The Daily Crunch 08/03/16

There's no business like moon business, but will Facebook be the one to build the doodads we use when we get there? All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 3, 2016. And a special announcement: Future editions of The Daily Crunch will be available in touchable video format.

1. So begins the business of Moon

Moon Express now has express permission to head to the moon in 2017, thanks to official U.S. government approval on its plans. The FAA signed off after Moon Express met with a number of government agencies to explain their plan, and had the government agree to supervise in the interest of keeping fair of the international Outer Space Treaty. Making the moon a mineable resource might sound like science fiction, but it's something governments are already laying the regulatory framework for. Moon Express, if it has legs beyond the sprint, could be among the first big intergalactic resource companies.

2. Facebook has a hardware lab, and here's what's inside

Area 404 (get it, location not found?) is a 22,000 square foot space wherein Facebook builds hardware. Long story short, there's a lot of highly accurate machinery within for producing things including data center racks, drone pieces and housings for 360-degree cameras. Basically, it's a hardware prototyping dream facility, wherein FB's various business units can experiment with building the future piece-by-piece. What's most interesting is that this seems like a way for Facebook to hone a combinatory approach, wherein it builds what it needs to accomplish larger goals, rather than something that positions Facebook as what we'd traditionally think of as a hardware company.

3. Hey Elon, a fleet of shared Teslas is already a real thing

Startup Green Commuter, which replaces existing vanpools with shared electric vehicles, just launched a group of Tesla Model X's for commuter use in L.A. Others like Tesloop are also early believers in the idea that sharing all-electric Tesla vehicles among a group of users is the way forward. Elon Musk himself, of course, sees this as the ultimate end of his company's grand master plan – which raises the question of whether these third-party early movers are mere bacterium in his overarching Petri dish of fleshing out the best way for Tesla to ultimately make that happen.

4. 500 is too many so here's our top picks from batch 17

So yes, it's not actually 500, but 42 is still a lot of startups and that's how many are in batch 17 of 500 Startups' incubator. TechCrunch chose its top 14, which included a health selection of e-commerce and B2B offerings. My favorites from among our highlights? Programmable friendship bracelets that teach kids to code from Jewelbots, and Blavity, a new media platform aimed at black millennials that has a strong user-generated content component. The rest of the list is definitely worth checking out, especially as a guidebook for where one of the world's top incubators is focusing its investment resources.

5. A shortcut to interaction for AR and VR apps

Our interaction with video is pretty decidedly passive, but MIT researchers could change that. A team at the school's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence lab has built a means through which users can interact with video by simulating realistic responses of objects caught on camera to touch interaction. It has potential to revolutionize YouTube, but also to pave the way for easier development sprints on interactive AR and VR content, which could help blow the market up in terms of the breadth of available experiences.

6. HoloLens is now a $3,000 impulse buy for anybody

Microsoft's HoloLens developer hardware is now available to anyone to purchase, provided you're located in the U.S. and Canada and have a spare $3,000 lying around. This still isn't consumer production hardware – the "Development Edition" label still very much applies, and it's not being sold in stores, but you can now skip the former application process and require nothing but some breathing room on your credit card balance to get a nice, close look at the future of augmented reality. But don't plan to buy one for everyone you know: there's a max limit of five units per customer.

7. Is the future of the mobile web AMP'd?

Google is making AMP available for websites beyond news publishers, allowing other mobile sites to speed up their loading time and optimize their formatting for consumption on smartphone devices. AMP load times boast a 4X speed improvement over conventional non-AMP pages. So far, it's still just a preview, but broad access is planned "in the coming months," according to Google. AMP could be how Google holds on to mobile relevancy and tips the scales back to web as a mobile destination versus apps.