If you ever believed that Faraday Future could pull off its ambitious EV vision, I have a bridge in New York to sell you. Also, a new entrant in CPG and DARPA wants brainnnnnsss (to connect to computers). All that and more in The Daily Crunch for July 11, 2017. 1. Faraday has no future This electric car company is done. It has been done for ages, and we've never believed otherwise. But the news that it's officially cancelling its Nevada factory means any doubters had better come around. Faraday made a number of missteps, but none probably hurt it more than believing it had a reliable bank thanks to investment partner LeEco. Rather than working like a lean, hungry startup, a la Tesla, it probably acted more like an automaker further along in its maturation – which ended up being a bet on bad money. 2. Brandless is a new take on CPG Consumer packaged goods is an area where a few legacy titans still rule the roost, but new startup Brandless aims to shake that up with basic products for $3 each across the board. They used tech to cut out all the middle parts between them and consumers, which is what gets that even, no-nonsense pricing. 3. X marks the spot for Elon Musk Elon Musk used to own X.com, which was originally PayPal's name. He just got it back from PayPal, likely for a lot of money, but he's not yet sharing what he'll do with the very cool domain as a result. 4. DARPA hands out $65 million for computer-brain interfaces It's basically inevitable at this point that we'll be mixing our brains up with computers some day in the future. All I ask is for Google Chromecast support so that I can play multi-room music directly from my connected cranium. 5. Snap dips below IPO price Snap's market honeymoon is over, after it dropped below its IPO share price for the first time since going public. July 31 is the date for when the lock-up period expires for early shareholders, so we'll see wha happens then – it could be very bad. 6. Apple's ARKit looks like a big winner ARKit is a new feature Apple introduced for developers in iOS 11, and it's already being used by eager developers to build a ton of cool things. This will definitely result in a lot of fun stuff on iOS 11 launch day, but the question will be whether it continues to be cool once the novelty wears off. I have high hopes. 7. Waymo's Pacificas learn about emergency vehicles Waymo is giving its newest self-driving cars and sensor tech some quality time with emergency vehicles, including police cars and ambulances. This will help it be better able to respond correctly when encountering these in real life situations, which is hugely important for commercial service readiness. |