Begnadigung. That’s German for reprieve… well, close enough for us. And that’s what we’re giving all the lollygaggers, procrastinators and last-minute decision-makers. We extended the deadline to apply for Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. Yup, you now have until August 27 at 9 p.m. PST to submit your application. But why wait any longer — apply right here, today.
If you’re an early-stage startup founder with dreams of building a company to rival the likes of Dropbox, Mint or Yammer, then our premier startup pitch competition was designed for you. We should know because the founders of those companies — and more than 750 others — launched to fame and fortune from the Startup Battlefield stage and have gone on to collectively raise $8 billion dollars and generate 102 exits.
Here’s what you need to know about competing in Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin 2018.
First, TechCrunch editors, who clearly have a flair for identifying high-potential startups, review every application. Our acceptance rate is typically 3 percent, making this event highly curated and competitive. We’ll choose up to 15 startups to participate.
Startup Battlefield takes place in front of a live audience — thousands of people, including investors, journalists and influential technologists. Each team gets just six minutes to present a live demo to an expert panel of investors and entrepreneurs. Following each pitch, the judges get six minutes to put each team through an intensive Q& A.
Approximately five teams move to the semi-finals and endure another round of pitching and inquisition. And then only one team will emerge victorious, hoist the Disrupt Cup and take home the $50,000 equity-free cash prize.
If that sounds nerve-wracking, well, it is. But the good news is that TechCrunch editors provide all team founders with free pitch coaching before they ever step onstage. You’ll be ready to handle anything the judges throw your way.
And win or lose, all Startup Battlefield teams benefit from broad investor and media exposure. Plus, we live-stream the entire Startup Battlefield competition to a global audience on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter (and make it available later, on-demand).
This is a prime opportunity to place your early-stage startup in front of Europe’s top tech investors, and you’ll never know if you have what it takes to win it all if you don’t apply.
Startup Battlefield takes place at Disrupt Berlin 2018 on November 29-30. The new application deadline is August 27 at 9 p.m. PST. Take advantage of your begnadigung and apply right now.
For three years, Velo3D has operating in stealth mode. The bay area based startup has largely managed to fly on the radar, in spite of raising an impressive $90 million since launching in June 2015. Today, however, the 120 person company is finally ready to discuss what it’s been working on, just as it announces the availability of its first product.
The Sapphire system utilizes a technology the company calls Intelligent Fusion. The system is capable of 3D printing complex metal objects by sintering a bed of powder with a laser, in a process similar to standard resin-based 3D printing systems.
One of the more compelling aspects of the technology is its ability to create geometrically complicated objects without the need for the support structure most require. Rather, the objects, as described described by Chief Product Officer Stefan Zschiegner , essentially come out of the out of the powder fully formed.
Among the things that set the company’s new machine apart from some of the competition is a focus on additive manufacturing for production, in addition to prototyping. “Desktop Metal, HP and other focus on prototyping,” Zschiegner says of the competition (though Desktop Metal will be launching its Production system next year). “Their parts often cannot be used for final manufacturing process.”
Of course, the current technology isn’t scalable for true mass production. Instead, Velo3D’s early manufacturing clients include aerospace and space travel companies, primarily working through 3D production houses. Florida-based 3D prototyping company 3DMT is among the first to adopt the Sapphire system, which Velo3D claims has a 90-percent first pass success rate. Other potential case uses include customized titanium medical implants.
No official pricing has been announced, but the company says it will be “competitive” with other industrial metal printing systems. Velo is also using the opportunity to announce that former President and CEO of AutoDesk, Carl Bass, will be joining the company’s board as chairman.
SoftBank’s Vision Fund is backing Chinese online insurance giant ZhongAn through its latest investment, which could take the company — which has struggled for stability following a monster IPO last year — into international markets.
The Vision Fund announced today it has made an undisclosed investment in ZhongAn International, the global arm of the five-year-old company created by $200 billion insurance giant Ping An and internet firms Tencent and Alibaba. The ZongAn business is widely-heralded as China’s first digital insurance company. Its insurance products cover lifestyle, consumer finance, health, travel and automotive, and it went public last September in a Hong Kong IPO that raised $1.5 billion. ZhongAn International was created in December of last year to scout out overseas opportunities.
Despite impressive credentials and a trailblazing business, it hasn’t been smooth sailing.
Disappointing financial results — which center around hefty fees paid to online platforms that give it distribution — have seen the value of ZhongAn shares nosedive. The current price of HKD35.55 is down on the HK$59.70 IPO price, and a far cry from a peak HKD 93.65 back in October.
Aside from adding the support of a major name — SoftBank’s Vision Fund is easily the largest tech investment firm in the world, with a $90 billion-plus purse — this investment might give cause for optimism. Alongside the investment, ZongAn International is creating a new entity in partnership with SoftBank that will be dedicated to “exploring international opportunities.”
More specifically, SoftBank plans to use ZongAn’s technology and its network to expand to “multiple markets” in Asia, although it isn’t specific about which countries or a timeframe for the potential launches.
“We are pleased to announce this partnership which will allow us to explore new and innovative ways to serve more companies and customers outside of China. SoftBank is an important business partner and we believe this collaboration will significantly boost our technology solutions businesses,” said ZhongAn Online CEO Jeffrey Chen in a statement.
The deal, and joint entity, signifies a growing trend of SoftBank becoming operationally involved in investments with companies that are looking at overseas growth opportunities.
SoftBank inked a joint-venture with Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing to launch a taxi-booking service in Japan. While it has also announced a JV to bring Indian payment service Paytm to Japan. Both companies are long-term investments for SoftBank, but SoftBank believes its experience and network can help them navigate international waters. The same thinking applies to the ZhongAn deal although it appears that the partnership is shooting for more than just Japan.
Qutoutiao, a news aggregator app backed by Tencent, has filed for an initial public offering of up to $300 million in the United States. In its F-1 form, the company, whose name means “fun headlines,” said it is the number two mobile content aggregator in China. Its main rivals are Jinri Toutiao, China’s top news aggregator, Tencent’s Kuaibao and Yidianzixun.
Based in Shanghai, Qutoutiao reportedly reached unicorn status in March, when it raised a Series B of about $200 million led by Tencent. For Tencent, Qutoutiao and Kuaibao represent opportunities to take market share away from Jinri Toutiao, which is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is reportedly planning a Hong Kong IPO that could value it at over $45 billion.
In its SEC filing, Qutoutiao said that since launching in July 2016, it has achieved monthly average users of about 48.8 million and daily average users of about 17.1 million, with the average time users spend on the app each day totaling about 55.6 minutes in July 2018. To compete with Jinri Toutiao and other rivals, Qutoutiao targets users from China’s smaller Tier 3 cities. Despite increasing levels of disposable income, Qutoutiao says Tier 3 cities, many of which are located in the west of China, are still underserved markets.
Qutoutiao also said in its filing that its net revenues increased from RMB 58.0 million (about $8.8 million) in 2016 to RMB 517.1 million (about $78.1 million) in 2017, and from RMB 107.3 million (about $16.2 million) in the six months ended June 30, 2017 to RMB 717.8 million (about $108.5 million) in the same period in 2018.
The app uses an AI-based content recommendation engine to display articles and videos based on user profiles and plans to use money raised from its IPO to add more content offerings, increase monetization opportunities and look for acquisition and investment opportunities. Qutoutiao plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker symbol QTT. The IPO will be underwritten by Citigroup Global Markets, Deutsche Bank Securities, China Merchants Securities and UBS Securities and KeyBanc Capital Markets.
The team at inVia Robotics didn’t start out looking to build a business that would create a new kind of model for selling robotics to the masses, but that may be exactly what they’ve done.
After their graduation from the University of Southern California’s robotics program, Lior Alazary, Dan Parks, and Randolph Voorhies, were casting around for ideas that could get traction quickly.
“Our goal was to get something up and running that could make economic sense immediately,’ Voorhies, the company’s chief technology officer, said in an interview.
The key was to learn from the lessons of what the team had seen as the missteps of past robotics manufacturers.
Despite the early success of iRobot, consumer facing or collaborative robots that could operate alongside people had yet to gain traction in wider markets.
Willow Garage, the legendary company formed by some of the top names in the robotics industry had shuttered just as Voorhies and his compatriots were graduating, and Boston Dynamics, another of the biggest names in robotics research, was bought by Google around the same time — capping an six-month buying spree that saw the search giant acquire eight robotics companies.
“In the midst of all this we were looking around and we said, ‘God there were a lot of failed robotics companies!’ and we asked ourselves why did that happen?” Voorhies recalled. “A lot of the hardware companies that we’d seen, their plan was: step one build a really cool robot and step three: an app ecosystem will evolve and people will write apps and the robot will sell like crazy. And nobody had realized how to do step 2, which was commercialize the robot.”
So the three co-founders looked for ideas they could take to market quickly.
The thought was building a robot that could help with mobility and reaching for objects. “We built a six-degree-of-freedom arm with a mobile base,” Voorhies said.
However, the arm was tricky to build, components were expensive and there were too many variables in the environment for things to go wrong with the robot’s operations. Ultimately the team at inVia realized that the big successes in robotics were happening in controlled environments.
“We very quickly realized that the environment is too unpredictable and there were too many different kinds of things that we needed to do,” he said.
Parks then put together a white paper analyzing the different controlled environments where collaborative robots could be most easily deployed. The warehouse was the obvious choice.
“Dan put a white paper together for Lior and I,” Voorhies said, “and the thing really stuck out was eCommerce logistics. Floors tend to be concrete slabs; they’re very flat with very little grade, and in general people are picking things off a shelf and putting them somewhere else.”
With the idea in place, the team, which included technologists Voorhies and Parks, and Lazary, a serial entrepreneur who had already exited from two businesses, just needed to get a working prototype together.
Most warehouses and shipping facilities that weren’t Amazon were using automated storage and retrieval systems, Voorhies said. These big, automated systems that looked and worked like massive vending machines. But those systems, he said, involved a lot of sunk costs, and weren’t flexible or adaptable.
And those old systems weren’t built for random access patterns and multi-use orders which comprise most of the shipping and packing that are done as eCommerce takes off.
With those sunk costs though, warehouses are reluctant to change the model. The innovation that Voorhies and his team came up with, was that the logistics providers wouldn’t have to.
“We didn’t like the upfront investment, not just to install one but just to start a company to build those things,” said Voorhies. “We wanted something we could bootstrap ourselves and grow very organically and just see wins very very quickly. So we looked at those ASRS systems and said why don’t we build mobile robots to do this.”
In the beginning, the team at inVia played with different ways to build the robot.l first there was a robot that could carry several different objects and another that would be responsible for picking.
The form factor that the company eventually decided on was a movable puck shaped base with a scissor lift that can move a platform up and down. Attached to the back of the platform is a robotic arm that can extend forward and backward and has a suction pump attached to its end. The suction pump drags boxes onto a platform that are then taken to a pick and pack employee.
“We were originally going to grab individual product.s. Once we started talking to real warehouses more and more we realized that everyone stores everything in these boxes anyway,” said Voorhies. “And we said why don’t we make our lives way easier, why don’t we just grab those totes?”
“E-commerce industry growth is driving the need for more warehouse automation to fulfill demand, and AI-driven robots can deliver that automation with the flexibility to scale across varied workflows. Our investment in inVia Robotics reflects our conviction in AI as a key enabler for the supply chain industry,” said Daniel Gwak, Co-Head, AI Investments at Point72 Ventures, the early stage investment firm formed by the famed hedge fund manager, Steven Cohen.
Given the pressures on shipping and logistics companies, it’s no surprise that the robotics and automation are becoming critically important strategic investments, or that venture capital is flooding int the market. In the past two months alone, robotics companies targeting warehouse and retail automation have raised nearly $70 million in new financing. They include the recent raised $17.7 million for the French startup Exotec Solutions and Bossa Nova’s $29 million round for its grocery store robots.
Then there are warehouse-focused robotics companies like Fetch Robotics, which traces its lineage back to Willow Garage and Locus Robotics, which is linked to the logistics services company Quiet Logistics.
“Funding in robotics has been incredible over the past several years, and for good reason,” said John Santagate, Research Director for Commercial Service Robotics at Research and Analysis Firm IDC, in a statement. “The growth in funding is a function of a market that has become accepting of the technology, a technology area that has matured to meet market demands, and vision of the future that must include flexible automation technology. Products must move faster and more efficiently through the warehouse today to keep up with consumer demand and autonomous mobile robots offer a cost-effective way to deploy automation to enable speed, efficiency, and flexibility.”
The team at inVia realized it wasn’t enough to sell the robots. To give warehouses a full sense of the potential cost savings they could have with inVia’s robots, they’d need to take a page from the software playbook. Rather than selling the equipment, they’d sell the work the robots were doing as a service.
“Customers will ask us how much the robots cost and that’s sort of irrelevant,” says Voorhies. “We don’t want customers to think about those things at all.”
Contracts between inVia and logistics companies are based on the unit of work done, Voorhies said. “We charge on the order line,” says Voorhies. “An order line is a single [stock keeping unit] that somebody would order regardless of quantity… We’re essentially charging them every time a robot has to bring a tote and present it in front of a person. The faster we’re able to do that and the less robots we can use to present an item the better our margins are.”
It may not sound like a huge change, but those kinds of efficiencies matter in warehouses, Voorhies said. “If you’re a person pushing a cart in a warehouse that cart can have 35 pallets on it. With us, that person is standing still, and they’re really not limited to a single cart. They are able to fill 70 orders at the same time rather than 55,” he said.
At Rakuten logistics, the deployment of inVia’s robots are already yielding returns, according to Michael Manzione, the chief executive officer of Rakuten Super Logistics.
“Really [robotics] being used in a fulfillment center is pretty new,” said Manzione in an interview. “We started looking at the product in late February and went live in late March.”
For Manzione, the big selling point was scaling the robots quickly, with no upfront cost. “The bottom line is ging to be effective when we see planning around the holiday season,” said Manzione. “We’re not planning on bringing in additional people, versus last year when we doubled our labor.”
As Voorhies notes, training a team to work effectively in a warehouse environment isn’t easy.
“The big problem is that it’s really hard to hire extra people to do this. In a warehouse there’s a dedicated core team that really kicks ass and they’re really happy with those pickers and they will be happy with what they get from whatever those people can sweat out in a shift,” Voorhies said. “Once you need to push your throughput beyond what your core team can do it’s hard to find people who can do that job well.”
Netflix user reviews are no more. Sure, chances are pretty decent you didn’t realize Netflix still had reviews at this point, but the video streaming giant has delivered on its promise to do away with the one-time mainstay of the service.
Last month, it informed recent users that reviews would be sunset soon. Netflix dropped the feature this week with little fanfare, simply updating the “How do I post reviews on Netflix” section of its help page to read, “You can no longer post reviews on Netflix.” Fair enough, I guess.
The service has slowly evolved its recommendation engine over the year, putting plenty of effort into one of its primary drivers of user engagement. Review were slowly moved into the background to make way for new features, including the current thumbs up/thumbs down offering.
As Variety notes, while some continued to use reviews up until the end, the loss of reviews hasn’t exactly been met with a widespread backlash from users. Not a thumbs up, nor a thumbs down, so much as a collective indifference to the end of once key feature.
The Kindle Voyage is no more. The e-reader is currently unavailable through Amazon, as notedby afew sites. You can still pick up a refurbed version through the retailer, but listings for the new model note that, “[t]his item is only available from third-party sellers.”
TechCrunch confirmed that the product is no longer available with Amazon, which noted, “that customer response to Kindle Voyage has been incredibly positive and we’ve sold out.” While Amazon’s refusing to disclose any further information, if there was a refresh on the way, the company likely would have noted as much on the site as is its custom.
All of this probably means there’s either new model on the way or, more than likely, the Voyage has been sunset. The device was first introduced in 2014 as a thinner, lighter and generally more premium version of the popular reader. The arrival of the higher end Oasis two years later, however, has made the product a bit redundant.
The culling of the line was probably a bit overdue, really. Amazon’s the far and away leader in devoted e-readers, but even without the Voyage in the lineup, there’s plenty of variety to be had in a still fairly narrow space.
Jack Dorsey is hedging his bets. In an interview with CNN’s Brian Stelter, the beard-rocking CEO said Twitter is reluctant to commit to a timetable for enacting policies aimed at curbing heated political rhetoric on the site.
The executive’s lukewarm comments reflect an embattled social network that has been the brunt of criticism from both sides of the political divide. The left has taken Twitter to task for relative inaction over incendiary comments from far right pundits like Alex Jones. The site was slow to act, compared to the likes of services including YouTube, Facebook and even YouPorn (yep).
When it ultimately did ban Jones’ Infowars, it was a seven day “timeout.” That move, expectedly, has drawn scrutiny from the other side of the aisle. Yesterday, Trump tweeted a critique of social media in general, that is generally being regarded as a thinly-veiled allusion to his embattled supporter, Jones.
Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others
Trump also recently called for an end to what the right has deemed the “shadow banning” of conservative voices on social media.
“How do we earn peoples’ trust?” the CEO asked rhetorically during the conversation. “How do we guide people back to healthy conversation?”
Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices. Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others…….
Dorsey suggested that his company is “more left-leaning,” a notion that has made him extra cautious of blowback from the right. He also continued his position of refusing to hold the company to be accountable for fact-checking, a policy that runs counter to proclamations of other social media like Facebook.
“We have not figured this out,” Dorsey said, “but I do think it would be dangerous for a company like ours… to be arbiters of truth.”
.@BrianStelter: Is your job to make sure people are not misinformed on Twitter?
For now, Dorsey and co. appear to be in a holding pattern, an indecisiveness that has drawn fire from all sides. The exec pines for a less polarized dialogue, citing NBA and K-Pop accounts as examples of Twitter subcultures that have been more measured in their approach.
Of course, anyone who’s spent time reading replies to LeBron or The Warriors can tell you that that’s a pretty low bar for discourse.
The fact of the matter is that this is the state of politics in 2018. Things are vicious and rhetoric can be incendiary. All of that is amplified by social media, as political pundits lean into troubling comments, conspiracy theory and outright lies to drive clicks.
Dorsey, says he’s pushing for policies “that encourage people to talk and to have healthy conversation.” Whatever Twitter’s “small staff” might have in the works, it certainly feels a long way off.
Soon, Saint Louis University students won’t be able to avoid Amazon’s near ubiquitous smart speakers. The university announced this week a plan to outfit living spaces with 2,300 Echo Dots. The devices are set to be deployed by the time classes start, later this month.
SLU is quick to note that it’s “the first college or university in the country to bring Amazon Alexa-enabled devices, managed by Alexa for Business, into every student residence hall room and student apartment on campus.” It’s certainly not the first to adopt Amazon’s smart speakers, but it’s among the largest scale for this sort of deployment.
While the product has become a mainstay in plenty of American homes, it does seem like an odd choice dorms and student campus. SLU has worked with Alexa for Business to create 100 custom questions, including, “What time does the library close tonight?” and “Where is the registrar’s office?”
Then, of course, there are the privacy concerns of having little cloud connected recording devices populating the school’s living spaces. SLU is attempting to get out in front of that here. The company addressed those issues on a privacy page, writing,
Because of our use of the Amazon Alexa for Business (A4B) platform, your Echo Dot is managed by a central system dedicated to SLU. This system is not tied to individual accounts and does not maintain any personal information for any of our users, so all use currently is anonymous. Additionally, neither Alexa nor the Alexa for Business management system maintains recordings of any questions that are asked.
The school notes that students can also mute the microphone. Students can’t technically opt-out, but they can unplug the product and shove it in a drawer, turning it in at the end of the year. Just don’t use it as a hockey puck, because that’ll cost you.
Just at the NFL is gearing up to kickoff its regular season, Adidas has announced that it will be partnering with Twitter to livestream high school football games on the platform. The “Friday Night Stripes” series (Get it? Get it?) will include eight games, featuring teams from California, Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Indiana.
The series starts September 7 (a day after the NFL season opener, incidentally), running throughout the standard high school football season, until November 9.
The deal joins a slew of existing streaming sports deals for the platform, including pro games from the NFL, MLB, NBA and NHL, along with collegiate conferences, like Pac-12. NFL games, in particular, have been a big hit for the site. This will, however, mark the first time high school football games have been streaming on the platform.
ESPN play-by-play announcer Courtney Lyle will call the games, along with analysis from former Packers linebacker A.J. Hawk and sideline coverage by YouTube comedian Cameron “Scooter” Magruder. Twitter will also offer the standard sports timeline features to supplement the on-field action.
