Poco X4 Pro 5G major leak confirms 108MP camera, SD695

Poco is having an event during MWC, and we expect to see new smartphones, including the Poco M4 Pro (an LTE-only version) and the Poco X4 Pro 5G. Yet Amazon France couldn't wait another week and released the full specs sheet and some images of the phone today. Looking closely into the characteristics of the phone, we can see it is the Redmi Note 11 Pro 5G but with a different desing on the back and the signature Poco yellow color. Xiaomi Poco X4 Pro 5G The Poco X4 Pro 5G will have a Snapdragon 695 chipset and a 6.67” AMOLED with 120Hz refresh rate. The back hosts a 108MP main...

from GSMArena.com - Latest articles https://ift.tt/NuAGoIw

Automata expands its lab automation ambitions with $40M B round

The world’s labs are under pressure to do more tests and process more materials, not just due to COVID but from the growing biotech and drug development sectors — and automation is the sure path forwards. Automata, which got its start making a robotic arm for handling individual tasks, has now raised $40M to automate entire lab processes from start to finish.

When we last talked with Automata in 2019, the company had just raised a $7.4M A round and was focusing on developing and deploying its Eva robotic arm, which could be used for a variety of common tasks: moving glass around, performing simple samples, that sort of thing. But they soon found that life as a robot provider for small, highly individual projects and labs wasn’t a viable business model.

“It’s not enough to engage with your customer at one stage — like, ‘here’s the most affordable robot arm on the market, good luck!’ If companies buy one or two robots, it optimizes a few processes but it doesn’t revolutionize how that company works. So over the last few years we’ve started looking at how we can drive adoption of our tech at a scale that matters,” said co-founder and CEO Mostafa ElSayed.

They identified three large markets that they felt were on the cusp of an automation boom: diagnostics, drug discovery, and synthetic biology (i.e. the discovery and cultivation of purpose-built microbes).

What the company found as it installed the first few hundred of its Eva arms was that companies in these sectors had a lot of “partial automation.” ElSayed compared this to having a dishwasher in your kitchen: you don’t have to wash plates by hand any more, but you still have to load and unload it, add soap, select the settings, etc. Useful but it still relies entirely on human labor.

The limits of partial automation were highlighted during the pandemic, when labs performing PCR tests especially were operating at maximum capacity and still nowhere near meeting demand. Similarly in drug development and synthetic bio, timelines stretch into the 5-7 year range for certain processes because there’s a hard limit on how frequently a given process can be run. By moving from partial to full automation, huge time savings and throughput increases can be realized. But it couldn’t be done with a handful of robotic arms.

The Automata Labs enclosure with Eva robotic arm next to it.

“We’ve had to build an entirely new hardware stack that allows for this kind of automation,” ElSayed said. Late last year they announced their new hardware platform, Automata Labs, a sort of modular container built for continuous operation of machinery inside and the ability to pass the results to the next step. “The benchtop is really the standard unit of all laboratories, so it’s basically a whole lab bench that’s amenable to automation.”

The company’s most visible success is an NHS testing facility that has been as automated as is currently possible (that is, humans are still in there but a huge amount of the work is done robotically), and has now processed over a million samples. ElSayed pointed out that the number is large, but the more important one was that the automation reduced turnaround times for results by half, which as you might imagine is crucial for time-sensitive tests. It’s largely because the automation level lets the clinicians set the robots to work overnight, and they can have results ready in the morning.

In experimental settings, timelines can be reduced by 25-40 percent, which is significant but may sound modest to anyone who has read of orders of magnitude productivity increases in sectors like manufacturing. ElSayed said there are other paths to go down to further improve that specific number, like the “lights out laboratories” that enabled the NHS rapid labs.

CEO Mostafa ElSayed.

But he noted that for many researchers there’s also a serious need for accuracy and repeatability.

“There was a clear, describable need for those user bases,” he said. “There’s the basic one of increasing throughput while reducing menial tasks in a lab… but there was also, and we didn’t know this going in, a repeatability problem in labs. Teams would publish their own research papers, then try to replicate the results and fail, because the processes in the lab were highly manual and variable.”

So a large part of the draw in automation is systematic tracking and performance, and fewer errors. To that end Automata has been investing in the software to manage and administer its labware and robots.

“The scientists in these organizations — especially their automation scientists, this up and coming role — what they really want is the ability to program these systems themselves, and design these screenings themselves, rather than call us in,” said ElSayed. As anyone who’s negotiated with scientists before probably knows, many would rather keep doing things the old way rather than cede control to an outside agency. So building a system that’s designed to be deployed and adjusted by the on-site crew has been a major focus.

“More and more of the labs adopting our hardware are coming to us for these digital solutions to configure or deploy them, or connect the ecosystem to their data system,” he continued.

A new generation of hardware, in limited testing with partners, is set to be revealed later this year, and Automata is also getting ready to make the leap into the U.S. and wider European markets. The huge amount of hiring, manufacturing, sales, support and so on that this expansion necessitates are the reason the company has raised this $40M B round. The round was led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Hummingbird, Latitude Ventures, ABB Technology Ventures, Isomer Capital, In-Q-Tel and others.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/rSLp8Aw

The Station: DeLorean teases an EV, VW and Huawei are ‘talking’ and feds investigate Tesla

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.

Hello readers: Welcome to The Station, your central hub for all past, present and future means of moving people and packages from Point A to Point B.

Before you dive into our weekly roundup of news and analysis, I wanted to flag two items. First up, the founders series returned this month with Anjali Jindal Naik, co-founder and COO of autonomous sidewalk robot maker Cartken.

Secondly, SXSW is coming up and I will be there IRL. Reach out if there’s a talk or presentation you believe I simply must see or a person I just have to meet. It’ll be a quick trip, but I am looking for any and all compelling transportation goings on. I am also moderating two panels: one is on sustainable mobility with folks from Arrival, Uber and autonomous vehicle consultant Selika Talbott. The other one, with Enel and Uber, is focused on EV charging infrastructure and the electrification of ride sharing, corporate fleets and service fleets.

Bah! wait, how could I forget … this is huge and finally we can have cars in the U.S. that don’t blind people! The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a final rule allowing automakers to install adaptive driving beam headlights, which automatically adjusts as you are driving, on new vehicles. These systems are already in Europe.

As always, you can email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, opinions or tips. You also can send a direct message to Kirsten at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin’

One of my favorite podcast and newsletter hosts, Azeem Azhar, dedicated a whole podcast to micromobility! On his latest show, Exponential View, where Azhar explores the impact of technology on business and society, he had on micromobility expert Horace Dediu. They talked about the role of software in driving the adoption of micromobility (a trend that some people questioned and even gave me a lot of flack for writing about a year ago), the integration of AR and micromobility and how big tech companies will integrate into micromobility.

---

There’s really no end to the companies trying to fuel the micromobility revolution, so catch up with just a few of them here.

Cogo is consolidating a less talked-about market in the micromobility world: shared mobility aggregating. The company just acquired another aggregator, eScoot, so that it can better offer comprehensive price comparisons for shared mobility. This helps users check the price, availability and travel time from multiple operators in one search. Funnily enough, this is something Dediu has said big tech companies, like Google, have an opportunity to capitalize on via Maps, so we’ll see how this kind of service unfolds in the long run.

Bird is extending its permits and increasing its fleet size in a few markets. It’ll be sticking around a little while longer in Long Beach, Portland and Decatur, and adding more vehicles to Durham, Isla Vista and Arlington.

Mundimoto, an online motorcycle buying and selling startup, raised $22.6 million to expand its platform outside of Spain and into the rest of Europe.

Lyft is starting to double down on its bikeshare business, per its Q4 2021 earnings. This supports comments that Tony Ho of Segway made to TechCrunch last year when he forecast that some of the “big rideshare guys” would be “coming back to play.”

Lightning Motorcycles is designing an electric two-wheeler that has a top speed of 250 mph (!!!). It’ll need a special metal called niobium that is found on rocket ships.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

This isn’t a deal, so much as a rumored one. Still, it’s worth noting because of the implications.

German media reported that Volkswagen is in talks with Huawei to acquire the latter’s nascent autonomous driving unit for billions of euros. Huawei said it had no immediate comment when contacted by TechCrunch. VW China said it has no comment.

As TC reporter Rita Liao notes, the potential merger will be a powerful one. Huawei’s autonomous unit sits under the telecom equipment and smartphone behemoth’s “smart vehicle solution” business unit, which started only in 2019. The founding of the smart car BU spurred much speculation over whether Huawei would develop its own cars, though the firm has repeatedly denied any manufacturing plans and said it instead wants to be the “Bosch of China”, or a components supplier for car brands.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Carbar, the Australian car subscription company, raised $28.9 million in a round led by Insurance Australia Group and Seven West Media.

CelLink, a California startup that developed a way to replace traditional wiring harnesses in vehicles, raised $250 million in a funding round backed by several strategic investors, including BMW iVentures, Lear Corp., Robert Bosch Venture Capital and 3M. Previous investor Ford Motor did not join the latest round.

Cepton, a lidar company that went public via a merger with SPAC partner Growth Capital Acquisition Corp, held its opening bell ringing ceremony at Nasdaq on February 17.

Haul, a company that developed software to connect CDL drivers to trucking companies with assignments, announced it raised $10 million in a round led by B Capital Group. Other investors included previous funders, Hack VC, Next Coast Ventures, Pipeline Capital Partners, RPM Ventures, Value Chain Ventures, as well as new participants, Bam Elevate, FJ Labs, WTI and angel investor Will Redd (cofounder of ZipRecruiter).

Ibex Investors has a new $113 million fund focused on early-stage mobility companies. The firm, which is based in Denver with offices in New York and Tel Aviv, has already tapped into the fund to invest in Aifleet and Visionary.ai.

Liefergrün, a German-based startup that offers emissions-free last-mile delivery services, raised €3 million in a seed funding round led by SpeedInvest and with participation from Norrsken VC.

Motorq, a connected car API startup, said it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Insight Partners. Existing investors also joined including Story Ventures, FM Capital, Monta Vista Capital and Avanta Ventures.

Parallel Systems, an autonomous electric rail company, received $4.5 million in grant money from the Department of Energy as part of its Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy initiative.

RideCo, a Canadian company offering cities on-demand transit tech, closed a $15.8 million (CAD $20 million) Series A round. RideCo’s funding round, which was led by Eclipse Ventures, represents the first time the company has raised institutional investment in the seven years since its founding.

Notable news and other tidbits

Autonomous vehicles

Argo AI is launching a new engineering and development office in Los Angeles where researchers will engage in R&D to advance its self-driving tech. Argo is bringing on Caltech professor Yisong Yue as principal scientist, who bring an expertise in ML and a connection to the university. Argo’s new office is close by Caltech, which will allow Argo to tap into that university-to-startup pipeline.

Aurora announced in a blog post that it is partnering with USXpress “to design optimal deployment strategies for autonomous technology in its commercial operations.” Think of this as a data exchange mission to find the lanes that would most benefit from early deployment of Aurora’s self-driving trucking technology.

Separately, Aurora reported its first earnings (Q4 and full year) as a publicly traded company. There weren’t too many surprises for a company that is still developing its technology and therefore pre-revenue. It’s R&D spend caught my eye though. Whooo weee! Aurora reported it spent $697.3 million on research and development in 2021, compared to $179.4 million in 2020. Aurora has $1.6 billion in cash on hand.

Baidu is launching its autonomous ride-hailing service, Apollo Go, in yet another city. Shenzhen will be the company’s seventh city where it’s introduced robotaxi services, starting with the Nanshan District, which is home to companies like Huawei and Tencent, as well as many tourist attractions. The company will be deploying Apollo’s 4th gen vehicle, the Hongqi EV, and has promised to bring its 5th gen robotaxi onto the fleet soon. Users will be able to hail a robotaxi via the Apollo Go app at one of 50 stations from 9am to 5pm. Baidu hopes to expand to more than 300 stations by the end of the year.

Important to note: This is still a trial operation. Baidu has gone commercial in Beijing and will be bringing a commercial service to Cangzhou in March. The Shenzhen service will also involve “drivered” autonomous vehicles (human safety operator is still behind the wheel) while Baidu seeks permission to test driverless in the city.

Cruise plans to expand the self-driving delivery pilot it has with Walmart in Arizona to eight stores. Today, that pilot involves just one Walmart store located on Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community lands near Scottsdale.

Starship Technologies launched an on-demand delivery service in Pleasanton, California, which is in the Bay Area. This is an expansion of its existing partnership deploying autonomous sidewalk robots for The Save Mart companies, which began in 2020.

Waymo’s autonomous trucking and cargo division Waymo Via and freight logistics company C.H. Robinson are gearing up to launch a pilot. The companies said within the coming months Waymo’s test fleet will be delivering freight in Texas for one of C.H. Robinson’s customers. The pilot is part of a larger partnership between the two companies that aims to combine Waymo’s AV technology, which is available to any carrier, with C.H. Robinson’s logistics data on over 3 million trucking lanes and access to a network of nearly 200,000 shippers and carriers, many of which are medium and small carriers that Waymo is interested in reaching.

Electric vehicles

Remember all of those electric vehicle ads that aired during the Super Bowl? Apparently, Cars.com saw an 80% increase in EV page views after all that marketing. TechCrunch reporter Rebecca Bellan tells me she loved this ad from General Motors, featuring Dr. Evil and crew from the Austin Powers movies, in part because it went nicely with the throwbacks from the halftime show.

Putting aside my Gen Xer reaction to the word “throwbacks” (we’ll talk later, Rebecca) I was struck by how many of the EVs in these ads are not yet on sale. When all those people turned to the internet to find these EVs were they disappointed? Or excited for what was to come?

Delorean is coming back as an EV! Or at least that’s the intention of some Texas executives who are working with Stephen Wynne, Bloomberg reported. Wynne owns the DeLorean branding rights and supplies parts for the 6,000 or so remaining vehicles. DeLorean Motor Company ReImagined LLC tweeted out a video that teases the upcoming EV; no word on timing.

Fisker confirmed in an earnings call that it’s still on track to start production of the Ocean SUV in November, with reservations for its first electric vehicle jumping to 31,000. Interestingly, there are 1,600 fleet reservations for the Ocean, including an incremental 200-unit order from software company ServiceNow.

Redwood Materials, the startup founded by former Tesla CTO JB Straubel, is launching an electric vehicle battery recycling program in California with Ford and Volvo as inaugural partners as pressure mounts to source materials for EVs. The two automakers will cover some of the cost of retrieving, properly packaging and then transporting the batteries back to Redwood’s recycling facility in northern Nevada.

The program will be free for those turning in vehicle batteries. Redwood says it will accept all lithium-ion and nickel metal hydride batteries in the state, regardless of the make or model of the vehicle.

Tesla said non-Tesla owners can charge their electric vehicles at all Supercharger stations in the Netherlands, marking an expansion of a pilot program that kicked off in November 2021 with 10 stations.

Speaking of Tesla, the company fell seven spots to No. 23 out of 32 brands in Consumer Reports’ annual auto brand rankings. And not to pile on, but … federal safety regulators opened an investigation into Tesla after receiving hundreds of reports alleging “phantom braking.” The investigation covers an estimated 416,000 Tesla Model 3 and Model Y vehicles from the 2021-22 model years.

Volta is expanding its collaboration with Walgreens and will install 1,000 DC fast charging stalls at over stores throughout the U.S.

Future of flight

AirAsia signed a non-binding MoU with Avolon, an aircraft leasing company, to lease a minimum of 100 eVTOLs that were built by Vertical Aerospace.

AutoFlight, a Chinese eVTOL company, completed the proof-of-concept, transition test flight for its air taxi Prosperity I, in which the aircraft switches from a vertical take-off motion to horizontal flight and back to vertical flight before landing — an important milestone for an eVTOL startup trying to make it in the business.

Joby Aviation is partnering with Japanese airline ANA to bring aerial ridesharing services to Japan. Toyota Motor Corporation will be partnering with the two companies, as well, in order to explore ways to connect the air taxis to ground-based transportation. In other Joby news, the company reported one of its test vehicles crashed. NTSB is investigating.

Gig economy and delivery

Doordash is launching express grocery delivery, which brings customer groceries in under 30 minutes, in partnership with Albertsons, which owns stores like Safeway, Vons, Tom Thumb, ACME Markets and more.

In-vehicle tech

Nvidia keeps scoring those automaker partnerships. This time, it is Jaguar Land Rover. The automaker said it will use Nvidia’s end-to-end Drive Hyperion platform in all of its vehicles starting in 2025. This platform will be used to power features like advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving.

People stuff

Caribou, the auto fintech startup formerly called MotoRefi, has hired or promoted 10 new executives. The company promoted former COO and Uber alum Eric Stradley to the role of president, appointed Jason Tepperman as chief lending officer, hired Arlene Dzurnak as the company’s chief compliance officer and named Jennifer Khazai chief accounting officer.

P.J. O’Rourke, the satirist and bestselling author who also wrote for Car and Driver, died February 15. Car and Driver has a nice send off piece featuring some of his work for the magazine.

Steve Taub left In-Q-Tel, where he was partner, and is now managing director of investments at JetBlue Technology Ventures.

Virgin Galactic announced that Chairman Chamath Palihapitiya, whose SPAC took the company public in 2019, is stepping down from the space-tourism company’s board of directors, effective immediately, CNBC reported.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/Je2nTza

Realme to introduce “World’s fastest smartphone charging” on February 28

Realme will attend the MWC in Barcelona, and we will see the GT2 series make their global debut. Today, we learned that there will be more to it, though - the brand will also bring the “world’s fastest smartphone charging”. Realme’s previous fastest charging solution was the 125W UltraDart which was announced in 2021, but never made it to a commercially-available smartphone. We do not know the actual speed of the new charger Realme will announce. Still, we expect it to be around 165W since nubia is preparing to reach those speeds with the upcoming Red Magic 7 Pro. We should also...

from GSMArena.com - Latest articles https://ift.tt/2Oy6eKa

Sweden’s Volta raises $260M at a $490M valuation to get its all-electric trucks into production by the end of this year

Volta Trucks — the Swedish electric vehicle startup that believes it can build better urban delivery vehicles and other trucks that are safer and take up a smaller carbon footprint than their gas-guzzling, more clumsy, existing counterparts — has closed a big round of funding to help it through that last mile of work before its Volta Zero trucks go into commercial production later this year.

The company has raised €230 million (around $260 million), a Series C round of funding that appears to value the company at just over $490 million (€433 million). Volta will be using the money to fund engineering and business operations ahead of its first trucks rolling off the assembly line, on the back of what looks like a healthy list of customers: Volta said that its pre-order book for its all-electric Volta Zero — said to be the first fully electric, purpose-built commercial freight vehicle designed for urban freight distribution — is currently totaling over €1.2 billion, covering more than 5,000 vehicles. Volta’s wider business strategy will be based both on selling trucks as well as offering its vehicles on a trucking-as-a-service model.

New York-based Luxor Capital, which led the company’s €37 million Series B in September 2021, is also leading this round. Real estate investment firm Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström (like Volta, based in Stockholm), supply chain services giant Agility, and B-FLEXION (formerly Waypoint Capital) also participated. While Volta has not disclosed its valuation, Pitchbook data notes that it is now just over $490 million — a figure that we have now confirmed also with sources close to the company.

Volta’s growth, and the large amount of capital it has now raised — over $325 million to date — are part of a bigger sea change in the automotive world. Startups, tapping into new manufacturing techniques, new batter technology, and new energy infrastructure, see a ripe opportunity to build new vehicles to disrupt the current status quo with safer and cleaner alternatives.

Investors — likely wowed by the success of electric efforts like Tesla’s with smaller cars — are putting their money behind these ventures to give them more firepower, and more credibility with would-be customers. These are all essential building blocks for catapulting cars into the next wave of technological innovation, where trucks like Volta’s become hardware platforms capable of gathering and working with massive data sets to help the vehicles and the businesses using them operate at new levels of productivity.

That is the theory, at least. The process of getting there inevitably ends up being slower, and more costly, than initial rosy projects, which is another reason why it’s important for companies in the space to raise large rounds and corral together groups of strategic backers to help them get to market.

Volta’s roadmap this year will include investing in its engineering and production operations to build prototypes to verify its designs for the Volta Zero.

These in turn will be rolled out to early customers for pilots in London and Paris, cities where delivery trucks are commonplace but also dangerous, given traffic congestion, narrow streets and the proliferation of cyclists and other micromobility users, making them ideal markets for Volta’s trucks, which claim not only to produce less emissions — the first trucks will have a pure-electric range of 150 – 200 kms (95 – 125 miles) and eliminate an estimated 1.2M tonnes of CO2 by 2025, the company claims — but have significantly better visibility (220 degrees, with the driver sitting in the center of the front seat) for its drivers. Initially, what they will not have, it seems, are self-driving capabilities.

“We are investigating autonomy / self-driving for the future but as a vehicle that’s specifically designed as a city centre distribution and delivery vehicle, the goods within the vehicle will need delivering from the vehicle to their end destination. As a result, the purpose of the vehicle will always need a person involved, making self-driving less relevant for this type of vehicle,” said a spokesperson.

Volta said it will also use some of the funding to continue developing smaller 7.5- and 12-tonne full-electric Volta Zero derivatives (the first model will be 16 tonnes), and eventually a larger 18-tonne model.

The company is building a production facility in Austria, with plans to produce 5,000 vehicles in 2023; 14,000 trucks in 2024; and up to 27,000 trucks in 2025.

“The successful and oversubscribed conclusion of our Series C funding round gives us a positive external validation of our journey,” said Essa Al-Saleh, CEO of Volta Trucks, in a statement. “As an innovator and disruptor in commercial vehicles, we are working at industry-leading pace and have significant ambitions. Today’s closing of the Series C funding round, bringing €230 million into the company, gives us the financial runway to be able to deliver on all our goals as we transition from a start-up to a manufacturer of full-electric trucks. The confirmation of our orderbook of over 5,000 vehicles with an orderbook value exceeding €1.2 billion, gives us and our investors, confidence that our pioneering product and service offering is both wanted and needed by our customers.”

 

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/HWwCh8u

Samsung announces Galaxy Tab S8 pricing for India

Samsung announced the Galaxy S22 pricing for India last week and we thought we might see the prices for the new Tab S8 slates at the same event, but no – the company kept that information under wraps until now. The three tablets will go on pre-order tomorrow, February 22, open sales will begin on March 10 (over two weeks from now). Those who pre-order during that time on Samsung.com and authorized Samsung partners will get a free Keyboard Cover worth ₹23,000. Additionally, Samsung is offering cashback deals - ₹7,000 for the Galaxy Tab S8, ₹8,000 for the Tab S8+ and ₹10,000 for the Tab...

from GSMArena.com - Latest articles https://ift.tt/tZavPqe

Poco MWC event scheduled for February 28

Xiaomi sub-brand Poco has issued official invites for its own MWC 2022 event scheduled to take place on February 28. Poco’s in-person keynote will take place at Hall 3, 3D10 and is scheduled to start at 1PM CET (7AM ET). We can expect a live stream of the event for online audiences. The big expectation for the event is the rumored Poco X4 Pro 5G. The device is rumored to be a rebrand of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 11 Pro. We should see some more Poco devices at the event so stay tuned for more info.

from GSMArena.com - Latest articles https://ift.tt/JveusB7