Month: October 2018

Waze Carpool, the app designed to connect drivers and commuters, is now available throughout the U.S. with a special focus on connecting Amazon employees.

As part of the nationwide rollout announced Wednesday, Waze said the carpool app will be available at 50 Amazon Fulfillment Center. The company said it’s partnering with cities, businesses, transit agencies, and civic organizations as well.

Waze originally trialed the app in markets, including San Francisco, Sacramento and Monterey. Waze expanded access to the app across California, Texas, Massachusetts and Washington. Now, it’s everywhere in the U.S.

“Traffic is at an all-time high in the U.S., yet over 75% of commuters journey to work alone in a car,” founder and CEO Noam Bardin said in a statement. “Waze is in a unique position to help facilitate carpooling on a national level. By leveraging the Waze community and connecting the dots between how people are traveling and where they want to go, we can empower everyone to reduce the number of cars on the road now.”

Waze Carpool isn’t like other ride-hailing services. The app lets riders and drivers find their own carpool buddies based on profiles, star ratings, number of mutual friends, and customizable filters such as gender, co-worker or classmate, and proximity to preferred route.. The app is designed to show the best matches, such as those closest to a preferred route or a coworker on the same shift,  at the top of the list. Payment is handled within the app.

The app lets users schedule rides up to 7 days in advance and a group setting enables several people to plan to carpool together.

Riders can download Waze Carpool on iOS or Android. Drivers need to download the Waze app. The company is offering all new riders $2 rides for 21 days.

The company is also rewarding drivers and riders for referrals. Drivers get $20 cash for each referral, and riders get $20 credit for each referral, with a max of 10 referrals per person.

Amazon is debuting a new feature that will allow businesses to use Alexa for booking conference rooms. The addition is part of the Alexa for Business platform, and works with linked calendars from either Google’s G Suite or Microsoft Exchange, as well as over an API, arriving soon.

The feature is part of Amazon’s broader plan to put Alexa to work outside the home. At last year’s AWS re:Invent conference, Amazon first launched its Alexa for Business platform to allow companies to build out their own skills and integrations for practical business use cases. Amazon also spoke of integrations that would allow Alexa to support productivity tools and enterprise services, including those from Microsoft, Concur, Splunk, and others.

Shortly after, early partner WeWork integrated Echo devices in some of its own meeting rooms to test out how the smart assistant could be useful for things like managing meeting room reservations, or shutting off or turning on lights.

Now, Amazon wants to make booking rooms themselves possible just by asking Alexa.

As the company explains, it’s common in workplaces for people to walk from room to room to grab a space for an ad-hoc meeting, or to find a space for a meeting that’s running over. But to reserve the room, they often have to pull out their laptop, run an application, do a search, and then look through the search results to find an available room. The Room Booking skill will allow them to ask Alexa for help instead.

The feature requires read/write permission to users’ calendar provider to enable, but can then be used to check the availability of the conference room you’re in, by asking “Alexa, is this room free?”

Users can then schedule the room on the fly by saying, “Alexa, book this room for half an hour,” or whatever time you choose.

Alexa will also be able to confirm if the room is booked, when asked “Alexa, who booked this room?”

Amazon is making this functionality available by way of a Room Booking API, too, which is soon arriving in beta. This will allow businesses to integrate the booking feature with their own in-house or third-party booking solutions. Some providers, including Joan and Robin are already building a skill to add voice support to their own offerings, Amazon noted.

The feature is now one of several on the Alexa for Business platform, specifically focused on better managing meetings with Alexa’s assistance. Another popular feature is using Alexa to control conference room equipment, so you can start meetings by saying “Alexa, join the meeting.”

A handful of large companies have since adopted Alexa in their own workplaces, following the launch of the Alexa For Business platform, including Condé Nast, Valence, Capital One, and Brooks Brothers. And the platform itself is one of many ways Amazon is contemplating as to how Alexa can be used outside the home. It has also launched Alexa for Hospitality and worked with colleges on putting Echo Dots in student dorms. It also last month introduced its first Alexa device for vehicles.

Moving air — that’s the through line across most of Dyson’s products. The vacuums, fans, hand dryers, hair driers — at their heart, they all the do the same thing. Same goes for the new Dyson Airwrap, which has figured out a way to leverage vacuum power into hair curling.

Here’s how Dyson describes it,

At the heart of this story comes a radical idea: harness Dyson’s digital motor to create a phenomenon known as the Coanda effect. The Coanda effect occurs when a high-speed jet of air flows across a surface and, due to differences in pressure, the air flow attaches itself to the surface. Taking advantage of this principle, Dyson’s team of aerodynamicists created a way to style hair using only air combined with heat.

That’s engineering talk for a device that shoots air through a half dozen holes, wrapping hair around the cylinder. Then, like a standard curling iron, it uses heat like a standard curling iron — though this one is much less hot than cheaper models, potentially saving your hair (and skin) in the process.

All of which is to say it’s not this:

Dyson says it spent six years researching/testing the product, which seems to be on-par with the company’s high engineering standards. No surprise then that the Airwrap isn’t cheap. The kit starts at $500, with the “complete” version running $550 for multiple hair types.

French watchmaker Unitam and 3D printing company Stainless teamed up to build a unique 3D printed watch, essentially the first of its kind. The team created the watch case using laser sintering to melt stainless steel 316L powder on a Renishaw AM250 printer.

The watch, which uses French-made hands and a Miyota movement, isn’t completely 3D printed. However, because 3D printing is now nearly foolproof and almost as good as injection molding, the teams will begin mass producing and selling these watches in the Unitam in Paris.

The watchmaker and the metals company showed off their watch at the Micronora trade show in France’s watchmaking city, Besançon.

It’s a clever and unique use case for 3D printing and I’d love to see more. Sadly, the current 3D printing systems can’t make small, complex parts for watch movements so we’re stuck with making larger, less complex parts until the technology truly takes off.

In this episode of Product Hunt Radio, I’m in Los Angeles talking to Brian Norgard and Jeff Morris Jr., both of whom may be indirectly responsible for a new term, “Tinder babies.”

Brian Norgard is an entrepreneur, investor and chief product officer at Tinder. He has worked on a number of other products and was Tinder’s first acquisition. He collaborated with Sean Rad on an earlier app called Chill, which we discuss on the podcast. Brian is also an investor in Lyft, SpaceX and AngelList.

Jeff Morris Jr. is the director of Product for Tinder’s revenue initiatives. He previously worked at Zaarly and has created a number of products, including one stretch over three months where he built and launched three products, reaching the top of Product Hunt. He is also an investor in Lyft, CryptoKitties, Particle, Brat and others.

In this episode:

• The joy of turning online connections into real-world connections. Jeff is great at this. He once went biking with Lance Armstrong in Hawaii after reaching out to Armstrong on Twitter.
• How seemingly minor design decisions, like adding a subtle animation to a play button, can “nudge” users into a new pattern of behavior and make products more enjoyable to use.
• Brian and Jeff discuss the design of Tinder Places, including the thoughtfulness that went into the privacy features of the product, and how they took inspiration from Foursquare.
• We get nostalgic and discuss some of our favorite products from the past, like Chill and Highlight. They leveraged location on mobile in an attempt to merge the online and offline world.
• Jeff tells the story of the time he reached out on Twitter about a job opportunity and less than 48 hours later had moved from San Francisco to Kansas City.
• Why Product Hunt has gained a reputation as a positive, fun and upbeat community and how subtle, very intentional design decisions — like our ridiculous Google Glass-sporting cat — contribute to the community and brand.

Of course, we also chat about some of their favorite products, including messaging apps, trivia games as well as a couple of now-obsolete apps that were onto something at the time but didn’t end up taking off.

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.

Warby Parker is introducing a new collaboration as part of the Pupils Project.

In participation with a number of famous New Yorkers, including Rosario Dawson, Lena Dunham, Nikolai Fraiture, Iman, Fran Lebowitz, Humberto Leon, Mary-Louise Parker, Chloë Sevigny, Gloria Steinem, and Michael K. Williams, the company is releasing ten new pairs of frames.

All the proceeds from the sale of these frames will go towards the Pupils Project, which is a program that partners with the Department of Education in NYC and in Baltimore to provide free vision screenings, eye exams and glasses to school children in need. According to the CDC, vision impairment is the single most prevalent disabling condition among children in the United States.

Neil Blumenthal, who ran a non-profit called Vision Spring before cofounding Warby Parker explained that the company was initially designed to be able to give back to people in need.

“With all of these programs, Buy a Pair, Give a Pair and Pupils Project, we are thinking about what’s going to motivate us to come to work every day,” said Blumenthal, co-CEO of Warby Parker. “Hopefully we’ll get to a point where businesses don’t need to justify every action in terms of increasing shareholder value and focus on being good for the world.”

Thus far, Warby Parker has distributed over 4 million pairs of glasses to people in need across the globe since their launch in 2010.

By working with celebrities and influencers on this latest collaboration, Warby Parker hopes to grow awareness domestically for the issues that face some school children around vision impairment.

Each pair in the collection, which is a combination of sunglasses and regular glasses, cost $95.

Front is launching a major revamp today. And it starts with a brand new design. Front is now powered by React for the web and desktop app, which should make it easier to add new features down the road.

Front hasn’t pivoted to become something else. At heart, it remains a multiplayer email client. You can share generic email addresses with your coworkers, such as sales@yourcompany or jobs@yourcompany. You can then assign emails, comment before replying and integrate your CRM with your email threads.

But the company is also adding a bunch of new features. The most interesting one is the ability to start a thread with your team without having to send an email first. If a client sends you an email, you can comment on the thread and mention your coworkers just like on a Facebook post.

Many companies already use emails for internal communications. So they started using Front to talk to their coworkers. Before today, you had to send an original email and then people could comment on it. Now, you can just create a post by giving it a title and jumping to the comment section. It’s much more straightforward.

“We aren't planning for all internal conversations to move to Front, but a lot of them very well could. A tool like Slack is often used for questions that don't require the immediate response that Slack demands,” co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin told me. “By bringing these messages into Front, we aim to reduce disruptions and help people stay focused.”

In other words, a Slack message feels like a virtual tap on the shoulder. You have to interrupt what you’re doing to take a minute and answer. Front can be used for asynchronous conversations and things that don’t need an immediate response. That’s why you can now also send Slack messages to Front so that you can deal with them in Front.

With this update, Front is making sharing more granular. Front isn’t just about shared addresses. You can assign your personal emails to a coworker — this is much more efficient than forwarding an email. Now, you can easily see who can read and interact with an email thread at the top of the email view.

If somebody sends an email to Sarah and Sam, they’ll both have a copy of this email in their personal inboxes. If Sarah and Sam start commenting and @-mentioning people, Front will now merge the threads.

As a user, you get a unified inbox with all your personal emails, emails that were assigned to you and messages assigned to your team inbox.

Finally, Front has improved its smart filtering system. You can now create more flexible rules. For instance, if an email matches some or all criteria, Front can assign an email to a team or a person, send an automated reply, trigger another rule and more.

The new version of Front will be available later this month. Once again, Front remains focused on its core mission — making work conversations more efficient and more flexible. The company doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and still relies heavily on emails.

Many people (myself included) say that email is too often a waste of time. Dealing with emails doesn’t necessarily mean getting work done. Front wants to remove all the pains of this messaging protocol so that you can focus on the content of the messages.

Parker Conrad likes to save time, even though it’s gotten him in trouble. The former CEO of Zenefits was pushed out of the $4.5 billion human resources startup because he built a hack that let him and employees get faster insurance certifications. But 2.5 years later, he’s back to take the busy work out of staff onboarding as well as clumsy IT services like single-sign on to enterprise apps. Today his startup Rippling launches its combined employee management system, which Conrad calls a much larger endeavor than the minimum viable product it announced while in Y Combinator’s accelerator 18 months ago.

“It’s not an HR system. It’s a level below that” Conrad tells me. “It’s this unholy, crazy mashup of three different things”. First, it handles payroll, benefits, taxes, and PTO across all 50 states. “Except Syria and North Korea, you can pay anyone in the world with Rippling” Conrad claims.

Second, it’s a replacement for Okta, Duo, and other enterprise single-sign on security apps that authenticate staffers across partnered apps. Rippling bookmarklets make it easy to auth into over 250 workplace apps like Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Asana, Trello, AWS, Salesforce, GitHub and more. When an employee is hired or changes teams, a single modification to their role in Ripple automatically changes all the permissions of what they can access.

And third, it handles computer endpoint security. When an employee is hired, Rippling can instantly ship them a computer with all the right software installed and the hard drive encrypted, or have staffers add the Rippling agent that enforces the company’s security standards. The system is designed so there’s no need for an expert IT department to manage it.

“Distributed, fragmented systems of record for employee data are secretly the cause of almost all the annoying administrative work of running a company” Conrad explains. “If you could build this system that ties all of it together you could eliminate all this crap work.” That’s Rippling. It’s opening up to all potential clients today, charging them a combined subscription or a la carte fees for any of the three wings of the product.

Conrad refused to say how much Rippling has raised total, citing the enhanced scrutiny Zenefits’ raises drew. But he says a Wall Street Journal report that Rippling had raised $7 million was inaccurate. “We haven’t raised any priced VC rounds. Just a bunch of seed money. We raised from Initialized Capital, almost all the early seed investors at Zenefits, and a lot of individuals.” He cited Y Combinator, YC Growth Fund, YC’s founder Jessica Livingston and president Sam Altman, other YC partners, as well as DFJ and SV Angel.

“Because we were able to raise bunch of money and court great engineers . . . we were able to spend a lot of time building this fundamental technology” Conrad tells me. Rippling has about 50 team members now, with about 40 of them being engineers, highlighting just how thoroughly Conrad wants to eradicate manual work about work, starting with his own startup.

The CEO refused to discuss details of exactly what down at Zenefits and whether he thought his ejection was fair. He was accused of allowing Zenefits’ insurance brokers to sell in states where they weren’t licensed, and giving some employees a macro that led them more quickly pass the online insurance certification exam. Conrad ended up paying about $534,000 in SEC fines. Zenefits laid off 430 employees, or 45 percent of its staff, and moved to selling software to other insurance brokers.

But when asked what he’d learned from Zenefits, Conrad looked past those troubles and instead recalled that “one of the the mistakes that we made was that we did a lot stuff manually behind the scenes. When you scale up, there are these manual processes, and it’s really hard to come back later when it’s a big hard complicated thing and replace it with technology. You get upside down on margins. If you start at the beginning and never let the manual processes creep in . . . it sort of works.”

Perhaps it was trying to cut corners that got Conrad into the Zenefits mess, but now that same intention has inspired Rippling’s goal of eliminating HR and IT drudgery with an all-in-one tool.

“I think I’m someone who feels the pain of that kind of stuff particularly strongly. So that’s always been a real irritant to me, and I saw this problem. The conventional wisdom is ‘don’t build something like this, start with something much smaller'” Conrad concludes. “But I knew if I didn’t do this, that no one else was gong to do it and I really wanted this system to exist. This is a company that’s all about annoying stuff and making that fucking annoying stuff go away.”

As zero-commission stock trading app Robinhood starts preparing to IPO, an engineering investment two years in the making could accelerate its quest for profitability. Most stock broker services have to pay an external clearing house to reconcile trades between buyers and sellers. Now with 6 million accounts, that added up to a huge cost for Robinhood since it doesn’t demand a trading fee like the $7 to $10 that incumbent competitors E*Trade and Scottrade charge. Relying on outside clearing also introduced bottlenecks around its innovation and user sign ups, limiting onboarding to business hours.

But today Robinhood will start migrating accounts to its new in-house clearing service over the next few months. That will save it from paying clearing fees on stock, option, ETF, and cryptocurrency trades. In turn, Robinhood is eliminating or reducing some of its edge case fees. $10 broker assisted trades, $10 restricted accounts, $50 voluntary corporate actions, and $30 worthless securities processing will all now be free. Robinhood is meanwhile cutting its margin on fees passed on by banks or FedEx, so ACH reversal fees will drop from $30 to $9, overnight check delivery from $35 to $20 and overnight mail from $35 to $20.

“What’s really interesting is that this is the only clearing system built from scratch on modern technology in at least the last decade” Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev tells me. Most clearing services ran mainframes and Terminal-based UIs  that aren’t built for the pace of startup innovation. Going in-house “allows us to vertically integrate our business so we won’t have to depend on third-parties for foundational aspects. It’s a huge investment in the future of Robinhood that will massively impact our customers and their experience, but also help us out on building the kind of business we want to build.”

There’s a ton of pressure on Robinhood right now since it’s raised $539 million to date, including a $363 million Series D in May at a jaw-dropping $5.6 billion valuation just a year after raising at $1.3 billion. Currently Robinhood earns revenue from interest on money kept in Robinhood accounts, selling order flow to exchanges that want more liquidity, and its Robinhood Gold subscriptions where users pay $10 to $200 per month to borrow $2,000 to $50,000 in credit to trade on margin. Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, Robinhood’s other co-CEO Baiju Bhatt told me the startup is now actively working to hire a CFO to get its business ready to IPO.

Whoever that CFO is will have an easier job thanks to Christine Hall, Robinhood’s Product Lead for Clearing. After stints at Google and Udacity, she was hired two years to navigate the regulatory and engineering challenges or spinning up Robinhood Clearing. She explains that “Clearing is just a fancy word for making sure that when the user places a trade, the price and number of shares matches what the other side wants to give away. In the less than 1 percent chance of error, the clearing firm makes sure everyone is on the same page prior to settlement.

Robinhood Clearing Product Lead Christine Hall

Forming the Robinhood Securities entity, Hall scored the startup the greenlight from FINRA, the DTCC, and the OCC. She also recruited Chuck Tennant, who’d previously run clearing firms and would grow a 70-person team for the project at Robinhood’s Orlando office. They allow Robinhood to clear, settle (exchanging the dollars and shares), and ensure custody (keeping records of asset movements) of trades. 

“It gives us massive cost savings, but since we’re no longer depending on a third-party, we basically control our destiny” Tenev says. No more waiting for clearing houses to adapt to its new products. And no more waiting the whole weekend for account approval as Robinhood can now approve accounts 24/7. These little improvements are critical to Robinhood staying ahead of the pack of big banks like Charles Schwab that are lowering their fees to compete as well as other startups offering mobile trading.

Clearing comes with additional risk. Regulatory scrutiny is high, and the more Robinhood brings in-house, the more security work it must do. A breach could break the brand of user trust it’s been building. Yet if successful, the launch equips Robinhood for an ambitious future beyond playing the markets. “The mission of the company has expanded a lot. It used to be all about stock trading. But if you look at Robinhood 5 years from now, it’s about being best-in-class for all of our customers’ financial needs” Tenev concludes. “You should be able to get everything from Robinhood that you could get from walking into your local bank.” That’s a vision worthy of the startup’s epic valuation.

As zero-commission stock trading app Robinhood starts preparing to IPO, an engineering investment two years in the making could accelerate its quest for profitability. Most stock broker services have to pay an external clearing house to reconcile trades between buyers and sellers. Now with 6 million accounts, that added up to a huge cost for Robinhood since it doesn’t demand a trading fee like the $7 to $10 that incumbent competitors E*Trade and Scottrade charge. Relying on outside clearing also introduced bottlenecks around its innovation and user sign ups, limiting onboarding to business hours.

But today Robinhood will start migrating accounts to its new in-house clearing service over the next few months. That will save it from paying clearing fees on stock, option, ETF, and cryptocurrency trades. In turn, Robinhood is eliminating or reducing some of its edge case fees. $10 broker assisted trades, $10 restricted accounts, $50 voluntary corporate actions, and $30 worthless securities processing will all now be free. Robinhood is meanwhile cutting its margin on fees passed on by banks or FedEx, so ACH reversal fees will drop from $30 to $9, overnight check delivery from $35 to $20 and overnight mail from $35 to $20.

“What’s really interesting is that this is the only clearing system built from scratch on modern technology in at least the last decade” Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev tells me. Most clearing services ran mainframes and Terminal-based UIs  that aren’t built for the pace of startup innovation. Going in-house “allows us to vertically integrate our business so we won’t have to depend on third-parties for foundational aspects. It’s a huge investment in the future of Robinhood that will massively impact our customers and their experience, but also help us out on building the kind of business we want to build.”

There’s a ton of pressure on Robinhood right now since it’s raised $539 million to date, including a $363 million Series D in May at a jaw-dropping $5.6 billion valuation just a year after raising at $1.3 billion. Currently Robinhood earns revenue from interest on money kept in Robinhood accounts, selling order flow to exchanges that want more liquidity, and its Robinhood Gold subscriptions where users pay $10 to $200 per month to borrow $2,000 to $50,000 in credit to trade on margin. Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, Robinhood’s other co-CEO Baiju Bhatt told me the startup is now actively working to hire a CFO to get its business ready to IPO.

Whoever that CFO is will have an easier job thanks to Christine Hall, Robinhood’s Product Lead for Clearing. After stints at Google and Udacity, she was hired two years to navigate the regulatory and engineering challenges or spinning up Robinhood Clearing. She explains that “Clearing is just a fancy word for making sure that when the user places a trade, the price and number of shares matches what the other side wants to give away. In the less than 1 percent chance of error, the clearing firm makes sure everyone is on the same page prior to settlement.

Robinhood Clearing Product Lead Christine Hall

Forming the Robinhood Securities entity, Hall scored the startup the greenlight from FINRA, the DTCC, and the OCC. She also recruited Chuck Tennant, who’d previously run clearing firms and would grow a 70-person team for the project at Robinhood’s Orlando office. They allow Robinhood to clear, settle (exchanging the dollars and shares), and ensure custody (keeping records of asset movements) of trades. 

“It gives us massive cost savings, but since we’re no longer depending on a third-party, we basically control our destiny” Tenev says. No more waiting for clearing houses to adapt to its new products. And no more waiting the whole weekend for account approval as Robinhood can now approve accounts 24/7. These little improvements are critical to Robinhood staying ahead of the pack of big banks like Charles Schwab that are lowering their fees to compete as well as other startups offering mobile trading.

Clearing comes with additional risk. Regulatory scrutiny is high, and the more Robinhood brings in-house, the more security work it must do. A breach could break the brand of user trust it’s been building. Yet if successful, the launch equips Robinhood for an ambitious future beyond playing the markets. “The mission of the company has expanded a lot. It used to be all about stock trading. But if you look at Robinhood 5 years from now, it’s about being best-in-class for all of our customers’ financial needs” Tenev concludes. “You should be able to get everything from Robinhood that you could get from walking into your local bank.” That’s a vision worthy of the startup’s epic valuation.