Reelgood, a startup aimed at helping cord cutters find their next binge, is out today with its biggest update yet. The company has been developing its streaming guide over the past year to solve the issues around discovery that exist when consumers drop traditional pay TV in favor of streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, Prime Video, and others.

The company first launched as a website in the summer of 2017 before expanding to mobile last fall. During that time, it’s grown to over a million monthly active users who now check in with Reelgood to find something new to watch.

With today’s update to its iOS app, Reelgood is adding a number of features, including personalized recommendations, curated selections, alerts for shows and movies you’re tracking, advanced search and filtering, and the ability to track content over 50 more streaming services, among other things.

As discovery is Reelgood’s focus, the updated app now offers two new types of recommendations.

One is Reelgood’s own take on “Because You Watched” – a type of viewing suggestion you’ll find today on individual services, like Netflix. But those are more limited because they’ll only suggest other shows or movies they offer themselves. Reelgood’s recommendations will instead span all the services you have access to, offering a more universal set of suggestions.

This feature is tied to Reelgood’s watch history, where you track which shows and movies you’ve seen. That means you have to use Reelgood as your tracking app as well, in order for this feature to work.

The app’s other new way of offering recommendations is less personalized – in fact, it’s random. Because sometimes serendipity is a better way to find something, a feature called “Reelgood Roulette” lets you shake your device while on the Discover tab to get a non-personalized, random suggestion.

Reelgood credits Netflix Roulette, created by Andrew Sampson, as the basis for this addition. In fact, it acquired the rights to the software last year, and then updated it to support more streaming services.

The app also now offers more powerful search and filtering capabilities involving Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb scores, plus cast and crew listings. This allows you to query up things like “Meryl Streep’s top-rated movies” or “drama series with an IMDb rating of at least 8.0 that came out in the last 3 years,” for example.

Reelgood’s search and filtering mechanisms have always been the place where it excels, but it’s less useful as a simple tracker. For that, I prefer TV Time, which lets you quickly mark entire seasons or series as “Watched” and offers discussion boards for each episode where you can post photos and memes and chat with other fans.

TV Time, however, hasn’t been as useful for making recommendations – its suggestions have been off-the-mark when I’ve tried it in the past, often leaning too heavily on network’s back catalogs than pushing me to more current or trending content. It makes me wish I could combine the two apps into one for the best of both worlds – tracking and recommendations.

The updated Reelgood app also doubles down on its own curation capabilities by offering editorial collections. For example: 2018 Emmy Nominees, IMDb’s Top 250 Movies, Original Picks, Dark Comedies, British Humour, and more. This can be a good way to find something to watch when you’re really stumped.

And as you discover new shows and movies you want to see, you can set alerts so you’ll be notified when they hit one of the streaming services you’re subscribed to, similar the tracking feature on Roku OS.

Finally, Reelgood’s update includes the addition of 50+ streaming services – that means there’s now support for more niche services like IndieFlix, FilmStruck, Shudder, Fandor, CrunchyRoll, Mubi, AcornTV and Starz, among others.

“Reelgood 4.0 is the culmination of all we’ve learned about how people watch and the increasingly fragmented streaming world,” said Eli Chamberlin, Reelgood’s head of product and design. “Our aim with this release was to take all the streaming content out there, and display it in the most meaningful way possible so that people can get the most out of their existing streaming services without wasting countless hours browsing.”

The new app is rolling out to iOS today on the App Store.

Good news!

California has passed a law banning default passwords like “admin,” “123456” and the old classic “password” in all new consumer electronics starting in 2020.

Every new gadget built in the state from routers to smart home tech will have to come with “reasonable” security features out of the box. The law specifically calls for each device to come with a preprogrammed password “unique to each device.”

It also mandates that any new device “contains a security feature that requires a user to generate a new means of authentication before access is granted to the device for the first time,” forcing users to change the unique password to something new as soon as it’s switched on for the first time.

For years, botnets have utilized the power of badly secured connected devices to pummel sites with huge amounts of internet traffic — so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Botnets typically rely on default passwords that are hardcoded into devices when they’re built that aren’t later changed by the user. Malware breaks into the devices using publicly available default passwords, hijacks the device and ensnares the device into conducting cyberattacks without the user’s knowledge.

Two years ago, the notorious Mirai botnet dragged thousands of devices together to target Dyn, a networking company that provides domain name service to major sites. By knocking Dyn offline, other sites that relied on its services were also inaccessible — like Twitter, Spotify and SoundCloud.

Mirai was a relatively rudimentary, albeit powerful botnet that relied on default passwords. This law is a step in the right direction to prevent these kinds of botnets, but falls short on wider security issues.

Other, more advanced botnets don’t need to guess a password because they instead exploit known vulnerabilities in Internet of Things devices — like smart bulbs, alarms and home electronics.

As noted by others, the law as signed does not mandate device makers to update their software when bugs are found. The big device makers, like Amazon, Apple and Google, do update their software, but many of the lesser-known brands do not.

Still, as it stands, the law is better than nothing — even if there’s room for improvement in the future.

Longtime venture capitalist Shirish Sathaye has quietly joined early-stage investor Cervin Ventures as a general partner.

Most recently, Sathaye was a general partner at Formation 8, the embattled venture firm co-founded by Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, Brian Koo (a scion of the Koo family, owners of the electronics giant LG) and former Khosla GP Jim Kim. Formation 8 announced in 2015 that it would not raise a third fund and would begin winding down operations.

Sathaye, who’s been in the VC business since 2001 as a GP at Matrix Partners, then at Khosla Ventures, remains a partner in Formation 8’s sophomore fund. His previous investments include Nutanix, Samsung-acquired Grandis, McAfee-acquired Solidcore Systems, cybersecurity startup Vectra Networks and data storage provider Panzura.

He’d only been at Formation 8 for one year when the firm began to crumble. As we now know, conflict between the firm’s founding partners led to its demise. Lonsdale quickly raised $425 million for a spin-off fund called 8VC; Koo, in a similar fashion, brought in $357 million for Formation Group and Kim followed up with a $200 million fund called Builders.

Sathaye, for his part, had grown tired of the “bigger is better” mentality and opted to leave the business of big VC for good.

He began making angel investments and advising startups at Cervin Ventures, a pre-Series A VC fund focused on the enterprise. It closed a $56 million fund in 2017, its largest vehicle to date.

“Smaller funds, in general, make better decisions,” Sathaye told TechCrunch. “At a larger fund, there are more people around the table to make decisions. I think returns are better when there are fewer people making those decisions.”

Watching funds swell past the billion-dollar mark and investors deploy the “spray and pray” strategy was a turn-off, Sathaye said. Startups have more access to capital than ever before, yet most companies can get off the ground with very little funding, thanks to recent innovations like Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

“With AWS, companies can bring products to market quickly and they can reach their customers with much less money,” Sathaye said. “If you look at it just from a returns profile, the smaller funds will get better cash-on-cash returns simply because companies don’t need that much money to be successful.”

Palo Alto-based Cervin is led by two other GPs, Preetish Nijhawan and Neeraj Gupta. It invests $1 million to $2 million in early-stage startups. Sathaye says he’ll be focused specifically on the security, mobile, cloud and data verticals.

For the 37.5 million adults who have trouble hearing without a hearing aid, Bose has a new product for you. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today approved audio technology company Bose to market a new hearing aid device.

Dubbed the Bose Hearing Aid, it’s designed to let people with audio impairments fit, program and control the hearing aid without the help or assistance of a healthcare provider. The hearing aid uses air conduction to capture sound vibrations through the microphone. From there, the device processes the signal, amplifies it and then plays it back through an earphone inside the ear canal. Through a mobile app, people can adjust the hearing aid.

“Hearing loss is a significant public health issue, especially as individuals age,” Malvina Eydelman, M.D., director of the Division of Ophthalmic, and Ear, Nose and Throat Devices at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, said in a press release. “Today’s marketing authorization provides certain patients with access to a new hearing aid that provides them with direct control over the fit and functionality of the device. The FDA is committed to ensuring that individuals with hearing loss have options for taking an active role in their health care.”

Before approving the device for marketing, the FDA says it reviewed data from clinical trials of 125 patients. Those studies showed comparable results to those with professionally fitted devices.

“In addition, when participants self-fit the Bose Hearing Aid, they generally preferred those hearing aid settings over the professionally-selected setting,” the FDA wrote in a blog post.

Bose is not the first company to try this. The now-defunct startup Doppler Labs developed earbuds with active listening, enabling people to augment the way they heard the world. There’s also Nuheara, which unveiled earbuds earlier this year that are designed to boost hearing. What makes Bose’s different, however, is the FDA approval.

Bose went through the FDA’s De Novo premarket review process, which is a regulatory pathway for low to moderate-risk devices that are especially novel, and not already available. As the FDA mentioned, this is the first hearing aid authorized for marketing that enables people to fit and program their own hearing aids. Still, depending on state laws, people may be required to purchase the device through a licensed hearing aid dispenser.

It’s not clear what this device looks like, or if the Bose Hearphones — currently marketed as a “conversation-enhancing” headphone — will simply be remarketed as a hearing aid. I’ve reached out to Bose and will update this story if I hear back.

It’s 2018, and pop culture is one giant ouroboros. Exhibit A: Wolverine: The Long Night, the new comic miniseries inspired by the podcast that was inspired by the comics. Is this a first? Maybe? Who can say? Who really cares anymore? Comics are pop culture now, and the nerds have definitively won the war, and here, enjoy this book.

Announced today at New York Comic-Con, the Benjamin Percy-written, Marcio Takara-drawn, Rafael Albuquerque-covered five-issue miniseries is based on what has, by all accounts, been a successful first-scripted podcast for Marvel.

Here’s a synopsis of the new comic, which is also basically a synopsis of the podcast: “Following a string of mysterious deaths in Burns, Alaska, Special Agents Sally Pierce and Tad Marshall arrive to investigate. They soon find there’s more going on than meets the eye…”

Spoilers: A diminutive, angry Canadian gentlemen with retractable metal claws crosses their paths. The book is due out in January.

When many consumers think of search, they think of Google, but under the hood of hundreds of businesses and other organizations, there are hundreds of other kinds of challenges that require search technology. Today, one of the bigger companies providing that, Elastic, saw just how valuable that business can be, by way of a very strong debut as a public company. The company today opened up at $70, a pop of 94 percent on its initial public offering at $36 on Thursday night. Elastic — founded in the Netherlands — raised $252 million at a market capitalization of around $2.5 billion in that IPO, and trading continues to be strong.

Its stock is currently at $71.69 (up about 99 percent on its IPO price, for those keeping track). We’ll update this post as trading continues.

Although Google has long dominated the market for consumer’s search queries, Elastic has taken the approach of providing a set of strong search tools to organizations to help them both with tackling their own internal data troves, but also to help them build products for their customers to use.

This is no small thing: the tech world is built on big data, and there are absolutely troves of it being created and that goes into making services work, but it’s only valuable if it can be harnessed, controlled and shaped to whatever purpose you need, and that’s where Elastic comes in, covering both customer-facing and internal requirements.

“When you hail a ride home from work with Uber, Elastic helps power the systems that locate nearby riders and drivers. When you shop online at Walgreens, Elastic helps power finding the right products to add to your cart. When you look for a partner on Tinder, Elastic helps power the algorithms that guide you to a match. When you search across Adobe’s millions of assets, Elastic helps power finding the right photo, font, or color palette to complete your project,” the company noted in its IPO prospectus.

“As Sprint operates its nationwide network of mobile subscribers, Elastic helps power the logging of billions of events per day to track and manage website performance issues and network outages. As SoftBank monitors the usage of thousands of servers across its entire IT environment, Elastic helps power the processing of terabytes of daily data in real time. When Indiana University welcomes a new student class, Elastic helps power the cybersecurity operations protecting thousands of devices and critical data across collaborating universities in the BigTen Security Operations Center. All of this is search.”

The company says its portfolio of search products — based on open source and existing under the brand Elastic Stack (which includes Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash) — have been downloaded over 350 million times since the company launched in 2013 — a mixture of paid and free products.

The strength of Elastic’s message/mission and customer base has been enough to entice investors despite the fact that the company is not profitable.

It has 5,500 customers across over 80 countries and in a wide range of industries, and it posted sales of $159.9 million in fiscal 2018, versus $88.2 million the year before, growth of 81 percent. It is also loss-making. Elastic posted net losses of $52.7 million in FY 2018, with a net loss of $52.0 million the year before, while operating cash flow was negative $20.8 million in FY 2018.

Dutch startups have had a strong little run in the market in the last couple of months. Adyen, the payments company, popped 67 percent when it made its debut in June. For some further context, Elastic had hoped to raise $100 million when it first filed its IPO in September. Overall for the tech IPO market, this is a big bounce back after the lacklustre performance of Funding Circle last week.

Photographer: Daro Sulakauri/Bloomberg

According to a new study conducted by the Center for American Entrepreneurship and NYU’s Shack Institute of Real Estate, the US may be losing its competitive advantage as the dominant nucleus of the startup and venture capital universe. 

The analysis, led by senior Brookings Institution fellow Ian Hathaway and “Rise of the Creative Class” author Richard Florida, examines the flow of venture capital over 100,000 deals from 2005 to 2017 and details how the historically US-centric practice of venture capital has become a global phenomenon.

While the US still appears to produce the largest amount of venture activity in the world, America’s share of the global pie is falling dramatically and doing so quickly.

In the mid-90s, the US accounted for more than 95% of global venture capital investment.  By 2012, this number had fallen to 70%. At the end of 2017, the US share of total venture investment had fallen to just 50%.   

Over the last decade, non-US countries have propelled growth in the global startup and venture economy, which has swelled from $50 billion to over $170 billion in size.  In particular, China, India and the UK now account for a third of global venture deal count and dollars – 2-3x the share held ten years ago.  And with VC dollars increasingly circulating into modernizing Asia-Pac and European cities, the researchers found that the erosion in the US share of venture capital is trending in the wrong direction.

Growth of global startup cities and the myth of the American “rise of the rest”

We’ve spent the summer discussing the notion of Silicon Valley reaching its parabolic peak – Observing the “rise of the rest” across smaller American tech hubs.  In reality, the data reveals a “rise in the rest of the world”, with startup ecosystems outside the US growing at a faster pace than most US hubs.

The Bay Area remains the world’s preeminent beneficiary of VC investment, and New York, Los Angeles, and Boston all find themselves in the top ten cities contributing to global venture growth.  However, only six of the top 20 cities are located in the US, while 14 are in Asia or Europe.  At the individual level, only two American cities crack the top 20 fastest growing startup hubs.  

Still, the authors found the bulk of VC activity remains highly concentrated in a small number of incumbent startup cities. More than 50% of all global venture capital deployed can be attributed to only six cities and half of the growth in VC activity over the last five years can be attributed to just four cities.  Despite the growing number of ecosystems playing a role in venture decisions, the dominant incumbent startup hubs hold a firm grip on the majority of capital deployed.

China and the surge of mega deals

Unsurprisingly, the largest contributor to the globalization of venture capital and the slimming share of the US is the rapid escalation of China’s startup ecosystem.

In the last three years, China has captured nearly a fourth of total VC investment.  Since 2010, Beijing contributed more to VC deployment growth than any other city, while three other Chinese cities (Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen) fell in the top 15. 

A major part of China’s ascension can be tied to the idiosyncratic rise of late-stage “mega deals”, which the study defines as $500 million or more in size.  Once an extremely rare occurrence, mega deals now make up a significant portion of all venture dollars deployed.  From 2005-2007, only two mega deals took place.  From 2010-2012, eight of such deals took place.  From 2015-2017, there were 80 global mega deals, representing a fifth of the total venture capital activity.  Chinese cities accounted for half of all mega deal investment over the same period.

The good, the bad, and the uncertain

It’s not all bad for the US, with the study highlighting continued ecosystem growth in established US hubs and leading roles for non-valley markets in NY, LA, and Boston.

And the globalization of the startup and venture economy is by no means a “bad thing”.  In fact, access to capital, the spread of entrepreneurial spirit, and stronger global economic development and prosperity is almost unquestionably a “good thing.”

However, the US’ share of venture-backed startups is falling, and the US losing its competitive advantage in the startup and venture capital market could have major implications for its future as a global economic leader.  Five of the six largest US companies were previously venture-backed startups and now provide a combined value of around $4 trillion. 

The intense competition for talent marks another major challenge for the US who has historically been a huge beneficiary of foreign-born entrepreneurs.  With the rise of local ecosystems across the globe, entrepreneurs no longer have to flock to the US to build their companies or have access to venture capital.  The problem attracting entrepreneurs is compounded by notoriously unfriendly US visa policies – not to mention recent harsh rhetoric and tension over immigration that make the US a less attractive destination for skilled immigrants.  

At a recent speaking event, Florida stated he believed the US’ fading competitive advantage was a greater threat to American economic power than previous collapses seen in the steel and auto industries.  A sentiment echoed by Techstars co-founder Brad Feld, who in the report’s forward states, “government leaders should read this report with alarm.”

It remains to be seen whether the train has left the station or if the US can hold on to its position as the world’s venture leader.  What is clear is that Silicon Valley is no longer the center of the universe and the geography of the startup and venture capital world is changing.

“The Rise of the Global Startup City: The New Map of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital” tries to illustrate these tectonic shifts and identifies tiers of global startup cities based on size, growth and balance of VC deals and investments.

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Keith Teare, Michael Markman, Denis Pombriant, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Sunday, September 23, 2018.

Turn out or turn off, media as anesthesia, what it is until it isn’t.

G3: Believe Me — Elisa Camahort Page, Francine Hardaway, Maria Ogneva and Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, September 28, 2018.

@stevegillmor, @fradice, @mickeleh, @kteare, @denispombriant

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Liner Notes

Live chat stream

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook

G3: Believe Me

G3 chat stream

G3 on Facebook

If mobile money was the first phase in the development of digital finance in Africa, the next phase of digital financial services on the continent will focus on lending, insurance and wealth management

In “Beyond Payments: The Next Generation of Fintech Startups in Sub-Saharan Africa,” the venture capital firm Village Global, and their reporting partner, PayPal, tip their hat to M-Pesa and mobile money in Africa, but say that there’s a wave of innovation still to come.

The investment firm identified f 12 companies it determined were “building solutions in fintech subsectors outside of payments.”

In partnership with PayPal, Village Capital has set up Fintech: Africa 2018, a program in that seeks to find and support startups bringing other “critical services” to Africa’s unbanked populations.

“We can’t do enough to highlight what the next generation of fintech startups will and should be driving….whether it’s in agriculture—helping farmers have access to the financial system—through alternative credit scoring and lending—so people can actually get access to loans or insurance—or building savings and wealth,” Village Capital Managing Director and report co-author Allie Burns told TechCrunch.

Village Capital’s work gives a snapshot of these four sub-sectors—agricultural finance, insurtech, alternative credit scoring, and savings and wealth—including players, opportunities and challenges, recent raises, and early-stage startups to watch.

In alternative credit scoring and lending it sees blockchain as a driver of innovation in reducing “both transaction costs and intermediation costs, helping entrepreneurs bypass expensive verification systems and third parties.”

The report highlights recent raises by savings startup PiggybankNG and Nigerian agtech firm Farmcrowdy. Village Capital sees the biggest opportunities for insurtech startups in five countries: South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Kenya and Nigeria.

On non-payments fintech startups overall, Village Capital chose a cohort of 12 for its 2018 program. They included F-Pesa — a Kenyan foreign exchange app­ — and Nigerian installment e-commerce app CredPal. All 12 participated in three Village Capital and PayPal sponsored workshops to introduce them to mentors and investors. Two of the cohort (identity venture Youverify and Ugandan cloud focused microfinance company Ensibuuko) received funding offers from Village Capital.

PayPal’s involvement in Village Capital’s Fintech Africa program “is really about…our commitment to financial health and the democratization of finance,” PayPal head of social innovation Sean Milliken told TechCrunch.

PayPal provided financial resources for the Fintech Africa program and study and participated in the development of the curriculum “toward those participating ventures getting investment ready,” said PayPal’s Director of Corporate Affairs Tyler Spalding. They didn’t invest though: “our funds were not actually deployed in an investment capacity,” he added.

PayPal has increased its presence and payment activity in Africa over the last several years through a number of partnerships—including one to transfer funds through Safaricom’s M-Pesa product—and plans to deliver more remittances into Nigeria and South Africa through its Xoom subsidiary.

Village Capital is still mulling the possibility running another round of its Fintech Africa program in 2019. To date the fund has invested in 14 Sub-Saharan African startups.

Whether its payment or non-payment applications, the number of startups in Africa’s fintech space and the breadth of their activities continue to grow.

Big developments TecCrunch has covered this year have mostly been on the digital payments side including Paga’s global expansion and plans to take on providers such as PayPal and Safaricom. Then there have been big raises by payments focused Paga ($10), Cellulant ($47M), and Mines ($13) and by lending platform Jumo ($52) and South African business enterprise services startup Yoco.

Magic Leap has announced they are acquiring Computes, a decentralized mesh computing startup. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

From Magic Leap’s blog post:

From the beginning, Chris Matthieu and Jade Meskill started Computes, Inc. based on the principle of enabling the next generation of computing. We believe Magic Leap is the perfect home to achieve this vision

Why would Magic Leap want to get their hands on this company? Well, it’s no secret that building a “digital layer” on top of the real world is more than a little compute-heavy; mesh computing offers an attractive future for leveraging the power of grouped systems to push resources to the devices that need it most.

The company’s website does a not-so-great job of explaining what exactly they do, but here’s a blip from one of the company’s whitepapers:

The Lattice protocol allows authorized computers to self-organize into a mesh computer, limited only by the number and power of the members. Lattice will intelligently allocate work to the best members of the mesh, based on the requirements of the task.

This is an interesting idea for AR headset systems, where eventually most of them may be in standby on average and could theoretically push their compute power to another system. Perhaps more likely is offsite PCs with beefy internals offering the headsets a punch. On the far less sexy side, this could also just be a play for the startup to drill down some of its backend services.

If you’re still curious about what they do and are interested in some even more mildly dubious explaining, check out this video from Computes’ CEO, which only mildly resembles a video from the Dharma Initiative.