way…

But what does that mean? 

It means there are zero bots, zero fake accounts, and zero opaque algorithms on their platform. Add all those zeros together and you get social media as it should be.

That’s not even the most exciting part. 

So far, Voice has been playing it nice and exclusive, with a small group of users on the platform. That changes today. For the first time ever, users on the platform can now extend an invite to their friends. 

Thanks to their new Human Sign-up technology, Voice can authenticate every new user’s identity and verify that each community member is a bona fide homosapien.

While it still takes an invite from a current Voice user to get onto Voice, Emerging Tech readers can get early access to Voice’s human-first community, as well as the chance to invite friends.

Sign up for early access today.

VC

Fundraising During COVID-19, Ed. 10

Facial recognition: SenseTime raised $1.5 billion ahead of a public listing on Shanghai’s STAR market, Reuters reports. Last year, the White House placed the Chinese AI startup on its Entity List. 

Quantum: Rigetti Computing, a Berkeley, CA-based quantum startup, recently raised a $79 million Series C. 

Chips: Syntiant, a California startup that makes chips for AI voice applications, announced a $35 million Series C last week. AI hardware is getting more and more specialized. 

Virtual reality: Varjo announced a $54 million Series C this week. The Finnish startup wants to build VR and extended reality technologies with human-eye-level resolution. Its recent devices are uber-expensive ($5,900–$7,000 a pop) and designed for high-fidelity applications like flight simulation.

Something in the water: Vicarious Surgical, a Cambridge, MA-based surgical robotics platform developer, raised $13.2 million this week. They weren’t the only Massachusetts robotics startup getting in on the action: Root AI, which makes agricultural harvesting bots, raised $7.2 million in seed funding (ha, harvesting and seeds). 

• The crop of robot startups in Greater Boston is a positive spillover from MIT and another school in Cambridge. 

BITS & BYTES

Stat: Southeast Asia will have 310 million digital consumers by the end of 2020, per Facebook and Bain. 

Quote: “If you were to try to boil down the three big trends happening in NBU today, I would say it's voice, vernacular—which is how people who don't usually speak English are coming online in massive quantities—and then video."—Josh Woodward, Google’s Next Billion Users (NBU) director of product management, tells Business Insider about his unit’s priorities.

Read: The U.S. Justice Department’s press release about seizing hundreds of cryptocurrency accounts from Al Qaeda.

SPONSORED BY CURIOSITY STREAM

This is the best nerd alert you’ll get all year. CuriosityStream lets you stream thousands of documentaries and non-fiction shows covering everything from technology and science to nature, history, travel, food—you name it. They even have exclusive programming with legendary nerds Chris Hadfield, Stephen Hawking, David Attenborough, and more. Get in so you can nerd out—use code EmergingBrew for just $14.99 for the whole year.

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• Twitter is launching an updated API with features for conversation threading, poll results, pinned tweets, spam filtering, and “a more powerful stream filtering and search query language.”
• ByteDance moderation headaches: BaBe (?), the company’s Indonesion news aggregator app, censored content critical of the Chinese government from 2018–2020, Reuters reports. 
• Reliance Industries is in talks with ByteDance about investing in TikTok, which would presumably revive the app in India. TikTok’s U.S. operation has 32 days to find a buyer. Clock’s ticking.
• Michigan and an Alphabet-backed smart city startup will build a 40-mile lane between Detroit and Ann Arbor reserved for connected, autonomous vehicles.

GOING PHISHING

We’re doing things differently today. Three of the following tweets came from Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, and one I made up. Can you spot the odd one out?

1. “It pains me to complain about Apple in this way. Apple is one of the greatest companies that has ever existed, perhaps the greatest.” (link)
2. “Apple is to Epic as extortionist landlords are to renters.” (link)
3. “Apple and Google are uniquely egregious in their practice on what are unquestionably general purpose computing devices used by nearly all people and businesses in America.” (link)
4. “In Apple’s view, only the Apple metaverse would be allowed.” (link)

TECH THINGAMABOBS

For AI craziness: Brain-NET, a deep learning model, can accurately predict surgeons’ motor skills and certification scores based on their neuroimaging data. 

For a self-driving directory: A database of autonomous vehicle companies that includes the markets, use cases, and technologies each player is focused on.

ICYMI

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

• SoftBank is back
• Tech trivia—cloud gaming edition
• Washington ramps up tech decoupling with “Clean Network”

GOING PHISHING ANSWER

Sweeney didn’t tweet “Apple is to Epic Games as extortionist landlords are to renters.”