Bolt Mobility, the Miami-based micromobility startup co-founded by Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt, appears to have vanished without a trace from several of its U.S. markets.
In some cases, the departure has been abrupt, leaving cities with abandoned equipment, unanswered calls and emails and lots of questions.
Bolt has stopped operating in at least five U.S. cities, including Portland, Oregon, Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski in Vermont and Richmond, California, according to city officials. City representatives also said they were unable to reach anyone at Bolt, including its CEO Ignacio Tzoumas.
TechCrunch has made multiple attempts to reach Bolt and those who have backed the company. Emails to Bolt’s communications department, several employees and investors went unanswered. Even the customer service line doesn’t appear to be staffed. The PR agency that was representing Bolt in March of this year told TechCrunch it is no longer working with the company.
Bolt halted its service in Portland on July 1. The company’s failure to provide the city with updated insurance and pay some outstanding fees, Portland subsequently suspended Bolt’s permit to operate there, according to a city spokesperson.
Bolt Mobility (not to be confused with the European transportation super app also named Bolt ) was on what appeared to be a growth streak about 18 months ago. The company acquired in January 2021 the assets of Last Mile Holdings , which owned micromobility companies Gotcha and OjO Electric. The purchaser opened up 48 new markets to Bolt Mobility, most of which were smaller cities such as Raleigh, North Carolina, St. Augustine, Florida and Mobile, Alabama.
After purchasing Last Mile’s assets, Bolt agreed to continue as the bike share vendor in Chittenden County, Vermont, including cities Burlington, South Burlington and Winooski.
That license was even renewed in 2022, said Bryan Davis, senior transportation planner of the county.
“We learned a couple of weeks ago (from them) that Bolt is ceasing operations,” Davis told TechCrunch via email, noting that Bolt ceased operations July 1, but actually informed the county a week later. “They’ve vanished, leaving equipment behind and emails and calls unanswered. We’re unable to reach anyone, but it seems they’ve closed shop in other markets as well.”
Sandy Thibault, executive director of Chittenden Area Transportation Management Association, told the Burlington Free Press that Bolt communicated that employees were being let go and the company’s board of directors was discussing next steps.
A spokesperson at Burlington relayed similar information.
“All of our contacts at Bolt, including their CEO, have gone radio silent and have not replied to our emails,” Robert Goulding, public information manager at Burlington’s Department of Public Works, told TechCrunch.
Davis went on to say that about 100 bikes have been left on the ground completely inoperable and with dead batteries. Chittenden County has given Bolt a time frame in which to claim or remove the company’s vehicles otherwise the county will take ownership of them.
Bolt also appears to have stopped operating in Richmond, California, according to Richmond Mayor Tom Butt’s e-forum.
“Unfortunately, Bolt apparently went out of business without prior notification or removal of their capital equipment from city property,” wrote Butt . “They recently missed the city’s monthly meeting check-in and have been unresponsive to all their clients throughout all their markets.”
Butt went on to say that the city is coming up with a plan to remove all the abandoned equipment – about 250 e-bikes that were available at hub locations like BART stations and the ferry terminal – and asked people to refrain from vandalizing the bikes until the city could come up with a solution.
TechCrunch has reached out to several other cities in which Bolt operates and has not been able to confirm that the company has stopped operating entirely. In fact, a spokesperson from St. Augustine told TechCrunch Bolt’s bike share was running as usual.
Bolt’s social media has also been rather inactive in recent weeks. The company hasn’t posted on Instagram since June 11 or on Twitter since June 2.
The last time TechCrunch heard from Bolt was nine months ago when the company was peddling its in-app navigation system that it dubbed “MobilityOS.” At the time, the startup promised that its next generation of scooters would include a smartphone mount that would double as a phone charger, but it’s unclear if those scooters ever hit the streets.
About a year ago, Keychron launched its Q-series of custom mechanical keyboards that now spans the gamut from small 60% boards to full-size options, with everything in between. Whatever your preference, Keychron clearly wants to be in the running for your money. Now, the company is launching the Q8 , a rare 65% Alice-style board with a gasket design.
Unless you’re deep into mechanical keyboards, chances are you’ve never heard of an Alice-style board. It’s basically a keyboard that’s split in the middle with both sides slightly angled and curved, with small space bars and B keys on both sides (yes, B keys on both sides…). Otherwise, it’s mostly a standard layout with arrow keys and numbers, but without a numpad or F keys. and while I hesitate to call it ‘ergonomic,’ the angled keys allow for a pretty relaxed wrist position. Unlike ‘real’ split ergonomic keyboards like an ErgoDox EZ or Matias Ergo Pro , all you get is a set angle though and no tenting to raise the middle of the board. In return, though, it’s extremely easy to adjust to an Alice layout and, by extension, the Q8.
Image Credits: Keychron
Image Credits: Keychron
Keychron provided us with a review sample ahead of the launch and having recently tried both their Q3 TKL and Q8 1800 board, this one may actually be my favorite one of the bunch. The version I have here is the pre-built Carbon Black edition with a knob and pre-lubed Gateron Pro red linear switches. That’s both a look I enjoy and a switch I can live with (I’d likely replace it with a slightly heavier linear).
Surprisingly, there is no foam at the bottom of the case to mute the sound. Instead, Keychron opted to pre-apply the popular tape mod and covered the back of the PCB with a pre-cut green tape, something I haven’t seen on a pre-built board before. That may sound like a weird thing to do, but it really does shape the sound by absorbing some of the unwanted higher frequencies. It’s nice to see Keychron learning from the mechanical keyboard community, though, and the result speaks for itself. There’s no case ping here either, which also helps shape the overall sound, and while there isn’t a lot of space at the bottom of the case, there should be just enough to add a thin layer of foam to mute the board a bit more, if that’s your thing.
Out of the box, the board actually sounds quite alright. It’s almost ‘thocky,” but not quite. The screw-in stabilizers need some additional lube, especially to make the larger right spacebar sound better, but half the fun of custom boards is to shape them to your preferences and there is still some room here to do that. Like with previous Q-series outings, the optional knob feels nice, with clear steps and a satisfying click when you press it.
I still wish Keychron would offer more switch options, but since this is a hotswap board, you can easily replace them. Given that the fully assembled versions of Keychron’s boards with switches and keycaps only cost about $20 more than the barebone sets, I tend to opt for the fully assembled versions. If you’re new to mechanical keyboards, that’s the way to go anyway and if you’re already deep down the rabbit hole, you can always find some use for a few extra switches. I’ve really enjoyed Keychron’s double-shot PBT Cherry profile keycaps lately, too, which at $40 are a bit of a steal.
Image Credits: Keychron
Image Credits: Keychron
Talking about keycaps: given that Alice-style boards aren’t exactly standard (though Akko also recently released one ), it’s hard to find mainstream — that is, non-group buy — keycap sets that support it. In addition to the two small space bars, Keychron opted for two B keys in the middle because quite a few typists apparently alternate between hands for typing B. In an earlier version , Keychron actually opted for two G’s instead (the slot for that is still on the PCB), but the community feedback was swift and almost uniformly negative. Some keycap sets actually feature two B keys, but that’s still somewhat unusual. You may have to get a bit creative with a function key there if you only use one of those anyway. Fun fact: Keychron’s latest Cherry keycaps feature two G keys…
Otherwise, the Q8 follows the lead of the rest of the Q series, with QMK/VIA compatibility for reassigning every key to your heart’s desire, a CNC-machined aluminum body and a polling rate of 100 Hz for gamers. There’s also per-key LED, of course, to light up your daily typing session. The PCB can handle both three- and five-pin MX-style switches. And like those other boards in the Q series, you can switch between Windows and Mac compatibility and like those other boards, the Q8 is only available in a wired version, which remains the standard for custom keyboards.
Overall, I was happily surprised by the Q8. Like most of Keychron’s recent offerings, you could easily use it as is and be perfectly happy with your choice, but with just a few small mods, you can make it great and shape it according to your needs.
Pricing starts at $175 for a barebone kit without knob and $185 with it. Add $20 to those and you get switches and keycaps, too. There aren’t a lot of affordable (in mechanical keyboard terms) Alice-style keyboards on the market, but it doesn’t feel like Keychron cut any corners here.
Neon , a startup providing developers with a serverless option for Postgres databases, today announced that it raised $30 million in a Series A-1 round led by GGV with participation from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Founders Fund and angel investors. In an email interview with TechCrunch, CEO Nikita Shamgunov, who described the tranche as “oversubscribed,” said it would be put toward growing Neon’s engineering team, bootstrapping its go-to-market team and building developer relations with new partnerships and integrations.
Postgres, also known as PostgreSQL, is an open source database management system launched in 1996 as the successor to a database developed at UC Berkeley called Ingres. Postgres has grown in popularity over the years, with a survey from Timescale finding that over half of developers report using Postgres more in 2021 than they did in 2020. Many developers opt for a fully managed platform. But according to Shamgunov, they’re often compromising, because the bulk of the available serverless Postgres database platforms — platforms that abstract away server management — are lacking in key capabilities.
“I noticed just how much Postgres is out there in the world, and my initial idea for Neon was to build an open source alternative to [Amazon] Aurora and provide developers with the best way to run Postgres in the cloud,” Shamgunov said. “As we started to build, we discovered how important serverless is, and now we emphasize the serverless Postgres when talking about Neon.”
Shamgunov, a former software engineer at Microsoft and Meta, founded SingleStore before incubating Neon at Khosla Ventures with Heikki Linnakangas and Stas Kelvich in 2021. Kelvich studied physics before joining embattled tech giant Yandex as a software engineer on the database team.
Neon provides a cloud serverless Postgres service, including a free tier, with compute and storage that scale dynamically. Compute activates on incoming connections and shuts down during periods of inactivity, while on the storage side, “cold” data (i.e., data that’s rarely accessed) can be offloaded to third-party services such as Amazon S3 for cost savings.
Image Credits: Neon
Image Credits: Neon
Neon implements what Shamgunov calls a “copy-on-write” technique to deliver checkpointing, branching and “point-in-time” restore. Using this, developers can create branches of databases for test environments every time new code is deployed, he said.
“Most cloud database platforms charge based on availability. But you only have about five hours a day of developers working on the codebase and about 22 business days in a month, so you only use the compute capabilities about 15% of the time when the database actually needs to run,” Shamgunov continued. “With Neon, the entire system is designed with costs in mind. It integrates a cloud object store to push cold data to the cheapest storage medium and automatically scales down to zero on inactivity.”
Shamgunov sees Neon’s main competitors as database vendors that separate storage and compute but aren’t open source, like Aurora and Google Cloud’s AlloyDB , and those that don’t separate storage and compute (e.g., Supabase , PlanetScale , CockroachDB , Zombodb, Heroku Postgres and Yugabyte ). He argues that the latter are disadvantaged because it’s technically challenging for them to implement features like branching and recovery from historical points in time. As for the former, Shamgunov notes that some customers are wary of the vendor lock-in and dependency that can come with closed-source products.
Findings on that last point are mixed. In a 2020 poll by 451 Research, only 10% of enterprises adopting infrastructure-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service public cloud products said that they were “very concerned” about vendor lock-in. On the other hand, it’s true that companies express a preference for diversification where it concerns the cloud — whether for pricing or robustness reasons. Research by Bain & Company, published in late 2020, found that the majority (65%) of CIOs at large organizations intend to use multiple cloud vendors.
“Tasks such as integrating storage, backups and archiving into one system, would be hard to do without Neon. Add to that open source and cloud, and we are noticing initial users seeing cost savings as they scale,” Shamgunov said. “[Neon’s] multicloud and serverless storage, branching capabilities and ‘quickstart’ services make it stand out.”
Neon is pre-revenue, but Shamgunov claims that the startup’s service, which launched in beta on June 16, already has 700 registered users and over 5,000 on the waitlist. The plan this year is to invest in building out the free tier before shifting focus to monetization in 2023.
“As users exceed the limits of the free tier, there is a natural path to monetize the platform … We keep our burn to have at least 28 to 30 months of runaway. So far, we have been very frugal and have multiple years of runaway,” Shamgunov said. “Building our developer relations team is one of the most important initiatives right after the raise. Every developer needs a database, and in many cases, they have already made their choice — Postgres.”
Neon has 30 employees currently and expects to be “in the 40s” by the end of the year, Shamgunov added. To date, the company has raised $55 million.
It took astronomers mere days to dig insights out of the first public image from JWST, which shows a massive galaxy cluster called SMACS 0723 and many more distant galaxies behind it.
Massimo Pascale wasn’t planning to study the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. But as soon as he saw the cluster glittering in the first image from the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, he and his colleagues couldn’t help themselves.
“We were like, we have to do something,” says Pascale, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley. “We can’t stop ourselves from analyzing this data. It was so exciting.”
Pascale’s team is one of several groups of scientists who saw the first JWST images and immediately rolled up their sleeves. In the first few days after images and the data used to create them were made public, scientists have estimated the amount of mass the cluster contains, uncovered a violent incident in the cluster’s recent past and estimated the ages of the stars in galaxies far beyond the cluster itself.
“We’ve been preparing for this for a long time. Myself, I’ve been preparing for years, and I’m not very old,” says Pascale, who is in his fourth year of graduate school. JWST “is really going to define a new generation of astronomers and a new generation of science as a whole.”
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When the image of SMACS 0723 was released in a White House briefing on July 11, most of the focus went to extremely distant galaxies in the background ( SN: 7/11/22 ). But smack in the middle of the image is SMACS 0723 itself, a much closer cluster of galaxies about 4.6 billion light-years from Earth. Its mass bends light from even farther away, making more distant objects appear magnified, as if their light had traveled through the lens of another cosmic-sized telescope.
The light from the most distant galaxy in this image started its journey to JWST about 13.3 billion years ago — “almost at the dawn of the universe,” says astrophysicist Guillaume Mahler of Durham University in England, who is already using the picture as his Zoom background.
But the image can also fill in the history of the intervening galaxy cluster itself. “People sometimes forget about that — the galaxy cluster is also very important,” Pascale says.
Pascale’s and Mahler’s teams each started by taking inventory of the distant galaxies that appear stretched and distorted in the image. The light from some of those galaxies is warped such that multiple images of the same galaxy appear in different places. Mapping those multiply imaged galaxies is a sensitive probe of the way mass is spread around the cluster. That, in turn, can reveal where the cluster contains dark matter , the invisible, mysterious substance that makes up the majority of the mass in the universe ( SN: 9/10/20 ).
Both teams found that SMACS 0723 is more elongated than it appeared in previous observations. They also found a faint glow, called intracluster light, inside the cluster from stars that don’t belong to any particular galaxy. Together, those features suggest that SMACS 0723 is still recovering from a relatively recent smash-up with another galaxy cluster, the teams report separately in a pair of papers submitted to arXiv.org on July 14.
A galaxy cluster that has been sitting on its own for eons should have a rounder distribution of matter and intracluster light, rather than SMACS 0723’s oblong shape. The stars that emit the intracluster light were probably ripped from their home galaxies by gravitational forces during the collision.
“Two separate clusters have merged together, and it looks to us as if it’s not totally settled yet,” Pascale says. “What we might be looking at is an ongoing merger.”
Mapping out mass in the cluster is also essential to decoding the properties of the more distant galaxies in the background of the image, Mahler says. “You need to understand the cluster and its magnification power to understand what’s behind.”
Some scientists are already investigating those distant galaxies in detail. The first JWST data include not just pretty pictures but also spectra, measurements of how much light an object emits at various wavelengths. Spectra allow scientists to determine how much a distant object’s light has been stretched — or redshifted — by the expansion of the universe , which is a proxy for its distance. Such data can also help reveal a galaxy’s composition and the ages of its stars.
“The main thing that limits the study of star formation in galaxies is the quality of the data,” says astrophysicist Adam Carnall of the University of Edinburgh. But with the vastly improved data from JWST, he says, he and his team were able to measure the ages of stars in those remote galaxies.
Carnall and colleagues turned their attention to the spectra of the distant galaxies just a few days after the SMACS image was released. They measured the redshifts of 10 galaxies, five of which were particularly distant , the team reports in a paper submitted to arXiv.org on July 18. One had already been highlighted as the most distant galaxy ever seen, with light that was emitted just 500 million years after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. The other four shone as late as 1.1 billion years after the Big Bang.
All 10 galaxies were relatively young when they emitted the light captured by JWST, Carnall says. They had all switched on their star formation just a few million years earlier. That’s not especially surprising, but it is interesting.
“The ability to look at these small, faint galaxies … gives you a sense of how all galaxies must look when they start forming stars,” Carnall says.
Scientists hope to use JWST to find the first instances of star formation ever. Other early results suggest they’re already getting close.
Some galaxies in a JWST image of another cluster may hearken from an even earlier time , as early as 300 million years after the Big Bang, two research teams report in a pair of papers submitted to arXiv.org on July 19. One of those galaxies seems to have already built up a spiral disk about a billion times the mass of the sun, which is surprisingly mature for such an early galaxy.
And a tally of galaxies seen in the SMACS 0723 image suggests that galaxies with mature disks , rather than disorganized blobs or ones made up mostly of dark matter, may have been more common in the very early universe than previously thought, another team reports in an arXiv.org paper submitted July 19. That means those early disks might not be outliers.
“Definitely these galaxies are a big deal, but it remains to be seen how exciting they will look in the context of a few months’ progress with JWST,” Carnall says. The best is yet to come.
Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from University of California, Santa Cruz. She lives near Boston.
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
BOSTON, July 20, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Greene LLP announces that the international pharmaceutical company, Biogen, Inc, has agreed to pay $900 million to resolve claims brought by Michael Bawduniak, a client of Greene LLP, that Biogen unlawfully paid kickbacks to physicians and other healthcare professionals. The settlement will be paid to the United States and the Medicaid programs of various states in resolution of the False Claims Act action in which the United States did not intervene.
“We believe this settlement represents the largest recovery in the over 150 years of False Claims Act cases to be secured by a whistleblower without the intervention or participation of the United States,” said attorney Thomas M. Greene, who served as Mr. Bawduniak’s lead counsel throughout more than a decade of litigation.
In 2012, Mr. Bawduniak disclosed to the United States that he believed Biogen, for whom he was then employed, was improperly paying kickbacks to its largest prescribers to discourage them from prescribing Biogen’s competitors’ products. Mr. Bawduniak had reported his concerns to Biogen’s compliance department, which had not taken any action. Based on Mr. Bawduniak’s information, the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked Mr. Bawduniak to record conversations with Biogen employees that would substantiate his allegations. These recordings confirmed that Biogen deliberately provided substantial monetary and non-monetary compensation to some of its most important prescribers to influence their prescribing and to ensure that they remained loyal Biogen customers.
Thereafter, in April 2012, Greene LLP, on behalf of Mr. Bawduniak, filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts under the federal False Claims Act and the false claims acts of several states. Mr. Bawduniak alleged that Biogen, to prevent its multiple sclerosis drugs from losing market share to newer drugs, knowingly paid its largest prescribers for services Biogen did not need and never intended to use, and which payments served no legitimate business purpose.
For example, Biogen paid hundreds of its customers to provide consulting advice on topics it either could not use, or for which Biogen had all the information it required. Additionally, Biogen also paid hundreds of health care professionals to speak when there was no demand for presentations on Biogen’s products and Biogen knew that its prospective speakers would likely never meet their minimum speaking requirements. Mr. Bawduniak also discovered that Biogen knowingly compensated its speakers and consultants a rate significantly exceeding the fair market value for their services. For example, Biogen inflated the amounts paid to most of its speakers and consultants by automatically adding three hours for travel time to their compensation, even when Biogen knew the customers whom it paid did not have to travel or only traveled a minimal distance. And many of Biogen’s events were held at sumptuous resorts and restaurants, where Biogen treated its speakers and consultants to lavish meals and free alcohol.
“The excessive consultant meetings always stood out to us as evidence of an improper purpose for these payments to physicians,” said Greene. “Over the years, as we learned more and more and gained feedback from nationally renowned experts, we were confident that a jury would agree: the only reasonable explanation for this kind of activity by Biogen was its belief that the prescribers it paid would be more likely to prescribe their drugs.”
The Biogen lawsuit was not Greene’s first foray into lengthy False Claims Act litigation. In 1996, he brought an action on behalf of a whistleblower alleging that off-label promotion of the drug Neurontin defrauded the United States. That case was resolved in 2004 when Pfizer, Inc. agreed to pay $430 million in civil fines and criminal penalties. Although the United States also elected not to intervene in the Neurontin case, that case became the model that ultimately led to the United States recovering more than $15 billion for unlawful off-label promotion by other drug companies.
The federal False Claims Act and several state statutes allow persons to file qui tam claims on behalf of federal or state governments when they have knowledge of schemes to defraud them. The statutes authorize those governments to intervene in such suits, but also permit the qui tam whistleblowers to pursue their claims if the governments elect not to intervene, which is what happened with Mr. Bawduniak’s action.
“Since July 2015, when the United States informed the District Court that it would not intervene in this action, our firm has litigated the case alone, reviewing millions of documents, conducting dozens of depositions, and preparing the case for trial,” said Greene. “The settlement with Biogen is a great example of what the False Claims Act is designed to encourage – and taxpayers clearly benefit.” As a result of the announced settlement, Mr. Bawduniak will receive an award of between 25% and 30% of the federal portion of the recovery, as well as awards from the states who will share in the settlement.
Michael Bawduniak was represented in the False Claims Act suit by Greene, Michael Tabb, Ryan P. Morrison, Tucker D. Greene, Simon Fischer, Eugenie Reich, and Kiel Green, all members of the Greene LLP firm. Greene LLP is a complex civil litigation firm in Boston specializing in representing qui tam whistleblowers with a low-volume, high-attention approach to litigation.
Contact: Thomas M. Greene Greene LLP (617) 261-0040 [email protected]
Bandai Namco , the Japanese video game publisher behind titles including Pac-Man, Tekken and Elden Ring , has admitted that hackers accessed its systems and potentially made off with customer data.
In a statement shared with TechCrunch, Bandai Namco said it detected “unauthorized access” to its systems by a third party on July 3, adding that it has since taken measures, such as blocking access to the affected servers, to “prevent the damage from spreading.” The confirmation comes days after the Alphv ransomware gang, also known as BlackCat, added the Japanese company to its dark web leak site.
Bandai Namco declined to elaborate on the nature of the cyberattack or how hackers were able to access its systems, but warned customer data may have been stolen, all but confirming that it was hit by ransomware.
“There is a possibility that customer information related to the Toys and Hobby Business in Asian regions (excluding Japan) was included in the servers and PCs, and we are currently identifying the status about existence of leakage [sic], scope of the damage and investigating the cause,” Bandai Namco said.
The Alphv ransomware group — believed to be the latest incarnation of the DarkSide ransomware gang responsible for the Colonial Pipeline attack — has threatened that the stolen data will be released “soon,” but no exact deadline has been given. Bandai Namco declined to say whether it had been given a ransom demand.
“We will continue to investigate the cause of this incident and will disclose the investigation results as appropriate,” Bandai Namco added. “We will also work with external organizations to strengthen security throughout the Group and take measures to prevent recurrence. We offer our sincerest apologies to everyone involved for any complications or concerns caused by this incident.”
Bandai Namco is the latest in a long line of gaming companies to be targeted by hackers. CD Project Red, the studio behind The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, was last year hit by a ransomware attack , which saw hackers leak data related to its games, contractors and employees. Electronic Arts was also hit by a cyberattack last June, an incident that is believed to be linked to the once-notorious Lapsus$ hacking group .
