Month: October 2018

Between 2013 and last year, the number of boot camp schools tripled to more than 90 in the U.S. alone, according to Course Report, an outfit that tracks the industry. Some — including The Iron Yard and Dev Bootcamp — have since folded, unable to find enough eager recruits willing to pay top dollar to learn coding skills. (The average cost of a 14-week program last year was $11,400.)

At the same time, it has become apparent that when it comes to massive open online courses, a very high percentage of students don’t stay the course.

New York-based Codecademy, which began offering free coding courses at its outset, has managed to keep plugging away — and grow — despite these headwinds. In fact, the company today employs 85 people, up from 45 when we last sat down with cofounder and CEO Zach Sims in 2016. Its revenue is also up 65 percent year over year.

None of it has been a walk in the park, admits Sims, who dropped out of Columbia University in 2011 to start the company. “There’s been a ton of ups and downs,” he says, explaining that the company struggled for years with how to produce meaningful revenue before introducing two premium products in the last couple of years, both of which are affordable by design.

One of these is Codecademy Pro, meant to help users learn the fundamentals of coding, as well as develop a deeper knowledge (and receive certification from Codecademy) in up to 10 areas, including machine learning and data analysis. The cost is $20 per month, money that Pro users often see back in the form of a a $5,000 to $10,000 raise from their employer, insists Sims. He says the course “isn’t so much for those who are transition to full-time jobs but people who are learning skills to level up in their existing career.”

A second offering is Codecademy Pro Intensive, which is designed to immerse learners from six to 10 weeks (depending on the coursework), in either website development, programming, or data science. Students follow a structured, detailed syllabus that’s broken into focused units to organize the learning experience, which is synchronous but collaborative. To wit, users are placed in a moderated Slack group and can chat with people who are learning the same materials at the same time. They also receive unlimited access to a pool of 200 mentors who work with Codecademy, some of them “graduates” of Codecademy themselves.

Sims declines to talk about what percentage of the 45 million people who’ve taken a Codecademy course has paid the company, but he notes that the “macro trends in the market are going our way. People still need to find jobs, and tech is still an important skill to get them there.” Indeed, according to Code.org, a nonprofit that seeks to expand computer-science instruction in schools, there are more than 540,000 open computing jobs. At the same time, fewer than 50,000 computer-science majors graduated from school last year.

Sims also stresses the importance to Codecademy of ensuring its offerings remain “free and low cost everywhere in the world.” Toward that end, the company is today rolling out its newest product, a mobile app that enables users to learn on the go, though it is accessible to paying customers only after a seven-day trial for everyone. (No credit card is required.)

The idea, says Sims: “Lots of people use mobile phones, and we should be letting them practice whenever and whereve they want. They end doing twice as many exercises if they can learn on the subway, then pick up where they left off on the desktop later.”

How much of an accelerant the app will be remains to be seen, but certainly, Codecademy’s approach — catering to people who can’t take or aren’t interesting in expensive offline programs — seems as relevant as ever as some of its competitors fade into the distance.

“When we first started,” says Sims, “the skills gap was just making itself evident. There were tons of tech reports about tech jobs and not a lot of people to fill them. A lot of boot camps and other options emerged to fill that vacuum because, at the time, colleges weren’t equipped to handle [the knowledge gap]. Plus, student debt continued to be an issue, which made [underprivileged] students particularly ill-prepared for the workforce.”

What has changed since then is, well, not much, argues Sims. He notes that aside from a glut of hyped offerings to come and go, people still need ways to adapt to rapid-fire technological change, and with college costs as high as they’ve ever been — prices have soared upwards of 200 percent over the last 20 years —  they need affordable alternatives in particular.

If Codecademy requires more capital to continue providing as much, it isn’t saying. Asked about fundraising — Codecademy has raised $42.5 million to date, including Union Square Ventures and Naspers — Sims says it isn’t talking currently with VCs. “We’re pretty capital efficient. We still have the majority of our last round (raised in 2016) in the bank. And we’ve been able to grow pretty sustainably.

“If we see opportunities to accelerate growth down the line,” he adds, “we’ll go raise it.”

Asked if it can see a day where it works more closely with enterprise customers that want to help employees burnish their skills, he says that’s a high likelihood, too. But “so far,” he says, “we’ve seen pretty good consumer growth. It kind of comes down to how many things can you focus on.”

Of all the things to add to the blockchain, wine makes a lot of sense. Given the need for provenance for every grape and barrel, it’s clear that the ancient industry could use a way to track ingredients from farm to glass. VinX, an Israeli company founded by Jacob Ner-david, is ready to give it a try.

According to a release, the plan is to create a “token-based digital wine futures platform based on the Bordeaux futures model” that lets you track wine from end to end “at a cost bearable to the industry.”

Investment banker Gil Picovsky joined Ner-david to build out the service.

“I was relating to Gil my frustrations with the way most wine is sold, and I had some early thoughts around using blockchain and tokens to radically remake the wine industry,” said Ner-david. “Together Gil and I developed the core concepts of VinX, and started to actively devote ourselves full time to VinX in November 2017.”

“VinX is democratizing the capital structure of the wine industry by bringing consumers in direct contact with producers early in the wine-making cycle,” said Ner-david. “We are riding the wave of direct-to-consumer. In addition, because we are registering all wine futures as tokens on a blockchain, we are bringing a powerful validating force that will go a long way toward reducing fraud.”

Overstock’s investment arm, Medici Ventures, is not reporting how much cash they are dumping into VinX but the company claims that “it is a seven-figure investment.”

The tool will help reduce the rate of fakery in winemaking. Experts estimate that 20 percent of all wine in the world is counterfeit. VinX will follow individual bottles from filling to drinking, ensuring a bottle is real.

Ner-david is also the co-founder of Jezreel Valley Winery, a boutique winery in Israel.

“We want to use modern technologies, including blockchain and tokening assets, in bringing consumers in direct contact with wineries around the world, humanizing the connection, and leaving more value in the hands of wineries and wine lovers,” he said.

You may recall Rylo from this time last year, when the imaging startup launched a creative take on the 360 camera. The company’s been fairly quiet in the six months since it launched some new software tricks, but a new round of funding should help the company take some key steps toward spreading the gospel.

This week, Rylo announced that it has secured a $20 million Series B, led by Icon Ventures. That brings its total up to $35 million, with help from Accel Partners and Sequoia Capital. Plans for the funding are pretty much what you’d expect.

“Securing Series B funding from this excellent group of investors will allow us to maximize our potential for growth and earn significantly more market share,” CEO Alex Karpenko said in a release tied to the news. “We have come a long way since our launch one year ago, and I’m excited to continue to drive Rylo’s growth through investments in marketing, sales and retail partnerships in the coming year.”

Rylo’s camera represents an interesting piece of tech that utilizes 360 videos to create some unorthodox camera tricks, like stabilizing images, following subjects and creating a number of interesting effects. The product also has solid distribution with more than 500 retail locations in the U.S., including Best Buy.

Marketing, however, is going to be key for the success of the $499 camera, whose initial appeal is not as immediately apparent as the likes of GoPro.

Square today launched a new service that will allow its small business sellers to offer financing to their customers. Square Installments, as the service is called, will be available at launch to sellers in 22 U.S. states for purchases between $250 and $10,000. Customers can apply to pay for their purchase over 3, 6, or 12 months’ time.

Interest rates for the purchases will range between 0 and 24%, Square says, and decisions on approvals will be made in real-time.

The company designed the process to be quick and transparent, only requiring a brief application process that can be done at any time – including either in the store or at home. When approved, Square also spells out what the total cost will be, and displays the monthly payment options available.

Square says it came to the decision to move into consumer lending services because of customer demand. A survey it ran indicated there was strong demand for more flexible payment options among U.S. consumers. It also cited research that found that 68% of consumers said they would be more likely to consider a small or local business if it offered financing options.

But many smaller businesses have not been able to offer payment programs, because they either have minimum sales requirements they can’t meet, or because set up time is too labor intensive or expensive, Square explains.

“We’re focused on removing the complexity associated with financial products, enabling more businesses to access incredible tools that can help them grow,” said Jacqueline Reses, Head of Square Capital, in a statement about the launch. “Square Installments delivers simple and quick financing to customers seeking greater flexibility as they make purchasing decisions.”

Square isn’t alone in addressing the needs of smaller sellers who want to offer payment programs.

A number of companies offer consumers alternative means of paying for purchases beyond just cash, check or charge these days. For example, Sezzle targets consumers with low FICO scores; London-based Divido is expanding to new markets after raising a Series A; Affirm now has over 1,000 retail partners; There’s also FuturePay, Afterpay, Klarna’s Slice, PayPal Credit, and many others.

However, not all are suitable for smaller sellers, like those who may run their businesses on Square.

The new Square Installments service is being run out of Square Capital, a subsidiary of Square that also offers cash advances to merchants. In the second quarter of 2018, Square Capital originated over 60,000 loans totally $390 million, up 22% from the second quarter last year.

Sellers who want to start offering Square Installments to their customers can go to squareup.com/installments, while customers who want to make a purchase using Square Installments can visit SquareInstallments.com.

Uber no longer wants the barrier to transportation to be a deciding factor between voting and not voting. On Election Day, Uber is going to make it easy for people to find their local polling places and then get them a ride there for free.

On Nov. 6, 2018, Uber will offer U.S. riders the ability to quickly find their polling place and then book a free ride. Lyft is similarly offering half-priced and free rides to polling places on Election Day.

“Decisions get made by those who show up,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a blog post. “This Election Day, Uber will be doing what we can to make it easier for people to do just that.”

In the 2016 election, 35 percent of youth surveyed cited a lack of transportation as the reason why they didn’t vote.

Uber is also working with non-profit organizations to help get both riders and drivers registered to vote before state deadlines. Between today and Election Day, Uber will also host voter registration drives at its 125+ driver hubs throughout the country.

Bird, the electric scooter sharing startup worth $2 billion, is further differentiating itself from the rest of the pack with the launch of custom, rugged electric scooters. These will roll out in the “coming weeks” post-beta testing in Los Angeles, Nashville, Atlanta, Baltimore, Austin and Salt Lake City.

Dubbed Bird Zero, the scooters have 60 percent more battery life, and better ride stability and durability than the original model. There’s also an integrated digital screen to display your speed.

“We call it Bird Zero because it’s the first vehicle we’ve designed and engineered ourselves specifically for the shared electric scooter space,” Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch this morning.

Bird, in partnership with Okai, designed and manufactured the scooter from the ground up. Bird handled the design and Okai handled the manufacturing. But for now, the plan is to continue working with multiple vehicle manufacturers, VanderZanden said.

“What I will say is the Bird Zero is designed specifically for this use case so we’re going to keep watching and getting feedback from our rider and charger community,” he said.

Many electric scooter companies don’t actually build their own scooters. Instead, they’re slapping stickers and logos on scooters that have been around for years. Lime, Bird and Spin launched using scooters from Ninebot, a Chinese scooter company that has merged with Segway. Ninebot is backed by investors, including Sequoia Capital, Xiaomi and ShunWei. Lime, however, has since partnered with Segway to build scooters and Skip has said from day one that it plans to make its own.

A Bird Rides Inc. shared electric scooter stands on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, May 3, 2018. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The name of the game, VanderZanden said, is to be as customer-obsessed as possible. That’s where Bird Delivery, launching soon, comes in. With Bird Delivery, riders can request a Bird be delivered to their home or office by 8 a.m. From there, the rider can use it throughout the day.

“The city is a top customer but we’ve also been listening to the riders and figuring out what riders really want,” he said. “Riders really want a Bird delivered to them in the morning at their house. We think that’s a super magical experience. We’ll be rolling that out very soon. Not a lot of our riders live close to downtown areas, so there’s an equity component there that we think is very exciting.”

Bird has yet to determine the pricing but will announce it soon. What VanderZanden would share is that it will make “financial sense for you.” He hypothesizes that, while people could theoretically purchase their own scooters, they won’t because then they’d have to deal with charging, maintenance and storage.

Last month, Bird announced 10 million scooter rides since launching about one year ago. To date, Bird has raised $415 million in funding for shared electric scooters and operates in more than 100 cities.

TechCrunch is pleased to announce that Nubank co-founder Cristina Junqueira and co-founder/CEO David Vélez will join us in a fireside chat at Startup Battlefield Latin America on November 8 at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil.

Nubank’s product is a no-fee credit card managed through a mobile app. Investors like Sequoia, Kaszek, Tiger Global and Goldman Sachs bet on the company’s potential to challenge Brazil’s big banks. The São Paulo-based company raised a total of $527.6M in funding over 8 rounds, making it the most recent business to reach unicorn status in the region. The fintech passed the milestone of 4 million credit card clients on its platform in May 2018, up from 3 million in late 2017.

Fueled by mega rounds from Western players like Andreessen, Sequoia, Accel and SoftBank, venture investment into Latin America doubled in 2017, reaching an all time high of $1.1 billion. The cash flow continued as more than $600M was invested into Latin American companies in the first quarter of 2018. Market conditions like rapid smartphone adoption in highly-populated countries like Brazil and a growing demand for digital services position Latin America for a big tech breakout.

Who better to speak to this trend and discuss the challenges and opportunities ahead for early stage companies in the region than one of the top-funded startups?

Before founding Nubank in 2013, Vélez was a Partner at Sequoia Capital, helping the firm scout opportunities to invest in Latin America. He previously worked in investment banking and growth equity at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and General Atlantic. Junqueira is the co-founder and VP of Branding and Business Development at Nubank. Prior to Nubank, she worked for many years at Itaú Unibanco dealing with product and marketing for the bank’s consumer loan and credit card businesses.

The pair will take the stage in what will surely be a fascinating talk about disrupting big banks, securing funding and what’s next for early stage startups in the Latin America region. You can catch the interview with Nubank’s founders, more panel discussions, and of course the Startup Battlefield competition at Startup Battlefield Latin America on November 8 at the Tomie Ohtake Institute in São Paulo, Brazil. Apply for your free spectator tickets here.

When your feed and Stories tray go stale, or your follower count stops rising, you drift away from Instagram . That’s why the app is rolling out two big new features designed to connect you to new people and diversify your graph so there’s alwasy something surprising to look at and like.

Today Instagram launches its QR Snapcode-style Nametags globally on iOS and Android, after TechCrunch broke the news on the feature back in March and April. Though not technically QR codes, they’re scanned like them to let you follow people you meet offline.

The customizable codes are accessible from the three-line hamburger menu on your profile. They can be scanned when other users tap and hold on your code through the Instagram Stories camera or Scan Nametag button on your own Nametag to instantly follow you. You can add colors, emojis, or AR-embellished selfies to your Instagram Nametag, show it off on your phone to help people follow you in person, put it on your website or social media, or message it to friends through SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger, and more.

It’s actually surprising it took this long for Instagram to copy Snapchat’s Snapcodes that debuted for profiles in 2015 and were later expanded to open websites and unlock AR filters. Facebook Messenger launched its own QR codes in April 2017, though never quite caught on. But they make a ton of sense on Instagram since it’s tougher to share links on the app, people often treat it as their primary presence on the web that they want to promote, and because businesses are increasingly relying on the app for commerce. It’s easy to imagine brands putting their Instagram Nametags on billboards and posters, or buying ads to promote them around the web.

Facebook Messenger and Snapchat’s QR codes

Secondly, Instagram is starting to test school communities in a variety of universities across the US. The allow you to join your university’s network to add a line to your profile listing your school, class year, and your major, sports team, or fraternity/sorority. You’ll show up in a directory listing everyone from your school that you can use to follow or message people, though those DMs may go to their pending inbox.

The school communities feature harkens back to Facebook’s origins when users could actually set their privacy to show all their content to everyone in their school. Here you won’t be able to instantly expose your private Instagram to everyone from your school. You could imagine a freshman in college going through their network to discover new potential friends to follow, or an alumni seeking out others from their Alma Mater in search of business or romance.

Instagram relies on info users have publicly shared about their school and the people they followed to verify if they were in fact a student or recent alumni of a university. Rather than actively signing up, users will get a notification prompting them to join the network. That’s a lot less reliable than using university email addresses for verification like Facebook used to, but also a lot simpler for users.

The company does provide a tool for alerting it to misuse of the school communities feature in case any sketchy older users are employing it as a stalking tool. Beside each user’s name is a three-dot button that opens a menu where users can report  Next to each user’s name is an overflow menu of 3 dots where people can report accounts they don’t think belong in a certain community.

The invite method is reminiscent of the growth hacks that teen Q&A app TBH that Facebook acquired was using. In what an internal memo called a “psychological trick”, TBH scraped Instagram user profiles for school names and looking at school location pages to find student accounts and invite them to join TBH. The teen sensation was eventually shut down due to low usage, the memo called the tactic too “scrappy” for a big public company, but now it’s found a home inside of Instagram.

Today’s launch is the first under Instagram’s new leader Adam Mosseri following the resignation of the company’s founders. Critics are watching to see if Mosseri, the former Facebook VP of News Feed and member of Mark Zuckerberg’s inner circle, will push harder to drive growth and monetization for Instagram. Given Instagram’s priority here is expanding its social graphs and keeping users engaged, it seems willing to trade occasionally allowing or disallowing the wrong people to reduce friction and juice growth.

The European Parliament has voted in favor of a new quota for content on streaming services. Services, such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, will have to make sure that at least 30 percent of their catalogs in Europe come from European countries.

Many European countries already have quotas for movie theaters and TV networks. Quotas foster cultural diversity and ensure that movies with smaller budgets get a chance to compete with blockbuster franchises.

Other countries thought it was better to let the market decide and now it’s just Fantastic Four and The Emoji Movie on repeat because local production got crushed by Hollywood’s dollars.

Some European countries also set a tax on sales ticket to finance local movie production. With today’s new European agreement, streaming platforms will also have to contribute to local productions. They’ll be able to invest directly in local content or finance national funds. Netflix has already announced plans to open offices in Paris and Madrid to produce more content in those countries.

Streaming services will have to contribute proportionally to their revenues in each country. It’ll be a bit tough to calculate for Amazon as Amazon Prime Video is mixed with a bunch of services as part of the Prime subscription plan.

In other news, online video platforms at large (including YouTube, Facebook, Twitch…) will have to go further when it comes to taking down dangerous content. This time, the Parliament wants to protect minors from violence, hatred, terrorism and harmful advertising in particular.

Platforms will need to be transparent when it comes to their flagging and moderation mechanisms. And there are new rules on children content. Platforms can’t capture personal data of children for targeted advertising purposes.

Whenever I see an overpass or billboard that’s been tagged, I worry about the tagger and the danger they exposed themselves to in order to get that cherry spot. Perhaps this spray paint-toting drone developed by ETH Zurich and Disney Research will take some of the danger out of the hobby. It could also be used for murals and stuff, I guess.

Although it seems an obvious application in retrospect, there just isn’t a lot of drone-based painting being done out there. Consider: a company could shorten or skip the whole scaffolding phase of painting a building or advertisement, leaving the bulk of painting to a drone. Why not?

There just isn’t a lot of research into it yet, and like so many domain-specific applications, the problem is deceptively complex. This paper only establishes the rudiments of a system, but the potential is clearly there.

The drone used by the researchers is a DJI Matrice 100², customized to have a sensing rig mounted on one side and a spraying assembly on the other, counterbalancing each other. The sprayer, notably, is not just a nozzle but a pan-and-tilt mechanism that allows details to be painted that the drone can’t be relied on to make itself. To be clear we’re still talking broad strokes here, but accurate to an inch rather than three or four.

It’s also been modified to use wired power and a constant supply of paint, which simplifies the physics and also reduces limits on the size of the surface to be painted. A drone lugging its own paint can wouldn’t be able to fly far, and its thrust would have to be constantly adjusted to account for the lost weight of sprayed paint. See? Complex.

The first step is to 3D scan the surface to be painted; this can be done manually or via drone. The mesh is then compared to the design to be painted and a system creates a proposed path for the drone.

Lastly the drone is set free to do its thing. It doesn’t go super fast in this prototype form, nor should it, since even the best drones can’t stop on a dime, and tend to swing about when they reduce speed or change direction. Slow and steady is the word, following a general path to put the nozzle in range of where it needs to shoot. All the while it is checking its location against the known 3D map of the surface so it doesn’t get off track.

In case you’re struggling to see the “bear,” it’s standing up with its paws on a tree. That took me a long time to see so I thought I’d spare you the trouble.

Let’s be honest: this thing isn’t going to do much more complicated than some line work or a fill. But for a lot of jobs that’s exactly what’s needed — and it’s often the type of work that’s the least suited to skilled humans, who would rather be doing stuff only they can do. A drone could fill in all the easy parts on a building and then the workers can do the painstaking work around the windows or add embellishments and details.

For now this is strictly foundational work — no one is going to hire this drone to draw a Matterhorn on their house — but there’s a lot of potential here if the engineering and control methods can be set down with confidence.