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Saturday, March 17, 2018

Qualcomm’s war may be over, but the casualties are just starting to be calculated

{rss:content:encoded} Qualcomm’s war may be over, but the casualties are just starting to be calculated http://ift.tt/2FS7kYt http://ift.tt/2G5dh7E March 17, 2018 at 07:59PM

The epic battle between Qualcomm and Broadcom seems to have hit a final ceasefire, with President Trump using the power of CFIUS to block the transaction this past week, ending what would have been the largest tech M&A transaction of all time.

It may be all quiet on the semiconductor front, but Qualcomm and Broadcom will now need to find a path forward to win the peace and secure access to the coming 5G wireless market. Qualcomm faces a daunting number of challenges, including a potential takeover battle waged by the spurned son of its founder. Broadcom will have to find a new path to use acquisitions to continue its growth.

As with any war though, the damage from this conflict isn’t exclusive to the two enemy combatants. The future of corporate governance and shareholder autonomy is now being reevaluated in light of the actions used by Qualcomm in its defense against Broadcom’s hostile takeover. In addition, America’s openness to foreign investment is increasingly under scrutiny.

Qualcomm picks up the pieces

Hostile takeovers are always going to be damaging affairs, no matter the outcome. The most important mandate for any board of directors — and particularly for the boards of technology companies — is to identify long-term threats and opportunities facing a company, and guide the executive team toward the best possible outcome for shareholders. Hostile takeovers are firefighting affairs — the discussions of the board are jolted from roadmaps, strategy, and vision to the minute-by-minute tactics of defending the company from marauding invaders.

Qualcomm should be directing its attention to strategy, but it faces additional wars on nearly every front. Its fighting shareholders for its future, fighting Apple and Huawei over its revenues, fighting China over its acquisition of NXP, and now potentially fighting its founder’s son from a private takeover attempt.

Many of Qualcomm’s shareholders see the company’s performance as disappointing. While its stock has fluctuated over the past six years, today’s share price is essentially flat from where it stood in January of 2012. Compare that to Broadcom, which in the same timeframe has seen an increase of about 740%, and the PHLX Semiconductor Sector index, a basket index of the industry, which has seen its value increase by about 280%.

Unsurprisingly, shareholders were enticed by the opportunity to suddenly realize a 35% premium on their shares with Broadcom’s $82-a-share offer. Unlike Qualcomm’s board, shareholders were very interested in accepting Broadcom’s offer. In fact, we now know that Qualcomm’s board knew that it has lost the battle against Broadcom with its own shareholders during the acquisition process. As Bloomberg reported this week:

The votes started to come in on Friday, March 2. By Sunday it was clear that Qualcomm’s defense had failed.

Four of the six directors Broadcom had nominated were polling so far ahead of their Qualcomm peers that the race was effectively over, according to data viewed by Bloomberg. The remaining two were winning by less substantial margins. Making it worse, Mollenkopf and Jacobs, the architects of Qualcomm’s standalone plan, had received some of the fewest votes.

Inside the Qualcomm camp, the mood was bleak; assuming the trend continued, the board would lose control of the company at the shareholder meeting.

Broadcom’s message was one of quiet confidence. The company knew it had won, one person close to the discussions said. At that point, the person said, it was just a question of by how many votes, and who was going to leave the board.

Broadcom was winning the battle with shareholders, so Qualcomm’s board shifted to a terrain far more favorable to it: Washington bureaucrats. From the same Bloomberg report, “Federal lobbying disclosures for 2017 showing that Qualcomm spent $8.3 million, or roughly 100 times the $85,000 Broadcom spent…” These weren’t regulators; these were friends.

In late January, Qualcomm’s board submitted a preliminary, voluntary, and confidential notice to CFIUS asking for a review of Broadcom’s potential board coup. When Broadcom attempted to redomicile to the United States to avoid CFIUS purview (as it would no longer be a foreign company but a domestic one after it redomiciled), the government’s anger was palpable and sealed the company’s fate. The board’s original outreach to CFIUS precipitated the sequence of events that led to Trump’s block this past week.

Qualcomm’s board won the war, but it is still facing a rebellion from its own bosses. The board will be up for election unopposed this week at the company’s delayed shareholders meeting. Perhaps taking a page from tomorrow’s Russian presidential election, some shareholders are withholding their votes from the board slate to show their displeasure with the entire saga. From the Wall Street journal, “Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., an influential proxy-advisory firm, … in a note to investors late Wednesday, stood by its original recommendation that shareholders vote for four Broadcom nominees for Qualcomm’s 11-person board, even though the votes won’t count.”

That shareholder meeting will no doubt be eventful. While the board and the company’s execs will argue that they have a strategy moving forward, they confront two other ongoing firefighting challenges and one new one that could be another round of bruising internecine warfare.

Qualcomm is still in the midst of its $44 billion NXP acquisition, which continues to wait on Chinese regulatory approval. The timeline for that approval is still unclear, but even when Qualcomm does receive it, it will still have to close the deal and actually implement the transaction, which will take significant time and energy.

Even more complicated is the continuing fight over Qualcomm’s IP licensing revenue, which Apple and Huawei have been fighting for some time now. Licensing revenue is crucial for Qualcomm, and the litigation around the fight will force the board to continue monitoring the day-to-day legal tactics of the company rather than focus on a longer-term vision of how to work with the largest smartphone producer in the world to generate profits.

On top of those two challenges, another takeover attempt could potentially exhaust the board further. Yesterday, Qualcomm’s board voted to remove board member Paul Jacobs, who is the son of Qualcomm’s founder and also headed the company from 2005 to 2014. He had been demoted from executive chairman to director just last week. As the New York Times noted, “The split, which means no member of the Jacobs family will be involved at the top echelons of Qualcomm for the first time in 33 years, was not friendly.”

According to reports, Jacobs is attempting to raise more than $100 billion to buy the company, potentially leveraging SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the process. SoftBank, of course, is a Japanese company, and the Vision Fund has significant capital from foreign countries including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Even more ironically, Qualcomm is an investor in the Vision Fund.

Jacobs is following in the footsteps of Michael Dell who bought the eponymous tech company back in 2013 in a take-private transaction worth $24 billion. Can Jacobs even raise the required amount of capital, four times more than Dell? Will Qualcomm be forced to run back to the Trump administration in order to avoid a “foreign” takeover of the firm yet again, this time by the son of the company’s founder?

My guess — fairly weakly held — is that the answers are yes and no. Jacobs will find the money, and the board won’t fight a distinguished former executive — even if Jacobs was running seriously behind in shareholder approval in the Broadcom fight. We will learn more in the coming weeks, but expect more strategic actions here (maybe from Intel) as well.

Broadcom regroups

Despite its very public failure, Broadcom is in a much stronger position coming out of this battle. It beat analyst estimates this week for its Q1 earnings, and has seen impressive growth in its wireless communications segment, which were up 88% year-over-year. It also managed to lower expenses, which helped drive an increase in gross margin to 64.8% (aren’t fabless and patents awesome?)

Broadcom continues to deliver strong results, but the big question post-Qualcomm is really what’s next? Qualcomm was the single most important chip company that might have been available for purchase (Intel is out of Broadcom’s league). While it plans to continue to redomicile to the U.S., which should allow it to get back into the acquisition game in America, Broadcom may struggle in the coming years to find the kinds of accretive acquisitions that can keep its growth on the trajectory it has been on over the past few years.

Shareholder power wanes?

The biggest questions coming out of the Qualcomm / Broadcom spat is not related to the companies themselves, but the entire intellectual edifice of shareholder rights and the framework used by American companies to conduct corporate governance.

Qualcomm’s board of directors took extraordinary steps to block the Broadcom acquisition. They unilaterally went to Washington to get an injunction not on a deal — which had never been consummated between the two companies — but to block Broadcom from replacing its board of directors in a standard shareholder vote. This is a very important distinction: Qualcomm’s board saw the direction shareholders wanted to go, and essentially decided to just ignore the election process entirely.

From Dealpolitik columnist Ronald Barusch:

This change threatens over three decades of a carefully balanced governance system. Since the Delaware Supreme Court approved the use of the poison-pill takeover defense in 1985, the courts have basically blessed the following tradeoff: On the one hand, corporate directors can fight tooth and nail to stop a deal and the courts will give only limited scrutiny to defensive tactics.

However, the board is strictly limited in any moves to interfere with shareholders’ ability to replace directors and force a company to change course that way. In the vernacular of a leading Delaware case, a “just say no” defense doesn’t mean “just say never.” A bidder with enough patience who can convince a target’s shareholders to change directors has a path at least toward cooperation on resolving regulatory impediments to a deal.

This is a unique case as Barusch notes, but at what point can boards use every method at their disposal to prevent their own shareholders — the people they have a fiduciary duty to represent — from taking charge of the company? This past week presents one of the most complex examples to date, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a shareholder decides to attempt a legal attack on Qualcomm.

The other side of the potential waning of power for shareholders is CFIUS itself. The Trump administration ended a potential deal for a company that shareholders were widely in favor of. Where do the rights of shareholders to realize a return on their equity end and the right of America as a nation to control national security technology start?

We are on new terrain, and there are no clear answers here. In many ways, it depends on what happens over the next few years of the Trump administration. If there are more blocks like what we saw this week, we could see a radical change in the corporate calculus that would have a long-term negative effect on the value of some American companies.

Hostile takeovers may be incredible drama for writers like yours truly, but they have enormous consequences for companies and the employees who work at them. Qualcomm is going to have to shore up its support with a whole host of stakeholders in the coming months (while dealing with a potential take-private fight), while Broadcom needs to find its next strategy for further growth. All of us are going to have to deal with new uncertainty around the power of shareholders to shape the destiny of their companies. The war is over, but the aftermath and its consequences have just begun.

Amid the greatest NCAA basketball upset ever, a Twitter hero emerges

{rss:content:encoded} Amid the greatest NCAA basketball upset ever, a Twitter hero emerges http://ift.tt/2pjL7v4 http://ift.tt/2phPWoK March 17, 2018 at 06:53PM

Happy Saturday, everyone! While many things in the world are very bad today, if you were on the Internet last night, you probably caught wind of a pretty cool historic moment in college basketball: UMBC — University of Maryland, Baltimore County — knocked off the overall number one seed in the annual NCAA men’s basketball championship tournament in an absolute landslide.

So, naturally, I absolutely had to find the tech angle here, and if you owned a smartphone, you probably saw a series of extremely excellent tweets from UMBC’s twitter account, which went absolutely ballistic last night. So, we wanted to recognize the other star of the show: UMBC’s twitter account. You probably would too if, as a 21-point underdog, beat what most consider the best team in the country. Most tweet compilations are not great, but this one is very great.

University of Virginia was absolutely crushed during the second half of the game after dominating the world of college basketball for the entire regular season and throughout the conference tournament on the way to the overall number one seed — a system in place where teams are placed in the tournament based on favorable matchups as a reward for their performance. The system is still ripe for upsets, and there have been a lot this year, but this one is arguably one of the biggest upsets of all time.

So, without further ado:

Alarming bucket of truth, that one. We’ll end with this one:

Happy March Madness, all! May fortune favor (the rest) of your brackets.

Late-blooming startups can still thrive

It seems like startup news is full of overnight success stories and sudden failures, like the scooter rental company that went from zero to a $300 million valuation in months or the blood-testing unicorn that went from billions to nearly naught.

But what about those other companies that mature more gradually? Is there such a thing as slow and successful in startup-land?

To contemplate that question, Crunchbase News set out to assemble a data set of top late-blooming startups. We looked at companies that were founded in or before 2010 that raised large amounts of capital after 2015, and we also looked at companies founded a least five years ago that raised large early-stage funds in the last year. (For more details on the rules we used to select the companies, check “Data Methods” at the end of the post.)

The exercise was a counterpoint to a data set we did a couple of weeks ago, looking at characteristics of the fastest growing startups by capital raised. For that list, we found plenty of similarities between members, including a preponderance of companies in a few hot sectors, many famous founders and a lot of cancer drug developers.

For the late bloomers, however, patterns were harder to pinpoint. The breakdown wasn’t too different from venture-backed companies overall. Slower-growing companies could come from major venture hubs as well as cities with smaller startup ecosystems. They could be in biotech, medical devices, mobile gaming or even meditation.

What we did find, however, was an interesting and inspiring collection of stories for those of us who’ve been toiling away at something for a long time, with hopes still of striking it big.

Pivots and patience

Even youthful startups have been known to make a major pivot or two. So it’s not surprising to see a lot of pivots among late bloomers that have had more time to tinker with their business models.

One that fits this mold is Headspace, provider of a popular meditation app. The company, founded in 2010 by a British-born Buddhist monk with a degree in circus arts, started as a meditation-focused events startup. But it turned out people wanted to build on their learning on their own time, so Headspace put together some online lessons. Today, Santa Monica-based Headspace has millions of users and has raised $75 million in venture funding.

For late bloomers, the pivot can mean going from a model with limited scalability to one that can attract a much wider audience. That’s the case with Headspace, which would have been limited in its events business to those who could physically show up. Its online model, with instant, global reach, turns the business into something venture investors can line up behind.

Sometimes your sector becomes hip

They say if you wait long enough, everything comes back in style. That mantra usually works as an excuse for hoarding ’80s clothes in the attic. But it also can apply to entrepreneurial companies, which may have launched years before their industry evolved into something venture investors were competing to back.

Take Vacasa, the vacation rental management provider. The company has been around since 2009, but it began raising VC just a couple of years ago amid a broad expansion of its staff and property portfolio. The Portland-based company has raised more than $140 million to date, all of it after 2016, and most in a $103 million October round led by technology growth investor Riverwood Capital.

CloudCraze, which was acquired by Salesforce earlier this week, also took a long time to take venture funding. The Chicago-based provider of business-to-business e-commerce software launched in 2009, but closed its first VC round in 2015, according to Crunchbase records. Prior to the acquisition, the company raised about $30 million, with most of that coming in just a year ago.

Meanwhile, some late bloomers have always been fashionable, just not necessarily as VC-funded companies. Untuckit, a clothing retailer that specializes in button-down shirts that look good untucked, had been building up its business since 2011, but closed its first venture round, a Series A led by VC firm Kleiner Perkins, last June.

Slow-growing venture-backed startups are still not that common

So yes, there is still capital available for those who wait. However, the truth of the matter is most companies that raise substantial sums of venture capital secure their initial seed rounds within a couple years of founding. Companies that chug along for five-plus years without a round and then scale up are comparatively rare.

That said, our data set, which looks at venture and seed funding, does not come close to capturing the full ecosystem of slow-growing startups. For one, many successful bootstrapped companies could raise venture funding but choose not to. And those who do eventually decide to take investment may look at other sources, like private equity, bank financing or even an IPO.

Additionally, the landscape is full of slow-growing startups that do make it, just not in a venture home run exit kind of way. Many stay local, thriving in the places they know best.

On the flip side, companies that wait a long time to take VC funding have also produced some really big exits.

Take Atlassian, the provider of workplace collaboration tools. Founded in 2002, the Australian company waited eight years to take its first VC financing, despite plentiful offers. It went public two years ago, and currently has a market valuation of nearly $14 billion.

The moral: Those who take it slow can still finish ahead.

Data methods

We primarily looked at companies founded in 2010 or earlier in the U.S. and Canada that raised a seed, Series A or Series B round sometime after the beginning of last year, and included some that first raised rounds in 2015 or later and went on to substantial fundraises. We also looked at companies founded in 2012 or earlier that raised a seed or Series A round after the beginning of last year and have raised $30 million or more to date. The list was culled further from there.



http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Late-blooming startups can still thrive http://ift.tt/2tWGs7N

Tinder owner Match is suing Bumble over patents

Drama is heating up between the dating apps.

Tinder, which is owned by Match Group, is suing rival Bumble, alleging patent infringement and misuse of intellectual property.

The suit alleges that Bumble “copied Tinder’s world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise.” The lawsuit also accuses Tinder-turned-Bumble employees Chris Gulczynski and Sarah Mick of copying elements of the design. “Bumble has released at least two features that its co-founders learned of and developed confidentially while at Tinder in violation of confidentiality agreements.”

It’s complicated because Bumble was founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe, who was also a co-founder at Tinder. She wound up suing Tinder for sexual harassment. 

Yet Match hasn’t let the history stop it from trying to buy hotter-than-hot Bumble anyway. As Axios’s Dan Primack pointed out, this lawsuit may actually try to force the hand for a deal. Bumble is majority-owned by Badoo, a dating company based in London and Moscow.

(It wouldn’t be the first time a dating site sued another and then bought it. JDate did this with JSwipe.)

Match provided the following statement:

Match Group has invested significant resources and creative expertise in the development of our industry-leading suite of products. We are committed to protecting the intellectual property and proprietary data that defines our business. Accordingly, we are prepared when necessary to enforce our patents and other intellectual property rights against any operator in the dating space who infringes upon those rights.

I have, um, tested out both Tinder and Bumble and they are similar. Both let you swipe on nearby users with limited information like photos, age, school and employer. And users can only chat if both opt-in.

However, Tinder has developed more of the reputation as a “hookup” app and Bumble doesn’t seem to have quite the same image, largely because it requires women to initiate the conversation, thus setting the tone.

As TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez pointed out recently, “according to App Annie, Tinder is more than 10x bigger in terms of monthly users and 7x bigger in terms of downloads in the last 12 months, versus Bumble.”

We’ve reached out to Bumble for comment.



from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Tinder owner Match is suing Bumble over patents Katie Roof http://ift.tt/2GCrzdu
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Friday, March 16, 2018

Suspicious likes lead to researcher lighting up a 22,000-strong botnet on Twitter

Botnets are fascinating to me. Who creates them? What are they for? And why doesn’t someone delete them? The answers are probably less interesting than I hope, but in the meantime I like to cheer when large populations of bots are exposed. That’s what security outfit F-Secure’s Andy Patel did this week after having his curiosity piqued by a handful of strange likes on Twitter.

Curious about the origin of this little cluster of random likes, which he just happened to see roll in one after another, he noticed that the accounts in question all looked… pretty fake. Cute girl avatar, weird truncated bio (“Waiting you”; “You love it harshly”), and a shortened URL which, on inspection, led to “adult dating” sites.

So it was a couple bots designed to lure users to scammy sites. Simple enough. But after seeing that there were a few more of the same type of bot among the followers and likes of these accounts, Patel decided to go a little further down the rabbit hole.

He made a script to scan through the sketchy accounts and find ones with similarly suspicious traits. It did so for a couple days, and… behold!

This fabulous visualization shows the 22,000 accounts the script had scraped when Patel stopped it. Each of those little dots is an account, and they exhibit an interesting pattern. Here’s a close-up:

As you can see, they’re organized in a sort of hierarchical fashion, a hub-and-spoke design where they all follow one central node, which is itself connected to other central nodes.

I picked a few at random to check and they all turned out to be exactly as expected. Racy profile pic, random retweets, a couple strange original ones, and the obligatory come-hither bio link (“Do you like it gently? Come in! 💚💚💚”). Warning, they’re NSFW.

Patel continued his analysis and found that far from being some botnet-come-lately, some of these accounts — and by some I mean thousands and thousands! — are years old. A handful are about to hit a decade!

The most likely explanation is a slowly growing botnet owned and operated by a single entity that, in aggregate, drives enough traffic to justify itself — yet doesn’t attract enough attention to get rolled up.

But on that account I’m troubled. Why is it that a single savvy security guy can uncover a giant botnet with, essentially, the work of an afternoon, but Twitter has failed to detect it for going on ten years? Considering how obvious bot spam like this is, and how easily a tool or script can be made that walks the connections and finds near-identical spurious accounts, one wonders how hard Twitter can actually be looking.

That said, I don’t want to be ungenerous. It’s a hard problem, and the company is also dealing with the thousands and thousands (maybe millions) that get created every day. And technically bots aren’t against the terms of service, although at some point they probably tip over into nuisance territory. I suppose we should be happy that the problem isn’t any worse than it is.



from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2GzIVYA Suspicious likes lead to researcher lighting up a 22,000-strong botnet on Twitter Devin Coldewey http://ift.tt/2DxzSUY
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Enterprise subscription services provider Zuora has filed for an IPO

Zuora, which helps businesses handle subscription billing and forecasting, filed for an initial public offering this afternoon following on the heels of Dropbox’s filing earlier this month.

Zuora’s IPO may signal that Dropbox going public, and seeing a price range that while under its previous valuation seems relatively reasonable, may open the door for coming enterprise initial public offerings. Cloud security company Zscaler also made its debut earlier this week, with the stock doubling once it began trading on the Nasdaq. Zuora will list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “ZUO.” Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo told The Information in October last year that it expected to go public this year.

Zuora’s numbers show some revenue growth, with its subscriptions services continue to grow. But its losses are a bit all over the place. While the costs for its subscription revenues is trending up, the costs for its professional services are also increasing dramatically, going from $6.2 million in Q4 2016 to $15.6 million in Q4 2017. The company had nearly $50 million in overall revenue in the fourth quarter last year, up from $30 million in Q4 2016.

But, as we can see, Zuora’s “professional services” revenue is an increasing share of the pie. In Q1 2016, professional services only amounted to 22% of Zuora’s revenue, and it’s up to 31% in the fourth quarter last year. It also accounts for a bigger share of Zuora’s costs of revenue, but it’s an area that it appears to be investing more.

Zuora’s core business revolves around helping companies with subscription businesses — like, say, Dropbox — better track their metrics like recurring revenue and retention rates. Zuora is riding a wave of enterprise companies finding traction within smaller teams as a free product and then graduating them into a subscription product as more and more people get on board. Eventually those companies hope to have a formal relationship with the company at a CIO level, and Zuora would hopefully grow up along with them.

Snap effectively opened the so-called “IPO window” in March last year, but both high-profile consumer IPOs — Blue Apron and Snap — have had significant issues since going public. While both consumer companies, it did spark a wave of enterprise IPOs looking to get out the door like Okta, Cardlytics, SailPoint and Aquantia. There have been other consumer IPOs like Stitch Fix, but for many firms, enterprise IPOs serve as the kinds of consistent returns with predictable revenue growth as they eventually march toward an IPO.

The filing says it will raise up to $100 million, but you can usually ignore that as it’s a placeholder. Zuora last raised $115 million in 2015, and was PitchBook data pegged the valuation at around $740 million, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures are two big investors in the company, with Benchmark still owning around 11.1% of the company and Shasta Ventures owning 6.5%. CEO Tien Tzuo owns 10.2% of the company.



http://ift.tt/2tQP1B8 Enterprise subscription services provider Zuora has filed for an IPO http://ift.tt/2IywcpS

Tingles is an app devoted to ASMR videos

{rss:content:encoded} Tingles is an app devoted to ASMR videos http://ift.tt/2phRpMA http://ift.tt/2pirapr March 16, 2018 at 09:03PM

The Tingles team has done much in the way of promotion, but the app has already built a fairly sizable following in its community. That’s one of the nice things about a targeted product — it spreads fast.

In the year since Slovenian co-founders Gasper Kolenc and Miha Mlakar launched, the service has focused almost exclusively on ASMR — autonomous sensory meridian response — those whispered, pleasant-sounding videos that give listeners a sense of low-level euphoria. The service is about to get a big push, with help from Y Combinator.

“We were just trying to figure the best way to build it for artists and the community,” Mlakar, who also serves as the company’s CPO, tells TechCrunch. “We established all of these relationships. All of the features came from the community. We needed time to work on the product.”

In spite of a lack of promotion, the company says it’s pulled in 60,000 monthly active users, bout a third of whom use the product every day. The site’s content is created by more than 200 “artists” (a term taken from the ASMR community’s almost-too-clever “ASMRtist”), many of whom were poached from YouTube.

Google’s video service has, of course, been ground zero for the rise of the ASMR online phenomenon. And while Mlakar admits that it’s proven a valuable resource for the community (it was where he first learned of the concept), the co-founder believes there were still issues unserved by YouTube’s catch-all approach to online video.

“I think YouTube is great for discovery,” says Mlakar. “I discovered ASMR on there. But when you become a regular user, it becomes a problem. The main thing is the ads. If you’re listening to ASMR to fall asleep and you’re just about to doze off, then a loud commercial wakes you up, it’s really unpleasant.”

The other benefits of offering such a hyper-focused service include a better monetization model for creators. The service is available ad-free for free, but the company is working with creators to develop exclusive premium content deals, along with other features like tipping. Creators are vetted through a short approval process, and Tingles does police the videos. But while the app — and most ASMR proponents — are quick to point out that the phenomenon itself isn’t a sexual one, there are indeed “more erotic channels,” according to Mlakar.

For Tingles, ASMR is just the beginning. Mlakar describes the Android/iOS app as “basically the best place to find any video content that helps you relax and fall asleep,” and future plans include a larger push into other relaxation categories, like meditation/mindfulness.

GrokStyle’s visual search tech makes it into IKEA’s Place AR app

GrokStyle’s simple concept of “point your camera at a chair (or lamp, or table…) and find others like it for sale” attracted $2 million in funding last year, and the company has been putting that cash to work. And remarkably for a company trying to break into the home furnishing market, it landed furniture goliath IKEA as its first real customer; GrokStyle’s point-and-search functionality is being added to the IKEA Place AR app.

What GrokStyle does, in case you don’t remember, is identify any piece of furniture your camera can see — in your house, at a store, in a catalog — and immediately return similar pieces or even the exact one, with links to buy them.

I remember being skeptical last year that the product could possibly work as well as they said it did. But a demo shut my mouth real quick. The growing team is led by Sean Bell and Kavita Bala, who spun GrokStyle out of their work on computer vision at Cornell University — and it’s clear they know what they’re doing.

GrokStyle’s tech in action grabbing an image from a catalog.

IKEA thought so as well. In December, Bell and Bala got a chance to present it to Michael Valdsgaard, IKEA’s “Leader of Digital Transformation.” He loved it.

“He just said, ‘OK, this needs to be in the next release,'” recalled Bell, “and in 3 months we were able to turn it around for them.”

It seemed as clear to Valdsgaard as it is to GrokStyle that the advent of mixed reality in all its forms necessitates a fundamentally different kind of search. If information is to be presented and mixed visually, why shouldn’t you be able to find and browse things the same way?

“To make AR work, that’s where you really need tech like visual search,” said Bala. “It lets you find things, cool designs and furniture, all in situ and visualize it in place.”

What’s more, she noted, images and video are just how people communicate and record things now. “People take pictures of absolutely everything. If you want to remember someone’s phone number, sometimes you just take a picture of it. That’s the world we’re living in now.”

Being able to search among a visual record is a powerful tool, and one few companies have unlocked in any kind of powerful way. GrokStyle could very easily have overshot to begin with and tried to offer consumers an app that categorizes and searches among your photos and others, but that way lies great cost and questionable utility.

I originally thought that furniture was a rather prosaic and narrow field in which to deploy their obviously effective tech, but in fact it was a very wise choice. IKEA is a big get, but in the long term it’s the narrow end of a wedge.

We’re also building recommendation systems and business intelligence tools,” Bala said. “Once you see what people are searching for, there are tons of opportunities.”

Imagine, for example, someone using GrokStyle’s tech while shopping at Crate and Barrel. They scan an item, see how it would look in their living room, then see a similar but slightly cheaper one available from a competitor. This is a critical moment in retail: the moment when Crate and Barrel and this other retailer compete for the consumer’s attention and money. Being at the center of that is a propitious position.

For now the plan is to execute on IKEA and get the knowledge out there that this exists and works well enough to be adopted by a major retailer. “We’re inviting retailers to come talk to us, and as part of working with them we’re setting up pilots and things,” said Bell. APIs are also in the offing.

As a sort of cherry on top of all this, the company also recently secured another $750K in grants from the National Science Foundations. GrokStyle had received $250K as part of the Small Business Innovation Research program, and successfully competed for the other three quarters of a million up for grabs in Phase II. That ought to keep the lights on for a while.



http://ift.tt/2GAU23I GrokStyle’s visual search tech makes it into IKEA’s Place AR app http://ift.tt/2phgfeM

Village Global raises $100M seed scout fund from Zuck, Bezos…

It takes a village to grow a startup, so Village Global is offering access to a deep network of top tech execs to lure founders to its seed fund. Today, Village Global announced it’s raised $100 million for that fund that was first unveiled in September.

In exchange for equity, portfolio companies get investment plus mentorship from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s BIll Gates, Google’s Eric Schmidt, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Disney’s Bob Iger, VMWare’s Diane Green, NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg, and more.

Village Global also announced its 90-day intensive Network Catalyst program that sees the fund get more involved in developing a startup’s product and connections. It takes 7 percent for an $120,000 investment plus admission to the program. Erik Torenberg, Product Hunt’s first employee and a founding partner of Village Global tells me that with the program “Founders get a ‘brain trust’ assembled to fit their needs and to introduce talent, customers and investors.”

“I really think of Village Global as a co-founder at Keyo” says actual Keyo co-founder Kiran Bellubbi whose real estate startup we wrote about last week. “We’ve ideated, strategized and built this business from the ground up together in under 3 months. Couldn’t have done it without this team. The pace of play is astonishing.”

Most venture funds today have a slew of general partners searching for and leading deals. A few have expansive service arms like Andreessen Horowitz’s recruiting program or GV’s design assistance. But Village Global’s approach is to have just a few partners but a ton of scouts that earn a portion of the returns if they bring in a great startup. These “network leaders” include Quora vice president Sarah Smith and YouTube’s VR lead Erin Teague. Rather than connect them to more tangible services, portfolio companies get access to Village Global’s deep mentor bench.

Newly announced LPs and mentors for Village Global include Fidelity’s Abby Johnson, Activision’s Bobby Kotick, 23andme’s Anne Wojcicki, and Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert.

Other big funds have their own scout programs too that Village Global will have to compete with. The Wall Street Journal reported that Accel Partners, Founders Fund, Index Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Social Capital and Sequoia are among the top tier funds that use scouts to sniff out early stage deals. Others like First Round’s Dorm Room Fund and General Catalyst’s Rough Draft Ventures use student ambassadors on university campuses to identify high potential college startups.

The question is whether letting younger, less experienced scouts right checkbooks is good for their funds or their own track records, and whether these scouts are shirking responsibilities from their own companies. But for founders, it means there are more people with their ears to the street who aren’t already famous finance big-shots. That could promote more meritocracy in an industry known for talking a lot about it despite tons of privilege given to founders of certain complexions or pedigrees.

With increased competition in the seed stage, funds can’t wait for founders to come to them any more.



http://ift.tt/2pmJop4 Village Global raises $100M seed scout fund from Zuck, Bezos… http://ift.tt/2ph4nJK

NexGenT wants to rethink bootcamps with programs for network engineering certifications

Developer bootcamps — several-month training programs that are designed to help people get up to speed with the technical skills they need to become a developer — exploded in popularity in the early part of the decade, but there’s been a bit of a shakedown on the space recently.

And that could be a product of a lot of things, but for Jacob Hess and Terry Kim, it’s just not enough time to become a fully-fledged developer. With training in the Air Force, where both had to work on these kinds of compressed programs for entry-level technicians, both decided to try their own approach. The end result is NexGenT, which is own kind of bootcamp — but it’s for getting a certificate in network management, and not a one-size-fits-all sticker as a developer. That approach, which includes a 16-week class, is considerably more reasonable and helps get people industry-ready with a skill that’s teachable in that compressed period of time, Hess says. The company is launching out of Y Combinator’s winter class this year.

“There are 500,000 open IT jobs, but when you look at that number, what’s more interesting is so many of them are IT operation roles, and the remaining is software development,” Hess said. “The bigger pie in IT is non-software programming jobs. Cyber security is also huge because of the automation and AI. We want to create the stepping stone. Network engineering becomes a foundation for a lot of these jobs, whether you want to be a cloud architect and work for Amazon, it all starts with understanding and building a foundation around networking.”

The end result is a 16-week program where a batch of applicants gets a review, and a percentage of them are accepted into a cohort of students. They go through an engineering module, which teaches them the basics and mechanics of network engineering and learn about the IT industry. Students can go faster if they want — it’s primarily online — and then start working on labs where they are building their own lab, either physical or virtual. The process culminates in a project where the students have to roll out an HQ facility in two branch offices from design to technically implementing it.

The next phase is about getting them certifications for various technologies, which help them basically show that they are ready to start entering the workforce. Think of it as something similar to having a Github account where prospective employers can review the work, except the process is a lot more formalized and you end up with something concrete on the resume. The final phase is around career coaching and helping them get a job, which can last up to 6 months. Throughout this process, students have access to a mentor and live coaching where students can ask whatever questions they wish.

So, the process is not so dissimilar from the notion of a developer bootcamp. But at the same time, there’s a small-ish graveyard of developer bootcamps and some with issues. Galvanize in August said it would lay off around 11% of its staff, while Dev Bootcamp and Iron Yard shut down altogether. The knock on these camps is it’s hard to get developers ready to start shipping code in such a small period of time — but Kim argues that getting them certified and ready to be a network engineer is definitely something that’s doable in around 16 weeks.

“It’s more realistic,” Kim said. “For coding bootcamps, you have to go by off the portfolios and check their Github, and they have to pass that technical interview. In our world of IT operations, it’s not about the bachelor’s degree, it’s about the person having the knowledge. But the industry certifications come from third parties, and when they come out of our program and have two or three certifications. It’s enough to get into that entry-level job.”

It remains to be seen if this kind of an approach is going to work. NexGenT charges a tuition — around $12,000, which with maximum discounts hits around $6,500. The company offers a 36-month payment plan as well that comes with an enrollment fee, which stretches out that very steep ticket price. In reality, these zero-to-60 programs are designed to be for-profit, though there are some different models that take in a percentage of salary among other approaches. With that in mind, though, there’s always an opportunity to build a strong pipeline with certain companies, and if they can identify high-performing students they can offer more of a proof point and potentially use that as an opportunity to offer some variation of scholarship.

While this is more of a bootcamp-ish style program, there are already some IT certification programs through tools like Coursera. Google, in one instance, is offering financial aid for a batch of those students, and companies with deep pockets might be able to build out these kinds of pipeline programs on their own. Hess and Kim hope to offer some kind of high-touch approach, instead of just a class on a platform of many, that will give them an edge to be a preferred option.



http://ift.tt/2FNmcHb NexGenT wants to rethink bootcamps with programs for network engineering certifications http://ift.tt/2IwEVIU

Zoosk relaunches dating app Lively as a way to meet new people while playing trivia games

Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of trivia applications like HQ Trivia, dating app maker Zoosk has just released an experimental app that combines trivia with the potential for meeting someone new. The app is a relaunch and complete makeover of Zoosk’s Lively, which first debuted in July 2016 as a dating app that used video to tell stories, instead of static profile images.

The new version of Lively is nothing like its former namesake.

As Zoosk explains, the previous version of Lively’s group video chat app was fun, but people didn’t know how to connect and relate to one another using the video format. It felt awkward to start conversations, with no reason to be there besides wanting to date.

The company went back to the drawing board, so to speak, to think about what sort of experiences could bring people together. Trivia, naturally, came to mind.

Lively aims to reproduce the feeling that comes with competing at a bar trivia night. When you join, you’re placed in a group video chat team of two to four people. Together, the team works to answer a series of 12 questions while discussing the answers over video in real-time. When they finish the questions, they’ll be able to see how their scores compared with other teams.

The “dating” component to the app isn’t quite what you would expect. In fact, it’s less of a way to find a date for a night out, than it is to just make new friends. After the game wraps, you’ll have the option to continue chatting with the other players, if you choose. You can also add people as a friend, if you hit it off.

And when trivia isn’t in session – the games run twice daily at 3 PM and 7 PM PST – you can group video chat with others on Lively.

Because you’re not added to a team with nearby players, your ability to make friends who are also possible real-life dating prospects is decidedly limited. That’s something that Lively could change to support in time, if it’s able to grow its user base. But for now, it needs to match users with any live players in order to fill out its teams.

It’s understandable why it went this route, but it doesn’t lend itself well to meeting someone special – unless you’re open to meeting people anywhere (which some are), or are fine with just making new friends and seeing where that leads.

Unlike HQ Trivia, which features live streams with a host, Lively is just group video chat with a trivia component. That means it won’t be as challenging for Zoosk to operate, as it doesn’t have to worry with bandwidth issues and other costs of putting on a live game show. Also, because there are no prizes or payouts, you can join anytime during the 30-minute gaming session to be placed into a team and play along.

Lively is not the first app to support a group video chat interface where gameplay is an option. A number of video chat apps over the years have integrated games into their experience, including older apps like Tango or Google+ Hangouts, Line, and more recently, Facebook Messenger. But none have integrated games for the purpose of facilitating new relationships.

Zoosk today has 38 million members, but wanted to find a way to reach a younger demographic, which is why it originally launched Lively. The app was the first product to emerge from Zoosk’s in-house incubator, Zoosk Labs, where the company experiments with new ideas to expand its core business.

Whether or not Zoosk can turn trivia players into love connections remains to be seen, but it’s interesting how HQ Trivia’s success has led to this wider market full of knock-offs (e.g. Genius, Joyride, Cash Show, The Q, TopBuzz, Live Quiz, Live.me, Halftime Live!, Jam Music, etc.) and other tweaks that follow its idea of live trivia games.

Lively is available on iOS only for now.



from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2pjKwJP Zoosk relaunches dating app Lively as a way to meet new people while playing trivia games Sarah Perez http://ift.tt/2HEiY9I
via IFTTT

Zoosk relaunches dating app Lively as a way to meet new people while playing trivia games

{rss:content:encoded} Zoosk relaunches dating app Lively as a way to meet new people while playing trivia games http://ift.tt/2HEiY9I http://ift.tt/2pjKwJP March 16, 2018 at 05:32PM

Hoping to capitalize on the popularity of trivia applications like HQ Trivia, dating app maker Zoosk has just released an experimental app that combines trivia with the potential for meeting someone new. The app is a relaunch and complete makeover of Zoosk’s Lively, which first debuted in July 2016 as a dating app that used video to tell stories, instead of static profile images.

The new version of Lively is nothing like its former namesake.

As Zoosk explains, the previous version of Lively’s group video chat app was fun, but people didn’t know how to connect and relate to one another using the video format. It felt awkward to start conversations, with no reason to be there besides wanting to date.

The company went back to the drawing board, so to speak, to think about what sort of experiences could bring people together. Trivia, naturally, came to mind.

Lively aims to reproduce the feeling that comes with competing at a bar trivia night. When you join, you’re placed in a group video chat team of two to four people. Together, the team works to answer a series of 12 questions while discussing the answers over video in real-time. When they finish the questions, they’ll be able to see how their scores compared with other teams.

The “dating” component to the app isn’t quite what you would expect. In fact, it’s less of a way to find a date for a night out, than it is to just make new friends. After the game wraps, you’ll have the option to continue chatting with the other players, if you choose. You can also add people as a friend, if you hit it off.

And when trivia isn’t in session – the games run twice daily at 3 PM and 7 PM PST – you can group video chat with others on Lively.

Because you’re not added to a team with nearby players, your ability to make friends who are also possible real-life dating prospects is decidedly limited. That’s something that Lively could change to support in time, if it’s able to grow its user base. But for now, it needs to match users with any live players in order to fill out its teams.

It’s understandable why it went this route, but it doesn’t lend itself well to meeting someone special – unless you’re open to meeting people anywhere (which some are), or are fine with just making new friends and seeing where that leads.

Unlike HQ Trivia, which features live streams with a host, Lively is just group video chat with a trivia component. That means it won’t be as challenging for Zoosk to operate, as it doesn’t have to worry with bandwidth issues and other costs of putting on a live game show. Also, because there are no prizes or payouts, you can join anytime during the 30-minute gaming session to be placed into a team and play along.

Lively is not the first app to support a group video chat interface where gameplay is an option. A number of video chat apps over the years have integrated games into their experience, including older apps like Tango or Google+ Hangouts, Line, and more recently, Facebook Messenger. But none have integrated games for the purpose of facilitating new relationships.

Zoosk today has 38 million members, but wanted to find a way to reach a younger demographic, which is why it originally launched Lively. The app was the first product to emerge from Zoosk’s in-house incubator, Zoosk Labs, where the company experiments with new ideas to expand its core business.

Whether or not Zoosk can turn trivia players into love connections remains to be seen, but it’s interesting how HQ Trivia’s success has led to this wider market full of knock-offs (e.g. Genius, Joyride, Cash Show, The Q, TopBuzz, Live Quiz, Live.me, Halftime Live!, Jam Music, etc.) and other tweaks that follow its idea of live trivia games.

Lively is available on iOS only for now.

 

Small businesses love free stuff, so Gusto is giving them free HR Basics

Gusto, formerly ZenPayroll, is the rare startup unicorn that has stayed relatively mum on its product and growth — it’s last press release, for instance, was more than a year ago. The company’s core offering remains payroll for small businesses, and it has been working to expand its customer base across the nation, including have its CEO, Joshua Reeves, go on a tour of the country to visit SMBs in an RV.

One challenge small businesses face though is getting access to high-quality, yet affordable software, particularly in HR. “Small businesses actually get that people are the core more than large companies,” Reeves explained to me. “In a ten person company, you know everyone, your customers are your neighbors, but they never really had access to high-quality software.”

Gusto is hoping to fill that gap, announcing the beta launch of a new product it’s calling HR Basics. The product offers a suite of tools for small businesses to handle the quotidian tasks of HR, including managing vacation time, compiling employee directories, and improving the onboarding of new hires. Most importantly, the product is free, and doesn’t require a credit card or a bank account to sign up.

Reeves believes that Gusto has two purposes: to offer “peace of mind” to small business owners around areas like compliance that can lead to negative enforcement actions, and to provide software that can help companies become “great places to work” that are more focused on community. Reeves is particularly passionate about the latter point. “Even the terminology ‘human capital management’ — humans are not capital, humans are not resources, they are people thank you very much.”

One particular area of focus for HR Basics is around onboarding. Gusto is hoping that it can move all HR paperwork online, so that everything required to officially onboard an employee can be done even before the employee walks into work the first day. With that out of the way, Gusto can then focus on helping companies create the right corporate culture. For instance, the product offers a “Welcome Wall” where other employees can write cheerful and encouraging notes for a new employee to make them feel like they belong at the company from day one.

The Welcome Wall is designed to encourage new employees joining a company

This new product is free for businesses, and Gusto obviously hopes that it creates a funnel of potential customers who will eventually sign up for its payroll service and full HR platform, which charge around $6-12 a month per employee based on the specific plan that a business chooses.

One interesting commitment Gusto is making according to Reeves is that an employee’s profile on the platform will be a lifetime account. If an employee moves from one company to the next and both use Gusto, all of the preferences and other data required to administer HR should work immediately.

That portability mattered less in a world where employees spent decades at a single company, but now that employees often switch employers as often as every year, the repeated savings of time in the transition can be quite significant. Longer term, Gusto sees that sort of portability as critical for facilitating the changing nature of work in the 21st century.

Gusto, which was founded in 2011, is now entering middle age, and the company has 530 employees across its San Francisco and Denver offices according to Reeves.



http://ift.tt/2DxV50U Small businesses love free stuff, so Gusto is giving them free HR Basics http://ift.tt/2ph4ipm

Equity podcast: Theranos’s reckoning, BroadQualm’s stunning conclusion and Lyft’s platform ambitions

{rss:content:encoded} Equity podcast: Theranos’s reckoning, BroadQualm’s stunning conclusion and Lyft’s platform ambitions http://ift.tt/2FQu5eY http://ift.tt/2GzblBU March 16, 2018 at 02:10PM

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Katie Roof and I were joined by Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha, an investor with early connections with Lyft to talk about, well, Lyft — as well as two bombshell news events in the form of an SEC fine for Theranos and Broadcom’s hostile takeover efforts for Qualcomm hitting the brakes. Alex Wilhelm was not present this week but will join us again soon (we assume he was tending to his Slayer shirt collection).

Starting off with Lyft, there was quite a bit of activity for Uber’s biggest competitor in North America. The ride-sharing startup (can we still call it a startup?) said it would be partnering with Magna to “co-develop” an autonomous driving system. Chaddha talks a bit about how Lyft’s ambitions aren’t to be a vertical business like Uber, but serve as a platform for anyone to plug into. We’ve definitely seen this play out before — just look at what happened with Apple (the closed platform) and Android (the open platform). We dive in to see if Lyft’s ambitions are actually going to pan out as planned. Also, it got $200 million out of the deal.

Next up is Theranos, where the SEC investigation finally came to a head with founder Elizabeth Holmes and former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were formally charged by the SEC for fraud. The SEC says the two raised more than $700 million from investors through an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.” You can find the full story by TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos here, and we got a chance to dig into the implications of what it might mean for how investors scope out potential founders going forward. (Hint: Chaddha says they need to be more careful.)

Finally, BroadQualm is over. After months of hand-wringing over whether or not Broadcom would buy — and then commit a hostile takeover — of the U.S. semiconductor giant, the Trump administration blocked the deal. A cascading series of events associated with the CFIUS, a government body, got it to the point where Broadcom’s aggressive dealmaker Hock Tan dropped plans to go after Qualcomm altogether. The largest deal of all time in tech will, indeed, not be happening (for now), and it has potentially pretty big implications for M&A going forward.

That’s all for this week, we’ll catch you guys next week. Happy March Madness, and may fortune favor* your brackets.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocketcast, Downcast and all the casts.

assuming you have Duke losing before the elite 8.

Reverie Labs uses new machine learning algorithms to fix drug development bottlenecks

Developing new medicines can take years of research and cost millions of dollars before they are even ready for clinical trials. Several biotech startups are using machine learning to revolutionize the process and get drugs into pharmacies more quickly. One of the newest is called Reverie Labs, which is part of Y Combinator’s latest batch. The Boston-based company wants to fix a critical bottleneck in the drug development process by speeding up the process of identifying promising molecules using recently published machine learning algorithms.

Reverie Labs’ founders Connor Duffy, Ankit Gupta and Jonah Kallenbach, who named their company after a pivotal detail in the HBO series “Westworld,” explain that its tech analyzes early ideas for molecules from pharmaceutical scientists and suggests possible improvements to shorten the amount of time it takes to reach clinical trials. Duffy says Reverie Labs’ ambition is to “become a full service molecule-as-a-service company.” It’s already partnered with several biotech companies and academic institutes working on treatments for diseases including influenza and cancer.

Reverie Labs specializes in the lead development stage, which is when researchers focus on prioritizing and optimizing molecules so they can go to animal and human clinical trials more quickly. Pharmaceutical scientists need to first identify the proteins that cause a disease and then find molecular compounds that can bind to those proteins. Then it becomes a process of elimination as they narrow down those molecules to ones that not only create the results they want, but are also suitable for animal and human studies.

Before clinical trials can start, however, they need to evaluate molecules very carefully in order to understand things like how they are metabolized by the body and their potential toxicity.

“I’ve heard it compared to juggling eight balls at once or playing whack-a-mole,” says Duffy. “You want your compound to be very safe before you put it in people, you want to be efficacious and go where you want it to go in your body and you don’t want side effects. There are a lot of problems drug companies need to think about before putting a molecule in a human, and when you fix one problem, you often come up with another problem. We want to alleviate that by looking at all problems at the same time.”

Lead development is very labor intensive and requires the work of many medicinal chemists. Reverie Labs’ founders say it often takes more than $100 million and two years per drug before a final selection of molecules are ready for clinical trials. Reverie Labs wants to set itself apart from other startups focused on solving the same problem by taking recently-discovered machine learning techniques, and applying them to drug development.

“The machine learning algorithms we implemented are some of the most promising advances that have been published in the past couple of years,” says Kallenbach.

First, molecules are “featurized,” or turned into representations that work with machine learning algorithms. Reverie Labs’s tech creates proprietary featurizations based on quantum chemical calculations, then uses them to analyze the molecules’ properties and how they may act in the body. Afterwards, it selects molecules that have the potential to do well in clinical trials or suggests new molecules based on what properties scientists need.

In addition to the machine learning algorithms it uses, Reverie Labs founders say one of the startup’s key differentiators is that it trains its models on customers’ proprietary in-house datasets, which means the tech can integrate more smoothly into existing drug development workflows. Reverie Labs’ software also runs on customers’ virtual private clouds, giving them more security.

While using artificial intelligence to develop new drugs seemed almost like science fiction just a few years ago, the space is developing quickly. Last month, BenevolentAI, one of the first companies to apply deep learning to drug discovery, bought biotech company Promixagen’s operations in the United Kingdom, which it says will make it the first artificial intelligence company to cover the entire drug research and development process. Atomwise, another AI-based drug discovery startup, announced at the beginning of this month that it has raised a $45 million Series A. Other notable startups include Nimbus Therapeutics and Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

The process of creating new drugs is currently very complicated, slow and extremely expensive. With so much room for improvement, the work done by various AI-based startups to improve the process don’t necessarily overlap.

“The space doesn’t seem like a zero sum game at all,” says Gupta. “Many players can be involved and the fact that other startups are interested shows that there is legitimacy to the technology.”

“The end result is trying to delivery life-saving cures faster and more cheaply,” adds Duffy. “We don’t really feel any competitiveness. We want everyone to succeed.”



http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Reverie Labs uses new machine learning algorithms to fix drug development bottlenecks http://ift.tt/2pgRwYL

Equity podcast: Theranos’s reckoning, BroadQualm’s stunning conclusion and Lyft’s platform ambitions

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Katie Roof and I were joined by Mayfield Fund’s Navin Chaddha, an investor with early connections with Lyft to talk about, well, Lyft — as well as two bombshell news events in the form of an SEC fine for Theranos and Broadcom’s hostile takeover efforts for Qualcomm hitting the brakes. Alex Wilhelm was not present this week but will join us again soon (we assume he was tending to his Slayer shirt collection).

Starting off with Lyft, there was quite a bit of activity for Uber’s biggest competitor in North America. The ride-sharing startup (can we still call it a startup?) said it would be partnering with Magna to “co-develop” an autonomous driving system. Chaddha talks a bit about how Lyft’s ambitions aren’t to be a vertical business like Uber, but serve as a platform for anyone to plug into. We’ve definitely seen this play out before — just look at what happened with Apple (the closed platform) and Android (the open platform). We dive in to see if Lyft’s ambitions are actually going to pan out as planned. Also, it got $200 million out of the deal.

Next up is Theranos, where the SEC investigation finally came to a head with founder Elizabeth Holmes and former president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were formally charged by the SEC for fraud. The SEC says the two raised more than $700 million from investors through an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.” You can find the full story by TechCrunch’s Connie Loizos here, and we got a chance to dig into the implications of what it might mean for how investors scope out potential founders going forward. (Hint: Chaddha says they need to be more careful.)

Finally, BroadQualm is over. After months of hand-wringing over whether or not Broadcom would buy — and then commit a hostile takeover — of the U.S. semiconductor giant, the Trump administration blocked the deal. A cascading series of events associated with the CFIUS, a government body, got it to the point where Broadcom’s aggressive dealmaker Hock Tan dropped plans to go after Qualcomm altogether. The largest deal of all time in tech will, indeed, not be happening (for now), and it has potentially pretty big implications for M&A going forward.

That’s all for this week, we’ll catch you guys next week. Happy March Madness, and may fortune favor* your brackets.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocketcast, Downcast and all the casts.

assuming you have Duke losing before the elite 8.



http://ift.tt/eA8V8J Equity podcast: Theranos’s reckoning, BroadQualm’s stunning conclusion and Lyft’s platform ambitions http://ift.tt/2FQu5eY

Samsung’s Galaxy S9 gets Disney AR Emojis at launch

{rss:content:encoded} Samsung’s Galaxy S9 gets Disney AR Emojis at launch http://ift.tt/2DwnHrH http://ift.tt/2DxzpSE March 16, 2018 at 09:00AM

I wasn’t alone in suggesting that Samsung’s Animoji competitors were, well, creepy. AR Emojis sit firmly in the uncanny valley between face scans and cartoon characters — generally lacking the adorableness of Apple’s offering. They have, however, had one saving grace: Disney, the entertainment company that essentially owns all of your best childhood memories. 

Samsung teased the partnership this month at Mobile World Congress, during the big Galaxy S9 launch, but didn’t offer much in the way of specifics. There is, however, some good news on the front. Disney’s AR Emojis will be available at launch for the S9 and S9+ — which, as it so happens, is today.

Right now, only Mickey and Minnie are available, accessible to phone buyers as a free download.  More character offerings from such blockbuster films as The Incredibles, Zootopia and Frozen will be made available before the end of the year.

The decision to go with Samsung is no doubt a sore spot for Apple, which has had a tight partnership with Disney for decades, including numerous product crossovers and shared board members. But the entertainment giant is no doubt looking to spread the love. The company also recently licensed Star Wars characters for some very Porg-y Pixel 2 AR stickers.

“By extending our characters and stories to new digital platforms,” Disney VP John Love said in a release tied to the announcement, “we are creating daily Disney experiences everywhere our audience goes, and we are able to draw in new generations of fans.”

The S9 hits the market today, priced starting at $720.

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