Month: October 2018

Lightning had a good run, but it’s time to switch everything to USB-C. Apple finally dropped the Lightning port with the new iPad Pro. And the USB-C port is much more versatile than Lightning.

For instance, you can plug a 5K display to your iPad Pro and show some video on the external display. It’s still unclear how it’s going to work when it comes to software, but it opens up a lot possibilities.

You can also use USB-C dongles to plus all sort of data accessories. SD card readers, Ethernet cables, etc. The iPad Pro is looking more and more like a traditional laptop. Many third-party accessory makers will probably use this opportunity to develop docks and other hubs.

Finally, the good thing about USB-C is that you can theoretically turn any device into an external battery pack. Using a USB-C to Lightning, you can now charge an iPhone from your iPad. It’s an expensive battery pack, but it can be useful for those who always carry both at the same time.

Now let’s hope this is the first sign that USB-C is coming to the iPhone. I can’t wait to use my laptop charger to charge my phone, or my iPhone charger to charge my Nintendo Switch.

To get an edge on the market, investors must look beyond traditional financial info like revenue and profits. Our every online activity generates data exhaust like web traffic, Twitter mentions, app downloads, and search trends. It’s the ability to overlay the old and new data sets to spot surprising trends that will set the best traders apart. Sentieo wants to be their tool.

Sentieo is an investment research software suite that uses AI to scan financial documents, analyze alternative data sets, and create visualizations. The fintech SAAS startup now has 700 customers including top hedge funds plus mutual funds, Fortune 500s, and investment banks who pay around $500 to $1000 per year per license. That’s a lot cheaper than a $21,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscription.

Now Sentieo is ready to crank up its name recognition with a sales and marketing blitz fueled by a new $19 million Series A round led by Centana, a $250 million growth equity firm focused on fintech SAAS. Now with $30 million in total funding, the 160-person startup plans to “Educate [traders] that ‘hey, this product is built by people who sat in your seats'” says CEO Alap Shah.

Sentieo charts Search Trends data and Sentieo Index data on Facebook vs the social network’s revenue

10 year ago, Shah was making the Wall Street rounds after graduating from Harvard in economics. He was an analyst in consulting at Novantas, private equity at Castanea, and worked for hedges funds VIking Global and Citadel. “It became clear that there were some really big holes in my process where software wasn’t meeting my needs. Importantly, there was a hole around search” Shah tells me. “We’ve grown accustomed to going to Google. But unfortunately that’s just not the way the old-school financial data programs are structured.”

So he built his own. “I used all the financial tools out there: Capital IQ, FactSet, Bloomberg — each had their strengths and weaknesses. But they were all over 20 years old, so they pre-date the cloud, pre-date SAAS, pre-date mobile!” With Sentieo, he wanted to develop a tool that could understand the nuances of business momentum before it showed up in the balance sheets.

Sentieo does have a traditional financial equity data terminal with real-time pricing. But there’s also a machine learning and natural language processing-powered document search tool that can sort through SEC documents, earnings call transcripts, press releases, and more. It taps Alexa web traffic data, Apptopia app download rates, and Twitter chatter, as well as Thomson Reuters analyst estimates and fundamentals. Customers can annotate files, organize ideas, generate visualizations, and share their insights through Sentieo’s Notebook.

For example, Sentieo could look through all of Tesla’s earnings calls and financial documents for mentions of guidance on Model 3 production volume. It could highlight them all, analyze the sentiment of those mentions, and chart them against Tesla’s share price. Or you could search for all the companies starting to list President Trump as a risk factor for their business, which would surface how the medical cannabis companies are concerned about his Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ stance on legalization.

 

Sentieo’s synonym library allows it to hunt down different ways of saying the same thing with the goal of not forcing investors — or their dutiful analysts — to read through 100 page 10-Q documents manually. “You can get the same information at 10x the speed with something like Sentieo” Shah claims. It wants to a be a “research management system”, like a Salesforce CRM for tracking investment ideas.

But Sentieo’s 65-person India-based engineering must keep data from all 50 feeds, 25 million documents, and 64,000 equities flowing to keep customers satisfied. There are a ton of moving parts, and Sentieo is competing with much bigger companies. Beyond Bloomberg, there are lots of alternative data providers out there. And Microsoft’s software suite also has plenty of info management tools.

Sentieo’s hope is to emerge as an aggregator of information sources and an annotation tool that benefits from being purposefully designed for what analysts need. If Robinhood is on one side of the spectrum making investing easy for novice traders, Sentieo is on the other end making investing smarter for experts. “It’s really at the bleeding edge of how you get the data today” Shah concludes. “For every company driven by consumer demand, there are all these little breadcrumbs being left all over the internet.”

[Disclosure: I briefly rented a room in an apartment where Shah lived five years ago and I know him from the San Francisco social scene frequented by many Silicon Valley figures.]

Apple is expanding the number and types of classes it hosts at its retail stores, under the banner of “Today at Apple.” The company says it’s adding 60 more sessions at its stores, including those focused on using its newer apps, like Siri Shortcuts and Clips, as well as those focused on AR, art, music, family photo-taking and more.

According to Apple SVP of Retail, Angela Ahrendts, Apple has hosted over 18,000 sessions per week, since the launch of the “Today at Apple” program 18 months ago. It also updated the Apple Store app in the latest release to better highlight sessions tailored to individual users based on the devices they own, as well as other signature programs.

Now, it’s expanding the program lineup.

“Today we’re announcing 60 newly designed sessions,” said Ahrendts. “Video, music and design have all been expanded and we’re adding walks and labs to most categories. And of course, we’re using Apple’s latest technologies like AR and Siri Shortcuts,” she added.

Apple is also creating its first video lab called “Small Screen Magic” in partnership with video creator Zach King where people will learn how to shoot and edit videos using Apple’s Clips app.

Another session will be a photo lab called “Fun Family Portraits,” which will feature the use of Live Photos, filters and Apple Pencil.

Meanwhile, a new design lab called “Drawing Treehouses” has been co-created with architects Foster + Partners – which collaborated with Apple on Apple Park. The course will teach architectural principles through the lens of fantasy.

A new Pro series will cover skills for Mac owners, like a video lab that teaches Final Cut Pro and a music lab involving Logic Pro.

The company says it’s also expanding spaces for sessions, by adding Forums at over 70 stores per year.

Ahrendts offered an update on existing initiatives, too, noting that Apple had hosted over 2,000 coding sessions throughout Europe as part of EU Code Week, and now holds sessions at all 505 retail locations.

Apple is borrowing some ideas from the competition with the second-generation Apple Pencil with a flat edge. The most exciting thing is that you won’t lose it in your backpack anymore as it uses magnets just like your smart cover.

You can attach it to the tablet and it won’t get in the way if you’re using it in landscape. Even better, you no longer need to remove a cap to plug it to the Lightning port. The Apple Pencil charges when it’s attached to the iPad. It works pretty much like a regular wireless charger.

When you first attach it to your iPad, it automatically pairs with the iPad. Finally, Apple added a gesture on the Pencil so that you can change the color or the shape of your strokes. You just need to tap twice with your finger. Tapping the screen with the Pencil lets you wake up the iPad as well.

The new Pencil seems to work only with the new iPad Pro given that it requires magnetic edges. It will be available for $129. The new Smart Keyboard Folio will cost $179 for the 11-inch iPad Pro and $199 for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro.

Here it is, the latest iPad Pro. A refreshed version of Apple’s highest-end tablet is, as anticipated, the centerpiece for today’s big event in Brooklyn. The new tablet marks what is arguable the most radical departure for the line from a design perspective, since the line rolled out some eight and a half years ago.

The “all new” iPad takes more than a few design cues from the iPhone line, continuing Apple’s single-minded focus of eliminating the world’s bezels. To achieve this, the company has dropped the home button, leaving only room for the front-facing camera along the top. Like the iPhone, the new Pro logs you in via FaceID using the depth-sensing, front-facing camera. There are four stereo speakers flanking the device, as well. Of course, a little bezel is require — after all, you’re going to need a place to put your hands.

The new tablets are thinner than their predecessors  (5.9 mm) and feature larger screen sizes at either 11 or 12.9 inches. The thinner design does mean the real camera pops out a bit from the rear. Inside, you’ll find the company’s latest chip, the A12X bionic, a step up from the iPhone’s 12.

It features an 8 core CPU and a 7 core GPU. Performance is up 35 percent faster for single core and up to 90 percent faster for multi-core programs. Graphical performance is around double its predecessor. The new chip also brings the neural engine found on the company’s phones, which should help more intelligently perform tasks like editing photos.

The company is working to position the device as a serious gaming platform — even going so far as comparing favorably it to the new Xbox, demoing a Warriors vs. Nets game on NBA 2k. The graphics were certainly solid for a tablet gaming demo. Ditto for the ability to run a full version of Photoshop on the device. Adobe is also one of the companies helping push Apple’s ARKit augmented reality platform. The company also demoed a sneak peak of a file created on its Project Aero AR app.

Of course, controls are still very much a question when pitting a touchscreen slate against a devoted gaming platform. That said, the Pencil does interact pretty well with the Adobe demo, and the souped up, 8-core product handles images with several layers pretty admirably.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of here is the addition of USB-C. That’s right, the company just ditched its longstanding Lightning port, in favor of the far more ubiquitous connector. And, get this, the iPad can actually be used as an external battery pack to key your iPhone alive.

[gallery ids="1739297,1739293,1739291,1739290,1739289,1739288,1739285,1739262,1739263,1739265,1739260"]

The Apple Pencil now snaps to the side of the tablet magnetically — and charges while it does so. The redesigned peripheral also features a few new tricks, like the ability to switch modes simply back tapping the side. There’s an upgraded version of the bluetooth folio keyboard case arriving for the redesigned device, as well.

All in all, a pretty solid redesign for the top-level iPad, with a number of updates that will likely trickle down to the rest of the line in coming years. After all, the Pro has become something of a proving ground for the rest of the iPad line.

Like the Mac Mini, the 11 inch iPad Pro starts at $799. The 12.9 inch version starts at $999. Both versions will come in LTE configurations. Pre-order starts today and the devices will begin shipping on November 7.

Now that the Air’s got shiny new update, it’s time for the other major neglected entry in the Mac line. As Tim Cook noted on stage, the company’s got another “small” addition to the line. The pint sized desktop is getting it’s “biggest updated, ever, according to the company.

The footprint is the same familiar squircle design that’s defined the line since the begin, but now with the space gray finish found on the rest of the line.

The biggest changes, however, are on the inside. The new device features the latest generation six core processor, up to 64GB of RAM and up to 2TB of solid state storage. On the back of the device, you’ll find four Thunderbolt 3, an HDMI and USB-A ports. Like the new Air, the updated Mini is made from 100 percent recycled aluminum.

As is fitting with the theme of the event, the company is positioning the product toward creative pros. Apple’s clearly hoping to blur the lines between consumer and professional, by souping up its lower end devices. That said, the Mini is still priced like an entry level device. The low-end version features 8GB of RAM and starts at $799. Pre-orders for the diminutive desktop starts today, and it starts shipping on November 7.

MacBook Air fans aren’t hard to find. Although I admit to being a bit skeptical at its introduction, the laptop grew from an underpowered runt to an underappreciated workhorse over the years. But the design has hardly changed in the decade (!) since it came out — at least until today’s Apple event, when the company took the wraps off a totally redesigned Air with a retina display and Touch ID — and a new $1,199 price.

“When Steve pulled that MacBook Air out of that envelope, it was clear things would never be the same,” recalled CEO Tim Cook in his introduction. “MacBook Air truly embraced the notion that less indeed could be more. And it redefined the modern notebook in the process. MacBook Air has become the most beloved notebook ever. it’s time for a new MacBook Air, one that takes the MacBook Air experience even further in the areas that are most important to our customers.” (Yes, he said the product name five times in a row like that.)

The new Air is clearly meant for budget buyers who have been put off by the 12″ MacBook, which although popular, isn’t without its flaws, and it ain’t cheap, either. For anyone looking to spend less than a grand on a new Mac notebook, the Air is their best (and practically only) bet.

Although the old Air was updated as late as last year with new specs, the display has always been an obvious deficiency. 1440×900 was nothing to crow about even in 2008, let alone nearly a decade later. That’s been fixed with a new high-resolution 13.30-inch screen: inches and 2560×1600. (And “48 percent more color,” whatever that means.)

Of course the guts to support that display, and the tasks you’ll be doing on it, needed a serious bump too. So the new Air has an 8th-generation Intel processor, presumably with integrated graphics. It’s probably enough to play Fortnite, which is all that matters.

As for the design, it really is hard to improve on the original; its knifelike profile was nothing short of astonishing at its debut, and it’s stayed more or less the same since, with a solid keyboard and (regrettably) a rather prominent bezel. The bezel is gone, at least, replaced with a thinner black one. There goes the signature Air look, but you won’t see anyone crying about that.

At least it’s still aluminum, and all recycled aluminum now too, Apple explained with pride. Helps make it more sustainable.

The trackpad is the new force touch version, meaning no actual movement when you click, which is a mixed blessing. It’s quite a bit larger, at least, while the laptop itself is a bit smaller and lighter.

The addition of Touch ID and the secure enclave that runs it is welcome, of course, and it’s doubtful many will miss the Touch Bar, which so far hasn’t demonstrated any serious utility outside a few specialty apps and workflows. You have the F-keys instead, which is a good choice.

Unfortunately, Apple has also decided to change the keyboard. While the old Air used a tried and true scissor switch, and my 2012 model still types like a dream, the new model uses the much-criticized “butterfly switch” mechanism. This keyboard has proven to be one of Apple’s worst engineering mistakes in years, with many complaining of noise, key failures, and discomfort. Air lovers may find this extremely disappointing.

The MBA’s variety of ports, including USB-A and an SD card reader, are of course gone, replaced by Thunderbolt 3. It’s still a little sad to lose those legacy ports, which are still incredibly useful.

I’ll be holding onto my late-model MacBook Air, myself, but I understand the draw of this new one. It starts at $1,199 — apparently they couldn’t quite hit that $999 sweet spot — and should be available next week.

During its press event in Brooklyn, Apple CEO Tim Cook shared some numbers on the Mac in particular. The active install base of all Macs is currently 100 million.

“People love the Mac and they use it to create all kinds of amazing things every day,” Cook said.

Obviously this number is much smaller than the iPhone install base, but it’s also a smaller market overall. More important than the number of active Macs, Apple is still converting a lot of new users to the Mac.

51 percent of Mac customers are new users overall. And in China in particular, 76 percent of buyers are buying a Mac for the first time.

Cook didn’t say how many Mac people are buying a Windows computer because Apple has been really slow when it comes to Mac updates. Maybe it’ll change today.

“Of course, one of the drivers for Mac’s high customer satisfaction is macOS,” Cook said before recapping some of the new features in macOS Mojave. PC makers have stepped up their game. It’s clear that macOS remains the best thing in the Mac.

Former TokBox head Ian Small is replacing Chris O’Neill as CEO of Evernote, the note-taking and productivity app company said this morning. In a blog post, Small said that the leadership change was announced to employees this morning by Evernote’s board. “We are all hugely appreciative of the energy and dedication Chris has shown over the last three years, and in particular for putting Evernote on solid financial footing so we can continue to build for the future,” he wrote.

Small added, “When Stepan Pachikov founded Evernote, he had a vision for how technology could augment memory and how an app could change the way we relate to information at home and at work. Evernote has been more successful at making progress towards Stepan’s dreams than he could have imagined, but Stepan and I both think that there is more to explore and more to invent.”

O”Neill had been Evernote’s CEO since 2015, when he took over the position from co-founder Phil Libin. Small previously served as CEO of TokBox, which operates the OpenTok video calling platform, from 2009 to 2014, and then as its chairman from 2014 to July of this year.

O’Neill’s departure as CEO is the latest significant leadership shift for Evernote, which has withstood several key executive departures over the last few months. In early September, we reported that the company had lost several senior executives, including CTO Anirban Kundu, CFO Vincent Toolan, CPO Erik Wrobel, and head of HR Michelle Wagner, as it sought funding in a potential down-round from the unicorn valuation it hit in 2012. According to TechCrunch’s sources, Evernote had struggled to grow its base of paid users and active users, as well as enterprise clients, for the last six years.

Then a few weeks later, Evernote announced that had to lay off 54 people, or about 15 percent of its workforce. O’Neill wrote a blog post about the company’s future growth strategy, including streamlining specific functions like sales so it could focus on product development and engineering.

After four months “on the beach,” per his LinkedIn profile, Uber’s former global head of business and corporate development has a new gig. Lime has hired David Richter (pictured) as its first-ever chief business officer and interim chief financial officer.

Based in San Francisco, Richter will be overseeing the bike- and e-scooter-sharing startup’s business operations. Richter spent more than four years at Uber leading the ride-hailing giant’s global business development, corporate development, experiential marketing, autonomous vehicle alliances and brand relevance teams. He left in May after expressing frustrations with a series of departures in his group, according to The Information.

“As Lime continues to grow, David will bring in unparalleled expertise, particularly in the realm of business development and corporate partnerships, as well as in managing our overall business strategy and deal flow,” Lime co-founder and chief executive officer Toby Sun said in a statement. “His leadership experience, coupled with his keen understanding of the fast-moving shared mobility industry will be a huge advantage to our company as we continue to expand our global footprint.”

Lime is said to be completing the fundraising circuit right now, asking investors for a valuation north of $3 billion. The company, which entered the unicorn club in June, has raised a total of $467 million to date from GV, Andreessen Horowitz, IVP, Section 32, GGV Capital and more.

The company is using the buckets of capital to expand beyond bikes and scooters. Last Monday, rumors emerged that it was planning a brick-and-mortar push. The company confirmed that it would indeed build scooter “lifestyle stores” in major U.S. and international markets, starting with Santa Monica, Calif.

The next day on stage at the JD Power Automotive Roundtable, Lime announced its official foray into car-sharing. The company has since applied for a car-sharing permit in Seattle and plans to rent out small electric vehicles, which it’s calling “transit pods,” by the end of the year.

According to Axios, Lime plans to spend $50 million on the pods, which will cost $1 for consumers to start, plus an additional 40 cents per minute.