Month: July 2018

There’s no lack of on-demand fresh meal services in Paris and its area. But what about the rest of France? FoodChéri has launched a new offering called Seazon to deliver fresh meals with no additive every week.

Seazon is a subscription service that delivers anywhere in France. You decide how many meals per week you want (4, 6, 8 or 10), and you decide what you like. You can also filter options if you’re vegetarian or vegan.

After that, you’ll start getting a weekly delivery from a refrigerated truck with all your meals. This could work particularly well for lunch at work. Maybe you don’t have time to cook lunch boxes or maybe you work in a company with few lunch options.

Seazon offers the same meals as the ones you can find on FoodChéri. The company uses fresh ingredients and organic food as much as possible. When it comes to sourcing, the company works directly with local farmers.

FoodChéri originally started as an online-only restaurant and delivery service. The company offers a dozen different options as well as a handful of starters and desserts. The company cooks everything in house and delivers to your office or home in half an hour or an hour.

You can still order on FoodChéri if you live or work in Paris or near Paris — the existing service is not going away. Back in January, corporate catering giant Sodexo acquired FoodChéri without folding the service into another Sodexo offering.

While many big French companies rely on Sodexo for their cafeteria, many small companies don’t have a cafeteria. FoodChéri lets you have a cafeteria experience without requiring a big kitchen and an expensive contract with a catering company.

This is a highly competitive market in Paris as there have been quite a few full-stack food startups over the past few years. Frichti and Nestor also have a somewhat similar approach. Popchef pivoted to serving corporate clients exclusively. 62degrés got acquired by La Belle Vie. Le Zeste’s team joined Frichti.

Following the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal and the more recent discovery of a Facebook app that had been leaking data on 120 million users, Facebook is today announcing a number of API changes aimed at better protecting user information. The changes will impact multiple developer-facing APIs, including those used to create social experiences on the site, as well as those for media partners, and more.

Some of the APIs are being shuttered for low adoption, while others will require app reviews going forward, Facebook said.

The company said the following API restrictions were now being put into place:

• Graph API Explorer App: Facebook will deprecate its test app today. Developers will need to use their own apps’ access tokens to test their queries on the Graph API Explorer going forward.
• Profile Expression Kit: This let developers build apps that allowed people to jazz up their profile photos or create profile videos. This one seems to be lumped in the group of shutdowns not because of misuse potential, but because it had low adoption. It will shut down October 1st.
• Media Solutions APIs: On August 1, Facebook is shutting down Topic Search, Topic Insights and Topic Feed and Public Figure APIs due to low usage. It already deprecated the Trending API and Signal tool for journalists, the Trending Topics product, and the Hashtag Voting for interactive TV experiences. Going forward, Facebook says public content discovery APIs will be limited to page content and public posts on certain verified profiles.
• Pages API: Developers can search using the Pages API again, but will need feature permissions to Page Public Content Access, which can only be obtained through the app review process.
• Marketing API: Developers will have to go through an app review before they can use this API.
• Leads Ads Retrieval: Facebook is introducing new app review permissions for this, too.
• Live Video APIs: Will also have new app review permissions.

The changes were detailed in a post published the Facebook Newsroom, which hinted they would not be the last.

The company has been auditing its app ecosystem in an effort to find other apps that may have been leaking data. Related to this effort, it previously announced a series of other API changes aimed at getting a better handle on how Facebook apps can access and use people’s information.

This latest batch of API changes doesn’t include some of the higher-profile APIs – like when Facebook made changes to Facebook Login, Groups, Events and other APIs back in April. However, it does indicate that the developer platform review process is still underway, and more APIs will likely still be addressed in the future.

After years of teasing, Original Stitch has officially launched their Bodygram service and will be rolling it out this summer. The system can scan your body based on front and side photos and will create custom shirts with your own precise measurements.

“Bodygram gives you full body measurements as accurate as taken by professional tailors from just two photos on your phone. Simply take a front photo and a side photo and upload to our cloud and you will receive a push notification within minutes when your Bodygram sizing report is ready,” said CEO Jin Koh. “In the sizing report you will find your full body measurements including neck, sleeve, shoulder, chest, waist, hip, etc. Bodygram is capable of producing sizing result within 99% accuracy compared to professional human tailors.”

[gallery ids="1666969,1666970,1666971,1666972,1666973,1666974"]

The technology is a clever solution to the biggest problem in custom clothing: fit. While it’s great to find a service that will tailor your clothing based on your own measurements, often these measurements are slightly off and can affect the cut of the shirt or pants. Right now, Koh said, his team offers free returns if the custom shirts don’t fit.

Further, the technology is brand new and avoids many of the pitfalls of the original body scanning tech. For example, Bodygram doesn’t require you to get into a Spandex onesie like most systems do and it can capture 40 measurements with only two full-body photos.

“Bodygram is the first sizing technology that works on your phone capable of giving you highly accurate sizing result from just two photos with you wearing normal clothing on any background,” said Koh. “Legacy technologies on the market today requires you to wear very tight fitting spandex suit, take 360 photos of you, and require a plain background to work. Other technologies gives you accuracy with 5 inches deviation in accuracy while Bodygram is the first technology to give you sub 1-inch accuracy. We are the first to use both computer vision and machine learning techniques to solve the problem of predicting your body shape underneath the clothes. Once we predicted your body shape we wrote our proprietary algorithm to calculate the circumferences and the length for each part of the body.”

Koh hopes the technology will reduce returns.

“It’s not uncommon to see clothing return rate reaching in the 40%-50% range,” he said. “Apparel clothing sales is among the lowest penetration in online shopping.”

The system can also be used to measure your body over time in order to collect health and weight data as well as help other manufacturers produce products that fit you perfectly. The app will launch this summer on Android and iOS. The company will be licensing the technology to other providers who will be able to create custom fits based on just a few side and front photos. Sales at the company grew 175% this year and they now have 350,000 buyers who are already creating custom shirts.

A number of competitors are in this interesting space, most notably ShapeScale, a company that appeared at TechCrunch Disrupt and promised a full body scan using a robotic scale. This, however, is the first commercial use of standard photos to measure your appendages and thorax and it’s an impressive step forward in the world of custom clothing.

Tesla hit a key milestone in the second quarter, managing to hit a 5,000-per-week production target for its important Model 3 electric vehicle. Remarkably, about 20 percent of the 5,031 Model 3 vehicles made in the past seven days were produced on the company’s GA4, a hastily built general assembly line housed under a massive tent at its Fremont, California factory.

News that Tesla had hit the 5,000-per-week target came out Sunday as the last Model 3 rolled off the assembly line and employees celebrated. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted later that day the company had produced 7,000 vehicles in a week, a figure that includes Model S and X vehicles as well.

On Monday, the company released its production and delivery numbers for the second quarter and provided more detail about how it reached the target.

“We expect that GA3 alone can reach a production rate of 5,000 Model 3s per week soon, but GA4 helped to get us there faster and will also help to exceed that rate,” Tesla said in a statement released Monday.

Tesla reported Monday that it made 28,578 Model 3s in the second quarter more than three times as more than it did in the previous quarter. That figured also overshadowed the combined production of the Model S and X, which stood at 24,761.

Production breakdown for Q2:

• Total: 53,339 vehicles, up 55% from the previous quarter
• Model S and X (the company doesn’t break these out): 24,761
• Model 3: 28,578

The company produced just 2,425 in the fourth quarter.

Delivery breakdown for Q2:

• Total: 40,740
• Model 3: 18,440
• Model S: 10,930
• Model X: 11,370

Tesla has delivered a total of 28,386 Model 3 vehicles since its splashy event in July 2017 when CEO Elon Musk handed out the first vehicles to employees. But the vast majority of those Model 3 vehicles were made in the second quarter of 2018. The company had failed to meet any of its production and delivery targets for the Model 3 up until now.

The company says it expects to produce 6,000 Model 3 vehicles a week by the end of July. Tesla also reaffirmed its cash flow positive outlook for the third and fourth quarters, despite negative pressures from a weaker dollar and likely higher tariffs for vehicles imported into China as well as components procured from China.

Tesla says it target to deliver 100,000 Model S and Model X vehicles in 2018 is unchanged.

Or Arbel doesn’t like spending too much time on design. His startup Yo only let you send your friends the word “Yo” after all. That messaging app made waves with its minimalism, but quickly petered out. Now Arbel is back with a new company called Anima that could let app designers build more complex products in less time.

Anima makes a set of plug-ins for popular interface design platform Sketch. Auto-Layout creates responsive designs. Launchpad exports Sketch designs to HTML. Without funding, the bootstrapped startup’s products have quietly amassed 100,000 users, and several thousand paying customers

Today, Anima is announcing it’s been admitted to Y Combinator’s prestigious accelerator. And it’s launching Timeline, which lets allows interactive designs made in Sketch to be exported directly into functioning code. That’s a process that usually requires frustrating back and forth exchanges between designers and coders.

“As it turns out, communicating design specs in the form of mockups, GIFs, and even hand-waving, leads to details getting lost in translation” Arbel tells me. ” Imagine a painter that instead of painting themselves, gives verbal instructions to someone else for how to paint their art. Obviously, that’s less than ideal. This is exactly what the process is like.” But with Timeline, software serves instead of a software engineer serves as the middleman between designers and code.

“If there is one thing I don’t like to do, it’s repetitive work” Arbel tells me. “Creative people are much happier when working on creative tasks rather than repetitive, mundane work.”

One strategy to avoid running in circles is to work with a team you trust. Arbel and his co-founders have been building startups together for a decade. He met Avishay Cohen and Michal Cohen at Ben-Guriun University in Israel after those two finished their military service.

Eventually, Arbel’s expanded team of engineers was working on a complex user interface for two months. Then a week before launch, “the designer shows up with a long list of UI bugs.  one th, the designer shows up with a long list of UI bugs one week before launch. To the engineers, the implementation looked exactly like the specification, but to the designer, everything was completely off.” Arbel believed there had to be a better way.

Now, Anima’s products are being used by individual designers at Fortune 500 companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook, and the startup is profitable. Meanwhile, Arbel says “I wound down Yo 2 years ago as we failed to find a product-market fit” but notes that “Yo is operating in auto-pilot mode. A few thousand of Yo’s avid users are still using and loving the product.” Yo recently asked those loyalists to back a Patreon monthly donation campaign to keep it running.

Still, Timeline will have a tough time living up to the standards of these dominant companies. Turning design nuance into smooth code is exceedingly difficult. Other startups like Invision and Zeplin already offer products to simplify the design-to-code handoff. And building an entire startup on top of Sketch could be risky, as decisions that impact Anima’s products are beyond its control.

Arbel is trying to mitigate those risks. It’s planning to build plugins for other design platforms. And he believes that in “the component-based movement led by React, there is a unique opportunity to use this technology to make this process a hundred times better.”

Some potential clients might not have total faith in a design tool from the inventor of Yo. But if Anima can save them money, designers might give it a shot. “The most expensive resource in tech is engineers time” Arbel concludes, claiming that “We shorten a process that takes 2 weeks to a click of a button.”

Suse, one of the longest-running commercial Linux distributors and, these days, a major player in the open-source infrastructure and management space, has been through a few ownership changes in recent years. Micro Focus acquired Suse from The Attachmate Group back in 2014, which itself had acquired Novell, the then-owner of Suse, in 2010. Today, Micro Focus announced that Suse is changing owners yet again, as private equity firm and venture capital fund EQT is acquiring Suse.

While the exact terms of the deal where not disclosed, EQT says the deal valued Suse at $2.535 billion.

Unlike other companies that have gone through this number of ownership changes, Suse has emerged stronger. What was once a solid Linux distribution for the enterprise is now a player in various open-source fields, with a focus on software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions, as well as other managed cloud services. The company currently has 1,400 employees and in 2017 it had sales of $320 million.

While the company managed to thrive under the Micro Focus umbrella, Micro Focus itself has hit some rough patches. Its last earnings report was a major disappointment, not in the least because the assets that it acquired from Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $8.8 billion in 2016 failed to move the needle. It’s maybe no surprise then that Micro Focus decided to sell off Suse in an effort to refocus its business.

It’s worth noting that EQT makes for an interesting acquirer. The firm’s current portfolio includes a range of technology companies, though you probably haven’t heard of any of them, as well as a motley assortment of consumer goods businesses, real estate groups and healthcare services, with a few energy companies thrown into the mix.

“We were impressed by the business’ strong performance over the last years as well as by its strong culture and heritage as a pioneer in the open source space,” said EQT partner Johannes Reichel in today’s announcement. “These characteristics correspond well to EQT’s DNA of supporting and building strong and resilient companies, and driving growth.” EQT’s focus so far hasn’t been on open-source companies, though, so it’ll be interesting to see how this will play out. Because Suse will essentially remain independent, though, chances are we won’t see any changes in its involvement with the open-source community.

Instagram is turning the Time Well Spent philosophy into features to help users avoid endless scrolling and distraction by notifications. Today, Instagram is rolling out its “You’re All Caught – You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days” warning in the feed which TechCrunch broke the news about in May. Past that notice will only be posts that iOS and Android users have already seen or that were posted more than 48 hours ago. This will help Instagram’s 1 billion monthly users stop fiendishly scrolling in search of new posts scattered by the algorithm. While sorting the feed has made it much better at displaying the most interesting posts, it can also make people worry they’ve missed something. This warning should give them peace of mind.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch has learned that both Facebook and Instagram are prototyping Do Not Disturb features that let users shut off notifications from the apps for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, or until they’re turned back on manually.  WhatsApp Beta and Matt Navarra spotted the Instagram and Facebook Do Not Disturb features. Facebook is also considering allowing users to turn off sound or vibration on its notifications. Both apps have these Do Not Disturb features buried in their code and may have begun testing them.

Both Facebook and Instagram declined to comment on building new Do Not Disturb features. “You’re All Caught Up” could prevent extra scrolling that doesn’t provide much value that could make Instagram show up atop your list of biggest time sinks. And an in-app Do Not Disturb mode with multiple temporary options could keep you from permanently disabling Instagram or Facebook’s

 

We referenced Instagram Do Not Disturb our scoop about Instagram building a Usage Insights dashboard detailing how much time you spent on the app. Both Facebook and Instagram are preparing these screens that show you how much time you’ve spent on their apps per day, in average over the past week, and that let you set a daily limit after which you’ll get a notification reminding you to look up from your screen.

When we first reported on Usage Insights, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom has tweeted a link to the article, confirming that Instagram was getting behind the Time Well Spent movement. “It’s true . . . We’re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram – any time should be positive and intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and it’s the responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.”

Now we’re seeing this perspective manifest itself in Instagram’s product. Instagram’s interest conveniently comes just as Apple and Google are releasing Screen Time and Digital Well-Being tools as part of the next versions of their mobile operating systems. These will show you which apps you’re spending the most time in, and set limits on their use. By self-policing now, Instagram and Facebook could avoid being out by iOS and Android as the enemies of your attention.

In other recent Instagram news:

BuildDirect, the Vancouver, BC.-based online home improvement store, went through a tough transition in recent months. In late October 2017, the company’s co-founder and CEO Jeff Booth stepped back from his job days before the company filed for the Canadian equivalent of bankruptcy protection. It then installed former Amazon executive Dan Park, who had only joined the company only a few weeks before, as its new CEO. Under Park, BuildDirect successfully restructured its debt and balance sheet and by late March of this year, it emerged from bankruptcy protection with new funding in place to help it find its feet again.

Unsurprisingly, this process led to much soul-searching at the company, which had long been seen as a high-flying success story. “What contributed to us exiting [the bankruptcy process] so successfully was that the business model was sound,” Park told me. “But what happens when a startup evolves in its journey is that it takes on loans and debt to fund its operations and it had some of that build-up of debt.” Now, however, Park argues, BuildDirect finds itself in the “strongest position in its 19-year history.”

With this process behind it, it’s maybe no surprise that BuildDirect is now looking ahead and rethinking its overall strategy. To do so, the company is announcing the hire of four new executives. Ken Stanick, the former Director of Sales & Channels at Amazon Business, is joining as the company’s new chief revenue officer, a new role at BuildDirect. Mukund Mohan, who was previously a director at Amazon Business and responsible for its automated quoting and analytics products, is joining as the company’s new CTO. Godwin Pavamani, the former Global Product Leader for Prime Samples and Head of Vendor Management PC/IT category at Amazon is now BuildDirect’s Chief Merchandising Officer and the GM of its marketplace, while Stephanie Roberts, formerly the CFO of Specialized Bicycle Components and Old Navy, is joining as the interim CFO.

With this team in place, Park believes that BuildDirect is now in a position to execute on a strategy that looks a bit different from its existing model. Historically, BuildDirect always focused on both homeowners and professionals (with a bit of B2B business thrown in), but going forward, the focus will shift away from homeowners who are looking to renovate their homes.

The reason for this is pretty straightforward, as Park told me. “What we found with homeowners when we looked at the data, even those with high discretionary income, they would make maybe one home remodel in their lifetime,” he explains. Pros, however, almost guarantee repeat purchases. And while homeowners who are attempting a DIY remodel need a lot of handholding, pros are somewhat easier to work with.

So going ahead, BuildDirect will focus its energies more directly on marketing to these professionals, though it will still sell to homeowners, too. That means a bit of rebranding and a site redesign, but also new services that are specifically tailored toward general contractors, flooring installers, interior designers and other home remodeling pros.

Park also noted that he plans to bring more ancillary services to the site that maybe help homeowners connect with the right pros, a model that’s working quite well for the likes of Houzz. And indeed, BuildDirect may end up partnering with existing services that already have an established userbase. In addition to that, the company will also continue to build out its logistics product, the Gateway Supply Chain, which is open to all shippers who want to deliver bulky goods from anywhere in the world to consumers.

Spotify is the latest tech company to join the ‘Lite’ app party after a data-friendly version of its music streaming app surfaced for Android devices.

‘Spotify Lite’ — which was first spotted by the eagle eyes at Android Police — is designed to take up less space on smartphones and to consume less data, too. That’s particularly important for cheaper smartphones, which tend to have less memory, and people who use metered mobile data . In that respect, the app is just 15MB in size, as opposed to 100MB for the main Spotify app, while it also tracks the amount of data that the app uses each month.

However, like most things in life, there’s a compromise here… although we can’t quite be sure exactly what. That’s because the app is being trialed in Brazil only — tough luck if you live elsewhere and want to get it — although Android Police got hold of an SDK which it said shows the app is devoid of some key features. That apparently includes — or, rather, doesn’t include — offline playback and Spotify Connect for streaming to other devices. It looks like Lite app users can’t select specific songs and must instead rely on the shuffle button, even if they are a Spotify Premium subscriber.

Of course, the app is in beta right now so that list of missing features may change as/when it gets a full worldwide release. For now, app tracking firm Sensor Tower suggests Spotify Lite has racked up just 4,000 downloads so this is very much a test deployment.

Here’s Spotify’s non-committal statement on the Lite app.

“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We aren’t going to comment on specific tests at this time,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The company has tested other apps on Android in the past, like Spotify Hopper back in 2016, and more recently, a pared-down radio app called Spotify Stations.

Spotify Lite isn’t the first time Spotify has helped its users save on data consumption. The company added a low-data mode to its service in April as part of a wider product launch focused on bringing more value to its free-tier users. The Lite app could add another element to attract more users, giving Spotify an additional competitive advantage over rivals like Apple Music and Pandora.

Instagram has been incredibly busy of late, announcing IGTV, Instagram Lite and a slate of features including Stories Soundtracks. But the Facebook-owned photo sharing service doesn’t show any signs of letting up.

Android Police today noted that Instagram is testing a feature that would allow users to post questions to their followers and receive answers.

Instagram already offers the ability to publish polls to followers with multiple-choice options for answering. But this test seems to point toward the option to offer lengthier responses to user’s questions.

One user in Indonesia sent a screencap of the feature in to Android Police (pictured above), and a user in Spain also spotted the feature. That said, we still have very little information on just how this might work.

Right now, when a user posts to their Story, their followers can respond via DM. With more open-ended questions and responses, it’s unclear if responses will still come in via DM or be bundled together as part of the story.

The latter seems more in keeping with Instagram’s push to make Stories as interactive as possible. The open-ended question could serve as a jumping off point for a collaborative story comprised of everyone’s responses.

That said, this feature hasn’t been confirmed by Instagram, though we’ve reached out and will update the post when we learn more.