French startup Skello just raised a $6.9 million funding round (€6 million) from Aglaé Ventures, XAnge, Jean-Baptiste Rudelle and existing investors Thomas Landais, Guillaume le Dieu de Ville and Gilles Blanchard.
The startup is helping bar, restaurant and hotel managers keep track of all the shifts and staffing issues. Skello uses a software-as-a-service approach to help you save time on pesky admin tasks.
After setting up your rules, you can easily generate shifts. Waiters, receptionists and other staff members receive their schedule via email and SMS. Employees can also request shift changes, say when they’re unavailable and make sure everything is taken into account.
At the end of the month, Skello can generate detailed reports with bonuses, leaves, etc. Everything is then exported to payroll solutions. And of course, Skello helps you visualize how much you’re spending on staff, if you’re keeping costs under control and more.
There are many companies trying to do the same thing. But in reality many bars and restaurants still rely on Excel. Chances are it works quite well if you’re running a small business. But it doesn’t scale well. 30,000 employees are now using Skello every day. Alain Ducasse, Planet Sushi and AccorHotels’ Ibis are using Skello.
With today’s funding round, the company first wants to expand to new categories, such as retail and healthcare. Skello then plans to expand to other European countries.
Alphabet’s self-driving car company Waymo has spent years testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads. What started as a trickle of miles driven each day has exploded in the past few years.
And now, the company has hit a new milestone as it prepares to launch a commercial ride-hailing service with fleets of self-driving vehicles.
Waymo announced Wednesday that its autonomous vehicles have driven 10 million miles on public roads in the United States. Keep in mind that the company hit 8 million miles in July and had logged just 4 million miles in November 2017. In other words, Waymo’s pace is quickening.
These autonomous vehicle miles were logged in 25 cities, notably in Google’s hometown of Mountain View, California and in the greater Phoenix area, where the company launched an early rider program to shuttle passengers around the city. More than 400 early riders use the Waymo app and ride in their autonomous Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.
The company’s progress on public roads is made possible by its investment in simulation, Waymo CEO John Krafcik noted in a post on Medium. The company will hit 7 billion miles driven in its virtual world by the end of the month.
“In simulation, we can recreate any encounter we have on the road and make situations even more challenging through ‘fuzzing,’ ” Krafcik wrote. “We can test new skills, refine existing ones, and practice extremely rare encounters, constantly challenging, verifying, and validating our software. We can learn exponentially through this combination of driving on public roads and simulation.”
Of course, it’s not just about racking up miles.
Companies like Cruise and Waymo with large numbers of autonomous vehicles have been challenged to develop self-driving cars that can safely navigate complex urban environments and fit in with the millions of human drivers on the road. It’s not always smooth, and traffic can stack up behind these cautious autonomous vehicles, sometimes requiring the human test driver to take manual control of the car.
“Today, our cars are programmed to be cautious and courteous above all, because that’s the safest thing to do,” Krafcik wrote. “We’re working on striking the balance between this and being assertive as we master maneuvers that are tough for everyone on the road. For example, merging lanes in fast-moving traffic requires a driver to be both assertive enough to complete the maneuver without causing others to brake and smooth enough to feel pleasant to our passengers.”
For now, Waymo vehicles are more circumspect and are designed to take the safest route, even if that means adding a few minutes to the trip, according to Krafcik.
The next 10 million miles, Krafcik said, will focus on building out the ride-hailing service to make it more convenient and efficient. For instance, the company is working to improve its routes, pick-ups and drop-offs.
Waymo engineers are also applying advanced artificial intelligence and new in-house-designed sensing systems to navigate complex weather conditions like heavy rain and snow, Krafcik said.
School’s back in session and a startup that’s building games to help students learn has moved to the top of the class. Kahoot — the educational gaming startup out of Norway that has been a quick hit with schools in the US and elsewhere — today announced that it has raised 126.5 million Norwegian krone (around $15.4 million), its second round this year, at a valuation of about 2.55 billion krone ($300 million), tripling its valuation in 7 months.
Kahoot has been around since 2006 — originally as a gamefied education app called Lecture Quiz — although its rise in popularity and usage has been a more recent shift, dovetailing with how teachers are increasingly using more learning aids that are in tune with two of the more popular pastimes among kids these days: playing around on devices with screens, and playing games.
Kahoot is a notable standout at a time when gaming among kids is dominated by Fortnite, a top-grossing app, but a controversial one because of how addictive it is. (Even Prince Harry — yes, Prince Harry — has weighed in on this one.)
Åsmund Furuseth, Kahoot’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview that the money will be used to continue investing in building the platform, and also to make acquisitions — likely to be announced in the next couple of months.
“It’s about strengthening our position in learning and the platform,” he said in an interview. This latest round comes from Nordic investors in the company led by existing investor Datum AS, and Furuseth said that there is likely to be another round in the company that brings in international investors and strategic backers.
“Disney is an investor already and they have an option to become a larger shareholder,” he noted. Others that have already backed Kahoot include Microsoft and Northzone. “This round was specifically around the Nordic region and Nordic investment bankers, who were interested in acquiring shares because of our growth and what we are doing in the learning space.”
As we have written before, Kahoot in January this year passed the 70 million user mark with about a 50 percent penetration among K-12 students in the US, with about 51 million games created on the platform.
Furuseth today said that the company is on track to pass 100 million users by the end of this year, with rises in its other metrics. Alongside its push into the K-12 education sector, it’s also been growing its enterprise line, building “games” for businesses to use in helping onboard employees and other services.
“Our largest amount of users come from the education sector, but when it comes to revenue and growth, it’s the business segment that is larger,” he said. The plan is to continue building products for audiences, he added.
He did not say whether the company is closer to being cash-flow positive. Notably, he took over as CEO earlier this year on a platform of aiming for just that, after a period in which the company appeared to be bulking up quickly with an ambitious plan to ink content partnerships and build out more products.
Yesterday, a Saudi news outlet broke the news that such Silicon Valley big wheels as Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, and Travis Kalanick are advisors to a $500 billion megacity project being built by the country, which has pitched it as a model of what future cities will look like.
The announcement’s timing was not ideal for members of this 19-member list, who signed on to the project months ago in some cases. At the moment, there’s growing outrage over the weeklong disappearance of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Turkish officials say was murdered last week in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on orders from the Saudi Royal family, then chopped into pieces with a bone saw and removed from the building. It’s graphic and upsetting to contemplate and, importantly, it has not been proven. But the widespread and growing assumption that Saudi intelligence agents did something to Khashoggi (there is no evidence to support that he left the building) has put Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud under the world’s glare. Indeed, the advisory board announcement seemed very much a way for the prince, known as MBS, to brandish his powerful American friends just as many in the U.S. are beginning to wonder exactly what he is capable of.
We might have wondered sooner, given that MBS has been fairly consistent about his lack of tolerance for either criticism or rivals since his rise to prominence was sealed by his appointment as crown prince in June of last year. Though MBS has been widely lauded for his reformist tendencies — he has “stood up to the religious elite to impose breathtaking social changes, including letting women drive and allowing concerts and cinemas,” as noted this summer in a WSJ opinion piece — he has also led air raids in Yemen that have killed many thousands of civilians (with White House support, to the dismay of lawmakers from both political parties).
Saudi Arabia also detained more than a dozen women’s rights activists over the summer. When Canada’s foreign ministry rebuked Riyadh for jailing them, saying it was “seriously concerned” with the arrests, Saudi Arabia expelled the country’s ambassador, suspended flights to and from Toronto, barred its citizens from receiving medical care in Canada, and froze new trade and investment with Canada worth billions of dollars. It also announced plans to move thousands of Saudi scholarship students out of Canadian schools.
Meanwhile, last year, MBS directed Saudi officials to lock up for several months more than 300 businessmen and royal family members in what was billed an anti-corruption campaign, one that led to MBS’s control of more than $100 billion in seized assets. As later reported by the New York Times, at least 17 of those detainees were “hospitalized for physical abuse and one later died in custody with a neck that appeared twisted, a badly swollen body and other signs of abuse, according to a person who saw the body.”
The maneuver was widely reported by U.S. outlets, yet MBS came to the U.S. just months after this high-profile sweep and he was welcome with open arms. Donald Trump invited him to the White House and has only worked to solidify that attachment, one characterized as “abnormal and unseemly” by international relations scholars.
Silicon Valley CEOs also embraced MBS on that spring tour. MBS visited with Google co-founder Sergey Brin and CEO Sundar Pichai; Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz; and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, among others who praised his social progressiveness. What they apparently liked even more: his ambitious plans to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil, including by plugging more of the kingdom’s money into American companies.
In fact, looking the other way at MBS’s other goings-on hasn’t been all that hard, given the money at stake. Certainly, SoftBank doesn’t have qualms with it. In fact, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has bragged the he convinced MBS to provide $45 billion for SoftBank’s massive $100 billion fund in just 45 minutes’ time. And just last week, MBS said he is committing $45 billion to a second Vision Fund.
If the alarming disappearance of Khashoggi, who was most recently working as a Washington Post columnist, changes the calculation in any way, no one is willing to say. Neither representatives from SoftBank’s Vision Fund nor roughly ten SoftBank-backed founders responded to requests for comment yesterday.
A number of venture capitalists whose companies have received funding from SoftBank were also either unresponsive when asked their opinion yesterday about SoftBank and whether Khashoggi’s disappearance might impact how startups think about their fundraising. In fact, just one, Pejman Nozad of Pear Ventures, who has seen two portfolio companies — DoorDash and newly public Guardant Health — raise later-stage funding from the Vision Fund, responded at all. “There is an overflow of capital in tech, from seed to pre IPO. Companies that need $500,000 in seed funding are ending up raising $3 million, and those who need $50 million raise $500 million. Only history will tell us if this is healthy or not,” said Nozad in an email.
Longtime VC Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston offered a slightly more nuanced view, noting that venture and private equity firms have been raising money from Middle East capital sources for many years and that “typically, entrepreneurs don’t like to focus on politics and historically have not cared very much where the money came from.”
Added Bussgang, “Yes, it would be great if all VC money came from poor widows and orphans, but that’s obviously not the case. And it is obviously a subjective process to determine whether the money is from a righteous source. Is Starbucks a righteous source?”
Bussgang was referring to a recent incident at Starbucks involving two black men who were wrongly arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after an employee called the police. Which isn’t really comparable with killing innocent civilians in Yemen, jailing human rights activists, or others of MBS’s alleged pastimes, even while terrible.
In fairness, many in the U.S. and elsewhere are waiting to see if Khashoggi materializes. While it seems less likely by the day that he will, never knowing what happened is undoubtedly the best possible outcome for those in tech and the White House, who would rather be affiliated with a reformer than a murderous despot. Let’s face it, a missing Washington Post columnist may look today like a miscalculation, but as these cycles go, Khashoggi may be yesterday’s news by tomorrow, if you’ll forgive the pun. Then everyone can get back to business.
It’s almost comical when one considers that many of these same people — especially Silicon Valley leaders — can muster outrage over a memo about gender diversity.
We’re excited to head to São Paulo, Brazil on November 8 for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Latin America. Yes, we’re bringing our premier startup pitch competition to Latin America and launching 15 of the hottest startups in the region onstage for the first time. We’ll also be joined by some leading lights of the scene.
Tickets to this event — our first in this part of the world — are free, and you can apply for your tickets right here.
Startup Battlefield consists of three preliminary rounds with 15 teams — five startups per round — which have six minutes to pitch and present a live demo to a panel of expert technologists and VC investors. After each pitch, the judges have six minutes to grill the team with tough questions. This is all after the free pitch-coaching the teams receive from TechCrunch editors.
One startup will emerge as the winner of TechCrunch Startup Battlefield LATAM 2018 — and receive a USD$25,000 cash prize and win a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).
We still have a few tricks up our sleeves and will be adding some new names to the agenda over the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open. In the meantime, check out these agenda highlights:
With Didi Chuxing’s acquisition of car-sharing service 99 and GGV’s investment in scooter / bike mobility startup Yellow, what lessons from China’s mobility revolution will unfold in Brazil?
10:00 AM – 11:05 AM
Startup Battlefield Session 1
TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is here for the first time in Latin America, as entrepreneurs from around the region pitch expert judges and vie for the Battlefield Cup.
Movile started with SMS and ringtones in 1998 and evolved into a powerful conglomerate of digital businesses on mobile platforms. Founder Fabricio Bloisi discusses the journey and what’s next.
The latest generation of tech founders in Latin America may be more disruptive than their predecessors but also face rapidly rising expectations at home and abroad.
6:00 PM
Startup Battlefield Closing Awards Ceremony
Watch the announcement of the Startup Battlefield winner.
We’ve been chronicling how LinkedIn, now owned by Microsoft, has built out tools and services it provides on its platform to capitalise on the fact that it now has nearly 600 million registered professional profiles and is a go-to for people looking to network and look for work in the white-collar world (these have included online learning, CRM solutions, business intelligence, and most recently employee engagement). The latest chapter in that story comes from its recruitment business, where the company is today announcing a big overhaul.
The Recruiter platform has been completely rebuilt, and along with that, LinkedIn is launching a new product to help employers manage the sourcing, interviewing and hiring of candidates. LinkedIn is also making a foray into how it can help businesses improve their diversity, by allowing recruiters assess the gender proportions in a pool of candidates.
The moves underscore LinkedIn’s currently strong position under its new(ish) owner Microsoft. LinkedIn’s revenues rose 37 percent in the last quarter (with engagement up 41 percent), bringing in $1.46 billion in revenues, and now it is gearing up to add in more monetization and services for its user base.
“LinkedIn has been reaccelerating our growth and is doing well financially, and Talent Solutions is in line with that, so we feel like this is the right time to be doing more,” John Jersin, LinkedIn’s VP of Talent Solutions, said in an interview. “We’re going beyond what our products have done in the past to now support the entire hiring process, helping jobseekers more.”
At the same time, it’s facing a lot of competition in the recruitment market, not just from the likes of Facebook (which is making talent acquisitions to build more intelligent tools to help in the hiring process, not just compete as a straight listings portal), but also startups like ZipRecruiter that is also bringing a more intelligent spin to make connecting talent with jobs less of a crap shoot.
“We’re not operating under the same rules as before,” Jersin admitted. “Candidates can be found online, and the process is more agile [than it used to be]. So we are evolving our product roadmap to [match] the talent ecosystem.”
Recruiter redux
The key feature of the new Recruiter platform — which will start to get rolled out in the coming months — is simplicity. Over the years, as LinkedIn has built out monetizing features on its service like advertising, the company’s back-end experience for those using the platform to broadcast job opportunities or search for candidates has become increasingly fragmented, with Recruiter (to proactively search for people), Jobs (job listings that you post), and Media (ads that you might take out advertising those jobs) all essentially existing as separate entities.
Now, the three will be merged into a single platform where those three products will sit on the same pool of data to work more efficiently. For example, when a job now gets posted, LinkedIn will use the data about who clicks on the link, and what kinds of searches it comes up in and for whom, to help tailor the search results that a recruiter gets when proactively looking for candidates to fill the role. There is an element of AI and machine learning to how LinkedIn is approaching this: the more data that LinkedIn reads, the better it will get at giving recruiters more relevant information.
It will also mean more monetising potential: if LinkedIn knows that a recruiter is actively looking for job candidates for a role, it will also know that the recruiter has yet to post a job ad for that role. Now, it will be able to suggest one action because of the other.
If you’ve been a user of LinkedIn before (and it seems that many people have at least established profiles on there, even if they are not great at keeping them up to date or using the platform for anything else), you know that it’s sometimes a little uncanny (if not a little creepy) for how it’s able to provide suggestions of people to connect to, even if there doesn’t appear to be many reasons for it to know what it does. I’ve never been a big fan of that — and it can sometimes be very upsetting, such as the time LinkedIn suggested I connect to my deceased mother — but on the other hand, it’s a clear sign of just how much social data science is being built and used under the hood at the company. Today’s Recruiter launch, in fact, is an example of where it could be used for a clear business benefit.
What will be interesting to see is if LinkedIn develops something like an incognito option for people who might want to look at job opportunities but not subsequently get put into buckets to get targeted by ads or recruiters in the future. LinkedIn says that incognito mode currently only applies to masking your identity when looking at profile views.
Talent Hubbub
[gallery ids="1730559,1730560"]
Meanwhile, Talent Hub, pictured above, is the latest effort from LinkedIn to build products that are adjacent to how people are already using its premium features. The Talent Hub is an ATS (applicant tracking system, in HR parlance), that will let recruiters manage candidate leads through the whole interviewing and hiring process. Today, there are a number of products that already do this — such as SmartRecruiters, Zoho Recruit and Jobvite — and LinkedIn is also going to start integrating better with those. But now it’s also going to offer its own service to compete with them, with the idea being that the different people who are involved with the different stages of the process can also communicate better together, too.
Interestingly, while LinkedIn is building more direct recruitment products, it’s also enhancing the kinds of data points that people can use when shaping how they will hire people today and in the future. Today, it’s launching its first effort at trying to tailor this in a way that might change the diversity ratio, specifically around gender.
[gallery ids="1730566,1730563,1730570,1730568"]
A few weeks ago, LinkedIn made its first foray into business intelligence with the launch of a product called Talent Insights, which gives companies the ability to dig into trends in their own hiring, and that of companies against which they compete or compare themselves to.
Today, LinkedIn’s adding a new feature in there that lets those companies now see gender breakdown within businesses. Then, when companies are in the process of hiring, they are now also given another detail: they will now know what the gender breakdown is in a given pool of applicants or potential candidates for a role. LinkedIn also will now provide a way on Recruiter to see how a company’s recruitment ads are performing across gender lines.
For companies that are looking to be more proactive on this front, LinkedIn’s also launching more online education classes related to diversity: on subjects like confronting bias, inclusive leadership and managing diversity.
These are very much baby steps for LinkedIn in the area of diversity and what role it might play in helping companies think about it. Jersin admits that trying to query for attributes that are typically the kind that are associated with diversity can be “tough questions.” Given that LinkedIn doesn’t ask for these kinds of details in people’s profiles, it would be hard if not impossible to actively search for minority candidates, and it could open a can of worms into how such a feature might get used.
(And as a measure of the state of things today, it appears to be much easier to search for someone on LinkedIn who went to MIT and is an engineer than it is to find a African American female who is an engineer.)
My guess is that this is partly why LinkedIn is taking a less direct approach to start with by providing guiding data and other supplementary information, and why the company is tackling gender first before other diversity attributes.
“We need to think about this carefully and how to build into platform for other attributes,” Jersin said. “It’s a complex and challenging area that we are exploring.”
It’s a positive step ahead, though, and helps lay the groundwork for how LinkedIn (and its customers) might approach the issue in the future. The company said that a recent survey it ran to identify hiring trends found that diversity was the top hiring priority today, with 78 percent marking it as “extremely important.”
“That’s become a guiding product principle for us,” Jersin said, describing the company’s approach as “diversity by design.”
Google just one-upped Apple in a significant way by addressing a problem that’s plaguing U.S. cellphone owners: spam calls. The company’s new Pixel 3 flagship Android smartphone is first to introduce a new call screening feature that leverages the built-in Google Assistant. The screening service transcribes the caller’s request in real-time, allowing you to decide whether or not to pick up, and gives you a way to respond.
Apple has nothing like this call screening feature, only third-party call blocking apps – which are also available on Android, of course.
Siri today simply isn’t capable of answering phones on your behalf, politely asking the caller what they want, and transcribing their response instantly. It needs to catch up, and fast.
Half of calls will be spam in 2019
Call Screen, based on Google’s Duplex technology, is a big step for our smart devices. One where we’re not just querying our Assistant for help with various tasks, or to learn the day’s news and weather, but one where the phone’s assistant is helping with real-world problems.
They now often trick people by claiming to be the IRS, a bank, government representatives, and more. They pretend you’re in some sort of legal trouble. They say someone has stolen your bank card. They claim you owe taxes. Plus, they often use phone number spoofing tricks to make their calls appear local in order to get recipients to pick up.
The national Do-Not-Call registry hasn’t solved the problem. And despite large FCC fines, the epidemic continues.
A.I. handles the spammers
In light of an industry solution, Google has turned to A.I.
The system has been designed to sound more natural, stepping in to do the sort of tasks we don’t want to – like calling for bookings, or screening our calls by first asking “who is this, please?”
With Call Screen, as Google explained yesterday, Pixel device owners will be able to tap a button when a call comes in to send it to the new service. Google Assistant will answer the call for you, saying: “Hi, the person you’re calling is using a screening service from Google, and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name and why you’re calling.”
The caller’s response is then transcribed in real-time on your screen.
To handle the caller, you can tap a variety of buttons to continue or end the conversation. Based on the demo and support documentation, these include things like: “Who is this?,” “I’ll call you back,” “Tell me more,” “I can’t understand,” or “Is it urgent?”
You can also use the Assistant to say things like, “Please remove the number from your contact list. Thanks and goodbye,” the demo showed, after the recipient hit the “Report as spam” button.
While Google’s own Google Voice technology has been able to screen incoming calls, this involved little more than asking for the caller’s name. Call Screen is next-level stuff, to put it mildly.
And it’s all taking place on the device, using A.I. – it doesn’t need to use your Wi-Fi connection or your mobile data, Google says.
As Call Screen is adopted at scale, Google will have effectively built out its own database of scammers. It could then feasibly block spam calls or telemarketers on your behalf as an OS-level feature at some point in the future.
“You’ll never have to talk to another telemarketer,” said Google PM Liza Ma at the event yesterday, followed by cheers and applause – one of the few times the audience even clapped during this otherwise low-key press conference.
Google has the better A.I. Phone
The news of Call Screen, and of Duplex more broadly, is another shot fired across Apple’s bow.
Smartphone hardware is basically good enough, and has been for some time. Apple and Google’s modern smartphones take great photos, too. New developments on the camera front matter more to photography enthusiasts than to the average user. The phones are fine. The cameras are fine. So what else can the phones do?
The next battle for smartphones is going to be about A.I. technology.
Apple is aware that’s the case.
In June, the company introduced what we called its “A.I. phone” – an iPhone infused with Siri smarts to personalize the device and better assist. It allows users to create A.I.-powered workflows to automate tasks, to speak with Siri more naturally with commands they invent, and to allow apps to make suggestions instead sending interruptive notifications.
But much of Siri’s capabilities still involve manual tweaking on users’ parts.
You record custom Siri voice commands to control apps (and then have to remember what your Siri catch phrase is in order to use them). Workflows have to be pinned together in a separate Siri Shortcuts app that’s over the heads of anyone but power users.
These are great features for iPhone owners, to be sure, but they’re not exactly automating A.I. technology in a seamless way. They’re Apple’s first steps towards making A.I. a bigger part of what it means to use an iPhone.
Call Screen, meanwhile, is a use case for A.I. that doesn’t require a ton of user education or manual labor. Even if you didn’t know it existed, pushing a “screen call” button when the phone rings is fairly straightforward stuff.
And it’s not just going to be just a Pixel 3 feature.
Said Google, Pixel 3 owners in the U.S. are just getting it first. It will also roll out to older Pixel devices next month (in English). Presumably, however, it will come to Android itself in time, when these early tests wrap.
After all, if the mobile OS battle is going to be over A.I. going forward, there’s no reason to keep A.I. advancements tied to only Google’s own hardware devices.
For a few, Luna Display feels like a game changer. I certainly got that feeling testing the tiny red dongle this week. The device’s promise is similar to Duet, but accomplishes the task wirelessly and with higher fidelity than its chief competitor.
Launched as a Kickstarter project last year, Luna is now available to everyone, priced at $80 (a $20 markup over the crowdfunded version). It’s not a pittance, and unless you’re someone who requires a secondary portable display for your Mac (and who happens to own an iPad), it’s not for you.
If, however, you can tick off all those boxes, the device has the potential to seriously alter your workflow on the road. As a frequent traveler who relies on a large secondary monitor at the office, I happen to be right at the center of that Venn diagram, so I’m pretty excited at the potential.
At home, the system worked like a charm. You plug the adapter into either a USB-C or Mini DisplayPort, make sure the two devices are connected to the same network and boom, you’ve got a second monitor.
Things were, admittedly, a bit trickier at TC’s New York headquarters, where the corporate Wi-Fi structure of our Verizon overlords is a veritable rat king of wireless signals. “Wi-Fi can be tricky,” as the Luna app puts it. Here I had to do everything manually, using the iPad’s camera to capture a QR code on my MacBook.
It took a couple of tries, but I was able to make it work. The real failsafe backup is doing it through a wired connection. Not ideal, but it does the trick.
Once up and running, I have to say, I was pretty impressed with the results. Once up and running, you can freely drag windows across the displays.
However, there were a few issues here and there. The pixelation when moving things that Darrell mentioned in his review hasn’t been fully solved. There were also some strange artifacts here and there — the DM popup window in Facebook was a bit of a mess, and the system had some issues with the overcrowded menu bar.
For the things I need (RSS feeds, browser, Slack), none of this was a deal breaker. And the ability to use touch on the second screen is about as close as we’re coming to a touchscreen Mac at any point soon.
Luna Display is available now in wide release. It also works with the company’s other product, AstroPad, which turns the iPad into a makeshift Wacom drawing tablet.
Now that “utility” tokens have become a popular and international way to fund major blockchain projects, a pair of investors are creating a new way to turn tokens into true equities. The investors, Jonathan Nelson and Laura Nelson, have created Hack Fund, an early stage investment vehicle that allows startups to launch what amounts to “blockchain stock certificates,” according to Jonathan.
“Our previous business model exchanged equity from startup companies for services, and wrapped that equity into funds that we then sold to investors. These fund investors have included family offices, institutions, and high net worth individuals,” said Jonathan. “However, Hack Fund represents a new business model. Because Hack Fund leverages the blockchain, investors all over the world at all levels can participate in startup investing by trading blockchain stock certificates. Also, its SEC compliant structure means that it is also available to a limited number of accredited investors in the US.”
The team originally created Hackers/Founders, a tech entrepreneur group in Silicon Valley, and they now support 300,000 members in 133 cities and 49 countries. Hack Fund is a vehicle to support some of the startups in the Hackers/Founders network.
“HACK Fund, through its Hackers/Founders heritage, has a large, unique global network,” said Jonathan. “This provides Hack Fund with unparalleled reach and deal flow across the global technology market. There are a few blockchain-based funds, but they are limited themselves to blockchain-only investments. Unlike typical venture funds, HACK Fund will provide quick liquidity for investors, leveraging blockchain technology to make typically illiquid private stocks tradeable.”
The idea behind Hack Fund is quite interesting. In most cases investing in a company leads to up to ten years of waiting for a liquidity event. However, with blockchain-based stock certificates investors can buy shares that can be bought and sold instantly while company performance drives the value up or down. In short, startups become liquid in an instant, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the founding team.
“HACK Fund is a publicly traded closed-end fund. The fund’s venture investments are valued on a quarterly basis by an independent third party, audited and posted to the blockchain for all token holders to review. There are no K-1 statements issued, there is no partnership/LLC, rather HACK Fund is an investment company akin to Berkshire Hathaway which invests in the same manner as early-stage venture capital,” said Jonathan.
The team is raising a little over $2 million in an ICO to build out the fund. They’ve already raised most of their $100 million total goal from individual investors but the ICO will let retail investors buy some of the tokens as they are made available on the BRD wallet.
Shujinko — yes, like the Mortal Kombat character — is emerging from stealth today after raising $2.8 million in seed funding from Unusual Ventures, Defy, Vulcan Capital, PSL Ventures and Vas Ventures.
The Seattle-based cloud security compliance platform is rolling out of startup studio Pioneer Square Labs, which itself recently raised $15 million to expand its incubation program.
Founded by a former director and a manager of Starbucks’ cloud engineering team, Scott Schwan and Matt Wells, Shujinko automates the auditing process for cloud-based IT businesses with at least 50 million users.
Here’s how Schwan explained it to me: “When you pay taxes through an accountant, basically you end up collecting all these receipts, you have all this evidence that you collected over time and you end up having to talk through it with an auditor to prove you don’t have any issues. That is a painful process … In IT, they are doing those on a regular basis, sometimes multiple times a year they are going through the equivalent of an IT audit.”
“When companies go through an IT audit they generally spend months manually gathering evidence, like screenshots of a firewall configuration or an [operating system] configuration,” Wells added. “That takes months of manual effort and what we are trying to do is alleviate that pain by automating that process.”
Schwan and Wells have a long professional history. They met in 2008 at Tommy Bahama, where Schwan was a security and PCI program manager and Wells was an application system administrator. A few years later, Schwan joined Cardfree, a software platform for merchants. Not long after, he encouraged Wells to follow him.
“What I saw in [Wells] was someone who had this real drive to continue to learn,” Schwan said. “It’s something I felt I had as well.”
Wells ultimately agreed to join Cardfree, and when Schwan left the startup in 2015 to join Starbucks’ cloud engineering team, Wells, once again, followed suit.
For both of them, the experience of working at such a massive enterprise was transformative.
“What we saw there were the trends in the industry and how other competitors in the space were struggling with their cloud migration and specifically with the compliance needs in the cloud,” Wells said.
Wells and Schwan left Starbucks in January, joining Pioneer Square Labs as entrepreneurs-in-residence to work on what would become Shujinko.
As for the name, Shujinko — aside from its Mortal Kombat affiliation — is Japanese for hero or protagonist.
“Matt and I have worked in infrastructure and security for a long time and we are never that main character,” Schwan said. “You can’t really see what we do, but it’s really important … With Shujinko, we’re really looking to step out and become that main character in our story.”
This is a massive problem that every smartphone owner can relate to, and one the larger mobile industry has so far failed to solve.
