Xiaomi goes after global markets with two new Android One phones

{rss:content:encoded} Xiaomi goes after global markets with two new Android One phones https://ift.tt/2O90hyS https://ift.tt/2LAEFgy July 24, 2018 at 01:40PM

Xiaomi gave Google’s well-intentioned but somewhat-stalled Android One project a major boost last year when it unveiled its first device under the program, Mi A1. That’s now joined by not one but two sequel devices, after the Chinese phone maker unveiled the Mi A2 and Mi A2 Lite at an event in Spain today.

Xiaomi in Spain? Yes, that’s right. International growth is a major part of the Xiaomi story now that it is a listed business, and Spain is one of a handful of countries in Europe where Xiaomi is aiming to make its mark. These two new A2 handsets are an early push and they’ll be available in over 40 countries, including Spain, France, Italy and 11 other European markets.

Both phones run on Android One — so none of Xiaomi’s iOS-inspired MIUI Android fork — and charge via type-C USB. The 5.99-inch A2 is the more premium option, sporting a Snapdragon 660 processor and 4GB or 6GB RAM with 32GB, 64GB or 128GB in storage. There’s a 20-megapixel front camera and dual 20-megapixel and 16-megapixel cameras on the rear. On-device storage ranges between 32GB, 64GB and 128GB.

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The Mi A2 Lite is the more budget option that’s powered by a lesser Snapdragon 625 processor with 3GB or 4GB RAM, and 32GB or 64GB storage options. It comes with a smaller 5.84-inch display, there’s a 12- and 5-megapixel camera array on the reverse and a front-facing five-megapixel camera.

The A2 is priced from €249 to €279 ($291-$327) based on specs. The A2 Lite will sell for €179 or €229 ($210 or $268), against based on RAM and storage selection.

The 40 market availability mirrors the A1 launch last year, but on this occasion, Xiaomi has been busy preparing the ground in a number of countries, particularly in Europe. It has been in Spain for the past year, but it also launched local operations in France and Italy in May and tied up with CK Hutchison to sell phones in other parts of the continent via its 3 telecom business. While it isn’t operational in the U.S., Xiaomi has expanded into Mexico and it has set up partnerships with local retailers in dozens of other countries.

Xiaomi has been successful with its move into India, where it one of the top smartphone sellers, but it has not yet replicated that elsewhere outside of China so far.

China is, as you’d expect, the primary revenue market but Xiaomi is increasingly less dependent on its homeland. For 2017 sales, China represented 72 percent, but it had been 94 percent and 87 percent, respectively, in 2015 and 2016.

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League raises $62M Series B to fix corporate health care benefits

League founder and CEO Michael Serbinis

League, an online platform that wants to reduce the strain of managing health benefits for companies and employees alike, announced today that it has raised a $62 million Series B. The round was led by TELUS Ventures, with participation from Wittington Ventures and returning investors OMERS, Infinite Potential Group, RBC Ventures and BDC Ventures.

The Toronto-based startup’s last round of funding was a $25 million Series A two years ago. With clients like Uber, Shopify and Unilever, League is currently one of the bigger players in the “employee wellness space,” which encompasses a roster of startups dedicated to boosting retention and productivity rates by improving health benefits. The growth of the sector is fueled by competition for top talent, the rising cost of healthcare and increasing awareness of mental health issues.

League was launched in 2014 by serial entrepreneur Michael Serbinis, who was previously founder and CEO of Kobo, the Kindle competitor that was acquired by Rakuten in 2011. Serbinis tells TechCrunch that his interest in healthcare was sparked by a conversation about healthcare inefficiencies with Patrick Soon-Shiong, the pharmaceutical entrepreneur and NantHealth founder probably better known outside of biotech circles as the newest owner of the Los Angeles Times. Serbinis says Soon-Shiong told him that the healthcare system needed to be fixed by someone outside of the industry, who was able to take a fresh, consumer-driven approach.

“I got into it naively not being a healthcare person, with not even a biology class anywhere in my past, and I very quickly realized that most people think about healthcare through the lens of health insurance, i.e. can I do it, can I afford it?” Serbinis, League’s CEO, says. “The more I learned about it, the more I realized how broken it is. In the U.S. and Canada and Western European nations, healthcare gets more expensive, but you get less and less, and no one loves the experience.”

Health benefits “are a top three requirement for anyone seeking a new job in the U.S. today and for millennials it’s the top one or two, depending on the survey,” he notes. At the same time, healthcare is also one of the top three expenses for companies. While there is a growing roster of startups that want to fix corporate healthcare issues, including Spring Health, Lyra Health and Lumity, Serbinis felt the space was still missing “an end-to-end platform that fits on top of health insurance providers and underwriters, to give employers a way to offer a competitive solution in the war for talent and saving money.”

League’s mission is to let employees take more control over their

health plans, while reducing costs for companies by providing a HIPAA-compliant platform that connects all benefits. This enables employees to manage their benefits with League’s chat-based online assistant and a digital wallet. They also gain more transparency into things like health insurance pricing and flexible spending accounts. League partners with other companies to offer perks like ClassPass or Headspace discounts, prescription delivery services or access to fertility treatments that aren’t covered by traditional insurance plans.

On the other end, companies can access analytics to help them design healthcare plans and see if the benefits they offer are actually improving employee morale.

Serbinis says League’s ease of use is proven by its high engagement rate. Three-quarters of users log onto the platform each month, and of that number, with many accessing it five to 20 times a month.

One interesting aspect of League’s story is that Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan are currently making headlines for a new joint health care initiative. While the venture will start by overhauling health benefits at those three organizations, it is being closely watched because of its potential influence on the health care industry. Thanks to Kobo, which was once Kindle’s top competitor, Serbinis already has experience going head-to-head with Amazon.

After learning about triumvirate’s plans, Serbinis says he emailed Bezos. “I said I love the initiative and would love to help out, because for the most part, what people expect in the short-term is really aggregate purchasing power and driving costs down there. But ultimately, I expect a lot more from them, and the idea of bringing strategic assets and capability, a big pool of employees and technology together is the right strategy,” he says. “I can see Amazon looking for a partner like League.”

He adds that the joint initiative will light a fire in the sector. “I see new entrants into this market accelerate because of Amazon. It really has opened people’s eyes to the idea that this is a massive problem,” Serbinis says. “I see a lot of people getting into the game because of Amazon leading the way, and what I’ve seen already is incumbent players trying to speed up and accelerate their innovation programs.”

In a media statement, TELUS Ventures managing partner Rich Osborn said “We believe that innovative companies like League–which deliver compelling, consumer-centric experiences–will not only drive high employee and employer engagement, but will also deliver fundamental improvements in health outcomes for Canadians through their carrier-friendly open platform.”

The company’s Series B will be used to open offices in San Francisco, New York and London. League launched in the United States in 2017, starting with an office in Chicago, and is now licensed to operate in all 50 states. Serbinis says one of the markets that will help its American expansion are employers with less than 50 “full-time equivalent” employees who aren’t mandated to provide coverage under the Affordable Care Act, but still need to offer health benefits in order to attract talent. Another new opening is the recent Department of Labor ruling on “association health plans” that makes it easier for small businesses in the same sector to team up and buy employee health insurance together.

League also plans to begin operating in the United Kingdom and European Union next year, which will make it easier to attract multinational clients who want to use the same platform to manage health benefits in different countries.

“When you think about the future of health insurance, it’s easy to think about more of the same, but with a better website or app,” says Serbinis. “But the fact is that the future of health insurance is not just about insurance, but health and there is the idea of focusing on consumers and delivering personalized experiences, a digital experience that is data driven and helps them every day, instead of waiting to the point where they are sick and have to go to a website under duress to find out what to do.”

https://ift.tt/2uNnbDQ League raises $62M Series B to fix corporate health care benefits https://ift.tt/2A2ebjr

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ezCater acquires GoCater to expand beyond the US

Catering marketplace company ezCater is already putting its big $100 million funding round to good use. The company is acquiring GoCater, a European marketplace that operates in the same field. This is ezCater’s first international expansion move.

If you’re in charge of ordering catered lunch at your office, you probably have heard about ezCater. The company lets you order breakfast, lunch or dinner for 10, 30 or maybe 100 people at once. This service could be particularly useful to impress a client, throw an office party, get lunch together during an off-site and more.

But ezCater doesn’t cook anything itself. The company is a marketplace and connects you with catering companies and big restaurants around you. In other words, ezCater lets you browse the menu of dozens of restaurants around you from the same website and place an order without picking up the phone.

Of course, ezCater didn’t invent catering. But catering is a fragmented industry with a lot of friction. It’s hard to know how much you’re going to pay in advance, it takes a lot of effort to find a new restaurant outside of your usual list. And restaurants could use a new way to promote their offering. Those are the perfect ingredients to create an online marketplace.

You may already know all the options around your office, but ordering through ezCater provides additional benefits. For instance, all your receipts are centralized in the same interface, which lets you get a clear overview of your spendings on catering.

You can also let other people order food for their clients and events. ezCater lets you set maximum amounts, tipping policies and more.

GoCater offers more or less the same thing, but in France and Germany. The company started as a spinoff from French startup La Belle Assiette. GoCater lets you create a whitelist of catering options. You can also set up an approval system so that the intern doesn’t order ice creams for everyone. Finally, GoCater clients only get billed once per month, even if companies order multiple times.

You pay the same price if you order through GoCater or the catering company directly. Catering companies end up paying a cut on GoCater orders. But the startup takes care of billing, accounting and accounts receivable. This way, you can focus on your core business instead of chasing money from past clients.

ezCater is an order of magnitude bigger than GoCater. ezCater works with 60,000 restaurants, while GoCater only has a few hundred restaurants on its platform. It’s worth noting that ezCater has been around for much longer.

But GoCater has one big advantage over ezCater — they have a team on the ground in Europe, ready to attract new restaurants and corporate clients. It’s clear that ezCater was looking for a way to get started in Europe, and GoCater seems like the right fit.

For now, the company will keep both brands after the acquisition. The teams will slowly merge the platforms into a single product.

“The entire GoCater team is staying, and we’re now going to rapidly expand the European team of the company — both the sales team for Europe and the tech and product team for the group,” GoCater founder and CEO Stephen Leguillon told me.

https://ift.tt/2LNiSiE ezCater acquires GoCater to expand beyond the US https://ift.tt/2LwUXXO

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Doughbies’ cookie crumbles in a cautionary tale of venture scale

Doughbies should have been a bakery, not a venture-backed startup. Founded in the frothy days of 2013 and funded with $670,000 by investors including 500 Startups, Doughbies built a same-day cookie delivery service. But it was never destined to be capable of delivering the returns required by the VC model that depends on massive successes to cover the majority of bets that fail. The startup became the butt of jokes about how anything could get funding.

This weekend, Doughbies announced it was shutting down immediately. Surprisingly, it didn’t run out of money. Doughbies was profitable, with 36 percent gross margins and 12 percent net profit, co-founder and CEO Daniel Conway told TechCrunch. “The reason we were able to succeed, at this level and thus far, is because we focused on unit economics and customer feedback (NPS scoring). That’s it.”

Many other startups in the on-demand space missed that memo and vaporized. Shyp mailed stuff for you and Washio dry cleaned your clothes, until they both died sudden deaths. Food delivery has become a particularly crowded cemetary, with Sprig, Maple, Juicero, and more biting the dust. Asked his advice for others in the space, Conway said to “Make sure your business makes sense – that you’re making money, and make sure your customers are happy.”

Doughbies certainly did that latter. They made one of the most consistently delicious chocolate chip cookies in the Bay Area. I had them cater our engagement party. At roughly $3 per cookie plus $5 for delivery, it was pricey compared to baking at home, but not outrageous given SF restaurant rates. From its launch at 500 Startups Demo Day with an ‘Oprah’ moment where investors looked beneath their seats to find Doughbies waiting for them, it cared a lot about the experience.

But did it make sense for a bakery to have an app and deliver on-demand? Probably not. There was just no way to maintain a healthy Doughbies habit. You were either gunning for the graveyard yourself by ordering every week, or like most people you just bought a few for special occassions. Startups like Uber succeed by getting people to routinely drop $30 per day, not twice a year. And with the push for nutricious and efficient offices, it was surely hard for enterprise customers to justify keeping cookies stocked.

Flanked by Instacart and Uber Eats, there weren’t many ripe adjacent markets for Doughbies to conquer. It was stuck delivering baked goods to customers who were deterred from growing their cart size by a sense of gluttony.

Without stellar growth or massive sales volumes, there aren’t a lot of exciting challenges to face for people like Conway and his co-founder Mariam Khan. “Ultimately we shutdown because our team is ready to move on to something new” Conway says.

The startup just emailed customers explaining that “We’re currently working on finding a new home for Doughbies, but we can’t make any promises at this time.” Perhaps a grocery store or broader food company will want its logistics technology or customer base. But delivery is a brutal market to break into, dominated by those like Uber who’ve built economies scale through massive fleets of drivers to maximize routing efficiency. 

In the end, Doughbies was a lifestyle business. That’s not a dirty word. A few co-founders with dream can earn a respectable living doing what they care about. But they have to do it lean, without the advantage of deep-pocketed investors.

As soon as a company takes venture funding, it’s under pressure to deliver adequate returns. Not 2X or 5X, but 10X, 100X, even 1000X what they raise. That can lead to investors breathing down their neck, encouraging big risks that could tank the business just for a shot at those outcomes. Two years ago we saw a correction hit the ecosystem, writing down the value of many startups, and we continue to see the ripple effect as companies funded before hit the end of their runway.

After the correction comes The Conclusion

Desperate for cash, founders can accept dirty funding terms that screw over not just themselves, but their early employees and investors. FanDuel raised over $416 million at a peak valuation of $1.3 billion. But when it sold for $465 million, the founders and employees received zero as the returns all flowed to the late-stage investors who’d secured non-standard liquidation preferences. After nearly 10 years of hard work, the original team got nothing.

Not every business is a startup. Not every startup is a rocket ship. It takes more than just building a great product to succeed. I can require suddenly cutting costs to become profitable before you run out of funding. Or cutting ambitions and taking less cash at a lower valuation so you can realistically hit milestones. Or accepting a low-ball acquisition offer because it’s better than nothing. Or not raising in the first place, and building up revenues the old-fashioned way so even modest growth is an accomplishment.

Investors are often rightfully blamed for inflating the bubble, pushing up raises and valuations to lure startups to take their money instead of someone else’s. But when it comes to deciding what could be a fast-growing business, sometimes its the founders who need the adjustment.

https://ift.tt/2LvnsVK Doughbies’ cookie crumbles in a cautionary tale of venture scale https://ift.tt/2Lw4SwE

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YouTube is testing its own ‘Explore’ tab on iPhone

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki on Friday promised the company would do a better job with communicating to creators about its experiments and tests. Today, YouTube is making good on that commitment with an update about a new feature it’s testing out: an Explore tab, aimed at offering viewers a more diverse set of video recommendations.

The news was announced via the Creator Insider channel – the same channel Wojcicki highlighted in her recent update as the “unofficial” resource operated by YouTube employees. The channel today offers weekly updates, responses to creator feedback, and behind-the-scenes info on product launches.

According to the announcement, the new Explore feature is currently in testing with just 1 percent of iPhone YouTube app viewers, so there’s a good chance you won’t see the option in your own app.

However, if you do happen to be in the test group, then you’ll notice the bottom navigation bar of the app looks different. Instead of the tabs Home, Trending, Subscriptions, Inbox and Library you have today, you’ll instead see Home, Explore, Subscriptions, Activity and Library.

The idea behind Explore is to offer YouTube viewers a wider variety of what-to-watch suggestions than they receive today. Currently, personalized video recommendations are very much influenced by past viewing activity and other behavior, which can then create a sort of homogenous selection of recommended content.

“Explore is designed to help you be exposed to different kinds of topics, videos or channels that you might not otherwise encounter, but they’re still personalized,” said Tom Leung, Director of Product Management, in a YouTube video.

That is, the videos are still based on viewing activity.

For example, he explains, a viewer who was watching videos about telescopes might be recommended videos about high-end cameras.

“It’s just going to give you a little more variety,” says Leung.

The tab will also feature a “Trending” section at the top of the screen, which directs users to the same sort of content that the Trending tab in the current version of the YouTube app today features.

The hope, however, with the new Explore tab is to offer creators the ability to reach more viewers, even if their content doesn’t “trend.”

Whether or not that theory proves true, remains to be seen. YouTube will review the data from the experiment before making a decision to roll out the Explore tab to more users.

Early feedback from YouTube creators in the comments section of the video seems cautiously optimistic, with many expressing hopes that the new tab would provide exposure to smaller creators rather than just the well-known names.

Calling the tab “Explore” makes sense in light of the increased threat from Instagram, whose own Explore section features personalized video suggestions, and has launched a YouTube rival with IGTV. YouTube has responded by offering its stars big, five to six-figure checks to post their best stuff on YouTube, according to Business Insider. (YouTube downplayed the report, saying it has “always invested in creators’ success.)

But an experiment involving YouTube’s own Explore section makes it clear that the company is interested taking on Instagram head-on when it comes to offering a home for discovering new video content through algorithmic recommendations.

If successful, YouTube’s Explore tab would connect viewers to more creator channels they’ll like and subscribe to, as well as increase their time spent in app. That, in turn, could potentially decrease viewers’ time in apps like IGTV, Facebook, Instagram and elsewhere.

 

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2uIpo3y YouTube is testing its own ‘Explore’ tab on iPhone Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/2uWWqMM
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Musical.ly’s shutdown of Live.ly was contractually obligated

Musical.ly has begun redirecting users of its Live.ly app, which it decided to kill off last month, to a competing app called LiveMe. Existing Live.ly users are being pointed to LiveMe through an in-app message, it says. While it’s a fairly common industry practice for companies to direct users to similar apps or services when a product of theirs is being sunsetted, in this case, Musical.ly’s decision to close down Live.ly and send users to LiveMe was actually a contractually obligated part of Musical.ly’s nearly $1 billion acquisition by Chinese technology company Bytedance last year.

A clause in Bytedance’s agreement to acquire Musical.ly stated that, if the deal went through, Musical.ly would have to close Live.ly within six months, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

The agreement also said that Live.ly would have to point users to LiveMe for at least 30 days following its closure, we learned, when verifying the information.

The issue at hand was a competing investment – right around the time of the Musical.ly acquisition, Bytedance had also put $50 million into the live-streaming app LiveMe. Apparently, it didn’t want to operate two rival properties.

Clearly, this request was not a deal-breaker for Musical.ly – in fact, it’s integrating Live.ly’s feature set into its own app. That means it will still be something of a competitor to LiveMe, though now no longer a direct one. Musical.ly’s main app, after all, is not known today for its live streaming, but rather for lip syncing videos that are recorded and edited using the app’s included visual effects and editing tools.

In addition, Live.ly had not been able to attract the viewership numbers that Musical.ly had. The company said, when confirming Live.ly’s closure last month, the majority of live stream views were taking place in Musical.ly itself, not in its spinoff.

That said, Live.ly had a fair number of users. Though nowhere near as big as Musical.ly’s 200+ million registered users or 60 million actives, its live stream app had 26 million installs, around 70 percent in the U.S., according to Sensor Tower’s data.

But LiveMe is bigger – it has more than 60 million users and has paid out over $30 million to its broadcasters through its direct virtual gifting program, the company claims.

LiveMe is also not the only app operated by the company. Other LiveMe portfolio apps include the social short video app Cheez, and mobile gaming and esports live streaming app Fluxr. To date, it has raised a total of $110 million.

Live.ly isn’t only redirecting users to LiveMe, however. In its own announcement about the news today, it shows a screenshot that’s pointing Live.ly users to Twitter’s Periscope, for instance. The message also notes that the Live.ly domain name is for sale, and provides an email for sales inquiries.

Musical.ly hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2uJalq8 Musical.ly’s shutdown of Live.ly was contractually obligated Sarah Perez https://ift.tt/2mCmNDF
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Musical.ly’s shutdown of Live.ly was contractually obligated

{rss:content:encoded} Musical.ly’s shutdown of Live.ly was contractually obligated https://ift.tt/2mCmNDF https://ift.tt/2uJalq8 July 23, 2018 at 08:18PM

Musical.ly has begun redirecting users of its Live.ly app, which it decided to kill off last month, to a competing app called LiveMe. Existing Live.ly users are being pointed to LiveMe through an in-app message, it says. While it’s a fairly common industry practice for companies to direct users to similar apps or services when a product of theirs is being sunsetted, in this case, Musical.ly’s decision to close down Live.ly and send users to LiveMe was actually a contractually obligated part of Musical.ly’s nearly $1 billion acquisition by Chinese technology company Bytedance last year.

A clause in Bytedance’s agreement to acquire Musical.ly stated that, if the deal went through, Musical.ly would have to close Live.ly within six months, according to a source with knowledge of the deal.

The agreement also said that Live.ly would have to point users to LiveMe for at least 30 days following its closure, we learned, when verifying the information.

The issue at hand was a competing investment – right around the time of the Musical.ly acquisition, Bytedance had also put $50 million into the live-streaming app LiveMe. Apparently, it didn’t want to operate two rival properties.

Clearly, this request was not a deal-breaker for Musical.ly – in fact, it’s integrating Live.ly’s feature set into its own app. That means it will still be something of a competitor to LiveMe, though now no longer a direct one. Musical.ly’s main app, after all, is not known today for its live streaming, but rather for lip syncing videos that are recorded and edited using the app’s included visual effects and editing tools.

In addition, Live.ly had not been able to attract the viewership numbers that Musical.ly had. The company said, when confirming Live.ly’s closure last month, the majority of live stream views were taking place in Musical.ly itself, not in its spinoff.

That said, Live.ly had a fair number of users. Though nowhere near as big as Musical.ly’s 200+ million registered users or 60 million actives, its live stream app had 26 million installs, around 70 percent in the U.S., according to Sensor Tower’s data.

But LiveMe is bigger – it has more than 60 million users and has paid out over $30 million to its broadcasters through its direct virtual gifting program, the company claims.

LiveMe is also not the only app operated by the company. Other LiveMe portfolio apps include the social short video app Cheez, and mobile gaming and esports live streaming app Fluxr. To date, it has raised a total of $110 million.

Live.ly isn’t only redirecting users to LiveMe, however. In its own announcement about the news today, it shows a screenshot that’s pointing Live.ly users to Twitter’s Periscope, for instance. The message also notes that the Live.ly domain name is for sale, and provides an email for sales inquiries.

Musical.ly hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment.

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Sonos prices its IPO to raise as much as $105M

{rss:content:encoded} Sonos prices its IPO to raise as much as $105M https://ift.tt/2JOaqh6 https://ift.tt/2A2V9tn July 23, 2018 at 07:26PM

Sonos today took the next step in its initial public offering price, setting a range for the shares it intends to sell that will help calibrate the final amount of money – and valuation — that it will have when it begins its trading debut.

This isn’t the final, final step in the IPO process as this is usually done to test the waters and figure out the exact appetite for the company’s shares when it goes public. Sonos is offering 5,555,555 (a wonderful palindrome of a number) shares, where it will raise as much as $105 million if it prices on the upper end of its range and sells them at $19 per share. The official range is between $17 and $19, but this can go up and down throughout the process — with a drop-off signaling a lack of interest or skepticism, and an increased range a sign of heavy demand. Companies will sometimes lowball their range, though we won’t find out for a little bit where everything lands.

Insiders are also selling 8,333,333 million shares in this initial public offering. Including that, the IPO could end up raising around $250 at the middle of that $17 to $19 range that it’s estimating including the shares sold by existing stockholders. The proceeds from those shares sold by stockholders aren’t going to end up in Sonos’ hands, so the company itself is only going to net around that $105 million at the top end of its range. There’s also an over-allotment, typically called a greenshoe, that consists of shares sold by Sonos and existing stockholders. That could add a total of $15 million and $22.5 million respectively at a price of $18 in the middle of that range.

The company is offering some preliminary estimates for its second quarter, saying it generated between $206.4 million and $208.4 million in revenue with a net loss of between $29 million and $27.1 million (this is probably because the final accounting isn’t finished up as we’re just about entering the front end for earnings season for major companies). The company said it sold between 880,000 and 890,000 products as an estimated range in the second quarter this year, up from 796,000 products in the second quarter last year.

Sonos is nicely positioned as a third-party option in an ecosystem that’s getting increasingly crowded by proprietary speakers from the larger companies that own voice assistants like the Echo, HomePod, and Google Home. But Sonos has been around for a considerable amount of time and has clearly built up a significant following to ensure that it could find itself operating as an independent public company. In its fiscal 2017 year, Sonos said it brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue, an increase of 10% year-over-year. The initial filing indicated that the company had sold a total of 19 million products in 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

This is basically the next step in the process as the company continues its march toward making its debut, and we’ll get more details soon enough as to whether or not investors are interested in a publicly-traded company that’s known for its speakers.

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Xage secures $12 million Series A for IoT security solution on blockchain

Xage (pronounced Zage), a blockchain security startup based in Silicon Valley, announced a $12 million Series A investment today led by March Capital Partners. GE Ventures, City Light Capital and NexStar Partners also participated.

The company emerged from stealth in December with a novel idea to secure the myriad of devices in the industrial internet of things on the blockchain. Here’s how I described it in a December 2017 story:

Xage is building a security fabric for IoT, which takes blockchain and synthesizes it with other capabilities to create a secure environment for devices to operate. If the blockchain is at its core a trust mechanism, then it can give companies confidence that their IoT devices can’t be compromised. Xage thinks that the blockchain is the perfect solution to this problem.

It’s an interesting approach, one that attracted Duncan Greatwood to the company. As he told me in December his previous successful exits — Topsy to Apple in 2013 and PostPath to Cisco in 2008 — gave him the freedom to choose a company that really excited him for his next challenge.

When he saw what Xage was doing, he wanted to be a part of it, and given the unorthodox security approach the company has taken, and Greatwood’s pedigree, it couldn’t have been hard to secure today’s funding.

The Industrial Internet of Things is not like its consumer cousin in that it involves getting data from big industrial devices like manufacturing machinery, oil and gas turbines and jet engines. While the entire Internet of Things could surely benefit from a company that concentrates specifically on keeping these devices secure, it’s a particularly acute requirement in industry where these devices are often helping track data from key infrastructure.

GE Ventures is the investment arm of GE, but their involvement is particularly interesting because GE has made a big bet on the Industrial Internet of Things. Abhishek Shukla of GE Ventures certainly saw the connection. “For industries to benefit from the IoT revolution, organizations need to fully connect and protect their operation. Xage is enabling the adoption of these cutting edge technologies across energy, transportation, telecom, and other global industries,” Shukla said in a statement.

The company was founded just last year and is based in Palo Alto, California.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Xage secures $12 million Series A for IoT security solution on blockchain https://ift.tt/2LIE9tF

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Industrial robots startup Gideon Brothers raises $765K led by TransferWise co-founder

Gideon Brothers, an ambitious startup out of Croatia that is building autonomous robots to put to work in warehouses and other industrial logistics, has quietly raised $765,000 in funding.

The round is led by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, who has become an increasingly active investor, recently backing fintech Cleo, legal tech startup Juro, and satellite company Open Cosmos. Ex-Wired U.K. editor David Rowan and a number of unnamed Croatian angels have also participated in Gideon Brothers’ seed round.

Founded in early 2017 and comprising a 40-plus team of deep learning and robotics experts — which includes 5 PhDs and 27 Masters of Hardware and Software engineering and other related disciplines — the company is developing an AI-powered robot for various industrial applications.

Dubbed “The Brain,” the technology combines 3D computer vision and deep learning to enable Gideon Brothers’ robots to be aware of their environment and operate autonomously, similar to self-driving vehicles.

“We have been developing a technology we call a ‘robot brain’,” co-founder and CEO Matija Kopic tells me. “We believe that robots of the future will rely on the same type of vision that you and I rely on, which is basically stereo vision. We’ve deployed deep learning on top of stereo vision to give our robots a new type of perception of their environment”.

The startup’s first product is described as an “autonomous and modular intralogistics robot” that is capable of safely handling large pallets in manufacturing, warehouse and commercial environments. It is designed to work alongside humans, with minimal changes to a facility, negating the need for prohibitively expensive retrofitting or investing in brand new robot-enabled buildings, which is the route that Amazon has gone down.

More broadly, Gideon Brothers wants to help address current labour shortages in industrial logistics. Citing a research brief by DHL, Gideon Brothers says that demand for supply chain professionals exceeds supply by a ratio of six to one. The work is often painstakingly dull and physically demanding, meaning that turnover can be as high as 40 percent.

“[We use] a combination of camera-based 3D vision, primarily powered by deep learning algorithms to make sure that our robot, whatever it ends up doing, is aware of its surroundings and the dynamics that exist in these old school industrial facilities which are not highly structured or highly organised like, for example, e-commerce environments are,” adds Kopic.

“We are targeting the remaining 90 percent of the world’s industrial facilities that are completely old school, traditional and centered around human beings as the drivers of those facilities and the business model”.

In practice, this means that instead of workers rushing around a warehouse taking orders from a computer-generated voice or a scanner, and then moving several tons of product around (the so-called “man-to-goods” model), the Gideon Brothers’ robot brings the goods to the worker. It receives instructions from the Gideon Brothers fleet management system, which is integrated into an operator’s Warehouse Management System.

“It goes to the pallet position it has been sent to, lifts it off the frame it is sitting on and transports the entire pallet to a commissioning or “picking” area where workers take the product that need to be packed onto another customer-specific pallet. The robot then returns the original pallet back to its original position – autonomously and safely. The workers don’t have to zoom around and can focus on more complex tasks like picking,” explains Kopic.

If all of that sounds incredibly ambitious for a European startup that has raised less than $1 million, it’s because it is. However, Kopic says that by setting up shop in Croatia he has been able to recruit a very specialist team while keeping costs much lower than direct competitors. It also has the advantage of being close to a number of facilities where the startup is currently testing its robots, including being given access to much-needed warehouse logistics data.

Investor Hinrikus echoes this sentiment. “[Gideon Brothers is] building a killer deep tech team. This will be the best team of deep tech talent to the east from here (well, before we get to China),” he tells me.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J Industrial robots startup Gideon Brothers raises $765K led by TransferWise co-founder https://ift.tt/2mAe8l8

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Samsung is probably keeping the headphone jack around for the Galaxy Note 9

{rss:content:encoded} Samsung is probably keeping the headphone jack around for the Galaxy Note 9 https://ift.tt/2uWacit https://ift.tt/2JMMHO9 July 23, 2018 at 05:17PM

Let’s be real — the latest batch of Samsung ads are more about the company’s perception of Apple than its own devices. But hey, that tact has worked for the company in the past, so who can blame ‘em? They do, however, offer at least one key bit of insight into the company’s on-going plans.

In a spot titled “Dongle” that takes aim at the easiest possible joke in the smartphone world, Samsung takes Apple to task for the iPhone for its lack of headphone jack. A conversation ensues between a customer and Genius Bar employee, the term “double dongle” is coined and the former grimaces like someone just explained the plot of Human Centipede to him for the first time.

Again, the ad’s less about what Samsung has, than what Apple doesn’t, but it does appear to reaffirm the company’s commitment to the headphone jack. Granted, we’ve seen companies do about-faces on the issue before. The most notable instance is probably Google, who called Apple out one year and dropped the jack the next.

But releasing such an openly mocking ad a month or so before dropping the headphone jack would not, as the kids say, be a great look for the company. The inclusion of the port has been a selling point for Samsung ever since Apple dropped it way back in 2016 for the iPhone 6. It’s an easy win for Samsung. All the company has to do is literally nothing.

And from the leaks we’ve seen of the Note 9, it appears that the 3.5mm will once again be returning.

Of course, what felt like an act of aggression to some two year back has become increasingly common amongst the competition. I’ve talked to a number of manufacturers who’ve retained the jack over the past two years, and nearly all have acknowledged that it’s simply a matter of time before they go that route as well.

It’s tough to say how much of the decision to keep the jack around is Samsung simply giving customers what they want, and how much is the company simply trying to distance itself from Apple. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Samsung can continue to use its (admittedly pretty nice) wired AKG headphones as a selling point, while making all the “double dongle” jokes its hefty ad budget can support.

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HoneyLove looks to reinvent shapewear

Betsie Larkin spent the first ten years of her professional career as an EDM artist. She released two solo albums, toured five continents and worked with the likes of Armin van Buuren and Ferry Corsten. But after being constantly frustrated by shapewear she wore under her stage outfits, she felt compelled to try her hand at a new industry.

That’s how HoneyLove was born.

HoneyLove, backed by Y Combinator, aims to disrupt the traditional shapewear market by making an affordable, high-quality product that actually works.

In her research before starting HoneyLove, Larkin identified two big problems with shapewear. The first is that it tends to bunch up, causing constant readjustment, and the second is that it tends flatten out everything, even the curves people want to show off. That’s why Larkin developed HoneyLove Sculptwear.

HoneyLove uses supportive structures in side the seams of the garment, similar to the flexible boning used in old-school corsettes, and encases those structures in a soft channel of protective fabric. This simple enhancement ensures that the garment doesn’t bunch up around the legs or waistband.

HoneyLove also inserts its patent-pending BoostBands, made from a combination of compression fabric and a flat elastic panel, in the back of the legs of the garment to accentuate the natural curve between the bottom and the upper legs, according to Larkin.

The company manufactures at a gold-certified responsible (WRAP) factory that is dedicated to shapewear in the Guangdong province of China.

HoneyLove first started out on Kickstarter in February, and raised a whopping $300,000 in pre-orders after posting a $30,000 goal. The product is now available via the HoneyLove website for $89, which sits right in the middle of the larger market, where you can find cheap shapewear for as little as $35 and high-end shapewear for as much as $150.

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J HoneyLove looks to reinvent shapewear https://ift.tt/2uI9yWJ

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