Year: 2018

Amazon’s version of Prime aimed at business users is gaining a handful of new perks, the retailer announced this morning. Unlike the consumer version of Prime, the new benefits aren’t focused around entertainment – like access to streaming music or movies, for example – but are instead meant to help business customers gain better insight and control over their Amazon spending.

Business customers in the U.S. also today gain access to free same-day and one-day shipping on over a million items on orders over $35 in more than 8,000 cities and towns.

Plus, they can opt for Consolidated Shipping on bulk orders to receive fewer shipments, if they choose.

Also included in the new set of benefits is a feature called “Spend Visibility,” which provides visualizations powered by AWS QuickSight of the company spend in graphics designed to be pasted into corporate PowerPoints. Amazon says its goal is to help businesses free up the time it takes them to analyze their data in order to identify spending trends.

Another new benefit is “Guided Buying,” which allows the Amazon Business account admins to identify certain suppliers and products as “preferred” while restricting others, so those buying under the business account makes the company-approved choices when shopping for supplies and other business needs. This can also help companies reduce spend, improve compliance with corporate policies, and consolidate their suppliers, Amazon notes.

Starting today, Prime Business members can choose to now request Extended Terms for Pay by Invoice, when they qualify, opting for 45 or 60 days for better cash flow management, too.

In addition to the new Prime benefits, Amazon and American Express launched a new Amazon Business American Express Card which offers U.S. customers 5% back or 90-Day terms on eligible purchases at Amazon.com, Amazon Business, Amazon Web Services, and Whole Foods Market.

Amazon first launched Business Prime last year, as a way to compete with traditional office suppliers like Staples, Office Depot, as well as big box retailers like Walmart and Costco. The service extends Prime’s free, two-day shipping to businesses, and it integrates with dozens of purchasing systems, workflows, reporting and analytics systems, purchasing cards and more.

The program’s cost is based on the number of users. There’s now a new tier for smaller businesses, starting at $179 per year – not much more than a typical Amazon Prime membership.

The pricing tiers are as follows: $179 per year for up to 3 users; $499 per year for up to 10 users; $1,299 per year for up to 100 users; and $10,099 per year for over 100 users.

Since its launch, Amazon says it has signed up “millions” of business customers and “hundreds of thousands” of business sellers to the program.

In the U.S., Amazon Business now serves nearly 80% of the 100 largest enrollment education organizations, 55 of the Fortune 100 companies, more than half of the 100 biggest hospital systems, and more than 40% of the most populous local governments. (You’ll note that those numbers have been massaged a bit to make the percentages appear larger, and Amazon isn’t saying how many actual subscriptions it has sold, or what subscription tiers are involved.)

That said, it’s still taking a notable chunk of the market for a year-old service – one that probably makes rival retailers nervous as Amazon aims for their market.

Amazon says the new benefits (except for the Amex card and same-day/1-day shipping which are U.S.-only) are rolling out to Amazon Business Prime in the U.S., Germany and Japan, starting today.

 

Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) will spin off MoviePass and all movie-related activities into a separate public company. HMNY is an analytics company after all, and MoviePass has been a pretty bad investment for the company’s bottom line.

When HMNY acquired MoviePass last year, the company didn’t really care about creating a subscription service for movie theaters. HMNY wanted to attract enough subscribers to generate more data about the movie industry. This data could then be leveraged for targeted advertising.

But MoviePass has had so many financial issues that it’s hard to believe it’s still around. HMNY filed an S-3 to sell up to $1.2 billion in debt and equity. It doesn’t mean HMNY raised $1.2 billion for MoviePass, but it has the opportunity to do so.

$1.2 billion isn’t a big deal for the biggest tech companies. But HMNY has a market capitalization of $37.2 million as of yesterday’s closing price.

“Since we acquired control of MoviePass in December 2017, HMNY largely has become synonymous with MoviePass in the public’s eye, leading us to believe that our shareholders and the market perception of HMNY might benefit from separating our movie-related assets from the rest of our company,” the company said in a press release.

And sure enough, HMNY shares soared minutes after the announcement went live. Shares are currently trading at $0.024, up 42 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $0.0169.

The new MoviePass Entertainment Holdings company will be the parent company of the MoviePass subscription service, HMNY’s movie production company MoviePass Films, MoviePass Ventures and Moviefone, which HMNY acquired from TechCrunch’s parent company Oath. HMNY will then focus on RedZone.

You know what happens when you ask a kid to clean their room. They take the piles of toys on the ground and put everything under the bed. At least, all the mess is in the same spot now, away from the rest of the room. This is exactly what’s happening with MoviePass.

Helios and Matheson Analytics (HMNY) will spin off MoviePass and all movie-related activities into a separate public company. HMNY is an analytics company after all, and MoviePass has been a pretty bad investment for the company’s bottom line.

When HMNY acquired MoviePass last year, the company didn’t really care about creating a subscription service for movie theaters. HMNY wanted to attract enough subscribers to generate more data about the movie industry. This data could then be leveraged for targeted advertising.

But MoviePass has had so many financial issues that it’s hard to believe it’s still around. HMNY filed an S-3 to sell up to $1.2 billion in debt and equity. It doesn’t mean HMNY raised $1.2 billion for MoviePass, but it has the opportunity to do so.

$1.2 billion isn’t a big deal for the biggest tech companies. But HMNY has a market capitalization of $37.2 million as of yesterday’s closing price.

“Since we acquired control of MoviePass in December 2017, HMNY largely has become synonymous with MoviePass in the public’s eye, leading us to believe that our shareholders and the market perception of HMNY might benefit from separating our movie-related assets from the rest of our company,” the company said in a press release.

And sure enough, HMNY shares soared minutes after the announcement went live. Shares are currently trading at $0.024, up 42 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $0.0169.

The new MoviePass Entertainment Holdings company will be the parent company of the MoviePass subscription service, HMNY’s movie production company MoviePass Films, MoviePass Ventures and Moviefone, which HMNY acquired from TechCrunch’s parent company Oath. HMNY will then focus on RedZone.

You know what happens when you ask a kid to clean their room. They take the piles of toys on the ground and put everything under the bed. At least, all the mess is in the same spot now, away from the rest of the room. This is exactly what’s happening with MoviePass.

Dirty data means bad business. Yet sales operations are still largely based on incomplete, manually entered activity logging done by sales reps. Anyone who’s worked in a sales role can attest to the wasted hours of task logging that managers require as part of their oversight. But what if a company could automatically track the steps employees took to land a deal, freeing up reps’ schedules to do their actual jobs? People.ai has raised $30 million to try to achieve just that.

People.ai, a startup that tracks every communication touchpoint between sales teams and customers, wants to solve this problem. Now, the company (and the youngest Y Combinator graduate to make the accelerator’s list of its most successful startups) has attracted the attention of Andreessen Horowitz, scoring a fresh $30 million to move forward on this mission. Also participating in the round were Series A investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and Y Combinator. In addition to the investment, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Peter Levine is joining People.ai’s board.

The startup, founded by Oleg Rogynskyy, previously raised $7 million. It started out as a software meant to give sales managers a predictive playbook for the best way to close a deal, but investors have a master plan for the long term.

While this kind of live data mapping tech resembles an acquisition target for Microsoft or Salesforce, it’s no secret that Andreessen likes to build massive software franchises like Skype, Airbnb and GitHub. As we enter Q4 of 2018, early stage SaaS investment is stabilizing and public cloud stocks are soaring. Salesforce continues to pump more money into the AI sales concept, paving the way for startups like People.ai to thrive. But when it comes to exit strategy, selling to a large enterprise player is not the goal.

While Rogynskyy tells me he’d eventually like to take the company public, People.ai first needs to solidify itself as an AI solution for enterprises. To do so, the founder says they will use about half of the Series B investment to fund commercial expansion and customer acquisition (something the Andreessen network will undoubtedly catalyze) and the other half to fuel data science and engineering advancements within the business. The San Francisco-based company has also opened up offices in Boston and Los Angeles, and is considering building out an engineering-focused team in Canada.

People.ai works with companies like Lyft, Palo Alto Networks and New Relic to help sales and customer support teams improve performance. But how exactly does it operate? The company built a machine learning technology meant to perfectly populate CRM records of salespeople’s processes as they work to close deals. The tech scans email, phone calls and calendar meetings to reveal how much time top performers are spending at each phase of a deal, and where struggling reps may be deviating from typically successful methods. Are salespeople too zoned in on one phase of a deal? Not spending enough time talking to product managers, executives or other decision makers? Are they focusing on the right leads to begin with? Those are the questions People.ai’s algorithms seek to answer.

“We’ve expanded so that we don’t solely work with salespeople. We now work with everyone who touches the customer interactions, including marketing, inside sales engineers, customer success and sales support services. People.ai not only captures the activity of salespeople, but now gives teams a 360 degree view of everything that is happening with a customer across an entire team,” explains Rogynskyy.

As data cleans up, a bigger question for managers unfolds. While companies shouldn’t fly blind with years of incomplete CRM records, automative software like this removes the human element from business. If managers have the insights to reward individuals purely based on data rather than immeasurable qualitative soft skills or personal style, a product like this could internally redefine an organizations’ best practices.

Investors view People.ai as a foundational company in the next generation of SaaS that could provide greater efficiency within existing workforces. There are ways for best practices to be culled from these communications and distributed across an organization, and Andreessen thinks People.ai has the head start. “Every organization in an enterprise is collecting data through email and manual entry right now, that we believe can unlock tremendous efficiency and optimization not only in sales but across HR, services, marketing and finance using the exact same algorithms that People.ai is applying to sales,” says Levine.

Dirty data means bad business. Yet sales operations are still largely based on incomplete, manually entered activity logging done by sales reps. Anyone who’s worked in a sales role can attest to the wasted hours of task logging that managers require as part of their oversight. But what if a company could automatically track the steps employees took to land a deal, freeing up reps’ schedules to do their actual jobs? People.ai has raised $30 million to try to achieve just that.

People.ai, a startup that tracks every communication touchpoint between sales teams and customers, wants to solve this problem. Now, the company (and the youngest Y Combinator graduate to make the accelerator’s list of its most successful startups) has attracted the attention of Andreessen Horowitz, scoring a fresh $30 million to move forward on this mission. Also participating in the round were Series A investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, GGV Capital and Y Combinator. In addition to the investment, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Peter Levine is joining People.ai’s board.

The startup, founded by Oleg Rogynskyy, previously raised $7 million. It started out as a software meant to give sales managers a predictive playbook for the best way to close a deal, but investors have a master plan for the long term.

While this kind of live data mapping tech resembles an acquisition target for Microsoft or Salesforce, it’s no secret that Andreessen likes to build massive software franchises like Skype, Airbnb and GitHub. As we enter Q4 of 2018, early stage SaaS investment is stabilizing and public cloud stocks are soaring. Salesforce continues to pump more money into the AI sales concept, paving the way for startups like People.ai to thrive. But when it comes to exit strategy, selling to a large enterprise player is not the goal.

While Rogynskyy tells me he’d eventually like to take the company public, People.ai first needs to solidify itself as an AI solution for enterprises. To do so, the founder says they will use about half of the Series B investment to fund commercial expansion and customer acquisition (something the Andreessen network will undoubtedly catalyze) and the other half to fuel data science and engineering advancements within the business. The San Francisco-based company has also opened up offices in Boston and Los Angeles, and is considering building out an engineering-focused team in Canada.

People.ai works with companies like Lyft, Palo Alto Networks and New Relic to help sales and customer support teams improve performance. But how exactly does it operate? The company built a machine learning technology meant to perfectly populate CRM records of salespeople’s processes as they work to close deals. The tech scans email, phone calls and calendar meetings to reveal how much time top performers are spending at each phase of a deal, and where struggling reps may be deviating from typically successful methods. Are salespeople too zoned in on one phase of a deal? Not spending enough time talking to product managers, executives or other decision makers? Are they focusing on the right leads to begin with? Those are the questions People.ai’s algorithms seek to answer.

“We’ve expanded so that we don’t solely work with salespeople. We now work with everyone who touches the customer interactions, including marketing, inside sales engineers, customer success and sales support services. People.ai not only captures the activity of salespeople, but now gives teams a 360 degree view of everything that is happening with a customer across an entire team,” explains Rogynskyy.

As data cleans up, a bigger question for managers unfolds. While companies shouldn’t fly blind with years of incomplete CRM records, automative software like this removes the human element from business. If managers have the insights to reward individuals purely based on data rather than immeasurable qualitative soft skills or personal style, a product like this could internally redefine an organizations’ best practices.

Investors view People.ai as a foundational company in the next generation of SaaS that could provide greater efficiency within existing workforces. There are ways for best practices to be culled from these communications and distributed across an organization, and Andreessen thinks People.ai has the head start. “Every organization in an enterprise is collecting data through email and manual entry right now, that we believe can unlock tremendous efficiency and optimization not only in sales but across HR, services, marketing and finance using the exact same algorithms that People.ai is applying to sales,” says Levine.

Announced last year at CES, the original Vapor found Misfit finally going full smartwatch. The Fossil-owned wearable company announced this morning that it’s going back to the well, with the simply named Vapor 2. The new watch includes built-in GPS, NFC support and adds a smaller, 41mm build to the mix.

The additional size option is a nice one for the company. After all, Misfit’s long prided itself on being both fashion focused and gender inclusive, but only offering a wearable device in one size is a good way to bypass a large potential user base.

After all, two of the top Android smartwatches, the Fitbit Versa and Samsung Galaxy Watch, opted for their own in-house OSes. Huawei also recently announced that it would do the same with the Watch GT.

The new Vapor has a round 328 ppi display and sports the Snapdragon Wear 2100 inside. It’s arriving, “soon,” priced at $250.

Announced last year at CES, the original Vapor found Misfit finally going full smartwatch. The Fossil-owned wearable company announced this morning that it’s going back to the well, with the simply named Vapor 2. The new watch includes built-in GPS, NFC support and adds a smaller, 41mm build to the mix.

The additional size option is a nice one for the company. After all, Misfit’s long prided itself on being both fashion focused and gender inclusive, but only offering a wearable device in one size is a good way to bypass a large potential user base.

After all, two of the top Android smartwatches, the Fitbit Versa and Samsung Galaxy Watch, opted for their own in-house OSes. Huawei also recently announced that it would do the same with the Watch GT.

The new Vapor has a round 328 ppi display and sports the Snapdragon Wear 2100 inside. It’s arriving, “soon,” priced at $250.

The idea of using computer vision and AI to enable cars to drive themselves is well-established, but how about using similar technology to keep an eye on a human driver instead of the road? That’s the thinking behind Tel Aviv-based EyeSight, which has developed an in-car “AI vision” system that claims to be able to detect when a driver loses concentration or gets dangerously distracted.

Using advanced facial processing, it tracks a driver’s gaze direction, pupil dilation, eye openness and head position and uses proprietary algorithms to determine attentiveness. The resulting “smart car” can either do something to alert the driver (e.g. sounds and vibrations) or potentially temporarily activate self-driving mode. So far, so clever.

However, in terms of the business case for selling EyeSight’s tech into car manufacturers, there are two other noteworthy dynamics at play. The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP), a voluntary vehicle safety rating system backed by the European Union, will require new car models to have Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) by 2020. Cars released after this point without DMS won’t be able to achieve a five-star safety rating.

This is also where autonomous vehicles comes into focus, too. It is well accepted that in the interim stages before we reach level 5 or full autonomy, semi autonomous driving technology that goes well beyond cruise control will become more and more commonplace. This sees AI and computer vision take over various driving functions, but still requires human assistance, intervention and responsibility. However, some argue that this stage is potentially more dangerous than either human driving or fully autonomous vehicles as there is a much higher risk that a human will lose concentration or stop paying enough attention to remain safe.

“DMS is even more important for semi-autonomous vehicles, which have some self-driving features. The autonomous system must be sure that a driver is alert and awake before it hands over control of a moving car to a human,” notes EyeSight.

In addition to driver monitoring, the EyeSight tech can scan the entire cabin of a car, understanding who and what is in the vehicle. This includes being able to detect children, thus “helping ensure that babies aren’t forgotten in locked cars,” which is also a feature that Euro NCAP will require by 2022.

All of which hasn’t gone unnoticed by investors, with EyeSight picking up $15 million in growth funding. The round is led by Jebsen Capital, Arie Capital, and Mizrahi Tefahot, and will be used to deploy in-car AI vision system. The Israeli company is already partnering with two major car manufacturers and says the technology will be in at least four car models by 2020.

The idea of using computer vision and AI to enable cars to drive themselves is well-established, but how about using similar technology to keep an eye on a human driver instead of the road? That’s the thinking behind Tel Aviv-based EyeSight, which has developed an in-car “AI vision” system that claims to be able to detect when a driver loses concentration or gets dangerously distracted.

Using advanced facial processing, it tracks a driver’s gaze direction, pupil dilation, eye openness and head position and uses proprietary algorithms to determine attentiveness. The resulting “smart car” can either do something to alert the driver (e.g. sounds and vibrations) or potentially temporarily activate self-driving mode. So far, so clever.

However, in terms of the business case for selling EyeSight’s tech into car manufacturers, there are two other noteworthy dynamics at play. The European New Car Assessment Program (Euro NCAP), a voluntary vehicle safety rating system backed by the European Union, will require new car models to have Driver Monitoring Systems (DMS) by 2020. Cars released after this point without DMS won’t be able to achieve a five-star safety rating.

This is also where autonomous vehicles comes into focus, too. It is well accepted that in the interim stages before we reach level 5 or full autonomy, semi autonomous driving technology that goes well beyond cruise control will become more and more commonplace. This sees AI and computer vision take over various driving functions, but still requires human assistance, intervention and responsibility. However, some argue that this stage is potentially more dangerous than either human driving or fully autonomous vehicles as there is a much higher risk that a human will lose concentration or stop paying enough attention to remain safe.

“DMS is even more important for semi-autonomous vehicles, which have some self-driving features. The autonomous system must be sure that a driver is alert and awake before it hands over control of a moving car to a human,” notes EyeSight.

In addition to driver monitoring, the EyeSight tech can scan the entire cabin of a car, understanding who and what is in the vehicle. This includes being able to detect children, thus “helping ensure that babies aren’t forgotten in locked cars,” which is also a feature that Euro NCAP will require by 2022.

All of which hasn’t gone unnoticed by investors, with EyeSight picking up $15 million in growth funding. The round is led by Jebsen Capital, Arie Capital, and Mizrahi Tefahot, and will be used to deploy in-car AI vision system. The Israeli company is already partnering with two major car manufacturers and says the technology will be in at least four car models by 2020.

Finding clothes that are the right fit can be a laborious, psychologically challenging experience. RedThread, a custom clothing startup founded by former GoPro VP of Direct to Consumer, E-commerce and Digital Meghan Litchfield, aims to do away with sizes and instead focus on actual fit.

“What we’re doing is we’re kind of challenging the apparel industry and everything that it does, from how women shop, to how clothing is designed, to how it’s manufactured, and ultimately, to how women feel about themselves and perceive their bodies,” Litchfield told TechCrunch. 

Currently, RedThread makes and sells four items: ankle and wide legs pant for $148 each, a snap jacket for $168 and a tee-shirt for $78. Down the road, RedThread plans to expand its apparel offerings, but the goal will always be to offer everyday basics for working women. RedThread designs its clothes to ensure they’re easily tailorable.

“We’re able to [custom fit] more quickly than if you just brought in a random pair of pants and tried to get it tailored,” Litchfield said.

 

[gallery ids="1735829,1735830,1735846"]

Using its patent-pending tailoring algorithms, manufacturing process and designs, RedThread delivers clothes direct to consumers within one week of purchase. All RedThread requires from you is a short fit quiz — where you answer questions about your fit challenges — and four photos (three from different angles and one of an empty room). To capture the photos, RedThread texts you a link after purchase to scan your body. For each angle, RedThread tells you exactly how to stand.

[gallery ids="1735835,1735834,1735836,1735837,1735838,1735839"]

From there, its 3D mobile body scanning technology pulls 15 specific measurements from the model and inputs them into RedThread’s algorithms to calculate the best fit for you. Today, the process is about 80 percent math and 20 percent human, Litchfield said.

“But the more the algorithm learns about how to do this, the more the technology can drive the decisions,” she said. “We envision a world where we’re at 95 percent math, five percent human.”

As you can see, I went through the body scanning process and it was pretty straight-forward. If this actually works (which I’ll report back on), that’d be pretty magical. But here’s the thing: these clothes really aren’t my style. I’d much rather RedThread license its technology (assuming it works well) to brands from which I already buy clothes.

Down the road, RedThread would be open to partnering with other clothing brands, Litchfield said. But the priority for the company is to “build an apparel brand that women love,” Litchfield said. “And I don’t think there’s one out there right now. Because the industry is toxic and creates these standard sizes and doesn’t make women feel great about themselves. So, therefore, we want to own the whole experience.”