Month: October 2018

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has today been announced as the keynote speaker at a European data protection conference taking place in Brussels later this month — at a time when US lawmakers are asking tech giants outright if they’ll support “EU-like” privacy rules to shield US consumers from platform power.

For a week this month Europe’s data protection commissioners will gather to discuss the bloc’s shiny new privacy framework, GDPR, and what comes after it. They will also gather to listen to Cook talking on the theme of data ethics.

It’s a topic the Apple CEO has been speaking out about publicly for years.

Just this week, in an interview on US television, he couched privacy as “one of the most important issues of the 21st century” — describing it as a human right, and saying he supported “some level” of regulation, even as he professed himself “not a pro-regulation kind of person”.

Privacy is too important to keep being screwed with — or screwed over — was his clear subtext.

In a few weeks’ time Cook will literally stand alongside the architects of Europe’s GDPR, talking up privacy and ethics at the center of a Union whose founding charter grants its citizens data protection as a fundamental right.

The signalling is clear.

While Apple might so far have fallen just shy of calling for a full copypaste of GDPR-level data protections into US law, there’s perhaps an element of strategic caution at play that’s moderating its plain-text political messaging.

Because the company’s actions from all other angles show Apple consistently defending privacy rights in a big data ethics fight that’s pitting Europe against a small number of powerful US adtech giants whose ‘best’ argument in defence of the unethical stuff they’re doing is they need to ‘keep up with China’ — a country that neither respects human rights nor privacy…

These same self-interested adtech giants are now, of course, hard at work lobbying US lawmakers that big data is a tenet of tech faith — when it really doesn’t have to be that way.

Privacy-respecting data-based innovations are both possible and available. The father of the World Wide Web thinks so — and is now doing a startup to make it so. And Apple’s business is an incredible testament to the power of putting people in control of technology, not vice-versa.

Apple is also a testament to how handsome a profit can be turned from privacy.

At a recent Senate hearing to discuss how the US should approach setting a federal privacy law, its VP of software technology, Bud Tribble, summed up the company’s position as: “We want your device to know everything about you but we don’t think we should.”

It’s notable that no other tech giants can make that claim. Not Amazon, not Facebook, not Google.

These platforms fall awkwardly silent when faced with questions about data ethics.

Nor can they comfortably stand on a public podium and discuss what does and does not produce “a result that’s great for society”, as Cook can. They have to invent their own ludicrous measures — like ‘relevant ads’.

Frankly speaking, if that’s your price for giving up on human rights you really are selling out.

So it’s left to Apple to send out the privacy bat-signal.

Let’s just hope the lawmakers are watching. Because the lobbyists are busy whispering.

We’ve just wrapped up Startup Battlefield MENA in Beirut, Lebanon. Throughout the day, 15 companies pitched their ideas, demonstrated their technology and answered questions.

We took the feedback from all our expert judges and chose five teams to compete in the finals. Then after another round of pitches and Q&A, our finals judges selected a winner and a runner-up.

The winner of the Startup Battlefield MENA is taking home $25,000 (equity-free) and has also won a trip to Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Plus, both the winner and runner-up received some tasty Lebanese treats.

Here’s the winner:

BuildInk

Real estate construction firms are struggling to keep up with the fast-moving pace of technological advancements. BuildInk is offering a solution for those firms, via a scalable and mobile-friendly robot concrete 3D printer and signature concrete mixture. The company says 3D printing will not only open the space for unlimited architectural designs, but also reduce the overall construction cost.

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Here’s the runner-up:

Synkers

Synkers is a mobile platform that connects students with highly qualified peer tutors on-the-spot. The company says it utilizes adaptive and personalized learning to enable a seamless cross-border transfer of knowledge, and to make education accessible to all.

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And here are the other finalists:

Naturansa

Naturansa produces high-quality protein from edible insects, grown through pre-consumer food waste decomposition. The company says it has built scalable technology that produces insects year-round, which then get converted into a protein powder. It’s currently targeting the pet food market, but ultimately plans to move into human consumption.

Pure Harvest

Pure Harvest Smart Farms is a sustainable agriculture company focused on the production of greenhouse fruits and vegetables in the extreme climates of the Arab Gulf region, using world-leading greenhouse growing technologies. The company seeks to pioneer year-round production of affordable, premium quality fresh produce.

Seez

Seez is a mobile app that reduces the time people spend searching for a car from 17 hours down to a few seconds. By fully automating your search, Seez uses its AI chatbot, Cesar, to scan all sites, identify the seller, and even negotiate the price down for you. This way you will see all cars for sale in your country and the final price of each car.

Though some of the biggest names in tech are wholly focused on getting consumers to strap into VR, there has been an increasing amount of movement in companies adopting virtual reality to help train employees.

STRIVR, one of the VR training startups leading this movement, announced today that they’ve pulled in $16 million in a new round led by GreatPoint Ventures. The company has raised $21 million to date.

The startup, which initially began as a project to help the Stanford football team train in VR, has made some major strides with big partnerships of late; they partnered with Walmart last year to train employees going through their worker training centers.

The company’s training products are largely based around interactive 360-based video, which in addition to being easier to produce and experience, are also less hardware intensive and can be used on lower-end systems, like Facebook’s $199 Oculus Go.

A few weeks ago, the startup announced that Walmart would be sending 17,000 Oculus Go headsets across thousands of stores loaded up with training materials from STRIVR . CEO Derek Belch tells me that the company now has 27 Fortune 500 customers that encompass “pretty much every industry.”

“We’ve really been thinking about how we build the team and strategically go after scale for the last several months,” Belch told TechCrunch in an interview. “That’s what this new capital with GreatPoint is about, more hiring and other operational things associated with bringing more people on to take on more customers.”

The patent system is broken — there are too many ways to list here, really. The problems surrounding prior art are certainly among them, and a team of high profile companies and organizations are joining forces to address some of the these with the Prior Art Archive.

The database is a collaboration between MIT’s Media Lab, Google, Cisco and the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which certainly has the most to gain here. Using the MIT-hosted archive, patent applicants can find easily accessible examples of prior art and other technical information for reference.

“The patent examination process should stop patents from being issued on old or obvious technology,” MIT writes. “Unfortunately, just because technology is old doesn’t mean it is easy for a patent examiner to find. Particularly in the computer field, much prior art is in the form of old manuals, documentation, web sites, etc. that have, until now, not been readily searchable.”

Google also has a blog post detailing its own work with the archive, which mostly revolves around search. The company is also implementing AI and ML technologies to help bolster searches. “To this end,” the company writes, “we’ve recently created an open ecosystem, the Google Patents Public Datasets, to make large datasets available for empirical public policy, economics, and machine learning research.”

I haven’t seen a virtual reality glove system that also includes a suitcase-sized pneumatic box accessory before, but then again there aren’t too many VR peripherals that have delivered quite the depth of immersion that the HaptX system did.

Today, HaptX announced the release of their Gloves development kit that will allow its users to feel pressure and resistance in their virtual reality interactions all while delivering smooth hand-tracking. The company, whose backers include Chinese gaming company NetEase and ex-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, wants virtual reality experiences to be more than just what people are seeing, they want to drive big improvements to the quality of their physical interactions as well. I had a chance to don the latest HaptX gloves and look like a real VR monster while playing through a demo that highlights some of their device’s capabilities.

The big highlight of the system is the pressure sensitivity it offers, meaning that you can roughly tell what an object feels like when you grab it because little air bubbles are building out the shape of the object inside the gloves. This is the reason there’s a suitcase-sized box filled with pneumatic actuators, which the company says has been rapidly shrinking and will be much smaller by the time the product exits the dev kit phase. Alongside the pressure offered by the 130 feedback points, there’s also a bit of an exoskeleton around your hands designed give your fingers some resistance as you try to close them on solid objects.

To account for the bulkiness of the system and all of the hand-tracking occlusion that would occur as a result, HaptX isn’t using IR cameras to map where your hands are like a system from Leap Motion may. Instead, the startup is using magnetic planar tracking to track the movement and position of your fingers and joints. It’s the same kind of tracking tech used in the Magic Leap remote, but it’s a bit more of a stress test here given just how much is being tracked. The system held up well enough teamed with some Vive trackers to estimate the positions of my arms themselves in VR.

Actually playing around with this was a bizarre sensation, I felt like a mech monster, even when they tossed me into a demo simulation that had me cutting wheat in a barnyard scene and picking up a little fox.

The system definitely worked best with more subtle feedback. When grabbing something absolutely solid like a small rock, I was far less tricked by the glove system than when I was feeling virtual rain hitting the gloves and delivering tapping sensations on my hand at the same rate. Feeling a spider jump on to my hand and all of its legs move across my palm was honestly one of the least pleasant things I’ve experienced in VR and left my spine crawling while I flicked the digital spider off of my very disturbed real body.

It’s all engaging, but who on earth needs something like this?

I found myself wondering that even as we discussed enterprise solutions. HaptX sees their expensive glove system as a peripheral that makes good on a lot of the failed promises of other systems and as something that has some real promise in the prototyping phase for manufacturing or in making workplace training highly realistic. I have tried several other VR gloves and this is definitely the most complete solution, even if it is likely the most bulky and most expensive solution as well — though the company isn’t releasing pricing details on its system yet. If a company is interested in bringing hands into a VR experience and just wants the best possible solution out there regardless of price or complexity, this is probably what they would want to buy.

This isn’t remotely a consumer solution and seems to definitely be a fringe enterprise product in its current iteration but as virtual reality systems begin becoming more commonplace in workplace settings, it’s not unreasonable that these companies are going to want input methods to become more realistic and shift away from controllers towards VR gloves that can translate what people have been trained in more directly. 

Upwork, the rebranded merger of oDesk and Elance, debuted on Nasdaq this morning, after dropping its S-1 about four weeks ago. Shares opened at $23.00, which represents a 53% jump — shares were priced at $15 before the opening bell by investors, a significant uptick from the company’s revised projection of $12 to $14, which was already an increase from its original $10 to $12 target. The stock trades under the ticker UPWK, and the company will fundraise approximately $102 million of new cash for its balance sheet ($187 million total with existing shareholders).

Shares are still currently up 40% compared to their original price.

I talked with Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel this morning about the IPO road show, in which he said he took approximately 160 meetings with investors. Investors were engaged on the “combination of the strengths of the business and the strengths of the mission,“ and he was clearly excited about the engagement the offering received.

Upwork, whose antecedent companies go back almost two decades, is a positive cash flow business, albeit one growing top line revenue only about 27.6% year over year. Kasriel said that the company should be able to “compound at that rate for decades” due to the growing number of workers who freelance around the world in order to have flexible work arrangements. “When you think about which jobs are being created in the global economy, in most countries it is these knowledge jobs,” he said.

In addition, “When you really take a long term view, what really matters is to be good stewards of capital,” Kasriel noted, and said that the company was very focused on areas like sales and marketing ROI. His goal is to continue to grow the company with limited dilution to shareholders, a message that apparently has been well-received.

As for Kasriel himself, he becomes a public company CEO. He was elevated to the CEO role in 2015 from SVP of Engineering – a somewhat unusual path, even in tech-obsessed Silicon Valley. He emphasized that “we are a tech company,” and noted that every day is a learning experience. “I was just on CNBC, and for introverts, what really scares me is to be on live broadcast TV,” he said.

A huge part of Upwork’s business today is focused on the enterprise, particularly complex workflows that require multiple types of talent. The company’s platform not only handles talent management, but the long array of tasks to manage people: HR, legal, procurement, information security, and others.

According to the company, it will host $1.5 billion worth of gross sales value across two million unique projects. The company estimates that its products are used by 30% of the Fortune 500.

Upwork, which has offices in Mountain View, San Francisco, and Chicago, has 1,500 employees – and as is to be expected – roughly 1,100 of them are freelancers. Kasriel said, “We use our own product, which we call drinking our own champagne.”

Among the major VC investors behind the company are Benchmark, which owned 15%, Sigma Partners, which owned 14.2%, and Globespan, T. Rowe Price, and FirstMark. The company is offering 6,818,181 new shares as well as 5,658,512 shares from existing shareholders. Citigroup, Jefferies, and RBC jointly led the book.

Now that the company has debuted, Upwork wants to refocus once again on its business following weeks of talking to investors. “We need to build this company for the ages,” Kasriel noted, and said that his message to employees was to “focus on the mission.”

As it approaches its 35th year in the venture capital business, Accel is staying true to its promise to continue passing the torch to the younger generation of investors.

This week, the firm brought on Maya Noeth as a principal leading its consumer growth investing efforts. Accel typically promotes from within; Noeth is its first outside hire since Amit Kumar and Nate Niparko joined over two years ago.

Noeth has an impressive track record. She’s spent the last nine years at TCV, most recently as a vice president of its B2C group, where she invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix and Spotify, as well as Airbnb, Rent The Runway, Rover and VICE Media.

At Accel, she’ll be writing checks sized between $30 million and $100 million in growth-stage startups focused on digital and social media, subscription e-commerce, gaming and vertical marketing. Noeth and the rest of Accel’s growth team are pulling capital out of the firm’s fourth flagship growth fund, which closed on $1.5 billion in 2016. 

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Noeth explained what she’s looking for in a B2C company.

“At a high-level, whenever I meet a new company, I’m interested in how big and attractive the market size is, who the team leading it is — execution is one of the most important attributes of a business — does the businesses have a great product that is differentiated with great competitive moats, what is the revenue model, what is the financial profile and is it really good unit economics?”

As a new mom, Noeth says she is especially interested in identifying companies in the kids-focused digital media sector.

“I think a lot of people are scratching their heads wondering what is there beyond YouTube Kids,” she said. “There is potential for really disruptive businesses to take over.”

Before joining TCV in late 2009 at the age of 23, Noeth began her career at Morgan Stanley as an investment banking analyst specializing in the technology, media and telecom vertical.

Accel invests in companies at all stages, counting Spotify, Jet and Etsy among its investments. The firm’s recent exits include cybersecurity company Tenable’s summer IPO, Flipkart’s momentous sale to Walmart and Amazon’s nearly $1 billion purchase of PillPack, an online pharmacy startup Accel first backed in 2014.

Accel currently has 11 partners and five principals in the U.S. writing checks. According to PitchBook, it has $10.8 billion of assets under management.

For the last two and a half years, Iron Ox has been working on perfecting its agricultural robots to tend its indoor farms. After first testing its systems on a small scale, the company is opening its first fully autonomous production farm, with plans to start selling its produce soon.

The farm is currently growing a number of leafy greens, including romaine, butterhead and kale, in addition to basil, cilantro and chives.  The robots that are tending these plants are Angus, a 1000-pound machine that can lift and move the large hydroponic boxes that the produce is growing in, and Iron Ox’s robotic arm for harvesting the produce.

As Iron Ox co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander told me, the current setup can produce about 26,000 plants per year and is equivalent to a one-acre outdoor farm — though this one is obviously indoors and far more densely packed.

Alexander noted that he and his co-founder Jon Binney decided to get into indoor farming after working at a number of other robotics companies — for Alexander, that includes a stint at Google X — where the focus was often more on building cool technologies and not on how those robots could be used. “We’d seen lots of novelty robotics stuff and wanted to avoid that,” he told me. And while the founding team considered getting into warehouse logistics or drones, they eventually settled on farming because, as Alexander tells it, they didn’t just want to build a good business but also one that would create social good.

Today, the vast majority of the kinds of leafy greens (the kind of produce that Iron Ox focuses on) in the U.S. is grown in California and Arizona — especially during the winter months when it’s colder in the rest of the country. That means a romaine lettuce that’s sold on the East Coast in January has often traveled more than 2,000 miles to get there. “That’s why we switched to indoors,” Alexander said. “We can decentralize the farm.”

It also helps that an indoor hydroponic farm can achieve 30 times the yield of an outdoor farm over the course of a year, yet uses far less space.

To get to this point where Iron Ox can operate an autonomous farm, though, took plenty of work and engineering chops. The hardest challenge, Alexander told me, was to get the robotic arm to look at the plants through its stereo cameras and then plan the pickup operation to harvest the produce, which isn’t always uniform. And to run this operation autonomously, it obviously has to do so reliably.

Angus, the larger robot that picks up the 800-pound pallets the produce is grown in and brings them to the robotic arm, also took some time to get right. You don’t want to move those pallets to quickly, after all, or you’ll have plenty of water to mop up.

All of that, including the system that monitors the plants, their growth, the sensors that watch over them and the hydroponics system, is then controlled from a cloud-based service that tells the robots when it’s time to harvest and what operations to perform. The robots themselves, though, then perform those tasks autonomously.

One thing that came as something of a surprise to the team, though, was that running an indoor farm solely with LED lighting still results in electricity bills that are simply too expensive to make the operation profitable. So going forward, Iron Ox is actually betting on more traditional greenhouses that are augmented by high-efficiency LED lighting.

That means the team can’t build these autonomous farms right in the city, though, because you can’t exactly stack a number of greenhouses on top of each other. But as Alexander noted, even if you have to be 20 miles outside of the city, that’s still far better than shipping produce to a supermarket that is thousands of miles away.

As Alexander stressed, the team spent a lot of time talking to both existing farmers and chefs to figure out what they needed. Farmers, it turned out, were mostly complaining about their inability to find labor. And that’s no surprise. The labor shortage in the agricultural industry is starting to become a major issue for farmers, especially in states like California. As for the chefs, what they were mostly looking for was quality, of course, but also predictability and consistent quality.

The plan now is to start selling the produce from the first farm and the scale to more and larger locations over time. Iron Ox also now has the money to do so, given that it has raised over $5 million in total, including a $3 million round it announced earlier this year.

In a few hours, millions of Americans will get a test emergency “Presidential Alert” message sent to their phone — a simulation in case the president ever needs to reach to entire country in a national emergency.

At 2:18pm ET, the Federal Emergency Management Agency will send a short alert, saying: “THIS IS A TEST of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. No action is needed.” A few minutes later, televisions and radio broadcasts will briefly suspend and a similar message will run.

The test was originally scheduled for mid-September but was delayed until Wednesday after Hurricane Florence hit the east coast.

This will be the first time the government has conducted a nationwide test of the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system, according to a FEMA advisory.

Emergency warnings used to be confined to television and radio broadcasts, sounding out that familiar terrifying high-pitch tone. But as consumers moved away from televisions and radio to mobile devices that are always with us, the government began working on a system to get emergency alerts in our hands.

Since it was devised in 2006 under the Bush administration, the Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) has slowly rolled out across the U.S. to form a new state-of-the-art emergency alert system. Like the legacy system, the WEA is designed to alert Americans to bad weather and missing children at a local level directly to your phone.

But now FEMA wants to test a third alert — the presidential alert — which will send a message to every switched-on phone with cell service across the U.S. at the same time.

This won’t be a text message sent to your phone, experts say. Instead of sending text messages that would flood the networks, the alerts are sent directly over the cellular network.

Although today is a test, any future presidential alert can be sent solely at the discretion of the president and can be issued for any reason. And, unlike other alerts, Americans cannot opt-out of receiving a presidential alert.

Some have expressed concern that the system could be abused for political reasons. Others worry that the system could be hacked.

Tom Crane, an expert in emergency management at Everbridge, a critical communications provider, told TechCrunch that the WEA has “extra safeguards” in place before sending an alert. An authorized user has to enter a complex password that has two elements — a private key and a keystore password — which are unique for each alerting authority.

“It’s not as easy as ‘someone left their computer unattended so i’m going to send a Wireless Emergency Alert’,” he said.

The emergency alert system is far from perfect. Earlier this year, panic spread on Hawaii after an erroneous alert warned residents of a “ballistic missile threat inbound.” The message said, “this is not a drill.” The false warning was amid the height of tensions between the US and North Korea, which at the time was regularly test-firing rockets used for its nuclear missile program.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I’m visiting Y Combinator’s San Francisco headquarters to talk to two of the people who are integral to Y Combinator — Kat Manalac and Michael Seibel.

Michael is CEO of Y Combinator’s accelerator program. He has been through YC himself a couple of times — first in 2007, as co-founder and CEO of Justin.tv — and again in 2012 as co-founder and CEO of Socialcam. Justin.tv later became Twitch and sold to Amazon, and Socialcam was sold to Autodesk.

Kat is a partner at Y Combinator and one of the people who convinced us to apply to join the program back in 2014. She has been at YC for five years, where she focuses on founder outreach, helping companies perfect their pitches, and much more. Prior to joining YC, she was chief of staff to Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian and also worked on brand and strategy at WIRED.

In this episode we talk about:

• The evolution of Y Combinator — it’s changed a ton since Product Hunt went through the program four years ago. They’ve been working on several programs for founders — things that Michael wishes existed when he went through the program.
• Michael and Kat’s advice for founders, including counter-intuitive tips they’ve learned after working with literally thousands of startups.
• A key mistake that trips up new founders when pitching their company, as well as advice for founders seeking a technical co-founder.
• How YC has scaled the organization as a 50-person company with its 4,000 (and growing) alumni.

Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including a virtual assistant that will do anything, a $1,500 smart mirror that will get you fit, and a beverage that will get you high.

We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.