Google employees are still going strong and not letting up on their demands. Following a sit-in protesting retaliation last month, Googlers are making four demands.

“Google seems to have lost its mooring, and trust between workers and the company is deeply broken,” Google walkout organizers wrote on Medium today. “As the company progresses from crisis to crisis, it is clear Google management is failing, along with HR. It’s time to put HR on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) and bring in someone we trust to supervise it. It’s time to escalate.”

The first demand is for Google to meet the rest of the demands of the walkout. While Google did make some changes post-walkout, the company did not address all of the organizers’ demands. For example, Google failed to elevate its chief diversity officer to report directly to Pichai and also ignored the organizers’ request to add an employee representative to the board of directors.

Employees also want Alphabet CEO Larry Page to intervene and address the demands of the walkout.

“Larry controls Alphabet’s board and has the individual authority to make changes, where others do not,” the organizers wrote.

Additionally, employees are demanding Google unblock Meredith Whittaker’s transfer and let Claire Stapleton transfer to a new team. Whittaker, the lead of Google’s Open Research and one of the organizers of the walkout, said her role was “changed dramatically” while fellow walkout organizer Claire Stapleton said her manager told her she would be demoted and lose half of her reports.

“We call on Google to unblock Meredith’s transfer, and allow her to continue her work as before, fully funded and supported, and to allow Claire to transfer to a new team without continued retaliation and interference,” Googlers wrote.

Lastly, they want a transparent and open investigation of human resources and how it handles employee complaints. That’s because they say Google’s HR department is broken.

“Over and over again it prioritizes the company and the reputation of abusers and harassers over their victims,” they wrote. “The collateral damage is all around us. Time is up. We need third party investigators. Even Uber did this, bringing in Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington.”

Amidst scandals at Uber pertaining to sexual harassment, the company brought in an outside team to investigate the company’s culture. That’s what Googlers are now asking for. They want the investigators not to have any financial relationship with Google or Alphabet.

Google declined to comment but pointed to its previous statement regarding retaliation:

“We prohibit retaliation in the workplace and publicly share our very clear policy. To make sure that no complaint raised goes unheard at Google, we give employees multiple channels to report concerns, including anonymously, and investigate all allegations of retaliation.”

Facebook still won’t let you advertise for cryptocurrencies, exchanges, binaries, or ICOs without prior approval. But a year after banning all blockchain-related ads, it’s reopening to ones for “blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency” without the need for pre-approval.

The change could be a boon to an industry struggling for mainstream attention in the wake of the 2018 cryptocurrency price collapse that soured much of the public on the financial technology. Blockchain events were especially hit hard since Facebook’s local and interest targeting capabilities made it ideal for selling tickets to potential attendees.

Facebook’s goal was to prevent users from getting scammed by Initial Coin Offerings and other cryptocurrency deals where providers had little to no accountability. When Facebook users get scammed, they don’t just blame the scammer but the social network too. Facebook initially cast a wide net in its ban to prevent this. Users began seeing ads for blockchain education yesterday.

Additionally, beginning June 5th Facebook will ban ads for “promoting contracts for difference (CFDs), complex financial products that are often associated with predatory behavior. These products, due to their complexity, often mislead people.”

The news comes as more info on Facebook’s own blockchain group trickles out. Bloomberg’s Julie Verhage reports it now has over 50 employees, one-fifth hailing from PayPal where Facebook Blockchain’s head David Marcus was formerly president. They’re working on a stablecoin, potentially pegged to a bundle of currencies Facebook is trying to raise from outside investors in order to keep its cryptocurrency’s price stable.

Facebook’s stablecoin could allow zero-fee remittance to friends or family across borders or payments to merchants without traditional credit card processing fes, as we predicted last year. To that end, hiring PayPal talent makes sense. They already built a nearly ubiquitous checkout option for ecommerce. But because they act as a middleman for the money and assume some risk of fraud, PayPal charges fees on insured payments to merchants. Facebook could undercut those fees by using blockchain technology to instantly transfer value between accounts.

Microsoft’s yearly Imagine Cup student startup competition crowned its latest winner today: EasyGlucose, a non-invasive, smartphone-based method for diabetics to test their blood glucose. It and the two other similarly beneficial finalists presented today at Microsoft’s Build developers conference.

The Imagine Cup brings together winners of many local student competitions around the world with a focus on social good and, of course, Microsoft services like Azure. Last year’s winner was a smart prosthetic forearm that uses a camera in the palm to identify the object it is meant to grasp. (They were on hand today as well, with an improved prototype.)

The three finalists hailed from the U.K., India, and the U.S.; EasyGlucose was a one-person team from my alma mater UCLA.

EasyGlucose takes advantage of machine learning’s knack for spotting the signal in noisy data, in this case the tiny details of the eye’s iris. It turns out, as creator Brian Chiang explained in his presentation, that the iris’s “ridges, crypts, and furrows” hide tiny hints as to their owner’s blood glucose levels.

These features aren’t the kind of thing you can see with the naked eye (or rather, on the naked eye), but by clipping a macro lens onto a smartphone camera Chiang was able to get a clear enough image that his computer vision algorithms were able to analyze them.

The resulting blood glucose measurement is significantly better than any non-invasive measure and more than good enough to serve in place of the most common method used by diabetics: stabbing themselves with a needle every couple hours. Currently EasyGlucose gets within 7 percent of the pinprick method, well above what’s needed for “clinical accuracy,” and Chiang is working on closing that gap. No doubt this innovation will be welcomed warmly by the community, as well as the low cost: $10 for the lens adapter, and $20 per month for continued support via the app.

It’s not a home run, or not just yet: Naturally, a technology like this can’t go straight from the lab (or in this case the dorm) to global deployment. It needs FDA approval first, though it likely won’t have as protracted a review period as, say, a new cancer treatment or surgical device. In the meantime, EasyGlucose has a patent pending, so no one can eat its lunch while it navigates the red tape.

As the winner, Chiang gets $100,000, plus $50,000 in Azure credit, plus the coveted one-on-one mentoring session with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

The other two Imagine Cup finalists also used computer vision (among other things) in service of social good.

Caeli is taking on the issue of air pollution by producing custom high-performance air filter masks intended for people with chronic respiratory conditions who have to live in polluted areas. This is a serious problem in many places that cheap or off-the-shelf filters can’t really solve.

It uses your phone’s front-facing camera to scan your face and pick the mask shape that makes the best seal against your face. What’s the point of a high-tech filter if the unwanted particles just creep in the sides?

Part of the mask is a custom-designed compact nebulizer for anyone who needs medication delivered in mist form, for example someone with asthma. The medicine is delivered automatically according to the dosage and schedule set in the app — which also tracks pollution levels in the area so the user can avoid hot zones.

Finderr is an interesting solution to the problem of visually impaired people being unable to find items they’ve left around their home. By using a custom camera and computer vision algorithm, the service watches the home and tracks the placement of everyday items: keys, bags, groceries, and so on. Just don’t lose your phone, since you’ll need that to find the other stuff.

You call up the app and tell it (by speaking) what you’re looking for, then the phone’s camera it determines your location relative to the item you’re looking for, giving you audio feedback that guides you to it in a sort of “getting warmer” style, and a big visual indicator for those who can see it.

After their presentations, I asked the creators a few questions about upcoming challenges, since as is usual in the Imagine Cup, these companies are extremely early stage.

Right now EasyGlucose is working well but Chiang emphasized that the model still needs lots more data and testing across multiple demographics. It’s trained on 15,000 eye images but many more will be necessary to get the kind of data they’ll need to present to the FDA.

Finderrr recognizes all the images in the widely used ImageNet database, but the team’s Ferdinand Loesch pointed out that others can be added very easily with 100 images to train with. As for the upfront cost, the U.K. offers a 500-pound grant to visually-impaired people for this sort of thing, and they engineered the 360-degree ceiling-mounted camera to minimize the number needed to cover the home.

Caeli noted that the nebulizer, which really is a medical device in its own right, is capable of being sold and promoted on its own, perhaps licensed to medical device manufacturers. There are other smart masks coming out, but he had a pretty low opinion of them (not strange in a competitor but there isn’t some big market leader they need to dethrone). He also pointed out that in the target market of India (from which they plan to expand later) isn’t as difficult to get insurance to cover this kind of thing.

While these are early-stage companies, they aren’t hobbies — though admittedly many of their founders are working on them between classes. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear more about them and others from Imagine Cup pulling in funding and hiring in the next year.

We’re hunting for a cadre of exciting early-stage startups to attend and exhibit at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 as part of our TC Top Pick program — for free. Not only that, if your company makes the cut, you’ll get the VIP treatment and receive a ton of media and investor attention. Sounds great, right? You bet. Gotta be a catch, right? Wrong.

The only thing you need to do is apply to be a TC Top Pick.

The application is super quick and easy, but the selection process is very competitive. Highly discerning TechCrunch editors will review every application. They’ll select up to five startups to represent each of these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

TC Top Pick designees receive a free Startup Alley Exhibition package that includes one full day of exhibiting alongside hundreds of startups in Startup Alley, our expo hall of opportunity. They also receive three Founder passes (good for all three days of the show), use of CrunchMatch — our investor-to-startup matching platform — access to the Disrupt SF 2019 press list, invitations to special events at Disrupt SF and a prime location in the Startup Alley.

In a classic “but wait, there’s more” moment, a TechCrunch editor will interview each Top Pick live on the Showcase Stage — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms. That kind of media exposure drives opportunity to your startup long after the show closes.

Here’s a real-world example of what a TC Top Picks designation can do for your startup.

UATAG, which stands for “unique authentication tag,” earned a TC Top Pick designation in the Privacy/Security category at Disrupt SF 2018. The startup’s authentication tags are designed to protect high-end luxury goods and other valuable items from forgery and counterfeiting. The unbreakable tags use two levels of security — the unique way that glass shatters plus blockchain ledger and data records.

Taras Rodtsevych, UATAG’s founder and CEO, said that the connections his team made as a TC Top Pick helped them find local representation in San Francisco, and it also resulted in two very promising leads.

“Currently we’re conducting negotiations with two major U.S. brands that are interested in our tags,” said Rodtsevych. I can’t disclose them yet, but they’ve already received and are in the process of testing the prototypes. We hope to build and expand on these relationships.”

Exhibiting in Startup Alley is an opportunity to make connections with influencers you might not normally meet, and that was certainly true for UATAG.

“We made valuable contacts in the fashion and logistics industries, and we met potential technical partners interested in becoming our local representatives in the U.S., Japan and Europe,” said Rodtsevych. “We even found a company that offers different kinds of back-office services — like accounting, payroll and HR — that are essential to registering our company in the U.S.”

Remember that Showcase Stage interview we mentioned?

“The Showcase interview with Greg Kumparak was an exceptional opportunity,” said Rodtsevych. “So far, that video has earned us 3,500 views on YouTube, 13,600 on Facebook and 12,700 on Twitter. It increased our reputation and made us recognizable worldwide.”

Of course, there’s more than one way to grab the spotlight at Disrupt SF. While you’re applying to be a TC Top Pick, why not apply to compete in Startup Battlefield, too? Our epic startup pitch competition carries a $100,000 equity-free cash prize.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4. Apply now to be a TC Top Pick. It’s free and there’s no catch. Just big opportunity.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt SF? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Almost three years ago, as the gig-economy company TaskRabbit was nearing its eventual sale to Ikea, its founder, Leah Busque, headed into the venture world. More specifically, she joined Fuel Capital, a firm founded in 2013 by Chris Howard, a VC who’d spent nearly six years as a principal with Ignition Parters before deciding to break out and do his own thing.

Things have seemed to go well since the two teamed up. The early-stage firm, which looks for startups building developer tools, business software, marketplaces, and consumer goods and services — and which closed its second fund with $45 million in late 2015 — just closed its third fund with $75 million in capital commitments.

Adding Busque as a partner is a move that Fuel’s limited partners apparently like.

The young firm’s performance is also presumably a major factor. Though Fuel is relatively low-flying compared with many of its venture peers, its exits include CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat in January of last year for $250 million, and Nervana’s sale to Intel for more than $350 million in 2016.

Fuel also has stakes in an impressive number of in fast-growing and highly valued companies, including Katerra, Flexport, Convoy — all so-called unicorns — along with Figma, Mesosphere, CTRL-Labs, and Lattice. (At Ignition, Howard also wrote one of the first checks to PagerDuty, which went public last month.)

Given the track record they are building, we asked Howard and Busque yesterday how they think about teams; they told us that they lean toward first-time founders, saying that as Silicon Valley outsiders (Busque is from Boston and Howard is from Seattle), people looking for an inside edge resonate with both.

Like a lot of firms, Fuel is also looking for founders that have been building toward their product or service through their lived experiences. Busque herself founded TaskRabbit in 2008 after finding it forever difficult to run errands while juggling her job as a software engineer at IBM.

As for the size checks that both are writing, they tell us they’ve always matched investments to their size and strategy and that with this newest fund, most first checks will range from $750,000 to $1 million.

It’s enough to start leading rounds, they say, though they also plan to partner with the firms with which it they’ve long partnered.

Indeed, just last month, Fuel led a $2.7 million seed round in Fuzzbuzz, a year-old, San Francisco-based startup aiming to deliver a class of automated software testing known as fuzzing. We have more on that deal here.

Where top VCs are investing in Media, Entertainment & Gaming

Our media columnist Eric Peckham (who is hard at work on the Unity EC-1, which we will start to publish here shortly) pinged his network of media investors to figure out what the media VC world is up to in mid-2019:

Here are the media investment theses of: Cyan Banister (Founders Fund), Alex Taussig (Lightspeed), Matt Hartman (betaworks), Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia), Jordan Fudge (Sinai), Christian Dorffer (Sweet Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor), MG Siegler (GV), and Eric Hippeau (Lerer Hippeau).

Lots of interesting ideas in Eric’s piece, but one that I thought was particularly interesting was from Matt Hartman at Betaworks:

In 2019, I’m paying attention to Synthetic Media and the continued fluidity between what’s real and artificially generated inside of social media. Synthetic celebrities will be complemented by synthesized voice as these content types go mainstream. The technology tools to create these characters will improve and we’ll also see technology built to detect malicious use of these new tools.

The future of mobility is the big topic driving TC Sessions: Mobility 2019, which takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Will it include flying cars? Space tourism? Transporter beams? Before we can go where no person has gone before, we need to foster a deep bench of thinkers, makers and technologists.

Students are essential to the future of mobility. If you’re in high school or college and have a passion for mobility tech, take advantage of our deeply discounted student tickets. Come to TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 to meet, network with and learn from some of mobility’s most creative thinkers, makers and investors.

Student tickets cost only $45, which means you’ll save $250 over the general admission price. Apply here for a student ticket and, once we verify your student status, we’ll send you an email with your ticket.

What can you expect at TC Sessions: Mobility? Our day-long conference — with more than 1,000 attendees — is packed with discussions, demos and workshops with the brightest founders, technologists and investors in mobility and transportation.

You’ll hear from industry experts like Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s CTO and VP of engineering. Waymo started out as Google’s super-secret self-driving car project, and Dolgov’s been involved since the beginning. Learn about the early days, how the company evolved and where it’s headed. We’ll dig into the tech behind self-driving cars, too.

You’ll also hear from Jump founder Ryan Rzepecki and Katie DeWitt, the SVP of product at Scoot, as they talk about the future of micromobility. That includes topics like asset management, unit economics, partnering with cities, data sharing and more.

That’s just a small sample of what you’ll experience. Check out our list of speakers — we’re announcing more every week. If you’d like to speak, demo your technology or nominate someone else, you can submit an application right here.

If $45 is still too rich for your budget, you can earn a free ticket. Simply join our Ambassador Program by downloading the Social Ladder app. Share your unique code with friends, family and colleagues to sell tickets. When you earn enough points, you score a free pass to TC Mobility 2019.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place July 10 in San Jose, Calif. Students are the future of mobility, so book your student ticket today. Join us to learn, share and connect with a community that creates the opportunity to build the future.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy and a Core Faculty Member in Women’s Studies at the University of New Hampshire. She is the lead “axion wrangler” and a social media team member for the NASA STROBE-X Probe Concept Study.

The first Black woman in history to hold a faculty position in theoretical cosmology, Prescod-Weinstein  is also a Twitter activist who frequently goes viral, a prolific writer and editor in multiple genres and disciplines, and the author of a soon to come column in the New Scientist, and a 2021 book, The Disordered Cosmos: from Dark Matter to Black Lives Matter.

A millennial, she is at the vanguard of a new cohort of brilliant, young, tech-savvy academics who are conducting important research in science and technology while also gracefully shouldering the responsibility of helping transform the way many of us think about what it means to be a scientist or technologist and who we think of when we imagine those categories.

Why interview a theoretical cosmologist for this series on tech ethics? Because tech, like science, has much work to do in reckoning with issues of race, gender, inclusion, and intersectionality.

As I spoke with her recently, I pictured young women and men of color or other marginalized backgrounds, looking to find their own place in the extraordinary world that is our tech culture/industry (I call tech a religion to underscore its size and influence, but more on that in some other column) and wondering if a) they will be given a just and equitable opportunity to demonstrate their innate abilities; and b) if in their quest to “make it” in this world they will have to somehow ‘sell out.’

Prescod-Weinstein tells the story, below, of a profound ethical dilemma she faced at the very beginning of her career in science.

Prescod-Weinstein quoted Daniel Berrigan, about whom she first read in an Adrienne Rich poem about the“Catonsville Nine,” a group of anti-war activists who, in 1968, took hundreds of draft files in wire baskets to the parking lot of the draft board in Catonsville, MD. Berrigan, his brother and fellow Catholic priest Phillip, and their seven colleagues dumped the files out, doused them in homemade napalm, and set them on fire.

Berrigan later explained he was inspired to take such dramatic action, rather than merely talking about ethics, because he believed that mere talk would place him “in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence.”

In Prescod-Weinstein’s story and in her reference to Berrigan, we can find a parable about the need for inclusion and justice in today’s tech world. When we talk about tech ethics, after all, are we talking mainly about having yet more academic discussions about self-regulation or even incremental government policy changes? Or will we eventually need to grapple with burning issues to which we can only respond meaningfully with hard choices or dramatic actions?

What we all make of this, and of several of other ethical questions raised in the conversation below, will determine so much about the future of ethics in tech.

---

Greg E.: You have been playing a prominent role in facilitating conversations about justice, inclusion, and intersectionality in the science world. I wanted to speak with you about your activism because it seems to me discussions are also needed in the tech world, but seem to be happening even less in tech. What do you think?

Chanda P.W.:

Pandora’s integration with new owner SiriusXM continues today, as the music streaming service will now benefit from the numerous SiriusXM guests and artists who come through its New York studios on a regular basis. Now, those guests’ interviews will contribute to Pandora Stories — the recently launched product that combines music and podcasts in a new format.

Launched in February, the idea behind Pandora Stories is to allow music listeners hear from their favorite artists as they play their music. For example, the artist might talk about the song’s back story, or what inspired them to write it. These are the sorts of insights that might otherwise be covered by an interview with an artist on a podcast program, but typically the podcast would then only play a clip from the song. In Pandora Stories, however, the storytelling is interspersed with full tracks.

The product launched with just over a half-dozen artists’ stories and has continued to grow its lineup. To date, Pandora Stories has featured music-enhanced stories from John Legend, Rob Thomas, 2 Chainz, Lauren Alaina, Daddy Yankee, Perry Farrell, and several others.

Now, Pandora is adding to that lineup with 15 new stories from SiriusXM guests. This includes big names like Adele, Lady Gaga, Blake Shelton, P!nk, Twenty One Pilots, Queen, Fall Out Boy, Stevie Nicks, J. Cole, Mariah Carey, Darius Rucker, Mumford and Sons, Phil Collins, and more.

SiriusXM has been quick to leverage its $3.5 billion acquisition of Pandora to benefit both businesses in recent months. Already, the company had rolled out talk show programming from SiriusXM as podcasts and Pandora, and launched a music station powered by listener data, Pandora NOW, across both services.

In addition to helping Pandora listeners get a taste of SiriusXM’s content, Pandora Stories also helps the music streaming service better compete against rivals — particularly Spotify, which has begun heavily investing in podcasts this year, with acquisitions of exclusive content, podcast studios and software for podcast creation.

Unrelated to the expansion of Pandora Stories, the company also announced Pandora was now available to Waze users on iOS, following the service’s launch on the navigation app on Android back in October. The integration here goes both ways — you can control Pandora in Waze, as well as see your Waze navigation in the Pandora app.

Who would have thought Rent the Runway would emerge as a competitor to The Wing and all traditional brick-and-mortar retail?

Its newest store, complete with co-working space, shows it’s more than just a designer gown rental service. Shortly after landing a $125 million investment at a $1 billion valuation, Rent the Runway (RTR) has replanted roots in San Francisco, opening an 8,300 square foot West Coast flagship in the city’s Union Square neighborhood.

Located on 228 Grant Avenue, the store is RTR’s fifth and largest location yet. In addition to 3,000 pieces of merchandise curated daily, the store includes stylists, a coffee cart, space for evening programming and networking events, desk space for co-working, a beauty bar and some 20 dressing rooms.

“Think of it like your gym or your Starbucks; it’s part of what you do on a daily basis,” RTR chief operating officer Maureen Sullivan told TechCrunch.

RTR was founded in 2009 by Jenn Hyman and Jenny Fleiss as a website for renting expensive, designer dresses. Since then it’s expanded to become a fashion rental marketplace equipped with accessories, casual pieces and its bread and butter: formal wear.

The company’s core product, RTR Reserve, lets customers rent one piece of clothing for four to eight days with prices starting at $30 per garment. RTR Update, at $89 per month, gives customers access to up to four pieces of clothing per month. And finally, RTR Unlimited charges users $159 for unlimited swaps every month, meaning you get up to four pieces at a time but can visit a store daily and swap the pieces out, if you wanted.

Its new space is essentially The Wing with an enormous closet of designer clothing available to rent. RTR even used the same all-female design team that crafted The Wing’s spaces to create its newest spot, which mimics The Wing’s airy, West Elm-like vibe.

Of course, RTR isn’t trying to compete with co-working spaces or salons or coffee shops; rather, the team recognizes that sometimes women need to find beautiful clothes and get shit done simultaneously.

“Our subscriber is a busy working woman,” Sullivan said. “Sometimes she may want to come in and work.”

The new store was built for the 21st century tech-enabled consumer. A “physical manifestation of the shared closet,” the store’s technology allows customers to return rented items within a few seconds, check out with their RTR Pass on their phone and pick up orders without having to wait in line.

RTR currently operates physical stores in Chicago, New York, Woodland Hills, Calif. and Washington, DC. Sullivan says San Francisco is the company’s third largest market behind New York and DC.

RTR opened its first standalone location in San Francisco last year and quickly realized the space was too small for its expanding crowd of subscribers. While the service was intended to be all-digital, data collected by RTR indicated users wanted to try on clothes before they rented. With that in mind, RTR will continue to open additional stores and “experiment with its physical presence” in other ways, too.

“Data is at the heart of our company,” Sullivan said. “We aren’t a typical direct-to-consumer brand.”

RTR has raised a total of $521 million in equity funding from Franklin Templeton Investments, T. Rowe Price, Female Founders Fund and others.