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Saturday, May 5, 2018

Lobe’s ridiculously simple machine learning platform aims to empower non-technical creators

Machine learning may be the tool de jour for everything from particle physics to recreating the human voice, but it’s not exactly the easiest field to get into. Despite the complexities of video editing and sound design, we have UIs that let even a curious kid dabble in them — why not with machine learning? That’s the goal of Lobe, a startup and platform that genuinely seems to have made AI models as simple to put together as LEGO bricks.

I talked with Mike Matas, one of Lobe’s co-founders and the designer behind many a popular digital interface, about the platform and his motivations for creating it.

“There’s been a lot of situations where people have kind of thought about AI and have these cool ideas, but they can’t execute them,” he said. “So those ideas just like shed, unless you have access to an AI team.”

This happened to him, too, he explained.

“I started researching because I wanted to see if I could use it myself. And there’s this hard to break through veneer of words and frameworks and mathematics — but once you get through that the concepts are actually really intuitive. In fact even more intuitive than regular programming, because you’re teaching the machine like you teach a person.”

But like the hard shell of jargon, existing tools were also rough on the edges — powerful and functional, but much more like learning a development environment than playing around in Photoshop or Logic.

“You need to know how to piece these things together, there are lots of things you need to download. I’m one of those people who if I have to do a lot of work, download a bunch of frameworks, I just give up,” he said. “So as a UI designer I saw the opportunity to take something that’s really complicated and reframe it in a way that’s understandable.”

Lobe, which Matas created with his co-founders Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges, takes the concepts of machine learning, things like feature extraction and labeling, and puts them in a simple, intuitive visual interface. As demonstrated in a video tour of the platform, you can make an app that recognizes hand gestures and matches them to emoji without ever seeing a line of code, let alone writing one. All the relevant information is there, and you can drill down to the nitty gritty if you want, but you don’t have to. The ease and speed with which new applications can be designed and experimented with could open up the field to people who see the potential of the tools but lack the technical know-how.

He compared the situation to the early days of PCs, when computer scientists and engineers were the only ones who knew how to operate them. “They were the only people able to use them, so they were they only people able to come up with ideas about how to use them,” he said. But by the late ’80s, computers had been transformed into creative tools, largely because of improvements to the UI.

Matas expects a similar flood of applications, even beyond the many we’ve already seen, as the barrier to entry drops.

“People outside the data science community are going to think about how to apply this to their field,” he said, and unlike before, they’ll be able to create a working model themselves.

A raft of examples on the site show how a few simple modules can give rise to all kinds of interesting applications: reading lips, tracking positions, understanding gestures, generating realistic flower petals. Why not? You need data to feed the system, of course, but doing something novel with it is no longer the hard part.

And in keeping with the machine learning community’s commitment to openness and sharing, Lobe models aren’t some proprietary thing you can only operate on the site or via the API. “Architecturally we’re built on top of open standards like Tensorflow,” Matas said. Do the training on Lobe, test it and tweak it on Lobe, then compile it down to whatever platform you want and take it to go.

Right now the site is in closed beta. “We’ve been overwhelmed with responses, so clearly it’s resonating with people,” Matas said. “We’re going to slowly let people in, it’s going to start pretty small. I hope we’re not getting ahead of ourselves.”



https://ift.tt/2rn1CYw Lobe’s ridiculously simple machine learning platform aims to empower non-technical creators https://ift.tt/2KFPIBS

The formula behind San Francisco’s startup success

Friday, May 4, 2018

You can now easily buy movie tickets with Google Assistant

{rss:content:encoded} You can now easily buy movie tickets with Google Assistant https://ift.tt/2wbCdGC https://ift.tt/2rkYtZ7 May 04, 2018 at 09:01PM

Google Assistant is gaining some new capabilities thanks to a deal with Fandango which should make ordering movie tickets a quick and easy process. Simply tell Google Assistant that you want to buy some movie tickets and you’ll see what’s playing nearby, you can dial in the specificity to find out just what’s playing at a specific theater of what theaters a particular flick is going to be at.

The deal is going live on May the Fourth™ in honor of the Star Wars™ marketing holiday and the fact that advanced tickets for Solo: A Star Wars Story™ are going on sale today.

This functionality is something that’s been available on Siri, but Google Assistant allows you to make the purchase without downloading the Fandango app which had pretty much negated most of the utility this feature had on Siri.

For now, this launch is just for Google Assistant on Android phones but if you’re perplexingly a heavy user of the Google Assistant app on iOS than you’ll be able to get your movie ticket ordering functionality sometime later this year.

Wedding startup Zola just received a lavish gift: $100 million in fresh funding

Zola, a fast-growing company that invites newly engaged couples to register their guests, shop from 600 different brands, and create customizable checklists, has itself received something a bit extravagant: $100 million in Series D funding.

Earlier investor Comcast Ventures led the round, which also included new investors NBCUniversal and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. The five-year-old, New York-based, 110-person company has now raised $140 million altogether.

We talked last night with founder and CEO Shan-Lyn Ma to learn more. Ma is a former executive with the e-commerce companies Gilt Groupe and Chloe + Isabel who originally started Zola to reinvent the traditional registry process but who now sees an opportunity to eventually address every need a young couple may have, from caterers to Cuisinarts, to eventually, perhaps, even home mortgages. Our chat has been edited lightly for length.

TC: You’re a decent size-company at this point. Is everyone in New York?

SM: The vast majority, though we also have a small number in Charlottesville, Virginia. Earlier this year, we acquired the assets of a small wedding startup that had shut down and brought some of that team into Zola.

TC: Have you made other acquisitions? Will you now with this giant new round?

SM: No, and it’s possible, but the bigger vision is to cater to couples from the day they get engaged, into their first years of marriage. We’ll be using the funding to accelerate the product development of more wedding planning tools for couples, so we can be that go-to destination.

TC: How are people learning about Zola?

SM: The biggest growth driver has been people who’ve gone to a wedding where Zola was the registry that the couple used. One hundred and fifty people on average see the registry, and if those visitors believe it’s a better product, [they come to us, too]. It’s built-in virality.

We also picked Comcast Ventures to be our lead investor because Comcast and [fellow investor] NBC are market leaders in media with wide reach. They’ll help us with our marketing and awareness goals, which is a big opportunity and area of focus for us in the coming year.

TC: How many people have used the site to date?

SM: More than 500,000 couples have used our wedding registry or else managed their guest list through Zola.

TC: Zola started as a wedding registry product. Now, it’s a full-fledged marketplace, connecting engaged couples to 600 brands and 60,000 products. Are you making a percentage off each sale?

SM: It’s more like a retail model. Couples can register for items or buy them for themselves; we sell to them at retail prices and buy at wholesale.

TC: Are you buying these products and housing them?

SM: No. We learned from our past experiences in other e-commerce [companies] the pitfalls and land mines, and Zola was built to avoid those problems. We have virtually no inventory and we have virtually no returns, and those are the big reasons why e-commerce is such a tough business.

TC: Can you elaborate?

SM: We’ve built our in-house proprietary drop-ship platform that allows us to connect directly with brand partners to offer their products on Zola. So when an order is placed, we are interfacing with the customer, but when it comes time to ship, we transmit that order to the brand’s warehouse, and they ship directly to the customer.

The reason returns are so low is because we built the registry in such a way that we give couples flexibility to not ship something to themselves until they’re sure they want to receive it. We had the insight that couples don’t want to receive gifts until after they get back from honeymoon. That way, they can see what’s being given to them and do a virtual exchange through the platform if they like, as well as ship themselves the things they definitely do want.

TC: Are brands giving you a discount for promising to buy a certain amount of their products over the course of a year? Why do they let you pay wholesale?

SM: We’re delivering to them a millennial audience and getting their brands in front of couples just as they are deciding on their brand preferences for the rest of their lives. We also deliver a certain degree of predictability to them. We can forecast how much of each product they should expect to sell through Zola in a month’s time

TC: Will we ever see Zola-branded products?

SM: The only instances where it may make sense for us to develop our own product is if we see demand for something that we can’t get through a brand.

TC: I’ve heard you talk about going after the wedding market, which is a $100 billion market in revenue in the U.S. alone. But you also talk about catering to the every need of couples who are just getting hitched. Does that mean connecting them to caterers and travel experiences and mortgages?

SM: Our ambition is to serve couples on that journey, so all of those things are top of mind, and we believe we can help them in unique ways because of the insights we [glean] thanks to our registries and checklists and other wedding planning tools.

TC: How do you weigh profitability versus growth? Do have a timeline for the company to turn profitable that you can share?

SM: One of the big lessons our leadership has learned from past startups and e-commerce [companies] was to build a sustainable business model — and one that can be healthfully profitable in a reasonable time frame.

Right now, we’re investing for growth. But we’re marching toward that goal where we are a huge company, serving companies across the entire wedding-planning journey, and have a business that supports that mission. Absolutely.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Wedding startup Zola just received a lavish gift: $100 million in fresh funding https://ift.tt/2jqFUiK

Chinese robotics company UBTECH gets $820 million in funding

Shenzhen-based home robotics company UBTECH announced this week that it has closed a massive $820 million Series C. The round, led by Tencent and a whole slew of other investors, follows a $100 million Series B and $20 million Series C.

The bipedal robotics maker certainly isn’t a household name here in the States — though the company’s taken a few baby steps over here, including a walking Stormtrooper robot released alongside The Last Jedi. It also debuted a “robotic butler” with a tablet face back at CES in January that seemed more proof of concept than shipping product — though UBTECH has promised a broad 2019 release date.

CEO James Zhou has promised the company will use this huge backing to accelerate its vision of bringing robots into the home.

“As technology evolves to include more voice and touch capabilities, people need new devices that communicate and interact more naturally and intuitively at home, at school and at work,” he said in a release tied to the announcement. “While trends in robots and robotics are developing, no company has yet stepped forward with the resources, vision and products ecosystem to transform robot fantasy and fiction into robot reality. UBTECH is bringing this reality to life by expanding the possibilities for innovation.”

The company says the funding will go into R&D, hires and expanding its global footprint. UBTECH is one of a number of companies pushing home robotics beyond the Roomba, including a rumored upcoming device from Amazon. The technology has been a tough nut to crack in the preceding decades, but an $820 million investment certainly couldn’t hurt. 



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Chinese robotics company UBTECH gets $820 million in funding https://ift.tt/2FIVMFK

China said to be discussing ZTE ban with U.S. officials

{rss:content:encoded} China said to be discussing ZTE ban with U.S. officials https://ift.tt/2Kyxli2 https://ift.tt/2rktPjh May 04, 2018 at 05:35PM

The Chinese government is reportedly going to bat for ZTE over a seven-year ban that would have broad ranging consequences for the phone maker. According to a new report from Reuters, the subject was broached during a meeting with between senior Chinese and U.S. officials in Beijing this week.

The ban imposed by the Department of Commerce is the result of a violation against U.S. Iranian sanctions. ZTE pled guilty, agreeing to pay a fine and penalize employees. After the DOC insisted it failed to do the latter, it barred US companies from selling software or components to the phone maker for seven years. Between chip makers like Qualcomm and software providers including, most notably, Google, the restrictions will prove next to impossible for ZTE to circumvent.

For many, the steep penalty appears to be part of a larger looming trade war between the two countries that’s also found ZTE and Huawei caught in the crosshairs over ties to the Chinese government. U.S. officials, however, have insisted that the ban isn’t related to trade issues between the two countries.

Earlier this week, the Pentagon banned the sale of both companies’ phones on military bases — just the latest in a long line tough breaks here in the States.  ZTE has largely weathered the broader U.S. spying concerns better, due in part to a broader footprint in the States than Huawei, but the company admitted that this latest ban would be downright devestating. 

“The Denial Order will not only severely impact the survival and development of ZTE,” the company told TechCrunch, “but will also cause damages to all partners of ZTE including a large number of U.S. companies.”

ZTE has also reportedly been in talks with U.S. companies like Google and has suggested it will take judicial action, if necessary. 

Facebook is still falling short on privacy, says German minister

Germany’s justice minister has written to Facebook calling for the platform to implement an internal “control and sanction mechanism” to ensure third-party developers and other external providers are not able to misuse Facebook data — calling for it to both monitor third party compliance with its platform policies and apply “harsh penalties” for any violations.

The letter, which has been published in full in local mediafollows the privacy storm that has engulfed the company since mid March when fresh revelations were published by the Observer of London and the New York Times — detailing how Cambridge Analytica had obtained and used personal information on up to 87 million Facebook users for political ad targeting purposes.

Writing to Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, justice minister Katarina Barley welcomes some recent changes the company has made around user privacy, describing its decision to limit collaboration with “data dealers” as “a good start”, for example.

However she says the company needs to do more — setting out a series of what she describes as “core requirements” in the area of data and consumer protection (bulleted below). 

She also writes that the Cambridge Analytica scandal confirms long-standing criticisms against Facebook made by data and consumer advocates in Germany and Europe, adding that it suggests various lawsuits filed against the company’s data practices have “good cause”.

Unfortunately, Facebook has not responded to this criticism in all the years or only insufficiently,” she continues (translated via Google Translate). “Facebook has rather expanded its data collection and use. This is at the expense of the privacy and self-determination of its users and third parties.”

“What is needed is that Facebook lives up to its corporate responsibility and makes a serious change,” she says at the end of the letter. “In interviews and advertisements, you have stated that the new EU data protection regulations are the standard worldwide for the social network. Whether Facebook consistently implements this view, unfortunately, seems questionable,” she continues, critically flagging Facebook’s decision to switch the data controller status of ~1.5BN international users this month so they will no longer be under the jurisdiction of EU law, before adding: “I will therefore keep a close eye on the further measures taken by Facebook.

Since revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook data snowballed into a global privacy scandal for the company this spring, the company has revealed a series of changes which it claims are intended to bolster data protection on its platform.

Although, in truth, many of the tweaks Facebook has announced were likely in train already — as it has been working for months (if not years) on its response to the EU’s incoming GDPR framework, which will apply from May 25.

Yet, even so, many of these measures have been roundly criticized by privacy experts, who argue they do not go far enough to comply with GDPR and will trigger legal challenges once the framework is being applied.

For example, a new consent flow, announced by Facebook last month, has been accused of being intentionally manipulative — and of going against the spirit of the new rules, at very least.

Barley picks up on these criticisms in her letter — calling specifically for Facebook to deliver:

  • More transparency for users
  • Real control of users’ data processing by Facebook
  • Strict compliance with privacy by default and consent in the entire ecosystem of Facebook
  • Objective, neutral, non-discriminatory and manipulation-free algorithms
  • More freedom of choice for users through various settings and uses

On consent, she emphasizes that under GDPR the company will need to obtain consent for each data use — and cannot bundle up uses to try to obtain a ‘lump-sum’ consent, as she puts it.

Yet this is pretty clearly exactly what Facebook is doing when it asks Europeans to opt into its face recognition technology, for example, by suggesting this could help protect users against strangers using their photos; and be an aid to visually impaired users on its platform; yet there’s absolutely no specific examples in the consent flow of the commercial uses to which Facebook will undoubtedly put the tech.

The minister also emphasizes that GDPR demands a privacy-by-default approach, and requires data collection to be minimized — saying Facebook will need to adapt all of its data processing operations in order to comply. 

Any data transfers from “friends” should also only take place with explicit consent in individual cases, she continues (consent that was of course entirely lacking in 2014 when Facebook APIs allowed a developer on its platform to harvest data on up to 87 million users — and pass the information to Cambridge Analytica).

Barley also warns explicitly that Facebook must not create shadow profiles, an especially awkward legal issue for Facebook which US lawmakers also questioned Zuckerberg closely about last month.

Facebook’s announcement this week, at its f8 conference, of an incoming Clear History button — which will give users the ability to clear past browsing data the company has gathered about them — merely underscores the discrepancies here, with tracked Facebook non-users not even getting this after-the-fact control, although tracked users also can’t ask Facebook never to track them in the first place.

Nor is it clear what Facebook does with any derivatives it gleans from this tracked personal data — i.e. whether those insights are also dissociated from an individual’s account.

Sure, Facebook might delete a web log of the sites you visited — like a gambling site or a health clinic — when you hit the button but that does not mean it’s going to remove all the inferences it’s gleaned from that data (and added to the unseen profile it holds of you and uses for ad targeting purposes).

Safe to say, the value of the Clear History button looks mostly as PR for Facebook — so the company can point to it and claim it’s offering users another ‘control’ as a strategy to try to deflect lawmakers’ awkward questions (just such disingenuousness was on ample show in Congress last month — and has also been publicly condemned by the UK parliament).

We asked Facebook our own series of questions about how Clear History operates, and why — for example — it is not offering users the ability to block tracking entirely. After multiple emails on this topic, over two days, we’re still waiting for the company to answer anything we asked.

Facebook’s processing of non-users’ data, collected via tracking pixels and social plugins across other popular web services, has already got Facebook into hot water with some European regulators. Under GDPR it will certainly face fresh challenges to any consent-less handling of people’s data — unless it radically rethinks its approach, and does so in less than a month. 

In her letter, Barley also raises concerns around the misuse of Facebook’s platform for political influence and opinion manipulation — saying it must take “all necessary technical and organizational measures to prevent abuse and manipulation possibilities (e.g. via fake accounts and social bots)”, and ensure the algorithms it uses are “objective, neutral and non-discriminatory”.

She says she also wants the company to disclose the actions it takes on this front in order to enable “independent review”.

Facebook’s huge sprawl and size — with its business consisting of multiple popular linked platforms (such as WhatsApp and Instagram), as well as the company deploying its offsite tracking infrastructure across the Internet to massively expand the reach of its ecosystem — “puts a special strain on the privacy and self-determination of German and European users”, she adds.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to multiple requests for comment about the letter.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Facebook is still falling short on privacy, says German minister Natasha Lomas https://ift.tt/2rnh0E3
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Thursday, May 3, 2018

Instagram quietly launches payments for commerce

Get ready to shop the ‘Gram. Instagram just stealthily added a native payments feature to its app for some users. It lets you register a debit or credit card as part of a profile, set up a security pin, then start buying things without ever leaving Instagram. Not having to leave for a separate website and enter payment information any time you want to purchase something could make Instagram a much bigger player in commerce.

TechCrunch reader Genady Okrain first tipped us off to the payment feature. When we asked Instagram, a spokesperson confirmed that native payments for booking appointments like at restaurants or salons is now live for a limited set of partners.

One of the first equipped is dinner reservation app Resy. Some of its clients’ Instagram Pages now offer this native payment for booking. And in the future, Instagram says you can expect direct payments for things like movie tickets through the app. Instagram initially announced in March 2017 that “we’ll roll out the ability to book a service with a business directly from their profile later this year,” but never mentioned native payments.

Instagram’s native appointment booking

We’ve confirmed that the payment settings are now visible; some, but not all, users in the U.S. have it while at least some in the U.K. don’t. A tap through to the terms of service reveals that Instagram Payments are backed by Facebook’s Payments rules.

With its polished pictures and plethora of brands, shopping through Instagram could prove popular and give businesses a big new reason to advertise on the app. If they can get higher conversion rates because people don’t quit in the middle of checkout as the fill in their payment info, brands might prefer to push people to buy via Instagram.

Instagram’s existing Shoppable Tags feature forces you out to a business’ website to make a purchase, unlike the new payments feature

Facebook started dabbling in native commerce around 2013, and eventually started rolling out peer-to-peer payments through Messenger. But native payment for shopping is still in closed beta in the chat app. It’s unclear if peer-to-peer payments might come to Instagram, but having a way to add a credit or debit card on file is a critical building block to that feature.

It’s possible that the payments option will work with Instagram’s “Shoppable Tags,” which first started testing in 2016 to let you see which products were in a post and tap through to buy them on the brand’s site. Since then, Instagram has partnered with storefront platforms BigCommerce and Shopify to get their clients hooked up, and expanded the feature to more countries in March. For now, though, none of Instagram’s previous shopping feature partners like Warby Parker or Kate Spade let you checkout within Instagram, and still send you to their site.

But the whole point of Instagram not allowing links in captions is to keep you in a smooth, uninterrupted browsing flow. Getting booted out to the web to buy something broke that. Instagram Payments could make impulse buys much quicker, enticing more businesses to get on board. Even if Instagram takes no cut of the revenue, brands are likely to boost ad spend to get their shoppable posts seen by more people if the native payments mean more of them actually complete a purchase.

Instagram isn’t the only one who sees this potential. Snapchat started testing its own native payments and checkout feature in February.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2KxhArD Instagram quietly launches payments for commerce Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2wbRA1W
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Freeda raises $10 million for its new media brand for women

Italian startup Freeda Media is raising a $10 million Series A round led by Alven Capital. U-Start and business angels are also participating in the round.

Freeda Media runs the popular Freeda Facebook page. With nearly 1.4 million likes, the page has an impressive reach. 24 million unique users see Freeda content every month in Italy, including 100 percent of millennial women who live in Italy. The company is also quite active on Instagram.

In other words, Freeda Media is a new media company that runs mostly on social media platforms. Many of the Facebook posts are short videos, social cuts with subtitles and quick interviews. Some posts link to Freeda’s own website for more traditional articles with text and photos. But there’s no front page per se.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to expand to other markets, starting with Spain. More interestingly, Freeda is still quite young as it took them 15 months to reach this level.

The company compares itself with other media brands for women, such as Elle, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or Man Repeller. According to CrowdTangle, Freeda has a much higher engagement rate compared to its direct competitors.

Freeda Media’s business model is branded content and native advertising. But the startup is looking at other potential revenue streams. There’s clearly a risk of branded content overload for social-first media organizations. When you build a Facebook audience based on trust, your reputation can also quickly deteriorate and the algorithms can turn on you. So far, it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

Internationalization is going to be key to foster Freeda’s growth. If Freeda can replicate the same impressive numbers in multiple countries, the startup could end up convincing bigger advertisers and distributing more or less the same content in multiple countries.



https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Freeda raises $10 million for its new media brand for women https://ift.tt/2HK4eud

Washé raises $3.5 million for its on-demand car washing service and biz platform

{rss:content:encoded} Washé raises $3.5 million for its on-demand car washing service and biz platform https://ift.tt/2FDUewZ https://ift.tt/2FE4F3x May 03, 2018 at 05:59PM

Another startup wants to make on-demand car washing work, where others have failed. Washé, a Boca Raton-based service for on-demand washes, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to continue to grow its business, which involves a mobile app consumers use to connect with Washé’s network of around 1,000 licensed and insured car washing professionals.

The round was led by veteran tech entrepreneur Ron Zuckerman, currently a board member at TV Time, and included other, unnamed investors.

Washé, which operates in parts of Florida, Southern California, and more recently, Georgia and New Jersey, has performed roughly 100,000 car washes to date in the South Florida market – its largest – and is currently seeing 125 percent growth, it says.

To use the service, customers download the Washé app to their phones, create a profile and pick a package. There are four available, ranging from $30 to $120. With a tap of a “Wash Me Now!” button, a mobile washer (or Washér, as the company says) is deployed to the customer’s location, like their home or office. The washer has all their own equipment, so the job can really be anywhere – they don’t need the customer’s power or water.

When the job is a complete, customers are sent a photo of the work and can choose to tip or rate the washer in the app.

Washers are primarily existing business owners who use the service as lead generation, allowing them to focus on making money – not finding customers. Washé’s focus, meanwhile, is on the customer experience – it vets the washers, and inspects their vehicles and equipment before bringing them on.

But Washé will also train those who want to be their own boss, and it sells car wash equipment to help them get started. The products are available at local Washer hubs and online at The Washé Store – which gives it an e-commerce business on the side of its B2C operation. In addition, washers without a van can rent a branded one from Washé to use.

Washers can set their own hours and are paid through the app, including tips. These payments are automatically deposited to their bank account. Washé keeps 70 to 80 percent of the transaction, like a typical marketplace, with the variance depending on things like package or location.

Beyond the consumer-facing service, the startup also offers a service for businesses who want to offer car washes as an amenity for employees, customers, or others on-site. The company offers its tech platform for businesses to track and manage car wash activity. It currently partners with corporations, valets, hotels, and travel companies, including Office Depot, Citrix, Curbstand, Jetsmarter, and the Setai Hotel. Some of these are single locations, not large deals, as this business is just getting off the ground.

The B2B business is more flexible, however, offering more options for packages and pricing, as well as specific times Washé will be available.

The fundraise will be focused on growing both the B2C and B2B operations, the company says, as well as hiring to expand its 15-plus person team in Boca Raton.

 

 

The idea of bringing services to the customer is of growing interest in an on-demand world, where you can order nearly anything online, and have it show up at your location – sometimes just an hour or so later. Washé believes that services like the one it offers will be able to ride this wave, as people begin to expect not just products – but anything else they need – to come to them, as well.

Specifically, the company points to recent market intelligence from IBIS World Industry, which says there’s a $3 billion mobile car wash industry in the U.S, and a $10 billion total U.S. car wash industry. IBIS expects that demand to grow over the next five years, too.

Of course, on-demand car washing hasn’t always fared well. It’s extremely difficult to become the “Uber for X,” (in this case, car washes), and Washé still has a long way to go to prove itself.

But the company believes its focus on matching supply and demand will help it to succeed.

“What is key is that you have to balance the supply and demand. So you have to really understand how to how to engage your supply channels…our supply is equally as important to us as our customers,” explains Washè CEO Matt Stadtmauer.

Stadtmauer previously worked in the investment industry, specifically hedge funds, before getting the bug to do something more entrepreneurial. He says he got the idea to try Washé from a friend, and developed the app with help from Tel Aviv-based Execute – meaning, the technical side of the business is currently outsourced to some extent.

The company tested the market for over six months in 2016 in Boca Raton, and had saw some success.

“[Washé has a] strong go-to-market strategy, plus a scalable footprint that allows us to take what was initially a B2C model and grow it into a vertically-integrated business where we’re doing B2B,” says Stadtmauer. “We have product line for the do-it-yourself market, in addition to strategic integrations with other apps and the auto care space. We have a very interesting roadmap that touches all the various four points of our vertical business lines,” he adds.

Washé is currently available on iOS, where it has a notably good 4.7-star rating, and Android, where it’s a 3.9. Customers complaints relate to the quality of the wash, which can be subjective, but also a tough problem to address at scale. Other times, the complaints are more technical in nature – something that Washé could improve by bringing engineering and development more in-house.

 

The app has been live since April 2016, initially in a smaller, beta period. It now plans to expand further into L.A., plus new markets in Arizona, greater California, and the Tri-State area, among others.

Washé is leading the way in the on-demand car wash space by offering an innovative platform for both consumers and businesses,” said Ron Zuckerman, in a statement. “Washé’s success over the past two years demonstrates tremendous growth potential and I’m excited to work with them to expand Washé in the U.S and globally.”

 

HTC confirms its newest flagship smartphone will arrive May 23

{rss:content:encoded} HTC confirms its newest flagship smartphone will arrive May 23 https://ift.tt/2I71kzn https://ift.tt/2rifxiu May 03, 2018 at 12:03PM

Perennial smartphone struggler HTC has revealed its newest smartphone — the U12/U12+ — will launch on May 23. The big spoiler from the company is that the phone will include… components.

That isn’t exactly an informative teaser, but we do actually have a flavor for what HTC will bring to market.

Serial leaker Evan Blass, writing for VentureBeat, revealed a dual-camera setup on the reverse of the phone, with a Snapdragon 845 chipset, 6GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of internal storage under the hood.

HTC badly needs this device to be a winner. Its most recent results for Q4 2017 were grim with a loss $337 million from total sales of $540 million. The company did get a cash boost from a $1.1 billion deal to sell some of its tech and talent to Google, but that wasn’t reflected in these results.

The firm is putting that capital to use for “greater investment in emerging technologies” that it says will be “vital across all of our businesses and present significant long-term growth opportunities.” The fruits of that aren’t likely to be seen for a while yet.

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Nintendo’s new president aims to build a billion-dollar mobile gaming business

{rss:content:encoded} Nintendo’s new president aims to build a billion-dollar mobile gaming business https://ift.tt/2HMGq4Y https://ift.tt/2KuAwHu May 02, 2018 at 11:12PM

It’s a time of optimism and transition at Nintendo, where brisk sales of the Switch have bolstered its bottom line and new leadership signals a fresh approach to the market. Shuntaro Furukawa, the new president, told the Nikkei that one of his plans is to pursue mobile gaming with more vigor, aiming to build it into a billion-dollar business.

Furukawa is taking over from Tatsumi Kimishima, who took the helm temporarily after the tragic and sudden death of the beloved Satoru Iwata in 2015. He’s only 46, and clearly as a member of the younger generation has different outlook on mobile, which the company completely avoided until very recently.

“The idea that something will emerge that transforms into something big, in the same manner as game consoles, is the defining motive of the Nintendo business,” he told the Nikkei. “From what I can see, smartphone games are the ones I want to expand the most.”

He said he envisions the smartphone side of the game company to become a 100 billion yen business – short of a billion at the present exchange rate, but why not round up? The company did a trillion yen in sales last year, so it’s not like we’re going to run out of zeroes.

The company’s tentative forays into the field have been a mixed success. Pokemon Go was, of course, a worldwide phenomenon, but widely criticized for half-baked gameplay and other issues. Mario Run was a perfectly fun game but many mobile player balked at its high up-front price. Then Fire Emblem: Heroes has proven popular and a financial success — but its reliance on “loot box” mechanics and in-game microtransactions soured the experience for many.

A new game and franchise, Dragalia Lost, is coming this summer.

Clearly Nintendo is still finding its feet in this relatively unfamiliar territory, though long practice with the DS (in many ways very like a smartphone) means that mobile gaming, if not a core competency, is at least core-adjacent. And popular franchises like Advance Wars and Professor Layton are great matches for mobile.

No one should expect a smartphone equivalent to sprawling, beautiful games like Breath of the Wild, but Nintendo has handheld fun in its blood and there’s no reason to think they won’t nail it after a few tries.

Spotify misses on revenue in first earnings report with 170M users

{rss:content:encoded} Spotify misses on revenue in first earnings report with 170M users https://ift.tt/2jpek5s https://ift.tt/2jp3KLO May 02, 2018 at 10:12PM

In Spotify’s first ever earnings report, the streaming music came up short, pulling in $1.36 billion revenue in Q1 2018. That’s compared to Wall Street’s estimates of $1.4 billion in revenue and an adjusted EPS loss of $0.34. Spotify hit 170 million monthly active users, up 6.9 percent from 159 million in Q4 2017 and 99 million ad-supported users. It also hit 75 million Premium Subscribers, up 30 percent year-over-year, and 75 million paid subscribers, up 5.6 percent from 71 million in Q4 and up 45 percent YoY.

Interestingly, the MAU account seems to indicate that 4 million of Spotify’s 75 million subscribers pay but don’t listen.

 

Spotify’s results were in line with the guidance it gave yet Wall Street was still disappointed. Spotify shares promptly fell over 8 percent in after-hours trading to around $156, beneath its IPO pop a month ago but still above its $149 day one closing price and $132 IPO pricing.

Spotify’s Gross Margin was 24.9 percent in Q1, over the top of its guidance range of 23-24 percent. Its operating loss was $48.9 million, and its has $1.91 billion in cash and cash equivalents at the end of Q1.

As for Q2 guidance, Spotify expects 175 to 180 million MAU, 79 to 83 million paid subscribers, and $1.3 to $1.55 billion in revenue, excluding the impoact of foreign exchange rates. It’s planning an operating loss of $71 million to $167 million, in part due to a $35 million to $42 million expense related to its direct listing debut on the public markets.

Spotify is hoping to boost paid subscriber numbers by first luring more users to its free ad-supported service. Last month it unveiled a revamped free tier that lets users listen to songs on-demand on particular Spotify-controlled playlists instead of only being able to play in shuffle mode. The idea is that once users get a taste of on-demand listening, they’ll pay to upgrade so they can listen to whatever they want across the whole catalog.

That strategy could not only boost subscriber numbers, but also give Spotify more leverage over the record labels. More than 30 percent of all Spotify listening now happens on its owned playlists. That gives it the power to choose what will become a hit, and in turn means record labels need to play nice. This could help Spotify secure more exclusive content and a better bargaining position in royalty negotiations.

BuzzFeed built its own editing tool for short, meme-y videos

Although the “pivot to video” has been notoriously challenging for most publishers, they can’t exactly give up on video. In fact, BuzzFeed has been ramping up production with a new editing tool called Vidder.

Vidder was created Senior Product Designer Elaine Dunlop and Senior Software Engineer Joseph Bergen. Dunlop recalled talking to Bergen more than a year ago and pointing out that while BuzzFeed is known for building its own publishing tools, “there wasn’t really the same opinionated software solution” for creating videos.

So they decided to build a video editing product that could be used by anyone, not just experienced producers and editors. Duynlop said the initial goal was to “demystify video production.”

“We basically started out with this hypothesis that if we gave a very simple tool to these editors who are constantly creating very funny, interesting things, they would really be able to fly,” Bergen added.

Fast forward to 2018 and BuzzFeed says Vidder is being used by 40 or 50 team members to create 200 videos each month, with 800 videos created in all since October. Almost none of BuzzFeed’s Vidder users are full-time video producers, and most of them had little to no experience with professional video editing software.

Vidder

For example, Kayla Yandoli was a member of BuzzFeed’s social team (she’s since transferred to the video) when she created this compilation of “shady” insults from The Golden Girls last fall. With 1.1 million shares, it was one of Vidder’s early success stories, and Yandoli estimated that it only took her only an hour and a half to edit.

We moved even faster when the Vidder team demonstrated the product for me last week. We started with a basic template, then customized it by uploading one or two video clips, typing in captions and subtitles, adding emojis, and we had a perfectly serviceable video ready to go in just a few minutes.

The experience had very little in common with the hours I’ve fiddling with timelines on FinalCut. It also benefits from being entirely web-based, with no software download needed.

The key to Vidder is simplicity. As Product Manager Chris Johanesen put it, “We’re not trying to recreate Adobe Premiere.” There are teams at BuzzFeed creating more in-depth, highly produced videos, and Vidder isn’t built for them. Instead, it might be used by an editor like Yandoli who wants to quickly translate a regular BuzzFeed post into a video for Facebook or Instagram.

“There was a really big boom with Facebook videos around pop culture, animals, babies and stuff,” Yandoli recalled. “People on my team interested in creating videos, but everyone couldn’t download premiere. We were yearning to just find an accessible tool so that we could create things for our social platforms.”

Vidder

And while you might think that Vidder has become less relevant with recent Facebook algorithm changes, Johanesen said the tool allows BuzzFeed to continue experimenting.

“Ever since the big Facebook algorithm changes that happened, our social strategy is less about longer videos and more about making things that will engage communities and conversations,” Johanesen said. “Vidder has helped teams move a little bit faster than mgiht ahve been possible with other tools. I don’t know that we’ve cracked it, but it’s helping us make progress.”

BuzzFeed is also using Vidder to adapt videos for different platforms, like creating a shorter video for Instagram or compiling several short videos into a longer cut for YouTube. The tool is also being used by international teams who might quickly create a localized version when they see that a BuzzFeed U.S. video is doing well. In fact, BuzzFeed says one international editor was able to “clone” eight Vidder videos in an hour.

Usage is spreading beyond social media teams, with the sales team potentially using it to create “BuzzCuts” for advertisers.  And of course Johanesen and his team are going to continue working on the product — for example, they have plans connect it to a library of licensed content.



https://ift.tt/2KuPCg0 BuzzFeed built its own editing tool for short, meme-y videos https://ift.tt/2w8mCaP

Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what?

We’re at the cusp of the visual communication era. Stories creation and consumption is up 842 percent since early 2016, according to consulting firm Block Party. Nearly a billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger now create and watch these vertical, ephemeral slideshows. And yesterday, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox showed a chart detailing how “the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

The repercussions of this medium shift are vast. Users now consider how every moment could be glorified and added to the narrative of their day. Social media platforms are steamrolling their old designs to highlight the camera and people’s Stories. And advertisers must rethink their message not as a headline, body text, and link, but as a background, overlays, and a feeling that lingers even if viewers don’t click through.

WhatsApp’s Stories now have over 450 million daily users. Instagram’s have over 300 million. Facebook Messenger’s had 70 million in September. And Snapchat as a whole just reached 191 million, about 150 million of which use Stories according to Block Party. With 970 million accounts, it’s the format of the future. Block Party calculates that Stories grew 15X faster than feeds from Q2 2016 to Q3 2017. And that doesn’t even count Google’s new AMP Stories for news, Netflix’s Stories for mobile movie previews, and YouTube’s new Stories feature.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even admitted on last week’s earnings call that the company is focused on “making sure that ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” When asked, Facebook confirmed that it’s now working on monetization for Facebook Stories.

From Invention To Standard

“They deserve all the credit”, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me about Snapchat when his own app launched its clone of Stories. But what sprouted as Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and his team reimagining the Facebook News Feed through the lens of its 10-second disappearing messages has blossomed into the dominant way to see life from someone else’s perspective. And just as Facebook and Twitter took FriendFeed and refined it with relevancy sorting, character constraints, and all manners of embedded media, the Stories format is still being perfected. “This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it” Systrom followed up.

Snapchat is trying to figure out if Stories from friends and professional creators should be separate, and if they should be sorted by relevancy or reverse chronologically. Instagram and Facebook are opening Stories up to posts from third-party apps like Spotify that makes them a great way to discover music. WhatsApp is pushing the engineering limits of Stories, figuring out ways to make the high-bandwidth videos play on slow networks in the developing world.

Messenger is removing its camera from the navigation menu, and settling in as a place to watch Stories shared from Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, Messenger is merging augmented reality, commerce, and Stories so users can preview products in AR and then either share or buy them. Facebook created a Stories carousel ad that lets businesses share a slideshow of three photos or videos together to string together a narrative. And perhaps most tellingly, Facebook is testing a new post composer for its News Feed that actually shows an active camera and camera roll preview to coerce you into sharing Stories instead of a text status. Companies who refuse the trend may be left behind.

Social Media Bedrock

As I wrote two years ago when Snapchat with the only app with Stories:

“Social media creates a window through which your friends can watch your life. Yet most social networks weren’t designed that way, because phones, screen sizes, cameras, and mobile network connections weren’t good enough to build a crystal-clear portal.

With all its text, Twitter is like peering through a crack in a fence. There are lots of cracks next to each other, but none let you see the full story. Facebook is mostly blank space. It’s like a tiny jail-cell window surrounded by concrete. Instagram was the closest thing we had. Like a quaint living room window, you can only see the clean and pretty part they want you to see.

Snapchat is the floor-to-ceiling window observation deck into someone’s life. It sees every type of communication humans have invented: video, audio, text, symbols, and drawings. Beyond virtual reality and 360 video — both tough to capture or watch on the go — it’s difficult to imagine where social media evolves from here.” It turns out that over the next two years, social media would not evolve, but instead converge on Stories. 

What comes next is a race for more decorations, more augmented reality, more developers, and more extendability beyond native apps and into the rest of the web. Until we stop using cell phones all together, we’ll likely see most of sharing divided between private messaging and broadcasted Stories.

The medium is a double-edged sword for culture, though. While a much more vivid way to share and engender empathy, they also threaten to commodify life. When Instagram launched Stories, Systrom said it was because otherwise you “only get to see the highlights”.

But he downplayed how a medium for capturing more than the highlights would pressure people around the world to interrupt any beautiful scene or fit of laughter or quiet pause with their camera phone. We went from people shooting and sharing once or a few times a day to constantly. In fact, people plan their activities not just around a picture-perfect destination, but turning their whole journey into success theater.

If Stories are our new favorite tool, we must learn to wield them judiciously. Sometimes a memory is worth more than an audience. When it’s right to record, don’t get in the way of someone else’s experience. And after the Story is shot, return to the moment and save captioning and decoration for down time. Stories are social media bedrock. There’s no richer way to share, so they’re going to be around for a while. We better learn to gracefully coexist.



from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2rhTNmR Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what? Josh Constine https://ift.tt/2HKjeIy
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Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what?

{rss:content:encoded} Stories are about to surpass feed sharing. Now what? https://ift.tt/2HKjeIy https://ift.tt/2rhTNmR May 02, 2018 at 08:41PM

We’re at the cusp of the visual communication era. Stories creation and consumption is up 842 percent since early 2016, according to consulting firm Block Party. Nearly a billion accounts across Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Messenger now create and watch these vertical, ephemeral slideshows. And yesterday, Facebook chief product officer Chris Cox showed a chart detailing how “the Stories format is on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends sometime next year.”

The repercussions of this medium shift are vast. Users now consider how every moment could be glorified and added to the narrative of their day. Social media platforms are steamrolling their old designs to highlight the camera and people’s Stories. And advertisers must rethink their message not as a headline, body text, and link, but as a background, overlays, and a feeling that lingers even if viewers don’t click through.

WhatsApp’s Stories now have over 450 million daily users. Instagram’s have over 300 million. Facebook Messenger’s had 70 million in September. And Snapchat as a whole just reached 191 million, about 150 million of which use Stories according to Block Party. With 970 million accounts, it’s the format of the future. Block Party calculates that Stories grew 15X faster than feeds from Q2 2016 to Q3 2017. And that doesn’t even count Google’s new AMP Stories for news, Netflix’s Stories for mobile movie previews, and YouTube’s new Stories feature.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg even admitted on last week’s earnings call that the company is focused on “making sure that ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.” When asked, Facebook confirmed that it’s now working on monetization for Facebook Stories.

From Invention To Standard

“They deserve all the credit”, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom told me about Snapchat when his own app launched its clone of Stories. But what sprouted as Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and his team reimagining the Facebook News Feed through the lens of its 10-second disappearing messages has blossomed into the dominant way to see life from someone else’s perspective. And just as Facebook and Twitter took FriendFeed and refined it with relevancy sorting, character constraints, and all manners of embedded media, the Stories format is still being perfected. “This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it” Systrom followed up.

Snapchat is trying to figure out if Stories from friends and professional creators should be separate, and if they should be sorted by relevancy or reverse chronologically. Instagram and Facebook are opening Stories up to posts from third-party apps like Spotify that makes them a great way to discover music. WhatsApp is pushing the engineering limits of Stories, figuring out ways to make the high-bandwidth videos play on slow networks in the developing world.

Messenger is removing its camera from the navigation menu, and settling in as a place to watch Stories shared from Facebook and Instagram. Meanwhile, Messenger is merging augmented reality, commerce, and Stories so users can preview products in AR and then either share or buy them. Facebook created a Stories carousel ad that lets businesses share a slideshow of three photos or videos together to string together a narrative. And perhaps most tellingly, Facebook is testing a new post composer for its News Feed that actually shows an active camera and camera roll preview to coerce you into sharing Stories instead of a text status. Companies who refuse the trend may be left behind.

Social Media Bedrock

As I wrote two years ago when Snapchat with the only app with Stories:

“Social media creates a window through which your friends can watch your life. Yet most social networks weren’t designed that way, because phones, screen sizes, cameras, and mobile network connections weren’t good enough to build a crystal-clear portal.

With all its text, Twitter is like peering through a crack in a fence. There are lots of cracks next to each other, but none let you see the full story. Facebook is mostly blank space. It’s like a tiny jail-cell window surrounded by concrete. Instagram was the closest thing we had. Like a quaint living room window, you can only see the clean and pretty part they want you to see.

Snapchat is the floor-to-ceiling window observation deck into someone’s life. It sees every type of communication humans have invented: video, audio, text, symbols, and drawings. Beyond virtual reality and 360 video — both tough to capture or watch on the go — it’s difficult to imagine where social media evolves from here.” It turns out that over the next two years, social media would not evolve, but instead converge on Stories. 

What comes next is a race for more decorations, more augmented reality, more developers, and more extendability beyond native apps and into the rest of the web. Until we stop using cell phones all together, we’ll likely see most of sharing divided between private messaging and broadcasted Stories.

The medium is a double-edged sword for culture, though. While a much more vivid way to share and engender empathy, they also threaten to commodify life. When Instagram launched Stories, Systrom said it was because otherwise you “only get to see the highlights”.

But he downplayed how a medium for capturing more than the highlights would pressure people around the world to interrupt any beautiful scene or fit of laughter or quiet pause with their camera phone. We went from people shooting and sharing once or a few times a day to constantly. In fact, people plan their activities not just around a picture-perfect destination, but turning their whole journey into success theater.

If Stories are our new favorite tool, we must learn to wield them judiciously. Sometimes a memory is worth more than an audience. When it’s right to record, don’t get in the way of someone else’s experience. And after the Story is shot, return to the moment and save captioning and decoration for down time. Stories are social media bedrock. There’s no richer way to share, so they’re going to be around for a while. We better learn to gracefully coexist.

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