Month: October 2018

Women-focused co-working space The Wing has made its way to California, opening its first of two planned locations in the state this morning.

On Sansome Street in San Francisco’s Financial District, The Wing hopes to attract professional women able to shell out $215 per month for access to its 8,000-square-foot workspace, which is complete with conference rooms, a cafe, a library stocked with books on feminist theory, a lactation room and more.

In addition to its chic decor and feminist messaging, The Wing is also known for its programming. Headquartered in New York City, where the company operates three of its four existing spaces, The Wing has hosted events with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actress Jennifer Lawrence and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, to name a few. The San Francisco location will be no different.

A spokesperson for The Wing tells me they have a fully booked calendar of politics, tech, entertainment and lifestyle-focused events prepped for members. In the first month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed will stop by, as will Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf.

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As a brand founded by women — Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan — and inspired by the women’s club movement of the 19th century, The Wing and its majority female staff very carefully and skillfully practice what they preach. In building their spaces, for example, they hire female architects to design and perfect the location. Their conference rooms are named for notable women. One, in particular, named for Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, stands out.

The dozens of art pieces scattered throughout The Wing are by female artists. The menu at The Wing’s cafe, which has a sign above it that reads “I’ll have what she’s having,” showcases women of the Bay Area’s food and beverage industries. Even the wines served at The Wing are made by female wine makers in California.

If there’s on thing about The Wing that stands out, it’s the startup’s attention to detail.

Founded in 2016, The Wing plans to open its next location, in West Hollywood, in early 2019.

The Wing is backed by venture capital firms NEA, Kleiner Perkins, Forerunner Ventures and BBG Ventures, as well as co-working unicorn WeWork. It has raised just over $40 million to date to expand its co-working spaces throughout the U.S. and beyond.

“The Wing answers a desire by women to connect with each other in an environment that aims to promote learning and camaraderie,” Forerunner’s Kirsten Green told TechCrunch. “It’s both a timely and timeless need. With so much focus on entrepreneurship and start-ups here in the Bay Area, The Wing offers the community that many independent women are looking for and can benefit from.”

Google is launching its Pixel Stand today, a new wireless charging accessory for your Pixel phone that lets you dock your phone and — as you’ve probably guessed — sit your phone upright next to your bed or on your kitchen counter. That way, you can use it hands-free, similar to the new Google Assistant-powered smart displays that Google, Lenovo, LG and JBL have now announced.

While Google hasn’t officially announced this new gadget yet, we now know for sure that it’s coming, thanks to Verizon (via 9to5google), which put up its Pixel 3 page a bit too early. We expect Google will announce this at its annual hardware event, which is about to start.

The Pixel Stand is basically a sleek little round dock for your phone. While it can obviously charge your phone, what’s maybe more interesting is that when you put your phone into the cradle, it looks like it’ll start a new notifications view that’s not unlike what you’d see on a smart display.

You’ll be able to use it just like a Google Home and the Verizon page says you can use “one-touch shortcuts” or your voice.

We’ll update this post once we learn more details from Google’s official announcement or more features leak ahead of the official launch.

Bullet Messenger, a fast-rising Chinese messaging upstart that’s gunning to take on local behemoth, WeChat, has been pulled from the iOS App Store owing to what its owners couch as a copyright complaint.

Reuters reported the development earlier, saying Bullet’s owner, Beijing-based Kuairu Technology, claimed in a social media posting that the app had been taken down from Apple’s app store because of a complaint related to image content provided by a partner.

“We are verifying the situation with the partner and will inform you as soon as possible when download capabilities are resumed,” it said in a statement on its official Weibo account.

The company did not specify which part of the app has been subject to a complaint.

We’ve reached out to Apple to ask if it can provide any more details.

According to checks by Reuters earlier today, the Bullet Messenger app was still available on China’s top Android app stores — including stores owned by WeChat owner Tencent, as well as Baidu and Xiaomi stores — which the news agency suggests makes it less likely the app has been pulled from iOS as a result of censorship by the state, saying apps targeted by regulators generally disappear from local app stores too.

Bullet Messenger only launched in August but quickly racked up four million users in just over a week, and also snagged $22M in funding.

By September it had claimed seven million users, and Chinese smartphone maker Smartisan — an investor in Bullet — said it planned to spend 1 billion yuan (~$146M) over the next six months in a bid to reach 100M users. Though in a battle with a competitive Goliath like WeChat (1BN+ active users) that would still be a relative minnow.

The upstart messenger has grabbed attention with its fast growth, apparently attracting users via its relatively minimal messaging interface and a feature that enables speech-to-text transcription text in real time.

Albeit the app has also raised eyebrows for allowing pornographic content to be passed around.

It’s possible that element of the app caught the attention of Chinese authorities which have been cracking down on Internet porn in recent years — even including non-visual content (such as ASMR) which local regulators have also judged to be obscene.

Although it’s equally possible Apple itself is responding to a porn complaint about Bullet’s iOS app.

Earlier this year the Telegram messaging app fell foul of the App Store rules and was temporarily pulled, as a result of what its founder described as “inappropriate content”.

Apple’s developer guidelines for iOS apps include a section on safety that proscribes “upsetting or offensive content” — including frowning on: “Apps with user-generated content or services that end up being used primarily for pornographic content.”

In Telegram’s case, the App Store banishment was soon resolved.

There’s nothing currently to suggest that Bullet’s app won’t also soon be restored.

Just a day after Google decided to drop out of the Pentagon’s massive $10 billion, 10-year JEDI cloud contract bidding, Microsoft announced increased support services for government clients. In a long blog post, the company laid out its government focused cloud services.

While today’s announcement is not directly related to JEDI per se, the timing is interesting just three days ahead of the October 12th deadline for submitting RFPs. Today’s announcement is about showing just how comprehensive the company’s government-specific cloud services are.

In a blog post, Microsoft corporate vice president for Azure, Julia White made it clear the company was focusing hard on the government business. “In the past six months we have added over 40 services and features to Azure Government, as well as publishing a new roadmap for the Azure Government regions providing ongoing transparency into our upcoming releases,” she wrote.

“Moving forward, we are simplifying our approach to regulatory compliance for federal agencies, so that our government customers can gain access to innovation more rapidly. In addition, we are adding new options for buying and onboarding cloud services to make it easier to move to the cloud. Finally, we are bringing an array of new hybrid and edge capabilities to government to ensure that government customers have full access to the technology of the intelligent edge and intelligent cloud era,” White added.

While much of the post was around the value proposition of Azure in general such as security, identity, artificial intelligence and edge data processing services, there were a slew of items aimed specifically at the government clients.

For starters, the company is increasing its FedRAMP compliance, a series of regulations designed to ensure vendors deliver cloud services securely to federal government customers. Specifically Microsoft is moving from FedRAMP moderate to high ratings on 50 services.

“By taking the broadest regulatory compliance approach in the industry, we’re making commercial innovation more accessible and easier for government to adopt,” White wrote.

In addition, Microsoft announced it’s expanding Azure Secret Regions, a solution designed specifically for dealing with highly classified information in the cloud. This one appears to take direct aim at JEDI. “We are making major progress in delivering this cloud designed to meet the regulatory and compliance requirements of the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community. Today, we are announcing these newest regions will be available by the end of the first quarter of 2019. In addition, to meet the growing demand and requirements of the U.S. Government, we are confirming our intent to deliver Azure Government services to meet the highest classification requirements, with capabilities for handling Top Secret U.S. classified data,” White wrote.

The company’s announcements, which included many other pieces that have been previously announced, is clearly designed to show off its government chops at a time where a major government contract is up for grabs. The company announced Azure Stack for Government in August, another piece mentioned in this blog post.

Shipwell, a startup pitching a marketplace for domestic ground shipping and fleet and cargo management services for freight trucking companies, has raised $10 million in a new round of funding.

A booming American economy coupled with failing infrastructure and a low-margin business reluctant to adopt new technologies have put stress on domestic logistics companies in the $900 billion market for U.S. trucking services.

Shipwell combines a marketplace for shippers to connect with freight companies and online tools to manage those shipments. In effect, the company is pitching a version of the proprietary logistics management toolkit that has made Amazon so successful, to any retailer or outlet. 

“We coordinate the freight, we pay the truckers, we help optimize the fleets,” says Shipwell president and co-founder, Jason Traff. 

Those services — and the company’s growing business among small and medium-sized suppliers to the construction industry — brought the Austin-based company to the attention of Fifth Wall Ventures, the Los Angeles based investment firm whose limited partners are among the biggest construction companies in the world.

For Fifth Wall the opportunity was clear. “Shipwell’s full-service, digitized brokerage platform can streamline the way many of our Anchor LPs and portfolio companies approach large-scale freight shipping,” the firm’s principal — and newest Shipwell board member — Vik Chawla wrote in a blog post announcing its most recent deal.

Fifth Wall led the company’s Series A round, which also included the new investor Global Founders Capital and previous investors First Round Capital, Base 10 Ventures, Capital Theory and Village Global .

The company’s business isn’t for big shippers that deal with thousands of shipments per-day, but rather the small and medium sized businesses that spend $100 million or less per-year on freight. And the small-fleet shipping companies that make up the bulk of the industry.

“In addition to the obvious use case for Shipwell customers who own warehousing, landlords can use Shipwell to become effective facilitators for their tenants,” according to Chawla. “Some Anchor LPs [the limited partners that provide capital for Fifth Wall to invest] are already engaged in this shipping ecosystem on behalf of their tenants, while others act as transport hubs. Beyond these, however, there are easy tie-ins within a number of key categories of Fifth Wall Anchors [sic] that regularly ship or receive freight—developers, of course, but also retail, office, homebuilding anchors.”

“We focus on the longer tail. If you are doing $50 million in freight per-year then you’re doing dozens of shipments per week,” said Traff. “Most of our freight is less than a truckload or a full truckload freight and it’s more long-haul.”

It hasn’t been a straight road for Traff and his co-founder Gregory Price. Traff originally got the startup bug in Asia, where he launched a company that would sell low-cost copies of old masters paintings. When he sold that business he moved back to the U.S. and pitched an idea to Y Combinator that eventually became Leaky, a car insurance company.

When Leaky shut down and its business was acquired by Navion in 2013, Traff moved to Austin to figure out his next move.I t was there that he ran into a fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus named Greg Price and the two began hatching schemes for the company that would become Shipwell.

The two men began planning the business in 2016 and only launched the service in the beginning of this year. “Supply chains were very complex and there was a lot of building to do,” Traff said. 

Shipwell makes money by charging a commission on freight services and fees for its freight management software platform.

Ultimately this could create a new model to unify a fragmented industry. “This connective approach makes all of the difference in an industry with so many small companies at play,” Chawla wrote. “A surprising 89% of freight trucks in the U.S. are owned by carriers with fewer than five total trucks, and 99% of freight carriers possess fewer than 10 total trucks in their fleet. Despite the big business of freight shipping in the U.S., it’s actually a fragmented market of small businesses.”

 

Soon, you might be walking across the border through a shipping container.

Yes, you read that right.

You’re off the flight, seven hours later, exhausted and hungry, and cranky from being hurtled at your destination at more than half the speed of sound. You grab your bag from overhead, stumble through the bright lights of the airport towards customs and then — suddenly — you’re funneled through a 20-foot shipping container that’s packed to the rafters with biometric gadgetry.

That’s the latest vision from Princeton Identity, a New Jersey-based startup, which will this week lift the lid on its latest offering.

The container — dubbed the Biometric Conex — can work almost anywhere — from government buildings and border control to large events that require personnel checks to prevent improper access or perimeter breaches.

The Conex takes several of the company’s existing biometric technologies and integrates it into a self-contained air-conditioned unit that can process as many as 20 people per minute. You enter the container at one end and, in a normal walking pace, pass through the container as you have your biometrics scanned — your fingerprints, then your face and irises — and out of the other side. By fusing together the three sets of data, the system claims a near-perfect level of accuracy to prevent identity spoofing.

No stopping, no standing, and no waiting around.

Princeton Identity’s specializes in biometrics in motion, authenticating people while they move. “That helps speed up the process by cutting down on queueing,” said Mark Clifton, the company’s chief executive, told TechCrunch.

Assuming you’re not flagged as on a watchlist and tackled to the ground by security guards, the process is quick and non-invasive to the average person.

Clifton said the container is operational in less than a day. As it’s smaller than the average shipping container, it can fit on the back of a heavy duty truck. It can be deployed almost anywhere — power can be drawn from a generator and a connection drawn from the cell networks. And, the company’s technologies are compatible with government databases, making it easy to integrate the technology wherever it’s needed. In other cases, anyone who requires authentication can be enrolled in less than a minute.

Each unit costs about $280,000, he said.

To some, biometric authentication makes life easy — replacing passwords that can be shared, lost or stolen. To others, it sparks worry. Governments and airports are increasingly relying on biometrics to speed up immigration, border and pre-flight security. But what happens when the data is lost or stolen? You can’t just get new fingerprints — or eyeballs for that matter.

“Credentials get copied,” Clifton said. “There’s a lot of fraud.” Passwords can be written down, and driving licenses and passports can be cloned. “Biometrics will rise as the way you become authenticated.” Not wanting to see anyone’s data get exposed, the company took an approach of storing each set of biometrics as a scrambled record that’s readable by its technology but not to anybody else.

“We don’t store the images — we store the template, the digital representation,” he said. “It may mean you re-enroll, but you haven’t lost your data.” Though, Clifton said that its customers who buy its technology can choose to store data as a raw image, like governments. And, in most cases, he said, data is encrypted and stored locally on the devices — and not by the company.

“We’re just devices that sit inside their firewall,” he said. “We don’t control the data — they do.”

So far the company has deployed its technologies at Dubai International Airport to help passengers process through the terminal — with more partnerships set to be announced in the near future.

As convenient as biometrics are, the more they’re used, the greater the data collection — and the risk that data could get lost or stolen. But Princeton Identity’s effort to minimize the data it collects is a mature take, but whether others heed that approach remains to be seen.

Marshall speakers stand out. That’s why I dig them. From the company’s headphones to its speakers, the audio is warm and full just like the classic design suggests.

The company today is announcing revisions across its lines. The new versions of the Action ($249), Stanmore ($349) and Woburn Bluetooth ($499) speakers now feature Bluetooth 5.0, an upgraded digital signal processor and a slightly re-worked look.

Marshall also announced a new version of the Minor wireless in-ear headphones. The wireless headphones were among the company’s first products and the updated version now features Bluetooth 5.0 aptX connectivity, new 14.2 mm drivers and 12 hours of battery life. Marshall also says the redesigned model will stay in place better than the original model.

It’s important to note that the company behind these Marshall speakers and headphones is different from the company that makes the iconic guitar amp though there is collaboration. The Marshall brand is used by Zound Industries, which also operates Ubanears.

The models produced by Zound Industries stay true to the Marshall brand. I’ve used several of the products since the company launched and I’m pleased to report that this new generation packs the magic of previous models.

The company sent me the new Woburn II speaker (pictured above) and it’s a lovely speaker. This is the largest speaker in the company’s line. It’s imposing and, in Reddit-speak, an absolute unit. It’s over a foot tall and weighs just under 20 lbs.

The speaker easily fills a room. The sound is warm and inviting.

The Woburn II features a ported design which helps create the rich sound. Bass is deep though doesn’t pound. Mid-tones are lovely and the highs are perfectly balanced. If they’re not, there are nobs mounted on the top to adjust the tones.

I find the Woburn a great speaker at any volume. Turn it down and the sound still feels as complex as it does at normal listen volumes. Crank the speaker to 10, drop the treble a bit, and the speaker will shake walls.

Don’t be scared by the imposing size. The Woburn II can party, but it is seemingly just as happy to spend the evening in, playing some Iron and Wine.

Sadly, the Woburn II lacks some of the magic of the original Woburn. The new version does not have an optical input and the power switch is a soft switch. It’s just for looks. The first Woburn had a two position switch. Click one way to turn on and click the other to turn off. It was an analog experience. This time around the speakers retain the switch, but the switch is different. It’s artificial and might as well be a power button. When pressed forward, the switch turns on the speaker and then snaps back to its original position. The clicking it gone. I know that seems like a silly thing to complain about but that switch was part of the Marshall experience. It felt authentic and now it feels artificial.

Like past models, the speaker is covered in a vinyl-like material and the front of the speaker is covered in fabric. Don’t touch this fabric. It stains. The review sample sent to me came with stains already on the fabric.

The Woburn II is a fantastic speaker with a timeless look. At $499 it’s pricy but produces sound above its price-point rivals. I expect the same performance out of updated Action II and Stanmore II speakers. These speakers are worthy of the Marshall name.

Just ahead of today’s Google’s hardware event, the company has quietly rolled out an update to its Google Photos application which introduces a new, automated way of organizing and sharing photos: Live Albums. According to the app’s “What’s New” description, Live Albums appear to be a spin-off from partner sharing, introduced last year. But instead of automating sharing of a set of photos – like those of a child – between just two people, Live Albums allow you to automate the sharing of people and pet photos with anyone you choose.

For example, the feature could be used to share photos of your children with your extended family, instead of just a spouse. You could also specify certain, close friends who would always receive the photos you took together.

Easy, collaborative photo sharing has been something of a holy grail for photo apps for years. It’s been the basis of numerous startups including Bump, whose founder David Lieb now leads Google Photos, Fabric, Batch, Color, Cluster, and many more. Facebook Moments also tries to make collaborative photo sharing easier.

But automation using A.I. technologies and facial recognition is a next step, and one that makes Google Photos an even more compelling app.

In practice, it means that you wouldn’t have to manually share photos with certain people ever again – you can just set up a Live Album once, and then allow the automation to take over.

The feature was previously spotted in testing, in an APK breakdown done by Android Police last month. However, today’s iOS app update text indicates it’s now rolling out to a broader set of users.

That may be a staged rollout, though, as not everyone has access to the feature at this time. It’s also not currently mentioned in the update text of the Android version, but Google keeps its cross-platform apps in parity, with few delays.

Here’s the full text of the change, per the App Store description:

Introducing Live Albums, an easier way to share with loved ones. Select the people and pets you want to see and Google Photos will automatically add photos of them as you take them. Now your family and friends will always see the latest photos, no manual updates needed.

It seems we’ll hear more at today’s Google event about the news, given Google Photos has been teasing updates on its Twitter account. Hopefully, there’s even more to come, as well.

In the meantime, we’ve reached out to Google for further comment. We aren’t expecting a response as this news is likely being held until the event later this morning.

 

Netlify wants to revolutionize the way developers build websites, abstracting away the web server and breaking web sites into microservices, making the process more like building a mobile application than a traditional website. Today, the company announced a $30M Series B investment to help continue to build on that vision.

Kleiner Perkins led the round. Andreessen Horowitz and the founders of Slack (Stewart Butterfield), Yelp (Jeremy Stoppelman) and Figma (Dylan Field) all participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $44 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Chris Bach, co-founder and president and Matt Biilmann, co-founder and CEO see the change they are trying to make as part of the larger shift to an API economy. They want to take the same ease of development APIs have given programmers in a mobile context and bring that to web development.

As I wrote earlier this year when they announced support for AWS Lambda, they want to reduce the complexity around web development:

“Netlify has abstracted away the concept of a web server, which it says is slow to deploy and hard to secure and scale. By shifting from a monolithic website to a static front end with back-end microservices, it believes it can solve security and scaling issues and deliver the site much faster.”

The founders have a grand vision, “We are basically out to replace all web servers with a with a global application delivery network,” Bach explained.

Mamoon Hamid, general partner at investor Kleiner Perkins says that while the website backend has evolved over recent years, the front end has remained static, and that’s what Netlify is addressing with their microservices-based approach to web development. “Netlify smack dab hits our view of where we need to go for the web to flourish,” Hamid told TechCrunch.

He believes the last shift of this magnitude in web development at the presentation layer was the advent of the CMS 15 years ago, and we are starting to see developers attracted to the Netlify approach in a big way. “We really believe that with this 300,000 strong developer force that’s already behind Netlify that they’re showing early signs of tapping into what could be  the platform from which a significant portion of the web content is served from [in the future],” Hamid said.

Netlify is working to increase the number of websites running on their approach in the coming years and see this as a mission to change the web. “For us, it’s very important to keep being a place where developers want to go and very easily can get something up and running. And then you can scale from there,” Bach said.

The company wants to build out a more organized sales and marketing team to sell the Netlify approach to larger organizations, while continuing to build out the product and developer outreach. All of this takes money and that’s why they went for such a large round today.

“I’ve always believed the web is for everyone,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the well-known (and knighted) creator of the World Wide Web.

“The web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas,” he added. “Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible — and necessary.”

Late last month, he published the above in a blog post announcing inrupt, a startup that would finally execute on his vision for the information superhighway he built nearly 30 years ago. Backed with an undisclosed amount of funding from Glasswing Ventures, the startup is emerging from stealth today with a plan to decentralize the web and restore power to the people rather than the companies that have exploited user trust for their own financial gains.

The timing couldn’t be better. The last year has been plagued with scandals, from Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that used Facebook data to target voters for President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, to most recently a data-exposing hack on Google+ that relinquished the private information of hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting users.

Internet privacy and security are hot-button issues, to say the least. Users are rapidly losing trust in the companies that became institutions in the digital age — and they’re demanding solutions.

The race to restore control of data and the web at large has begun; inrupt is looking to the finish line.

The father of the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee is a British engineer and professor of computer science who famously gave away the web, which allows anyone with a computer to access the internet, for free.

For the past few years, he’s been quietly working on a project called Solid with a small team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Solid is an open-source project built on the existing web meant to give people control over their own data. Using Solid, users can keep their data wherever they choose, rather than being forced to store it on centralized servers.

Despite its populist ambitions, Solid has failed to garner the momentum necessary to truly disrupt the web.

Berners-Lee realized Solid needed commercial backing, a real business behind it to earn the interests of open-source developers who have to build decentralized apps on the Solid platform for it to be useful.

Thus, inrupt was born. Berners-Lee tapped John Bruce, a fellow British engineer and serial entrepreneur, to lead the company as its chief executive officer. Most recently, Bruce co-founded Resilient, an incident response platform later acquired by IBM. Before that, he was the chairman and CEO of Quickcomm and the vice president of Symantec.

Bruce resigned from IBM in April to focus on inrupt full time.

“The world we’ve created on the web [is] not the right one,” Bruce told TechCrunch. “Maybe, just maybe, we can put it in the place it was originally intended to be.”

“Inrupt’s mission, at this point, is to bring resources, process and skills to galvanize the open-source effort that Tim was leading out of MIT to help [Solid] become, truly, a force to be reckoned with,” he added. “We are at the stage of the new web that Tim was at when he first started the World Wide Web.”

Bruce says that since Berners-Lee announced inrupt in late September, open-source developers have poured into the Solid platform in droves.

Now, the pair are gearing up to raise another round of funding, hire, expand the Solid platform and work on a digital assistant tool called Charlie, which the company describes as a “decentralized version of Alexa.”

For Berners-Lee, inrupt is Act II of a much larger story. For Bruce, it’s the opportunity to work with a legend.

“This is a man that understands the web truly better than anyone else on the planet,” Bruce said. “And the wheels of innovation have really just started to turn.”