Month: July 2018

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch may earn affiliate commissions.

Gearing up for a pleasant road trip entails more than picking an exciting destination. The mode of transportation, and what you’re able to do while traveling, sometimes makes or breaks hours spent on the road.

Whether you’re taking an older car on a short solo excursion, or piling in with family and friends for a cross-country drive, your road trip gear and setup can add to the experience. We’ve gathered some of our favorite picks that cover the basics.

iPad Headrest Mount: Arkon Center Extension Car Headrest Tablet Mount

If getting comfortable in a backseat and watching a movie sounds like an ideal way to pass time, do so with the help of a tablet mount. The Arkon Center Extension Car Headrest Tablet Mount securely holds iPads and most 9- to 12-inch tablets.

It attaches to the metal rods of the front seat headrest and its holster is attached to an extendable arm that can be positioned so one or multiple backseat passengers can get a clear view.

Car GPS: Garmin DriveSmart 51 LMT-S

Before the wheels start rolling, knowing where you’re going and how to get there is likely the first order of business. Using a standalone car GPS means your smartphone doesn’t have to be held hostage and you don’t have to rely on a live data connection.

The Garmin DriveSmart 51 LMT-S has maps and a database with points of interest built in so that navigation — even off of the beaten path — is straightforward. It works via Bluetooth, can display alerts or searches from a smartphone and its maps are updated over Wi-Fi. During testing, its voice-control system was the simplest to use and its audible directions were the most precise.

You’ll like that its 5-inch touchscreen displays easy-to-follow lanes and road signs, along with nearby stops and speed limits.

Bluetooth Kit: Anker SoundSync Drive

There’s no fun in a road trip that doesn’t include your favorite podcasts and music playlists. Older cars without built-in Bluetooth pose a problem when it comes to streaming curated entertainment from a smartphone.

Bypass installing a new stereo system and use an inexpensive Bluetooth kit instead. We recommend the Anker SoundSync Drive for cars with an aux-in port as well as other options for different setups. The SoundSync Drive will allow you to listen to music and makes hands-free calls.

It offers high-quality audio that’s on par and better than competitors we tested, and it has convenient track-control buttons. Keep it powered by plugging its USB-A charging cable into any car charger or USB power source.

Car Mount: iOttie Easy One Touch 4 Air Vent Mount

For a car mount that won’t get in the way of other devices that have to be placed on a windshield or dashboard, we recommend the iOttie Easy One Touch 4 Air Vent Mount. It fits into an air vent and its grip — which is secured by long rubber-lined arms and a spring-loaded clamp — places it above similar models.

Its cradle holds firm, it can be placed on vents of all thicknesses and it’s easy to position. The Easy One Touch 4 Air Vent Mount’s build makes it easy to access and it works against weighing down vent slats.

USB Car Charger: RAVPower RP-VC006

The RAVPower RP-VC006 USB car charger is small but packs a punch (up to 2.4 amps) with two USB ports for powering smartphones or tablets. It isn’t difficult to insert or remove, and when it’s dark outside, its LED and white ports make it easy to locate.

We like that it’s compact and doesn’t stick out too far. The RAVPower RP-VC006 plugs into a 12-volt power jack and it’s capable of charging two devices — simultaneously and in little to no time. It comes with a lifetime warranty, and if you’re concerned about misplacing it or running out of juice, it’s cheap enough to buy a few.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter.

When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commissions.

Newer Sonos devices and “rooms” now appear as AirPlay 2-compatible devices, allowing you to stream audio to them via Apple devices. The solution is a long time coming for Sonos which promised AirPlay 2 support in October.

You can stream to Sonos One, Sonos Beam, Playbase, and Play:5 speakers and ask Siri to play music on various speakers (“Hey Siri, play some hip-hop in the kitchen.”) The feature should roll out to current speakers today.

I tried a beta version and it worked as advertised. A set of speakers including a Beam and a Sub in my family room showed up as a single speaker and a Sonos One in the kitchen showed up as another. I was able to stream music and podcasts to either one.

Given the ease with which you can now stream to nearly every device from every device it’s clear that whole-home audio is progressing rapidly. As we noted before Sonos is facing tough competition but little tricks like this one help it stay in the race.

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Pinterest is trying to further tap its popularity as a place to plan events, this time adding ways for users to collaborate across boards that are baked directly into the app.

Group boards will have their own designated feed, where users will be able to communicate with others collaborating on that board and also get updates on new member additions or added pins. There are also the other typical social structures you’d expect on an app these days, including @-mentions or liking comments. It’s another step to get people onto Pinterest and sticking around as they look to plan events, and create more ways to make the platform more and more sticky. It’s also another quality-of-life improvement that Pinterest seems to have needed for quite some time.

It’s those kinds of events — weddings, parties and others — that propelled Pinterest initially to become one of the larger social networks in the early 2010s. The company late last year said it had more than 200 million monthly active users, which while small compared to the likes of Instagram or Facebook, serves as a hub for a different kind of user behavior than you might find on those other platforms. The majority of the content on Pinterest is high-resolution products from businesses, where people will search for or save those products as they look to plan future life events.

Pinterest has tried to position itself as one of the best ways to discover new ideas, whether that’s stumbling upon something in a primary feed or finding something through searching. Over time, it’s added more and more tools to try to get people to come back more regularly, and if it continues to improve those recommendation engines, it can continue to run that feedback loop and keep users more and more attached to the platform. Adding a sort of light social pressure from friends that are sharing ideas and looking for feedback is one way to do that, in addition to it generally being useful.

All that is good for its pitch to advertisers as well. Pinterest, in addition to trying to cater to that unique kind of user behavior, is also trying to sell itself to advertisers as a platform where they can reach potential customers through ways they wouldn’t be able to with primary advertising channels like Facebook or Google. By making the platform more sticky, it can go back to those advertisers and offer them better engagement metrics and show that users stick around and are paying closer attention to content on Pinterest, which can in turn drive that additional value to advertisers.

It’s been an interesting past few years for the virtual reality industry and while there is still plenty for insiders to pin their hopes on in 2018, it’s no secret that things have been progressing a bit slower than more bullish parties would have hoped for. Yet for all of what potential still remains unfulfilled, it seems fair to say that storytellers are still just as entranced (and occasionally bewildered) by the power of the fully immersive medium.

Penrose Studios has been one of the more shining stars in the narrative-based VR content space. Their work has drawn easy comparisons to Pixar’s and their efforts have seemed to influence other studios in the space as well.

The VR studio announced today that they have closed a $10 million round of Series A funding led by TransLink Capital. Also participating in the round were Marc Benioff, Will.i.am, Korea Telecom and Co-Made with returning investment from Sway Ventures, 8VC and Suffolk Equity.

While some competing venture-backed virtual reality content studios may be focusing their efforts on creating streamlined processes to build fast and cheap stories, Penrose appears to be more squarely focused on reaching its creative visions first and foremost.

The company’s latest major project, Arden’s Wake, is one of the more captivating VR short films I’ve seen to date. The ambitious half-hour animated feature pairs a tightly scoped storyline with a highly polished design that is whimsical and delightful in a way few other studios have managed to figure out. The startup began development of Arden’s Wake 18 months ago, sharing the finished product, which features voice acting from Alicia Vikander, at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival.

The film certainly seems like an expensive endeavor, and while CEO Eugene Chung didn’t talk numbers, he also didn’t confirm whether the startup would be charging users to download the film and view on home VR devices. The company’s previous releases, “Allumette” and “The Rose and I,” are currently offered as free downloads on major VR platforms.

Overall headset numbers are still fairly low however, and for venture-backed startups in this space I would imagine that there’s a strong desire to wait until there’s a more sizable audience size before both cutting access off to the potential new fans who wouldn’t pay to download anyway. While the unit economics of making money from individual downloads of narrative-based titles is still a bit of a Wild West in the VR world, it’s a critical issue that can probably only be punted for so long.

Chung, who previously worked on narrative storytelling at Oculus, seems optimistic about virtual reality hardware’s near-term prospects and the rise of so-called standalone headsets which integrate the compute power, display and battery into a singular device that is untethered and more powerful than past phone-based options.

The next of four new projects that Penrose is currently developing is being built with these standalone devices as their central focus though Chung tells me the startup is also starting to look more seriously about what there is to be done with phone-based augmented reality systems based on the ARKit and ARCore platforms and what does and does not make sense to bring to them in the future.

It’s been an interesting past few years for the virtual reality industry and while there is still plenty for insiders to pin their hopes on in 2018, it’s no secret that things have been progressing a bit slower than more bullish parties would have hoped for. Yet for all of what potential still remains unfulfilled, it seems fair to say that storytellers are still just as entranced (and occasionally bewildered) by the power of the fully immersive medium.

Penrose Studios has been one of the more shining stars in the narrative-based VR content space. Their work has drawn easy comparisons to Pixar’s and their efforts have seemed to influence other studios in the space as well.

The VR studio announced today that they have closed a $10 million round of Series A funding led by TransLink Capital. Also participating in the round were Marc Benioff, Will.i.am, Korea Telecom and Co-Made with returning investment from Sway Ventures, 8VC and Suffolk Equity.

While some competing venture-backed virtual reality content studios may be focusing their efforts on creating streamlined processes to build fast and cheap stories, Penrose appears to be more squarely focused on reaching its creative visions first and foremost.

The company’s latest major project, Arden’s Wake, is one of the more captivating VR short films I’ve seen to date. The ambitious half-hour animated feature pairs a tightly scoped storyline with a highly polished design that is whimsical and delightful in a way few other studios have managed to figure out. The startup began development of Arden’s Wake 18 months ago, sharing the finished product, which features voice acting from Alicia Vikander, at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival.

The film certainly seems like an expensive endeavor, and while CEO Eugene Chung didn’t talk numbers, he also didn’t confirm whether the startup would be charging users to download the film and view on home VR devices. The company’s previous releases, “Allumette” and “The Rose and I,” are currently offered as free downloads on major VR platforms.

Overall headset numbers are still fairly low however, and for venture-backed startups in this space I would imagine that there’s a strong desire to wait until there’s a more sizable audience size before both cutting access off to the potential new fans who wouldn’t pay to download anyway. While the unit economics of making money from individual downloads of narrative-based titles is still a bit of a Wild West in the VR world, it’s a critical issue that can probably only be punted for so long.

Chung, who previously worked on narrative storytelling at Oculus, seems optimistic about virtual reality hardware’s near-term prospects and the rise of so-called standalone headsets which integrate the compute power, display and battery into a singular device that is untethered and more powerful than past phone-based options.

The next of four new projects that Penrose is currently developing is being built with these standalone devices as their central focus though Chung tells me the startup is also starting to look more seriously about what there is to be done with phone-based augmented reality systems based on the ARKit and ARCore platforms and what does and does not make sense to bring to them in the future.

Next Insurance, the Israeli digital insurance startup that helps small businesses get cover, has raised a significant new funding round, adding another $83 million to its balance sheet.

The Series B round is led by Silicon Valley’s Redpoint Ventures, and will be used by the company to continue expanding across the U.S., where it now operates as a full service insurance carrier. It will also increase headcount in both its Israel and U.S. offices.

Founded in 2016 with the aim of becoming a one-stop insurance shop for micro and small business insurance needs, Next Insurance designs insurance plans for business sectors that are often overlooked by more general insurers.

Small business owners often rely on price comparison websites to figure out what kind of coverage they need and where to buy it, though that means the plans they get don’t always cover all their needs. The other option is to use a broker but that also adds another middle person.

“The complexity of the small business insurance market is very significant and this leads to a situation where even the largest insurance providers own less than 10 percent of the small business market,” founder and CEO Guy Goldstein told TechCrunch when the company raised its Series A. “This offers us huge growth potential as we aim to specialize in and become a market leader in each small business vertical”.

The small business sectors where Next Insurance offers general and professional liability insurance currently includes contractors, fitness, cleaning, beauty, therapy, entertainment, and education. It lets you buy insurance instantly at what it claims is very competitive prices and with no hidden fees. In addition, now that Next Insurance is a licensed carrier, it is able to write policies independently, with what it says is more freedom over underwriting, setting prices, and configuring policies.

Moving forward, the company plans on adding further lines of insurance, on-demand coverage, and ensuring that claims are paid within 48 hours. It is also hoping to develop more sophisticated uses of AI and machine learning to improve the customer experience and streamline the insurance purchasing process.

To that end, Goldstein says Next Insurance’s Series B is a “monumental turning point” in the company’s history, describing growth over the last two years as exponential. Hyperbole aside, the company does appear to have found market fit, as evidenced by the size of the round and how many previous backers followed on.

The Series B Round brings Next Insurance’s total funding to $131 Million in just two years. Other investors that participated in this round include Nationwide Insurance, Munich Re, American Express Ventures, Ribbit Capital, TLV Ventures, and Zeev Ventures. Elliot Geidt, Managing Director of Redpoint Ventures, will join the board of Next Insurance.

More broadly, the insurtech space is rapidly heating up in recognition that the insurance sector, both consumer and B2B, is still yet to be fully digitised, especially in a mobile-first world. In the U.S., consumer home insurance app Lemonade has been grabbing most of the headlines, not least after it raised $120 million in a round led by Softbank.

“Gone are the days of complicated, unreadable policies, exclusions that leave entrepreneurs vulnerable, and endless meetings and phone calls with insurance agents who don’t understand the nuances and needs of different classes of business,” adds Goldstein in a statement. “Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, and they deserve insurance policies that are simple to access, affordable to own, and which provide them the support and confidence they need to thrive”.

Next Insurance, the Israeli digital insurance startup that helps small businesses get cover, has raised a significant new funding round, adding another $83 million to its balance sheet.

The Series B round is led by Silicon Valley’s Redpoint Ventures, and will be used by the company to continue expanding across the U.S., where it now operates as a full service insurance carrier. It will also increase headcount in both its Israel and U.S. offices.

Founded in 2016 with the aim of becoming a one-stop insurance shop for micro and small business insurance needs, Next Insurance designs insurance plans for business sectors that are often overlooked by more general insurers.

Small business owners often rely on price comparison websites to figure out what kind of coverage they need and where to buy it, though that means the plans they get don’t always cover all their needs. The other option is to use a broker but that also adds another middle person.

“The complexity of the small business insurance market is very significant and this leads to a situation where even the largest insurance providers own less than 10 percent of the small business market,” founder and CEO Guy Goldstein told TechCrunch when the company raised its Series A. “This offers us huge growth potential as we aim to specialize in and become a market leader in each small business vertical”.

The small business sectors where Next Insurance offers general and professional liability insurance currently includes contractors, fitness, cleaning, beauty, therapy, entertainment, and education. It lets you buy insurance instantly at what it claims is very competitive prices and with no hidden fees. In addition, now that Next Insurance is a licensed carrier, it is able to write policies independently, with what it says is more freedom over underwriting, setting prices, and configuring policies.

Moving forward, the company plans on adding further lines of insurance, on-demand coverage, and ensuring that claims are paid within 48 hours. It is also hoping to develop more sophisticated uses of AI and machine learning to improve the customer experience and streamline the insurance purchasing process.

To that end, Goldstein says Next Insurance’s Series B is a “monumental turning point” in the company’s history, describing growth over the last two years as exponential. Hyperbole aside, the company does appear to have found market fit, as evidenced by the size of the round and how many previous backers followed on.

The Series B Round brings Next Insurance’s total funding to $131 Million in just two years. Other investors that participated in this round include Nationwide Insurance, Munich Re, American Express Ventures, Ribbit Capital, TLV Ventures, and Zeev Ventures. Elliot Geidt, Managing Director of Redpoint Ventures, will join the board of Next Insurance.

More broadly, the insurtech space is rapidly heating up in recognition that the insurance sector, both consumer and B2B, is still yet to be fully digitised, especially in a mobile-first world. In the U.S., consumer home insurance app Lemonade has been grabbing most of the headlines, not least after it raised $120 million in a round led by Softbank.

“Gone are the days of complicated, unreadable policies, exclusions that leave entrepreneurs vulnerable, and endless meetings and phone calls with insurance agents who don’t understand the nuances and needs of different classes of business,” adds Goldstein in a statement. “Small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, and they deserve insurance policies that are simple to access, affordable to own, and which provide them the support and confidence they need to thrive”.

Most of us never really stop to think about how the software and services we use on a daily basis are created. We just know it’s there when we want to access it, and it works most of the time. But companies don’t just appear and expand randomly, they need a well defined process and methodology to keep innovating or they won’t be around very long.

Box has been around since 2005 and grown into a company on a run rate of over $500 million.  Along the way, it transformed from a consumer focus to one concentrating on enterprise content management and expanded the platform from one that mostly offered online storage and file sharing to one that offers a range of content management services in the cloud.

I recently sat down with Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer Jeetu Patel . A big part of Patel’s job is to keep the company’s development teams on track and focused on new features that could enhance the Box platform, attract new customers and increase revenue.

Fundamental beliefs

Before you solve a problem, you need the right group of people working on it. Patel says building a team has a few primary principles to help guide the product and team development. It starts with rules and rubrics to develop innovative solutions and help them focus on where to invest their resources in terms of money and people.

When it comes to innovating, you have to structure your teams in such a way that you can react to changing requirements in the marketplace, and in today’s tech world, being agile is more important than ever. “You have to configure your innovation engine from a team, motivation and talent recruiting perspective so that you’ve actually got the right structure in place to provide enough speed and autonomy to the team so that they’re unencumbered and able to execute quickly,” Patel explained

Finally, you need to have a good grip on the customer and the market. That involves constantly assessing market requirements and looking at building products and features that respond to a need, yet that aren’t dated when you launch them.

Start with the customer

Patel says that when all is said and done, the company wants to help its customers by filling a hole in the product set. From a central company philosophy perspective, it begins with the customer. That might sound like pandering on its face, but he says if you keep that goal in mind it really acts as an anchor to the entire process.

“From a core philosophy that we keep in mind, you have to actually make sure that you get everyone really oriented in the company to say you always start from a customer problem and work backwards. But picking the right problem to solve is 90 percent of the battle,” he said.

Solve hard problems

Patel strongly believes that the quality of the problem is directly proportional to the outcome of the project. Part of that is solving a real customer pain point, but it’s also about challenging your engineers. You can be successfully solving the low-hanging fruit problems most of the time, but then you don’t necessarily attract the highest quality engineering talent.

“If you think about really hard problems that have a lot of mission and purpose around them, you can actually attract the best team,” he said.

That means looking for a problem where you can add a lot of value. “The problem that you choose to spend your time solving should be one where you are uniquely positioned to create a 10 x value proposition compared to what might exist in the market today,” Patel explained. If it doesn’t reach that threshold, he believes that there’s no motivation for the customer to change, and it’s not really worth going after.

Build small teams

Once you identify that big problem, you need to form a team to start attacking it. Patel recommends keeping the teams manageable, and he believes in the Amazon approach of the two-pizza team, a group of 8-10 people who can operate on..well…two pizzas. If the teams get too large, he says it becomes difficult to coordinate and too much time gets wasted on logistics instead of innovation.

“Having very defined local missions, having [small] teams carrying out those local missions, and making sure that those team sizes don’t get too large so that they can stay very agile, is a pretty important kind of core operating principle of how we build products,” Patel said.

That becomes even more important as the company scales. The trick is to configure the organization in such a way so that as you grow, you end up with many smaller teams instead of a few bigger ones, and in that way you can better pinpoint team missions.

Developing a Box product

Patel sees four key areas when it comes to finally building that new product at Box. First of all, it needs to be enterprise grade and all that entails — secure, reliable, scalable, fault tolerant and so forth.

That’s Job One, but what generally has differentiated Box in the content management market has been its ease of use. He sees that as removing as much friction as you can from a software-driven business process.

Next, you try to make those processes intelligent and that means understanding the purpose of the content. Patel says that could involve having better search, better surfacing of content and automated trigger events that move that content through a workflow inside a company.

Finally, they look at how it fits inside a workflow because content doesn’t live in a vacuum inside an enterprise. It generally has a defined purposed and the content management system should make it easy to integrate that content into the broader context of its purpose.

Measure twice

Once you have those small teams set up with their missions in place, you have to establish rules and metrics that allow them to work quickly, but still have a set of milestones they have to meet to prove they are on a worthwhile project for the company. You don’t want to be throwing good money after a bad project.

For Patel and Box that involves a set of of metrics that tell you at all times, whether the team is succeeding or failing. Seems simple enough, but it takes a lot of work from a management perspective to define missions and goals and then track them on a regular basis.

He says that involves three elements: “There are three things that we think about including what’s the plan for what you’re going to build, what’s the strategy around what you’re going to build, and then what’s the level of coordination that each one of us have on whether or not what we’re building is, in fact, going to be successful.”

In the end, this is an iterative process, one that keeps evolving as the company grows and develops and as they learn from each project and each team. “We’re constantly looking at the processes and saying, what are the things that need to be adjusted,” Patel said.

Most of us never really stop to think about how the software and services we use on a daily basis are created. We just know it’s there when we want to access it, and it works most of the time. But companies don’t just appear and expand randomly, they need a well defined process and methodology to keep innovating or they won’t be around very long.

Box has been around since 2005 and grown into a company on a run rate of over $500 million.  Along the way, it transformed from a consumer focus to one concentrating on enterprise content management and expanded the platform from one that mostly offered online storage and file sharing to one that offers a range of content management services in the cloud.

I recently sat down with Chief Product and Chief Strategy Officer Jeetu Patel . A big part of Patel’s job is to keep the company’s development teams on track and focused on new features that could enhance the Box platform, attract new customers and increase revenue.

Fundamental beliefs

Before you solve a problem, you need the right group of people working on it. Patel says building a team has a few primary principles to help guide the product and team development. It starts with rules and rubrics to develop innovative solutions and help them focus on where to invest their resources in terms of money and people.

When it comes to innovating, you have to structure your teams in such a way that you can react to changing requirements in the marketplace, and in today’s tech world, being agile is more important than ever. “You have to configure your innovation engine from a team, motivation and talent recruiting perspective so that you’ve actually got the right structure in place to provide enough speed and autonomy to the team so that they’re unencumbered and able to execute quickly,” Patel explained

Finally, you need to have a good grip on the customer and the market. That involves constantly assessing market requirements and looking at building products and features that respond to a need, yet that aren’t dated when you launch them.

Start with the customer

Patel says that when all is said and done, the company wants to help its customers by filling a hole in the product set. From a central company philosophy perspective, it begins with the customer. That might sound like pandering on its face, but he says if you keep that goal in mind it really acts as an anchor to the entire process.

“From a core philosophy that we keep in mind, you have to actually make sure that you get everyone really oriented in the company to say you always start from a customer problem and work backwards. But picking the right problem to solve is 90 percent of the battle,” he said.

Solve hard problems

Patel strongly believes that the quality of the problem is directly proportional to the outcome of the project. Part of that is solving a real customer pain point, but it’s also about challenging your engineers. You can be successfully solving the low-hanging fruit problems most of the time, but then you don’t necessarily attract the highest quality engineering talent.

“If you think about really hard problems that have a lot of mission and purpose around them, you can actually attract the best team,” he said.

That means looking for a problem where you can add a lot of value. “The problem that you choose to spend your time solving should be one where you are uniquely positioned to create a 10 x value proposition compared to what might exist in the market today,” Patel explained. If it doesn’t reach that threshold, he believes that there’s no motivation for the customer to change, and it’s not really worth going after.

Build small teams

Once you identify that big problem, you need to form a team to start attacking it. Patel recommends keeping the teams manageable, and he believes in the Amazon approach of the two-pizza team, a group of 8-10 people who can operate on..well…two pizzas. If the teams get too large, he says it becomes difficult to coordinate and too much time gets wasted on logistics instead of innovation.

“Having very defined local missions, having [small] teams carrying out those local missions, and making sure that those team sizes don’t get too large so that they can stay very agile, is a pretty important kind of core operating principle of how we build products,” Patel said.

That becomes even more important as the company scales. The trick is to configure the organization in such a way so that as you grow, you end up with many smaller teams instead of a few bigger ones, and in that way you can better pinpoint team missions.

Developing a Box product

Patel sees four key areas when it comes to finally building that new product at Box. First of all, it needs to be enterprise grade and all that entails — secure, reliable, scalable, fault tolerant and so forth.

That’s Job One, but what generally has differentiated Box in the content management market has been its ease of use. He sees that as removing as much friction as you can from a software-driven business process.

Next, you try to make those processes intelligent and that means understanding the purpose of the content. Patel says that could involve having better search, better surfacing of content and automated trigger events that move that content through a workflow inside a company.

Finally, they look at how it fits inside a workflow because content doesn’t live in a vacuum inside an enterprise. It generally has a defined purposed and the content management system should make it easy to integrate that content into the broader context of its purpose.

Measure twice

Once you have those small teams set up with their missions in place, you have to establish rules and metrics that allow them to work quickly, but still have a set of milestones they have to meet to prove they are on a worthwhile project for the company. You don’t want to be throwing good money after a bad project.

For Patel and Box that involves a set of of metrics that tell you at all times, whether the team is succeeding or failing. Seems simple enough, but it takes a lot of work from a management perspective to define missions and goals and then track them on a regular basis.

He says that involves three elements: “There are three things that we think about including what’s the plan for what you’re going to build, what’s the strategy around what you’re going to build, and then what’s the level of coordination that each one of us have on whether or not what we’re building is, in fact, going to be successful.”

In the end, this is an iterative process, one that keeps evolving as the company grows and develops and as they learn from each project and each team. “We’re constantly looking at the processes and saying, what are the things that need to be adjusted,” Patel said.

Xara is on a mission to help businesses create better looking content, and in turn save us all from having to consume visually unappealing marketing and comms material. The German startup has developed Xara Cloud, a design tool that resides in the cloud and attempts to bridge the gap between professional design and business content created by non-design professionals.

Specifically, Xara Cloud consists of a drag and drop browser-based editor that lets you create designs using text, shapes, icons, charts and imported images, but with a few extra tricks up its sleeve. These include the ability to use off-the-shelf professionally created colour schemes or have the software create a new colour scheme based on an image, such as your company logo, that you’ve uploaded.

As you’d expect, you can also choose from a library of pre-made templates ranging from social media graphics to flyer and brochures to presentations. These can be designed on top of or tweaked ad nauseam, and in addition you can create your own templates to function as reusable assets.

The editor adheres to a smart grid system, too, which helps non-designers create more disciplined and visually appealing layouts. There are also collaboration features so you can easily create content as part of a team.

“The problem being solved is that there is a massive software gap between basic document editors like Word, PowerPoint, etc. and professional design software like Adobe,” Xara co-founder and CEO Matt Bolton tells me. “Xara Cloud is a robust suite of rich design and editing tools packaged in a drag and drop editing platform that allows anyone to create designer-quality documents… It is 100 percent browser-based with a consistent UI across all desktop and touch devices”.

Bolton says the business case for using Xara Cloud is that brand inconsistency impacts business revenue. “The estimated average revenue attributed to always presenting the brand consistently is 23 percent,” he says, citing a report by Zimmer Communication.

“Repetition and consistency are critical pillars of any branding effort. By a business presenting a brand consistently, over time, consumers will internalize the brand values and be more likely to purchase”.

To mitigate brand inconsistency, Xara Cloud lets you add your logo, fonts, and brand colours, which are then automatically applied to any of Xara Cloud’s templates. “This ensures that any document, no matter the type, will have the current and consistent brand when it reaches the customer,” adds the Xara co-founder.

Meanwhile, the Berlin-based startup is disclosing that it has raised €3 million in funding. Backing the young company is investment group Bellevue Investments & Co.