Technology

For a decade, Apple has solely relied on third-party sellers, stores and marketplaces to sell its products in India. That will begin to change this year.

At the companyannual shareholder meeting Wednesday, chief executive Tim Cook told investors that Apple will open its online store in India, the worldsecond largest smartphone market, at some point this year, and set up its first flagship brick-and-mortar store next year.

&I&m a huge believer in the opportunity in India,& said Cook. &Ita country with a vibrancy and demographics that are just unparalleled.&

TechCrunch reported last month that Apple was planning to open its online store in Q3 this year and was unlikely to be able to have its brick-and-mortar store ready in the country this year.

India, perhaps the last great growth market for American technology giants, has been a conundrum for Apple and several firms that sell premium items.

Ita big market that continues to report growth, but most people in the country can&t afford Appleproducts. In fact, the vast majority of smartphones that ship in India carry a price tag of $150 or lower, according to research firm Counterpoint.

For Apple, the other challenge has been the heavy import duty that New Delhi levies on electronic items. This has made iPhone even more expensive for people in India, as the company passes the additional cost to customers.

Apple has attempted to broaden its appeal in India by looking to reduce prices of its handsets. For years, it urged the government to provide it with some tax benefits. When those talks did not materialize, Apple moved to do something that all the Chinese phone makers have done in India: assemble smartphones locally.

New Delhi provides several incentives to companies that assemble electronic items locally. Two years into the process, Apple contractors Foxconn and Wistron are assembling a range of iPhone models in India, and that has lowered the prices for a number of models (except those in the current-generation lineup.)

These moves have already proven useful for the company. Apple shipped close to 925,000 iPhone units in India in the quarter that ended in December, research firm Canalys estimated. That figure, up 200% year-over-year, was the iPhone-makerbest year in the country to date, the research firm added.

Madhumita Chaudhary, an analyst with Canalys, said Appledecision to become more aggressive with pricing — partnering with banks to offer more incentives to customers — helped the company improve its position in a market with 99% Android smartphones.

Apple has also held discussions with content studios to bulk up its movie and TV show offerings for the Indian audience. Three years ago, for instance, it was in late stages of talks to acquire the Indian business of Eros Now for $300 million — something which has not been previously reported — with an option to expand its stake in the publicly listed global company, sources with direct knowledge of the matter told TechCrunch a few months ago.

But the deal did not materialize.

TechCrunch also reported last month that Cook may plan an India visit for the opening of the online store. Apple did not comment on that story.

Indiaeased sourcing norms for single-brand retailers last year, which paved the way for companies like Apple to open online stores before they establish a presence in the brick-and-mortar market.

ItT-minus one week to the big day, March 3, when more than 1,000 startuppers will convene in Berkeley, Calif. for TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020. We&re talking a hefty cross-section representing big companies and exciting new startups. We&re talking some of the most innovative thinkers, makers, researchers, investors and influencers — all focused on creating the future of these two world-changing technologies.

Don&t miss out on this one-day conference of interviews, panel discussions, Q-As, workshops and demos dedicated to every aspect of robotics and AI. General admission tickets cost $345. Snag your ticket now and save, because prices go up at the door. Want to save even more? Save 15% when you buy four or more tickets. Are you a student? Grab a ticket for just $50.

What do we have planned for this TC Session? Herea small sample of the fab programming that awaits you, and be sure to check out the full TC Session agenda here.

• Q-A with Founders: This is your chance to ask questions of Sébastien Boyer, co-founder and CEO of FarmWise and Noah Ready-Campbell, founder and CEO of Built Robotics — some of the most successful robotics founders on our stage.
• Disney Robotics: Imagineers from Disney will present state-of-the-art robotics built to populate its theme parks.
• Investing in Robotics and AI: Lessons from the IndustryVCs: Dror Berman, founding partner at Innovation Endeavors, Jocelyn Goldfein, managing director at Zetta Venture Partners and Eric Migicovsky, general partner at Y Combinator will discuss the rising tide of venture capital funding in robotics and AI. The investors bring a combination of early-stage investing and corporate venture capital expertise, sharing a fondness for the wild world of robotics and AI investing.

And — new this year — don&t miss watching the finalists from our Pitch Night competition. Founders of these early-stage companies, hand-picked by TechCrunch editors, will take the stage and have just five minutes to present their wares.

With just one more week until TC Sessions: Robotics + AI 2020 kicks off, you don&t have much time left to save on tickets. Why pay more at the door? Buy your ticket now and join the best and brightest for a full day dedicated to all things robotics.

When Keith Block joined Salesforce from Oracle in 2013, the CRM giant was already a successful SaaS vendor on a billion-dollar quarterly revenue cadence. When the co-CEO announced he was stepping down yesterday, the company reported revenue of $4.9 billion for the quarter.

During his tenure, the companyrevenue more than quadrupled, earning an impressive $17.1 billion last year, and, as Block announced at the earnings call, the company he was leaving was forecasting revenue of $21 billion for FY2021.

Consider that it was not that long ago (in May 2017) that we wrote about the company reaching the $10 billion mark. Itperilously easy to get lost in these numbers, to take them for granted and think they don&t mean as much as they do. Ithard work to build a billion-dollar SaaS business, never mind $10 billion or $20 billion.

Yet Salesforce is embarking on unchartered territory for a SaaS company. Itapproaching $20 billion in revenue for a single year.

Growth through acquisition

Granted, the company keeps growing revenue by making big deals like buying MuleSoft for $6.5 billion in 2018 or Tableau for $15.7 billion in 2019, or just this week buying Vlocity for a mere $1.33 billion. That means the company spent more than $25 billion over a couple of years to buy substantial companies that will help them build their business.

Block took a moment to brag a bit about his accomplishments, including how some of those purchases performed, during his swan song call with Salesforce, calling it a capstone of his time at Salesforce:

In Q4, we grew 32% in the Americas, 28% in APAC and 47% in EMEA in constant currency. Now that includes our recent acquisitions. And at the close of FY 2020, the number of Salesforce customers spending $20 million annually grew 34%.

Think about that last number for just a minute. This a SaaS vendor with the number of customers spending $20 million growing by 34%. Block helped orchestrate that growth and worked with the executive team to help determine which companies it should be targeting.

At a press conference in 2016 at Dreamforce, he discussed Salesforceacquisition strategy. At the time, it had bought 10 of 12 companies it would end up acquiring that year. It would buy only one in 2017, before revving up again in 2018. Herewhat he said about what they look for in a company, as we reported in an article at the time:

We look at culture. Will it be a good cultural fit? Is it a good product fit? Is there talent? Is there financial value? What are the risks of assimilating the company into our company?

Whatnext for Block?

There is no word on what Block will do next beyond acting as an advisor to his former co-CEO Marc Benioff, who took time in the earnings call to thank his colleague for his time at Salesforce. As well he should.

As Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research point outs, Block leaves a big hole as he steps away. &If there is no equivalent replacement, you will see a significant impact in sales. Keith brought industries and sales discipline,& Wang told TechCrunch

It will be interesting to watch what he does next, and who, if anyone, will benefit from his vast experience helping to build the most successful pure SaaS company on the planet.

As much as we&d all like to believe that our houses are built with perfectly square angles and other highly regular measurements, thatrarely the case — which makes remodeling complex and tedious. ShapeMeasure hopes to alleviate that pain with a device that automatically measures a space and a robotic mill that cuts the required lumber precisely to size, shortening and easing the process by huge amounts.

Founder Ben Blumer, who was exposed to the art of building and repair early by his father, a general contractor, had a brainwave that became the company during some renovations of his own.

&I was shocked to see our flooring installer, who had 10 years of experience, and was excellent at what he did, take over an hour to install a single stair,& Blumer said. &I started thinking, ‘a little bit of technology could go a long way here.& &

Finding himself at the time free to work on such a project, he recruited a former general contractor friend and applied to HAX, which soon shipped them off to Shenzhen to pursue their idea.

The main issue is stairs: they&re tricky, and especially in older homes can be pretty off-kilter. So although you know each stair is about 35 inches wide, it might be 35 and 3/64 inches, while the next one could be 34 and 61/64. Likewise, the angles might be ever so slightly off the 90 degrees or whatever they theoretically should be. Painstakingly measuring every single stair and manually cutting wood to those many slightly different dimensions is extremely time-consuming. The tool ShapeMeasure built makes it literally a push-button affair.

The device they settled on is essentially a super-precise lidar that measures around itself in wide arc, and the exact details of which comprise part of the companysecret sauce. This gives the precise dimensions and attachment angles of the area around it, in the first intended use case a stair. The design, helped along by HAXNoel Joyce, looks a bit like a giant Dust Buster by way of the original &Alien.&

Obviously his shirt contradicts my headline, but if you think about the cutting as an automated process rather than something a person has to do, mine makes sense.

&We were working with Noel Joyce, HAXlead industrial designer. We wanted a product that looked and felt like a tool. We figured, if you&re trying to convince contractors to try something new, it should feel familiar,& Blumer said. &We spent hundreds of hours sourcing parts and re-engineering our scanning mechanism so that it could fit into Noelbeautiful form factor. Turns out, contractors don&t care what it looks like. They liked the design, but were way more excited for the functionality.&

Once the shapes are scanned in and checked, that information can be beamed off to ShapeMeasureother device, a robotic lumber sizing system that cuts wood into the exact size and shape necessary to fit together as stairs. Of course, the contractor still has to bring them to the location and attach them by whatever means they see fit, but what was once a process with perhaps hundreds of steps has been simplified by an order of magnitude.

The machine is similar to other lumber-cutting devices, but simpler and easier to operate.

&There are lots of automatic cutting systems — often big, heavy, expensive and operated by professional CNC technicians. To cut flooring on a machine like that involves setting up jigs, clamping and reclamping each board, and generating custom gcode for each stair we cut,& Blumer said. They can be several times more costly and difficult to employ. &The cutting solution we&re building is compact, requires no clamping, and can be operated with just a few hours of training.&

Itnot just about length and width, either — molding and other flourishes on the stairs can make complex cuts necessary that would be impractical or at the very least extremely time-consuming to attempt manually.

Examples of complex cuts made by the ShapeMeasure machine.

The result is that the installation process from start to finish is about four times faster, they determined. If this seems a bit optimistic, know that it isn&t just armchair theorizing — they were careful to back up these numbers from the start.

&We take our speedup data really seriously,& said Blumer. &This is our top metric! One of the first purchases I made for the company was a dozen stopwatches. We&ve done installations in the ShapeMeasure lab and on real, messy construction sites — filming, timing and logging every moment.&

Interestingly, the precut lumber made other improvements possible — the team designed a bucket to accommodate the increased rate at which the installer uses glue and other parts. Ita bit like if you improved painting speed so much that your new bottleneck was mixing and pouring the paint into roller trays fast enough.

Currently the company is working on establishing standard practices and packaging so that a ShapeMeasure µfactory& can be set up easily anywhere in the country on short notice. And they&re &considering& raising money before then to accelerate the process. Blumer built the prototype with his own money and they pulled in a bit from HAX and then a small pre-seed round to get things started.

With luck and a bit of elbow grease, ShapeMeasure could turn out to be a real differentiator in the contractor space — every hour counts, as does every dollar in an estimate.

Weeks after Uber exited Indiafood delivery market, conceding defeat to local giants Swiggy and Zomato, a new player is gearing up to challenge the heavily-backed duopoly: Amazon.

The e-commerce giant plans to enter the Indian food delivery market in the coming weeks, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. The launch of the service, which would be offered as part of either Amazon Prime Now or Amazon Fresh platform, could happen as soon as next month, we are told.

In the run up to the launch, the e-commerce giant has been testing its food delivery service with select restaurant partners in Bangalore, the source said, requesting anonymity as details of the new business are still private.

The company has been working on its food delivery business for several quarters and was previously aiming to launch it during the festival of Diwali. Itunclear what caused the delay.

TechCrunch could not ascertain the kind of business agreement Amazon has formed with Indian restaurant partners — many of which have grown frustrated with online food delivery players. An Amazon spokesperson was not immediately available for comment.

Amazonforay into the food delivery market would create new challenges for Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy, and Zomato, a 10-year-old startup that acquired UberEats business in India for about $180 million in January.

Both the startups, having raised more than $2 billion together, are still not profitable, losing more than $15 million each month to acquire new customers and sustain existing ones.

Anand Lunia, a VC at India Quotient, said in a recent podcast that the food delivery firms have little choice but to keep subsidizing the cost of food items on their platform as otherwise most of their customers can&t afford them.

Figuring out a path to profitability is especially challenging in India as unlike in the developed markets such as the U.S., where the value of each delivery item is about $33; in India, a similar item carries the price tag of $4, according to estimates by Bangalore-based research firm RedSeer.

In recent years, both Swiggy and Zomato have expanded beyond food delivery businesses. Swiggy today runs what it claims to be the largest cloud kitchen network in India, and has also expanded to delivery of just about any item (not just food). Zomato has been working on &Project Kisan,& to procure raw material directly from farmers and fishermen in an attempt to assume control of the supply of items to restaurants.

Thatnot to say that it would be very easy for Amazon to scale its food delivery business in India. Swiggy alone operates in more than 520 cities in India and maintains partnership with over 160,000 partners.

Swiggy is adding 10,000 new partners to its platform each month, it said last week on the sidelines of its latest fundraise announcement. At stake is Indiafood delivery market that was worth $4.2 billion as of the end of last year, according to RedSeer.

Amazon has established a dense delivery network in India through its own logistics chain and also through partnership with thousands of neighborhood stores.

The companymove comes as Flipkart, its chief rival in India, is foraying into food retail business. Flipkart, which sold a majority stake in the company to Walmart for $16 billion last year, has registered an entity called &Flipkart Farmermart Pvt Ltd& that will focus on food retail, said Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Flipkart Group CEO, in a statement to TechCrunch in October.

The extended business for the Indian firm represents &an important part of our efforts to boost Indian agriculture as well as food processing industry in the country,& he said, adding that the company is already working with hundreds of thousands of small farmers for the business.Flipkart has already committed $258 million to the new venture. Last month, it piloted delivery of fresh fruits and vegetable, Indian newspaper Economic Times reported.

When it comes to the so-called &consumerization of the enterprise,& a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trendfinal form. Brooklyn-based Air is building a digital asset manager for communications teams that aren&t satisfied with more general cloud storage options and want something that can show off visual files with a bit more pizzazz.

The startup tells TechCrunch that they have closed $6 million in funding led by Lerer Hippeau . RedSea Ventures, Advancit Capital and WndrCo also participated.

General-purpose cloud storage options from Google or Dropbox don&t always handle digital assets well — especially when it comes to previewing items, and Airmore focused digital asset management competitors often require dedicated managers inside the org, the company says. Air has a pretty straightforward interface that looks more like a desktop site from Facebook or Pinterest, with a focus on thumbnails and video previews thatsimple and sleek.

Air is trying to capitalize on the trend toward greater à la carte software spend for teams looking to phase in products with very specific toolsets. The team is generally charging $10 per user per month, with 100GB of storage included.

&Adobe is an amazing suite of products, but with the idea that companies are mandating the tools that their employees use versus letting their employees choose — it makes a lot of sense that teams are going to ultimately end up having more autonomy and creating better work when they&re using tools that they care about,& Lerer Hippeau managing partner Ben Lerer tells TechCrunch.

Air lets customers migrate files from Dropbox or Google Drive to its AWS-hosted storage platform, which displays files like photos, videos, PDFs, fonts and other visual assets as Pinterest-esque boards. The app is a way to view and store files, but Airplatform play focuses pretty heavily on giving co-workers the ability to comment and tag assets. Collaborating around files is a pretty easy sell; a couple of users discussing which photo they like best for a particular marketing campaign doesn&t require too much imagination.

The team has been focusing largely on attracting users in roles like brand marketing managers, content coordinators and social media managers as a way of infiltrating and scaling vertically inside marketing departments.

&What Airtable did to spreadsheets and what Notion did to docs, we&re doing for visual work,& CEO Shane Hegde told TechCrunch in an interview. &As we think about how we differentiate, itreally that we&re a workspace collaboration tool, we&re not just cloud storage or digital asset management…&