K Health, the startup providing consumers with an AI-powered primary care platform, has raised $25 million in series B funding. The round was led by 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Primary Ventures, BoxGroup, Bessemer Venture Partners and Max Ventures – all previous investors from the company’s seed or Series A rounds.

Co-founded and led by former Vroom CEO and Wix co-CEO, Allon Bloch, K Health (previously Kang Health) looks to equip consumers with a free and easy-to-use application that can provide accurate, personalized, data-driven information about their symptoms and health.

“When your child says their head hurts, you can play doctor for the first two questions or so – where does it hurt? How does it hurt?” Bloch explained in a conversation with TechCrunch. “Then it gets complex really quickly. Are they nauseous or vomiting? Did anything unusual happen? Did you come back from a trip somewhere? Doctors then use differential diagnosis to prove that it’s a tension headache vs other things by ruling out a whole list of chronic or unusual conditions based on their deep knowledge sets.”

K Health’s platform, which currently focuses on primary care, effectively looks to perform a simulation and data-driven version of the differential diagnosis process. On the company’s free mobile app, users spend three-to-four minutes answering an average of 21 questions about their background and the symptoms they’re experiencing.

Using a data set of two billion historical health events over the past 20 years – compiled from doctors notes, lab results, hospitalizations, drug statistics and outcome data – K Health is able to compare users to those with similar symptoms and medical histories before zeroing in on a diagnosis. 

With its expansive comparative approach, the platform hopes to offer vastly more thorough, precise and user-specific diagnostic information relative to existing consumer alternatives, like WebMD or – what Bloch calls – “Dr. Google”, which often produce broad, downright frightening, and inaccurate diagnoses. 

Ease and efficiency for both consumers and physicians

Users are able to see cases and diagnoses that had symptoms similar to their own, with K Health notifying users with serious conditions when to consider seeking immediate care. (K Health Press Image / K Health / https://www.khealth.ai)

In addition to pure peace of mind, the utility provided to consumers is clear. With more accurate at-home diagnostic information, users are able to make better preventative health decisions, avoid costly and unnecessary trips to in-person care centers or appointments with telehealth providers, and engage in constructive conversations with physicians when they do opt for in-person consultations.

K Health isn’t looking to replace doctors, and in fact, believes its platform can unlock tremendous value for physicians and the broader healthcare system by enabling better resource allocation. 

Without access to quality, personalized medical information at home, many defer to in-person doctor visits even when it may not be necessary. And with around one primary care physician per 1000 in the US, primary care practitioners are subsequently faced with an overwhelming number of patients and are unable to focus on more complex cases that may require more time and resources. The high volume of patients also forces physicians to allocate budgets for support staff to help interact with patients, collect initial background information and perform less-demanding tasks.

K Health believes that by providing an accurate alternative for those with lighter or more trivial symptoms, it can help lower unnecessary in-person visits, reduce costs for practices and allow physicians to focus on complicated, rare or resource-intensive cases where their expertise can be most useful and where brute machine processing power is less valuable.

The startup is looking to enhance the platform’s symbiotic patient-doctor benefits further in early-2019, when it plans to launch in-app capabilities that allow users to share their AI-driven health conversations directly with physicians, hopefully reducing time spent on information gathering and enabling more-informed treatment.

With K Health’s AI and machine learning capabilities, the platform also gets smarter with every conversation as it captures more outcomes, hopefully enriching the system and becoming more valuable to all parties over time. Initial results seem promising with K Health currently boasting around 500,000 users, most having joined since this past July.

Using access and affordability to improve global health outcomes

With the latest round, the company has raised a total of $37.5 million since its late-2016 founding. K Health plans to use the capital to ramp up marketing efforts, further refine its product and technology, and perform additional research to identify methods for earlier detection and areas outside of primary care where the platform may be valuable.

Longer term, the platform has much broader aspirations of driving better health outcomes, normalizing better preventative health behavior, and creating more efficient and affordable global healthcare systems.

The high costs of the American healthcare system and the impacts they have on health behavior has been well-documented. With heavy copays, premiums and treatment cost, many avoid primary care altogether or opt for more reactionary treatment, leading to worse health outcomes overall.

Issues seen in the American healthcare system are also observable in many emerging market countries with less medical infrastructure. According to the World Health Organization, the international standard for the number of citizens per primary care physician is one for every 1,500 to 2,000 people, with some countries facing much steeper gaps – such as China, where there is only one primary care doctor for every 6,666.

The startup hopes it can help limit the immense costs associated with emerging countries educating millions of doctors for eight-to-ten years and help provide more efficient and accessible healthcare systems much more quickly.

By reducing primary care costs for consumers and operating costs for medical practices, while creating a more convenient diagnostic experience, K Health believes it can improve access to information, ultimately driving earlier detection and better health outcomes for consumers everywhere.

The UK government has set out a labor market reform package it bills as a major upgrade to workplace rights in the era of disruptive gig economy platforms.

The reforms, which include new legislation, are intended to take account of changes in working practices including those flowing from tech platforms.

But despite some gig economy platforms standing accused of exploiting workers, the government’s package does not look set to require a radical reworking of existing business models — and unions have attacked the reforms as weak and lacking substance, pointing out that, for example, a right to request a more stable contract doesn’t add up to much of a rights advance.

Among the measures being announced today (some of which have been trailed before) are:

• a day one statement of rights for all workers setting out leave entitlements and pay, and also including detail on rights such as eligibility for sick leave and pay; and details of other types of paid leave, such as maternity and paternity leave
• introducing a right for all workers, not just zero-hour and agency, to request a more predictable and stable contract, providing more financial security for those on flexible contracts
• plans to bring forward proposals for a new single labour market enforcement body to ensure workers rights are properly enforced; and more resource for the Employment Agency Standards (EAS) Inspectorate
• an end to the legal loophole which enables some firms to pay agency workers less than permanent staff (aka the ‘Swedish derogation’)
•  an extension to the the holiday pay reference period from 12 to 52 weeks, to “ensure workers in seasonal or atypical roles get the paid time off they are entitled to”
• enforcing vulnerable workers’ holiday pay for the first time
• ensuring tips left for workers go to them in full

The government also says it is committed to legislate to improve the clarity of the employment status tests to “reflect the reality of the modern working relationships” — though it does not provide any detail on how exactly it intends to reform such tests.

The labor market package comes ten months after it unveiled a plan slated to expand workers rights. It also kicked off a number of consultations at that time.

With today’s package, the government is drawing heavily on an independent review of modern  working practices it commissioned, which was carried out by Matthew Taylor and published last summer.

It says it’s taking forward 51 of the 53 recommendations in the Taylor review — agreeing with him that banning zero hours contracts in their totality would “negatively impact more people than it helped”.

It has also accepted Taylor’s view that the flexibility of ‘gig working’ — where platforms distribute paid tasks via apps, and use digital technology to remotely manage what can be tens of thousands of individuals providing a service for the business — is “not incompatible with ensuring atypical workers have access to employment and social security protections”; and that platform-based working offers opportunities for “genuine two way flexibility”, as well as opportunities for those who may not be able to work in “more conventional ways”.

That’s likely music to the ears of gig economy giants that have built massive businesses by claiming to offer flexible work opportunities for the ‘self-employed’, using algorithms to distribute jobs and remote-manage a distributed workforce, thereby enabling them to massively shift employment risk onto the individuals who actually provide the core service.

Though the government also claims to be going further than Taylor in some instances.

Business secretary, Greg Clark, said the government’s intention is to build “an economy that works for everyone”, while also lauding what he dubbed “an effective balance between flexibility and worker protections” — which he credited for helping the UK have “the highest employment rate on record”.

Yet, at the start of this year, the government also committed itself to being “accountable for good quality work as well as quantity of jobs”.

And today’s package reiterates that the secretary of state for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will take a new responsibility to the ensure the “quality of work”.

So expect a lot of hot air to be expended in the future over what does — and does not — constitute ‘quality’ work. (Albeit, measuring working time is hard enough, from a legal point of view, let alone determining work “quality”… )

“The UK has a labour market of which we can be proud. We have the highest employment rate on record, increased participation amongst historically under-represent groups and wages growing at their fastest pace in almost a decade,” Clark said in a statement.

“This success has been underpinned by policies and employment law which strikes an effective balance between flexibility and worker protections but the world of work is changing, bringing new opportunities for innovative businesses and new business models to flourish, creating jobs across the country and boosting our economy.

“With new opportunity also comes new challenges and that is why the government asked Matthew Taylor to carry out this first of a kind review, to ensure the UK continues to lead the world, through our modern Industrial Strategy, in supporting innovative businesses whilst ensuring workers have the rights they deserve.”

“Today’s largest upgrade in workers’ rights in over a generation is a key part of building a labour market that continues to reward people for hard work, that celebrates good employers and is boosting productivity and earning potential across the UK,” he added.

Last year two parliamentary committees urged the government to close gig-economy employment law loopholes — saying they had enabled “dubious business practices” by letting digital work platforms use flexibility as a tool to circumvent workers rights and entitlements.

The committees went on to call for companies with a self-employed workforce above a certain size to be required to treat individuals as workers by default.

Today’s reform plan certainly does not look to be going so far.

Much will rest on how exactly the government changes the law around employment status tests — and that’s still tbc.

Rachel Farr, a senior professional support lawyer in the Employment, Pensions & Mobility group at law firm TaylorWessing, told us it’s also rather easier said than done — suggesting it’s difficult to see how the government will “truly improve clarity”.

This element of the reform is a key consideration where gig economy businesses are concerned, as they typically allow for so-called ‘multi-apping’ — meaning those providing a service on one platform can be logged into multiple (rival) platforms simultaneously available to work. So the issue — for employment law purposes — is how to determine what constitutes working time in a platform context. (Which you need to be able to measure in order to determine employment status.)

“Simply codifying the existing case law tests will still mean each case is dependent on its specific facts, so is the government proposing to change the boundaries with some ‘check box’ style tests as they have in other EU jurisdictions?” wondered Farr. “This means greater clarity through simplifying the law but would probably mean we lose the nuances of existing U.K. tests and that some people who are currently genuinely self-employed will find that they may become workers (or vice versa).”

Uber was back in court in the UK two months ago for its latest appeal against a 2016 employment tribunal ruling which found that a group of Uber drivers were workers, not self-employed contractors as it contends.

The company has previously suggested it would cost its UK business “tens of millions” of pounds if it reclassified the circa 50,000 ‘self-employed’ drivers operating on its platform as workers.

So the devil will be in the detail of the commitment to clarify employment status tests — and where those tests end up drawing the line.

But the government’s embrace of the overarching notion of a “balance” between flexibility and worker protections looks very friendly to current-gen gig economy business models.

A decision on Uber’s latest tribunal appeal is rumored to be due this week, though it’s not clear that it will provide much clarity on the multi-apping/working time issue. TaylorWessing litigator Sean Nesbitt also told us the tribunal has not been able to spend much time debating those elements.

Responding to the government’s reform package today, the ride-hailing giant sounded pleased. An Uber spokesperson said: “We welcome more clarity from the Government and look forward to working closely with them to make sure drivers can keep all the benefits that come from being your own boss.”

“The majority of drivers choose to partner with Uber because of the freedom and flexibility on offer. A recent Oxford University study found that most drivers want to choose if, when and where they drive,” it added.

At the same time UK unions offered a downbeat assessment of the reform package.

Reuters reports the Unite Union making critical comments. “People on zero hour contracts and workers in the insecure economy need much more than a weak right to request a contract and more predictable hours,” it quoted Unite general secretary Len McCluskey responding to the reform package.

While the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain general secretary, Jason Moyer-Lee, tweeted that “exploited workers are sick of press releases, rhetoric and self-congratulatory announcements”. He added that a “real update in rights and a serious enforcement regime” does not seem to be on offer with the government’s package.

The IWGB union has supported a number of legal and protest actions by gig economy workers in recent years, including a (so far unsuccessful) human rights challenge to Deliveroo’s opposition to collective bargaining for riders.

This summer an inquiry into pay and conditions for Deliveroo riders, carried out by UK MP Frank Field, likened the model to casual labor practices at British dockyards until the middle of the 20th century — finding a dual labour market that he said works very well for some but very poorly for others.

In its response to Field’s report, as well as claiming Deliveroo riders choose flexibility, the company emphasized it had been pushing the government to update employment rules to end what it dubbed “the trade-off between flexibility and security and enable platforms to offer riders even more benefits without putting their employment status at risk”.

Responding to the government’s reform package today, a Deliveroo spokesperson reiterated this line, saying: “Court judgements have consistently found Deliveroo riders to be self-employed. However, Deliveroo has consistently said that we would like to see the rules change to end the trade-off between flexibility and security that currently exists in employment law, to allow companies such as ours to offer more benefits to riders.”

“Independent research has shown riders are consciously choosing to opt out of traditional employment in favour of new ways of working where they have more control,” the spokesperson added. “On-demand working is set to grow as people want to fit work around their lives, not vice versa, and we will work with the Government to ensure the interests of Deliveroo riders can be advanced.”

Days after Apple announced a major expansion to its operations in the U.S. — including a new $1 billion campus in Austin — fellow tech giant Google has announced that it too will invest $1 billion as it sets up a new campus at Hudson Square in New York.

Google already has 7,000 staff located in New York and this strategy is aimed at doubling that headcount over the next ten years. Hudson Square will be a 1.7 million square-foot campus that’ll serve as “the primary location” for Google’s ‘Global Business Organization.’

Google expects two Hudson Square buildings to be operational for staff by 2020, with a building on 550 Washington Street coming online two years later. That’s in addition to Manhatten Chelsea Market, which it bought for $2.4 billion in March, and additional space at Pier 57 which it is planning to take.

All this adds up to a major hiring push outside of the Bay Area.

“Our investment in New York is a huge part of our commitment to grow and invest in U.S. facilities, offices and jobs. In fact, we’re growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it, and this year opened new offices and data centers in locations like Detroit, Boulder, Los Angeles, Tennessee and Alabama,” wrote Google CFO Ruth Porat.

Google and Apple’s commitments come after Amazon announced that New York would be the location for its much-anticipated “HQ2” following a long search that pulled in authorities from cities and states across the U.S.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in the increasingly competitive world of banking, perhaps poaching your best people also counts. In a move that is bound to raise eyebrows in London’s fintech ecosystem and beyond, Megan Caywood, who up until this week was Starling Bank’s Chief Platform Officer, is joining banking incumbent Barclays.

According to sources, Caywood, who led Starling’s marketplace banking efforts — a key pillar of the challenger bank — handed in her notice two weeks ago, whilst Starling Marketplace partners were informed last week. I understand she is currently on “gardening leave” and will officially become Managing Director, Head of Barclays Consumer Strategy early next year.

With an academic background in cognitive science research, and a Silicon Valley import — having worked at Xero and Intuit in the U.S. — Caywood joined Starling in June 2016 where she soon became an important lieutenant to Starling CEO and founder Anne Boden, often appearing publicly as the second face of the challenger bank. I understand, however, that the pair remain good friends and that Starling threw a leaving party for Caywood last week.

Megan Caywood speaking at a Startup Grind event in London moderated by TechCrunch’s Steve O’Hear

Meanwhile, the move to Barclays is thought to be primarily motivated by the impact Caywood believes she can have at a large bank compared to an upstart, according to a source familiar with her thinking. Caywood has always talked passionately about making financial services work better for consumers and has long-argued that banks working with fintech startups is the best way to achieve this.

Related to this, Caywood’s new title at Barclays makes no reference to marketplaces, even though my fintech sources tell me Barclays is rumoured to be working on more third-party integrations. As a pointer, the incumbent bank has a number of existing partnerships, including with London startup Flux to offer itemised digital receipts and loyalty within the Barclays Launchpad app.

It is also noteworthy that Caywood’s title doesn’t include ‘UK’, and I understand that her remit is going to be international, perhaps expanding across the pond based on her Silicon Valley roots and the fact that she is American.

During her two and a half years at Starling, Caywood helped design and rapidly roll out the Starling Marketplace, which includes an open API and a marketplace of third-party financial services that sit inside of the Starling app. Marketplace partners include Flux, mortgage broker Habito, travel insurance provider Kasko, and investment products Wealthify and Wealthsimple, amongst others.

I’ve reached out to Caywood, who declined to comment, instead referring me to Barclays’ PR.

A Barclays spokesperson said:

“We can confirm that Megan Caywood is joining Barclays as our new Head of Consumer Strategy. Megan brings significant talent and expertise, and we look forward to welcoming her to the bank.”

India-based educational startup Byju’s was widely reported to have raised a massive $400 million round and now the company is making things official. The ten-year-old company revealed today it has pulled in a total of $540 million from investors to go after international opportunities.

The round is led by Naspers, the investment firm famous for backing Tencent that also includes educational firms Udemy, Codecademy and Brainly among its portfolio. The Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) provided “a significant portion” of the round, according to an announcement which also revealed that the deal included some secondary share sales. A source told TechCrunch that’s from Sequoia India, an early investor which is cashing in a piece of its winnings.

This round takes Byju’s to $775 million from investors to date. Its backers include Tencent, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife — General Atlantic, IFC, Lightspeed Ventures and Times Internet.

The deal takes the company valuation to nearly $4 billion, a source told TechCrunch. That’s in line with what was reported by India media last week and it represents a major jump on the $800 million valuation that it commanded when it raised money from Tencent in July 2017. It also makes Byju’s India’s fourth highest-valued tech startup behind only Paytm, Ola and OYO.

Founded in 2008 by Byju Raveendran as on offline teaching center, it moved into digital courses as recently as 2015. The company specializes in grades 4-12 educational courses that use a combination of videos and other materials. Besides courses, the service covers exams, free courses and paid-for courses.

Byju’s says that 30 million students have registered for its online educational service Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg

It claims to have registered over 30 million students, while more than two million customers have signed up for an annual paid subscription to date. Raveendran told TechCrunch in an interview that there are currently around 1.3 million paying users. He said that the service enjoys a renewal rate of around 80 percent, and that it is adding 1.5-2 million new students per month, some 150,000 of which are part of paying packages.

English learning for kids worldwide

This new money will go towards globalizing the service beyond India with an international English service for children aged 3-8, an entirely new category for the company, set to launch next year.

Raveendran told TechCrunch that the service will target English-speaking markets, as well as other major international countries including India.

“There’s a growing percentage of people wanting to learn English or [in countries where] it is becoming aspirational. Slowly but surely it is happening around the world,” he said in an interview.

The company will release the new services at the beginning of local academic years — which vary worldwide — with the aim of appealing directly to kids. If the youngsters enjoy the app, parents can buy the full experience for them. It’s a logical way to find a global audience — families prepared to spend on English tuition exist worldwide — whilst also expanding into a new customer base that could become users of the core Byju’s service.

While the company has developed the core content aspect of the service, Raveendran said he is on the lookout for acquisitions and partnerships that can add more to the appeal.

“They will all be product-based acquisitions that will be value-adds on top of our core product,” he said. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve scouted for core product acquisitions but went the other way around and decided to build it ourselves.”

Further down the line, Byju’s may develop more localized services in countries where it sees high demand for the children’s product, Raveendran added.

Byju Raveendran started the company ten years ago, but it entered the digital education space in 2015 [Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg/Getty Images]

Global investor base

That expansion is likely to be influenced by Naspers which has a very global portfolio, including deals in emerging markets like Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Asia. Indeed, the deal sees Russell Dreisenstock — head of international investments for Naspers — join the Byju’s board.

Tencent also has experience and connections, having backed China’s Yuanfudao education platform, which is now reportedly valued around $2.8 billion. Alongside Sequoia — another Byju’s investor — it is also part of VIPKid, a hugely successful platform that connects U.S-based teachers with English language learners in China.

Despite that, Raveendran said those investments are unlikely to be core to this global push.

“We expect [our investors] to help us finding partners through portfolio companies or others [but] there is no significant overlap with what we will do,” he explained.

In the case of VIPKid, he said that if Byju’s “ever decides to do anything in China” then it is likely that it will complement VIPKid’s tutor-led approach to learning rather than take it on directly.

Still, Raveendran expects the global business to become profitable and self-sustaining within the next three years. Already, the India-based business is profitable as of this year, he said, but its appeal has grown globally somewhat even before this new product launch. Overseas is currently 15 percent of revenue, a figure that the CEO puts down to the Indian diaspora globally.

Meeshkan, a Finnish startup that made quite a splash at the recent Slush conference, has quietly raised €370,000 in pre-seed funding to continue developing its “ChatOps” product for machine learning developers.

Deployed on Slack, the bot allows developers to “rapidly stop, restart, fork, tweak, monitor, deploy and test machine learning models” without interrupting the collaborative workflows they are accustomed to or being forced to go back and forth between disparate developer tools.

Under the hood, Meeshkan says it uses patent-pending tech for speedily partitioning of data-flow across distributed infrastructure. Related to this, the burgeoning company is currently partnering with Northeastern University and CUDA to develop “zero-downtime” checkpointing of ML models in TensorFlow and PyTorch.

In an email exchange, Meeshkan founder Mike Solomon explained that training ML models is currently done through command line interfaces and web dashboards, which is not optimum for collaboration. This is because teams typically need to communicate about ML model training, make decisions about models, act on these decisions instantly, and react to push notifications about a job’s status, none of which can conveniently happen through the command line or web dashboards.

“My generation writes less and less code, but we are iterating on it faster and faster with incremental changes,” he says. “In machine learning, this could be a small tweak in the learning rate of a model. In unit testing, this could be covering the corner case of an API that returns null values in certain circumstances. What unites these scenarios is that developers are dealing with externalities, like data or a third-party API, and trying to build fast on top of them. A world-class IDE, while it helps with lots of problems, does not provide much value for these small tweaks. We’ve found that what developers need is a frictionless environment to make the tweak/test/learn loop turn as fast as possible”.

To begin fixing this, Solomon tells me that Meeshkan set out to create a bot on Slack that helps teams monitor and tweak the training of their ML models in realtime. “For ML engineers, we found that they spent hours on Slack discussing what to do with their models but had to resort to arcane and byzantine hacks to apply, document and archive these changes,” he says.

“We made a simple bot where teams can turn their discussions on Slack about things like changing a learning rate or a batch size into action, right from Slack. From this simple idea, the floodgates opened. Developers really quickly let us know what they wanted to control from Slack, some of which is trivial to implement, some of which is profoundly difficult and leads us to uncharted engineering territory”.

Meeshkan has several patent-pending algorithms from the resulting work. Solomon also explained that the same underlying problem exists in continuous integration and “data wrangling” as well, and that the team is developing a suite of products that address this concern.

This includes a second product called unmock.io, which brings the same idea to testing and continuous integration and has seen traction at AWS re:Invent. “We look to be releasing more tools along this line during Q1 of 2018,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Meeshkan’s pre-seed backers include Risto Siilasmaa and Kim Groop (First Fellow Partners), Finnish angel Ali Omar, Christian Jantzen’s Futuristic.vc, and Neil Murray’s The Nordic Web Ventures.

BMW has joined a handful of automakers to compete with transportation upstart Didi Chuxing, which bought Uber’s Chinese business in 2016. Last Friday, the German luxury carmaker launched a premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, the capital of China’s Sichuan Province with over 14 million people.

The new offer is part of BMW’s ReachNow carsharing brand that kicked off an electric vehicle rental business with a local partner last December. The new ride-hailing venture manages a crew of trained drivers to chauffer riders in a fleet of 200 BMW 5 Series, out of which half are plug-in-hybrid, according to the company.

“We are excited to offer our new premium ride-hailing service in Chengdu, one of the largest ride-hailing hubs in the world embracing mobility solutions for a sustainable urban future,” said Peter Schwarzenbauer, member of BMW AG’s board of management, in a statement.

ReachNow trips appear to be pricier than those on Didi’s “luxury” feature — which is currently only available in China’s top-tier cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou — that also deploys BMW Series 5 and the likes of Mercedes-Benz E-Class and Audi A6. A 23-kilometer ride in Chengdu, for instance, costs 468 yuan or $68 at 3 p.m. on Monday. That’s about $3 per kilometer.

By comparison, a trip of similar distance in Shenzhen via Didi Luxury costs 210 yuan, or $30, at a rate of $1.3 per kilometer on a Monday afternoon.

BMW’s new move comes shortly after it became the first global carmaker to nab China’s ride-hailing operating license in late November and at a time when the country’s biggest player Didi faces public and government backlashes following two passenger murders.

Following the Didi incidents, Chinese authorities have applied deeper controls over the verification process in both drivers and their vehicles to step up safety for riders, leading to a shortage in both drivers and vehicles for Didi and its ride-hailing peers.

China’s transportation rules stipulate that drivers must hold two certificates — one for themselves and one for their vehicles — to be eligible to take passenger requests on ride-hailing apps. That turned a lot of part-time drivers away as they either don’t want to invest the time and money preparing for exams or scrap their passenger cars after eight years.

To cope with regulatory changes, Didi has introduced training programs to help drivers obtain the desired licenses. The mobility giant has also partnered with carmakers to make “purpose-built” vehicles for on-demand rides, although that process had started before the passenger deaths.

Like BMW, China’s oldfashioned carmakers also have their sights set on the car-hailing market. Among them are Volkswagen’s local partner SAIC Motor and Geely, which is partnering with Daimler to roll out a new ride-hailing venture.

Update: The headline has been corrected.

You need to stop procrastinating. Maybe it’s time for some…

Bulletproof Coffee, Modafinil, nootropics, microdoses of acid, caffeine from coffee, caffeine from bracelets, aromatherapy, noise-canceling headphones, meditation, custom co-working spaces, or productivity apps?

Whatever your choice, workers today (especially in the tech industry) will do just about anything to be more productive.

What we seek is that elusive, perfect focus or flow state. According to researchers, someone in flow will experience a lack of sense of self, a decline in fear, and time distortion. It is peak performance coupled with a euphoric high. All your happy neurotransmitters fire, and your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex performs differently –you do not second guess yourself, you quite simply just flow into the next stages of the activity at hand. And you happen to be performing at the highest level possible. Sounds amazing, right?

But how do we invite this state in? A detailed piece in Fast Company outlines how extreme sports (professional surfing, steep incline skiing, skydiving etc.) are the quickest way we’ve found to tap into human flow. Yet, these hobbies are just that — extreme. They require a large amount of skill and can be dangerous. For example, Steven Kotler, a pioneer in flow state research, broke almost 100 bones as a journalist researching the topic.

It all leads back to our collective (and very American) obsession with input versus output –are we achieving the most possible with the energy we put in? For all the bells and whistles at our disposal, we as a society are steadily declining in productivity as time goes on.

In 2014, a Gallup Poll found that the average American worker only spends a depressing 5% of their day in flow. A 2016 Atlantic article hypothesized that the main reason that we’re decreasing in productivity as a workforce is that we’re not introducing new technologies quickly enough. Tech like robotics and smartphones could add a productivity push, but aren’t being integrated into the workplace. Business models are for the large part not that different from 10 years ago. In essence, we’re bored — we’re not being challenged in an engaging way, so we’re working harder than ever but achieving less.

But what if getting into flow state could be as easy as playing a video game?

Gameplay in RaveRunner

I first met Job Stauffer, Co-Founder and CCO at Orpheus Self-Care Entertainment when I was, in fact, procrastinating from work. I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a clip of Job playing RaveRunner. As I love rhythm games, I immediately requested a build. Yet, I’d soon learn that this wasn’t just a simple VR experience.

RaveRunner was built for Vive, but easily ran on my Rift. When I first stepped into the game, I felt a bit overwhelmed — there was a lot of dark empty space; almost like something out of TRON. It was a little scary, which is actually very helpful for entering flow state. However, my fear soon dissipated as before me was a transparent yellow lady (Job calls her “Goldie”) dancing with the beat — providing a moving demo for gameplay. Unlike the hacking nature of Beat Saber where you smash blocks with lightsabers, in WaveRunner you touch blue and orange glowing circles with your controllers, and move your whole body to the rhythm of the music.

There’s a softer, feminine touch to WaveRunner, and it wasn’t just Goldie. Behind the design of this game is a woman, Ashley Cooper, who is the developer responsible for the gameplay mechanics that can help a player attain flow. “Being in the flow state is incredibly rewarding and we strive to help people reach it by creating experiences like RaveRunner,” says Cooper. RaveRunner is a game you can get lost in, and by stimulating so many senses it allows you to let your higher level thoughts slip away — you become purely reactionary and non-judgemental.

In essence — flow.

After playing in this world for an hour, I called Job and learned more about his company. Apart from RaveRunner, Orpheus has also rolled out two other experiences — MicrodoseVR and SoundSelf. I got my first hands-on demo of all three products in one sitting at a cannabis technology event in Los Angeles, Grassfed LA. Grassfed is specifically geared towards higher brow, hip tech enthusiasts; and the Orpheus suite of products fit right in.

As I lay in a dome with meditative lighting; a subwoofer purring below me; SoundSelf gave me one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had in VR. I chanted into a microphone and my voice directly influenced the visuals before me. It felt like my spirit, the God particle, whatever you want to call it, was being stimulated from all these sensations. It was such a beautiful experience, but also was pure flow. I felt 2 minutes pass in the experience. I would have bet a hundred dollars on this. But I was inside for 10. Time didn’t make sense — a key indicator of flow state.

Next up was Microdose VR. I first tried Microdose VR in 2016 at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Esalen is the birthplace of the human potential movement, and so it was fitting that it was there, where I initially grasped the potential of VR for transformational experiences. Every other experience I had tried up to that point had been First Person Shooters or 360-video marketing pieces. And not to slight those experiences, but I felt that VR must be able to do MORE. Android Jones’ Microdose blew my mind. Like with SoundSelf, I completely lost track of time. I was directly impacting visuals with my body movements, and sound was a big factor as well. It was the first time I could easily imagine staying in VR for hours. Most of all, it was an experience that was only possible within VR. The game was the biggest euphoric rush I’ve felt in VR, and that feeling occurred again at this event.

We have the power as consumers to play games that tie in intrinsically with self care but often don’t have options available. Job was propelled down this path when he asked himself “if I invest one hour of my time per day into playing a video game, what will I personally gain from that time invested, and will I even have time left over to do genuinely good things for myself?”

Orpheus is pioneering the fusion of game design with traditional self-care practices like meditation, dance/exercise, listening to music and creating art: “In short, we simply want players to feel amazing and have zero regrets about their time spent playing our games, allowing them to walk away knowing they have leveled up themselves, instead of their in-game avatars alone.”

One thing that will make it easier for people to try these experiences are portable headsets such as the ViveFocus and the Oculus Quest. Being untethered will allow people to travel with VR wherever they may go. Job sees this fundamental shift right ahead of us, as “video games and self-care are about to become one in the same. A paradigm shift. This is why all immersive Orpheus Self-Care Entertainment projects will be engineered for this critically important wave of VR.”

Orpheus is not a VR-only company, although their first three experiences are indeed for VR. As they expand, they hope to open up to a variety of types of immersive experiences, and are continually looking for projects that align with their holistic mission.

At the end of the day, I love that Orpheus is attempting to tap into a part of the market that so desperately needs their attention. If we don’t make self-care a major part of VR today, then we’ll continue to use VR as a distraction from, as opposed as a tool to enhance, our daily lives.

As for me, along with the peppermint tea, grapefruit candle, and music that make my focus possible, I’ll now be adding some Orpheus games into my flow repertoire.

At first, “Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle” might seem like an afterthought — or maybe a failed exercise in franchise-building.

This new take on the story of Rudyard Kipling’s “Jungle Book” comes just two years after Disney’s version made nearly a billion dollars at the worldwide box office. Plus, it seemed a little strange for director Andy Serkis to say he’d respect the “darkness” of the source material — this is, after all, a talking animal story. And Warner Bros’ last-minute decision to sell “Mowgli” to Netflix didn’t exactly suggest that it had much confidence in the film.

But as we argue in the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, “Mowgli” is actually a lot more interesting than the Disney film. It certainly has its flaws, including a rushed ending, but the increased darkness and maturity is surprisingly effective, giving real excitement and suspense to the action.

And thanks to Serkis’ background in performance capture (he played Gollum in Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the new Planet of the Apes films), the animals turn out to be the real highlight. Each of them seems to be animated by their actor’s personality — for example, Benedict Cumberbatch brings a sense of sly menace to the tiger Shere Khan — and the relationship between Mowgli (Rohan Chand) and Bagheera (Christian Bale) ends up being the heart of the movie.

Before our review, we also cover the latest streaming headlines, namely casting details for “The Mandalorian” and growth at Facebook Watch.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Colin Kroll, the 35-year-old co-founder and CEO of the HQ Trivia app, has been found dead of an apparent drug overdose in his apartment, TechCrunch has confirmed.

A spokesman for the NYPD told us that a female called 911 for a wellness check on Kroll’s apartment and he was found dead inside at 08:00 hours today.

The police department said the investigation is ongoing but added that the cause of death is “allegedly a drug overdose”.

“We’re still waiting on the ME’s report to confirm that,” he added.

The story was reported earlier by TMZ — which cites a police source saying cocaine and heroin were believed to be involved.

We reached out to HQ for comment but the company has declined to make a statement at this time.

Kroll was only named CEO of the HQ Trivia mobile game show app three months ago, replacing fellow co-founder Rus Yusupov who moved over to serve as chief creative officer.

Prior to taking the CEO role Kroll served as HQ’s CTO. He co-founded the startup in 2015, a few months after moving on from Vine — the Twitter-owned short video format startup which got closed down in 2017.

It’s not clear who will take over the CEO role for HQ Trivia at this stage but Yusupov looks a likely candidate, at least in the interim.

In recent months the startup has been beta testing a follow up mobile game show, called HQ Words. Its original trivia format show airs twice per day and awards winners as much as $100,000 for successfully answering 12 questions.

The app debuted last August and was a viral success. But the question hanging over HQ Trivia and its co-founders has increasingly been how to sustain an early winning streak, once the novelty of the original show ran its course.

As we reported previously, HQ Trivia’s ranking in the app store has been steadily decreasing in recent months.

Kroll started his career as a software engineer at Right Media, which went on to be acquired by Yahoo in 2006. From then until 2011, he led the engineering team in Yahoo’s search and advertising tech group before joining luxury travel site Jetsetter as VP of Product — where he went on to be promoted to CTO.

In 2012 he left to start Vine with co-founders Dominik Hofmann and Yusopov.