Month: July 2018

Pitching a dollar-pegged token that offers cryptocurrency speculators a way to move their investments across volatile exchanges, TrustToken (the first public investment from a16z crypto) is now looking for public investments from accredited investors on CoinList.

The company’s first token is TrueUSD, a stablecoin that is redeemable one-to-one for U.S. dollars. In its first four months of trading the speculative investors that are looking for some sort of island of security have boosted the coin’s market price to over $85 million.

There’s a $61 million hard cap on the token allocated over three tranches at $0.12, $0.14, and $0.16 per trust token.

Other investors in TrustToken’s initial $20 million pre-sale include BlockTower Capital, Danhua Capital, GGV Capital, Jump Capital and other undisclosed investors.

As it expands its investor base to include accredited investors, the TrueUSD currency is also expanding its reach, with an agreement between the company and HitBTC to list the stablecoin as a quote currency. The TrueUSD coin can be used as a stalking horse to secure investments in Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, 0x, and NEO, according to a statement from the company.

Every TrueUSD token is redeemable one-for-one with U.S. dollars, which the company’s founders think should open the door for more institutional investment (or speculation depending on your point of view) into the market.

Using TrueUSD’s system, dollars are held in the escrow accounts of multiple trust companies rather than in a bank account. Those accounts are verified by an independent third party that issues monthly reports on the amount of dollars held in collateral.

A buyer of TrueUSD needs to pass a know your customer and AML check and then can send dollars to one of TrueUSD’s trust company partners. Once that transaction is verified, the TrueUSD smart contract issues tokens on a one-to-one ratio before sending the tokens to a buyer. The company uses Prime Trust, a Las Vegas-based company for its financial services.

Once tokens are delivered to a wallet, those tokens can be transferred or used as payment to buy other cryptocurrencies.

“The users of this space are really the traders,” says TrustToken co-founder and chief executive Danny An. “They want a native crypto asset that’s stable. They want to be able to hedge against volatility.”

An said the company does have a broader vision than just helping traders secure speculative assets so they can come up with even more arcane financial instruments. “For the entire crypto-economy to work, a lot of people believe that a stablecoin or multiple stablecoins need to be created,” An said.

TrustToken makes money whenever its coins are minted or burned, An says. “Whenever USD is involved we take a small cut,” which is ten basis points per transaction, he said.

Ultimately, TrustToken (like other alt-coins) wants to tokenize all real world assets. And one of the most attractive markets for An and his co-founders is real estate. “There is $200 trillion dollars of real estate that is offline,” said An. Tokenizing those assets would create more wealth in the world overall, he said. “Assets that are not liquid are not as valuable as assets that are liquid,” An said.

It’s a far cry from the work that An and his co-founders Rafael Cosman and Stephen Kade were doing at Kernel — a company that was developing technologies to create neural interfaces between humans and machines.

“The problem with Kernel or Google Brain [where the team also spent time] was that the timelines were very long,” An said. 

Codenamed “Eagle,” Snapchat is building a visual product search feature that delivers users to Amazon’s listings. Buried inside the code of Snapchat’s Android app is an unreleased “Visual Search” feature where you “Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode, and more! This works by sending data to Amazon, Shazam, and other partners.” Once an object or barcode has been scanned you can “See all results at Amazon.”

Visual product search could make Snapchat’s camera a more general purpose tool for seeing and navigating the world, rather than just a social media maker. It could differentiate Snapchat from Instagram, whose clone of Snapchat Stories now has more than twice the users and a six times faster growth rate than the original. And if Snapchat has worked out an affiliate referrals deal with Amazon, it could open a new revenue stream. That’s something Snap Inc. direly needs after posting a $385 million loss last quarter and missing revenue estimates by $14 million.

TechCrunch was tipped off to the hidden Snapchat code by app researcher Ishan Agarwal. His tips have previously led to TechCrunch scoops about Instagram’s video calling, soundtracks, Focus portrait mode and QR Nametags features that were all later officially launched. Amazon didn’t respond to a press inquiry before publishing time, and it’s unclear if its actively involved in the development of Snapchat visual search or just a destination for its results. Snap already sells its Spetacles v2 camera glasses on Amazon — the only place beyond its own site. Snap Inc. gave TechCrunch a “no comment,” about visual search but the company’s code tells the story.

Snapchat first dabbled in understanding the world around you with its Shazam integration back in 2016 that lets you tap and hold to identify a song playing nearby, check it out on Shazam, send it to a friend or follow the artist on Snapchat. Project Eagle builds on this audio search feature to offer visual search through a similar interface and set of partnerships. The ability to identify purchaseable objects or scan barcodes could turn Snapchat, which some view as a teen toy, into more of a utility.

What’s inside Snapchat’s Eagle eye

Snapchat’s code doesn’t explain exactly how the Project Eagle feature will work, but in the newest version of Snapchat it was renamed as “Camera Search.” The code lists the ability to surface “sellers” and “reviews,” “Copy URL” of a product and “Share” or “Send Product” to friends — likely via Snap messages or Snapchat Stories. In characteristic cool kid teenspeak, an error message for “product not found” reads “Bummer, we didn’t catch that!”

Eagle’s visual search may be connected to Snapchat’s “context cards,” which debuted late last year and pull up business contact info, restaurant reservations, movie tickets, Ubers or Lyfts and more. Surfacing within Snapchat a context card of details about ownable objects might be the first step to getting users to buy them… and advertisers to pay Snap to promote them. It’s easy to imagine context cards being accessible for products tagged in Snap Ads as well as scanned through visual search. And Snap already has in-app shopping.

Being able to recognize what you’re seeing makes Snapchat more fun, but it’s also a new way of navigating reality. In mid-2017 Snapchat launched World Lenses that map the surfaces of your surroundings so you can place 3D animated objects like its Dancing Hotdog mascot alongside real people in real places. Snapchat also released a machine vision-powered search feature last year that compiles Stories of user-submitted Snaps featuring your chosen keyword, like videos with “puppies” or “fireworks,” even if the captions don’t mention them.

Snapchat was so interested in visual search that this year, it reportedly held early-stage acquisition talks with machine vision startup Blippar. The talks fell through with the U.K. augmented reality company that has raised at least $99 million for its own visual search feature, but which recently began to implode due to low usage and financing trouble. Snap Inc. might have been hoping to jumpstart its Camera Search efforts.

Snap calls itself a camera company, after all. But with the weak sales of its mediocre v1 Spectacles, the well-reviewed v2 failing to break into the cultural zeitgeist and no other hardware products on the market, Snap may need to redefine what exactly that tag line means. Visual search could frame Snapchat as more of a sensor than just a camera. With its popular use for rapid-fire selfie messaging, it’s already the lens through which some teens see the world. Soon, Snap could be ready to train its eagle eye on purchases, not just faces.

In related Snapchat news:

The gaming world is evolving at a rapid clip. No longer is the idea of the lonely gamer a reality. Twitch and Discord have brought gamers together and given everyone the opportunity to see just how talented some of these young players are. Meanwhile, publishers and eSports organizations have built out an infrastructure.

But there is plenty left to do, and PlayVS founder and CEO Delane Parnell is well aware of this.

We’re amped to announce that Parnell is joining us at TC Disrupt SF in September to talk about how high school esports could pave the way for even more growth in this industry.

PlayVS is a startup that has partnered with the NFHS to bring esports to the high school level, providing infrastructure around scheduling, refs, rules, and state tournaments. Not only does this allow high school students to get extracurricular experience doing what they love (playing video games), but it offers a new way for esports orgs and colleges to look at the bright young talent coming up through the ranks.

PlayVS launched in April after securing its partnership with the NFHS. Through this partnership, the company will be able to bring organized esports to more than 18 states and approximately 5 million students across 5,000 high schools.

The company has since raised $15 million in Series A, and the inaugural season begins in October of this year.

We’re absolutely thrilled to get the chance to sit down with Parnell to discuss the launch of the platform and hear about how high school esports could set the tone for the industry as a whole.

Passes to Disrupt SF are available here at the Early Bird rate until July 25.

Topbox helps businesses understand how their customers experience their products and where they run into issues by analyzing voice and text chats to surveys, social media posts and online reviews. Today, the company announced it has raised a $5 million funding round led by Telescope Partners, with participation from Cascade Angels, Flyover Capital and the Maryland Venture Fund.

Topbox CEO Chris Tranquill told me he first experienced the problem he’s trying to solve when he was running call centers with thousands of agents. All of the companies that contracted his services faced the same problem: understanding the friction points their customers were experiencing.

“We always had this vision that being able to really understand those friction points with deep context — that’s what the key is — but really getting to that granular level of detail so that you can have that context to support a decision,” Tranquill said. Say you want to understand what issues customers are having with a new shoe. Ideally, Topbox will aggregate all of the data across all channels about that shoe and help the company understand who the wearers are and what issues they are experiencing.

Theoretically, companies could do this on their own, but all of this data exists in various silos and combining those disparate data sets is a major challenge. Topbox uses its technology to ingest this data (and it’s pretty agnostic about where it comes from) and then runs it through its classification models. Indeed, as Tranquill told me, it’s this model that’s the secret sauce behind the company’s ability to classify data.

It’s not just about getting a high-level overview of your customer’s reactions, though. Tranquill stressed that users can go deeper. “The big thing for us is granularity,” he told me. “I can find high-level data all day long, but can I find the root cause?” With a few clicks, any Topbox user should be able to understand what issues their customers are facing, no matter whether that’s a product issue, a shipping problem or something else.

Current Topbox customers include the likes of Orvis, Bed Bath & Beyond and Western Union. With this new round, Topbox expects to build out its go-to-market strategy and continue to develop its product. Currently, the company focuses on a number of verticals where its model works best (retailers, mobile telcos, cable and broadband providers and healthcare companies), and Tranquill tells me this is where it will focus its energy for now. The company will also soon launch a new user interface and bring on more machine learning experts as it looks to provide its users deeper insights into their data.

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a robot clapping over a human face, forever,” wrote George Orwell and his dire prediction has finally come to pass. This product – a year old device that I have never seen before but now love – is called BigClapper and it is basically an orb with a funny face and big white hands. When you set it up in a location it will yell and clap endlessly, a sort of robotic tummler that can pick up your spirits while it drains your will to live.

The product, found by RobotStart, is wildly manic. BigClapper can be used at offices! In front of stores! At parties! It can clap as people walk by, encouraging them to come into your shop! It is red! It has hands!

While it’s not yet Alexa compatible, the BigClapper looks to be a model of future human-computer interaction. After all what is more pure than a big red face howling at you on the street while it claps maniacally in an effort to sell you more products. It’s a literal symbol of true capitalism in this modern era.

I, for one, welcome our clapping robot overlords.

In a truly fascinating exploration into two smart speakers – the Sonos One and the Amazon Echo – BoltVC’s Ben Einstein has found some interesting differences in the way a traditional speaker company and an infrastructure juggernaut look at their flagship devices.

The post is well worth a a full read but the gist is this: Sonos, a very traditional speaker company, has produced a good speaker and modified its current hardware to support smart home features like Alexa and Google Assistant. The Sonos One, notes Einstein, is a speaker first and smart hardware second.

“Digging a bit deeper, we see traditional design and manufacturing processes for pretty much everything. As an example, the speaker grill is a flat sheet of steel that’s stamped, rolled into a rounded square, welded, seams ground smooth, and then powder coated black. While the part does look nice, there’s no innovation going on here,” he writes.

The Amazon Echo, on the other hand, looks like what would happen if an engineer was given an unlimited budget and told to build something that people could talk to. The design decisions are odd and intriguing and it is ultimately less a speaker than a home conversation machine. Plus it is very expensive to make.

Pulling off the sleek speaker grille, there’s a shocking secret here: this is an extruded plastic tube with a secondary rotational drilling operation. In my many years of tearing apart consumer electronics products, I’ve never seen a high-volume plastic part with this kind of process. After some quick math on the production timelines, my guess is there’s a multi-headed drill and a rotational axis to create all those holes. CNC drilling each hole individually would take an extremely long time. If anyone has more insight into how a part like this is made, I’d love to see it! Bottom line: this is another surprisingly expensive part.

Sonos, which has been making a form of smart speaker for fifteen years, is a CE company with cachet. Amazon, on the other hand, sees its devices as a way into living rooms and a delivery system for sales and is fine with licensing its tech before making its own. Therefore to compare the two is a bit disingenuous. Einstein’s thesis that Sonos’ trajectory is troubled by the fact that it depends on linear and closed manufacturing techniques while Amazon spares no expense to make its products is true. But Sonos makes speakers that work together amazingly well. They’ve done this for a decade and a half. If you compare their products – and I have – with competing smart speakers an non-audiophile “dumb” speakers you will find their UI, UX, and sound quality surpass most comers.

Amazon makes things to communicate with Amazon. This is a big difference.

Where Einstein is correct, however, is in his belief that Sonos is at a definite disadvantage. Sonos chases smart technology while Amazon and Google (and Apple, if their HomePod is any indication) lead. That said, there is some value to having a fully-connected set of speakers with add-on smart features vs. having to build an entire ecosystem of speaker products that can take on every aspect of the home theatre.

On the flip side Amazon, Apple, and Google are chasing audio quality while Sonos leads. While we can say that in the future we’ll all be fine with tinny round speakers bleating out Spotify in various corners of our room, there is something to be said for a good set of woofers. Whether this nostalgic love of good sound survives this generation’s tendency to watch and listen to low resolution media is anyone’s bet, but that’s Amazon’s bet to lose.

Ultimately Sonos is strong and fascinating company. An upstart that survived the great CE destruction wrought by Kickstarter and Amazon, it produces some of the best mid-range speakers I’ve used. Amazon makes a nice – almost alien – product, but given that it can be easily copied and stuffed into a hockey puck that probably costs less than the entire bill of materials for the Amazon Echo it’s clear that Amazon’s goal isn’t to make speakers.

Whether the coming Sonos IPO will be successful depends partially on Amazon and Google playing ball with the speaker maker. The rest depends on the quality of product and the dedication of Sonos users. This good will isn’t as valuable as a signed contract with major infrastructure players but Sonos’ good will is far more than Amazon and Google have with their popular but potentially intrusive product lines. Sonos lives in the home while Google and Amazon want to invade it. That is where Sonos wins.

Autodesk has made a name for itself among designers, engineers and architects with its 3D and other modelling software. Now, as it continues to build out its business in adjacent business areas like construction, it has acquired Assemble Systems, a startup that has built a platform to help plan and run building projects — and more generally building information management (BIM) — across the network of people and jobs involved.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed as Autodesk says the value is not material to its previous guidance. The deal will be a mixture of cash and stock: Autodesk had led Assemble’s Series A last year, so it was already a strategic investor in the startup.

This will not be Autodesk’s first move into construction. It had recently launched a project management platform called BIM 360, and the plan will be to integrate Assemble — which provides software that lets construction firms plan projects, but also manage bids, estimate costs and carry out assembly works — with that. And it will also bring a lot of potential customers into the Autodesk fray: Assemble has 174 unique customers using its software across 1,000 sites, working on 12,700 projects.

“I welcome the Assemble Systems team to the Autodesk family, as part of our efforts to digitize and improve the construction industry,” said Andrew Anagnost, president and CEO of Autodesk, in a statement. “We are connecting project data from design through construction, creating the cloud-enabled tools necessary to make the critical preconstruction phase of a project more predictable and profitable.”

The rise of “construction tech” has been part of a bigger trend in the last decade, where startups have increasingly applied the advances of technology — in this case, mobile apps, cloud computing, collaborative working, graphics that quickly render, and data-heavy computations that complete faster than the blink of an eye — to fields of work that have yet to be digitised and have not traditionally been associated with tech. Now, every company is a “tech company.”

Startups like PlanGrid helped put the concept of construction tech on the map when it became a part of Y Combinator in 2012 with its early concept of using iPad tablets as a better way of creating and sharing blueprints. But given that construction goods and services is estimated to be a $10 trillion industry — and employing seven percent of all of the world’s workforce, making it one of the world’s biggest — it’s no surprise to see rising demand and valuations for startups in the field. Katerra earlier this year raised $865 million from Softbank, and Oracle acquired construction collaboration software maker Aconex for $1.2 billion last December.

This is the opportunity that Autodesk is hoping to capitalise on, which makes sense, as it flows directly from the software-based services it already provides to sectors that are directly linked to the world of construction.

“Autodesk is an [architecture, engineering and construction] technology leader and was the majority investor in our Series A funding last year,” said Don Henrich, CEO of Assemble Systems, in a statement. “We partnered closely with Autodesk to make the greatest impact on the construction industry. We’re excited about joining Autodesk and continuing to make BIM data more useful across construction project workflows.”

Apple has released a handful of new ads promoting the iPad’s portability and convenience over both laptops and traditional paper solutions. The 15-second ads focus on how the iPad can make even the most tedious things — travel, notes, paperwork, and ‘stuff’ — just a bit easier.

Three out of the four spots show the sixth-generation iPad, which was revealed at Apple’s education event in March, and which offers a lower-cost ($329 in the U.S.) option with Pencil support.

The ads were released on Apple’s international YouTube channels (UAE, Singapore, and United Kingdom).

This follows another 90-second ad released yesterday, focusing on FaceID. The commercial shows a man in a gameshow-type setting asked to remember the banking password he created earlier that morning. He struggles for an excruciating amount of time before realizing he can access the banking app via FaceID.

There has been some speculation that FaceID may be incorporated into some upcoming models of the iPad, though we’ll have to wait until Apple’s next event (likely in September) to find out for sure.

This week Samsung is opening what it’s calling the world’s largest mobile phone factory in the world’s second largest smartphone market. Expansion, which will be fully complete in 2020, is expected to nearly double Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), India’s current phone producing capabilities from 68- to 120 million phones per year.

The electronics giant has been producing phones in the country for well over a decade (while the original factory dates back to 1996), while much of the competition has mostly been dabbling. Earlier this year, for instance, Apple started a manufacturing trial run of the iPhone 6S, after having previous done a small batch of the iPhone SE.

Along with bringing jobs, such localized manufacturing could also go a ways toward helping bring the cost of devices down. India’s government, naturally, is excitedly embracing the announcement as art of its “Make in India” initiative. As such, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on-hand for the opening ceremony, along with South Korean president Moon Jae-in, repping his home country’s largest company.

“Our Noida factory, the world’s largest mobile factory, is a symbol of Samsung’s strong commitment to India, and a shining example of the success of the Government’s ‘Make in India’ program,” Samsung India CEO HC Hong said in a release tied to the news. “Samsung is a long-term partner of India. We ‘Make in India’, ‘Make for India’ and now, we will ‘Make for the World’. We are aligned with Government policies and will continue to seek their support to achieve our dream of making India a global export hub for mobile phones.”

India represents a massive — and growing — smartphone market. Last year the country passed the U.S., becoming the number two market after China. A commitment to local manufacturing will no doubt go a long way for Samsung, which currently ranks as the number two smartphone maker in the country, behind Xiaomi.

After promising up the feature for the better part of a year, Dish’s Hopper line just got Google Assistant functionality. The feature brings hands-free control to the receivers, allowing for the standard array of functionality like play, pause, fast forward and rewind, along with content search.

Here are a handful of examples from Google,

• “Turn on my Hopper”
• “Tune to channel 140”
• “Show me home improvement shows”
• “Open Game Finder on Hopper”
• “Rewind 30 seconds” “Pause” and “Resume”
• “Record Game of Thrones on Hopper”

You get the idea.

Dish announced the feature back at CES — I’m not sure eight months qualifies as “soon” in terms of software updates, but there you go. The feature works with Hoppers that are paired with Assistant-enabled devices like Google Home smart speakers and Android handsets. Apparently the company rolled the feature out to about one-percent of users last week as a kind of large-scale test. 

Dish has supported Alexa for some time, on the other hand. Last May, the company brought the hands-free skill to Hopper, and added support for its Joey receivers back in October. Amazon’s assistant also added DVR recording capability for Dish, TiVo, DIRECTV and Verizon this March.