Month: October 2018

Inventor Jamie Siminoff was rejected by the sharks on ABC’s “Shark Tank” in 2013 when trying to make a deal for his video doorbell startup. This year, Amazon bought his company, Ring, for a billion dollars. Now, Amazon is looking for another way to tap into breakout products from the popular TV show – by becoming an official retailer partner for “Shark Tank.” The newly announced deal allows Amazon to showcase past and future “Shark Tank” products on its website, and come with a $15,000 Amazon Web Services (AWS) credit for each eligible “Shark Tank” entrepreneur.

The products will be available in a new Shark Tank Collection on Amazon Launchpad, its platform for hardware and physical goods startups, which first arrived in 2015. The idea is to offer a dedicated place on Amazon where consumers can shop products from up-and-coming companies, like Bluesmart’s luggage, eero’s Home Wi-Fi system, Casper mattresses, and hundreds more.

This new collection is not the first time Amazon has featured “Shark Tank” products on its site, however.

Also in 2015, Amazon launched a new online store called Amazon Exclusives, which featured a variety of new brands, including products from “Shark Tank,” like Tower Paddle Boards, for example.

At the time, the “Shark Tank” merchandise selection was limited, though.

With today’s launch, that’s changing.

Amazon says the new collection features over 70 products that successfully received funding from “Shark Tank” seasons 1 through 9, and new products from season 10 and beyond will be featured here in the future.

The products available today include things like smart changing pad and scale Hatch Baby, coffee enhancer Third Wave Water, and storage bags from Stasher, among others. You can even sort and filter products by those that were funded by two or more sharks, or those with over $250,000 in funding.

“For the first time ever, ‘Shark Tank’ has a store on Amazon.com dedicated to helping our entrepreneurs scale their businesses and highlight top products from the show,” said “Shark Tank” investor, Barbara Corcoran, in a statement. “We are excited for the Amazon Launchpad Shark Tank Collection to bring products from our entrepreneurs to retail for customers and fans of the series.”

For Amazon, the deal isn’t just a way to redirect “Shark Tank”-related shopping searches to its site, following an airing of the TV show. It also gives Amazon a first-hand way of seeing which products are becoming viable consumer hits – something that could open the door for an acquisition or further deal-making at some later point, perhaps.

Of course, that would require the TV sharks to not be quite so short-sighted – after all, they thought Ring was overvalued, and passed. (They’re not interested in companies that require too much capital, apparently.) In hindsight, it still seems like a miss on their parts. And with the start of Season 10, the sharks again passed on a product Amazon could like – Boxlock, a smart lock for securing packages left at your doorstep. After all, not everyone will want to let delivery drivers into their home.

“The Amazon Launchpad program is all about empowering creators and inventors, enabling them to reach hundreds of millions of customers,” said Jim Adkins, Vice President, Amazon. “By teaming up with ‘Shark Tank,’ we are making it fun and easy for fans of the show to discover a wide variety of unique innovations and cutting-edge products,” he said.

I hate STEM toys. I have three kids and ultimately every “educational” toy they’ve used – from LittleBits to Nintendo Labo – has ended up in a corner somewhere, ignored for more exciting fare. This happens for a few reasons but the primary one is that the toys require too much attention and have no lasting play value.

Given this fact, I thought our species (or at least my kids) would be doomed to Idoicracy-style techno illiteracy. Luckily, a set of toys from the optimistically-named organization Tech Will Save Us, has changed my mind.

TWSU toys are nice in that they are at once rugged toys that withstand constant play and electronic devices that can be programmed by a clever eight year old. For example, the $60 Creative Coder is basically a LilyPad device with a USB interface and a block-based programming language that lets you program it. The TWSU website features a number of little programs you can upload to the board including a Pokemon sensor that starts out red and white until you shake the board, activating the sensor and causing the lights to blink. My son loved it and he slept in it, strapping the wearable to his wrist like an Apple Watch.

Programming the Creative Coder is very simple. It uses a Scratch -like interface to set colors and activate timers and in a few minutes I was able to make a Ghost Detector that “hunted” for ghosts and then blinked when it found one. I based the idea on an old toy I had in the 1980s called IAN that beeped when it got close to “invisible aliens.” I still remember the excitement I felt walking around in my Grandma’s basement looking for monsters. I think he felt the same excitement.

The other toys – including a simple game machine that uses an Arduino and a 9×9 LED display – were similarly interesting. The game machine, for example, included a primitive version of Flappy Bird that my son played for hours and he was excited to get the LED to spell his name on command. It did, however, require knowledge of Arduino programming which limited the usability. However, because it comes preloaded with a simple game the device felt complete right out of the box.

How are these toys different from all the other STEM junk I’ve tried? Again, they worked out of the box. The Creative Coder could double as a bike light as soon as you assembled it and it came inside of a plastic case that made it a wearable instead of a science project. The other toys were just that – toys – and the programming was an afterthought. Ultimately I’m sure this stuff will end up under the couch, dead and forgotten, but until that happens they’ve supplied a great deal of fun.

STEM toys often focus on the STEM. I suspect this is because engineers are building them and not toymakers. Further, toymakers create things like the Zoomer Playful Pup (another clever toy) and hide all of the technology deep behind layers of plastic. Finding the right balance in so-called STEM toys is incredibly difficult but its doable and, as Tech Will Save Us have proved, these toys don’t have to be too boring or too complex for the kids (and parents) who might buy them.

Earlier this year, Adobe previewed Project Rush, a new multi-platform video editing tool. Today, at its Mac conference, the company announced that Project Rush is now Premiere Rush CC and an official part of the Creative Cloud suite.

The idea behind Rush is pretty straightforward. It’s meant to provide video creators with a modern all-in-one video editing solution that allows them to quickly edit a video and publish it on platforms like YouTube and other social networks. Indeed, it’s very much meant to be the video editing tool for the YouTube generation.

Rush takes the core parts of Adobe’s suite of video and audio editing tools and combines them in a single mobile and desktop experience. That means you get a set of Motion Graphics templates, for example, that were specifically designed to give Rush users easy access to customizable titles. The color correction system is built on top of the same technology that powers the more fully featured and complicated Premiere Pro editing tool. And the audio-editing features, including one-click ducking, are powered by the same code as their counterparts in Audition.

All of those edits easily sync between platforms, giving creators the ability to start editing on their phone, for example, and then finish their work on a laptop.

The current version of Rush is pretty much what Adobe announced a few months ago, but the company also used today’s announcement to preview what’s next. Soon, you’ll also be able to edit on Android (Adobe promises a release in 2019) and get speed controls so you can speed up and slow down your videos (a feature that YouTube creators are bound to overuse), as well as the ability to more easily create different versions of your videos for multiple platforms. The team also promises to increase performance over time.

Premiere Rush is now available to all Creative Cloud All Apps, Premiere Pro CC single app and Student plan subscribers. There is also a single app plan for $9.99/month for individuals (or $19.99/month for teams). In addition, there is a free starter plan that gives users access to all the apps and features, but limits exports to three projects.

Adobe today announced that Typekit, the company’s subscription service and marketplace for fonts that it acquired in 2011, is getting a new name. The service is now called Adobe Fonts. What’s maybe more important, though, is that Adobe Founts is now part of all Creative Cloud plans, including single-app plans the popular Photography plan. Even those who don’t pay for a Creative Cloud subscription now get access to a basic font collection, courtesy of their Adobe ID.

There’s a couple of other new features today, too. Adobe has removed all sync limits, for example, so that you can now activate whichever fonts you need and then use them everywhere. And ‘everywhere’ is an important term here, because the company has also done away with “web-only” fonts. Every font in the library is now available for usage on the web and the desktop.

In addition to these functional updates, Adobe also today announced that it is adding 3,000 new fonts to the library (and the library itself is getting a design overhaul, too). The new fonts come from a number of sources, including the Type Network collective, which accounts for 2,500 fonts in the library, and Adobe’s own type foundry. And starting today, Adobe will launch new font packs every day for the next 30 days.

At its Max conference in Los Angeles, Adobe today announced a number of new products in its Creative Cloud suite. Among those is Project Aero, a new tool that allows for building new AR experiences, and Project Gemini for painting and drawing on the iPad.

The ‘Project’ moniker is Adobe’s way of signifying that these are still early-stage products and not quite ready for prime time yet. Over time, though, they typically become fully named parts of the Creative Cloud suite.

The fact that Adobe is launching a tool for building AR experience doesn’t come as a major surprise. Adobe isn’t one to stand by as hype builds around a new technology (see: Adobe’s early support for VR). Project Aero, which integrates with both Adobe Dimension and Photoshop for creating importing assets, is now in private beta, with plans for a wider release in 2019.

The other new tool is Project Gemini, which takes some of Adobe’s Photoshop technology, including its painting engine, to create a stand-alone drawing app for the iPad. The app also takes some cues from existing drawing tools from Adobe like Photoshop Sketch and Illustrator Draw. Indeed, it gets its time-lapse recording feature and support for Photoshop brushes from these — but in a new package that also includes selection and masking tools, grids, drawing guides and a mix of raster and vector drawing capabilities.

One interesting note here is that Kyle T. Webster is behind this new project. Last year, Adobe bought Webster’s Photoshop brush tools almost exactly one year ago.

“Through rigorous testing with artists of all skill levels, we reconsidered how drawing tools work. All of Project Gemini’s features are focused on accelerating drawing and painting workflows,” Adobe writes in today’s announcement. “Illustrators can expect the most natural brushes handcrafted by Kyle Webster, dynamic brushes such as watercolors and oils, new ways to select, mask, and transform, and the integration of technology by the Adobe research team.”

Gemini will support the same brushes that are available in Photoshop, as well as dynamic brushes, and feature the ability to move files between the two programs.

Like many of the projects the company announced today, Project Gemini is still in closed beta. For now, it’s also only scheduled for release on iPad, though Adobe says it’ll come to other platforms, too. I take that to mean Windows given Adobe’s and Microsoft’s close relationship and the lack of compelling Android tablets these days.

Connected car startup Vinli aims to connect vehicles to the cloud and is today announcing a change in its business model as it partners with the largest fleet operator in Europe, ALD Automotive.

Vinli launched in 2014 as a direct consumer company that allowed owners to add cloud services to automobiles. It was a clever concept, and when it launched four years ago, it was ahead of the curve. The company went on to raise to $6.5M through four rounds of funding, slowly evolving the product to meet the changing needs of the market.

Today, the company is announcing a change in focus and will no longer sell products directly to consumers. The company founder and CEO Mark Haider tells TechCrunch this is in response to the product’s evolution, which can now offer enterprises a platform for them to launch their own mobility applications directly to their users.

Vinli is discontinuing the production of its hardware and will work with partners to offer the same services to consumers.

To go along with this new business strategy, Vinli is launching a data platform that Haider tells me can ingest data from any source and correlate it with machine learning and AI, allowing customers to develop predictive services for their products. Called Era, Vinli believes this will enable its customers to mine trends from data without the need of data scientists.

Vinli signed a deal with ALD Automotive to add its connected services to its fleets of 1.6 million vehicles. In a press release, ALD Automotive says Vinli will enrich ALD’s “overall service offering and develop new value-added solutions to improve both driver experience and optimize overall Total Cost of Ownership for efficient fleet management.”

“We believe that the automotive industry is evolving to become a service-based and subscription-driven industry,” said Mark Haidar, CEO of Vinli. “Connected cars and data are at the epicenter of this change. Collecting, analyzing, and discovering trends from ALD’s 1.6 million vehicles will not only be transformative to the driver but to the industry as a whole”

Terms of the partnership were not released.

Connecting vehicles to the cloud has significant implications as car makers, insurers and consumers alike can gain deep insights into the habits of the driver and mechanics of the car throughout its life. Vinli seems well positioned to offer a platform to provide this data and today’s moves should help the company into the future.

Adobe XD, the company’s platform for designing and prototyping user interfaces and experiences, is adding support for a different kind of application to its lineup: voice apps. Those could be applications that are purely voice-based — maybe for Alexa or Google Home — or mobile apps that also take voice input.

The voice experience is powered by Sayspring, which Adobe acquired earlier this year. As Sayspring’s founder and former CEO Mark Webster told me, the team has been working on integrating these features into XD since he joined the company.

To support designers who are building these apps, XD now includes voice triggers and speech playback. That user experience is tightly integrated with the rest of XD and in a demo I saw ahead of today’s reveal, building voice apps didn’t look all that different from prototyping any other kind of app in XD.

To make the user experience realistic, XD can now trigger speech playback when it hears a specific word or phrase. This isn’t a fully featured natural language understanding system, of course, since the idea here is only to mock-up what the user experience would look like.

“Voice is weird,” Webster told me. “It’s both a platform like Amazon Alexa and the Google Assistant, but also a form of interaction […] Our starting point has been to treat it as a form of interaction — and how do we give designers access to the medium of voice and speech in order to create all kinds of experiences. A huge use case for that would be designing for platforms like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft Cortana.”

And these days, with the advent of smart displays from Google and its partners, as well as the Amazon Echo Show, these platforms are also becoming increasingly visual. As Webster noted, the combination of screen design and voice is being more and more important now and so adding voice technology into XD seemed like a no-brainer.

Adobe’s product management lead for XD Andrew Shorten stressed that before acquiring Sayspring and integrating it into XD, its users had a hard time building voice experiences. “We started to have interactions with customers who were beginning to experiment with creating experiences for voice,” he said. “And then they were describing the pain and the frustration — and all the tools that they’d use to be able to prototype didn’t help them in this regard. And so they had to pull back to working with developers and bringing people in to help with making prototypes.”

XD is getting a few other new features, too. It now features a full range of plugins, for example, that are meant to automate some tasks and integrate it with third-party tools.

Also new is auto-animate, which brings relatively complex animation to XD that appear when you are transitioning between screens in your prototype app. The interesting part here, of course, is that this is automated. To see it in action, all you have to do is duplicate an existing artboard, modify some of the elements on the pages and tell XD to handle the animations for you.

The release also features a number of other new tools. Drag Gestures now allows you to re-create the standard drag gestures in mobile apps, maybe for building an image carousel, for example, while linked symbols make it easier to apply changes across artboards. There is also now a deeper integration with Adobe Illustrator and you can export XD designs to After Effects, Adobe’s animation tool for those cases where you need full control over animations inside your applications.

It’s no secret that Adobe is currently in the process of modernizing its Creative Cloud apps and bringing them to every major platform. Today, the company is using its Max conference in Los Angeles today to officially announce Photoshop CC for the iPad.

Sadly, you won’t be able to try it today, but come 2019, you’ll be able to retouch all of your images right on the iPad. And while it won’t feature ever feature of the desktop from the get-go, the company promises that it’ll add them over time.

As with all of Adobe’s releases, Photoshop for iPad will play nicely with all other versions of Photoshop and sync all the changes you make to PSD files across devices. Unsurprisingly, the user experience has been rethought from the ground up and redesigned for touch. It’ll feature most of the standard Photoshop image editing tools and the layers panel. Of course, it’ll also support your digital stylus.

Adobe says the iPad version shares the same code base as Photoshop for the desktop, “so there’s no compromises on power and performance or editing results.”

For now, though, that’s pretty much all we know about Photoshop CC on the iPad. For more, we’ll have to wait until 2019. In a way though, that’s probably all you need to know. Adobe has long said that it wants to enable its users to do their work wherever they are. Early on, that meant lots of smaller specialized apps that synced with the larger Creative Cloud ecosystem, but now it looks as if the company is moving toward bringing full versions of its larger monoliths like Photoshop to mobile, too.

Celonis has been helping companies analyze and improve their internal processes using machine learning. Today the company announced it was providing that same solution as a cloud service with a few nifty improvements you won’t find on prem.

The new approach, called Celonis Intelligent Business Cloud, allows customers to analyze a workflow, find inefficiencies and offer improvements very quickly. Companies typically follow a workflow that has developed over time and very rarely think about why it developed the way it did, or how to fix it. If they do, it usually involves bringing in consultants to help. Celonis puts software and machine learning to bear on the problem.

Co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke says that his company deals with massive volumes of data and moving all of that to the cloud makes sense. “With Intelligent Business Cloud, we will unlock that [on prem data], bring it to the cloud in a very efficient infrastructure and provide much more value on top of it,” he told TechCrunch.

The idea is to speed up the whole ingestion process, allowing a company to see the inefficiencies in their business processes very quickly. Rinke says it starts with ingesting data from sources such as Salesforce or SAP and then creating a visual view of the process flow. There may be hundreds of variants from the main process workflow, but you can see which ones would give you the most value to change, based on the number of times the variation occurs.

By packaging the Celonis tools as a cloud service, they are reducing the complexity of running and managing it. They are also introducing an app store with over 300 pre-packaged options for popular products like Salesforce and ServiceNow and popular process like order to cash. This should also help get customers up and running much more quickly.

The cloud service also includes an Action Engine, which Rinke describes as a big step toward moving Celonis from being purely analytical to operational. “Action Engine focuses on changing and improving processes. It gives workers concrete info on what to do next. For example in process analysis, it would notice on time delivery isn’t great because order to cash is to slow. It helps accelerate changes in system configuration,” he explained.

The new cloud service is available today. Celonis was founded in 2011. It has raised over $77 million. The most recent round was a $50 million Series B on a valuation over $1 billion.

Uber is facing calls for a boycott of its app in the Persian Gulf, a region that has poured billions of dollars of investment into the company’s ride-hailing business in recent years: Directly via Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and indirectly because the Saudis are major investors in Softbank’s Vision Fund vehicle, which is another big Uber investor.

The regional calls to boycott Uber were stoked yesterday by Saudi ally, Bahrain, whose foreign minister retweeted hashtags calling for a boycott of the company, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters.

An Uber spokesperson declined to comment when reached for a response.

A few boycott calls circulating on Twitter urge app users to switch to Uber ride-hailing rival, Careem, though it’s unclear whether Uber alternatives are seeing any local uplift as yet.

Anger at Uber has been sparked by the reaction of CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to the disappearance of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident, who has not been seen since entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2 for a pre-arranged appointment to obtain documentation for his forthcoming marriage to a Turkish citizen.

Newspaper reports have suggested Khashoggi was killed inside the embassy by a Saudi hit squad that traveled to Turkey for the purpose of carrying out the murder. As a Saudi ex-pat the journalist had written critically of the crown prince’s regime.

And while independent CCTV footage shows Khashoggi entering the embassy but there is no proof to show he ever left. Although the Saudis have denied any wrongdoing, and claimed their citizens were just visiting Turkey as tourists.

Following growing alarm over Khashoggi’s disappearance, Uber’s CEO was among several business leaders to announce they were pulling out of an investment conference due to take place in the Saudi capital later this month.

“I’m very troubled by the reports to date about Jamal Khashoggi. We are following the situation closely, and unless a substantially different set of facts emerges, I won’t be attending the FII conference in Riyadh,” said Khosrowshahi in a statement last week.

Uber confirmed to TechCrunch today that Khosrowshahi will not be attending the Future Investment Initiative conference — a conference’s hosted by Saudi’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, aka MBS, who is also chairman of the PIF; a key Uber investor, which has a member sitting on Uber’s board. 

Those links underline quite how complicated managing this particular piece of legacy baggage is for Khosrowshahi — who, as Uber’s new broom, has made it his stated mission to chart a new course by ‘doing the right thing. Period‘. 

Yet when Uber accepted $3.5BN from the Saudi PIF two years ago ‘doing the right thing’ meant just one thing: Growing Uber, with few if any other considerations on the table for then CEO and founder Travis Kalanick .

At the time he took the Saudi billions, Kalanick said: “We appreciate the vote of confidence in our business as we continue to expand our global presence. Our experience in Saudi Arabia is a great example of how Uber can benefit riders, drivers, and cities and we look forward to partnering to support their economic and social reforms.”

It’s unclear whether he weighed up the ethical and political risks of accepting investment from a conservative regime seeking to project a reforming image at the same time as carrying out violent repression in Yemen, and with its own long history of persecuting domestic critics.

But Uber’s decision to take Saudi money in 2016 and again, via SoftBank at the end of last year, is very much Khosrowshahi’s problem now. 

In a public remark on Twitter, tech investor, Mark Tluszcz, co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, suggested Uber’s CEO should have kept his concerns about Khashoggi’s fate to himself — saying there’s “no upside” for Uber or its investor SoftBank…

Responding to a follow up question about human rights, Tluszcz also told us: “Personally [a CEO] can do what they want, but should NOT use their position to express personal opinions. I doubt personal opinions are in the best interest of all stakeholders.”

Bloomberg also notes that SoftBank’s shares have continued to have a bumpy ride as outcry has grown over Khashoggi’s disappearance, as well as investors responding to wider uncertainties attached to its approach with the Vision Fund.

In the case of Uber, you could argue that had Khosrowshahi said nothing about the extraterritorial vanishing of a journalist critical to the Saudi regime that might have been a pretty tricky position for the CEO to square with a loud PR message about ‘doing the right thing’.

‘Uber: We do the right thing, sometimes’, wouldn’t have the same purifying ring as: ‘We do the right thing. Period.’ And detoxifying the Uber brand is clearly a key intent of Khosrowshahi’s tenure at Uber. 

Yet, at the same time, Uber remains awash with billions of dollars of Saudi investment. And a PR message alone can’t purge problematic legacy decisions which are also baked into the investment structure of the company.

That would take more than fine words.

So Uber is now facing regional blowback for something Khosrowshahi said, and setting itself against a major investor — risking another messy investor spat — while still potentially looking a like a hypocrite.

Safe to say, there are no shortcuts when the legacy issues attached to a business run so deep.

Not that Uber is alone in having Saudi money on its books, of course. As we wrote last week, a number of other Silicon Valley firms have welcomed recent overtures from MBS, and plenty will also have accepted Saudi PIF money, mostly via SoftBank’s vision fund.

Talking generally about MBS, longtime VC Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston told us last week that venture and private equity firms have been raising money from Middle East capital sources for many years — adding that “typically, entrepreneurs don’t like to focus on politics and historically have not cared very much where the money came from” (unless it’s “from the PLO or Iran”).

Whether future entrepreneurs will have the luxury of not being able to care so much about where investment comes from remains to be seen. Political and geopolitical risk must surely be looming larger on every entrepreneur’s radar.