Month: July 2018

Microsoft is teasing new Xbox hardware and accessories will launch at Gamescom in Germany next month. Details are limited. The word comes from a Microsoft blog post about the event in which it lists the date and time of the August 21 event, which will feature “lots of news, all-new Xbox hardware and accessories, and features on upcoming titles.”

Don’t expect the successor to the Xbox One, though.

There are several options here and most signs point to a new Xbox Elite controller. Rumors have been swirling that the updated controller will feature USB-C charging, Windows 10 compatibility and updated mechanisms for the triggers and buttons. The timing is right, too. If announced in the middle of August, Microsoft will have plenty of time to get the expensive controller into retail stores for the holiday season.

Microsoft just released the 4K Xbox One X last year. This model is still competitive with the latest Playstation 4. A lower price, or a redesigned low-end Xbox One S, could also be on tap.

Whatever is announced on August 21 at Gamescom, we’ll pass along the word.

Microsoft is teasing new Xbox hardware and accessories will launch at Gamescom in Germany next month. Details are limited. The word comes from a Microsoft blog post about the event in which it lists the date and time of the August 21 event, which will feature “lots of news, all-new Xbox hardware and accessories, and features on upcoming titles.”

Don’t expect the successor to the Xbox One, though.

There are several options here and most signs point to a new Xbox Elite controller. Rumors have been swirling that the updated controller will feature USB-C charging, Windows 10 compatibility and updated mechanisms for the triggers and buttons. The timing is right, too. If announced in the middle of August, Microsoft will have plenty of time to get the expensive controller into retail stores for the holiday season.

Microsoft just released the 4K Xbox One X last year. This model is still competitive with the latest Playstation 4. A lower price, or a redesigned low-end Xbox One S, could also be on tap.

Whatever is announced on August 21 at Gamescom, we’ll pass along the word.

Okta, the cloud identity management company, announced today it has purchased a startup called ScaleFT to bring the Zero Trust concept to the Okta platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

While Zero Trust isn’t exactly new to a cloud identity management company like Okta, acquiring ScaleFT gives them a solid cloud-based Zero Trust foundation on which to continue to develop the concept internally.

“To help our customers increase security while also meeting the demands of the modern workforce, we’re acquiring ScaleFT to further our contextual access management vision — and ensure the right people get access to the right resources for the shortest amount of time,” Okta co-founder and COO Frederic Kerrest said in a statement.

Zero Trust is a security framework that acknowledges work no longer happens behind the friendly confines of a firewall. In the old days before mobile and cloud, you could be pretty certain that anyone on your corporate network had the authority to be there, but as we have moved into a mobile world, it’s no longer a simple matter to defend a perimeter when there is effectively no such thing. Zero Trust means what it says: you can’t trust anyone on your systems and have to provide an appropriate security posture.

The idea was pioneered by Google’s “BeyondCorp” principals and the founders of ScaleFT are adherents to this idea. According to Okta, “ScaleFT developed a cloud-native Zero Trust access management solution that makes it easier to secure access to company resources without the need for a traditional VPN.”

Okta wants to incorporate the ScaleFT team and, well, scale their solution for large enterprise customers interested in developing this concept, according to a company blog post by Kerrest.

“Together, we’ll work to bring Zero Trust to the enterprise by providing organizations with a framework to protect sensitive data, without compromising on experience. Okta and ScaleFT will deliver next-generation continuous authentication capabilities to secure server access — from cloud to ground,” Kerrest wrote in the blog post.

ScaleFT CEO and co-founder Jason Luce will manage the transition between the two companies, while CTO and co-founder Paul Querna will lead strategy and execution of Okta’s Zero Trust architecture. CSO Marc Rogers will take on the role of Okta’s Executive Director, Cybersecurity Strategy.

The acquisition allows the Okta to move beyond purely managing identity into broader cyber security, at least conceptually. Certainly Roger’s new role suggests the company could have other ideas to expand further into general cyber security beyond Zero Trust.

ScaleFT was founded in 2015 and has raised $2.8 million over two seed rounds, according to Crunchbase data.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Samsung’s working on phone with a folding screen. And it’s arriving soonish. You’d be entirely forgiven if you rolled your eyes at that one, or at the very least took the whole thing with a sufficiently massive grain of salt.

This particular rumor has been floating around for about as long as Samsung’s been in the smartphone game, but The Wall Street Journal appears to have it on good authority that such a device may finally come to fruition early next year.

What’s more, those “people familiar with the matter” say the seven-inch handset is currently sporting the codename “Winner,” which sounds a bit like something Donald Trump would nickname his smartphone.

The design sounds more like a classic clamshell handset than the novel — though not particularly practical — dual-screen ZTE Axon M that arrived late last year. To be fair, that was more two screens fused together, rather than a “folding screen.” When the Samsung device is closed, on the other hand, it apparently sports cameras on either side and “a small display bar on the front.”

The phone will reportedly be released in smaller quantities than most Samsung smartphones/tablets at first, with wider availability later in the year. A lower than expected demand for the company’s latest flagship, the Galaxy S9 is said to be a driving force behind Samsung’s push to get this product out the door.

The category has long been a white whale for a smartphone industry intent on cramming the largest screen into the smallest footprint possible. The ability to fold it up and shove it in a pocket would certainly be a way to accomplish this. There have, however, been all manner of technical constraints along the way. 

A representative for the company offered TechCrunch a fairly boilerplate statement in response to the rumors, “ “It is Samsung’s policy to not comment on rumors and speculation.”

Netflix this morning announced the launch of a new interface for those who watch the streaming service on TV. The updated design is aimed at improving navigation by way of a remote control, making it quicker to get to the content you want to watch. The change involves relocating some of Netflix’s key features like the “Search” button and users’ “My List” over to a ribbon menu on the left side the screen which pops out when you navigate over. Here, it has also added new shortcuts to “Movies” and “TV” to filter its catalog by films and shows, as well as a button to see what’s “New.”

Related to this change, when you browse into a given section,  you’ll now see a full-screen preview of a top show or movie autoplaying above the rows of content suggestions.

The company says the redesign was based on “rigorous research and testing” and should make Netflix simpler and more intuitive in a number of ways.

The changes should be fairly welcome by TV viewers – except for those who despise auto-playing trailers, of course.

As Netflix’s catalog has expanded over the years, it’s gotten more difficult to find something what to watch due to the paradox of choice. The service makes recommendations based on your past viewing history, and offers thematic groupings, like “Trending Now,” “Comedies,” “TV Dramas,” plus things like your “Top Picks”  and more, which will have you scrolling down endless rows of suggestions.

But when you decide you want to start over and go back to your List or start a new search, you have to click, click, click on the remote to move back to those options.

With the redesign, you’ll only have to click over to the side.

It’s an obvious change – and Netflix even admits that – but says that it still took “extensive research, testing and technology improvements” to make it happen.

The larger goal in simplifying navigation is to reduce the time users spend browsing, thereby increasing their viewership hours.

Unlike traditional cable TV, streaming video on demand services can sometimes struggle to connect their viewers to content because users get stuck browsing the content undecided. TV, on the other hand, would just start playing something as soon as it turned on. Although loud and interruptive, this interface often helped people discover new shows – they’d have to view the content even as they clicked the remote.

Netflix has tried to embrace this “just start playing” mentality, too, with things like the auto-playing trailers and autoplaying the next episode in a season you’re watching. Now it’s doubling down on those auto-playing trailers with this TV update.

The redesigned interface arrives shortly after the company presented weaker earnings with subscriber growth and revenue falling short of expectations. The stock tanked, but then began to recover – it seems no one is ready to count out Netflix yet.

Netflix says the new TV interface will begin rolling out in the months ahead to subscribers worldwide.

Reali, a real estate platform that replaces traditional real estate transaction fees with a flat fee model, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Signia Venture Partners and other investors. This round brings Reali’s total funding to $30 million.

The basic idea behind Reali is to do away with the current agent-centric commission model and replace it was a technology platform and agents that are paid a flat fee per transaction. To do this more efficiently in the future, Reali is looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence.

“We are fusing AI with human intelligence and optimized workflows around buyer and seller journeys — all towards a superior customer experience for real estate transactions that also result in significant savings for buyers and sellers,” Reali CEO and founder Amit Haller told me.

It’s no suprise then that much of the new funding will go toward expanding the company’s expertise in this area. In addition, the service is also looking at expanding its service geographically. Currently, it’s only available in the Bay Area and Sacramento. Reali now wants to add Southern California to this list. “We are in the process of recruiting and training a team of Reali Experts and on-the-ground Brand Ambassadors, and we expect to begin servicing buyers and sellers later this summer,” said Haller. “We will be covering all of California this year, followed by out-of-state markets.”

So far, Reali says, the platform has processed “hundreds of millions of dollars in homes bought and sold.” The company boasts that its agents are far more efficient than other brokers on a per-transaction basis and that they have a Net Promotor Score of 85.2. The company’s app has only been downloaded 30,000 times since January 2017, though that number doesn’t mean much given that the service is only available in a very limited area.

D.C.-based Framebridge today announced the close of a $30 million Series C financing round led by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. with participation from existing investors SWaN & Legend Venture Partners, Revolution Ventures, and NEA.

Launched in 2014, Framebridge offers affordable and convenient custom framing via its website and mobile app. The idea for the company started when founder and CEO Susan Tynan went to get four National Parks posters framed. After a multi-hour consultation, she ended up spending $1,600.

“I left thinking ‘What did I just do?'” said Tynan. “The framing cost more than my couch, and that experience just really stuck with me.”

She poured herself into understanding how the framing industry works, and soon after, Framebridge was born.

On the consumer side, the process is really simple. Users can either upload a picture to be framed, or request shipping materials from Framebridge to send in an existing photo, poster, or piece of art. Users can then ship in their art and choose the framing style on the website or app, with the finished product returning back at their house within seven to ten days.

Because Framebridge does all its own production, the company has been able to implement some automation and refine the production process to lower cost. The highest price a user will pay on Framebridge is $199, with the lowest price at $39 for a framed 10×10 Instagram.

Unlike some other D2C custom framing startups who outsource their product, Framebridge handles all of its own production. This means that, as the company grows, its margins get healthier and the business gets stronger.

Another benefit of in-house production is that Framebridge gets to see what its users are framing, which has turned out to be much more than your average poster or picture. Tynan recalled seeing baseball tickets, hand-written vows, and other sentimental items come through the facility, and said that up to 65 percent of the items Framebridge customers framed with the startup are things they wouldn’t have taken to a traditional custom framer.

Tynan says that balancing supply and demand is one of the biggest challenges of the company.

“Every time we sell something, we have to produce it,” said Tynan. “We’re getting more sophisticated as we grow, but we’re not a Saas company. Unlike a lot of other startups, we had to get a lot of disciplines right from the very beginning.”

The new funding will go toward expanding manufacturing capabilities, refining the delivery process, marketing and brand awareness, as well innovation in the product itself.

Cloud Launcher has long been Google’s marketplace for cloud-based application from third-party vendors that lets you deploy them in Google’s cloud with just a few clicks. That name never quite highlighted that Cloud Launcher also included commercial applications and that Google cloud handle the billing for those and combine it with a user’s regular GCP bill, so the company has now decided to rebrand the services as the GCP Marketplace.

That’s not all, though. With today’s update, Google is also adding both commercial and open source container-based applications to the service that users can easily deploy to the Google Kubernetes Engine (or any other Kubernetes service). Until today, the marketplace only featured traditional virtual machines, but a lot of customers were surely looking for container support, too.

As Google rightly argues, Kubernetes Engine can take a lot of the hassle out of managing containers, but deploying them to a Kubernetes cluster is still often a manual process. Google promises that it’ll only take a click to deploy an application from the marketplace to the Kubernetes engine or any other Kubernetes deployment.

As Google Cloud product manager Brian Singer told me, his team worked closely with the Kubernetes Engine team to make this integration as seamless as possible. The solutions that are in the marketplace today include developer tools like GitLab, graph database Neo4j, the Kasten data management service, as well as open source projects like WordPress, Spark, Elasticsearch, Nginx and Cassandra.

Greycroft, the venture capital firm that’s backed companies like the Huffington Post, Plated and Venmo, is announcing that it has raised $250 million for its latest fund.

The firm was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Ian Sigalow and Dana Settle, and it now invests from a fund for seed and Series A deals (this is its fifth early-stage fund) and a separate fund focused on growth investments. Recent bets include scooter startup Bird and podcast network Wondery.

Sigalow told me that for the most part, the firm’s strategy isn’t changing, though it has adapted to what he called “the rise of the institutional seed round” by making more seed investments of its own.

“I think it’s mostly a change in nomenclature,” Sigalow said — where a funding round of a few million dollars would previously have been called a Series A, it’s is now considered seed funding. (And anything before that becomes “pre-seed.”) “There is on the margin more capital being deployed industry-wide now than there was five or 10 years ago. That’s true at every stage. Rounds have gotten slightly larger.”

And while Greycroft has offices in New York and Los Angeles, the firm notes that some of its recent successes have come from Birmingham, Alabama (Shipt, which was acquired by Target) and Chicago (Trunk Club, acquired by Nordstrom, as well as Braintree, acquired by PayPal).

Settle said Greycroft tries to look at “opportunities in all kinds of markets.” Sigalow added that one of the “big unsung advantages” of being in LA and NYC is “true access to virtually direct flights everywhere.”

The firm also says that nearly half of its investments go into startups founded by women and other underrepresented groups — its female-founded startups include BaubleBar, BitPesa, Clique, Cuyana, Eloquii, HopSkipDrive, theRealReal, Thrive Global and theSkimm.

And while many of Greycroft’s best-known investments have been consumer startups, Settle and Sigalow said the firm has always had a pretty even split between business-to-business and business-to-consumer models. It’s just that the consumer startups tend to get more attention from the press.

Sigalow also said that lately, more enterprise and non-consumer startups seem interested in working with Greycroft because of its consumer successes, because they’re looking to incorporate “what was traditionally B2C functionality.”

“I really think there’s an advantage to all these cross-discipline approaches,” he said.

Camera technology company Light is the latest to do the money dance with SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund after it raised a $121 million Series D round.

The funding round was led by Vision Fund, the near-$100 billion fund anchored by SoftBank, with participation from consumer camera giant Leica Camera AG. Today’s announcement takes Light to around $186 million raised from investors to date.

Light is best known for its futuristic camera technology and shooters. The company first introduced the $1,950 L16 camera back in 2015, which then began shipping in 2017. The camera uses 16 lenses to capture 52 megapixel imagery which produces impressive results. Perhaps most notably, the L16 is tiny which makes it hugely portable and convenient.

Given the small form factor and the rise of mobile photography, it was with little surprise that earlier this month Light teased its first smartphone camera product. Exact details of what that will look like are unclear, but a Light representative told TechCrunch that its mobile technology has been licensed to an OEM which plans to launch a Light-powered smartphone this coming September.

“In this era, pocketable, connected cameras can reconstruct the world in three dimensions and superhuman detail, cars are able to perceive the objects around them without the need for special sensors, and robots are able to thread the elusive needle autonomously,” Light said in a statement.

In addition, the company claims the smartphone tech, which supports up to nine cameras on the rear side of the phone, will “shatter the expectations of mobile photography” when it is released.

A representative said also that Leica and Light’s partnership may see the duo develop consumer products that utlize Light’s tech, although details of that are even less clear than the smartphone plan at this point.

That foray into mobile underscores the plans for this new round of funding for Light. The company said it intends to push its technology, which to date has been utilized in the consumer space, into security, robotic, automotive, aerial and industrial imaging verticals.

You can imagine that this ambition to expand fed nicely into SoftBank’s pitch for Vision Fund, which is designed to bring together the world’s top technology companies and encourage synergies between them. With ARM and Nvidia among the chipset firms backed by the fund, Light will see plenty of opportunities to knock on new doors and explore growth opportunities as part of the collective.

Here’s an interview with Light CEO Dave Grannan, who showed off the L16 at CES 2016: