 |  | | Monday, November 11, 2019 • By Darrell Etherington | |
Launch day What better way to kick off a Monday than with a rocket launch? SpaceX had one this morning, and it was a good one for a number of reasons. Also, Instagram is making a tweak to emphasize quality over quantity, enterprise M&A puts up some big numbers and more. It’s The Daily Crunch for November 11, 2019. | | | |
| SpaceX launched a rocket today, and while it does that pretty often now, this one was special for a few different reasons. The payload is its first production (i.e. not for testing purposes) batch of Starlink broadband internet satellites, for one — a key step in its target of launching service for U.S. and Canadian consumers next year. Meanwhile, this launch was also the first time that SpaceX re-used a fairing flown on a previous mission. The fairing, which protects the cargo, is a $6 million part, so that’s a good cost savings. Also, the Falcon 9 booster used was flown THREE TIMES previously, and landed again, so it can potentially be used again in the future. Mind-blowing. Read more | |  | | |
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| Instagram is going to expand a test wherein it hides the total number of likes on posts from everyone except the poster. The company started doing this in select markets, including Canada, a while ago, but apparently it likes what it has seen from those enough to bring it to the U.S. This should alleviate some social media anxiety, but will it be good for a business where influence is a key metric? Read more | | | |
| The era of rampant deepfakes is basically just around the corner, so how will we handle that? Probably not super well, but Twitter is already sharing a draft of how it intends to deal with content that is potentially manipulated but convincing. They’re looking for feedback on this before it goes into effect, but basically they want to add warnings but not necessarily remove deepfaked content, except in cases where a person’s safety is at risk. Read more | |  Image Credits: TechCrunch | | |
| Carbonite, which in recent years pivoted from being a straightforward backup company into a firm focused more on enterprise data recovery and security practices, is going to be bought by Canada’s OpenText, in a huge enterprise IT tie-up. The deal is valued at $1.42 billion, which stands as a decent premium on Carbonite’s value as assessed by the public market last week. Read more | | | |
| The used car market is one that’s apparently ripe for startup activity and investment, as most recently demonstrated by a $400 million investment in Frontier Car Group, which values the Berlin-based company at $700 million post-money. The global automotive secondary market, where Frontier focuses its effort, is indeed a huge opportunity. Read more | |  | | |
| Chris Cox isn’t a high-ranking executive at Facebook anymore, after leaving the company in March. That means he’s free to say he doesn’t like Trump, which is what he did at Wired’s annual conference last week. He said he could definitely indulge in his more progressive political opinions now — something he couldn’t do while an executive at FB. Read more | | | |
| Extra Crunch’s Eric Peckham looks at what NYC-based consumer VCs are interested in these days, and consumer health and banking are near the top of the list (Extra Crunch subscription required). Read more | | | |
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