The Daily Crunch 09/28/16

In the future you might get to choose between a ticket to Mars or an average U.S. home, and it's finally curtains for BlackBerry hardware. All that and more in The Daily Crunch for September 28, 2016. And please smize while you read this, it's what Tyra would want.

1. Musk's Mars dream elaborated

In terms of startup ambition, no one has aimed higher than Elon Musk. The SpaceX founder admitted his only motivation for accumulating any kind of personal wealth at all is to fund the project of making humans an interplanetary species, for example, during a talk at a big space conference in Mexico yesterday.

He also detailed exactly how he plans to get humans to Mars – and potentially beyond. The only big question mark remains where he'll get the money to do it all, since personal wealth alone isn't going to cut it.

2. BlackBerry's done with the hardware

BlackBerry finally let go of owning its hardware business, and will now outsource both design and manufacture to partners while focusing entirely on software. The OEM model makes sense, and it's surprising it actually took this long, but the big question will be whether BlackBerry can even maintain a sustainable software business using outsourced hardware running Android. More likely, even its outsourced hardware business sunsets next.

3. Uber wants to put self-driving trucks to work in 2017

Uber's acquisition of self-driving truck startup Otto wasn't just a talent play – Uber said it intended to pursue the younger company's goal of self-driving transport truck shipping, and it now says it hopes to make good on that with a launch on highways in 2017. Uber's hope is to one day provide transport truck services nearly as on-demand as it does ride-hailing today. Make no mistake, Uber, like others in the space including carmakers, are looking at providing holistic transportation services in the future, not just taxi rides.

4. Tyra Banks on investing and startup shows

Tyra Banks is celebrating one year of her cosmetics startup Tyra Beauty, and is also preparing to launch her new NBC startup competition show Funded on NBC, which also includes former pro skateboarder Rob Dyrdek. She says to expect "a bunch of love and a bunch of trash talk" on the show, which means it'll be just like the real startup world but with some added love.

5. Amazon's Alexa makes its way to ultra-low cost hardware

Amazon's making Alexa more affordable all the time – first it reintroduced the Echo Dot at a lower price, and now it's putting an Alexa-enabled remote in the box with its new Fire TV stick, which retails for just $40. This is very smart: Amazon needs to capitalize on its early mover advantage with Alexa and make the voice-based computing platform and ubiquitous as possible before it starts fielding real competition from the likes of Google and Apple.

6. Samsung's wait-and-see approach to VR

Samsung's still thinking about how to approach dedicated VR hardware, and is waiting to see if the trend fizzles or becomes more mainstream before going at VR whole-hog. It's definitely not a unique perspective, but it is particularly interesting coming from Samsung, since the company is better-positioned than most to know how VR is doing with consumers thanks to Gear VR and its work with Oculus.

7. This version of Facebook is actually designed for work

FB's enterprise play will launch in the next few weeks, with per-user pricing. Based on what we know about it so far, it sounds like it'll be similar to other platforms like Convo, Yammer and Salesforce Chatter, and Slack, but we'll have to see if it can make headway in enterprise given its consumer-focused background.