TechCrunch |
- Intellect, the mental health startup focused on APAC, raises $10M Series A
- Gillmor Gang: Culture Clubs
- For the first time in 4 years, profitability beats growth
- Telemedicine startups can survive and thrive under renewed regulation
- TikTok is working on avatars, live audio streams, new creator tools and more
- Asia HR tech platform Darwinbox becomes unicorn with TCV-led $72 million funding
- Daily Crunch: Peloton CEO in hot seat, activist investor says ‘the ride for Mr. Foley is over’
- Max Q: Sports in space?
- Hundreds of Y Combinator alumni join crypto collective to back web3 startups
- AI2 shows off an open, Q&A-focused rival to GPT3
- Apple extends an in-app purchase exemption for some developers impacted by pandemic
- Mentor Collective shakes off its boots to scale student support services
- Not Dead Yet: IBM’s revenue growth accelerates in Q4
- 3 ways investors can assess the strength of an NFT opportunity
- Google has a Wordle Easter egg and it’s cute, okay
- Google gets hit with a new lawsuit over ‘deceptive’ location tracking
- NASA celebrates private sector deployments of space-born tech in its latest Spinoff
- Mark Cuban on his online pharmacy: ‘Our KPI is how much we can reduce the stress of our patients’
- Recipe app Pestle helps you organize, plan, and cook hands-free or with friends on FaceTime
- Codenotary raises $12.5M Series B to secure software supply chains
| Intellect, the mental health startup focused on APAC, raises $10M Series A Posted: 24 Jan 2022 07:37 PM PST  Mental health app Intellect’s founder and CEO Theodoric Chew Intellect, the Singapore-based mental health startup focused primarily on Asia-Pacific markets, announced today it has raised a $10 million Series A. The company's services, including self-directed mental wellness programs in 15 languages and online therapy sessions, are available through two channels: as an employee benefit and through Intellect's consumer app. The round, which Intellect claims is the largest Series A ever raised by a mental health startup in Asia, was led by HOF Capital. New investors included Headline, East Ventures, MS&AD Ventures, DG Daiwa Ventures, Pioneer Fund and existing backer Insignia Ventures Partners also returned. Intellect claims its year-on-year revenue grew by over 20x in 2021, due in large part to new enterprise clients like foodpanda, Shopback, Singtel, Kuehne & Nagel and Schroders. It also partners with insurers and benefits brokers like Mercer. Co-founder and CEO Theodoric Chew told TechCrunch that Intellect differentiates from other employee wellness programs because "Intellect's vision isn't simply to be a self-care app or an employee benefits platform solely, but a full mental healthcare system for Asia. That drives a differentiated approach in how we build our platform which caters from the smallest of daily struggles through self-guided programs, all the way to clinical therapy for chronic issues.” The company, a Y Combinator alum, will use the capital to increase its product, engineering and commercial teams as it continues expanding into new markets. It currently has about three million registered users, in a total of 20 countries, with a strong commercial presence in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia, said Chew. The new round brings Intellect's total raised since its launch in 2020 (when TechCrunch first profiled the company) to $13 million and also included angel investors like Shopback co-founder and CEO Henry Chan; Cathay Innovation's Rajive Keshup; former Headspace VP of Engineering Neel Palrecha; Forge co-founder Samvit Ramadurgam; Peak co-founder Sagi Shorrer; Snap Inc. Director of Southeast Asia Anubhav Nayyar; and Tinder and Match Group general manager of Southeast Asia Gaurav Girotra. The startup says that among companies that offer it as an employee benefit, adoption rates consistently range between 20% to 40%, much higher than traditional employee assistance programs. The startup is participating in 10 clinical studies in collaboration with academic institutions, including the National University of Singapore, King's College London, University of Queensland and the Singapore General Hospital, and says some of them have already shown that Intellect improves stress, anxiety and depression among users. In a statement about the investment, HOF Capital partner Victor Wong said, "The need for mental health support is exceedingly timely today and it continues to rapidly grow in demand across the world. Intellect has grown to over 3 million individuals and enterprises across 20 countries in just under 2 years and we're very excited to back them for the long term as they continue to transform millions of lives through inventing a new mental healthcare system for workforces and individuals across Asia." |
| Posted: 24 Jan 2022 05:35 PM PST I've spent the last few weeks diving into the world of crypto, and lo and behold, there might be something to it. Part of the problem is I rarely sense an innovation that revolves around the inevitability of people making big money. Instead, I become aware of something that might be bubbling up, like a new Apple chip or series of chips that create a new market opportunity. The M1 series was such a development; it provided a palpable layer of horsepower that changed the equation of how I use computing. As with Tesla, market conditions evolve as chip production is brought in house. The iPhone and iPad were transformative for Apple and the tech industry. The obvious stuff was the touch interface, the app ecosystem, and the decoupling from the late great PC era. Before, computers represented a way to leverage software as a change agent for our daily lives. I learned the interfaces of Office, then the underlying structure of operating system services, then the connection point to the network. In a way, it was like the structure of filmmaking: the skeleton that was the plot, the scaffolding that was the dialogue, the narrative that was the connection between characters and the situation, and the rhythm that was the product of editing and off-screen context. That last one was most furtive in its revelation, but the key to the humor, music, and not just what is seen and heard but what is inferred. iPhones were famously the way Steve Jobs realized the iPad. The target was personal and business communications, easier to market than a replacement for the PC. There were the entrenched carriers, who propped up the perception that price was guided by physical distance. Today, we don't think about the concept of local versus long distance. Our friends and family are equidistant from us and each other. Our politics remain governed by historical measurement. The electoral college maintains the upper House's power distribution regardless of population; the smallest and the largest of the states each get 2 Senators. The power flows through and is metered by the fractured structure of gerrymandering and filibuster. Before the iPhone, video conferencing was limited to corporate links between hub and satellite offices. After the iPhone, each new entrant to the network was endowed with the effective unlimited bandwidth of the first carrier domino to fall — AT&T. By signing an exclusive deal with one carrier, Apple effectively held a gun to the head of the rest of the industry. The essential disruptive feature of unlimited access was only possible with the one network. Any other carrier lowered the feature set of the groundbreaking hardware. On the iPhone, audio became a first class citizen. With IP calling, the cost limitation of the previous POTS generation was erased. As other networks worked their way into broadband, the iPhone took new ground, with video conferencing and the apps ecosystem. Even today, third-party apps like Facebook Messenger are often used more frequently than the iPhone's built-in iMessage. The Facebook app rides on top of audio, video, messaging, screen sharing, and the beginnings of ecommerce — across international borders, proprietary phone systems, video standards, and wirelessly device to device via Apple's Airplay WiFi grid. The phone became the hub for watches, AirPods, stationary bikes, telemedicine, and iPads. What started as a small form factor iPad has now absorbed the larger sibling as a peripheral replacement for the PC. Cue the M1. Once the iPhone/iPad iOS operating system could run on M1 Macs, it seemed likely that the apps ecosystem would migrate to the Mac. Notifications seem better supported on the Mac than previously, but there's no real synchronization between the two platforms. Some video production apps like LumaFusion run across iPad and M1 without modification, but I've been happy to use the iPad as a staging machine for editing, and the M1 for transcription of conversations and interviews. The iPad has been upgraded recently to use the M1 chips, but for now I'm so happy with the Mac Book Pro that I'd rather move the majority of my computing off the iPad and split between the iPhone and M1 Mac. I didn't expect this, but the pandemic and its acceleration of work from anywhere has been the driver. As video conferencing has become a core service of the new office, the M1 has shifted my consumption of media in important ways. Streaming tools like Restream and the cross-platform ubiquity of Zoom make it trivial to produce a video conversation on multiple platforms. Airpods let us work on multiple streams and editing projects on multiple iPads and M1s, with an elastic subscription model that reduces all-over costs by as much as 10-1 on a monthly basis. Screensharing over Zoom will soon be atomized as APIs open up to allow live editing and audio sweetening to be distributed to iPads while the M1s (a Mac Book Air and Pro) produce text and manage social media releases. Zero fan noise makes the M1s ideal for use in live production. And when travel and events return, the whole studio comes along for the ride. Blur mode retains a consistent visual feel. Then there's the live audio trend, which sits atop the same tools plus an emphasis on the iPhone. The two major platforms have distinctive personalities: Twitter Spaces leverage the social graph, while Clubhouse seems more aggressive about adding features to keep pace with larger and more enterprise competitors. Twitter's tools for downloading recordings are clunky; the 30 day limitation on replays needs to shift to a more producer-centric perspective. Over time, the two feature sets should combine as notifications have done on Apple and Android. The vendor sports horserace aspect of the creator economy may drive media interest, but the more tangible impact will emerge in the iterative wave of what David Weinberger called small pieces, loosely joined. Clubhouse's new Shared on Clubhouse tool seems geared to earballs, quantity over influence. You can broadcast a comment to followers, expanding the social graph to welcome not just live participation, but crucially Replay listeners. Those notifications attract more organic groups of shared rooms and interests that exist outside of the more traditional newsmaker interviews and other celebrity-focused events. Sharing statistics promote a kind of interactive guide at the top of shared rooms, and listeners become 1st class citizens with the ability to comment and aggregate their discoveries to the same middle tier that retweets drove Twitter’s viral social graph. Of course, Twitter or LinkedIn adoption of these tools will prove successful in their bigger ponds. If crypto fans prove prescient, decentralized open standards may facilitate an actual use case for an alternative to centralized first- and third-party cookie replacements. None of this is to suggest these networks will become an important part of our work or social lives. Following the news on a regular basis is a frustrating exercise for those more accustomed to legacy platforms such as newspapers and magazines, or what some are called the new land line — cable.. But informing yourself about issues of the day seems a waste of time when large swaths of the country refuse even the simplest actions like vaccinations as some sort of political conspiracy. The characteristics of a replay economy may turn out to be more significant than the misinformation mills that social networks struggle with. the latest Gillmor Gang Newsletter __________________ The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, January 14, 2022. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor @fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram. The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here's our sister show G3 on Facebook.
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| For the first time in 4 years, profitability beats growth Posted: 24 Jan 2022 04:18 PM PST For the last decade, private company executives have all asked us the same question: "Do public market investors prefer profitability or growth?" While the answer to that question is not simple, the recent trends in the data are clear. In 2021, profitability — measured by free cash flow (FCF) margins, not revenue growth — had the higher correlation to positive stock returns in the software sector. This broke a four-year trend of revenue growth being the more important driver of software company stock performance. This correction is big. And the reversal in investor sentiment is clear. In addition to deviating from the four-year trend, the data shows profitability correlation hit a seven-year high at the end of last year, while revenue growth correlation was close to a seven-year low. With the continued selloff, revenue growth correlation broke well below the seven-year historic low, and profitability correlation stayed at record highs, as shown below. What's happening?So far in 2022, the S&P 500 and Dow Jones have significantly outperformed the tech-heavy Nasdaq. Additionally, a number of recent high-profile/high-growth/unprofitable IPOs have broken IPO price (Hashicorp, Sweetgreen, Rivian Automotive, Rent the Runway, etc.).
As the market turns and volatility increases, investors retreat to names they are comfortable with. The Bessemer Emerging Cloud Index (made up of prominent SaaS companies) is down over 30% from its November 2021 peak, while some high-multiple names like Cloudflare and HubSpot are down about 50% from their peaks. Broad SaaS valuation multiples over the same period have adjusted from a peak of about 17.5x NTM EV/Rev in November 2021 to about 10.5x. Investors are "rotating" out of high-growth/high-multiple software names into sectors like finance (banks) and insurance, which benefit from rising interest rates. Also, it is important to note that big, slower-growing, more profitable tech stocks like Microsoft, Google and Facebook have corrected, but to a much smaller degree. This shift has been fast, resolute and extreme. Why are investors selling high-growth stocks?Interest rates are increasingInflation is rising, which led the U.S. Federal Reserve to signal three or four interest rate hikes in 2022, which has caused the 10-year treasury yield to rise from about 1.5% in the beginning of the year to about 1.9% today, an around 40bps increase. As interest rates go up, investors focus more on profitability (or a derivative of profitability; Rule of 40 or Magic Number). |
| Telemedicine startups can survive and thrive under renewed regulation Posted: 24 Jan 2022 04:09 PM PST As the pandemic shifts from an acute phase to one in which we learn to live with COVID-19 as an endemic presence, some entrepreneurs and investors may fear what comes next for virtual medicine. Nearly half the U.S. states have ended emergency legal waivers introduced during the pandemic that allowed patients to be seen by doctors who practiced elsewhere. To some, the end of these waivers might portend daunting headwinds for telemedicine: a return to old regulations that snuff out the promise of new technology. Yet there’s another thesis – one driven not by fear but by strategic insight – where the return of regulations could mean something much more beneficial for telemedicine startups and those invested in their success: a moat. Telemedicine companies that research and understand the varied patchwork of state and federal regulations, analyzing them to identify patterns and build scalable business models, will survive and thrive in the coming environment. Those that do not prioritize this work and shoot from the hip will not fare as well, because patients and enforcement authorities alike will step in. It might mean a classic shakeout. Even with the return of regulation, the opportunity in digital health will expand. While state laws might change, the macroeconomic rule of supply and demand remains, and patient demand for healthcare far outstrips the supply of available clinicians. That imbalance only accelerated during the pandemic, as physicians and nurses downshifted productivity, moved into less stressful roles or quit the field entirely. On the demand side of the equation, there are more patients in need of care. Due to the aging Baby Boomers, the Affordable Care Act's insurance plans, and a proliferation of affordable retail health care options, more people have access to care today than a decade ago. On the supply side, telemedicine builds efficiency and access. While the increase in telemedicine may benefit doctors and nurses struggling with burnout — a reduced need for in-person visits may lead to less stress, goes the thinking — it does nothing to change the denominator in the equation. Surging inbound demand has, and will continue to, overwhelm the number of new clinicians graduating each year.
Telemedicine companies that research and understand the varied patchwork of state and federal regulations, analyzing them to identify patterns and build scalable business models, will survive and thrive in the coming environment. This dynamic all but guarantees that telemedicine startups offering a quality user experience, more medically nuanced/specialized services, and a wider variety of virtual-first access points will remain in high demand. Telemedicine was previously reserved for academic medicine or Medicare beneficiaries living in rural areas, with broad restrictions on who could receive the services and which providers could be paid to deliver them. While less than 1% of medical services were provided via telemedicine in January 2020, that figure is now estimated to be 38 times higher than the pre-pandemic baseline. Indeed, some startups have been conceived, launched and funded entirely during the era of COVID-19 waivers. Startups that gained traction at a time when the rules were relaxed are now going to have to raise their game. Regulators expect it and patients deserve it. The pressure for some form of regulatory clarity is only likely to increase. Along with the number of digital health startups transitioning to virtual provider groups and online clinics, there are giant players accelerating their digital transformation, reducing the footprint of brick-and-mortar locations, and increasing virtual care, including virtual primary care alternatives. No market participant should be lulled into inaction by temporary extensions of crisis waivers. The smart founders (and their investors) will waste no time in launching or modifying a business that can flourish in an environment where regulations revert to the pre-COVID standards. It's a development that will allow telemedicine to mature, moving from a convenient replacement in a crisis to earning its own seat at the table in the healthcare industry as an essential participant in the continuum of care. |
| TikTok is working on avatars, live audio streams, new creator tools and more Posted: 24 Jan 2022 03:38 PM PST TikTok is building a number of new features, including Bitmoji-like avatars, keyword filtering for the For You Page, group chats, audio-only livestreams, screen sharing on livestreams and Twitch-like subscription features, which would allow creators to make subscriber-only emotes and subscriber-only comment sections. These potential features-in-progress were spotted by social media analyst Matt Navarra.
These leaks should be taken at face value — just because TikTok is playing around with a new idea doesn’t mean it will roll out in the app. But, developing features can sometimes provide insight into a platform’s plans. “We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience,” a TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch. The spokesperson confirmed that these features are indeed being considered, but emphasized that when TikTok tries out new ideas, the goal is to get feedback from users — the resulting feature (if it gets rolled out) could look vastly different from what we see in leaks. Some of these leaked features have already been publicly tested in some form, like paid creator subscriptions. But subscriber-only emotes and comment sections — which borrow directly from Twitch — could make sense in context of yet another recent TikTok test: a desktop streaming software called TikTok Live Studio. The keyword filtering feature — which is similar to Twitter’s muted words feature — has already been mentioned as part of TikTok’s ongoing effort to clean up its For You Page. “We’re working on a feature that would let people choose words or hashtags associated with content they don’t want to see in their For You feed,” TikTok wrote in a December blog post. The other leaked ideas, like avatars and audio-only livestreams, point toward other potential avenues for TikTok’s expansion. If they can do livestream video, why not try to capitalize (pretty late) on interest in live audio? Also, it’s about time we can group message on TikTok. |
| Asia HR tech platform Darwinbox becomes unicorn with TCV-led $72 million funding Posted: 24 Jan 2022 03:33 PM PST HR tech platform Darwinbox has more than tripled its valuation to become a unicorn in a new $72 million funding round as the Indian startup leads what an investor calls the "SaaSification of Asia" trend. Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) — an investor known for backing firms such as Netflix, Meta, Spotify and Airbnb — led the Hyderabad-headquartered startup's $72 million Series D funding. Existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital India, Salesforce Ventures, 3One4 Capital, Endiya Partners, and SCB 10X also participated in the round, which pushes Darwinbox's all-time raise to over $110 million and values it at over $1 billion, the six-year-old startup said. Darwinbox operates a cloud-based human resource management platform. The startup’s eponymous platform manages the entire "hiring to retiring" cycle needs of employees. Hundreds of firms, including Starbucks, Domino’s, recently turned decacorn Swiggy, Tokopedia, Zilingo and Kotak use the startup's platform to handle onboarding of new hires and gaining visibility on their performance, attrition rates and establishing an ongoing feedback loop. The new funding follows a year of strong growth for Darwinbox. Co-founder Chaitanya Peddi told TechCrunch in an interview that the pandemic accelerated Darwinbox's growth as firms across the globe scrambled to find tools to coordinate with — and serve — their employees. The startup said its revenue doubled last year and grew by three times in the Southeast Asia region, which accounts for about 20% of its overall revenue.  Chaitanya Peddi, Jayant Paleti and Rohit Chennamaneni (l-r) co-founded Darwinbox in late 2015. Image Credits: Darwinbox The startup's full-stack offering — which includes a social network for employees to stay connected with one another and an AI assistant to apply for a leave or set up meetings with quick voice commands from phones — has helped it plant its place as the only Asian startup to be featured on Gartner's Magic Quadrant for enterprise Cloud HCM. The broad offering might explain why a third of Darwinbox's customers today are those who previously used more established platforms by Oracle and SAP and Workday. “We get most excited investing behind visionary founders that are fundamentally transforming large industries with a highly resonant product," said Gopi Vaddi, general partner at TCV, in a statement. "I am delighted to back an outstanding team that is doing exactly that in a highly impactful, fast-evolving HR technology space and partner with them on their journey to global HCM leadership." Darwinbox is part of a cohort of startups that is building from Asia for the world, said Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. "I am a strong believer in the SaaSification of Asia. I see increasing pull in the market for Asia-facing SaaS companies, a sea change from what I observed five years ago," he wrote in a LinkedIn post in 2019. "You may ask why SaaS for Asia needs to even exist as a category. Why can't vendors from the US or Europe continue to dominate here? My view is these Western vendors never really dominated, but only skimmed the top of the market. What's really happening in India/Asia is that companies that were non-users of packaged applications, or employees (e.g. blue collar workers) that were non-users of technology are now starting to leapfrog straight from paper-based and manual processes to SaaS," he wrote. Darwinbox plans to deploy the fresh funds to expand its team and further fuel its global expansion plans. It is also aiming to broaden its product offerings to add a number of ancillary services and solutions that enterprises can plug and play into their HR tech ecosystem. The startup is eyeing to add some of those product offerings by the way of merging with or acquiring startups, said Peddi. |
| Daily Crunch: Peloton CEO in hot seat, activist investor says ‘the ride for Mr. Foley is over’ Posted: 24 Jan 2022 03:12 PM PST To get a roundup of TechCrunch's biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PST, subscribe here. Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for January 24, 2022! Today is a kinda tough day for, well, everyone. The value of assets new and old dropped around the world, and everyone is staring around at the mess, wondering what comes next. Well, the good news is that we can answer that question for you. What's next? A gajillion startup funding rounds, of course! – Alex The TechCrunch Top 3
Startups/VC
To close out our startup news today, we're taking on a Manish Singh three-pack. Singh is a flat-out reporting beast, and he has a trio of stories out today that you need to read:
How our SaaS startup broke into the Japanese market without a physical presence Image Credits: Bitrise Launching a product in a foreign market where you're unfamiliar with the language and culture is a tall order — but investors expect growth. Barnabas Birmacher, CEO of platform-as-a-service company Bitrise, shared the lessons he learned as his team attempted to crack the Japanese market. Instead of relying solely on strategic partners, his team visited Japan before its expansion to host events and engage directly with early adopters. Using tactics that dispensed with traditional media and marketing, Birmacher's company hired a manga artist to create a comic featuring a mobile developer, developed "Japan-first" swag to hand out and even crafted a full-sized mascot costume for conferences. "We left the suit with one of our customers and now people wear it while they're drinking," he writes in a TechCrunch+ post. (TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.) Big Tech Inc.
TechCrunch Experts Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL / Getty Images Are you all caught up on last week's coverage of growth marketing and software development? If not, read it here. TechCrunch wants you to recommend growth marketers who have expertise in SEO, social, content writing and more! If you're a growth marketer, pass this survey along to your clients; we'd like to hear about why they loved working with you. |
| Posted: 24 Jan 2022 03:00 PM PST Welcome back to Max Q, our weekly newsletter about space and the business thereof. This week, plans for a private sports and entertainment complex in orbit materialize. Don't forget to sign up to get the free newsletter version of Max Q delivered to your inbox. The Space Station is getting a movie studio… which will also somehow be a “sports arena?” Yes, that’s right, it’s coming via a module developed by Space Entertainment Enterprise (SEE), the production company behind Tom Cruise’s infamous forthcoming movie that will be partly shot in space. Axiom, the private company that is already developing a private module to attach to the ISS, and which also plans to eventually convert that into the core of a free floating station of its own, is their partner in the project. The sports component comes because the plan will be to offer it up to not only artists, but also people looking to host sports events in low Earth orbit. Sounds like the battle room from Ender’s Game, which would make for a pretty compelling reality show, tbh. Don’t count your zero-G content before it’s created, however; SEE is currently in the fundraising process to land backers, which will presumably pay for this ISS add-on. In the meantime, if you want to get a sense of what it’s like to make content in space, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa is populating his YouTube channel with ISS diaries.  Image Credits: Axiom Space Startups making big movesA couple of deals of note from earlier in the month: Wyvern, a Canadian satellite maker focused on hyperspectral imaging, raised $4.5 million in a seed round, and Orbit Fab has partnered with Astroscale on satellite sustainability. Wyvern’s funding comes alongside its acceptance into the latest YC class, which should give you a sense of how hot it is right now. The small team is based out of Alberta, and focuses on the emerging opportunity of affordable, commercial hyperspectral imaging. Unlike visible light or even infrared imaging, hyperspectral can provide a ton of info, about things like the chemical composition of elements in the image. At high resolution, it provides ag tech with super powers, and Wyvern being based outside the U.S. actually means its client list is potentially less restricted than otherwise. Orbit Fab and Astroscale meanwhile will be providing each other with big boons in terms of proving out their respective businesses, which end up being very complementary. Orbit Fab wants to get everyone using its standard interfaces for on-orbit satellite and spacecraft refueling, and Astroscale wants to send up spacecraft that can attach to older, massively expensive geosynchronous sats and keep them going. Now, Astroscale’s ships will use Orbit Fab’s fueling system to keep them juiced up and working.  Orbit Fab CDO Jeremy Schiel shows off the company’s satellite coupling system on stage at TC Disrupt 2019. Image Credits: TechCrunch Other news from TC and beyondChina’s Chang’e-5 probe has found evidence of water on the surface of the moon — a first for the scientific community. SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites to orbit last Tuesday. It has another launch (of a client satellite) scheduled for tomorrow. The SpaceX Cargo Dragon currently in space undocked from the ISS on Sunday and is set to return to Earth today with experimental results on board. |
| Hundreds of Y Combinator alumni join crypto collective to back web3 startups Posted: 24 Jan 2022 02:56 PM PST A crypto collective backing web3 startups is seeking new members. The only condition for joining? Applicants must be alumni of the Y Combinator accelerator. The group, called Orange DAO, is an effort to build out a venture structure which can scout out and back young crypto startups. It was formed this fall with a few dozen YC alums, but has grown in recent weeks to attract more than 1,000 YC founders. The collective wants to use the crypto-native DAO formation to better incentivize its growing network to source deals. “Orange DAO will help startups apply to, and be accepted into Y Combinator, provide them with pre- and post-YC funding, while helping mentor their leadership and recruit talent, and acquire customers,” Orange DAO’s official charter reads. “And we will do it responsibly and equitably by becoming a DAO governed by its members because our hive mind is greater than any single ape brain.” The 1,000 founders now in Orange DAO’s Discord chat represent a sizable chunk of the total volume of YC founders — Y Combinator has backed more than 3,300 companies since launch. The effort is co-led by Ben Huh, who has co-founded a handful of startups and helped lead YC’s New Cities initiative back in 2016. Y Combinator is not formally involved in the project, the accelerator tells us. “It’s crazy to think about an alumni group that becomes its own entity that is for-profit and generates wealth for its members, but that’s exactly the state of the world we’re in,” Huh told TechCrunch in an interview. “We think that these groups will serve as a buying power as well as validation… So, if 1,000 YC alumni choose a specific service provider or toolset to use, it must mean that it’s actually quite good because these people build for a living.” After founders verify themselves by posting their crypto wallet address to their YC-linked HackerNews profile, each member can mint a non-transferable NFT that verifies they are indeed a previous YC founder and are now an NFT-carrying participant of Orange DAO. Orange DAO isn’t the first effort to build an alumni fund that taps into the networks of well-connected YC founders. Back in 2017 a group of a couple hundred YC alumni helped form the Pioneer Fund, a more traditional venture effort to tap into the expertise of past YC founders to win deals. DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, are groups that leverage blockchain tech to help multiple users make decisions as a single entity. Throughout the crypto bull market, they’ve become a popular way for users to band together to buy expensive NFTs or other objects. In November, a DAO called ConstitutionDAO generated excitement around its ultimately failed bid to buy an original copy of the U.S. Constitution. DAOs are also used by crypto projects and protocols to create decentralized governance structures to vote on key decisions. “At the end of the day, DAOs are a collective technology as opposed to an individual one,” Syndicate co-founder Will Papper tells TechCrunch. “DAOs are kind of the next evolution of the corporation because they encode both voice and exit into their foundations.” DAO startup Syndicate helps the groups get off the ground and navigate complex regulatory issues. Papper helped the ConstitutionDAO team navigate the intricacies of their Sotheby’s bid and also helped guide Huh’s efforts in early conversations around Orange DAO. Orange DAO’s structure is a bit unusual, part of an effort to experiment with the organization type while staying compliant with securities law. The DAO itself is an LLC, while the fund which actually backs startups is a separate legal entity called Orange Fund, which is run by Huh and a couple other general partners. That entity has already closed an initial fund and invested in about 30 startups, including DeFi startup Goldfinch. “We figured out a way to kind of combine the investing entity structure and then the DAO structure — they’re still separate but they work together,” Huh says “I think where we want to be headed is: do as the smart contract says.” The DAO itself is run through committees — an effort to organize the 1,000 members into smaller working groups. A fundamental element of Orange DAO’s structure will be finding ways to reward members who do more work on individual deals by awarding them internal governance tokens, Huh says. The group is a bit opaque on how performance from the fund will translate to returns for DAO members, though Orange Fund’s GPs will be contributing their carry in the fund to the Orange DAO’s internal treasury. The effort was initially branded the “YC Crypto DAO,” but as its ambitions have scaled, the group has taken efforts to adopt its own unique brand leading to its new name and a new mascot — a glasses-adorned pixelated citrus fruit bullishly nicknamed “Juicy Returns.” |
| AI2 shows off an open, Q&A-focused rival to GPT3 Posted: 24 Jan 2022 02:46 PM PST OpenAI’s impressive AI language model GPT-3 has plenty of things going it, but with 175 billion parameters no one would claim it’s particularly streamlined. The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) has demonstrated a model that performs as well or better than GPT-3 on answering questions, but is a tenth the size. Macaw, AI2’s model, emerged from research being done at the nonprofit into creating an AI that performs at human levels on standardized tests. “After we got a very high score they moved on to harder questions,” said AI2 head Oren Etzioni. “There’s this paradox where sometimes the questions that are easiest for people are the hardest for machines — and the biggest gap was in common sense.” For instance, he said, asking “When did Tom Hanks land on the moon?” GPT-3 says 1995, since that’s when the film Apollo 13 came out. But Macaw correctly notes that, as far as we know, Tom Hanks has in fact never been to the moon. AI2 has published a collection of examples (“demo” is probably too strong a word) that illustrate the difference, with Macaw often providing the better answer to a variety of tricky and not-so-tricky questions. It’s humorous to compare the two, as sometimes they both miss or give absurd answers at a pretty high rate. Macaw is good at tracking who did what, but is convinced snakes have legs. GPT-3’s answers are confident (perhaps overly so) and readable, even when they amount to conspiracy theories like that COVID-19 is “a new, experimental, and potentially dangerous drug.” A couple examples:
Clearly there’s still a ways to go in creating a question-answering AI that doesn’t trip up on basic questions that a child could answer. But it’s also worth noting that Macaw achieves a similar level of success with a far, far less data-intensive process. Etzioni was clear that this is not meant to be a GPT-3 replacement in any way, just another step in the research going on worldwide to advance the ball on language generation and understanding. “GPT-3 is amazing, but it only came out 18 months ago, and access is limited,” he said. The capabilities it demonstrated are remarkable, “But we’re learning you can do more with less. Sometimes you have to build something with 175 billion parameters to say, well, maybe we can do this with 10 billion.” A good question-answering AI isn’t just good for party tricks, but is central to things like voice-powered search. A local model that can answer simple questions quickly and correctly without consulting outside sources is fundamentally valuable, and it’s unlikely your Amazon Echo is going to run GPT-3 — it would be like buying a semi truck to go to the grocery store with. Large scale models will continue to be useful, but pared-down ones will likely be the ones being deployed. A part of Macaw not on display, but being actively pursued by the AI2 team, is explaining the answer. Why does Macaw think snakes have legs? If it can’t explain that, it’s hard to figure out where the model went wrong. But Etzioni said that this is an interesting and difficult process on its own. “The problem with explanations is they can be really misleading,” he said. He cited an example where Netflix “explains” why it recommended a show to a viewer — but it’s not the real explanation, which has to do with complex statistical models. People don’t want to hear what’s relevant to the machine but rather to their own mind. “Our team is building these bona fide explanations,” said Etzioni, noting they had published some work but that it isn’t ready for public consumption. However, like most stuff AI2 builds, Macaw is open source. If you’re curious about it, the code is here to play with, so go to town. |
| Apple extends an in-app purchase exemption for some developers impacted by pandemic Posted: 24 Jan 2022 02:26 PM PST The pandemic isn’t over yet, according to Apple. The iPhone maker has once again pushed back a Covid-era deferral of an App Store rule that allowed app developers to bypass Apple’s in-app purchase system for specific services that had been forced to go virtual due to ongoing Covid outbreaks. Specifically, Apple will continue to defer its App Store Review Guideline 3.1.1, which requires apps offering “paid online group services” to do so via in-app purchases. The impacted developers — whose original business models were built around in-person events, not virtual ones — have been able to forgo Apple’s requirement to use its in-app purchase system during the pandemic. Initially, Apple had only dropped the in-app purchase requirement on person-to-person services — like those involving a medical consultation between a doctor and patient, a tutoring session between a teacher and student, a real estate tour between a realtor and client, or a fitness training session between a trainer and client, for example. But Apple was soon publicly criticized by Meta (Facebook), for continuing charge commissions on group services events that could hurt small businesses during a global pandemic. Facebook, of course, had an ulterior motive. It wanted Apple to give it permission to use Facebook Pay, its own payments system, where it was waiving fees, instead of Apple’s in-app purchases. Even if Apple had only temporarily agreed, Facebook would have been able to onboard many thousands of customers into its own payments ecosystem. Instead, Apple temporarily deferred its own fees for online group services, including one-to-few and one-to-many services, like online seminars or group yoga classes. This addressed Meta’s criticism that it was profiting off the backs of small businesses being crushed by the pandemic, while also not giving Facebook Pay any advantages. As the pandemic continued, however, Apple has had to keep pushing back the deadline that would have ended the deferral and returned these businesses to Apple’s in-app payments system. In November 2020, Apple extended the deadline for the deferral’s end to June 2021. And in April 2021, it extended it again to December 31, 2021. Last November, Apple reminded developers the deadline was soon approaching. Unfortunately, the impacts of the omicron variant caused Apple to push that deadline yet again. Now, the company says impacted developers will have until June 30, 2022, to return to Apple’s in-app purchase system — a date Apple clearly hopes will be a more palpable time frame to start tapping back into its lost revenue stream. The company also noted it’s extending the deadline to implement account deletion functionality inside apps that allow for account creation, due to “the complexity of implementing this requirement. In other words, it’s a change that’s time-consuming and difficult to implement, but even more so when businesses are again struggling with office closures, staff out sick with Covid, and kids attending virtual school at home. The extensions, announced quietly over the weekend with a post on Apple’s Developer site, come at a time when Apple’s in-app purchase business model is under attack from many sides. The company is engaged with a lawsuit with Epic Games, now under appeal, and was just fined by a Dutch regulator for not complying with antitrust rules as Apple continues to force developers to use its in-app purchase infrastructure for third-party payments. The company also had to recently comply with a similar rule over in-app payments in South Korea. |
| Mentor Collective shakes off its boots to scale student support services Posted: 24 Jan 2022 02:21 PM PST Mentorship is a crucial ingredient to a student's success. The demand for a platform to make the art of advice more accessible is thus easy for entrepreneurs to identify then pitch, but the serendipity — or the chasm between what makes someone an effective mentor versus just a speed dial for questions — is harder for them to scale. Startups that want to scale mentorship across different industries need to build up a supply of mentors diverse, and present, enough to click with the variety of students in today's society: ranging from the part-time graduate student who is busy with parent duties, to the burnt out, first-generation Ivy League star, to the engineer who just broke into tech but is struggling with work/life balance. For Mentor Collective, a Boston-based startup founded in 2014, answers to the challenges and opportunities within scaled mentorship have taken time to figure out. The startup, founded by Jackson Boyar and James Lu Morrissey, began by pairing up students with mentors virtually, and over time has added more structure and management to its marketplace. It approaches the human questions of “how do you support intrinsic motivation” through participant surveys and algorithmic matching — while tackling diversity of student needs by building different curriculums for first-generation individuals, adult learners, veterans, BIPOC and others. To date, Mentor Collective has 165 institutional, higher-education customers, including University of Colorado Denver, Penn State and Dartmouth. It also works with corporations such as Wells Fargo. On the supply side, Mentor Collective says it has trained more than 50,000 mentors since first launching. While companies and competitors, including BetterUp and Sounding Board, have cumulatively raised hundreds of millions of dollars, Mentor Collective decided to bootstrap for the past seven years. CEO and co-founder Jackson Boyar believes the long game was necessary so they didn't take too much money too early, like some other early-stage edtech companies he's seen launch fast, and fail faster. "Even though it took a really long time to get to where we are, we feel confident to spend this money and know it won't negatively impact students," Boyar said. "It did take us half a decade to figure this out, and if somebody thinks that it takes half a year, it's a little audacious and not realistic…if your mission is about doing good, you probably need to adapt that mindset." Boyar announced today that his company has raised $21 million in a Series A round led by Resolve Growth Partners and continued investment from Lumina Foundation, an Indianapolis-based foundation focused on making lifelong learning more accessible. Boyar initially started the company thinking that it would be a nonprofit. While that has since obviously changed, he thinks that starting a company by aggressively focusing on "product efficacy with the expectation that maybe it wouldn’t make that much money" helped build a key foundation. "If you're trying to convince a college dean or provost to buy something and you don't have a randomized control trial that shows the impact on students, it's kind of ridiculous that you'd ask me to spend $100,000 on your product," he said. The founder decided that it was time to take serious money when the company doubled in revenue last year, now nearing $10 million in annual recurring revenue. The more important milestone? Mentor Collective finally began offering more predictable outcomes for students, he claims. According to an analysis conducted by Dr. Jenna Harmon, mentorship research lead and Dr. Joe Sutherland, head of data science, Mentor Collective helped power a 3.84% increase in student retention and a 14% increase in sense of belonging. "These numbers might initially appear low, but even just 1% retention is significant in education…4% across a class of 5,000 students is 200 fewer students dropping out of school," said Boyar. The magic metric for the company, as he just explained, is how it lowers drop-out rates for schools through giving students more subjective-based support. In money terms, if Mentor Collective can prove that a mentor increases a student's likelihood of graduating, it cloud show that the university will gain more tuition revenue by using its service. Another company, EdSights, has raised millions for a chatbot that connects students to resources or support services. "In a perfect world [where] we somehow had a magic wand that allowed us to collect the data on whatever we want on our fingers, what would we want to know to prevent [college] students from dropping out?," co-founder Claudia Recchi said in a previous interview. "Our form of mentoring is finding someone who does, or at least can, relate, and connecting them to you at the right moment in that journey, so that you can build a greater sense of belonging, that you’re more likely to graduate, that you get all the social mobility that college promises, but ultimately isn't delivered to students who don't look like the traditional college student," Boyar said. Currently, more than 50% of Mentor Collective's mentor cohort is non-white, and 36% identify as first-generation college students. For now, the company is relying on volunteer mentors to support its mission, but now, with venture backing, could be under pressure to start paying the people it makes money off of. The COVID-19 pandemic helped the company secure 83,000 mentorships in 2021, double the year prior and up from 19,874 in 2019. Looking back, Boyar thinks that his company could have been even more disciplined in focus during its earlier days. The demand for mentoring means that there are dozens of use cases for the platform, and the company often gets inbound from a variety of customers, from libraries to the military. While saying yes could work for short-term growth, the true efficacy of mentorship in those fields looks very different from person to person. Now, with new incentives laid atop the company, Mentor Collective will need to make a series of choices on how to stay thoughtful and ambitious on the way it grows. |
| Not Dead Yet: IBM’s revenue growth accelerates in Q4 Posted: 24 Jan 2022 02:09 PM PST IBM reported revenue for Q3 2021 — and the news wasn’t just “good.” For a company that has seen negative or low revenue growth for almost a decade, it was great. Big Blue reported $16.7 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 6.5% year over year (8.6% on a constant-currency basis; the strengthening dollar is making a number of companies deal with FX fluctuations). The solid results come a quarter after IBM posted far more modest 0.3% growth in the third quarter of 2021, on slightly higher $17.6 billion. The good news also comes in the wake of the company spinning out its $19 billion infrastructure services business. It may seem slightly counterintuitive to see a company lose a large chunk of business and have it work out in its favor so quickly, but that would appear to have been a big part of CEO Arvind Krishna’s thinking in making that move to focus almost entirely on the cloud. We watched the company flounder for years, at one point recording 22 straight quarters of negative revenue growth. When former CEO Ginni Rometty left in 2019 and was replaced by Krishna, he made it clear there were changes coming and he was going to cut the parts of the business that were not part of his vision. That included kicking Kyndryl to the curb and selling the bulk of the company’s Watson Health division, an area where Rometty had made a big bet and spent billions to build it into a substantial business. When it didn’t work out, Krishna was not afraid to cut his losses, selling off the assets on Friday to Francisco Partners in a deal that was far below the money Rometty had plowed into the division, with reports putting the deal at around $1 billion. Krishna has made it clear he wants to build the company around Red Hat now, the company IBM bought in 2018 for $34 billion. Hybrid cloud revenue, the division where Red Hat lives, reported $6.2 billion in revenue for the quarter — up 18% year over year, giving the company the kind of growing revenue it was hoping for. The CEO has made it known he’s looking for steady growth moving forward, not eye-popping, but the kind of steady growth you would expect from a mature company like IBM, and certainly not quarter after quarter of negative growth. This would appear to put them on that road. That’s three straight quarters of positive growth for fiscal 2021 — 3%, 0.3% and 6.5% — and while those are not the type of growth numbers that make you scream from the rooftops, they are a positive trend for a venerable corporation that desperately needs it Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategies, says the report is at the very least a good sign for the company. “While one good quarter doesn’t make a trend, I believe three do and at a minimum, I believe we will see mid-single-digit growth in the near future.” Other bright spotsWhile hybrid cloud revenue growth was the obvious outlier result from the company's matrix of Q4 outcomes, there were other bright spots worth considering. Software revenues were up 8% (10%, constant currency), and consulting-derived top line was up a strong 13% (16%, constant currency). The result of the generally positive results was a strong profit outcome. IBM reported gross profit of $9.5 billion, up a slim 2.5%. However, that figure converted into $2.9 billion in net income at Big Blue, up a shocking 183% on a pre-tax basis. The company's profit, after taxes, still came to a strong $2.5 billion, up a slightly more modest 107% compared to the year-ago quarter. In simple terms, IBM's business remains a very lucrative one. And one that, finally, after years and years of stagnation and decline from a volume (revenue) basis, has not only managed a string of growth, but, in its most recent quarter, pretty solid top line expansion, to boot. IBM did not survive this long by accident, so perhaps we should have had more faith. But its epic run of negative growth did engender a pretty strong cadre of doubters. Investors are impressed, at least, with IBM shares up sharply in after-hours trading. Now let's see if the company can repeat the feat this year. Then we can really call it a comeback. |
| 3 ways investors can assess the strength of an NFT opportunity Posted: 24 Jan 2022 01:01 PM PST Talk of NFTs may be filling board rooms and news feeds, but their complex and new nature makes it hard for investors to determine which projects show promise. In fact, only a small portion of investors are reaping the most profits from NFTs, according to a study by Chainalysis. I’ve been involved in more than 50 NFT and cryptocurrency deals, and am committed to scaling the DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) ecosystem. However, the unfamiliarity of the NFT space is why many investors fear dipping their toes. NFTs are more than famous artworks, songs and tweets — they serve as part of the broader decentralization movement. From copyright enforcement to buying real estate and identity verification, NFTs play a big role in the remote,= digital world. In the first half of 2021, the NFT market cap grew 2,100%, reaching $2.5 billion in sales volume. Meanwhile, the creator economy boom has opened more doors for NFTs, as people don’t have to go through aggregators or intermediaries to create a token.
If you’re speaking with a founder who doesn’t delve into the details of the business model, the tech and competitors, consider it a red flag. Investors need to know the basics of NFTs and their potential, but they don't need deep technical knowledge. That's because the real value of any NFT project lies with the people building it. They are the ones who will sustain promising NFT projects as they face inevitable moments of volatility. Here’s how to conduct the ultimate litmus test on an NFT project through its creators: Check if both the founder and tech are openThe first NFT was created in 2014 and was sold only last year. The NFT marketplace is still in its infancy, and investors shouldn’t expect NFT projects to undergo the same vetting process as other tech initiatives. There aren’t sufficient data points available, nor the tools to track NFT performance. Instead, investors should be looking for transparency in a project's leadership and tech infrastructure. It’s less about assessing the destination, and more about trusting that there’s a window to observe the journey. |
| Google has a Wordle Easter egg and it’s cute, okay Posted: 24 Jan 2022 12:43 PM PST I know, I know, you’re tired of Wordle. Just mute the word “wordle” on Twitter and don’t be like the guy who made a Wordle-spoiling bot and got banned from Twitter today for being a party pooper (actually, it’s because it’s against Twitter guidelines to make a bot that is designed to bother people, but that’s some definitively party-pooping behavior). Okay, now that we’re alone — all the curmudgeons have closed out of the article — let’s talk about Wordle. Today’s puzzle was particularly challenging, but when you typed “wordle” into the Google search bar to find that strange powerlanguage.co.uk website, you might have noticed a fun Easter egg. The Google icon in the upper right corner looks like Wordle! The animation even enacts someone guessing words like “column” and “goalie” before arriving at “Google.” It’s cute, okay! (And in other news, Google is being sued by Washington, DC and three states over a user privacy issue.) As the cultural significance of a Google Easter egg proves, Wordle is still very popular, and it’s not just on your Twitter feed. When TechCrunch spoke to the game’s creator Josh Wardle two weeks ago, he said that two million people were playing the game each day. If you’re decidedly not a curmudgeon and still think Wordle is fun (It is! If you don’t like it, just don’t play!), check out our conversation with Wardle (yep, that’s his name) about the game’s sudden virality, venture capital interest and why he doesn’t want to monetize the game. Wardle told TechCrunch:
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| Google gets hit with a new lawsuit over ‘deceptive’ location tracking Posted: 24 Jan 2022 12:11 PM PST Washington, DC, Texas, Washington state and Indiana announced the latest lawsuit against Big Tech Monday, alleging that Google deceived users by collecting their location data even when they believed that kind of tracking was disabled. “Google falsely led consumers to believe that changing their account and device settings would allow customers to protect their privacy and control what personal data the company could access,” DC Attorney General Karl Racine said. “The truth is that contrary to Google's representations it continues to systematically surveil customers and profit from customer data.” Racine described Google’s privacy practices as “bold misrepresentations” that undermine consumer privacy. His office began investigating how Google handles user location data after reporting from the Associated Press in 2018 found that many Google apps across iOS and Android recorded location data even when users have chosen privacy options that explicitly say they won’t. The AP coordinated with computer science researchers at Princeton to verify its findings. “Google's support page on the subject states: ‘You can turn off Location History at any time. With Location History off, the places you go are no longer stored,'” the AP reported. “That isn't true. Even with Location History paused, some Google apps automatically store time-stamped location data without asking.” The lawsuit argues that Google created a location tracking system that’s impossible for users to opt out of and that it misled users about how privacy settings could protect their data within apps and at the device level on Android. It also accuses Google of relying on deceptive dark pattern design to force users into making choices counter to their own interests. Those practices may have run afoul of state laws protecting consumers. In Washington, DC, the Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA) outlaws “a wide variety of deceptive and unconscionable business practices,” and is enforced by the attorney general. Racine’s office is pursuing an injunction against Google as well as seeking to force the company to pay out profits that it made from user data collected by misleading consumers about their privacy.
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| NASA celebrates private sector deployments of space-born tech in its latest Spinoff Posted: 24 Jan 2022 12:06 PM PST NASA’s Spinoff magazine is one of the things I look forward to reading every year. The space agency’s research trickles down to the rest of the world in surprising and interesting ways, which it tracks and collects in this annual publication. This year is no different, and NASA tech can be found in everything from hiking gadgets to heavy industry and, funnily enough, space. There are dozens of technologies that have made their way to everyday use in a variety of places highlighted in this year’s issue, which you can browse here. (It’s about 60 pages, so pour some coffee and settle in.) I talked with Daniel Lockney, the head of NASA’s Tech Transfer Program overseeing the deployment of its tech and research among terrestrial companies looking to put it to good use. “Typically what happens is: NASA develops something, they report it to my office, and we look at it to figure out, first, does it work? And second, who else can use it? And if someone can, we figure out how to get it to them,” Lockney explained. “I try to give as much away for free as I can. I’ve got no direction to generate revenue or bring something back to the U.S. Treasury. The 1958 NASA act that created us says to disseminate our work — nothing in there about making a dime.” The result is cheap or free licensing of interesting tech like compact, long-lasting water filters, unusual mechanical components and other tech that was needed for space or launch purposes but might find a second use on the ground. Lockney highlighted a couple items in the latest batch that he thought were especially interesting. “There was a partnership with GM to develop the Robo-Glove, a functional glove that astronauts will wear to help reduce strain during repetitive tasks and increase grip strength,” he said. “Squeezing something on a spacewalk, you can do it a couple times, but if you’re gripping a tool for the whole afternoon… so we developed this glove to assist in that work, and now it’s being used at factories around the world.”  Image Credits: Bioservo Technologies The Swiss company Bioservo licensed the NASA patents for Robo-Glove and has been iterating on the concept for years, and the latest version of its Ironhand device came out last summer. Its most common use case is by employees with hand injuries that might cause them to lose work, but can use the glove to return to the job faster, as well as reduce pain medication. It’s not always just a single company licensing a tech. Lockney noted how NASA was the first organization to look into the question of precision agriculture under totally artificial conditions. “NASA has a lot of experiments for keeping crews healthy on long distance spaceflight. One thing we have to do is grow our own food, plus there’s the psychological benefits of seeing plants,” he said. “But we needed to find ways to grow crops without a heavy growing medium like soil, or even hydroponics — water is so heavy, and so valuable. And you have to get the lighting right, but you can’t use too much energy. So we made these farming techniques to grow a lot of plants in a small space. If you control the plants’ stress, you can really dial in precision growth conditions and improve yield; we actually use a nutritive film that covers the roots, LEDs to give the right spectrum of light and of course there’s sensors everywhere.” “It’s a similar situation in cities, how do you provide food to this population without the resource waste of farmland? But we led this research because no one else had the need for it — it ended up being the direct result of the demands of spaceflight. And now there are a handful of companies doing vertical farms in dense urban areas, actually providing grocery stores with vegetables,” he continued. We’ve actually covered a few, and they’re still in early days, but the appetite is clearly there for both consumers and investors to have food grown efficiently and within a few blocks of them rather than shipped a thousand miles overseas. NASA work makes its way to leisure as well as life-sustaining industries. At least three of the items in this year’s Spinoff have to do with outdoors activities like hiking and camping. One, a thin-film radiant barrier originally used to line spacecraft, has made its way to jackets by 13-One and others as a super-light insulating layer. Aerogel research from the ’90s has made its way to new gear from Seattle-based Outdoor Research (a brand I covet when I walk by their store). And a material called NanoCeram is used in a new portable water filter bottle. One new application you wouldn’t expect to find in a publication about spinoff techs is Astrobotic’s Peregrine moon lander. In the past such things have been exclusively the domain of nationally backed programs, but with the commercial space sector expanding quickly, NASA tech is valuable to spacefaring companies as well. Not all of these are new — some are decades old and still finding new applications or companies to sell them. “By the time we’ve done all the work and we’ve found a partner doing the commercial stuff, manufacturing, marketing…. next thing you know, 10 years have passed,” Lockney said. “The R&D timeline is long and the commercialization timeline is long.” But that means there’s always something fresh coming out even when the papers or materials are years old. There are dozens more techs and companies worth looking at in this year’s Spinoff, so take a look. And if you’ve got time, head to the archives. |
| Mark Cuban on his online pharmacy: ‘Our KPI is how much we can reduce the stress of our patients’ Posted: 24 Jan 2022 11:22 AM PST Mark Cuban’s announcement over the weekend of an online pharmacy selling over a hundred generic drugs at near cost was totally unexpected but will likely be welcomed by millions who struggle to afford medication. The billionaire told TechCrunch that the business model is refreshingly simple: “Lower pricing reduces patient stress, and that will lead to more customers.” The Cost Plus Drug Company aims very simply to provide as many common medications as possible in generic form at as low a price as possible. All cash, no IP deals, no insurance companies — just buy pills for what they cost to make, plus 15 percent to cover overhead. Asked about ROI, Cuban admitted there isn’t much to speak of, by design. “I want to be above break even while maximizing the number of people who can afford their medications,” he said. “Shoot. I would be happy if we can make a little, but push pricing of generics sold elsewhere down significantly.” “Our challenge is to keep pushing prices lower,” not compete with anyone, he continued. “Our KPI is how much we can reduce the stress of our patients who buy generic meds. When people save a lot of money on their medications, they often will tell others they know that have the same challenges. That word of mouth impacts our growth the most.” The company currently offers generic versions of medications for everything from migraines to HIV to birth control, but there’s no particular priority to the ones on the list except that they can and should be offered cheaper, explained Cuban. There’s no board deciding which conditions are next on the list or anything like that. “As far as the process, we choose drugs that we can offer at a price that is lower than what is out there already,” he said simply. “It’s like any business.” The ultra-straightforward business plan of undercutting middle men and offering a proven product for a better price than anyone else seems almost quaint today, but Cuban knows what he’s doing — in a generic way, at least. Asked what advice he had for any startups looking to get into the online pharmacy space, he offered a virtual shrug: “I don’t have any. I’m still learning.” |
| Recipe app Pestle helps you organize, plan, and cook hands-free or with friends on FaceTime Posted: 24 Jan 2022 11:21 AM PST A newly launched recipe app called Pestle aims to do more than provide a place to save and organize your favorite recipes. The app, from indie developer Will Bishop, also helps you plan meals, create shopping lists, keep up with new recipes from creators and even cook hands-free or with friends and family remotely over Apple’s SharePlay feature for FaceTime. The result is a well-built recipe app that provides a better experience for the end user, and one which tries to respect the creator content it organizes by offering source links, tools to discover more recipes from the same creator as they’re published and a feature that encourages repeat visits to recipe sites. But some of Pestle’s other features make it almost too easy to bypass creators’ websites, which could cause concerns. Like many people who use the web to find cooking inspiration, Bishop grew frustrated with the clutter common to today’s recipe websites where you have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find the actual recipe steps — a format designed to capture more Google Search traffic. Also like many home chefs, Bishop found himself copying and pasting recipes into Apple’s Notes app so he could annotate them with his own tweaks and tips. This wasn’t the ideal solution, of course — as it involved many manual steps and resulted in a disorganized system, given that Notes isn’t designed to be a recipe database. So he decided to create his own solution with Pestle. The app integrates with Safari, so you can save any recipe you find on the web by tapping on the “Share” button from your iOS browser, like Safari or Chrome, then tapping on Pestle from the list of apps that appears. Pestle will automatically import the recipe, including the list of ingredients and instructions. This is similar to how other popular recipe-saving apps work, like Whisk or Paprika, for instance. However, where other apps may highlight the source directly on the recipe’s page, making it obvious who to credit, Pestle’s attribution link is tucked under its three-dot “more” menu at the top of the recipe’s page. This isn’t likely an issue for the end user, who can easily seek out the link if they need to refer back to the website for more information. But it could cause complaints from the recipe’s creator, given that it takes an extra tap to get to the link, and feels a bit hidden. In addition, while competitor Whisk even goes so far as to not import a recipe’s instructions — forcing users to visit the recipe site, where they can then choose to copy and paste instructions into the app for later reference — Pestle automatically imports the instructions alongside the ingredient list and nutritional info. Again, handy for the end user; less so for the creator. Finally, while premium users can enjoy smart suggestions of new recipes from the recipe sites they like to visit, these can also be browsed and saved without a website visit. Bishop, however, says he tried to be careful about the implementation here with regard to creator content.  Image Credits: Pestle “Ultimately I think Pestle complements recipe websites as opposed to simply taking. Firstly, when you share a recipe to Pestle, you have to already be on their page. Meaning you've loaded their ads, their ranking improves, etc.,” he explains. “Pestle is akin to clicking the print button in recipe websites.” Plus, he notes, the sources are attributed and linked to, and the app also prompts you to revisit the website after you finish cooking to leave a review, which is an interesting idea in terms of recirculating traffic from the app back to the creator’s original content. “Additionally, recipes are not redistributed en-mass,” Bishop adds. “Pestle users can share recipes with one another, but if they share the recipe to someone who doesn't have Pestle it'll simply load the original site.” From the end user’s perspective, there are few complaints as Pestle offers an easy-to-use app with a lot of helpful features. Though you can create your own folders, Pestle will automatically organize recipes for you by category and cuisine, so you can quickly find recipes without having to come up with your own foldering system. As you cook, you can switch into a guided experience where you move through the recipe on a step-by-step basis. You can also set multiple timers along the way, and tap on links within each to be reminded of the quantities you need. Many other apps force you to switch back and forth between ingredient lists and the steps, which can complicate matters when the recipe’s steps have to be implemented quickly or when hands are messy. And if dirtying your screen is a concern, you can navigate the app hands-free using voice commands like “Back” and “Next.”  Image Credits: Pestle Pestle also supports Apple’s SharePlay, so you can place a FaceTime call with family or friends, and cook together while using the app. Premium users gain access to a few more features, like the discover section for finding new cooking inspiration, handoff and sync between iPhone and iPad devices, 14-day meal planning support and shopping lists with Apple Reminders integration. (It won’t go so far as to help you order the ingredients through a shopping site like Instacart, however). The paid subscription is on sale during its launch where a “lifetime” subscription will cost just $4.99, rather than the $9.99 per year (or $0.99/mo) subscription that will otherwise be available. After launch, the lifetime subscription will later cost $25. Bishop, a 19-year-old indie developer and former WWDC scholar, had built other apps before Pestle, including an Apple Watch Reddit app Nano for Reddit and an Apple Watch Twitter app, Chirp, among others. But Pestle is his main focus as the others are largely self-sufficient. He’d like to bring Pestle to other platforms, but for the time being, that may not be possible as a one-person operation, he says. Pestle is a free download on the App Store. |
| Codenotary raises $12.5M Series B to secure software supply chains Posted: 24 Jan 2022 11:14 AM PST Codenotary, a service that makes it easier for development teams to build transparent software supply chains (and also the company behind the popular open source immudb immutable database), today announced that it has raised a $12.5 million Series B round from new and existing investors like Bluwat, Elaia and others. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $18 million, including last July’s $5.5 million Series A round. Founded by CEO Moshe Bar, who previously co-founded Qumranet, and CTO Dennis Zimmer, Codenotary helps people identify and track all of the components in their DevOps cycle. This means that when there is an attack on the supply chain or a vulnerability like Log4j, it’s far easier for a company to figure out where these libraries are being used and mitigate the potential blast radius. Because all of this sits on top of immudb, a ledger database that provides a tamper-evident history system (without any blockchain voodoo), users should be able to fully trust this information. After adding Codenotary to their software supply chain, the service automatically creates a bill of materials based on what it is seeing.  Image Credits: Codenotary “Our mission is to make sure that we can trust the artifacts that we use in the development of applications throughout any organization, whether it’s open source or an internal enterprise organization,” Bar said. “When we started the company, we were looking for ways to make sure that the information that we store — about who worked on which artifact, when and how and what did they do to it — will be safe from tampering.” Since there was no database available at the time that fulfilled Codenotary’s requirement, the team wrote its own. Bar noted that immudb provides the same cryptographic verification you could get from a blockchain, but in the form of a far more performant database. "Codenotary offers a solution which allows organizations to quickly identify and track all components in their DevOps cycle and therefore restore trust and integrity in all their myriad applications,” said Pascal Blum, senior partner at Bluwat AG in Switzerland, an early investor in Codenotary. “Combined with Codenotary's leading immutable database, immudb, the company has achieved a leader position in this new market.” The service currently has more than 100 customers and, while it is not able to disclose most of these names, the team noted that it includes some of the world’s largest banks. According to Zimmer, most of Codenotary’s customers first implement the service in the software pipeline to be able to establish the provenance of their software from source to production. That customer base, he also noted, varies from small software development shops to large ERP companies, which often use the service to disclose the quality assurance work they put into a new release, for example, and to provide a bill of materials for external customers that use their software. As Bar added, it’s often financial organizations and government agencies that are at the forefront of thinking about these issues. Codenotary plans to use the new funding to accelerate its product development and expand its marketing and sales worldwide. |
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