The Daily Crunch 08/04/16

Musk is the one who knocks, Southeast Asia's drive-on-demand market heats up and Alexa's virtual consciousness finds another host. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for August 4, 2016. And thank you for holding: Please press 1 now if you've raised $12 million to deal with infuriating customer service calls.

1. Tesla misses shipments, but Musk makes things personal

Tesla reported earnings for its fiscal Q2, and they weren't great. The company continues to struggle with getting out enough shipments to match its 80,000 vehicle year-end goal. It's hard to make cars, we get it Elon. But the Tesla founder is still aiming to hit that target by ramping up production, and now he's paying personal visits to suppliers who aren't meeting their deadlines. No word if he's visiting with bat in hand. Meanwhile in tech earnings land, Square's results gave Jack Dorsey a much-needed win. .500 would be a good batting percentage if CEO-ing were baseball.

2. The Uber rivals are raising

On-demand rides in Asia is a growing market with competition accelerating at a quick pace. Go-Jek, a motorbike taxi Uber equivalent based in Indonesia, has raised $550 million in new funding to help spur expansion in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, Singapore-based Grab, the company that already serves that area with an Uber-like service, is in the process of raising at a valuation of $2.3 billion in a $600 million round that could include existing investors Didi Chuxing and SoftBank. Didi is clearly the big kid on the block in the Eastern markets now, especially after acquiring Uber's China business, but consolidation doesn't mean competition in the area is over.

3. Formlabs tries to buck the downward DIY 3D printing trend

3D printing rode a wave of hype and then pretty much disappeared, with big early startups like MakerBot acquired and then slowly erased by bigger players less interested in the consumer DIY market. Formlabs has survived, however, and just raised a $35 million Series B round that includes strategic investor Autodesk. It sounds like Autodesk is more interested in guiding Formlabs further toward serving the design industry than the home hobbyist maker, however, and that's probably as it should be until the cost and convenience of 3D printing experiences another gigantic leap.

4. Alexa extends its tendrils

Amazon's Alexa has an API that gadget-makers can use to put the virtual assistant in whatever they desire, but we've only seen a slow trickle of OEMs take advantage so far. Nucleus, a new video intercom system for the home, is using it, however, and it turns what would be a basic two-way video chat device into a powerful smart home workhorse with an intercom kicker. I'm bullish on Alexa's usefulness as an API, so it's great to see new takes on how to bring Amazon's voice-powered interface to new types of hardware.

5. How you know your industry is dangerously broken

When startups can successfully raise funding based on the premise that they're making it less annoying for people to engage with your industry, you should start taking a look at what went wrong. The lumbering behemoth of stagnation that is air travel has attracted exactly this type of parasitic being. A startup called AirHelp raised $12 million from investors, including Khosla and Ev Williams, to basically call airline customer service and deal with how terrible they can be in order to ensure you're treated with basic human decency instead of like an animal.

6. Comma.ai wants to democratize development of self-driving tech

In many cases, the trick to doing anything in terms of developing effective machine learning tech is accumulating a lot of data. Just getting that data can be a grind and requires a chunk of equipment. Which is why it's a big deal that George Hotz's (aka Geohotz) startup, comma.ai, open-sourced a database of 7.25 hours of highway driving for use by anyone interested in taking a peek. Comma.ai still isn't interested in helping out Ford or Mobileye, Hotz tells me, so they've kept a lot of their data proprietary, but this is a treasure trove of data for hobbyists to play with.

7. Nadella concisely outlines his big-ticket acquisition strategy

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has made two high-visibility and high-value acquisitions during his tenure, and now he reveals the guiding logic that links them: Take a big and growing thing, add a new platform, and make it even bigger. That applies to Minecraft, which Nadella saw as something that would benefit hugely by being part of a console-making company, and it applies equally to LinkedIn, which he hopes will get the same kind of bump from integration with Office 365. Let's see if that rubric continues to apply in the future.