Year: 2018

Amazon will again enable procrastinators to hold off on completing their Christmas shopping until the last minute. The company today announced it will offer free, two-hour delivery up until midnight on Christmas Eve, powered by Prime Now, in select markets. Prime Now is currently available across 30 U.S. cities, Amazon says. In addition, Prime members in over 10,000 cities and towns now have access to free same-day delivery and free one-day shipping up until the final days before Christmas.

Specifically, December 23 is the last day for one-day shipping, while December 24 is the last day for same-day delivery, if orders are placed by 9:30 AM local time.

Two-hour delivery through Prime Now, however, is available through December 24, if orders are placed by 9:15 PM local time.

Of course it would be a better world if people didn’t rely on Amazon for their last-minute Christmas Eve needs, so the poor workers could go home and be with their families, too. But that’s no longer the world we live in. We now shop for Black Friday sales starting as soon as our turkey digests on Thanksgiving Day. And even brick-and-mortar retailers are keeping their doors open on holidays like Christmas, because of consumer demand. Stores like Starbucks, Walgreens, CVS, 7-Eleven, and more stay open on Christmas, for example.

On the e-commerce front, meanwhile, there are an increasing number of options for faster delivery.

Over the course of 2018, Amazon has expanded its free, same-day delivery and free, one-day shipping to more markets. Last year, these shipping services were available in over 8,000 cities and towns, up from 5,000 in 2016. The services are now offered in more than 10,000 cities and towns. That also means faster shipping is no longer just a luxury for those in major urban metros, but has expanded to smaller towns as well.

Amazon this year is also extending free shipping to all customers in the U.S. through December 18 – even if you’re not a Prime member.

Amazon is not the only retailer trying to court shoppers through free shipping deals.

Ahead of the holidays, Walmart expanded the number of items available for free two-day shipping to include the millions of items from marketplace sellers, which would roll out in the months following the fall announcement. And Target took on both Amazon Prime and Walmart with its launch of free, two-day shipping on hundreds of thousands of items, without a minimum purchase or membership fee.

A few other key dates for last-minute Amazon shopping are as follows:

• Dec. 18 (extended): Last day for free shipping with no minimum purchase amount, free for all customers
• Dec. 18: Last day for standard shipping, free for Prime members
• Dec. 22: Last day for two-day shipping, free for Prime members
• Dec. 23: Last day for one-day shipping, free for Prime members in eligible areas
• Dec. 24: Last day for same-day delivery, free for Prime members in eligible areas (order by 9:30 a.m. local time or earlier)
• Dec. 24: Prime Now offers free two-hour delivery windows, reserved exclusively for Prime members in eligible areas (order by 9:15 p.m. local time or earlier)
• Dec. 24: Whole Foods Market stores, Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Amazon Pop-up device kiosks open Christmas Eve (store hours vary by location)
• Dec. 25: Give the gift that keeps on giving – Amazon Gift Cards and Amazon Prime

Sovrn recently raised a $25 million in new funding with the goal of expanding beyond the adtech business through acquisitions. Now it’s announcing the first of those deals: It’s acquiring affiliate marketing company VigLink.

Sovrn first launched in 2014 — made up, as CEO Walter Knapp put it, from “bits and pieces of different companies.” (It emerged from Federated Media and its roots go back to Lijit, which FM acquired in 2011.) Knapp said the company’s vision is to “enable a professional class of storytellers to do more of what they want to do” by providing tools around content creation, distribution, monetization, operations and capital.

As for VigLink, it was founded in 2009 to help publishers monetize by automatically inserting affiliate links (where merchants share revenue with publishers when those publishers drive sales). Knapp said he’s been interested in the intersection of publishing and commerce because publishers are often the ones influencing consumer purchase decisions, but “they don’t really capture the commerce value of what they’ve created.”

VigLink already plays a big role in that process — Knapp said its links are driving nearly $1 billion in annual sales. But he also noted that there’s less than 10 percent overlap between the domains working with Sovrn and VigLink, so he sees plenty of opportunity to grow.

“We can take what is a really interesting product that has appealed more to high volume publishers and take it into content publishers,” Knapp said. “Now what’s required there is a pretty deep understanding of the editorial process.”

Knapp intends to bring entire 35-person VigLink team over to Sovrn, bringing the company’s headcount to 220. He also said that with the addition of VigLink to Sovrn’s business, “transactional adtech” will make up less than half of the company’s total revenue.

And he promised that the VigLink product will continue to evolve, for example by giving publishers more data about the entire customer journey.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. According to Crunchbase, VigLink raised more than $27 million from investors including GV, Emergence Capital, First Round Capital, RRE Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Foundry Group, Costanoa Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank.

Robinhood is undercutting the big banks by forgoing brick-and-mortar branches with its new zero-fee checking and savings account features. With no overdraft or monthly fees, a juicy 3 percent interest rate, and a claim of more US ATMs than the five biggest banks combined, Robinhood is using the scalability of software to pass impressive perks on to customers. The free stock trading app already used that approach to attack brokers like E*Trade and Charles Schwab that charge a per trade fee. Now it’s breaking into the larger financial services market with a model that could put the squeeze on Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank Of America.

Today Robinhood launches checking and savings accounts in the US with a Mastercard debit card issued through Sutton Bank that starts shipping December 18th. Users earn 3 percent on all the dough they keep with Robinhood, yet there’s no minimum balance or fees for monthly membership, overdrafts, foreign transactions, or card replacements. That’s a pretty sweet deal compared to the other leading banks that all charge for some of that or offer much lower interest rates. The tradeoff is that while customers get 24/7 live text chat support, they won’t be able to walk into a local bank branch. Users who want early access can sign up here.

Robinhood expects to turn a profit thanks to a lean 300-employee operation, earning a margin on investing your money in US treasuries, and a revenue share with Mastercard on interchange fees charged to merchants when you swipe. The launch could be critical to keeping Robinhood worthy of its $5.6 billion valuation from when it took a $363 million Series D in March just a year after raising at a $1.3 billion valuation. The 6 million-user app invested in launching a free cryptocurrency trading exchange early this year only to see coin prices plummet and mainstream interest fall off. But with banks hammering users with surprise fees and mediocre user experience, there’s a huge opportunity for a mobile-first startup to disrupt how we store money.

“Brick-and-mortar locations are costly. Our goal with this product was to build a completely digital experience so we can reduce our overhead so we can pass more of the value back to customers” Robinhood co-CEO Baiju Bhatt tells me. “Saving accounts in the US pay on average 0.09 percent and we all know the banks are making far more than that from the deposits. With Robinhood you earn 3 percent off all of your money. Mental math is hard so if you look at the median US household that has about $8000 in liquid savings, they’d earn $240 a year.”

One of the most appealing features of Robinhood checking and savings is getting access to 75,000 free-to-use ATMs in places like Target, Walgreens, and 7-Eleven. Users won’t be able to tell just by looking at an ATM whether it’s in the network, but the Robinhood app features a map for finding the nearest one.

Getting into banking could open a lucrative revenue stream for Robinhood as it charts its path to IPO. The startup recently hired Jason Warnick, a 20-year veteran of Amazon, to be its CFO and get it prepped to go public. Wall Street will want to see a more robust business that’s not as vulnerable to foes like stock brokerage Charles Schwab which is already lowering fees to stay competitive with Robinhood. Not only will checking and savings see users move more money into their Robinhood accounts that it can invest to earn a profit, but it also poises the startup to tackle more financial services in the future.

Soon after Google unveiled the top trends in what people searched for in 2018, Baidu published what captivated the Chinese in a parallel online universe, where most of the West’s mainstream tech services including Google and Facebook are inaccessible.

China’s top search engine put together the report “based on trillions of trending queries” to present a “social collective memory” of internet users, said Baidu. 802 million people have come online in China as of August, and many of them use Baidu to look things up daily.

Overall, Chinese internet users were transfixed on a mix of sports events, natural disasters, politics, and entertainment, a pattern that also prevails in Google year-in-search. On Baidu, the most popular queries of the year are:

1. World Cup: China shares its top search with the rest of the world. Despite China’s lackluster performance in the tournament, World Cup managed to capture a massive Chinese fan base who supported an array of foreign teams. People filled bars in big cities at night to watch the heart-thumping matches and many even trekked north to Russia to show their support.

2. US-China trade war: The runner-up comes as a no surprise given the escalating conflict between the world’s two largest economies. A series of events have stoked more fears of the standoff, including the arrest of Huawei’s financial chief.

3. Typhoon Mangkhut: The massive tropical cyclone swept across the Pacific Ocean in September, leaving the Philippines and South China in shambles. Shenzhen, the Chinese city dubbed the Silicon Valley for hardware, reportedly submitted more than $20.4 million in damage claims after the storm.

4. Apple launch: The American smartphone giant is still getting a lot of attention in China even as local Android competitors like Huawei and Oppo chip away at its market share. Apple is also fighting a legal battle with chipmaker Qualcomm which wanted the former to stop selling certain smartphone models in China.

5. The story of Yanxi Palace: The historical drama of backstabbing concubines drew record-breaking views for its streamer and producer iQiyi, China’s answer to Netflix that floated in the U.S. in February. The 70-episode show was watched not only in China but also across more than 70 countries around the world.

6. Produce 101: The talent show in which 101 young women race to be the best performer is one of Tencent Video’s biggest hits of the year, but its reach has gone beyond its targeted young audience as it popularized a meme, which made it to No. 9 on this list.

7. Skr: A buzzword courtesy to pop idol Kris Wu who extensively used it on a whim during iQiyi’s rap competition “Rap of China,” prompting his fans and internet users to bestow it with a myriad of interpretations.

8. Li Yong passed away: The sudden death of the much-loved television host after he fought a 17-month battle with cancer stirred an outpouring of grief on social media.

9. Koi: A colored variety of carps, the fish is associated with good luck in Chinese culture. Yang Chaoyue, a Produce 101 contestant who the audience believed to be below average surprisingly rose to fame and has since been compared to a koi.

10. Esports: Professional gaming has emerged from the underground to become a source of national pride recently after a Chinese team championed the League of Legend finals, an event regarded as the Olympics for esports.

In addition to the overall ranking, Baidu also listed popular terms by category, with staple areas like domestic affairs alongside those with a local flavor such as events that inspire national pride or are tear-jerking.

This was also the first year that Baidu has added a category dedicated to AI-related keywords. The search giant, which itself has pivoted to go all in AI and has invested heavily in autonomous driving, said the technology “has not only become a nationwide buzzword but also a key engine in transforming lives across the globe.” In 2018, Chinese people were keen to learn about these AI terms:

Robots, chips, internet of things, smart speakers, autonomous driving, face recognition, quantum computing, unmanned vehicles, World Artificial Intelligence Conference, and quantum mechanics.

Getaround, the peer-to-peer car-sharing service that first launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY in 2011, is expanding a partnership with Uber that gives users access to rideshare-ready vehicles.

The program, which launched as a pilot in May 2017 in San Francisco, is now available to Getaround customers in Los Angeles and San Diego. Two more cities, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. will soon follow, Getaround co-founder and CEO Sam Zaid told TechCrunch.

Getaround’s carsharing platform is designed to let people instantly rent and drive cars owned by their peers. Under this expanding partnership with Uber, people can now rent some of those vehicles by the hour to drive for the ride-hailing app.

This partnership shouldn’t be confused with Uber Rent, a car rental program launched in April 2018 that shut down last month.

“It really opens up a world of possibilities for people who might want to drive for Uber on a part-time basis but who don’t really need or want to own a car,” Zaid said. “If you’re a grad student who wants to do this one or two days a week, for example, this allows for you to make that happen.”

Still, Zaid noted, this isn’t for every car owner, or even car, on the Getaround platform. The pilot in San Francisco, which is continuing, attracts business-minded car owners who are thinking about maximizing their revenue opportunity. And Zaid expects a similar trend in the new cities.

Getaround cars used by Uber drivers travel about 50% more miles than other vehicles on the platform. However, the revenue potential is higher for owners who allow their vehicles to be used for rideshare, he noted.

The program in San Francisco was initially was limited to a select group. During the pilot, Getaround received feedback and made some changes to the product experience. All of the expansion of the program has been in the past six months. Over that timeframe, the supply of vehicles on the Getaround platform that can be used for rideshare has grown six to eight times, Zaid said. The number of drivers using the cars for Uber has also doubled each month, he added.

To kick off the expanded program, Getaround made the first booking day free for up to 12 consecutive hours. After that, drivers pay a $5 per hour flat rate for use of the vehicle. There are no upfront fees, commitments or subscriptions, and no limit to the booking duration.

Cars are also equipped with standard additions typically found in ridesharing cars such as Uber decals, phone mounts and phone chargers. Insurance is also included on every trip, and Uber’s 24/7 customer support is available directly through the Uber Driver app.

Once a person successfully clears Uber’s screening process and uploads their drivers’ license, they can view, select and unlock a car directly through Getaround.

The partnership is possible because all cars on the Getaround platform are equipped with an integrated hardware and software solution that it calls Getaround Connect, a device that allows users to instantly book and unlock the car through the app without having to physically exchange of keys between owner and renter.

Earlier this year, Getaround raised a $300 series D round led by SoftBank with participation from Toyota Motor Corporation and others.

Welcome, friends, to the consumer electronics dead zone. It’s that increasingly brief window between the last of the pre-holiday releases and the CES deluge. It’s rarely home to genuinely exciting announcements, but when you’re a company like Samsung, you’ve got to find somewhere on the roadmap to portion out all of those gadgets.

Say hello to the new Notebook 9 Pen. It’s a convertible Windows laptop aimed at creatives. It’s a very Samsungy answer to the Surface line, right down to the inclusion of the S Pen. The PC sports a swiveling 13 or 15 inch screen encased in an all-metal frame.

It’s an update to he admittedly somewhat confusingly named line, still sporting an 8th-gen Intel Core i7 and a hearty 15 hours of battery life by Samsung’s estimation. On-board audio has been improved, courtesy of the company’s AKG arm. The S Pen also gets some upgrades here, with improved latency and three swappable tips.

Today’s news is the latest in what’s been an uncharacteristically noisy holiday season for Samsung, including the recent partial announcement of two 5G phones due out next year. A spate of new rumors also have the company announcing the Galaxy S10 around MWC in Feb/March. And then, of course, there’s that folding phone. Should be a packed 2019 for the company, all around.

The new Notebook 9 Pen, meanwhile, is due out in the States early next year.

Months after a big round, African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific.

The new investment comes from London-based investment fund Odey Asset Management, and it is an extension to a $52 million round that closed back in September. The deal takes Jumo, which recently moved its headquarters to Singapore, to $103 million raised from investors. Its backers include Goldman Sachs, Proparco — which is attached to the French Development Agency — and Finnfund, and it was part of Google’s Launchpad accelerator last year.

Founded in 2014, Jumo specializes in social impact financial products, such as microloans, savings and insurance. It started out in Tanzania, and today it claims to have originated over $1 billion on loans. Since September, when it announced a first expansion into Asia via Pakistan, it claims it has grown to 10 million people saving or borrowing from its platform from a previous nine million. The company has some 350 staff across 10 offices in Africa, Europe and Asia.

Over the last year, the company said it has doubled the number of financial service providers and telcos on its platform. Of those deals, one of its highest profile is a digital finance product for Uber drivers that’s live in Kenya. That collaboration is likely to expand in Africa and potentially beyond, Jumo said.

Expansion is very much the name of the game all round for the company. Jumo CEO Andrew Watkins-Ball told TechCrunch in September that there are plans to expand to more Asian markets next year but, for now, the company isn’t saying which ones.

Work-Bench, an early stage enterprise startup venture capital firm based in New York City announced its $47 million Fund II today. It follows their initial $10 million fund.

Work-Bench is itself like a venture capital investment startup. A scrappy operation run by just five enterprise industry veterans, it defies convention in a number of ways including setting up shop in New York City. While it’s based in New York, the company will invest anywhere in the country, writing checks for $1.5 million for the Seed 2 and Series A investments.

Work-Bench’s philosophy centers around a sales approach and giving their startups entree into some of the biggest companies in the country, many of which not coincidentally, are based near their offices.

The company starts by trying to understand specific enterprise customer pain points, even before they send a founder into pitch an executive. The startup founders are judged and guided by their ability to sell. In fact, one of the founders Jonathan Lehr says even before they invest in a company, they will send them to pitch a couple of customers and take advantage of that two-way feedback channel as a way to understand the startup’s selling skills.

“Instead of starting with whiz bang tech like a lot of West Coast VCs do, by starting with the problem and and where budget dollars are being allocated, when we’re looking at companies from an investment perspective it really helps us connect all the dots a little a lot better. That’s because on the one hand the corporate executive is getting a solution to a pain point from the startup, and the startup founders are getting an introduction to the right stakeholder at the right time for them at the right organization,” Lehr told TechCrunch.

Work-Bench Team. Photo: Work-Bench

Work-Bench has set up their headquarters as space for hosting regular events that help introduce founders to key people in the community and learn about different subjects such as writing a successful RFP, negotiating contracts and setting up a successful proof of concept (PoC). They also have work spaces where founders from the portfolio companies can interact on a daily basis and get direct feedback from the Work-Bench principals, who run a truly hands-on operation.

It seems to have worked. Among the enterprise startups funded with their initial fund were Dialpad, Tamr, Cockroach Labs and CoreOS, which was sold to Red Hat for $250 million in January. In all, they invested in 17 companies in the first fund.

The second fund is already under way with 9 investments so far including Scytale, a security and identity protocol startup; Algorithmia, which is working on DevOps for AI and Catalyst, a customer success platform.

Fund II investors include co-anchors Industry Ventures and an unnamed Chicago family office. Corporate backers include Wipro, Schneider Electric and CA Technologies. Other investors include Fund I founders Craig Walker from Dialpad, Andy Palmer from Tamr, and Tim Eades from vArmour.

Minted, a company we’ve been covering on this site for a decade-plus, plans to double down on its wholesale and licensing business, which helps larger retailers sell stationery, art and home decor designed by its community of independent artists.

To fund the growing initiative, the design marketplace is today announcing a $208 million Series E funding led by Permira, with participation from T. Rowe Price. The round brings Minted’s total raised to date to $300 million. The company, founded in 2007, has previously landed backing from Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures and others.

“Minted is playing into a trend that’s really fortunate for us, which is a need for differentiated design that helps retailers compete,” the company’s founder and chief executive officer Mariam Naficy told TechCrunch.

Naficy, a former vice president of U.S. e-commerce at The Body Shop, declined to disclose the company’s valuation but says it’s profitable on an earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) basis and is on track to post “low hundreds of millions” in revenue this year. Its wholesale and licensing operation, she says, is itself expected to become a nine-figure business, too, and will likely represent 50 percent of Minted’s earnings in four years.

Minted is best known as an online marketplace for printed goods, like wedding invitations, greeting cards, notebooks, stationery and wall art. The company crowdsources work from independent illustrators, textile designers, painters and other artists, then lets its customers vote on the designs they like best to determine what is sold on Minted. Then, the platform leverages predictive analytics to forecast bestsellers. As a result, Naficy says they’ve collected hoards of valuable data surrounding consumer preferences.

Minted, in addition to fueling growth of its wholesale business, will use the investment to build out a robust supply chain, expand the team and continue experimenting with new business strategies, like its first brick-and-mortar store that recently popped up on San Francisco’s Fillmore Street, where the company is selling wall art and stationery.

San Francisco partially banned delivery robots because they obstructed pedestrians, so Postmates built one with eyes, turn signals, and a mandate to yield. Serve is Postmates’ new cooler-meet-autonomous-stroller that it hopes can cut costs and speed up deliveries. The semi-autonomous rover uses cameras and Lidar to navigate sidewalks, but always has a human pilot remotely monitoring a fleet of Serves who can take control if there’s a problem. There’s even a “Help” button, touchscreen, and video chat display customers or passers-by can use to summon assistance.

Serve will be rolling out in various cities over the next year. It does deliveries to customers that unlock its cargo hatch with their phone or a passcode, but it also can grab food from restaurants in congested areas and bring them to a Postmates dispatch hub from which delivery people can take packages the last mile. That could save Postmates money on delivery labor, but the company didn’t provide any information on how it might help transition couriers to other roles or careers.

“Somehow as a society we’re OK with moving a 2-pound burrito with a 2-ton car. All the energy is used to move the car, not the burrito, and there’s all the congestion it introduces” says Ali Kashani, VP of Postmates X special projects. So Postmates spent the last couple of years piloting autonomous rovers built by Starship and Robby before deciding only it had the on-demand experience to build the right bot.

Serve can carry 50 pounds of goods for 25 miles on a single charge — enough to make around a dozen deliveries per day. Thanks to a low center of gravity achieved by building the battery into the bottom of the chassis, it’s less likely to get cow-tipped. It uses Velodyne Lidar and a NVIDIA XAVIER processor to tell where it’s going.  A Postmates spokesperson tells me that the scalability and efficiency of the rovers, “ultimately we believe that there will be a world where goods move rapidly at almost zero cost to the consumer.”

“We took time to figure out what is the language for the rover and pedestrians to interact with each other. If a robot is at sidewalk and wants to be able to cross the street, it needs to show its intent to cross” Kashani tells me. Thanks to a light ring around the top with turn signals and eyes that can indicate where it’s trying to go, Kashani believes Serve can be a respectful and natural part of the urban environment.

Postmates could offer Serve not only to its customers, but to companies like Instacart for which it handles outsourced deliveries. That business could pit Serve against delivery robot startups like $42 million-funded Starship, $10 million-funded Marble, and $5 million-funded Robby.

Avoiding becoming an obstacle to seniors, children, and people in wheelchairs will be critical if cities are going to allow robots like Serve to operate. In December, San Francisco nearly banned the bots by limiting companies to three robots each with only nine total in the city that are relegated to low-population areas, can’t travel more than three miles per hour, and must be supervised remotely by humans.

Postmates tells me it’s been working with the SF board of supervisors including Norman Yee and a coalition of logistics companies to develop a regulatory framework for issuing permits allowing limited autonomous deliveries. Postmates’ permit application is under review by the City of SF. Postmates is working with SF’s Emerging Technology Working Group, local merchant associations, and pedestrian safety groups to figure out how to balance innovative tools that could increase local retail sales and reduce traffic with the public’s need for right of way on the sidewalks.

There’s also the question of what happens to the labor Serve replaces. A Postmates spokesperson claims that Serve is about augmenting its fleet with super powers rather than replacing its fleet. The company does 4 million deliveries per month and some might not ever be within the scope of robots. But it’d be nice to see Postmates spin up some training courses or offer transitions to behind-the-scenes operations and customer service roles to deliverers that eventually feel the squeeze.

Interestingly, Kashani hinted at how Postmates might end up moving to an “Uber X, Uber Black Car” model where you’d pay more to have a human take your delivery upstairs and directly to your door, while you might pay less if you’re willing to grab your order from the Serve robot out on the curb. Essentially, Postmates Serve is poised to turn human delivery into a luxury.