As Uber works to remake its tarnished image, the company is still dealing with the fallout from its past misdeeds.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/uber-sexual-harassment-lawsuit.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
I had a great time last year with Sony’s catchily-named DPT-RP1, an e-paper tablet that’s perfect for reading PDFs and other big documents, but one of my main issues was simply how big the thing is. Light and thin but 13 inches across, the tablet was just unwieldy. Heeding (I assume) my advice, Sony is putting out a smaller version and I can’t wait to try it out.
At the time, I was comparing the RP1 with the reMarkable, a crowdfunded rival that offers fantastic writing ability but isn’t without its flaws. Watch this great video I made:
The 10-inch DPT-CP1 has a couple small differences from its larger sibling. The screen has a slightly lower resolution but should be the same PPI — it’s more of a cutout of the original screen than a miniaturization. And it’s considerably lighter: 240 grams to the 13-inch version’s 350. Considering the latter already felt almost alarmingly light, this one probably feels like it’ll float out of your hands and enter orbit.
More important are the software changes. There’s a new mobile app for iOS and Android that should make loading and sharing documents easier. A new screen sharing mode sounds handy but a little cumbrous — you have to plug it into a PC and then plug the PC into a display. And PDF handling has been improved so that you can jump to pages, zoom and pan, and scan through thumbnails more easily. Limited interaction (think checkboxes) is also possible.
There’s nothing that addresses my main issue with both the RP1 and the reMarkable: that it’s a pain to do anything substantial on the devices, such as edit or highlight in a document, and if you do, it’s a pain to bring that work into other environments.
So for now it looks like the Digital Paper series will remain mostly focused on consuming content rather than creating or modifying it. That’s fine — I loved reading stuff on the device, and mainly just wished it were a bit smaller. Now that Sony has granted that wish, it can get to work on the rest.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/sony-shrinks-its-digital-paper-tablet-down-to-a-more-manageable-10-inches/
Another (very) big deal for Netflix: Former U.S. President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have reached an agreement to produce films and series for the streaming service.
The New York Times first reported in March that the Obamas were in “advanced negotiations” with Netflix. The goal, supposedly, was less about criticizing the Trump Administration or promoting any specific political message, and more about highlighting inspirational stories.
Netflix’s official announcement makes it sound like that continues to be what the Obamas have in mind, with Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos describing them as “uniquely positioned to discover and highlight stories of people who make a difference in their communities and strive to change the world for the better.”
The Obamas have formed a company called Higher Ground Productions to create this content.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Netflix has deep pockets and has shown a willingness to write very large checks. It says the Obamas might produce “scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries and features” — so basically any kind of audiovisual content.
In a statement, Mr. Obama said:
One of the simple joys of our time in public service was getting to meet so many fascinating people from all walks of life, and to help them share their experiences with a wider audience. That’s why Michelle and I are so excited to partner with Netflix – we hope to cultivate and curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the entire world.
Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming is scheduled for publication in November, while Barack Obama is expected to release a new memoir as well under the same deal. He’s kept a relatively low profile since leaving office, but he did make a recent appearance as the first guest David Letterman’s Netflix interview show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/obama-netflix-deal/
In March, the female-led media company and newsletter provider TheSkimm reported it was raising a $12 million Series C from Google Ventures and Spanx founder Sara Blakely, along with several existing investors. Today, the company is confirming its Series C round has closed with a number of new, mostly female investors joining – including big names like Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks.
Variety was the first to report the news of the new investors.
The Series C’s additional investors include former TV journalist Willow Bay, now dean at the USC Anneberg School for Communication and Journalism; Jesse Draper of Halogen Ventures; Shonda Rhimes; CEO of GingerBread Capital, Linnea Roberts; CEO of GingerBread Capital, Hope Taitz; as well as the Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.; and Michael Karsch of Juice Press.
Earlier Series C investors included GV (formerly Google Ventures); Spanx founder Sara Blakely; plus former lead investors 21st Century Fox, RRE Ventures and Homebrew Ventures.
TheSkimm began its life as an email newsletter, founded by former TV news producers Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg. The newsletter targets millennial women who want an easy way to keep up with the key news of the today. What makes the product so appealing is how it’s written in a conversational tone, making it accessible to a wide audience who often finds reading the news a dreary but necessary chore. Mixed in with its highlights from key U.S., political, and international news, are samplings of stories from pop culture and the entertainment industry, which gives the newsletter a bit of a palate cleanser – something that’s much appreciated these days.
That newsletter has now grown to around 7 million subscribers, the company says. (This is the same number it reported in March.)
The company has also expanded to other products since its launch, including a $2.99 per month subscription-based app for keeping up with upcoming news and televised events, a podcast, as well as original videos for YouTube and Facebook Watch via its production arm, Skimm Studios.
Its video offerings include Skimm’d with…” and “Get Off the Couch” for Facebook, and digital series “Sip n’ Skimm” which landed an interview with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, followed by a discussion with Speak Paul Ryan assessing the proposed GOP tax plan.
Meanwhile, TheSkimm’s podcast, “Skimm’d from The Couch,” reached #1 on Apple Podcasts hours after its launch.
The company generates revenue from a variety of sources, including its app subscriptions, native ads, affiliate, content licensing and distribution, TheSkimm notes in an announcement. The company is not offering revenue details, however.
“As a female led and founded company, we are excited to have the opportunity to bring such an impressive and dynamic group of female investors into theSkimm fold,” co-founders and co-CEOs Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, said in a statement. “With a majority of our audience being female, it’s vital to the success of our business to involve women at every single level, and that includes our investors. With their added perspective and resources, we look forward to this next chapter in our company’s history.”
Banks added she had a personal appreciate for the product, in addition to her desire to support female entrepreneurs.
Going from one business meeting, to the next studio set, and as a new Mama, it’s more difficult than ever to stay up to date on the day’s headlines,” the media mogul said. “theSkimm created a media platform that works seamlessly with on-the-go lifestyles. As a fervent supporter of trailblazing female-led businesses, I am thrilled to be a part of the next phase of theSkimm’s development,” Banks said.
The company didn’t offer many specifics in terms how it planned utilize the additional capital, but told us that it plans to “continue evolving the brand” and grow its product offerings–both premium and free. One of its plans involves expanding its No Excuses political-engagement campaign, reports Variety, which registered 110,000 U.S. voters.
New York-based TheSkimm has 72 full-time employees and has raised $29 million to date.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/theskimm-closes-its-12m-series-c-with-big-names-shonda-rhimes-and-tyra-banks-on-board/
Because there aren’t enough electric scooters on the roads, Lyft is looking into launching its own fleet of electric scooters in San Francisco, The Information reports. Lyft would join the likes of Spin, Bird and Lime — the three startups that deployed their scooters in San Francisco, without permission, back in March.
Lyft has reportedly been in talks with San Francisco city officials to discuss applying for a permit, and has drafted some prototypes of scooter designs. A Lyft spokesperson declined to comment.
Earlier this month, the city of San Francisco has laid out its requirements for companies seeking to obtain electric scooter permits. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Authority has yet to actually finalize the application and terms, but a spokesperson told me on Friday the permit applications should be ready as early as this week. The city will issue permits for no more than five companies during the 24-month pilot program. The program would grant up to 500 scooters per company.
Meanwhile, Uber also has its eyes on electric scooters. In April, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told me the company plans to “look at any and all options” that would help move transportation options in ways that are city-friendly. That same month, Uber acquired bike-share startup JUMP for about $200 million.
As it stands right now, there are four companies that have announced electric scooter sharing. Just last week, scooter startup Skip threw its hat in the ring with $6 million in funding.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/lyft-electric-scooter-san-francisco/
Facebook’s been talking Terragraph since way back during its 2016 F8 keynote. The social media giant’s ambitious plan to bring fast Wifi to cities is taking another key step toward real world trials with the addition of Qualcomm. The chipmaking giant announced today that it will add the 60Ghz tech to its future chipsets, with plans to start trials in the middle of next year.
“It is based on the pre-802.11ay standard with enhancements provided by the Qualcomm Technologies’ chipset and the integrated software between Facebook and Qualcomm Technologies to support efficient outdoor operation and avoid interference in dense environments,” Qualcomm writes in the announcement.
San Jose has already been floated as a potential testing ground for the technology. It’s not the biggest U.S. city, but the Silicon Valley hub should prove a solid testing ground with its tech savvy population. The companies say the tech will be useful in lowering the cost of high-speed wireless and helping deliver connectivity to populated areas with significant obstacles, including those densely packed with buildings.
The latter, naturally, makes Terragraph a natural for urban environments, where digging up the ground for fiber is a nuisance, to say the least. Facebook is also looking to service more rural spots with its Antenna Radio Integration for Efficiency in Spectrum (ARIES) system, a technology that was unveiled at the same F8 event.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/facebook-and-qualcomm-will-bring-fast-wifi-to-cities-in-mid-2019/
There are few open source projects as complex as OpenStack, which essentially provides large companies with all the tools to run the equivalent of the core AWS services in their own data centers. To build OpenStack’s various systems the team also had to develop some of its own devops tools, and in 2012, that meant developing Zuul, an open source continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) platform. Now, with the release of Zuul v3, the team has decided to decouple Zuul from OpenStack and to run it as an independent project. It’s not quite leaving the OpenStack ecosystem, though, since it will still be hosted by the OpenStack Foundation.
Now all of that may seem a bit complicated, but at this point, the OpenStack Foundation is simply the home of OpenStack and other related infrastructure projects. The first one of those was obviously OpenStack itself, followed by the Kata Containers project late last year. Zuul is simply the third of these projects.
The general concept behind Zuul is to provide developers with a system for automatically merging, building and testing new changes to a project. It’s extensible and supports a number of different development platforms, including GitHub and the Gerrit code review and project management tool.
Current contributors include BMW, GitHub, GoDaddy, Huawei, Red Hat and SUSE. “The wide adoption of CI/CD in our software projects is the foundation to deliver high-quality software in time by automating every integral part of the development cycle from simple commit checks to full release processes,” said BMW software engineer Tobias Henkel. “Our CI/CD development team at BMW is proud to be part of the Zuul community and will continue to be active contributors of the Zuul OSS project.”
The spin-off of Zuul comes at an interesting time in the CI/CD community, which is currently spoiled for choice. With Spinnaker, Google and Netflix are betting on an open source CD platform that solves some of the same problems as Zuul, for example, while Jenkins and similar projects continue to go strong, too. The Zuul project notes that its focus is more strongly on multi-repo gating, which makes it ideal handling very large and complex projects. A number of representatives of all of these open source projects are actually meeting at the OpenDev conference in Vancouver, Canada that’s running in parallel with the semi-annual OpenStack Summit there and my guess is that we’ll hear quite a bit more about all of these projects in the coming days and weeks.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/openstack-spins-out-its-zuul-open-source-ci-cd-platform/
Fueled by last year’s greed-inducing visions of a crypto-currency boom and a stock market largely untethered from classical economics, TradingView, a developer of social networking and data analysis tools for financial markets, has raised millions in new venture funding.
The New York-based company just scored $37 million in funding led by the growth stage investment firm Insight Venture Partners.
TradingView has developed a proprietary, JavaScript-based programming language called PineScript, which lets anyone develop their own customized financial analysis tools. The company “freemium” software as a service model let’s most users connect and exchange trading tips and tricks for free, but begins charging when customers want access to more charts, data and real-time server-side alerts.
There are three payment plans beginning at $15, with a mid-tier at $30 and a high-end $60 per-month premium option.
The company had previously boosted its growth by offering its charting software for free to partner websites like SeekingAlpha, Bitfinex, and the Nasdaq. That strategy helped it grow to 8 million monthly active users with around 61 percent coming from direct traffic as of March of this year.
These days the company derives nearly 75 percent of its revenue from those monthly subscription plans to individual traders. TradingView’s executives think the company still has an opportunity to expand its footprint among those retail investors, but it’s also planning to make a push to serve more institutional clients with its toolkit.
For the past seven years the company has enjoyed consistent growth, according to TradingView co-founder and chief operations officer, Stan Bokov.
For Paul Szurek, a vice-president at Insight Venture Partners, the investment in TradingView is building off of broad consumer interest in amateur speculative trading. Looking at RobinHood, Bux, and eToro as gateways for new investors who eventually move on to more sophisticated tools, Szurek said that TradingView was often their next step into market investing.
“The rise of cryptocurrencies… and trading those assets… has flywheeled into a broader interest in investing across asset classes,” Szurek said.
While TradingView was never crypto-focused, according to Bokov, the company was supportive from the beginning and it’s been a boon to the broader business. “They came for crypto. They stayed for the other stuff,” Bokov said.
And crypto might just be the gateway drug for younger speculative traders to start investing in financial markets more broadly, according to Szurek. “October to January, during the real core of the crypto boom here, there were a lot of users coming in starting out researching that asset class broadly. 80 percent move on to research other asset classes,” he said. “As TradingView kind of pushed through the [first quarter], trends in growth really diverged from what we were seeing in purely crypto-focused business and that’s a testament to users leveraging this one-stop-shop component of the platform.”
Additional investors in the new TradingView include DRW Venture Capital and Jump Capital. The company was a graduate of the 2013 TechStars Chicago batch and was seeded by Irish Angels, TechStars, iTech Capital and undisclosed angel investors.
“TradingView was built for non-professional traders, but its accessible trading tools and powerful-yet-intuitive charting capabilities have attracted the attention of institutional investors,” said Kimberly Trautmann, head of DRW Venture Capital, in a statement. “As an investor, we are excited about the diverse cross section of the industry that TradingView has reached and its rapid growth. As a proprietary trading firm on an institutional level, we’re looking forward to leveraging the platform and contributing to its further development.”
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/cryptocurrency-and-a-stock-market-boom-pushes-tradingview-to-37-million-in-new-funding/
Alibaba is teaming up with SenseTime, the world’s highest-valued AI startup, to launch a not-for-profit artificial intelligence lab in Hong Kong in a bid to make the city a global hub for artificial intelligence.
Alibaba, which is SenseTime’s largest single investor thanks to a recent $600 million round at a valuation of $4.5 billion, is providing financing for the “HKAI Lab” through its Hong Kong entrepreneurship fund. SenseTime said it will contribute too, although the total amount of capital backing the initiative hasn’t been revealed.
The partners of the project — which also includes the Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) — said the aim is to “advance the frontiers of AI,” which includes helping startups commercialize their technology, develop ideas and promote knowledge sharing in the AI field.
That’s all fairly general — Alibaba has a track record of politicking through technology investment schemes in Greater China and Southeast Asia — but one tangible project is a six-month accelerator program planned for September which will welcome AI startups to the HKAI Lab. Alibaba’s Cloud business and HKSTP are among the backers who will help the program offer early-stage funding to successful applicants, while Alibaba and SenseTime will help with mentoring and development during the program.
“Alibaba sees AI as a fundamental technology that will make a difference to society,” Alibaba executive vice chairman Joe Tsai said in a statement. “We envision the Hong Kong AI Lab to be an open platform where researchers, startups and industry participants can collaborate and build a culture of innovation.”
China and the U.S. are the two biggest players in the global AI battle, this project alone won’t divert that but it could stir up potential in Hong Kong.
Alibaba maintains tight relationships in Hong Kong, particularly through the fund which is around $130 million in size. While the program is ostensibly aimed at promoting startups in Hong Kong, particularly around AI, it is also sure to galvanize Alibaba’s ties to Hong Kong’s establishment and tech community. Hong Kong is growing as a destination for startups, as a number of the city-state’s key players discussed at a TechCrunch China event last year, but still the issue of talent is a key one and this initiative could benefit Hong Kong in that respect.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/alibaba-senstime-hong-kong-ai-lab/
HMD Global has been one of the mobile world’s biggest surprise hits in recent years. Founded by former Nokia execs, the Finnish company has made a name for itself reviving the dearly departed brand on Android smartphones to great effect. And it just managed to raise another $100 million, led by Ginko Ventures’ Alpha Ginko VC branch.
The new round puts the company’s valuation at over $1 billion, according to a HMD. It’s set to use this latest round to push even more “aggressively” into the mobile category with its branded devices, “doubl[ing] down on expanding channel reach in strategic markets while continuing to deliver innovation where it matters most to consumers.”
Not that the company’s been cautious in its push thus far, of course. HMD already has A LOT of options out there for a business that’s essentially been in existence for a year and a half. At MWC back in February, it announced five new phones sporting the legacy brand, including a reboot of the 8110. The company has also been positioning itself in developing markets, where the Nokia name still has a fair amount of cache, by wholeheartedly adopting Google’s Android One program.
It’s a tricky line to walk, between an embrace of retro appreciation and an attempt to offer innovation. Continuing its successful run is going to require more than just playing upon user nostalgia for a bygone brand.
The question moving forward is whether HMD will be able to reassert Nokia as a truly bleeding-edge brand, as it continues to flood the market with branded devices. After all, the smartphone market is starting to plateau and much of the competition has begun to scale back their releases.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/hmd-raises-100-million-to-bring-even-more-nokia-phones-to-market/
UK-based security researcher Robert Wiggins has found two exposed TeenSafe servers, leaking the passwords and information of some users of the monitoring service.
TeenSafe is meant to protect teenagers by letting their parents monitor their texts, phone calls, web history, location, and app downloads. The breach was first reported by ZDNet.
According to the report, TeenSafe left two of their servers, which were hosted on AWS, exposed and viewable by anyone. Moreover, the database included information such as the parent’s email address, child’s Apple ID email address, device name, device unique identifier, and plaintext passwords for the teenager’s Apple ID.
So… just about everything.
TeenSafe requires that teenagers abstain from using two-factor authentication so that parents can keep an eye on their activity, making those teenagers even more vulnerable to malicious actors now that their personal information has been exposed.
TeenSafe claims on its website that it encrypts data so that it wouldn’t be accessible in the case of the breach.
According to ZDNet, the server held at least 10,200 records from the past three months containing customer data. The publication also included that some of those records were duplicates and that one of the servers appeared to store test data.
That said, it’s unclear if there are other leaky servers with exposed data yet to be discovered.
TeenSafe says it has more than 1 million parents using the platform.
“We have taken action to close one of our servers to the public and begun alerting customers that could potentially be impacted,” a TeenSafe spokesperson told ZDNet on Sunday.
We reached out directly to TeenSafe and will update the post if/when we hear back.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/teen-monitoring-app-teensafe-exposes-thousands-of-passwords/
Managing, buying, and selling commercial real estate is a fairly primitive process. Crexi founder Mike DeGiorgio remembers one experience in 2014 when he was required to fax and mail details about an urgent transaction to the leasing office, a move that made him think he was back in the era of Pogs and MTV’s Real World Season 1.
“There simply was no great industry solution for researching markets, finding comps, transacting, connecting with key stakeholders, purchasing or investing in properties, renting or leasing space, getting a loan, finding partners to purchase properties with, marketing yourself or the properties you own, sell, or lease etc,” he said. “I started thinking about technology solutions for the commercial real estate industry to solve many of these inefficiencies in the CRE space. I could not figure out why it hadn’t been done and set out to build CREXi to help industry stakeholders be more efficient and to make the industry more liquid, transparent, and easier to access.”
Crexi – the CRE stands for “commercial real estate” – has been around since 2015 but recently announced an $11 million Series A as well as some interesting user numbers. Key investors include Jackson Square Ventures, Manifest Investment Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Freestyle Capital, TenOneTen Ventures, and Founder Collective. The company has managed over 100,000 “properties brought to market” on its platform and they have 200,000 users per month. They see more than 6,000 properties listed on the site each month.
The service is a suite of tools that streamlines the entire CRE processing.
“We give brokers the ability to find, manage and qualify leads, market their properties with customizable emails, and communicate with interested parties through in-app messaging. Additionally, our features help brokers interact with the industry and its stakeholders; solicit, make, accept, counter, and negotiate offers; run competitive bidding processes; run escrow and closing processes; research markets and sold properties etc,” said DeGiorgio.
While CRE isn’t very sexy, it’s clear that the industry can use all the help it can get. Considering Crexi manages $450 billion in property value, it’s also clear that this is a lucrative market ripe for disruption.
“We are the first platform to take the entire commercial real estate transaction process online with a simple to use and intuitive interface,” said DeGiorgio. “We collaborate with brokers and principals to blend technology with the fundamentals of CRE transactions, addressing the shifting needs of industry professionals to maximize revenue and minimize time spent on administrative tasks.”
Now he just has to get everyone to throw away their postal scales and fax machines and he help CRE enter the era of Honey Boo Boo and leave the era of the Olsen Twins.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/crexi-raises-11-million-to-bring-commercial-real-estate-out-of-the-dark-ages/
It was just matter of time, really. Amazon’s push to get its smart assistant on every piece of hardware imaginable now includes Windows 10 laptops, starting with Acer’s Spin 3 and 5 lines. Both include models sporting Alexa, currently available at retail.
Acer looks to be all in with the assistant — Alexa is coming to a number of other PCs from the company, including the Nitro 5 Spin gaming laptop and its all-one-ones, in the coming weeks. Beyond that, the company’s also bring Alexa to a number of existing systems courtesy of a software update, arriving later this week.
In a press release, Alexa VP Steve Rabichin says the company is “delighted” to be working with Acer. Well, yeah. The PC space was a pretty clear next step for Amazon, having already established a strong foothold in the smarthome space and slowly attacking the mobile market through third-party partnerships.
The company will, of course, be competing directly with Cortana. Microsoft’s assistant has attempted to establish Windows 10 as its primary stronghold. Apple, of course, brought Siri to MacOS some time back, while Google has been flirting with the form factor on its own devices like the Pixelbook.
From the sound of it, basic functionality doesn’t stray to far from what you’re already getting on the Echo, including things like the weather and smarthome control. In order to really assert its presence, however, Alexa is going to have offer some unique functionality that makes the laptops more than just an auxiliary smart speaker.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/now-you-can-buy-a-laptop-with-alexa-preinstalled/
In Silicon Valley, venture firms with a track record of success find themselves awash in money thanks to the growing number of institutions that want to invest more of their capital in tech. In March, an SEC filing showed that General Catalyst had closed a $1.375 billion fund, the biggest vehicle in its 18-year history. Battery Ventures also closed on two funds earlier this year that are the 35-year-old firm’s biggest to date. Sequoia Capital, meanwhile, is reportedly out raising $12 billion across a series of funds, a move that’s unprecedented for the firm — or any U.S.-based venture firm, for that matter.
Fifteen-year-old Emergence Capital could easily follow the same path. Emergence funds early stage ventures that are focused on enterprise and SaaS applications, and it does this very well. Its bets include the storage company Box (now public), the social networking company Yammer (sold for $1.2 billion to Microsoft in 2012), and Veeva Systems, the company that’s generally known for its customer relations software for the life sciences and pharmaceutical industries, though envious investors see Veeva as the company that produced a more than 300x return for Emergence when it went public in 2013. (Emergence had invested just $6.5 million in the outfit and owned 31 percent of it going into the IPO. It was also Veeva’s sole venture backer.)
Still, when it came time to raise its fifth fund, Emergence did not raise a billion-dollar fund, as it surely could have. Instead, the San Mateo, Ca., firm, which closed its fourth fund with $335 million in 2015, opted to increase the fund by 30 percent, closing its new vehicle this past Friday with $435 million.
We talked the other day with firm cofounder Jason Green, who is one of four general partners, about the firm’s trajectory. Specifically, we asked why — like almost every other firm in Silicon Valley — it didn’t close its newest fund with exponentially more in capital commitments than its last fund. The answer, said Green: “Our sweet spot is on early market fit, with a core team we can work around.” Because that hasn’t changed, neither has the size of the funds it raises, he said.
There have been some changes. In 2016, Emergence promoted Joe Floyd to partner three years after Floyd had joined the firm from Kaufman Fellows, which is a two-year development program for venture capitalists. As notably, cofounder Brian Jacobs will not be helping to invest this new fund. Asked if Jacobs is leaving to do crypto investing (a popular move at the moment), Green said Jacobs is moving “toward more philanthropic activities” instead.
Emergence, whose first investment was in Salesforce and whose other wins include the sale of ServiceMax to GE for $915 million in 2016 and Intacct’s sale to Sage Group for $850 million last year, only invests in five to seven new companies each year. Before we let Green go, we asked how the firm decides which handful of companies to pursue at any one time.
He said that Emergence is very “thematic oriented” and that it picks a couple of themes for every new fund then tries to find the best companies and founders within those themes. Though it has been SaaS and cloud and horizontal applications and industries from the outset, Green says that going forward, it plans to focus on a couple of related but more specific areas. The first of these he called “coaching networks,” which is another way of describing machine learning applied to the enterprise. Seattle-based Textio, for example, an Emergence portfolio company, uses AI-powered tools to augment business writing. Another portfolio company, Chorus, analyzes voice recordings of sales interactions to give sales teams real-time feedback about what’s working or not. Green says he sees these as “coaching networks” because they’re making people better at their jobs, rather than aiming to replace them.
Emergence is also focusing on the deskless workforce, meaning the 80 percent of the global workforce that doesn’t sit in front of a desk. It’s not a new trend, concedes Green, but he calls it “early innings,” with related technologies just “starting to infuse the operations of teams around the globe.” (An early investment in the fast-growing video conferencing company Zoom could probably be tucked into this category.)
Green dodged a question about what size checks the firm likes to write. He did say that like most traditional VCs, the firm looks to own 20 percent or more of the companies it backs, and it typically supports companies at the “Series A, all the way through” to an eventual exit.
Asked if Emergence allowed any new investors into its newest fund, Green said the firm “hand selected a handful of new LPs who we felt strongly were going to use the returns for good — foundations and endowments that we feel are doing really great work.”
It has “become more rare,” not raising a giant fund in today’s climate, Green said on our call. “It does take a lot of restraint. It’s very easy right now to raise lots of capital and spread your wings, and I’m proud that we’ve been able to maintain our focus and discipline.”
It “gets back to what you enjoy,” he continued. “We’re not just trying to place bets. We really do love getting our hands dirty.”
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/this-top-silicon-valley-venture-firm-just-made-a-contrarian-move-with-its-newest-fund/
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Chinese bike-sharing startup Mobike, which was recently acquired in a $3 billion deal, was already present in India. The company went on an aggressive global expansion spree in 2017, India wasn’t on the radar then but that’ll soon be rectified with a launch expected in early June.
Mobike has bold plans for India, where it freely admits that there isn’t currently a strong culture of biking. The goal is to work with municipal governments and town planners to do what Mobike (and rival Ofo did in China) which is to help cut down city congestion and provide new last-mile transit options.
“We’ve had great responses from many cities around how they see bike sharing in general and Mobike specifically,” Sujith Nair, Mobike India’s Chief Business Officer, told TechCrunch in an interview.
Ofo landed in India earlier this year and local Uber rival Ola started a service on a small scale last year so Mobike isn’t the first mover here. Nair said the company plans to launch its service in early June — or potentially before the end of May — but for now he isn’t saying which cities will be first.
“We’re talking to all the big cities, such as Bangalore and Delhi,” he added. “Our intent is to grow rapidly and we’re looking at partnerships to help accelerate that.”
While there have been infamous photos of piles of bikes in China, and stories of bikes dumped in trees or canals in other parts of the world, Nair said that the government agencies he’s spoken to haven’t expressed concern at a deluge of cycles. Instead, he said, conversations has focused around the practical potential of easing congestion and enabling short trips.
“It’s a great way to jump-start a sustainable transport ecosystem,” he said. “With the local government throwing in advocacy and communication to drive awareness. They’re investing in cycling tracks and infrastructure… we can always deal with excess later, it’s not a huge concern.”
Nair suggested that Mobike will look to grow to 10-12 cities in India over the next 18 months but the company “aspires” to grow even more rapidly than that since there are over 25 cities with a population of over one million people.
Initially, the focus is on the core dockless bike service, which — in most countries — lets a customer get a ride for around $1 after they scan a vacant bike’s QR code via the Mobike app. Mobike has spoken very publicly about its desire to get into other verticals, based around its bike fleet and adjacent transportation verticals too, and Nair said he expects to have “opportunities to look at other options” for the India-based business once that core service is up and running at some scale.
To help grease the wheels, Mobike is aiming to strike partnerships with major payment players. Typically, Mobike users worldwide bind a credit or debit card to their app to enable payment, but Nair suggested Mobike will have deals to integrate India’s mobile wallet services and the government-backed UPI payment initiative to help make its bikes open to as many of the population as possible.
Ofo, Mobike’s key ally, tied up with Paytm to go beyond payments and help drive users to its service, but it doesn’t seem like Mobike has a similar strategy in mind.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/mobike-india/
The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s meeting with elected representatives of the European Union’s ~500 million citizens will be livestreamed after all, it was confirmed today.
MEPs had been angered by the original closed door format of the meeting, which was announced by the EU parliament’s president last week. But on Friday a majority of the political groups in the parliament had pushed for it to be broadcast online.
This morning president Antonio Tajani confirmed that Facebook had agreed to the 1hr 15 minute hearing being livestreamed.
A Facebook spokesperson also sent us this short statement today: “We’re looking forward to the meeting and happy for it to be live streamed.”
When is the meeting?
The meeting will take place on Tuesday May 22 at 18.15 to 19.30CET. If you want to tune in from the US the meeting is scheduled to start at 9.15PT /12.15ET.
Tajani’s announcement last week said it would start earlier, at 17.45CET, so the meeting appears to have been bumped on by half an hour. We’ve asked Facebook whether Zuckerberg will meet in private with the parliament’s Conference of Presidents prior to the livestream being switched on and will update this story with any response.
Where to watch it online?
According to Tajani’s spokesperson, the meeting will be broadcast on the EU parliament’s website. At the time of writing it’s not yet listed in the EPTV schedule — but we’re expecting it to be viewable here.
Who will be meeting with Zuckerberg?
The Facebook founder will meet with EU parliament president Tajani, along with leaders of the parliament’s eight political groups, and with Claude Moraes, the chair of the EU parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee.
It’s worth noting that the meeting is not a formal hearing, such as the sessions with Zuckerberg in the US Senate and Congress last month. Nor is it a full Libe committee hearing — discussions remain ongoing for Facebook representatives to meet with the full Libe committee at a later date.
What will Zuckerberg be asked about?
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, MEPs are keen to discuss concerns related to social media’s impact on election processes with Zuckerberg.
Indeed, the impact of social media spread online disinformation is also the topic of an ongoing enquiry by the UK parliament’s DCMS committee which spent some five hours grilling Facebook’s CTO last month. Although Zuckerberg has thrice declined the committee’s summons — preferring to meet with EU parliamentarians instead.
Other topics on the agenda will include privacy and data protection — with Moraes likely to ask about how Facebook’s business model impacts EU citizens’ fundamental rights, and how EU regulations might need to evolve to keep pace, as he explained to us on Friday.
Some of the political group leaders are also likely to bring up concerns around freedom of expression as pressure in the region has ramped up on online platforms to get faster at policing hate speech.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/where-to-watch-zuckerbergs-meeting-with-eu-meps-on-tuesday/
Startups, TechCrunch Tel Aviv 2018 is coming for you in just 2 weeks! As you may know, we’re hosting our first inaugural day long conference at the Tel Aviv Convention Center on 7 June. The event will feature TechCrunch’s signature stellar programming on Mobility, and we will also have new expo area called Startup Alley, where hundreds of rockstar startups from ALL verticals demo their products to attendees. Check out the current list of startups that will be at the event!
Want to be part of this awesome lineup of startups? For 1700 ILS, you’ll get one full day to exhibit, two tickets to TechCrunch Tel Aviv 2018, a demo table, wifi, power, linens, and a branded table-top sign. You can secure your exhibit spot here.
Remember, TechCrunch events are the ideal place to show off your company to prospective customers, gain media attention, meet investors, and take your startup to the next level. If you’re a pre-Series A, early-age startup, we want to see you on our showcase floor.
Buy yours before we run out — space is limited, and feel free to email startupalley@techcrunch.com if you have any questions. Hope to see you in a few weeks!
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/last-chance-to-get-a-table-in-startup-alley-at-tc-tel-aviv-2018/
Whisk, the U.K. startup that has built a B2B data platform to power various food apps, including making online recipes ‘shoppable’, has acquired Avocando, a competitor based in Germany.
The exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although TechCrunch understands it was all-cash and that Whisk is acquiring the tech, customer base, integrations, and team. Related to this, Avocando’s founders are joining Whisk.
“The team is joining Whisk to help scale a joint global vision to help leading businesses create integrated and meaningful digital food experiences using cutting-edge technology,” says Whisk in a statement.
To that end, Whisk’s “smart food platform” enables app developers, publishers and online supermarkets/grocery stories to do a number of interesting things.
The first relates to making recipes shoppable i.e. making it incredibly easy to order the ingredients needed to cook a recipe listed online or in an app. Specifically, Whisk’s platform parses ingredients in a recipe, and matches it to products at local grocery stores based on user preferences (e.g. “50g of butter, cubed” matched to “250g Tesco Salted Butter”). It then interfaces with the store to fill the users basket with the needed items.
The second is recipe personalisation. Based on user preferences (e.g. disliked ingredients, diet, previous behaviour, deals at a favourite store, and trending recipes based on location), Whisk is able to create personalised recipe feeds, search results, and meal plans.
The third aspect is an Internet-of-Things play. This is seeing Whisk’s data power experiences that connect IoT devices with different parts of a user’s journey. Think: smart fridges connected to recipes.
“As the e-commerce grocery market quickly accelerates across Europe, players are increasingly looking for ways to connect recipe content to grocery retailers and provide consumers with personalized nutrition, planning and purchase options right from the comfort of their kitchen,” says the startup.
Whisk says its platform powers experiences for over 100,000,000 monthly users through the applications of its clients. They include retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, and Tesco who use Whisk to enable online grocery shopping via recipes. On the IoT front, Samsung is using Whisk to build smart food applications that take user preferences, what’s in their fridge, what offers are in the supermarket, and recommends recipes. Other customers include publishers, such as the BBC, and food brands like McCormick, Nestle, Unilever, and General Mills.
Meanwhile, Whisk says it is currently focused on the U.S., U.K. and Australia, and with today’s acquisition will expand services across Europe. “Together, Germany, France and Spain represent a larger e-commerce grocery market than both the U.S. and U.K. individually, with the largest online recipe usage per capita figures in the world,” adds the company.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/whisk-avocando/
While the cryptocurrency world continues to swirl around in a daze of troughs and highs, startups are continuing to make use of the fundamental underlying strengths of blockchain technology.
A new entrant in this race is Tradeshift, a leading players in supply-chain payments and marketplaces, which is today launching its new service which enables supports blockchain-based finance, or writing all transactions to a public ledger in order to create transparency and securing a record.
While this doesn’t involve the use of currencies like actual Bitcoin or Ethereum, “having the transactions on a public ledger ensures full transparency and the ability for companies to prove that they have legit transactions,” says CEO and cofounder Christian Lanng.
SO what this all means is that Tradeshift’s cloud platform will bring supply chain payments, supply chain finance, and blockchain-based early payments together into one unified end-to-end solution, called “Tradeshift Pay”.
They are aiming at a $9 trillion problem, which is the capital trapped in “accounts receivable” as a result of old-fashioned payment practices and the disconnection between large business buyers and their suppliers.
In other words, this could be a boon for small suppliers who find it hard to get paid when their invoices aren’t mapped to a ledger as strong as a blockchain.
With this single unified wallet, buyers can use several payment options, including virtual card payments of invoices and purchase orders, dynamic discounting, supply chain finance through bank partners, or blockchain-based payments.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/tradeshift-fires-up-blockchain-to-address-late-payment-problem/
Google’s recent revamp of its mail service has moved a few old features to new places, but you don’t have to look far.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/technology/personaltech/finding-your-contacts-in-the-new-gmail.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
Hey, this message goes out to all you early-stage startup founders with the drive and determination to take your company all the way to the land of the unicorns. Now’s the time to apply to TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition — the world’s best start-up pitch competition going down at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. If you require incentive, consider this: we bumped the top prize this year to a very cool $100,000. That sure would help your bottom line, now wouldn’t it?
If you’re not tuned in to how Startup Battlefield works, we’ll break it down for you. Seasoned TechCrunch editors review all applications in a highly-competitive vetting process. How competitive? The acceptance rate ranges from 3 to 6 percent. Factors that influence the decision include the team, the product and the market potential. Anywhere from 15-30 pre-Series A startups will make the final cut. This is a good time to point out that competing in Startup Battlefield doesn’t cost a thing, and that TechCrunch does not charge startups any fees or take any equity.
All competing teams receive free expert pitch training from the Startup Battlefield team who, trust us, have seen it all when it comes to startup pitch competitions. You’ll be primed and ready for round one where you’ll deliver a six-minute pitch and demo to a panel of expert judges — and then answer any questions they may have. The cream of the crop — roughly five teams — will advance to round two for a repeat pitch performance in front of a fresh set of judges.
Every exciting, heart-pounding minute takes place in front of a live audience numbering in the thousands, and we live-stream it to the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And it’ll be available later on-demand.
But the benefits of competing go far beyond winning the $100,000 cash prize. More than 400 media outlets will attend Disrupt SF’18, and an intense media spotlight will shine brightly on all Startup Battlefield contestants. Just making it into the initial Startup Battlefield cohort can draw significant investor interest. Aircall, a cloud-based call center solution, stands as a prime example.
The French startup competed in round one of Startup Battlefield SF 2015. It didn’t make the finals, but the company just received another round of funding to the tune of $29 million. Since its debut at Startup Battlefield three years ago, the company has gone on to raise a total of $40.5 million. Not too shabby for an “also-ran.”
All startups who compete will join the ranks of the Startup Battlefield alumni community. This impressive group of over 800 companies has collectively raised more than $8 billion in funding and produced more than 100 exits. Companies like Mint, Dropbox, Yammer, Fitbit, Getaround and Cloudflare — just to drop a few names. Networking as part of this community has its advantages.
So many reasons to apply, and we haven’t even talked about all the other fabulous happenings at Disrupt SF. More than 10,000 attendees will stream through Startup Alley, home to more than 1,200 of the best early-stage startups around. Twelve different tech tracks, four stages of unique programming, speakers, Q & A Sessions, after parties and world-class networking — made even easier with CrunchMatch, our curated investor-to-startup matching platform.
Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. Apply to Startup Battlefield. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/launch-with-techcrunch-in-the-startup-battlefield-competition-at-disrupt-sf-2018/
TechCrunch is headed to Germany yet again to host Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. We simply love this city’s startup scene, one of the most innovative and fastest-growing in Europe. If you’re a founder, investor, hacker or tech leader, you can’t afford to miss Disrupt Berlin. You also can’t afford to miss our limited-time offer on Innovator passes: two for €695. Sign up for our newsletter, and we’ll notify you when we release them into the wild.
What can you expect at Disrupt Berlin? We pack a lot of amazing programming into our two-day conference. For starters, there’s Startup Alley, the exhibition floor where, last year, more than 400 early-stage startups displayed an incredible array of tech products, services and talent. With more than 2,600 attendees passing through the Alley, you won’t find a better way to get your company in front of investors, potential partners, customers and the media. Who knows, attendees might even choose your startup as a WildCard company, which means you get to compete in the Startup Battlefield.
You know Startup Battlefield, right? That’s where you go head-to-head against 15-30 pre-Series A startups and compete for the coveted Disrupt Cup, bragging rights, massive media exposure, investor attention and, oh yeah, a $50,000 equity-free grand prize. Keep checking our site or — even better — sign up for our newsletter so you’ll know the minute we open applications to compete in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin.
We’re in the process of building out our roster of speakers and, as always, it promises to be an exciting array of European and international tech luminaries, VC experts, movers, makers and shakers determined to push the boundaries of technology. Want to recommend someone as a speaker or a judge? Check out our speaker nomination page.
What do you get with a Disrupt Berlin Innovator pass? We’re so glad you asked. You’ll have access to three distinct stages of content: The Main Stage, the Next Stage and the Q&A Stage. You’ll have full use of the Disrupt attendee list and be able to contact attendees via the Disrupt Mobile App. Plus, you can attend interactive workshops, explore Startup Alley and cut loose (or get down to fun networking) at our TC After Party. And, after the event, you’ll have access to our library of event video content.
Disrupt Berlin takes place on November 29-30, 2018 at the Arena Berlin. We’re releasing a very limited number of two-for-one Innovator passes for €695, but that special price won’t stick around for long. If you want to get the best deal, sign up for the newsletter and we’ll let you know when these passes become available. Come join us in Berlin!
Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/21/sign-up-today-2-for-1-innovator-passes-to-disrupt-berlin/
After taking tens of thousands of crowd-funding pre-orders for a high-end pair of “3D sound” headphones, audio startup Ossic announced this weekend that it is shutting down the company and backers will not be receiving refunds.
The company raised $2.7 million on Kickstarter and $3.2 million on Indiegogo for their Ossic X headphones which they pitched as a pair of high-end head-tracking headphones that would be perfect for listening to 3D audio, especially in a VR environment. While the company also raised a “substantial seed investment,” in a letter on the Ossic website, the company blamed the slow adoption of virtual reality alongside their crowdfunding campaign stretch goals which bogged down their R&D team.
“This was obviously not our desired outcome. The team worked exceptionally hard and created a production-ready product that is a technological and performance breakthrough. To fail at the 5 yard-line is a tragedy. We are extremely sorry that we cannot deliver your product and want you to know that the team has done everything possible including investing our own savings and working without salary to exhaust all possibilities.”
We have reached out to the company for additional details.
Through January 2017, the San Diego company had received more than 22,000 pre-orders for their Ossic X headphones. This past January, Ossic announced that they had shipped out the first units to the 80 backers in their $999 developer tier headphones. In that same update, the company said they would enter “mass production” by late spring 2018.
In the end, after tens of thousands of pre-orders, Ossic only built 250 pairs of headphones and only shipped a few dozen to Kickstarter backers.
Crowdfunding campaign failures for hardware products are rarely shocking, but often the collapse comes from the company not being able to acquire additional funding from outside investors. Here, Ossic appears to have been misguided from the start and even with nearly $6 million in crowdfunding and seed funding, which they said nearly matched that number, they were left unable to begin large-scale manufacturing. The company said in their letter, that it would likely take more than $2 million in additional funding to deliver the existing backlog of pre-orders.
Backers are understandably quite upset about not receiving their headphones. A group of over 1,200 Facebook users have joined a recently-created page threatening a class action lawsuit against the team.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/after-tens-of-thousands-of-pre-orders-high-end-3d-headphones-startup-ossic-disappears/
When we first told you about AT&T’s LTE-M Button, the information was socked away in a deluge of AWS Re:Invent announcements. The telecom giant was a bit more upfront when announcing its availability earlier this week — but just a bit.
After all, it’s not a direct-to-consumer device. Unlike the product-branded hunk of plastic you can presently pick up from Amazon to refresh your supply of Goldfish crackers and Tide Pods, this one’s currently open to developers at companies looking to build their own. What it does have going for it, however, is LTE-M, a cheaper, lower cost version of 4G that’s set to power a future generation of IoT devices.
That means it can be used for your standard Dash-like activities — letting customers replenish items with a press — and it can also be implemented in some more interesting scenarios, out of the bounds of regular WiFi. AT&T offers up a couple of case uses, including customer feedback in public venues and use in places like construction sites where home/office Wifi isn’t an option.
Of course, without the direct retail feedback loop, it’s not really a Dash competitor — and besides, AWS is helping power the thing, so Amazon’s still getting a kickback here. Oh, and then there’s the price — the buttons start at $30 a piece, which amounts to a lot of Tide Pods. As such, we likely won’t see them take off too quickly, but they do provide an interesting usage as AT&T looks to LTE-M to push IoT outside of the home.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/att-launches-its-lte-powered-amazon-dash-style-button/
Although bitcoin and blockchain technology may not take up quite as much mental bandwidth for the general public as it did just a few months ago, companies in the space continue to rake in capital from investors.
One of the latest to do so is Circle, which recently announced a $110 million Series E round led by bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer Bitmain. Other participating investors include Tusk Ventures, Pantera Capital, IDG Capital Partners, General Catalyst, Accel Partners, Digital Currency Group, Blockchain Capital and Breyer Capital.
This round vaults Circle into an exclusive club of crypto companies that are valued, in U.S. dollars, at $1 billion or more in their most recent venture capital round. According to Crunchbase data, Circle was valued at $2.9 billion pre-money, up from a $420 million pre-money valuation in its Series D round, which closed in May 2016. According to Crunchbase data, only Coinbase and Robinhood — a mobile-first stock-trading platform which recently made a big push into cryptocurrency trading — were in the crypto-unicorn club, which Circle has now joined.
But that’s not the only milestone for the world of venture-backed cryptocurrency and blockchain startups.
Back in February, Crunchbase News predicted that the amount of money raised in old-school venture capital rounds by blockchain and blockchain-adjacent startups in 2018 would surpass the amount raised in 2017. Well, it’s only May, and it looks like the prediction panned out.
In the chart below, you’ll find worldwide venture deal and dollar volume for blockchain and blockchain-adjacent companies. We purposely excluded ICOs, including those that had traditional VCs participate, and instead focused on venture deals: angel, seed, convertible notes, Series A, Series B and so on. The data displayed below is based on reported data in Crunchbase, which may be subject to reporting delays, and is, in some cases, incomplete.
A little more than five months into 2018, reported dollar volume invested in VC rounds raised by blockchain companies surpassed 2017’s totals. Not just that, the nearly $1.3 billion in global dollar volume is greater than the reported funding totals for the 18 months between July 1, 2016 and New Year’s Eve in 2017.
And although Circle’s Series E round certainly helped to bump up funding totals year-to-date, there were many other large funding rounds throughout 2018:
There were, of course, many other large rounds over the past five months. After all, we had to get to $1.3 billion somehow.
All of this is to say that investor interest in the blockchain space shows no immediate signs of slowing down, even as the price of bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies hover at less than half of their all-time highs. Considering that regulators are still figuring out how to treat most crypto assets, massive price volatility and dubious real-world utility of the technology, it may surprise some that investors at the riskiest end of the risk capital pool invest as much as they do in blockchain.
Like in our February analysis, we first created a list of companies in Crunchbase’s bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain, cryptocurrency and virtual currency categories. We added to this list any companies that use those keywords, as well as “digital currency,” “utility token” and “security token” that weren’t previously included in the above categories. After de-duplicating this list, we merged this set of companies with funding rounds data in Crunchbase.
Please note that for some entries in Crunchbase’s round data, the amount of capital raised isn’t known. And, as previously noted, Crunchbase’s data is subject to reporting delays, especially for seed-stage companies. Accordingly, actual funding totals are likely higher than reported here.
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/with-at-least-1-3-billion-invested-globally-in-2018-vc-funding-for-blockchain-blows-past-2017-totals/
On any given day in the United States, more than 450,000 people are behind bars awaiting their constitutionally mandated fair trial. None of them have been convicted of a crime — they’ve been accused of committing a crime, but no formal ruling of guilt or innocence has been made. That means these hundreds of thousands of people are incarcerated simply because they don’t have the financial means to post bail.
Bail was originally designed to incentivize people to show up for their court dates, but it has since evolved into a system that separates the financially well-off from the poor. It requires arrested individuals to pay money in order to get out of jail while they await trial. For those who can’t afford bail, they wind up having to sit in jail, which means they may be at risk of missing rent payments, losing their jobs and failing to meet other responsibilities.
Money bail is all too often a common condition to secure release from jail while a case is in progress. Cash bail systems result in leaving many people incarcerated, even though they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
The cash bail system in the United States is one of the greatest injustices in the criminal justice system, ACLU Deputy National Political Director Udi Ofer tells TechCrunch. Bail reform, Ofer says, is a “key way to achieve” the goals of challenging racial disparities in the criminal justice system and ending mass incarceration.
As we explored in “The other pipeline,” the criminal justice system in the United States is deeply rooted in racism and a history of oppression. Black and Latino people comprise about 1.5 million of the total 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. adult correctional system, or 67 percent of the prison population, while making up just 37 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Sentencing Project.
With a criminal justice system that disproportionately affects people of color, it’s no wonder why the cash bail system does the same. For one, people of color are 25 percent more likely than white people to be denied the option of bail, according to a pre-trial study by Dr. Traci Schlesinger. And for the black people who are given the option to pay bail, the amount is 35 percent higher on average than bail for white men, according to a 2010 study.
The national felony bail median is $10,000. For those who can’t afford it, they have to rely on bail bond agencies, which charge a non-refundable fee to pay the required bail amount on the person’s behalf. The bail bond companies, which are backed by insurance companies, collect between $1.4 billion and $2.4 billion a year, according to the ACLU and Color of Change.
Source: ACLU/Color of Change
And if bail bond companies are out of reach, those who are sitting in jail awaiting trial are more likely to be convicted of the crime they were charged with. The non-felony conviction rate rose from 50 percent to 92 percent for those jailed pre-trial, according to a study by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. Along the way, leading up to the trial, some prosecutors incentivize people to plead guilty to the charges even if they’re innocent.
“It’s time to end our nation’s system of cash bail that lets the size of your wallet determine whether you are granted freedom or stay locked up in jail,” Ofer says. “Money should never decide a person’s freedom yet that’s exactly what happens every day in the United States.”
Pre-trial detention is also costly to local cities, counties and taxpayers. It costs about $38 million a day to keep these largely nonviolent people behind bars, according to the Pretrial Justice Institute. Annually, that comes out to about $14 billion to jail unconvicted people.
“The only people benefiting from bail is the for-profit bail industry,” Ofer said. “If we’re ever going to end mass incarceration in the United States, then we need to end cash bail.”
Across the nation, bail reform has made its way into a handful of states. New Jersey’s bail reform law took effect last January; since then, its daily jail population has dropped 17.2 percent, and courts have imposed cash bail on just 33 defendants out of 33,400, according to the ACLU.
The ACLU itself is working on bail reform in 38 states, including California, where Ofer says he is optimistic reform will happen this year. Right now, a pre-trial release bill, Senate Bill 10, is up for consideration in the Assembly. The bill argues California should ensure people awaiting trial are not incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to pay bail. The bill also advocates for counties to establish pre-trial services agencies to better determine if people are fit to be released.
The bill, introduced by Senators Bob Hertzberg and others, is backed by the ACLU and Essie Justice Group, an Oakland-based organization that advocates for actual justice in the criminal justice system.
“Today we have a system that allows for people to be released pre-trial if they have enough money to afford their bail,” Essie Justice Group founder Gina Clayton tells TechCrunch. “Everyone else is required to sit inside of a cage without any way out.”
Essie Justice Group works mostly with and for women who have incarcerated loved ones. Often, the only way out for people is help from family or a plea deal, Clayton says.
“When we see people making the bail, we see that women are going into tremendous debt and are also beholden to an industry that has time and time again been cited and known to practice in quite an incredibly despicable way in terms of coercing and harassing their customers,” Clayton says. “When we think about who are the people who know about what’s going on with bail, it’s black and brown women in this country.”
For the past two years, Essie Justice Group held an action around Mother’s Day, with the goal of bailing moms out of jail or immigration detention. Last year’s action led to release of 30 women.
Photo via Essie Justice Group
The short the answer is maybe. Earlier this month, Google banned ads for bail bonds services, which Clayton says is the largest step any corporation has taken on behalf of people who have loved ones in jail. But while tech can help in some ways, Clayton has some concerns with additional for-profit entities entering the criminal justice system.
“There are definitely tech solutions that I’m very against,” Clayton said, but declined to comment on which ones in particular. “I will say that my energy around this doesn’t come from an imagined place. I’m seeing it happen. One of the things we’re seeing is companies who are interested in bail reform because they see another opportunity to make money off of families. Like, ‘let this person out, but have them, at a cost, check in with people I hire to do this fancy but expensive drug testing three times a week, pay for an ankle shackle or bracelet and GPS monitoring.’ I think the companies that are making money off of those types of things are the ones we need to be wary of.”
There is, however, one for-profit company that immediately jumped to Clayton’s mind as being one doing actual good in the criminal justice space. That company is Uptrust, which provides text message reminders to people regarding court dates.
“I think that is a really great addition to the landscape,” Clayton says. “The reason I’m a proponent of theirs is because I understand their politics and I know what they won’t do, which is take it a step further or get involved with getting incentivized to add on bells and whistles that look less like freedom for people but more revenue for them.”
Uptrust, founded by Jacob Sills and Elijah Gwynm, aims to help people make their court dates. While the movies like to depict flight risks and people skipping town ahead of their court dates, failure to appear in court often comes down to a lack of transportation, work conflicts, not receiving a reminder, childcare or poor time management, Sills tells TechCrunch.
That’s where the idea came to humanize the system a bit more, by enabling public defenders to more easily connect with their clients. Uptrust is two-way in nature and reminds people on behalf of the public defender about court dates. Clients can also communicate any issues they may have about making it to court.
“If the public defender knows the client has an issue, they can usually get court moved,” Sills says. “But if they don’t have the information, they’re not going to lie on behalf of clients.”
Because public defenders don’t make much money, Uptrust doesn’t charge very much, Sills says.
“But they really care about the client and one of the things we saw with this was we needed to change the whole front end of the system to be less adversarial and more human,” Sills says.
In addition to text reminders, Uptrust enables public defenders to assist with other needs clients may have.
“A lot of stuff around bail reform is around risk assessment rather than need assessment,” Sills tells me. “But we saw a lot of these individuals have needs, like helps with rides, child care or reminders.”
Public defenders who are invested in the care of their clients can remind them via Uptrust to do things like ask for time off work or schedule child care.
For the end-user, the client, Uptrust is all text-based. For the public defenders, Uptrust offers a software solution that integrates into their case management systems.
Since launching in the summer of 2016 in California’s Contra Costa County, the court appearance rate improved from 80 percent to 95 percent, Sills says. To date, Uptrust has supported 20,000 people with a five percent FTA rate.
“As we improve product, if we can get [the FTA rate] down to 3 percent, you really can start taking that data and pushing forth major policy change,” Sills says.
Uptrust’s goal is to shift from risk assessment to needs assessment and ensure people are supported throughout their interactions with the criminal justice system.
“Our view is in terms of bail reform, we need to make sure there’s not a proliferation of things like ankle monitors and whatnot,” Sills says. “For us, success is really being a subcontractor to the community as well as working with the government. I think there’s a huge risk in bail reform as it relates to technology because people see it as a big business opportunity, If a company replaces the government, they may not have the community’s best interest in mind. So it’s important to keep in mind they have the community’s best interest in mind.”
Similar to Uptrust, a tech organization called Appolition works by operating within the confines of the system. Appolition, founded by Dr. Kortney Ryan Zieger, enables people to funnel their spare change into the National Bail Out fund. As of April, Appolition has facilitated over $130,000 to go toward bail relief. Ziegler was not available for comment for this story.
Promise, on the other hand, aims to provide an alternative to the cash bail system. In March, Promise raised a $3 million round led by First Round Capital with participation from from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.
The idea is to offer counties and local governments an alternative approach to holding people behind bars simply because they can’t afford bail. With Promise, case managers can monitor compliance with court orders and better keep tabs on people via the app. GPS monitoring is also an option, albeit a controversial one.
Let’s say you get arrested and end up having a bail hearing. Instead of asking you to pay bail, the public defender could suggest a pre-trial release with Promise. From there, Promise would work with the public defender and your case manager to determine your care plan.
“It’s clear that our values are about keeping people out of jail,” Promise CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins told me on an episode of CTRL+T. “Like, we’re running a company but we fundamentally believe that not just it’s more cost effective but that it’s the right thing to do.”
https://embed.simplecast.com/cd639b7b?color=3d3d3d
Instead of a county jail paying $190 per day per person, Ellis-Lamkins said, Promise charges some counties just $17 per person per day. In some cases, Promise charges even less per person.
It’s that for-profit model that worries Clayton.
“Whenever you bring in the for-profit ethos in a criminal justice space, I think we need to be careful,” Clayton says.
She didn’t explicitly call out any companies. In fact, she said she doesn’t feel ready to make a judgment on Promise just yet. But she has a general concern of tech solutions that “dazzle and distract system actors who we really need to hold accountable and see operate in more systemic, holistic ways.”
Solutions, Clayton says, look like social safety nets like hospitals and clinics instead of jails.
“If we want to really move ourselves away from this path we’ve been on,” Clayton says, “which is towards normalizing state control of people then we should be really careful that our system that once looked like slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration doesn’t then become tech surveillance of all people.”
from iFeeltech IT News Mix4 https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/bail-reform-has-a-complex-relationship-with-tech/
