blogger better: 2018-12-30

Saturday, January 5, 2019

Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools

Joanna Glasner Contributor

Artificial intelligence

To begin, let us reflect that we are at a strange inflection point for AI and employment. Our artificially intelligent overlords are not smart enough to actually do our jobs. Nonetheless, they have strong opinions about whether we’re qualified to do them ourselves.

It is at this peculiar point that the alchemic mix of AI software, recruiting-based business models and venture capital are coming together to build startups.

In 2018, at least 43 companies applying AI or machine learning to some facet of employment have raised seed or early-stage funding, according to Crunchbase data. In the chart below, we look at a few startups that have secured rounds, along with their backers and respective business models:

At present, even AI boosters don’t tout the technology as a cure-all for troubles plaguing the talent recruitment space. While it’s true humans are biased and flawed when it comes to evaluating job candidates, artificially intelligent software suffers from many of the same bugs. For instance, Amazon scrapped its AI recruiting tool developed in-house because it exhibited bias against women.

That said, it’s still early innings. Over the next few years, startups will be actively tweaking their software to improve performance and reduce bias.

Happiness and engagement

Once the goal of recruiting the best people is achieved, the next step is ensuring they stay and thrive.

Usually, a paycheck goes a long way to accomplishing the goal of staying. But in case that’s not enough, startups are busily devising a host of tools for employers to boost engagement and fight the scourge of burnout.

In the chart below, we look at a few of the companies that received early-stage funding this year to build out software platforms and services aimed at making people happier and more effective at work:

The most heavily funded of the early-stage crop looks to be Peakon, which offers a software platform for measuring employee engagement and collecting feedback. The Danish firm has raised $33 million to date to fund its expansion.

London-based BioBeats is another up-and-comer aimed at the “corporate wellness” market, with digital tools to help employees track stress levels and other health-related metrics. The company has raised $7 million to date to help keep those stress levels in check.

Early-stage indicators

Early-stage funding activity tends to be an indicator of areas with somewhat low adoption rates today that are poised to take off dramatically. For employment, that means we can likely expect to see AI-based recruitment and software-driven engagement tools become more widespread in the coming years.

What does that mean for job seekers and paycheck toilers? Expect to spend more of your time interfacing with intelligent software. Apparently, it’ll make you more employable, and happier, too.

https://tcrn.ch/2SyCZUW Hire faster, work happier: Startups target employment with AI and engagement tools https://tcrn.ch/2AxWXbm

Startups Weekly: VCs celebrate the new year the only way they know how

Venture capitalists swore in the new year the only way they know how… by submitting SEC paperwork for new funds! insert party hat/confetti emoji here.

As many of us brainstormed our New Year’s resolutions and let our hangovers wear off, several firms began this week what for some is a long and arduous process of raising a VC fund and for others is as simple as a few phone calls to LPs. What else happened this week? Pokémon GO creator Niantic secured $190 million, Mary Meeker announced the name of her fund and a whole bunch of people played with Popsugar’s somewhat sketchy twinning app.

Fresh funds:

Mary Meeker will raise up to $1.5 billion for Bond, her new VC fund. Union Square Ventures raised $429 million across two new funds. Lightspeed Venture partners announced a $560 million China fund. And biotech firm Atlas Venture brought in $250 million.

AR startups are failing:

TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney takes a look at struggling augmented reality startups and questions some of the larger players, from Magic Leap to Snap and Niantic. And speaking of Niantic, the Pokémon GO developer closed a $190 million funding round this week at a $3.9 billion valuation.

Indian startups start the year off strong:

Startups based in India raised more than $10 billion in 2018, per Venture Beat, a record amount of capital for the country. Already this year one company has closed a round larger than $100 million. CarDekho, an online marketplace for car sales in India, has pulled in a new $110 million Series C funding round this week to push deeper into financial services and insurance.

Future tech:

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

A startup disrupting the … bottled water business:

FloWater has raised $15 million for its reusable water bottle refilling stations to produce purified water. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

VC subsidized vending machines:

Vengo makes wall-mounted mini-vending machines the size of large picture frames that it then sells to vending machine distributors, asking for a small fee per month in exchange for access to its software. Now it has $7 million to build out its business.

A VC gets a second chance:

After SpaceX filed more SEC paperwork as part of its $500 million upcoming fundraise, TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos noticed a familiar name on the document: Steve Jurvetson. Jurvetson is a longtime board member of both Tesla and SpaceX, but after he left DFJ, the venture capital firm he co-founded, in 2017 amid questions about his personal conduct, there was uncertainty around whether he would keep those director positions. Well, it looks like Elon Musk is standing by Jurvetson.

And finally, are you smarter than a TechCrunch reporter?

Let this test decide.

Want more TechCrunch newsletters? Sign up here.

https://tcrn.ch/2TobZY6 Startups Weekly: VCs celebrate the new year the only way they know how https://tcrn.ch/2RquGNR

Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things.

The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik.

“At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if you want to customize an object, it would be best to have access to the original shapes — what their dimensions are and how they’re combined. But once you combine everything into a triangle mesh, you have nothing but a list of triangles to work with, and that information is lost,”

“Once we recover the metadata, it’s easier for other people to modify designs,” said Tao Du to 3DPrintingIndustry.

The process cuts objects into simple solids that can then be added together to create complex objects. Because 3D scanning is imperfect, the creation of mesh models of various objects rarely leads to a perfect copy of the original. Using this technique individual parts are cut away, analyzed, and reassembled, allowing for a more precise scan.

“Further, we demonstrated the robustness of our algorithm by solving examples not describable by our grammar. Finally, since our method returns parameterized CSG programs, it provides a powerful means for end-users to edit and understand the structure of 3D meshes,” said Du.

The system detects primitive shapes and then modifies them. This allows it to recreate almost any object with far better accuracy than in previous versions of the software. It’s a surprisingly cool way to recreate begin hacking hardware in order to understand it’s shape, volume, and stability.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models https://tcrn.ch/2sjJb81

TikTok’s quietly launched ‘Lite’ app has reached over 12 million downloads since August

Short-form video app TikTok has been growing in popularity across international markets, including in the U.S. where a merger with Musical.ly has seen the app topping the App Store charts. Facebook and Snapchat have been hastily trying to copy TikTok’s features as a result. A part of TikTok’s ambitious global expansion plan has been its more recent targeting of emerging markets – like India and Indonesia – where the company’s quietly launched “TikTok Lite” app has been gaining ground in the latter half of 2018.

TikTok hasn’t yet made much fuss over its Lite version, which actually consists of two separate apps.

The first was launched on August 6, 2018 in Thailand, but is now available across other primarily Asian markets, including Indonesia where it’s most popular, as well as Vietnam, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

This version of TikTok Lite has grown to 5 million installs since its August debut. (It’s actually written with a lowercase “l” in “Lite” in the Play store, which is how you can tell the difference between this and the other app.)

This version was also briefly live in India, Brazil, and Russia, but now these countries are served by a separate Lite app (written as “Lite” with an uppercase “L”), which launched on November 1, 2018.

This second version of TikTok Lite has now become the larger of the two, thanks to India. It has around 7.1 million total downloads, according to Sensor Tower data.

It has also now been installed across 15 additional non-Asian countries, including Egypt, Brazil, Algeria, Tunisia, Russia, Ecuador, South Africa, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Kenya, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nigeria, Angola, and Ghana.

Combined, the two TikTok Lite apps have gained over 12 million downloads in around six months’ time, TechCrunch confirmed with Sensor Tower.

However, TikTok Lite is not being heavily promoted at this time – especially when compared with the outsize marketing that TikTok’s flagship app has been seeing as of late.

This advertising is courtesy of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, which has had an infusion of billions in outside capital recently. The company is valued at $78 billion, as of October.

And it’s spending, apparently:

E.g.:

More expensive promotion of #TikTok, this time in #Dubai. That 3 billion from #Softbank won't last long at this rate #Bytedance pic.twitter.com/A12tUMBgHC

— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) January 1, 2019

Sensor Tower found that more than half of TikTok Lite’s downloads came over the past month, following TikTok Lite’s return to India. Combined, the two Lite apps’ downloads reached around 6.7 million in December, which was a 158 percent increase over November’s 2.6 million installs, it said.

Despite TikTok Lite’s growth, 12 million+ downloads is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to TikTok’s larger user base. This represents only 4.5 percent of TikTok’s downloads on Google Play since August 2018, and only about 3.6 percent of all TikTok downloads since then across both the iOS and Google Play app stores combined.

To date, TikTok’s main app has been downloaded over 887 million times on Google Play. That doesn’t count the downloads from the Chinese version called Douyin, which is found on third-party Android app stores. That means TikTok’s true install base is even bigger.

ByteDance itself had publicly said last July the TikTok user base had grown to 500 million+ monthly active users – a way of counting who’s regularly using the app, instead of just installing it on their phone.

Given that Facebook Lite grew to 200 million users in under two years‘ time, it seems like a “Lite” version of TikTok, now one of the world’s biggest apps, could be doing a bit better than 12 million installs over a six month period.

The problem seems to stem from a variety of factors, including how TikTok Lite is marketed in the Play Store. The app uses screenshots and a description that make it seem like it’s just another version of TikTok. But according to user reviews, people were disappointed to find it’s a consumption-only app. Many have left reviews complaining about how they can’t make videos. They call it “fake” and “bad” as a result.

TikTok would do better to clarify how its Lite version is different, to eliminate this confusion.

It’s common for major tech companies to offer a “lighter” version of their app for emerging markets where low bandwidth is a concern. These apps tend to be smaller in size, more performant, and sometimes either have reduced capabilities or special features aimed at low-bandwidth users.

Google, for example, has a suite of light apps – the “Go” edition apps – like Gmail Go, YouTube Go, Files Go, Google Go, Google Maps Go, and Google Assistant Go. Uber now offers Uber Lite. Facebook operates apps like Facebook Lite, Messenger Lite, and Instagram Lite – the latter which launched just ahead of TikTok Lite, in fact.

Like most “Lite” apps, TikTok Lite clocks in at a smaller size – it’s only 10MB to 11MB (depending on the version) versus the much larger 71MB of TikTok’s main app.

A rep for TikTok confirmed the company is now offering a Lite version in some markets so users can choose a smaller app if they have concerns around data or the storage space on their phone. No other information about the Lite versions or strategy was provided.

So far, ByteDance’s efforts around TikTok Lite seem more experimental, given it hasn’t put up a proper description on Google Play; runs two separate Lite versions; and had offered the app in some markets briefly, pulled out, then returned with another version. It will be interesting to see what TikTok Lite becomes when it gets the sort of attention that the main TikTok app is receiving today.

from Social – TechCrunch http://bit.ly/2Rx9Goz TikTok’s quietly launched ‘Lite’ app has reached over 12 million downloads since August Sarah Perez https://tcrn.ch/2VuOw9C
via IFTTT

Boom Supersonic nabs $100M to build its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner

One Denver-based startup’s long-shot bid to move today’s commercial jets beyond supersonic speeds just got a big injection of cash.

Boom Supersonic, which is building and designing what it calls the “world’s first economically viable supersonic airliner,” announced today that they’ve closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by Emerson Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator Continuity, Caffeinated Capital, SV Angel, Sam Altman, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, Michael Marks and Greg McAdoo.

The startup has raised around $140 million to date. The team has about 100 employees today, and hopes to double that number this year with its new funding.

“Today, the time and cost of long-distance travel prevent us from connecting with far-off people and places,” said Boom CEO Blake Scholl in a statement. “Overture fares will be similar to today’s business class—widening horizons for tens of millions of travelers. Ultimately, our goal is to make high-speed flight affordable to all.”

Alongside the fund raise, Boom is further detailing its plans to begin testing its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner this year. The company is aiming to launch a 1:3 scale prototype of its planned Overture airliner this year called the XB-1. The two-seater plane will serve to validate the technologies being built for the full-sized jet.

The startup’s supersonic Overture jet will hold 55 passengers, and the team hopes that the costs of flying more than double the speed of sound will be comparable to today’s business class ticket prices. The company already has pre-orders from Virgin Group and Japan Airlines for 30 airliners .

$100 million may seem like a lot of money, but the development costs for lengthy projects like these can quickly race towards the billions of dollar suggesting that if they carry out their mission, they’re going to need a whole lot more.

https://tcrn.ch/2Far6R6 Boom Supersonic nabs $100M to build its Mach-2.2 commercial airliner https://tcrn.ch/2CQmu19

FloWater just raised $15 million to put bottled water out of business

FloWater, an eight-year-old, Burlingame, Calif.-based company whose reusable water bottle refilling stations produce purified water, has raised $15 million in its first major round of funding. Bluewater, a Swedish company that sells water purifiers, among other things, led the round.

FloWater caters to schools, colleges, fitness centers, hotels and offices, and, in the words of CEO Rich Razgaitis, set out to address four environmental concerns from the outset: obesity in the U.S., which has been tied in part to the rise of sugary, carbonated beverages; the nearly 40 billion single-use plastic water bottles that are used and tossed aside every year; the millions of barrels of oil and hundreds of millions of pounds of CO2 byproduct waste used to create and transport bottled water; and the toxins in single-use plastic bottles, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals.

It has a pretty compelling case to make, in short, as other purveyors of refilling stations would surely argue, and which clearly persuaded 13 investors altogether (according to a new SEC filing) to write checks to the company.

And it all started with an $18,600 bank loan, according to the company’s founder, Wyatt Taubman, who remains on the company’s board but stepped aside as head honcho in 2015 and has since founded a cold-pressed juice company.

Per his LinkedIn, Taubman, says he used that bank loan to launch a pilot refill station, before shaking $125,000 out of friends and family, and taking out a second, $62,000 loan to launch additional refill stations. The company later raised $950,000 from the Tech Coast Angels and the Hawaii Angels, hired Razgaitis, redesigned the look of its product and, in 2016, raised $2.6 million in Series A funding.

FloWater customers include Google, Airbnb, Specialized Bikes and, somewhat ironically, Red Bull.

It says its stations are now in nearly 50 states.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J FloWater just raised $15 million to put bottled water out of business https://tcrn.ch/2RvURmb

Trading app Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of planned UK launch

Robinhood, the U.S.-based “zero-fee” stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange, is stealthily recruiting for a new London office ahead of plans to eventually launch in the U.K., TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources within London’s thriving fintech industry, Robinhood is hiring for multiple U.K. positions. These span recruitment, operations, marketing and PR, and customer support. Notably, the company is also seeking people in compliance, and product, including product design.

In other words, significant localisation and local product market fit appears to be the intention. Compliance is also an important part of Robinhood’s future U.K. regulatory requirements as it applies to local regulator the FCA for the appropriate licenses. Robinhood declined to comment on its U.K. plans.

Meanwhile, news that Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of a planned U.K. launch is interesting in the context of local fintech startups who have launched or announced their own fee-free trading offerings.

Launched late last year, London-based Freetrade has built a bona-fide “challenger broker,” including obtaining the required license from the FCA, rather than simply partnering with an established broker. The app lets you invest in U.K. stocks and ETFs, but will soon add U.S. stocks, too. Trades are “fee-free” if you are happy for your buy or sell trades to execute at the close of business each day. If you want to execute immediately, the startup charges a low £1 per trade.

In June last year, Revolut, also headquartered in London, announced its intention to add commission-free trading to its banking app, in what was seen as a bid to compete with Robinhood. So far, no product has surfaced, although I’m told that we should see trading added to Revolut in Q1 this year.

What’s intriguing about the Revolut-Robinhood comparisons is that the two companies share a number of investors, namely Index and DST. Both companies have incredibly high valuations, too, and, depending on respective burn rates, quite deep pockets.

Co-founded by Baiju Bhatt and Vlad Tenev (pictured above), Robinhood claims 6 million accounts and is valued at $5.6 billion, having raised a total to date of $539 million. It has around 300 employees across its HQ in Menlo Park, California and its regional HQ in Lake Mary, Florida.

Revolut claims 3.5 million users, and at its last funding round was valued at $1.7 billion. The fintech has raised a total of $340 million, and has a headcount of 600 in London and across its various regional offices.

https://tcrn.ch/2CPMNoi Trading app Robinhood is stealthily recruiting ahead of planned UK launch https://tcrn.ch/2Awyljs

Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage

Today, many companies provide developer access to their services via APIs. Moesif, a San Francisco startup, wants to help these companies gain insight into their customer’s API usage patterns. Today, the company announced a $3.5 million seed round.

The investment was led by Merus Capital with participation by Heavybit, Fresco Capital and Zach Coelius, who sold his startup, Cruise Automation, to General Motors for $1 billion in 2016.

Moesif co-founder and CEO Derric Gilling says Moesif is akin to Mixpanel or Google Analytics, except instead of tracking web or mobile analytics, it looks at API usage. “As more and more companies are using and creating these APIs, there comes a point where you need to understand how your customers are using them, any problems they are running into and how do you actually decrease developer churn.”

Heat map showing API usage by region. Screenshot: Moesif

The company is aiming at two primary types of users. First of all, there are developers who can use the monitoring features to understand when there are issues with the API. These folks have access to the free tier.

Moesif also targets business units like product management, sales and marketing, who use the tool to understand who’s using the API, how often, and with machine learning, understand who is likely to stop using the product based on how they are using it. The tool can tie into other business systems like Mailchimp or a CRM tool to get a more complete picture of customers as they use the API.

The product was released last year and Gilling says his company already has 2000 customers, which includes both the free and pay tiers. He said they have had particular success with SaaS and FinTech companies, both of which make heavy use of APIs. Customers include PowerSchool, Schwab and InsideSales.

While the company currently consists of the three founders, flush with the seed investment, it intends to hire around 10 people in the next six months including a VP of engineering, additional developers and sales and marketing folks.

Moesif was founded in 2016, and the three founders went through the Alchemist Accelerator last year.

https://tcrn.ch/2COk5nJ Moesif raises $3.5M seed round to provide insight into API usage https://tcrn.ch/2TvvLBj

Qualcomm patent dispute forces Apple to pull iPhone 7 and 8 from its stores in Germany

{rss:content:encoded} Qualcomm patent dispute forces Apple to pull iPhone 7 and 8 from its stores in Germany https://tcrn.ch/2s9W6cr http://bit.ly/2Sx3tpT January 04, 2019 at 01:14PM

In more bad news for Apple, the company’s iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are not currently on sale in its own retail stores in Germany.

This follows an injunction issued by a Munich court last month related to patent litigation brought by chipmaker Qualcomm that’s being enforced from today. The patent dispute concerns smartphone power management technology that’s used to extend battery life.

In December the Munich court sided with Qualcomm, finding that Apple is infringing its patented power savings technology in the two models — granting a permanent injunction.

The court ordered Apple to cease the sale, offer for sale and importation for sale in Germany of infringing iPhones.

Apple has said it will appeal.

The Apple Germany website currently offers the newest models of the iPhone, the XS, XS Max and XR; and older models from 2014 (iPhone 6 and 6 Plus); 2015 (iPhone 6S and 6S Plus); and 2016 (iPhone SE). But buyers looking for 2016’s iPhone 7 or 2017’s iPhone 8 will be disappointed.

Yesterday Qualcomm announced it had posted security bonds totalling €1.34BN required by the court, enabling the injunction issued by the District Court of Munich on December 20 to be enforced.

The bonds are required to cover potential damages incurred by Apple should the judgment be overturned or amended on appeal. Qualcomm had said on December 20 that it would post the bonds “within a few days”.

In a statement yesterday the chipmaker also claimed the court had ordered Apple to recall infringing iPhones from third party resellers in the market.

But at the time of writing the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models are still being offered by Apple resellers in Germany.

Amazon.de currently offers both handsets, for instance. While Gravis, Germany’s biggest reseller of Apple products, also told Reuters it was still selling all Apple products including the two models.

Qualcomm has also been pursing patent litigation against Apple in China and the U.S., and last month Apple appealed against a preliminary injunction banning the import and sales of old iPhone models in that market.

In that case the patents relate to editing photos and managing apps on smartphone touchscreens.

While, in the US, Qualcomm has most recently accused Intel engineers working with Apple of stealing trade secrets.

The feud dates back further though. Two years ago the FTC filed charges against Qualcomm accusing it of anticompetitive tactics in an attempt to maintain a monopoly in its chip business — with Apple officially cited in the complaint.

Cupertino also filed a billion-dollar royalty lawsuit against the chipmaker at the same time, accusing it of charging for patents “they have nothing to do with”.

The legal battle between the pair shows no signs of fizzling out, and has led Apple to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm chips — with Intel the short term beneficiary.

An Apple spokesperson declined to comment on the latest litigious development in Germany but pointed to its statement from December 20 in which it takes a broad swipe at Qualcomm’s “tactics”.

In the statement Apple also said resellers in the market would continue to stock all models.

It writes:

Qualcomm’s campaign is a desperate attempt to distract from the real issues between our companies. Their tactics, in the courts and in their everyday business, are harming innovation and harming consumers. Qualcomm insists on charging exorbitant fees based on work they didn’t do and they are being investigated by governments all around the world for their behavior.

We are of course disappointed by this verdict and we plan to appeal. All iPhone models remain available to customers through carriers and resellers in 4,300 locations across Germany. During the appeal process, iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 models will not be available at Apple’s 15 retail stores in Germany. iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR will remain available in all our stores.

The sideswipe at Qualcomm’s “tactics” is perhaps also a tactic reference to the use of a controversial PR firm, Definers, which — as we reported in November — had sent pitches slinging mud at Apple seemingly on Qualcomm’s behalf.

Late last year Facebook confirmed it had severed its business relationship with the PR firm after it was revealed to have used antisemitic smear tactics to try to discredit Facebook critics.

We’ve asked Qualcomm for comment on its use of the PR firm.

Challenger bank Monzo has quietly begun working on a U.S. launch

Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank with more than a million customers and a unicorn valuation to boot, has quietly began working on a U.S. launch, TechCrunch has learned.

According to multiple sources, the fintech startup has set up a small team to begin laying the ground work to bring a version of Monzo to North America, which will initially be powered by a U.S. banking partner while Monzo works on the necessarily regulatory licenses to go it alone.

The plan, which could still be subject to change, is for Monzo to create a “lite” version of its product for U.S. customers, much in the same was as it first launched in the U.K. with a pre-paid debit card before eventually offering a fully fledged bank account.

The thinking, according to one person familiar with the company’s strategy, is that this will enable Monzo to build up a U.S. customer base and iterate its product for the U.S. market in parallel with the challenger bank’s federal charter bank application.

I understand that the plan is for the initial Monzo U.S. product to offer in-app signup, the trademark “hot coral” Monzo debit card, an account and routing number, the ability to make and accept payments, ATM withdrawals, and realtime transaction notifications. In other words, many of the same features that has endeared Monzo with U.K. customers.

Contacted by TechCrunch, a Monzo spokesperson provided the following statement:

We’re really excited about international expansion over the coming months and years. After all, it’s hard to build a bank for a billion people in the UK alone!

However, we don’t have anything specific to share at this stage about those plans. When we do, we’ll be sure to tell the world.

Meanwhile, news that Monzo has begun executing U.S. expansion plans isn’t entirely surprising, even it appears to be happening significantly faster than previously thought.

Co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield has openly talked about his ambition to bring Monzo to the U.S. one day and the London-based challenger bank boasts an array of U.S. investors. They include most recently General Catalyst, along with the likes of Thrive Capital, Goodwater Capital, Stripe, Michael Moritz, and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.

The fintech company also recently opened a Las Vegas office, from which it offers twilight hours customer support for U.K. customers. Or at least that is the party line. Now it appears that Las Vegas could soon have Monzo customers closer to home to keep happy, too.

https://tcrn.ch/2As8uck Challenger bank Monzo has quietly begun working on a U.S. launch https://tcrn.ch/2TuuhY0

Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes $190M funding round

Mobile AR gaming startup Niantic has closed a $190 million round of funding according to newly filed SEC docs.

The filing comes after a WSJ report last month suggested the company was in the process of closing a $200 million raise from investors, including IVP, aXiomatic Gaming and Samsung, at a $3.9 billion valuation. The round closed shortly after that report on December 20 according to the new documents.

With the close of this round, Niantic has now raised more than $415 million to date. The startup’s other investors include Founders Fund, Spark Capital and Alsop Louie Partners, among others. The filing details that there were 26 investors in this funding round.

The new influx of cash comes as the creator of Pokémon GO prepares to release its next major title, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. The augmented reality game does not have a release date yet, but is expected to launch this year.

Niantic reportedly raising $200M at $3.9B valuation

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Pokémon GO creator Niantic closes $190M funding round https://tcrn.ch/2F7LylS

Hey look, it’s the Samsung Galaxy S10

{rss:content:encoded} Hey look, it’s the Samsung Galaxy S10 https://tcrn.ch/2SCgCOj http://bit.ly/2GWnCnV January 03, 2019 at 09:51PM

Well, what have we here? If it isn’t the Samsung Galaxy S10, courtesy of perennial smartphone outer, EVLeaks. This marks one the first good looks we’ve got at the phone, which is likely due out in a couple of months at Mobile World Congress.

It’s a pretty rough photo — the icons are all blurred out and the cropping job isn’t great, likely in an effort to conceal the source. But it’s a pretty decent shot of the front — and hey, we probably have month and change to go for the thing to start leaking like crazy.

The most interesting bit here is probably the least surprising. After holding off on the notch last generation, Samsung has skipped it over entirely, instead opting for the hole-punch camera design we recently noted would be all the rage in 2019 smartphones. Huawei, notably, already beat Samsung to the proverbial hole-punch late last year with the Nova 4.

Samsung Galaxy S10 "Beyond 1," in the wild. pic.twitter.com/EMquh59Kln

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) January 3, 2019

The “Beyond 1” mentioned here is the working title for the flagship phone. “Beyond 2” will likely be the S10 Plus, while the “Beyond 0” is expected to be a budget version, akin to the iPhone XR.

Another tidbit from the new leak is the phone’s apparent ability to wirelessly charge compatible handsets and perhaps even Samsung wearables. That would put the product in line with another recent Huawei handset, the Mate 20 Pro.

PR management firm Cision is acquiring Falcon.io to expand into social media marketing

Social media has become a primary conduit for getting the word out, in some cases proving to be an even stronger force for publicity than more traditional media outlets and paid advertising, and so today, a company that has grown its business around public relations services has acquired a social media management company to make sure it has a foothold in the medium. Cision, which provides press release distribution, media monitoring, and other PR services to businesses and the media industry, has acquired Falcon.io, a startup founded in Denmark that lets companies post, manage and analyse their presence on social media platforms.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, the companies tell me, but the whole of the Falcon team, including CEO/founder Ulrik Bo Larsen, are joining the company, where they will continue to operate its existing product set as well as integrate it into Cision’s wider business. The last valuation noted in April 2017 at the Danish Companies House was about $52 million (€45 million) but they have been growing very rapidly, and one source tells us that the price paid was around $200-$225 million, while Danish publication Borsen says it’s 800 million Danish kroner, or around $122 million. I’m still trying to get more detail.

Falcon had raised around $25 million according to PitchBook, and it has never disclosed its valuation. Cision — well known to many journalists — is publicly traded and currently has a market cap of just under $1.6 billion. For some context, two other prominent social media management firms that compete with Falcon, Sprout Social and Hootsuite, are respectively valued at $800 million and anywhere between $750 million and $1 billion (depending on who you ask).

The latter two are bigger firms — Falcon has around 1,500 businesses as customers who use it to manage their social profiles and read social sentiment across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, while Sprout says it has around 25,000 and Hootsuite counts millions of individual users — and both have raised significantly more capital, but their valuations underscore the demand that we’re seeing for platforms and user-friendly tools to target the world’s social media users — estimated to number at upwards of 2.5 billion people globally.

Kevin Akeroyd, who came on as Cision’s CEO after long stints at both Oracle and Salesforce among other places, describes Falcon as a “top five” social media marketing and analytics firm, and in an interview he said that the new acquisition will form a key part of the “communications cloud” that Cision has been building.

As with Salesforce, Oracle and Adobe (who also use similar cloud-themed terminology to describe their product suites), Cision’s strategy is to build a one-stop shop for customers to manage all of their communications needs from one platform. Falcon itself may be smaller than its competitors, but idea is that it will be cross-sold to Cision’s customers, which currently number 75,000 businesses.

“We’re seeing too many of our customers using one application for content, another for something else, and so on. There are too many apps,” he said. “We have always believed in earned media” — that is, media mentions that are not in the form of paid advertising — “and the role of influencers alongside paid and owned marketing. We believe we could provide the first solution for businesses across earned, communications services and public relations, helping to build a better data stack to measure and attribute what you are doing in comms.”

As social networking companies like Facebook and Twitter build more of their own tools in-house to serve the social media needs of organizations who want to better manage their profiles and interactions on these platforms, this has led to some consolidation and shifts among social media management companies. Some are merging or getting acquired, and some are shopping themselves around.

And in that wider trend, it’s not too surprising to see public relations firms get in on the action. Social media has completely changed the landscape for how information is disseminated today, sometimes complementing what traditional media organizations do — there are many examples of how newspapers and other news outlets leverage, for example, Facebook to grow and communicate with their audiences — and often replacing traditional media altogether. (Pew last month said that social media outpaced newspapers for the first time as a news source in the US, although TV and radio are still bigger than social… for now.)

Given that public relations management has long been the connecting link between organisations and media outlets, they have had to take a bigger step into social media in order to provide a more complete picture of the media landscape to their clients. Cision is not the first to have done this: Last year, Meltwater, another media monitoring firm, acquired DataSift to add social signals and traffic to its platform mix.

“This consolidation has to come because there is just too much value for the user,” Akeroyd said. “CMOs and CCOs do not want their own islands, they want something bigger.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J PR management firm Cision is acquiring Falcon.io to expand into social media marketing Ingrid Lunden https://tcrn.ch/2GQ15Jh
via IFTTT

Scratch 3.0 is now available

{rss:content:encoded} Scratch 3.0 is now available https://tcrn.ch/2CNqDmq http://bit.ly/2SvG881 January 03, 2019 at 06:33PM

The only kids programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open source tool.

Scratch, for those without school aged children, is a block-based programming language that lets you make little games and “cartoons” with sprites and animated figures. The system is surprisingly complex and kids have created things like Minecraft platformers, fun arcade games, and whatever this is.

The new version of scratch includes extensions that allow you to control hardware as well as new control blocks.

Scratch 3.0 is the next generation of Scratch – designed to expand how, what, and where you can create with Scratch. It includes dozens of new sprites, a totally new sound editor, and many new programming blocks. And with Scratch 3.0, you are able to create and play projects on your tablet, in addition to your laptop or desk computer.

Scratch is quite literally the only programming “game” my kids will use again and again and it’s an amazing introduction for kids as young as pre-school age. Check out the update and don’t forget to share your animations with the class!

Scratch 3.0 is now available

The only kids programming language worth using, Scratch, just celebrated the launch of Scratch 3.0, an update that adds some interesting new functionality to the powerful open source tool.

The new version of scratch includes extensions that allow you to control hardware as well as new control blocks.

Scratch 3.0 is the next generation of Scratch – designed to expand how, what, and where you can create with Scratch. It includes dozens of new sprites, a totally new sound editor, and many new programming blocks. And with Scratch 3.0, you are able to create and play projects on your tablet, in addition to your laptop or desk computer.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Scratch 3.0 is now available https://tcrn.ch/2CNqDmq

Daily Crunch: AR Startups face an uneasy future in 2019

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Magic Leap and other AR startups have a rough 2019 ahead of them

2018 was supposed to be the year where the foundation of AR was set to expand, but now it looks like momentum has been sucked out of the industry’s heavy hitters.

2. Sorry I took so long to upgrade, Apple

Apple missed Wall Street’s Q1 sales projections yesterday and the company blamed faltering sales in China for the reason behind the drop. But let’s not kid ourselves; anyone who has an iPhone now is part of the problem. As essential as these devices have become to our lives, it’s too hard for many consumers around the world to justify spending more than $1,000 for a new phone.

BERND THISSEN/AFP/Getty Images

3. China’s lunar probe makes history by successfully soft-landing on the far side of the moon

China crossed a major milestone in space exploration last night by becoming the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon. Named after the Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e 4 will use a low-frequency radio to survey the terrain of the moon.

4. Mary Meeker targets $1.25B for debut fund, called Bond

With Bond, Meeker is set to be the first woman to raise a $1 billion-plus VC fund.

5. Money is no object: China’s Luckin sets sights on rivaling Starbucks

Caffeinated drinks are taking off in the tea-drinking nation. Luckin, which is only a year old, has announced an ambitious plan to topple Starbucks and expand to 6,000 stores by 2022.

6. 10 predictions on the future of gaming in 2019

Will the gaming industry clutch up in 2019?

7. Segway unveils a more durable electric scooter and autonomous delivery bot

Segway’s Model Max scooter is designed to help services like Bird and Lime reduce their respective operating and maintenance costs, while its new Loomo delivery bot is made for autonomous deliveries for food, packages and other items.

https://tcrn.ch/2BYQuGw Daily Crunch: AR Startups face an uneasy future in 2019 https://tcrn.ch/2LQGFPb

Apple stock has dropped 38 percent in 90 days

{rss:content:encoded} Apple stock has dropped 38 percent in 90 days https://tcrn.ch/2BW8CAN https://tcrn.ch/2GVo1qK January 03, 2019 at 05:59PM

Apple stock was down over 9 percent overnight and continued the downward trend in trading this morning. In fact, the company’s stock price is down a total of 38 percent since October. This, after the company halted trading yesterday afternoon to provide lower guidance for upcoming earnings. As the iPhone upgrade market softened, it was having a big impact on revenue, at least in the short term and Apple stock took a big hit as a result.

On October 3, the stock was selling at 232.07 per share, and while the price has fluctuated and the market in general has plunged in that time period, the stock has been on a downward trend for the past couple of months and has lost approximately $87 a share since that October high point.

Last night, before the company briefly stopped trading to make its announcement, the stock stood at $157.92 a share. This morning as we went went to publication, it was recovering a bit, but still down 8.19 percent to $144.981.

D.A. Davidson senior analyst, Tom Forte says yesterday’s announcement while not completely unexpected was surprising given Apple’s traditionally strong position. “We knew that iPhone unit sales were weak, but just not how weak,” he said.

The biggest factor in yesterday’s announcement in Forte’s view, was China where he says the company generates 20 percent of its sales. As the US-China trade war drags on, it’s having an impact on these sales. This could be due to a combination of factors including a weakening Chinese economy as a result of the trade war, or patriotism on the part of Chinese consumers, who are choosing to buy Chinese brands over of the iPhone.

This also comes at a time when Apple had already indicated that iPhone sales were weak in other worldwide markets including India, Russia, Brazil and Turkey. This already helped weaken the iPhone sales worldwide, although Forte still sees the Chinese market as the biggest factor in play here.

Forte says that in spite of the soft iPhone performance, the good news is the rest of the product portfolio is up 19 percent and that could bode well for the future. What’s more, the company has set aside $100 billion for stock buy-back purposes. “They have the balance sheet. They have the stock buy-back program. They still generate very significant free cash flow, and if the individual investor won’t buy the stock, then the company will buy the stock,” he explained.

In a report released this morning, financial analysts Canaccord Genuity believe that in spite of yesterday’s report, the company is still fundamentally sound and they continue to recommend a Buy for Apple stock. “We maintain our belief Apple can expand its leading market share of the premium-tier smartphone market and the iPhone installed base (excluding refurbished iPhones) will exceed 700M in 2018. This impressive installed base should drive iPhone replacement sales and earnings, as well as cash flow generation to fund strong long-term capital returns. We reiterate our BUY rating but decrease our price target to $190 based on our lowered estimates,” the company wrote in a report released this morning.

Forte says the unknown-unknown here is how the US-China trade war plays out and as long as that situation remains fluid, the company might not recover that income in the near term in spite of stronger sales across the catalogue.

Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise platform, adds another major customer, Nestle

While Facebook continues to repair its image with consumers disenchanted with the social network’s role in disseminating misleading or false information and mishandling their personal data, it’s ironically been finding some traction for its enterprise-focused service, Workplace. Today, the company announced that it has added another huge company to its books today: Nestle, the coffee, chocolate and FMCG giant with 2,000 brands and 240,000 employees, has signed up as its latest customer.

Facebook’s enterprise service competes against the likes of Microsoft Teams, Slack and smaller players like Crew and Zinc, among many others in a crowded market of mobile and desktop apps built to address a growing interest among organizations to have more user-friendly, modern ways for their employees to communicate.

Workplace positions itself as different from its competitors in a couple of different ways: it says its communications platform is designed for all different employment demographics, covering so-called knowledge workers (the traditional IT customer) as well as waged and front-line employees; but it also claims to be the most democratic of the pack, by virtue of being a Facebook product, designed for mass market use from the ground up.

In the workplace, that translates to apps that do not require company email addresses or company devices to use; a strong proportion of employees at Workplace’s bigger customers, such as Walmart (2.2 million employees) and Starbucks (nearly 240,000 employees) do not sit at desks and, until relatively recently, would not have been using any kind of PC or phone on a regular basis on any average day.

But as smartphones have become as ubiquitous as having your keys and wallet, acceptance of having them and utilising them to communicate workplace-related information has changed, and that is the wave that services like Workplace are hoping to ride.

But despite the strong engine that is Facebook behind it, Workplace has a lot of challenges up ahead.

The company has not updated its total number of customers in over a year at this point — its last milestone was 30,000 customers, back in November 2017 — and today Facebook VP Julien Codorniou said that the company might put out a more updated number later this year.

“We’re not using that metric to communicate our success,” he said, “but we have to communicate growth, I feel the demand from the market.” Slack claims 500,000 organizations, over 70,000 of which pay; Teams from Microsoft has some 329,000 customers, the company says.

There is also the issue of how a customer win is actually translating to usage. Last month, a much smaller competitor, Crew, with 25,000 customers, noted that at least some of them were in fact those that Workplace was claiming to have secured.

“Starbucks is theoretically using Workplace, but it’s been deployed only to managers,” Crew CEO Danny Leffel told me. “We have almost 1,000 Starbucks locations using Crew. We knew we had a huge presence there, and we were worried when Facebook won them, but we haven’t seen even a dent in our business so far.”

Codorniou said that this also doesn’t tell the full story. He describes the approach that Crew and others take as “shadow IT” in that the companies don’t talk to central HQ when winning the business. “You can’t give a voice to everyone by going in through the back,” he said. He also contends that it just takes time to deploy something across a massive business. “Workplace only works if you get 100 percent of the company using it,” he added. Notably, today Facebook announced that Nestle has already onboarded 210,000 customers to Workplace.

There is also the bigger question of how these products will develop technically to further differentiate from the pack. For now, it feels like Slack still reigns supreme when it comes to desktop knowledge worker functionality — even without usefully threaded comments — because of the fact that you can integrate virtually any other app you might want to into its platform.

Crew, meanwhile, has differentiated by focusing on providing handy tools to help businesses managing scheduling for shift workers, who comprise the majority of its user base.

While others like Teams, and yes, Workplace, have also added in integrations and their own functionality — Workplace’s most interesting features, I think, are how it has translated consumer-Facebook features like Live into the Workplace environment. But there is still a lot of space for apps to consider what other features and functionality will be most useful and stick for the most employees and for the business customer at large.

It will be interesting to see how and if this is affected by way of a key leadership appointment. Last month, Facebook appointed a new “head” of Workplace, Karandeep Anand, who came to Facebook three years ago from Microsoft (and thus has a close understanding of enterprise software). Codorniou said Anand be relocating to London, where Workplace is developed, and will focus on the technical development of the product while Codorniou focuses on sales, client relations and business development.

Technical leadership for Workplace had previously come straight from CTO Mike Schroepfer, Codorniou said. “We decided that we needed someone full time, here in London,” he said.

It’s not clear if Workplace’s win at Nestle is replacing another product: it seems, however, that it is more likely a trend of how more businesses are making an investment in company-wide communications platforms where they may never have had one before, in hopes of it helping keep employees switched on, linked up, and generally more happy and feeling less like expendable cogs.

“Nestlé is a people-first environment,” said EVP Chris Johnson, in a statement. “We really rely on our talented teams to manage more than 2,000 Nestlé brands worldwide. We help our employees develop and we give them the right tools, so Workplace is a perfect fit.”

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Workplace, Facebook’s enterprise platform, adds another major customer, Nestle Ingrid Lunden https://tcrn.ch/2Vrg13V
via IFTTT

Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple

{rss:content:encoded} Sorry that I took so long to upgrade, Apple https://tcrn.ch/2QlAraS http://bit.ly/2LKMJsw January 03, 2019 at 12:23AM

Apple had some bad news tonight. It was so bad in fact that it had to halt trading for a time while posting a grim report that its numbers would be lower than it had forecast at the last quarterly earnings report in November. Apple blamed faltering sales in Asia, particularly in China, for the adjustment, but I’m afraid it can lay at least part of the blame on me too.

You see I was part of the problem as well. On the bright side, I finally upgraded my iPhone this week. I had been using an old iPhone 6 that was over three years old. It had become crotchety with a bad battery life and the recharge cable wouldn’t say stuck without some serious coaxing. The phone had to be flat on a table, and would often disconnect if I even brushed against the cord or looked at it the wrong way.

I had been thinking about upgrading for several months, but I kept putting it off because the thought of spending $1000 for a new phone frankly irked me, and I had after all paid off my trusty 6 in full long ago. I was going to squeeze every bit of life out of it, dammit.

In spite of my great frustration with my old phone, it took the enticement of a $200 credit to finally get me to replace my old phone, as I’m sure the promotion was intended to do. Just yesterday on New Year’s Day, I headed to my closest Apple Store and I finally did right by the company.

I replaced my ancient 6, but I did something else that probably hurt Apple as part of its death by a thousand cuts. I went into the store thinking I would buy the more expensive XS, but in the end I walked out with the lower-cost XR. I looked at the two phones and I couldn’t justify spending over $1000 for a phone with 256 GB of storage. I wanted a phone with longer battery life and a decent display and camera and the XR gave it to me. Yes, I could have gotten an even better phone, but in the end the XR was good enough for me, and certainly a huge upgrade over what I had been using.

Clearly lots of people across the world had similar thoughts, and one thing lead to another and before you knew it, you had a situation on your on your hands, one that forced you to halt the trading of your stock and report the bad news. The stock price is paying a price, down over 7 percent as I write this post.

So, sorry Apple, but it appears that there is a tipping point when it comes to the cost of a new phone. As essential as these devices have become in our lives, it’s just too hard for many consumers around the world to justify spending more than $1000 for a new phone, and you just have to realize that.

Shine brings its female-focused self-care app to Android

{rss:content:encoded} Shine brings its female-focused self-care app to Android https://tcrn.ch/2F3KAYz https://tcrn.ch/2BT8PEH January 02, 2019 at 05:54PM

Shine, one of the many apps capitalizing on the growing self-care trend, has now brought its app used by 3 million people to Android devices. Originally launched as a simple messaging bot that doled out life advice and motivation, Shine has grown over the years to become a larger self-help platform aimed largely at the millennial crowd – and in particular, millennial women.

As of Shine’s $5 million Series A round last April, the app’s user base was 70 percent female, and 88 percent were under the age of 35.

Since then, it has added another million to its then 2 million users. That growth came despite Shine having missed the mark at times, as with its failed life-coaching subscription product that never emerged from testing.

Today, Shine’s focus is on personal growth, motivational messaging, and other self-improvement topics, which are delivered by way of both text and audio. Through short-form audio, users can get help across a number of areas, including things like productivity, mindfulness, focus, stress and anxiety, burn out, acceptance, self-care for online dating, creativity, forgiveness, work frustrations, and more.

The app also sends daily motivational texts based on research-backed materials that help users better understand the topic at hand. These are presented in a more casual style – almost like it’s a friend chatting with you.

Shine now monetizes through a Premium subscription that offers expanded access to Shine’s audio talks and challenges, as well as additional features like offline listening and the ability to save favorite texts. This is either $4.50/month if you pay the $53.99 annual fee at once, or $9.99 per month. That’s roughly in line with what some meditation apps charge – for instance, the top meditation app Calm is $59.99 per year. And it’s cheaper than Headspace, which is $95.88 annually, by comparison.

Shine had said last year that one of its plans for its Series A was to build out the Android experience as nearly half its customers were accessing Shine on Android devices. In those cases they were using the texting service due to the lack of an official app.

On iOS, Shine is fairly popular in its category. It has jumped to become the No. 16 “Health & Fitness” app in the U.S., following the Christmas holiday – a time of the year when people get serious about wellness and self-care. However, it’s only the No. 86 ranked app on the “Health & Fitness” Top Grossing chart, which puts it far behind other wellness apps including meditation apps like Calm, weight loss apps like Lose It!, and workout apps like the No. 1 app, Sweat from Kayla Itsnes.

Given the app stores’ larger shift to subscriptions over paid downloads in recent years, it will be interesting to see how many apps the average consumer will actually pay for through the subscription model – and to what extent more niche apps like Shine will be sustainable in the long term, as a result.

Shine is a free download on Google Play.