Furniture startups skip the showroom and go straight to your door

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Reminder: Other people’s lives are not fodder for your feeds

#PlaneBae

You should cringe when you read that hashtag. Because it’s a reminder that people are being socially engineered by technology platforms to objectify and spy on each other for voyeuristic pleasure and profit.

The short version of the story attached to the cringeworthy hashtag is this: Earlier this month an individual, called Rosey Blair, spent all the hours of a plane flight using her smartphone and social media feeds to invade the privacy of her seat neighbors — publicly gossiping about the lives of two strangers.

Her speculation was set against a backdrop of rearview creepshots, with a few barely there scribbles added to blot out actual facial features. Even as an entire privacy invading narrative was being spun unknowingly around them.

#PlanePrivacyInvasion would be a more fitting hashtag. Or #MoralVacuumAt35000ft

And yet our youthful surveillance society started with a far loftier idea associated with it: Citizen journalism.

Once we’re all armed with powerful smartphones and ubiquitously fast Internet there will be no limits to the genuinely important reportage that will flow, we were told.

There will be no way for the powerful to withhold the truth from the people.

At least that was the nirvana we were sold.

What did we get? Something that looks much closer to mass manipulation. A tsunami of ad stalking, intentionally fake news and social media-enabled demagogues expertly appropriating these very same tools by gamifying mind-less, ethically nil algorithms.

Meanwhile, masses of ordinary people + ubiquitous smartphones + omnipresent social media feeds seems, for the most part, to be resulting in a kind of mainstream attention deficit disorder.

Yes, there is citizen journalism — such as people recording and broadcasting everyday experiences of aggression, racism and sexism, for example. Experiences that might otherwise go unreported, and which are definitely underreported.

That is certainly important.

But there are also these telling moments of #hashtaggable ethical blackout. As a result of what? Let’s call it the lure of ‘citizen clickbait’ — as people use their devices and feeds to mimic the worst kind of tabloid celebrity gossip ‘journalism’ by turning their attention and high tech tools on strangers, with (apparently) no major motivation beyond the simple fact that they can. Because technology is enabling them.

Social norms and common courtesy should kick in and prevent this. But social media is pushing in an unequal and opposite direction, encouraging users to turn anything — even strangers’ lives — into raw material to be repackaged as ‘content’ and flung out for voyeuristic entertainment.

It’s life reflecting commerce. But a particularly insidious form of commerce that does not accept editorial let alone ethical responsibility, has few (if any) moral standards, and relies, for continued function, upon stripping away society’s collective sense of privacy in order that these self-styled ‘sharing’ (‘taking’ is closer to the mark) platforms can swell in size and profit.

But it’s even worse than that. Social media as a data-mining, ad-targeting enterprise relies upon eroding our belief in privacy. So these platforms worry away at that by trying to disrupt our understanding of what privacy means. Because if you were to consider what another person thinks or feels — even for a millisecond — you might not post whatever piece of ‘content’ you had in mind.

For the platforms it’s far better if you just forget to think.

Facebook’s business is all about applying engineering ingenuity to eradicate the thoughtful friction of personal and societal conscience.

That’s why, for instance, it uses facial recognition technology to automate content identification — meaning there’s almost no opportunity for individual conscience to kick in and pipe up to quietly suggest that publicly tagging others in a piece of content isn’t actually the right thing to do.

Because it’s polite to ask permission first.

But Facebook’s antisocial automation pushes people away from thinking to ask for permission. There’s no button provided for that. The platform encourages us to forget all about the existence of common courtesies.

So we should not be at all surprised that such fundamental abuses of corporate power are themselves trickling down to infect the people who use and are exposed to these platforms’ skewed norms.

Viral episodes like #PlaneBae demonstrate that the same sense of entitlement to private information is being actively passed onto the users these platforms prey on and feed off — and is then getting beamed out, like radiation, to harm the people around them.

The damage is collective when societal norms are undermined.

#PlaneBae

Social media’s ubiquity means almost everyone works in marketing these days. Most people are marketing their own lives — posting photos of their pets, their kids, the latte they had this morning, the hipster gym where they work out — having been nudged to perform this unpaid labor by the platforms that profit from it.

The irony is that most of this work is being done for free. Only the platforms are being paid. Though there are some people making a very modern living; the new breed of ‘life sharers’ who willingly polish, package and post their professional existence as a brand of aspiration lifestyle marketing.

Social media’s gift to the world is that anyone can be a self-styled model now, and every passing moment a fashion shoot for hire — thanks to the largess of highly accessible social media platforms providing almost anyone who wants it with their own self-promoting shopwindow in the world. Plus all the promotional tools they could ever need.

Just step up to the glass and shoot.

And then your vacation beauty spot becomes just another backdrop for the next aspirational selfie. Although those aquamarine waters can’t be allowed to dampen or disrupt photo-coifed tresses, nor sand get in the camera kit. In any case, the makeup took hours to apply and there’s the next selfie to take…

What does the unchronicled life of these professional platform performers look like? A mess of preparation for projecting perfection, presumably, with life’s quotidian business stuffed higgledy piggledy into the margins — where they actually sweat and work to deliver the lie of a lifestyle dream.

Because these are also fakes — beautiful fakes, but fakes nonetheless.

We live in an age of entitled pretence. And while it may be totally fine for an individual to construct a fictional narrative that dresses up the substance of their existence, it’s certainly not okay to pull anyone else into your pantomime. Not without asking permission first.

But the problem is that social media is now so powerfully omnipresent its center of gravity is actively trying to pull everyone in — and its antisocial impacts frequently spill out and over the rest of us. And they rarely if ever ask for consent.

What about the people who don’t want their lives to be appropriated as digital windowdressing? Who weren’t asking for their identity to be held up for public consumption? Who don’t want to participate in this game at all — neither to personally profit from it, nor to have their privacy trampled by it?

The problem is the push and pull of platforms against privacy has become so aggressive, so virulent, that societal norms that protect and benefit us all — like empathy, like respect — are getting squeezed and sucked in.

The ugliness is especially visible in these ‘viral’ moments when other people’s lives are snatched and consumed voraciously on the hoof — as yet more content for rapacious feeds.

#PlaneBae

Think too of the fitness celebrity who posted a creepshot + commentary about a less slim person working out at their gym.

Or the YouTuber parents who monetize videos of their kids’ distress.

Or the men who post creepshots of women eating in public — and try to claim it’s an online art project rather than what it actually is: A privacy violation and misogynistic attack.

Or, on a public street in London one day, I saw a couple of giggling teenage girls watching a man at a bus stop who was clearly mentally unwell. Pulling out a smartphone, one girl hissed to the other: “We’ve got to put this on YouTube.”

For platforms built by technologists without thought for anything other than growth, everything is a potential spectacle. Everything is a potential post.

So they press on their users to think less. And they profit at society’s expense.

It’s only now, after social media has embedded itself everywhere, that platforms are being called out for their moral vacuum; for building systems that encourage abject mindlessness in users — and serve up content so bleak it represents a form of visual cancer.

#PlaneBae

Human have always told stories. Weaving our own narratives is both how we communicate and how we make sense of personal experience — creating order out of events that are often disorderly, random, even chaotic.

The human condition demands a degree of pattern-spotting for survival’s sake; so we can pick our individual path out of the gloom.

But platforms are exploiting that innate aspect of our character. And we, as individuals, need to get much, much better at spotting what they’re doing to us.

We need to recognize how they are manipulating us; what they are encouraging us to do — with each new feature nudge and dark pattern design choice.

We need to understand their underlying pull. The fact they profit by setting us as spies against each other. We need to wake up, personally and collectively, to social media’s antisocial impacts.

Perspective should not have to come at the expense of other people getting hurt.

Additionally, I’ve not earned anything off of this. And do not wish to. The greatest gift I’ve been given – when I shouldn’t have received anything to begin with – is perspective.

— Rosey Blair (@roseybeeme) July 10, 2018

This week the women whose privacy was thoughtlessly repackaged as public entertainment when she was branded and broadcast as #PlaneBae — and who has suffered harassment and yet more unwelcome attention as a direct result — gave a statement to Business Insider.

“#PlaneBae is not a romance — it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent,” she writes. “Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.”

And as a strategy to push against the antisocial incursions of social media, remembering to respect people’s privacy is a great place to start.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Reminder: Other people’s lives are not fodder for your feeds Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2mgaCw8
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Yes, open office plans are the worst

If you’re endlessly distracted by your co-workers in the gaping open office space you all share, you’re not alone. Compared to traditional office spaces, face-to-face interaction in open office spaces is down 70 percent with resulting slips in productivity, according to Harvard researchers in a new study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B this month.

In the study, researchers followed two anonymous Fortune 500 companies during their transitions between a traditional office space to an open plan environment and used a sensor called a “sociometric badge” (think company ID on a lanyard) to record detailed information about the kind of interactions employees had in both spaces. The study collected information in two stages; first for several weeks before the renovation and the second for several weeks after.

While the concept behind open office spaces is to drive informal interaction and collaboration among employees, the study found that for both groups of employees monitored (52 for one company and 100 for the other company) face-to-face interactions dropped, the number of emails sent increased between 20 and 50 percent and company executives reported a qualitative drop in productivity.

“[Organizations] transform their office architectures into open spaces with the intention of creating more [face-to-face] interaction and thus a more vibrant work environment,” study’s authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, wrote. “[But] what they often get—as captured by a steady stream of news articles professing the death of the open office is an open expanse of proximal employees choosing to isolate themselves as best they can (e.g. by wearing large headphones) while appearing to be as busy as possible (since everyone can see them).”

While this study is far from the first to point fingers at open office space designs, the researchers claim this is the first study of its kind to collect qualitative data on this shift in working environment instead of relying primarily on employee surveys.

From their results, the researchers provide three cautionary tales:

1. Open office spaces don’t actually promote interaction. Instead, they cause employees to seek privacy wherever they can find it.
2. These open spaces might spell bad news for collective company intelligence or, in other words, an overstimulating office space creates a decrease in organizational productivity.
3. Not all channels of interaction will be effected equally in an open layout change. While the number of emails sent in the study did increase, the study found that the richness of this interaction was not equal to that lost in face-to-face interactions.

Seems like it might be time to (first, find a quiet room) and go back to the drawing board with the open office design.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Yes, open office plans are the worst Sarah Wells https://ift.tt/2Jm82Oy
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Moment Pro Camera app brings big camera controls to your phone

{rss:content:encoded} Moment Pro Camera app brings big camera controls to your phone https://ift.tt/2JmlrGd https://ift.tt/2ujNIsk July 13, 2018 at 09:30PM

The company that brought you the best glass for your mobile device now gives you DSLR-like controls with their Pro Camera app. Features include full manual adjustment over ISO, shutter speed, white balance, image format and more.

It should be noted that if you don’t have a shiny new device you won’t be able to use the app to its full potential since some of its key features include 3D touch, dual lens control, RAW image format, 120 and 240 fps, and 4k resolution.

Moment says the app is for “anyone looking for pro, manual controls on their phone.” Being one of TechCrunch’s resident image makers, I figured I should take the app out for a spin and pit it against the stock camera app. I enlisted my photogenic friend, Jackie, to be my muse.

Scrolling through the manual settings was very easy and the UI never felt fumbly. The histogram is nice to have and utilizes that iPhone notch well. The app doesn’t have portrait mode, however, which Jackie and I would have loved because who doesn’t love that buttery (fake) bokeh – amirite? Manipulating the exposure in video mode was equally as easy. The app didn’t have an audio meter or level settings, so folks recording dialog or VO need to plan accordingly. Luckily, our shoot didn’t need it since we were shooting slow-mo.

For a couple extra bucks you can get the same manual controls, audio levels, + RAW with ProCam 5. But if you’re already invested in the Moment Lens ecosystem and primarily shoot photography then the upgrade could be a worthwhile addition.

You can save photos in HEIF, JPG, RAW and TIFF format. For video, you have the option to shoot in 24, 30, 60, 120, and 240 fps in either 720p, 1080p or 4k resolution. Free to try. $2.99 iOS and $1.99 Android to upgrade.

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Chowly is raising $5.8 million to help restaurants manage on-demand delivery orders

Chowly, a point-of-sale system for restaurants, has raised nearly $4.7 million, according to an SEC filing. The company is targeting a total raise of $5.8 million.

Chowly aims to help restaurants better manage the influx of delivery orders they receive from a variety of services, such as Grubhub, Delivery.com and Chownow.

In May, Square launched a point-of-sale system for restaurants that integrates on-demand delivery platform Caviar. Down the road, Square said it envisions third-party applications from companies like Postmates, UberEats and DoorDash.

Chowly had previously raised just $700,000 from MATH Venture Partners, Domenick Montanile and others. I’ve reached out to Chowly and will update this story if I hear back.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Chowly is raising $5.8 million to help restaurants manage on-demand delivery orders https://ift.tt/2uvYI57

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Chad Rigetti to talk quantum computing at Disrupt SF

Even for the long-standing giants of the tech industry, quantum computing is one of the most complicated subjects to tackle. So how does a five-year old startup compete?

Chad Rigetti, the namesake founder of Rigetti Computing, will join us at Disrupt SF 2018 to help us break it all down.

Rigetti’s approach to quantum computing is two-fold: on one front, the company is working on the design and fabrication of its own quantum chips; on the other, the company is opening up access to its early quantum computers for researchers and developers by way of its cloud computing platform, Forest.

Rigetti Computing has raised nearly $70 million to date according to Crunchbase, with investment from some of the biggest names around. Meanwhile, labs around the country are already using Forest to explore the possibilities ahead.

What’s the current state of quantum computing? How do we separate hype from reality? Which fields might quantum computing impact first — and how can those interested in quantum technology make an impact? We’ll talk all this and more at Disrupt SF 2018.

Tickets are available here.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Chad Rigetti to talk quantum computing at Disrupt SF https://ift.tt/2Ng8aS3

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Emptor looks to help companies more easily find contractors in the area

For any company looking to spin up some kind of operation in a new region, one of the first steps may be finding contractors in the area that can actually get the work started — but, especially as companies drift further from cities, that can increasingly become a nightmare that’s quite familiar to Matt Velker.

That led to he and his co-founder starting Emptor, a network to connect companies with local contractors in order to get those local projects off the ground effectively. That can range from actual construction to janitorial work or landscaping. A platform like Emptor seeks to take a lot of the ambiguity or guesswork out of finding a set of local companies to work with in order to get construction projects off the ground. It also adds a robust audit trail — ratings or otherwise — to ensure that the best contractors surface up and that everyone knows which ones they should skip.

“Every time you’re building [projects in new regions] you have to find an entirely new set of suppliers,” Velker said. “Often in rural areas when there isn’t an saturation of contractors like there is in a large metro, that discovery process within a reasonable time frame was the biggest challenge. Especially within the construction industry, there’s a huge deviation in terms of the quality fo the companies you work with. We definitely had a lot of pains with unreliable contractors who weren’t getting the job done to spec or on time, or things that came close to fraud. It comes with the territory when you work with that volume of companies in a short period of time.”

Companies first go to Emptor and describe the projects they want and what kinds of pricing structure they are offering. Then, kind of like Thumbtack or other marketplaces, Emptor matches those projects up with qualified contractors and then compares those bids in order to select the best offer. It aims to be a replacement for the time spent searching around Yelp or Google, where there may be listings and pages but not a high volume of ratings — or ones that are even accurate to begin. Even after the search, getting the whole process started can take weeks, another period Emptor hopes to shrink by streamlining that process.

Right now Emptor mainly focuses on facilities and maintenance, though should something like this take off it could add other elements of contract work that companies need. The approach also aims to be more granular, giving companies more ways to identify the needs of the project that might not necessarily just be quantitative. After all, better data about a company’s actual needs that flows into some algorithm can produce better matching, and that can also go down to the actual way compensation would work on that project.

“Having just one number for what a project will cost is convenient from the supplier and buyer perspective, but it’s missing out on the ability to build structured data that you can analyze,” Velker said. “The companies are deciding, ‘what do I need to know, how many years have you done in business.’ You want to be explicit about how are we going to make this decision. If price is a factor, how much of a factor is it, so they can spec things out and there’s transparency to the buyers.”

But while it’s an attempt to try to bridge that gap between the company and a service provider, it’s one that many companies have tried to fill before. There are tools like Angie’s List and others for finding contractors, though Velker says those are primarily geared toward consumers — and some end up bending the apps in order to fill the needs they have for contractors without some kind of formal platform to use. Velker acknowledges the theory behind all these tools is pretty similar, though he hopes Emptor will be able to tackle the specific needs companies might have that he’s experienced himself.

https://ift.tt/2uwPuFT Emptor looks to help companies more easily find contractors in the area https://ift.tt/2LiZdXe

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Adobe could bring Photoshop to the iPad

{rss:content:encoded} Adobe could bring Photoshop to the iPad https://ift.tt/2JidYbe https://ift.tt/2qcO3uR July 13, 2018 at 04:38PM

Adobe currently has three dozens apps in the App Store. But one app is still missing. According to a report from Bloomberg, the company could be working on a full-fledged version of Photoshop for the iPad. And it makes sense for a ton of reasons.

First, it’s clear that the iPad has become powerful enough to run complicated image editing software. Just two days ago, Serif launched Affinity Designer for the iPad, an Adobe Illustrator competitor. You can also look at benchmarks to find out that the iPad Pro is now more powerful than most mid-range laptops.

Second, now that you can effortlessly sync your files and projects across multiple devices, many people work using multiple devices. It’s been true for many years if you’re just working on a Microsoft Word file on your work computer and your personal laptop for instance. Maybe you use Dropbox or OneDrive to stay on the same page. But it’s also true with huge media libraries now.

A few years ago, people looked at their devices based on contexts. Maybe you had a work laptop, a couch-computing iPad, a big desktop computer for games, etc. But this is a thing of the past now that you can literally work from all your devices.

And when it comes to Photoshop, the Apple Pencil and touch screen makes the iPad a particularly useful device. Maybe you need a big screen to look at a photo, but maybe you want to use the Apple Pencil to interact with the photo.

Bringing Photoshop to the iPad could let you seamlessly work on the same file across multiple devices, switching back and forth between those two devices. Illustrators could really use this kind of flexibility and ditch their Wacom tablet.

You might remember that Apple has put together a Pro Workflow Team for the same reason. You could imagine launching Final Cut Pro X or Logic Pro X on an iMac and on an iPad to interact with a project in different ways. Apple may not be working on Macs with a touchscreen, but it’s clear that there will be ways to interact with a creative project using your finger or the Apple Pencil.

Finally, bringing Photoshop to the iPad makes sense on a business model perspective. Now that Adobe has shifted to a subscription model, the company needs to increase stickiness as much as possible. If you end up spending more time in Adobe apps because your favorite app is on all platforms, you’ll keep paying for Creative Cloud every month.

This project will be an engineering achievement. But this isn’t the first time Adobe is developing a single app for multiple platforms.

TIL the new Lightroom CC is almost entirely built in Lua, running the same codebase on iOS, Mac, Windows & Android using Adobe's new UI system & design language. Seems significant…

— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) July 13, 2018

Bloomberg says that we might hear more from Photoshop for iPad at the Adobe Max conference in October. Adobe’s chief product officer of Creative Cloud Scott Belsky confirmed that the company was working on releasing these new versions as quickly as possible.

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Instacart taps Postmates to help with deliveries in SF during peak demand

Instacart has tapped Postmates to offer better delivery services during peak hours in a San Francisco pilot.

While Instacart will still handle all the shopping for its customers, it will hand off some deliveries to Postmates at times when there is high demand on the Instacart platform.

Postmates, obviously, has offered delivery-as-a-service for merchants and brands since its inception, and some of those brands, such as Walmart, offer their own delivery services. But this marks the first time that Postmates has offered delivery-as-a-service to a business that itself is already a delivery service.

This comes at a time when the grocery space is at an inflection point. Amazon’s nearly $14 billion acquisition of Whole Foods has spurred a race to offer quick and convenient grocery delivery from a number of the bigger players, such as Target and Walmart. On top of that, the grocery industry is highly fragmented, offering a huge opportunity for the catch-all of Instacart’s service.

But quantity means almost nothing without quality, and Instacart’s pilot with Postmates is meant to ensure that delivery times don’t lag in the late morning and early afternoon, when most Instacart orders are set to be delivered.

Instacart’s Northwest General Manager Michelle McRae explained that there is a load balance involved in the partnership with Postmates.

“Like many on-demand services, Instacart sees demand peaks on certain days and at certain times,” said McRae. “The pilot is a way to offer delivery during peak hours and utilize Postmates delivery staff at times where Postmates would be most underutilized. Instacart users overwhelmingly prefer mid-morning and mid-afternoon, where is different from when people want hot, prepared food.”

McRae also stressed that the pilot would not affect current Instacart shoppers or delivery contractors, as Postmates is simply offering delivery capacity during peak demand times.

Perhaps more interesting, Postmates sees a big opportunity to work with on-demand services in offering extra delivery either at or below the cost of hiring more delivery people.

“We definitely see this as a bigger part of Postmates’ future,” said Postmates SVP Dan Mosher. “Most brands are moving toward a world where they want to provide quick convenient delivery but they don’t have the capabilities. As we scale, we have the delivery density to drive economics in a really cost-effective way, not only to restaurants and retailers but to other on-demand services as well.”

He added that enterprise delivery services will never eclipse Postmates’ direct-to-consumer business.

The pilot is currently only going down in San Francsico, but Instacart said that it is considering expanding it to other geographies and other delivery services as the pilot continues. The deal is not exclusive, as Postmates is currently working with Walmart to help deliver their groceries to customers.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Instacart taps Postmates to help with deliveries in SF during peak demand https://ift.tt/2uk9gVD

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Guru announces new AI and Sync features for knowledge sharing platform

It’s one thing to have a great business idea, but connecting all of the disparate pieces of information and people needed to build it can be a frustrating growing pain — and one that the internal knowledge sharing company Guru is trying to fix.

Guru launched in 2015 as a Chrome extension to help revenue and customer service teams have easy access to all of their company’s information the moment they needed it by congregating relevant “cards” of information written by different internal teams. Since its launch, Guru has extended its company to include a web app, and Slack bot. Today, Guru unveiled a new AI, and syncing and impact analytics features aimed to improve the overall experience of the platform.

“[Customer facing teams] want to be responsive to their customers and feel confident in knowing what they want to communicate to the [them],” Guru CEO and co-founder Rick Nucci told TechCrunch. “They want to respond quickly and they want to respond accurately. [These features] further reduce the time it takes for them to dig up [information] and by reducing that time they’re [solving issues faster] and helping the customer have a better experience with them.”

With the introduction of AI Suggest to its Chrome extension, users will be able to access relevant company information without needing to search for it first. And because the extension can work wherever they work, there’s no time wasted returning to a single site. In its announcement, Guru says that this AI will learn a user’s search patterns overtime and grow to better understand their needs and improve efficiency.

While AI Suggest is specific to Guru’s Chrome extension, its Sync feature is universal across the company’s several implementations. With Sync, users can easily congregate and access not only information created natively on Guru but also information stored in a wiki, intranet or web-based applications.

“Companies have knowledge everywhere, and it’s not necessarily realistic that they’ll be able to move all of that into Guru,” Nucci said. “[But this allows] the team using Guru to still have one place to search.”

To get a better picture of how companies are using their knowledge, Guru has also incorporated impact analytics into its web app to help companies see where knowledge is best being utilized and where any gaps might be.

Nucci told TechCrunch that these new features are part a scaling plan the company is implementing with the help of a $9.3 million Series A funding round last summer with new investor Emergence Capital (as well as previous backers FirstMark Capital and MSD Capital). In addition to the new features announced today, Guru also has plans to expand its product into other areas of company knowledge management including HR and IT.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Guru announces new AI and Sync features for knowledge sharing platform https://ift.tt/2uwkZQn

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Headout lands $10M Series A to help tourists book last-minute outings

Imagine being in a new city with a few hours to kill, but no idea what to do. Headout is a travel app that enables tourists to book outings at very short notice, in most cases on the same day. The startup announced today that it’s raised a $10 million Series A led by returning investors Nexus Venture Partners and Version One Ventures to support its ambitious growth targets.

Over the next 18 months, co-founder and CEO Varun Khona says the startup wants to expand from 20 cities to 100 cities in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. The app recently added French, German and Spanish in select markets and aims to have all of its inventory available in 12 languages by the end of next year. Its bookings includes sightseeing tours, museum tickets and shows.

Headout’s Series A brings its total raised to $12 million. Its seed round was announced in 2015, when TechCrunch first profiled the company. The startup claims it has grown eight times over the past 12 months and is profitable.

As it enters new markets, however, Headout will be up against a roster of competitors that also offer experience bookings for tourists. These include Klook, TripAdvisor-owned Viator, Get Your Guide and Airbnb’s Experiences feature.

Khona says Headout’s main edge is tailoring its inventory and technology platform for “spontaneous last-minute mobile use cases.” It’s also a managed marketplace, meaning it standardizes pricing and quality, with the hope of creating a consistent experience across all outings. The startup says this focus on combining quality with unit economics means it’s enabled customers to save an average of 18% on last-minute bookings.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Headout lands $10M Series A to help tourists book last-minute outings https://ift.tt/2zAaiSJ

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Facebook would make a martyr by banning Infowars

Alex Jones’ Infowars is a fake news-peddler. But Facebook deleting its Page could ignite a fire that consumes the network. Still, some critics are asking why it hasn’t done so already.

This week Facebook held an event with journalists to discuss how it combats fake news. The company’s recently appointed head of News Feed John Hegeman explained that, “I guess just for being false, that doesn’t violate the community standards. I think part of the fundamental thing here is that we created Facebook to be a place where different people can have a voice.”

In response, CNN’s Oliver Darcy tweeted: “I asked them why InfoWars is still allowed on the platform. I didn’t get a good answer.” BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel meanwhile wrote that allowing the Infowars Page to exist shows that “Facebook simply isn’t willing to make the hard choices necessary to tackle fake news.”

Facebook’s own Twitter account tried to rebuke Darcy by tweeting, “We see Pages on both the left and the right pumping out what they consider opinion or analysis – but others call fake news. We believe banning these Pages would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech.” But harm can be minimized without full-on censorship.

There is no doubt that Facebook hides behind political neutrality. It fears driving away conservative users for both business and stated mission reasons. That strategy is exploited by those like Jones who know that no matter how extreme and damaging their actions, they’ll benefit from equivocation that implies ‘both sides are guilty,’ with no regard for degree.

Instead of being banned from Facebook, Infowars and sites like it that constantly and purposely share dangerous hoaxes and conspiracy theories should be heavily down-ranked in the News Feed.

Effectively, they should be quarantined, so that when they or their followers share their links, no one else sees them.

“We don’t have a policy that stipulates that everything posted on Facebook must be true — you can imagine how hard that would be to enforce,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch. “But there’s a very real tension here. We work hard to find the right balance between encouraging free expression and promoting a safe and authentic community, and we believe that down-ranking inauthentic content strikes that balance. In other words, we allow people to post it as a form of expression, but we’re not going to show it at the top of News Feed.”

Facebook already reduces the future views of posts by roughly 80 percent when they’re established as false by its third-party fact checkers like Politifact and the Associated Press. For repeat offenders, I think that reduction in visibility should be closer to 100 percent of News Feed views. What Facebook does do to those whose posts are frequently labeled as false by its checkers is “remove their monetization and advertising privileges to cut off financial incentives, and dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

The company wouldn’t comment directly about whether Infowars has already been hit with that penalty, noting “We can’t disclose whether specific Pages or domains are receiving such a demotion (it becomes a privacy issue).” For any story fact checked as false, it shows related articles from legitimate publications to provide other perspectives on the topic, and notifies people who have shared it or are about to.

But that doesn’t solve for the initial surge of traffic. Unfortunately, Facebook’s limited array of fact checking partners are strapped with so much work, they can only get to so many BS stories quickly. That’s a strong endorsement for more funding to be dedicated to these organizations like Snopes, preferably by even keeled non-profits, though the risks of governments or Facebook chipping in might be worth it.

Given that fact-checking will likely never scale to be instantly responsive to all fake news in all languages, Facebook needs a more drastic option to curtail the spread of this democracy-harming content on its platform. That might mean a full loss of News Feed posting privileges for a certain period of time. That might mean that links re-shared by the supporters or agents of these pages get zero distribution in the feed.

But it shouldn’t mean their posts or Pages are deleted, or that their links can’t be opened unless they clearly violate Facebook’s core content policies.

Why downranking and quarantine? Because banning would only stoke conspiratorial curiosity about these inaccurate outlets. Trolls will use the bans as a badge of honor, saying, “Facebook deleted us because it knows what we say is true.”

They’ll claim they’ve been unfairly removed from the proxy for public discourse that exists because of the size of Facebook’s private platform.

What we’ll have on our hands is “but her emails!” 2.0

People who swallowed the propaganda of “her emails”, much of which was pushed by Alex Jones himself, assumed that Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails must have contained evidence of some unspeakable wrongdoing — something so bad it outweighed anything done by her opponent, even when the accusations against him had evidence and witnesses aplenty.

If Facebook deleted the Pages of Infowars and their ilk, it would be used as a rallying cry that Jones’ claims were actually clairvoyance. That he must have had even worse truths to tell about his enemies and so he had to be cut down. It would turn him into a martyr.

Those who benefit from Infowars’ bluster would use Facebook’s removal of its Page as evidence that it’s massively biased against conservatives. They’d push their political allies to vindictively regulate Facebook beyond what’s actually necessary. They’d call for people to delete their Facebook accounts and decamp to some other network that’s much more of a filter bubble than what some consider Facebook to already be. That would further divide the country and the world.

When someone has a terrible, contagious disease, we don’t execute them. We quarantine them. That’s what should happen here. The exception should be for posts that cause physical harm offline. That will require tough judgement calls, but knowing inciting mob violence for example should not be tolerated. Some of Infowars posts, such as those about Pizzagate that led to a shooting, might qualify for deletion by that standard.

Facebook is already trying to grapple with this after rumors and fake news spread through forwarded WhatsApp messages have led to crowds lynching people in India and attacks in Myanmar. Peer-to-peer chat lacks the same centralized actors to ban, though WhatsApp is now at least marking messages as forwarded, and it will need to do more. But for less threatening yet still blatantly false news, quarantining may be sufficient. This also leaves room for counterspeech, where disagreeing commenters can refute posts or share their own rebuttals.

Few people regularly visit the Facebook Pages they follow. They wait for the content to come to them through the News Feed posts of the Page, and their friends. Eliminating that virality vector would severely limit this fake news’ ability to spread without requiring the posts or Pages to be deleted, or the links to be rendered unopenable.

If Facebook wants to uphold a base level of free speech, it may be prudent to let the liars have their voice. However, Facebook is under no obligation to amplify that speech, and the fakers have no entitlement for their speech to be amplified.

Image Credit: Getty – Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call, Flickr Sean P. Anderson CC

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Researchers find that filters don’t prevent porn

In a paper entitled Internet Filtering and Adolescent Exposure to Online Sexual Material, Oxford Internet Institute researchers Victoria Nash and Andrew Przybylski found that Internet filters rarely work to keep adolescents away from online porn.

“It’s important to consider the efficacy of Internet filtering,” said Dr, Nash. “Internet filtering tools are expensive to develop and maintain, and can easily ‘underblock’ due to the constant development of new ways of sharing content. Additionally, there are concerns about human rights violations – filtering can lead to ‘overblocking’, where young people are not able to access legitimate health and relationship information.”

This research follows the controversial news that the UK government was exploring a country-wide porn filter, a product that will most likely fail. The UK would join countries around the world who filter the public Internet for religious or political reasons.

The bottom line? Filters are expensive and they don’t work.

Given these substantial costs and limitations, it is noteworthy that there is little consistent evidence that filtering is effective at shielding young people from online sexual material. A pair of studies reporting on data collected in 2005, before the rise of smartphones and tablets, provides tentative evidence that Internet filtering might reduce the relative risk of young people countering sexual material. A more recent study, analyzing data collected a decade after these papers, provided strong evidence that caregivers’ use of Internet filtering technologies did not reduce children’s exposure to a range of aversive online experiences including, but not limited to, encountering sexual content that made them feel uncomfortable.21 Given studies on this topic are few in number and the findings are decidedly mixed, the evidence base supporting the widespread use of Internet filtering is currently weak.

The researchers “found that Internet filtering tools are ineffective and in most cases [and] were an insignificant factor in whether young people had seen explicit sexual content.”

The study’s most interesting finding was that between 17 and 77 households “would need to use Internet filtering tools in order to prevent a single young person from accessing sexual content” and even then a filter “showed no statistically or practically significant protective effects.”

The study looked at 9,352 male and 9,357 female subjects from the EU and the UK and found that almost 50 percent of the subjects had some sort of Internet filter at home. Regardless of the filters installed subjects still saw approximately the same amount of porn.

“Many caregivers and policy makers consider Internet filters a useful technology for keeping young people safe online. Although this position might make intuitive sense, there is little empirical evidence that Internet filters provide an effective means to limit children’s and adolescents’ exposure to online sexual material. There are nontrivial economic, informational, and human rights costs associated with filtering that need to be balanced against any observed benefits,” wrote the researchers. “Given this, it is critical to know possible benefits can be balanced against their costs. Our studies were conducted to test this proposition, and our findings indicated that filtering does not play a practically significant protective role.”

Given the popularity – and lucrative nature – of filtering software this news should encourage parents and caregivers to look more closely and how and why they are filtering their home Internet. Ultimately, they might find, supervision is more important than software.

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Octi raises $7.5M to create augmented reality that understands human movement

The team at Octi says it’s building a crucial piece of the augmented reality puzzle — the ability to understand the human body and its movement.

Co-founder and CEO Justin Fuisz told me that most existing AR technologies (including Apple’s AR Kit) tend to be “plane-based” — in other words, while they can make something cool appear against a real-world background, it’s usually on a flat surface, like a table or the floor.

Octi, on the other hand, recognizes where people are in-camera, and it can use that understanding to apply a variety of different effects.

For example, Fuisz and his team showed me how they could dance around their office while bright, squiggly lines overlaid their bodies — and then they erased their bodies entirely. They also showed me how effects could be tied to different gestures, like how a “make it rain” motion could result in dollar bills flying out of thier hands.

To do this, Octi says it’s built sophisticated machine learning and computer vision technology. For starters, it looks at a human being and detects key points like your eyes, nose, hips and elbows, then uses those points to construct a model of your skeleton.

Fuisz suggested that the technology could be applied to a number of different industries, including fashion, fitness, entertainment and gaming. In fact, the company is announcing a partnership and strategic investment from the OneTeam Collective, the accelerator of the NFL Players Association. As a result, Octi plans to create and distribute avatars of more than 2,000 active NFL players.

In addition, Octi is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Shasta Ventures, I2BF Ventures, Bold Capital Partners, Day One Ventures, Human Ventures Live Nation and AB InBev, plus individuals including former Pandora and Snap executive Tom Conrad, WeWork Chief Product Officer of Technology Shiva Rajaraman, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky, A&D Networks Chairman Abbe Raven and Joshua Kushner.

If you want to try this out for yourself, the startup has its own iOS app — Fuisz described the app as a technology showcase for potential partners, but he added, “The app is available to the public and is totally awesome.”

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Robinhood CEO Baiju Bhatt to talk fintech at Disrupt SF

Robinhood has gone from being a little consumer-facing fintech app to an absolutely giant consumer-facing fintech app.

The company, which launched in 2013, has ballooned to a $5.6 billion valuation on the heels of a $363 million Series D financing round led by DST Global. The app has also grown to 4 million users with more than $150 billion in transaction volume.

But the app, which lets people trade stocks and options for free, is also dabbling in the wondrous world of cryptocurrencies, setting the stage for a potential transition from ‘fun app’ to legitimiate financial institution.

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Robinhood cofounder and CEO Baiju Bhatt join us on the Disrupt SF 2018 stage.

The key to everything here is that Robinhood offered a simple consumer demand: free transactions on financial services. Unlike incumbents E*Trade and Scottrade, there are no trading fees on Robinhood, giving average consumers the chance to dip their toes in the market without any added barriers to entry.

At Disrupt, we’ll ask Bhatt about how Robinhood Crypto is progressing and what the company has in store as we head into next year.

Bhatt joins a wide array of big name speakers, from Dara Khosrowshahi to Reid Hoffman to Kirsten Green. It’s going to be an absolutely terrific show and we sincerely hope to see you there.

Tickets are available here.

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As product development incorporates more feedback, development toolkit productboard raises $8M

Since its debut on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in September 2016, demand for a service like productboard, which gives companies a holistic view of product development and encourages input from across an organization, has only gotten more acute, according to company chief executive Hubert Palan.

Now, with an $8 million commitment from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, with participation from Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, Reflex Capital and Rockaway Capital, alongside a host of angel investors, the company is looking to expand its sales and marketing and product development efforts to bring the benefits of its toolkit to more companies.

In the two years since TechCrunch last saw productboard, the company’s user base has grown significantly, from 100 customers in 2016 to more than 1,200 companies today, spanning a broad range of industries.

For Palan, the company’s growing user base (which now includes medical device companies, academic publishers and news organizations in addition to traditional digital product developers) is proof of a new demand in the market for more inputs around product design and development.

“Every company is now a digital company,” Palan said. “So every company needs to worry about digital product design.”

The company’s toolkit still includes features that allow it to hoover up information from customer support tickets, emails, input from sales teams and user research, to organize and prioritize features that need to be built.

But now, the company’s services allow anyone in an organization (with the proper access) to provide feedback and track the process of product development.

“Product Excellence is no longer optional,” said Palan in a statement. “These days competitors arise in a matter of months, not years. Customer loyalty is declining and users will happily switch to a competing solution that offers a better product experience. It’s more critical than ever to get the right products to market faster.”

As part of the financing, Kleiner Perkins’ new general partner, Ilya Fushman, will join the company’s board of directors. Fushman, who was integral in locking down productboard’s seed financing when he was at Index Ventures, has a long product history from his time at Dropbox, and is a welcome addition to the company’s board, Palan said.

While Fushman’s imprimatur is one sign of the company’s viability, the investment from strategic angel investors like Intercom co-founders Eoghan McCabe and Des Traynor; Clark Valberg, the co-founder of InVision; and Larry Gadea, the founder of Envoy, is still another.

“Product management is a core function in every technology organization, but few dedicated tools exist for it,” said Fushman, in a statement. 

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Ransomware technique uses your real passwords to trick you

A few folks have reported a new ransomware technique that preys upon corporate inability to keep passwords safe. The notes – which are usually aimed at instilling fear – are simple: the hacker says “I know that your password is X. Give me a bitcoin and I won’t blackmail you.”

Programer Can Duruk reported getting the email today.

Woah. This is cool. A Bitcoin ransom with using what I think is passwords from a big leak. Pretty neat since people would be legit scared when they see their password. The concealed part is actually an old password I used to use. pic.twitter.com/clEYiFqvHY

— can (@can) July 11, 2018

The email reads:

I’m aware that X is your password.

You don’t know me and you’re thinking why you received this e mail, right?

Well, I actually placed a malware on the porn website and guess what, you visited this web site to have fun (you know what I mean). While you were watching the video, your web browser acted as a RDP (Remote Desktop) and a keylogger which provided me access to your display screen and webcam. Right after that, my software gathered all your contacts from your Messenger, Facebook account, and email account.

What exactly did I do?

I made a split-screen video. First part recorded the video you were viewing (you’ve got a fine taste haha), and next part recorded your webcam (Yep! It’s you doing nasty things!).

What should you do?

Well, I believe, $1400 is a fair price for our little secret. You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin to the below address (if you don’t know this, search “how to buy bitcoin” in Google).

BTC Address: 1Dvd7Wb72JBTbAcfTrxSJCZZuf4tsT8V72
(It is cAsE sensitive, so copy and paste it)

Important:

You have 24 hours in order to make the payment. (I have an unique pixel within this email message, and right now I know that you have read this email). If I don’t get the payment, I will send your video to all of your contacts including relatives, coworkers, and so forth. Nonetheless, if I do get paid, I will erase the video immidiately. If you want evidence, reply with “Yes!” and I will send your video recording to your 5 friends. This is a non-negotiable offer, so don’t waste my time and yours by replying to this email.

To be clear there is very little possibility that anyone has video of you cranking it unless, of course, you video yourself cranking it. Further, this is almost always a scam. That said, the fact that the hackers are able to supply your real passwords – most probably gleaned from the multiple corporate break-ins that have happened over the past few years – is a clever change to the traditional cyber-blackmail methodology.

Luckily, the hackers don’t have current passwords.

“However, all three recipients said the password was close to ten years old, and that none of the passwords cited in the sextortion email they received had been used anytime on their current computers,” wrote researcher Brian Krebs. In short, the password files the hackers have are very old and outdated.

To keep yourself safe, however, cover your webcam when not in use and change your passwords regularly. While difficult, there is nothing else that can keep you safer than you already are if you use two-factor authentication and secure logins.

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Goodwall gets $10.8M to expand its ‘LinkedIn for students’

Goodwall, a US-focused student and graduate professional network which aims to connect young people with college and employment opportunities, has closed a $10.8 million Series A funding raise.

The round was led by Randstad Innovation Fund, a strategic corporate VC fund that focuses on recruitment, and Swiss private equity firm Manixer. Additional investors include Francis Clivaz, Zurich Cantonal Bank and Verve Capital Partners.

The 2014 founded startup says it will be using the new funding to grow the professional network, which has a core demographic of 14-24 year-olds, and more than one million members at this stage.

“Our main initiative with this round of funding is hiring new talent in New York to support our expansion,” says Taha Bawa, co-founder and CEO. “The funding will be used to grow our product team to provide better features for our two demographics: Highschool and college students. We are growing our sales team as well, to handle the demand that enterprises have shown in our talent.”

“The United States is our current focus and will continue to be the focus throughout 2018. We will be growing with our students and serving them in college,” he adds.

“We intend to widen the appeal to the college/post-grad segment by focusing on driving value in terms of being found easily (via a mobile-first experience) by the companies that are interesting to them, whether they be startups or larger companies, for internships or first jobs. Beyond this, as with high school students, we will provide current college students the ability to connect and support each other.”

Goodwall’s business model is based on generating revenue from colleges and enterprises looking to recruit students on the platform. For its target young people, the pull is an online platform where they can connect with fellow students and try to get ahead by showcasing their skills and experience, networking, and learning about education and employment opportunities.

Goodwall says it matches its college student and graduate users to employers for job and internship opportunities, while its high school students get connected to colleges and scholarships.

The startup is competing with traditional college and larger job boards but Bawa argues that its matching process offers an advantage to employers because it’s screening candidates so they get more relevant applications, rather than scores of irrelevant ones which they then have to sift themselves.

The platform generally offers employers a way to source, connect and engage with a pool of motivated students and graduates — with employers able to pay Goodwall to get their brand in front of the types of students or recruits they’re looking for.

“The typical Goodwall user is an English speaking, aspirational go-getter that is either college-bound or in college,” says Bawa. “Goodwall does not aim to only serve the 1% in terms of grades and achievements, though we have many students in this category, from Robotics Fairs winners to Olympic Champions. Rather we strive to serve all ambitious, hardworking students and bring their uniqueness to light via our comprehensive profiles.

“In high school these go-getters may not always be the best students academically, or at the college level, they may not necessarily be enrolled at top ranking institutions. Ultimately, these are the type of students we are looking to work with and the type of talent our partner universities and companies are looking to recruit.”

At the highschool level, Goodwall is also competing with scholarship and college matching websites but Bawa argues it also offers kids additional value — given the platform’s focus on building a community around achievements, connections and mutual support.

The network is also of course competing with LinkedIn — certainly at the older end of its age range. But because Goodwall offers tools for high school students it’s hoping to get in early and build a relationship that lasts right through college and users’ early career path, by acting as “the first resume they build”.

“We grow with them,” is how Bawa puts it. 

While the startup is taking VC funding now to focus on further building its network in the US, he confirms it would be open to an exit to a larger professional or student focused network in the future, saying: “We’d like to continue growing with our members.”

Commenting on the Series A in a statement, Paul Jacquin, managing partner at Randstad Innovation Fund, added: “We’re excited to support the Goodwall team in building a new segment with college and graduate demographics after their success in creating a unique and positive community to gain support, receive guidance and opportunities. The level of engagement on Goodwall has been impressive and unique in its community aspect. We are thrilled to bring the platform to its next chapter of growth.”

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Japanese startup Paidy raises $55M Series C to let people shop online without a credit card

Paidy, a fintech startup that enables Japanese consumers to shop online without using a credit card, announced today that it has raised a $55 million Series C. The round was led by Japanese trade conglomerate Itochu Corporation, with participation from Goldman Sachs.

The Tokyo-based startup says this brings its total funding so far to $80 million, including a $15 million Series B announced two years ago. One notable fact about Paidy’s funding is that it’s raised a sizable amount for Japanese startup, especially one with non-Japanese founders (its CEO and co-founder is Canadian and Goldman Sachs alum Russell Cummer, left in the photo above with CTO and co-founder Lee Smith).

Paidy was launched because even though Japan’s credit card penetration rate is high, their usage rate is relatively low, even for online purchases. Instead, shoppers pay cash on delivery or at convenience stores, which function as combination logistics/payment centers in many Japanese cities.

This is convenient for buyers because they don’t have to enter a credit card online or worry about fraud, but a hassle for businesses that often need to float cash for merchandise that hasn’t been paid for yet or deal with incomplete deliveries.

Paidy makes it possible for people to buy online without creating an account or using their credit cards. Instead, if a merchant uses Paidy, its customers are able to check out by entering their mobile phone numbers and email addresses. Then Paidy authenticates them with a four-digit code sent through SMS or voice. Every month, customers settle their bills, which include all transactions they made using Paidy, at a convenience store or through bank transfers or auto-debits (installment and subscription plans are also available).

The value proposition for businesses is that Paidy can increase their customer base and guarantee they get paid by using machine learning algorithms to underwrite transactions. The company claims that there are now 1.4 million active Paidy accounts, with the ambitious goal of increasing that number to 11 million by 2020 by expanding to bigger merchants and offline transactions.

In a press statement, Cummer said “We are extremely honored that Paidy’s business concept was highly valued by one of Japan’s most prestigious business conglomerates, ITOCHU. Through this tie-up, we expect to launch new merchants in order to deliver Paidy’s frictionless and intuitive financial solution to a much broader audience.”

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Spring Health raises $6M to help employees get access to personalized mental health treatment

In recent months, we’ve seen more and more funding flowing into tools for mental wellness — whether that’s AI-driven tools to help patients find help to meditation apps — and it seems like that trend is starting to pick up even more steam as smaller companies are grabbing the attention of investors.

There’s another one picking up funding today in Spring Health, a platform for smaller companies to help their employees get more access to mental health treatment. The startup looks to give employers get access to a simple, effective way to start offering that treatment for their employees in the form of personalized mental wellness plans. The employees get access to confidential plans in addition to access to a network and ways to get in touch with a therapist or psychiatrist as quickly as possible. The company said it has raised an additional $6 million in funding led by Rethink Impact, with Work-Bench, BBG Ventures, and NYC Partnership joining the round. RRE Ventures and the William K. Warren Foundation also participated.

“…I realized that mental health care is largely a guessing game: you use trial-and-error to find a compatible therapist, and you use trial-and-error to find the right treatment regimen, whether that’s a specific cocktail of medications or a specific type of psychotherapy,” CEO and co-founder April Koh said. “Everything around us is personalized these days – like shopping on Amazon, search results on Google, and restaurant recommendations on Yelp – but you can’t get personalized recommendations for your mental health care. I wanted to build a platform that connects you with the right care for you from the very beginning. So I partnered with leading expert on personalized psychiatry, Dr. Adam Chekroud our Chief Scientist, and my friend Abhishek Chandra, our CTO, to start Spring Health.”

The startup bills itself as an online mental health clinic that offers recommendations for employees, such as treatment options or tweaks to their daily routines (like exercise regimens). Like other machine learning-driven platforms, Spring Health puts a questionnaire in front of the end employee that adapts to the responses they are giving and then generates a wellness plan for that specific individual. As more and more patients get on the service, it gets more data, and can improve those recommendations over time. Those patients are then matched with clinicians and licensed medical health professionals from the company’s network.

“We found that employers were asking for it,” Koh said. “As a company we started off by selling an AI-enabled clinical decision support tool to health systems to empower their doctors to make data-driven decisions. While selling that tool to one big health system, word reached their benefits department, and they reached out to us and told us they need something in benefits to deal with mental health needs of their employee base. When that happened, we decided to completely focus on selling a “full-stack” mental health solution to employers for their employees. Instead of selling a tool to doctors, we decided we would create our own network of best-in-class mental health providers who would use our tools to deliver the best mental health care possible.”

However, Spring Health isn’t the only startup looking to create an intelligent matching system for employees seeking mental health. Lyra Health, another tool to help employees securely and confidentially begin the process of getting mental health treatment, raised $45 million in May this year. But Spring Health and Lyra Health are both part of a wave of startups looking to create ways for employees to more efficiently seek care powered by machine learning and capitalizing on the cost and difficulty of those tools dropping dramatically.

And it’s not the only service in the mental wellness category also picking up traction, with meditation app Calm raising $27 million at a $250 million valuation. Employers naturally have a stake in the health of their employees, and as all these apps look to make getting mental health treatment or improving mental wellness easier — and less of a taboo — the hope is they’ll continue to lower the barrier to entry, both from the actual product inertia and getting people comfortable with seeking help in the first place.

“I think VC’s are realizing there’s a huge opportunity to disrupt mental health care and make it accessible, convenient and affordable. But from our perspective, the problem with the space is that there is a lot of unvetted, non-evidence-based technology. There’s a ton of vaporware surrounding AI, big data, and machine-learning, especially in mental health care. We want to set a higher standard in mental healthcare that is based on evidence and clinical validation. Unlike most mental health care solutions on the market, we have multiple peer-reviewed publications in top medical journals like JAMA, describing and substantiating our technology. We know that our personalized recommendations and our Care Navigation approach are evidence-based and proven to work.

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Intelligent recruiting platform Greenhouse picks up another $50M

Finding the right talent is a make-or-break situation for any company — especially smaller ones, which might not have the robust tools (or pocket books) of larger companies like Google that have a complete system in place. Recruiting platform Greenhouse hopes to make that process a little bit easier, and it has caught the attention of investors.

The company said it has raised a new $50 million financing round from Riverwood Capital, bringing its total funding to $110 million. Greenhouse definitely isn’t the only company that’s starting to pick up a significant amount of funding recently by trying to crack open the process of talent acquisition and make it a little more data-driven. But as the cost and difficulty of collecting enormous amounts of data on different kinds of human activity has dropped with the emergence of new machine learning tools, the problems behind recruiting may also be one that can get a lot of help from employing the same data science rigor that powers a smart Google search result.

“Hiring tools and software in the market had been built for the previous generation, with an applicant tracking mindset to cover the basics of collecting resumes on your website,” Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait said. “We saw that winning companies in the talent market were ones who were able to attract the right talent, identify difference makers in a sea of LinkedIn profiles, make really smart decisions in who to hire, deliver winning experiences, use data to optimize. They needed tools to accomplish those goals and much broader than the recruiting software.”

The typical consumer’s experience with Greenhouse has probably been a bunch of job listings on a website somewhere, where an employee can submit an application or additional information that the company wants. Under the hood, Greenhouse provides companies with ways to find the right funnels for their applications — whether that’s something like GlassDoor or smaller niches on the Internet with more isolated pockets of talent — and discover the right employees for the roles that are available. Data is collected on all this behavior, which in turn helps Greenhouse give better recommendations for companies as to where to find potential recruits that fit their needs.

All that has to be packaged together with a generally nice user experience, both for the typical consumer and for the companies. That can boil down to actually understanding the right questions to ask, the right requirements to post in a job listing, and also making sure the process is pretty quick for people that are applying for jobs. Greenhouse implements scorecards to help interviewers — which can turn out to be a big group, depending on the position — determine whether or not candidates are the right person for the job in a more rigorous manner. And Greenhouse also hopes to work with companies with its tools to eliminate bias in the recruiting process to produce a more diverse set of hires.

“Companies are continuing to invest in recruiting and talent acquisition software,” Chait said. “As issues of talent and hiring have become more central at the C-suite, companies continue to invest in this area. Companies are starting to see the difference between HR and talent acquisition as its own specialty. If you’re a big company that has an all-in-one HR suite, it’s all well and good to have payroll and benefits in your org chart in one place, but when it comes to hiring, iit’s very dynamic.”

Greenhouse is still pretty dependent on its partners, but the startup has a wide array of companies that it works with to ensure that all the right tools are available to clients to find the right candidates. If a change is coming on LinkedIn — one of the biggest homes of candidate profiles on the planet — Greenhouse is going to work with the company to ensure that nothing breaks, Chait said. Greenhouse provides an API-driven ecosystem to ensure that its tools reach all the right spots on the Internet to help companies find the best talent.

But Greenhouse isn’t the only recruiting-driven company to attract a significant round of funding. It isn’t even the only one to do so in the last month — Hired, another recruiting platform, said it raised $30 million just weeks ago to create a sort of subscription model to help funnel the right candidates to companies. But all this interest, including Greenhouse, is a product of attempts to try to find the right talent in what might be unexpected spots powered by machine learning tools that are now getting to the point where the predictions are actually pretty good.

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Meero raises $45 million for its on-demand photography service

Have you ever wondered why photos on Airbnb, UberEats and your favorite hotel platform always look so good? French startup Meero has been working on a marketplace and AI-powered technology to make it easy to get good photos of products and places.

The company has raised a new $45 million round led by Alven Capital and Idinvest. Eight months ago, Meero already raised $15 million from Global Founders Capital, Aglaé Ventures, Alven Capital and White Star Capital.

“We focused on this idea because we wanted to make the web beautiful,” co-founder and CEO Thomas Rebaud told me last year. “We realized that we are all on Instagram and that photos are beautiful. But then, you go on a marketplace and photos aren’t great.”

The company first looked at the real estate market and partnered with real estate companies to optimize the photography process as much as possible.

It starts with finding a photographer. Instead of working with hundreds of photographers in hundreds of cities, Meero lets you find a photographer in over a hundred countries. Prices, contracts and processes are all standardized in order to avoid any surprise. Meero takes a cut on every transaction.

After the shooting, photographers usually have to spend hours selecting and editing the best photos. This usually takes even longer than the shooting itself.

Meero has been working on AI-powered algorithms so that you don’t have much to do. You upload your photos, and the service will automagically take care of the editing. By speeding up this process, a photographer can work on more projects. And Meero can also cut variable costs drastically — this is key when it comes to Meero’s scalability.

With today’s funding round, the startup is going to open new offices in the U.S. and somewhere in Asia. Meero will also hire more computer vision experts in France.

Meero currently has 40,000 clients and processes a new transaction every 30 seconds. Clients usually get photos within 24 hours. The company now also lets you order videos from the same platform.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Meero raises $45 million for its on-demand photography service https://ift.tt/2KPbIxV

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Pointy raises $12M Series B to help bricks and mortar retailers fight Amazon

Pointy​,​ the​ ​startup​ ​that​ offers tech to help ​bricks and mortar​ ​retailers put their stock online so that it can be discovered via search engines, has picked up $12 million in new funding. The Series B round is led Polaris Partners and Vulcan Capital, and brings total funding for the Irish company to $19 million.

Founded on the premise that people often resort to e-commerce behemoths like Amazon because they can’t find the same item locally, Pointy has developed a hardware and cloud software solution that makes it easy to create a bespoke website as means of making local stock discoverable online. Specifically, the ​”Pointy​ ​box”​ hardware ​gadget connects to a store’s barcode scanner and automatically puts scanned items on a Pointy-powered website for the store.

Store pages are then optimised for search engines, so that when you search for products locally — say your favourite artisan beer — a Pointy-powered result shows up and encourages you to visit the store and make a purchase. In other words, this is about helping local retailers drive more footfall, but with very little additional overhead.

Pointy CEO and co-founder Mark Cummins says the Series B round will be used by the startup to accelerate growth and build on an increased uptake by U.S. retailers. It currently counts 5,500 retailers using Pointy in total, with 70 percent from the U.S, and the remaining in Canada, U.K. and Ireland. “To put the U.S. number in context, just under 1 in 200 U.S retailers is now using Pointy,” a company spokesperson tells me.

Since we last covered Pointy, the started has extended its reach considerably with partnerships with Lightspeed, Clover and Square, which allows retailers using these POS systems to use the Pointy platform for free because it doesn’t require the purchase of the $499 Pointy device. It has also partnered with Google via the search giant’s new See What’s In Store (SWIS) program so that shoppers can discover what a store sells within Google’s search and maps pages.

“For all the hype around e-commerce and the media narrative of ‘Retail Apocalypse’, people still make the vast majority of their purchases in local stores,” adds Cummins in a statement. “But local retailers have lost out in not having their products visible online – we solve that problem for them”.

Meanwhile, Point’s previous backers include Draper Associates, Frontline Ventures, and notable angel investors such as Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress), Lars Rasmussen (co-founder of Google Maps), Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), and Michael Birch (co-founder of Bebo).

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Pointy raises $12M Series B to help bricks and mortar retailers fight Amazon https://ift.tt/2mbq2Sj

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Medical care scheduling startup Doctolib acquires MonDocteur

What do you do when you’ve raised nearly $100 million and you want to grow as quickly as possible? In Doctolib’s case, the startup is acquiring its main competitor MonDocteur. Together, the two companies work with tens of thousands of doctors and get tens of millions of unique visitors every month.

Doctolib has developed an online scheduling platform for all sorts of doctors, from your physician next door to the hospital in the big city.

Instead of creating integrations with existing calendars and software solutions, Doctolib is replacing your doctor’s scheduling system altogether. After signing up, you can create your profile and manage your calendar from Doctolib directly.

This way, patients can look at their doctor’s calendar on Doctolib’s website and find a time slot that works for everyone. But doctors even use Doctolib for patients who call them directly as it replaces the entire calendar system.

MonDocteur started five years ago with the exact same idea in mind. Over time, the two companies have significantly grown and convinced more and more doctors. You can’t use both solutions, so each doctor had to decide between Doctolib and MonDocteur.

Here are some numbers:

• MonDocteur has 150 employees, while Doctolib has 450 employees.
• MonDocteur works with 10,000 health professionals and Doctolib has signed up 45,000 health professionals.
• MonDocteur costs €106.80 per month, Doctolib costs €109 per month in France.
• MonDocteur gets 4 million visitors per month on its website. Doctolib now attracts 16 million visitors.

So it’s clear that MonDocteur was smaller than Doctolib, but not really an order of magnitude smaller. These two startups will form a big company after the acquisition with 600 employees. It will also lead to a huge jump in monthly recurring revenue.

It’s clear that Doctolib now has nothing to worry about in France. The startup also recently launched its service in Germany. Now, it’s all about convincing new doctors in France and Germany to join the platform. The company could also expand to new services to create new revenue streams.

For now, both MonDocteur and Doctolib will stick around. If you’ve been using one of those two sites, nothing will change. Doctors will also remain segmented between the two sites. Eventually, there will be just one service.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Medical care scheduling startup Doctolib acquires MonDocteur https://ift.tt/2KZC13H

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Nurx raises $36 million and adds Chelsea Clinton to its board of directors

Telemedicine startup Nurx recently closed a $36 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. As part of the investment, Kleiner Perkins General Partner Noah Knauf is joining the startup’s board of directors, along with Chelsea Clinton.

With this new funding, CEO and co-founder Hans Gangeskar told TechCrunch that the startup plans to scale its clinical teams, pharmacies and geographic reach in the coming year.

“We have a new site in Miami where we have a team of nurses being on-boarded, [we’re] building out our engineering and design teams and really just [working to] increase the pace of everything that we’re doing,” Gangeskar said.

The startup launched in 2014 with the goal to make reliable access to contraceptives as easy as opening your web browser. After plugging your information into its online app, users are connected with physicians, given a prescription and Nurx prepares their product for delivery.

Since its launch, this California-based startup now operates in 17 states, and has expanded its products to include not only contraceptives (such as pills, patches, injectables and products like Nuva Ring) but the anti-HIV medication PrEP as well. Gangeskar says the company is also preparing to launch an at-home lab kit soon for HIV testing.

For Gangeskar, creating affordable access to contraceptives is a first step to changing how patients interact and receive medication from their physicians.

“Birth control is one of the fundamental functions of any health care system [so] for us its a natural place to start,” said Gangeskar.

To help advance its plans to redefine this space, Gangeskar says Nurx is excited to welcome public health veteran Chelsea Clinton to its board.

“Her experience in public health and global health from the Clinton Global Initiative has been really valuable, [particularly learning about] rolling out preventative services in large scales, because really that’s the potential of our platform — [to reach] populations that can’t be reached by the conventional medical system.”

While Washington looks to make cuts to American’s healthcare access, startups like Nurx offer a fresh perspective on this critical space.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Nurx raises $36 million and adds Chelsea Clinton to its board of directors https://ift.tt/2LcqyL3

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