Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that Apple is considering removing the included earbuds from the iPhone 12 retail package back in May. Analysts at Barclays said the same a few days ago and hinted that even the power brick may be dropped, Kuo agrees in his latest research note. Apple will introduce a 20W charger with USB Power Delivery, says Kuo, which will be sold separately. He didn't forecast a price but the current 18W charger goes for $30. The company will stop production of the current 5W and 18W models. Apple will likely position this as an eco-friendly move that would result in...
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Samsung has reportedly fixed the focusing problems that ailed the Galaxy S20 Ultra's 108MP main camera. Many users and reviewers found the 108MP camera's focus to be slower than the 12MP main camera on the Galaxy S20/S20+ (especially in lower light) and to occasionally miss altogether. The issues and reduced performance of the AF could be due to the 108MP sensor's lack of dual-pixel phase detect autofocus. Whether Samsung has added dual-pixel PDAF or has fixed the issue another way, typically reliable leakster IceUniverse reports the 108MP camera will focus just fine on the Galaxy Note20...
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Xiaomi has announced on its official Weibo TV account that it will unveil a new Master TV series in China on July 2. The announcement is accompanied by a poster, which teases a TV with an OLED panel of 120Hz refresh rate and Dolby Atmos audio. Xiaomi is keeping the size and resolution secret for now and we don't know how many products we're in for. The company does promise that no expense has been spared in making a product that can challenge the "high-end" brands in the TV business, here's looking at you Samsung, LG, Sony. Source | Via
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Scotts Miracle-Gro, the lawn care and fertilizer giant that has opened up a secondary business as a pioneer in cannabis and hemp cultivation, is launching a $50 million corporate venture capital fund called1868 Ventures.
Is it strange that a fertilizer company would commit to a $50 million fund to invest in two to three startup companies per year over the next few years? It’s 2020, folks, nothing makes sense.
Except this might?
New discoveries around crop cultivation, the development of organic pesticides and herbicides, and the wave of new applications for hemp and cannabinoids in manufacturing, healthcare, and legal recreational use are creating new opportunities for the business and Scotts Miracle-Gro is looking to capitalize on them.
At least, that’s the word from the company’s chief financial officer, Randy Coleman.
“The company is doing extremely well in both of our big businesses,” said Coleman. “A lot of that ties back to the budding cannabis industry.”
For those who don’t know, while Scotts Miracle-Gro is humongous in the hedgerow business, it also has a subsidiary called Hawthorne Gardening Company which it created in 2014 to service the specific needs of cannabis growers.
“We identified some areas that we knew we needed to supercharge a bit,” said Coleman. And after a discussion with members of its board of directors, the company decided to turn to Touchdown Ventures to help power its new investment arm.
Investment areas the company intends to seed with its follow-on financing include technology to help with controlled agriculture environments and plant genetics.
“A lot of that work is being done in our Hawthorne business up in Canada,” said Coleman. “Down the road as laws change in the US we might do more there… Right now the R&D we’re doing around hemp in Oregon.”
The company will also look at ways to boost its e-commerce and direct to consumer channels as more Americans use online commerce instead of shopping at physical retail locations. Coleman said Scotts Miracle-Gro sales were up 200% on digital channels including Amazon.
Finally, natural products and sustainable packaging also are interesting to the company, said Coleman.
“I really like the exposure to more ideas and spreading our risk around and opportunity around,” he said.
1868 Ventures will be stage-agnostic and investments will range between $250,000 and $2.5 million, looking at companies primarily in North America.
To help with the firm’s venture initiatives, Scotts turned to Touchdown Ventures, a firm specializing in corporate venture capital. Touchdown will work closely with senior executives at Scotts Miracle-Gro to operate the fund, the company said.
“We are enthusiastic about the capital investment, industry expertise, and customer validation that Scotts Miracle-Gro can bring to innovators in lawn and garden care and controlled environment agriculture,” noted David Horowitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Touchdown Ventures, in a statement. “We believe Scotts Miracle-Gro will be the partner of choice for entrepreneurs seeking to create a competitive advantage for their startups in these categories.”
Amazon said on Monday it has eliminated all single-use plastic in its packaging across its fulfillment centers in India, delivering on a pledge it made last year to achieve this goal by June.
The American e-commerce group said it had replaced packaging materials such as bubble wraps with paper cushions and was also using “100% plastic-free biodegradable” paper tapes. All of Amazon’s 50-plus fulfilment centers in India were complying with the new guidelines, the company said.
Flipkart, which had made a similar pledge last year, said last month that its reliance on single-use plastic across its supply chain had dropped by 50%. Last year, the Walmart-owned marketplace said it intended to move entirely to recycled plastic consumption in its supply chain by March 2021.
Amazon’s announcement Monday follows Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s directive last year, when he urged Indians to put an end to usage of single-use plastic by 2022.
India has been grappling with a major plastic waste problem for several years. Asia’s third-largest economy is struggling with disposing of the 9.4 million tons of plastic waste it generates each year.
Dozens of nations across the world have in recent years moved to address this challenge by imposing curbs and levies on use of single-use plastic.
Amazon said today that it still uses some plastic in packaging material, but those are 100% recyclable through available collection, segregation and recycling channels. The company said it is continuing to educate sellers who fulfil customer orders to join in this nationwide change in packaging.
“Our aim is to minimize environmental impact while elevating customer experience. While navigating through unprecedented challenges with the lockdown and pandemic in the last few months, we have continued to take progressive steps towards ensuring that we meet our commitment,” said Prakash Kumar Dutta, Director of Customer Fulfilment & Supply Chain at Amazon India, in a statement.
Earlier this month, Amazon expanded Packaging-Free Shipping (PFS), an India-first initiative that sees fulfilment centers either deliver products that are completely packaging-free or have significantly reduced packaging, to over 100 cities in India. The company said more than 40% of its orders in India today are already using PFS.
Additionally, Amazon said it is also collecting and recycling plastic waste equivalent to its usage at a national level from September 2019, and has identified collection agencies to help collect equivalent 100% plastic waste generated from usage across the Amazon fulfilment network.
Earlier this month, Amazon announced it was launching a $2 billion internal venture-capital fund focused on technology investments to reduce the impact of climate change. The new fund, called The Climate Pledge Fund, will invest in firms across a number of industries, including transportation, energy generation, and manufacturing. Through the program, the companies aim to reach a goal of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2040.
Like it or loathe it, video has proven to be the most engaging of all mediums across the web, and today a company out of Israel called Artlist — which provides royalty-free libraries of music, sound effects and even video itself to enhance video content — is announcing a significant growth round of $48 million, both to continue its expansion, and to build better technology to help navigate users to the perfect clip.
The funding is being led by KKR, with participation also from Elephant Partners, a VC out of Boston that has also backed Allbirds, Scopely and Keelvar among others. This is the first funding that Artlist has ever announced, although Elephant had backed it with a previously undisclosed amount previously. Ira Belsky, Artlist’s co-CEO who co-founded the company with Itzik Elbaz, and Eyal Raz and started as a filmmaker himself, said the company has mostly been bootstrapped since being founded in 2016. It’s not disclosing the total amount raised to date, nor its valuation except to say that it’s on the rise.
“We have been 100% cash flow positive since the day we started,” he said. “We just want to accelerate growth because there is an opportunity to cater to a wider audience.”
The market gap that Artlist is tackling is a byproduct of how the internet is used and evolving. According to a recent report from Sandvine, video accounts for just under 58% of online traffic globally, with video, social and gaming (with the latter two also being very video-heavy) together accounting for some 80% of traffic. That speaks to a huge amount of content being made available not just from premium media provides like Netflix or Disney, but popular a vast array of user-generated content on channels like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter.
While some of these may be building their own sound and video content, a large part of those, to speed up production and focus on whatever aspect of their work that they can better individualise and control, many creators turn to stock audio and video footage in their work.
Indeed, there are a number of others in this same space, including the likes of Getty, Epidemic Sound, Shutterstock, Artgrid, the platforms themselves and many others, but Belsky said that in his time as a filmmaker, he found that many of these were not quite what he was looking for himself in terms of connecting him with just the right music that he was looking for, which was part of the impetus behind building Artlist.
What’s interesting is that Covid-19 has had a double impact on that market. Not only has there been a huge boost in online video usage as more people are spending time at home and staying away from public places, but in terms of creators, Belsky notes that many of them have found it harder either to shoot certain kinds of footage, or collaborate with people create music and other sound effects, all of which has led to a surge of usage for platforms like Artlist.
Artlist’s royalty-free model means that people pay subscription fees to Artlist to use its platform — prices range between $149 and $599 per year, depending on usage and whether you are taking the music, video, sound effects or combined plans — but then nothing more for individual clips. On the other side of the marketplace, the company does not disclose how much its artists are making from the service, but the basic model is that it varies depending on how much a track is used, and generally they are very competitive. “Our artists make more from us than they do from other platforms,” Belsky said. There are no plans to switch that business model include non-royalty-free, nor outright sales of exclusive rights, he added.
On royalty-free alone, the funding comes on the back of significant growth for the company in the last couple of years, with both users and amount of content both on exponential growth curves, respectively now standing at 1.1 million subscribers and 25.8 million pieces of content (mostly music at the moment, Belsky said).
While many users will incorporate one kind of media, either video or music, into a bigger video project — such as this Mercedes Benz commercial that uses Artlist audio — others looking to see how creative they can be when leaning on both, which speaks to how we might see video continue to evolve as the market matures and yet more video content gets produced:
That brings us to the company’s next steps. Belsky said that while today there are already various taxonomies for searching for just the right piece of content, the plan is to try to make that process more intuitive. Being based in Israel, the company has been tapping some interesting data science talent, and the country is well-known for producing some of the more interesting startups using AI and all of that is feeding into Artlist’s development, too.
“We want to invest in AI for personalisation,” he said. “We see ourselves in the creative tech space, a combination of content and technology. The aim is to find the best piece of music, but also the best user experience when finding it, to make it fast and intuitive.”
One experiment has involved people uploading examples of what they’d like, and Artlist searching for “matches” in its own catalogue, and there are others to come, he said. (Indeed, given what we’ve seen with the advances in semantic search, there is a potentially very interesting opportunity to start to explore how to, for example, ingest a video clip to try to match the mood of a piece of audio to it, which is not something that the company is exploring today, but could be an avenue down the line.)
Meanwhile, given Artlist’s traction and revenue growth, the opportunities and the needs of creators today are interesting enough to make this an interesting bet, despite the stiff competition.
“The growth of digital content creation – and the evolving way in which it is consumed – has generated a tremendous amount of opportunities for creators, but the process of licensing digital assets remains a significant challenge for small and large creators alike,” said Patrick Devine, a member of KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth investment team, in a statement. “What impresses us most about Artlist is the management team’s dedication to helping creators focus on what they do best and removing friction from the process of discovering and accessing content.”
LG released a new affordable Android 10 for Cricket Wireless users - the Harmony 4. The phone is essentially identical to the LG K40S though with a slight redesign and a newer version of the OS (the K40S came out with Android 9). The phone can be yours for $140 regardless of whether you're a new or an existing customer. For your money you will get a 6.1" 720p+ display. The phone has a metal frame and measures 156.2 x 74.2 x 8.6 mm (6.15 x 2.92 x 0.34 in), weighing 173 g (6.1 oz). LG Harmony 4 for Cricket Wireless Android 10 runs on top of on octa-core processor of unknown...
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