Year: 2018

Amazon Rapids, the chat fiction that encourages kids to read by presenting stories in the form of text message conversations, is now going free. Previously, Amazon had been charging $2.99 per month for a subscription that allows unlimited access to its story collection, which now numbers in the hundreds.

First launched in November 2016, Amazon Rapids was meant to capitalize on kids’ interest in chat fiction apps like Hooked, Yarn, Tap and others, which tend to cater to a slightly older teenage crowd. Amazon Rapids, meanwhile, was the schoolager-appropriate version, without the swearing, alcohol, sex and yeah, even incest references you’ll find in the Hooked app, for example. (Yuck. Delete.)

Instead, Amazon Rapids’ stories are aimed at kids ages 5 to 12 and generally just silly and fun. They’re not meant to addict kids through the use of cliffhangers and timeouts, nor are they scary.

Some of the app’s stories also serve as crossovers that helped promote Amazon’s kids’ TV shows, like “Danger & Eggs,” and “Niko and the Sword of Light.” These were authored by the shows’ writers, allowing them to extend the show’s universe in a natural way.

In addition, the app included educational features like a built-in glossary and a read-along mode to help younger readers.

However, the app wasn’t heavily marketed by Amazon, and many parents don’t even know it exists, it seems.

According to data from Sensor Tower, Amazon Rapids has been installed only around 120,000+ times to date, three-quarters of which are on iOS. (Subscription revenue goes through Amazon, not the app stores, so the firm doesn’t have a figure for that.)

Amazon Rapids is ranked pretty low on the App Store, at No. 1105 for iPhone downloads in the Education category, and No. 1001 on iPad. The highest it ever reached was No. 65 on iPad.

Oddly, it chose not to compete in the “Books” category, where the other chat fiction apps reside, as do the other non-traditional “book” apps, like Wattpad’s crowd-sourced fiction app, Audible’s audiobooks app, various comics apps, and others.

Amazon now says that the hundreds of stories in Rapids will be free going forward. Families can also listen to some of these stories through the Storytime Alexa skill, launched last summer, which includes stories from Amazon Rapids, along with others.

Given Amazon Rapids’ small user base, it’s clear that Amazon no longer believes it makes sense to try to sell subscriptions, and likely now sees its database of stories as more of a value-add for Alexa owners.

That said, it’s unclear what this means for Rapids’ future development and story catalog, which may not continue to grow. (We’ve asked Amazon if it plans to keep adding content to Rapids, and will update if the company responds.)

Arm, the semiconductor firm you probably still remember as ARM, today announced that it has acquired Treasure Data, a data management platform for large enterprise customers. The companies didn’t announce the financial details of the transaction, but earlier reporting by Bloomberg pegged the price at $600 million.

This move strengthens Arm’s IoT nascent play, given that Treasure Data’s specialty is dealing with the large streams of data that these systems produce (as well as data from CRM, e-commerce systems and other third-party services).

This move follows Arm’s recent acquisition of Stream and indeed, the company calls the acquisition of Treasure Data “the final piece” of its “IoT enablement puzzle.” The result of this completed puzzle is the Arm Pelion IoT Platform, which combines Stream, Treasure Data and the existing Arm Mbed Cloud into a single solution for connecting and managing IoT devices and the data they produce.

Arm says Treasure Data will continue to operate as before and continue to serve new clients as well as its existing users. “It will remain an important part of industry IoT enablement, providing the ability to harness new, complex edge and device data within a comprehensive customer profile to personalize their products and improve their experiences,” the company says.

Meet Radar Relay, a cryptocurrency startup that just raised $10 million from Blockchain Capital and other investors. The company is taking advantage of the 0x protocol to change your tokens into other tokens without going through a traditional exchange.

Centralized exchanges have been one of the main weaknesses of the cryptocurrency industry for years. A centralized exchange can get hacked or shut down. Malicious users can also hijack your account and transfer all your tokens.

“I definitely hope centralized exchanges go burn in hell as much as possible,” Vitalik Buterin said in a recent TechCrunch interview.

So what is the solution? Decentralized exchanges that never hold your tokens on their wallets. As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote, 0x is a protocol that makes this possible. 0x connects traders so that you can swap tokens without going through a centralized marketplace. It leverages smart contracts so that you don’t end up sending the tokens first and waiting for the other person to send you back their tokens — the transaction happens simultaneously.

Many companies are building projects on top of the 0x protocol, and Radar Relay is one of them. As the name suggests, Radar Relay helps you find other traders who are interested in your order.

For instance, if you want to exchange 10 MLN for 162 ZRX, you need to publicize your order somewhere so that other users can find it. If another Radar Relay user wants to make a similar transaction, but in the other direction, then the trade occurs.

Users connect wallet addresses on Radar Relay so that you stay in control of your tokens at all times. For instance, if you use a Ledger wallet, you can exchange tokens from one address on your Ledger to another. In the future, you can imagine integrations with wallet makers so that you can submit an order from your wallet directly.

In addition to leaving you in control of your tokens, you don’t need to create an account to use a decentralized exchange. Radar Relay is only compatible with ERC20 tokens as 0x has been designed for ERC20 tokens specifically. Since October, users have traded the equivalent of $150 million in 170 tokens.

While Blockchain Capital is leading the round, a ton of investors have put money in Radar Relay — Tusk Ventures, Distributed Global, Reciprocal Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Distributed Global, Reciprocal Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Elefund, Slow Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, Breyer Capital, Digital Currency Group, V1.VC, Kokopelli, Village Global and Chapter One.

It’s an impressive list of investors. So let’s see if decentralized exchanges can shake up the big exchanges that everybody uses today.

Comcast and Amazon today announced a new partnership that will see Amazon’s Prime Video service integrated into Comcast’s Xfinity TV set-top boxes. This is the first time that Prime Video content would be added to a cable operator’s platform in the U.S.. It’s also a particularly interesting choice on Comcast’s part,  given that Amazon is directly competing with pay TV providers through its Prime Video Channels a la carte TV subscriptions. And these will be available to Comcast’s customers via the Xfinity X1 set-top box as a result of this deal.

Today, Amazon offers over 160 premium Prime Video channels, including HBO, Showtime, Starz, Cinemax and others that have been previously sold as add-ons to cable TV subscriptions. Being able to access to these channels over-the-top – without a traditional TV subscription – is one of several factors that have convinced some consumers to cut the cord with cable TV entirely.

In other words, Comcast is really embracing the enemy here.

Of course, Prime Video Channels aren’t all that Prime Video offers. Members can also stream from Amazon’s library of TV shows and movies that come with a Prime subscription, as well as watch Amazon’s original programming, including shows like “Goliath,” “Sneaky Pete,” “Mozart in the Jungle,” “Man in the High Castle,” “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and soon, the recently rescued “The Expanse,” among others.

Plus, Prime Video features live events at times, and offers series and movies for rent or purchase.

“Amazon Prime Video’s growing list of originals, movies, shows, documentaries, and kids’ programming will be an excellent complement to the overall X1 viewing experience,” said Dana Strong, Comcast’s President of Consumer Services, in a statement. “We want to give customers easy access to all their favorite content in one place. X1 continues to be a platform that can curate live TV, On Demand movies and shows, and streaming internet video and music titles into one, easy-to-use, seamless experience.”

This isn’t the first streaming service Comcast has worked with. The company has been offering access to Netflix through its X1 interface since 2016, and this April expanded its relationship with Netflix by bundling it into Comcast subscriptions. It also provides access to Google’s YouTube.

Despite Comcast’s willingness to work with the very services that are causing cable TV companies to lose customers, some reports claim these moves are akin to shoving a finger in the hole of a dam – the flood (of cord cutters, that is) is still coming. In fact eMarketer recently noted that the number of U.S. cord cutters will reach 33 million this year, which is faster than expected.

And it specifically said that partnerships between traditional TV providers and over-the-top services – like the one between Comcast and Netflix – hasn’t seemed to have had any impact on the pace of cord cutting.

“These partnerships are still in the early stages, so we don’t foresee them having a significant impact reducing churn this year,” said eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Christopher Bendtsen, at the time of the July report. “With more pay TV and [over-the-top] partnerships expected in the future, combined with other strategies, providers could eventually slow—but not stop—the losses,” he noted.

Comcast didn’t announce an exact launch date for the Prime Video integration, only saying that it would be available to X1 customers “later this year.”

Square, the company you know from your favorite coffee shop’s checkout counter, is opening to developers its Reader hardware. Using the new Square Reader SDK, developers will be able to build their own custom checkout and point of sale experiences, no matter whether that’s a self-ordering kiosk, a mobile app for waiters or any other similar service.

“While we’ve built some of the best point of sale software on the market, we know that many industries have niche needs and businesses may crave unique experiences that aren’t served by our existing products,” Square’s developer platform lead Carl Perry writes today. “That’s why we’re opening up our platform and providing developers direct access to Square hardware for the very first time.”

The overall idea here, it seems, is to ensure that Square’s service doesn’t just work well in industries where it is already strong (retail, restaurants, etc.) but also in niches where it currently doesn’t have a presence. And this new SDK will allow iOS and Android developers that want to support Square’s payment system to bring their solutions to verticals like transportation and healthcare, for example. It’ll also make it easy for them to integrate their payment system with other business software, like customer relationship management solutions and more complex enterprise resource planning systems.

Among those who have already trialed the SDK is Shake Shack, which is testing a Square Reader SDK-powered self-service kiosk at its “Shack of the Future” in New York and a number of pop-up locations. Similarly, Infinite Peripherals is building a digital taxi meter that’s currently in use in Washington, DC. Other early users include Joe and the Juice, a juice chain with an Instagram account, and  QuiqMeds, which helps healthcare providers dispense medication at the point-of-care (instead of the pharmacy).

Sonos opened its first day of trading at $15 a share though quickly gained 20% as trading began. As of publication, Sonos, trading under SONO, is around $18.50 a share.

Sonos priced its initial shares at $15 a share, below the expected range of $17 to $19. At this price Sonos is valued at just under $1.5 billion and will raise $208.5 million by going public. If the stock price maintains its current levels, Sonos will end its first day of trading up and in the expected range. Pricing their initial shares under the expected range resulted in the company raising as much money, but it also provided a bit of cushion in case Wall Street traders disagreed with the pricing. It’s never a good look to end a company’s first day of trading in the red.

Sonos’ Michael Groeninger, VP of Corporate Finance, tells me the company priced its IPO price under the expected range in response to recent market movement. As examples he pointed to the volatile market environment caused by multiple down days including Facebook’s big drop in stock price. Sonos, Giannetto said, is more concerned about where the stock price is in three to five years rather than on the first day of trading.

To celebrate its Nasdaq listing, Sonos updated the sound of the Nasdaq bell where it will be used going forward to open and close the day’s trading.

Sonos is nicely positioned as a third-party option in an ecosystem that’s getting increasingly crowded by proprietary speakers from the larger companies that own voice assistants like the Echo, HomePod and Google Home. But Sonos has been around for a considerable amount of time and has clearly built up a significant following to ensure that it could find itself operating as an independent public company. In its fiscal 2017 year, Sonos said it brought in nearly $1 billion in revenue, an increase of 10 percent year-over-year. The initial filing indicated that the company had sold a total of 19 million products in 6.9 million households, with customers listening to 70 hours of content each month.

I spoke briefly with long-time Sonos employee Nick Millington who is now the company’s Chief Product Office. He sees Sonos as a unique offering in today’s consumer market. He explained that the company’s three pillars of focus — openness, quality, and cohesive product family (he called it systemness) — is what makes Sonos unique. He pointed out that because of those three areas of focus, 90% of the products Sonos ever sold are still in operation today. Sonos’ biggest competitor isn’t speakers from Amazon or Apple, but rather a silent home, he said. Because the company has long worked with outside services, it is committed to brining Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant to its products.

Still, it’s hard to ignore the facing increasing competition from the electronic giants of Apple, Google and Amazon — all which want a spot for their own speaker in people’s homes. Sonos responded by building-in Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant into several products. Its most recent product, the $399 Beam sound bar, has Alexa built-in and lets users ask Apple’s Siri to control music on Sonos systems. Google Assistant compatibility is expected to come later this year.

Rent the Runway today announced that it has partnered with Temasek for a $200 million credit facility.

Founded in 2009, Rent the Runway lets users rent items of clothing for special events or occasions, bringing runway styles to folks without the cash to purchase the clothing outright.

Rent the Runway started out by letting users rent their wares for about 10 percent of the item’s price. But in 2017, RTR introduced a subscription model, giving users unlimited rentals for $89/month.

The model has already been proven by other businesses. RTR started giving users access to fashion in the same way that Netflix gives users access to video, Spotify gives access to music, or even the way ClassPass gives users access to studio fitness classes.

Since the subscription launch, RTR’s subscription business is up 150 percent year over year, and represents 50 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

According to the release, RTR will use the new funds to continue growing its subscription business, expand operations, and refinance its existing debt facility. As part of the deal, Temasek has received an observer seat on the board of directors.

In response to the question around why Rent The Runway chose a credit facility over traditional VC investment, CFO Scarlett O’Sullivan had this to say via email:

We are very pleased that the company has demonstrated the kind of business model, growth prospects and financial discipline that make it possible to access a credit facility of this size with an equity-minded long-term partner like Temasek – they have a proven track record of supporting disruptive high-growth companies.

We were specifically looking for debt for three key reasons:

1 – This facility gives us the ability to access more financing – we can draw capital as we need to, giving us flexibility to grow our subscription business more quickly

2 – We improved the terms of our prior facility which we refinanced with a portion of these funds — and debt for us is a lower cost option to finance the business

3 – It is less dilutive to our existing shareholders – we believe there will be significant value creation over the next several years as we continue to change consume behavior and help women put their closet in the cloud

Before this latest deal, Rent the Runway had raised more than $200 million in funding from investors such as Bain Capital, KPCB, Highland Capital, TCV, and more.

Stampli, an invoice management platform, announced today the closing of a $6.7 M Series A funding round led by SignalFire, with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Hillsven Capital, and UpWest Labs.

If you’ve ever freelanced for a company, you’ll know that the long, instant ramen-filled days between filing an invoice and having it completed can be grueling. Brothers Eyal and Ofer Feldman launched Stampli in 2015 to help solve this problem and bridge the communication gap between accountants, related internal departments and vendors. Aimed at mid to large size companies, to date Stampli has helped a wide range of companies (from fashion to tech) manage over $4 billion in invoices through its AI driven interface.

“Invoice management is like an elephant,” co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman told TechCrunch. “One person sees the head, one person sees the tail, one person sees the legs. It’s a process that different people see different versions of but the whole picture should include everybody. The ability for all of these people to be involved is really the core of the process.”

Traditional invoice management between vendors and internal departments in a company can be a tangled mess of email exchanges, lost messages and ultimately delayed payments. But, Stampli’s interface (which can be integrated directly into a company’s enterprise resource planning software like NetSuite, Intuit QuickBooks, or SAP) allows for every step of the invoice’s journey to have a central landing page for every relevant party to collaborate on.

“We found that 85 percent of our users are not accounting people,” said Feldman. “[They] are all the managers around and all the other people involved. What we found in our research is that when the process works for them is when accounting is happy.”

This landing page not only provides easy access to pertinent information between departments, but Stampli’s built-in AI, Billy the Bot, helps invoice managers fill in relevant information by first learning the structure of the invoice and then learning through observation the user’s behavior and work flow. When Billy passes an 80 percent confidence threshold for its decision, it goes ahead and auto-fills the information. But, if it’s feeling unsure about its choice, Billy will leave it as a suggestion instead to avoid introducing any errors to the paperwork.

The more invoices users process through Stampli, the more Billy learns how to best streamline the process for that company.

In the arena of invoice management, Stampli faces competition from companies like Determine and Concur, which also offer all-in-one platforms for invoice management and, in the case of Concur, also incorporate machine learning to capture invoices.

According to Feldman, what helps Stampli stand apart from the competition is its emphasis on company collaboration and its no-fee installation of the software. With no upfront cost, the company only charges per invoice.

Tade Oyerinde is obsessed with communications inside educational institutions. A few years ago, while studying at Leeds University in England, he founded Gleepost, a Craigslist-like service targeting college campuses.

The startup flopped, so Oyerinde moved on to build with his college roommate and twin brother Uniroulette, a Chatroulette clone but limited to people with .edu email addresses. It was here that he got a searing introduction to product design and also learned how to become a social hacker, using design choices to drive conversations and engagement. “With Uniroulette… we needed to have about 20 kids concurrently on just to make it work,” he explained to me. To get those numbers, the startup officially opened at 8pm each evening, and anyone who tried to login earlier was given a countdown timer.

To further drive engagement, Oyerinde created dozens if not hundreds of Facebook pages around the concept of love and missed connections targeting different campuses, such as Leeds Crushes or Bodleian Library Secrets. Students were hooked — and also getting carefully calibrated advertising messages to spend more time on Uniroulette. He raised $250k from angels in London, but ultimately, the startup lost traffic and eventually twinkled out.

Oyerinde hopes that the third time is a charm with his new project, Campuswire. The platform, launching publicly today, is designed to maximize the efficiency of classroom conversations, even among different disciplines from math to English. The product is certainly inspired from Slack and other current campus communications tools, but with an intense focus on saving the time of teachers and faculty.

“70% of the things that students need to communicate in a college class is asking a question,” Oyerinde said. “You need a balance of synchronous and asynchronous communications, and we had a bunch of experience with this.”

The challenge for campuses these days is that the methods by which faculty and students communicate couldn’t be more different. Existing incumbents like Blackboard have forums features, but the community is often moribund. Professors use email, which is asynchronous, but not easily shared among students attending a class. Meanwhile, today’s students are obsessed with SMS, Instagram, and YouTube as channels for communication. Campuswire’s goal is to meet everyone halfway.

Campuswire’s platform allows students to ask questions and upvote answers, creating community in a lecture

There were several design decisions that make Campuswire unique. One is that students can post questions anonymously in their classes. “40% of students were never going to ask questions unless they can do it anonymously,” Oyerinde said. He noted that they have had limited issues with trust and safety issues since class discussions are closed to non-enrolled students.

Most importantly, the design of the product is driven by efficiency. Questions are easy to surface for students, helping teachers limit repetitive answers. The other side of efficiency is encouraging students to chime in with their own answers. We wanted to “incentivize the top 5% of students to help each other out,” Oyerinde explained. “They literally jump in, so professors have to do less work.” That’s critical in classes where the number of students can be in the hundreds if not thousands.

The platform has been in beta since last fall at UCLA, and usage in the initial set of classes has been heavy. “Users use us over five hours per day in three out of the four classes in UCLA, and in all of them it was over three hours per day on average,” Oyerinde said. He also said that “we had over 75% 10-week retention.” The team chose UCLA because of its quarterly schedule, “so it meant we had twice the iteration half-life.”

Campuswire debuts just as the kickoff for the new school season gets underway. We are going to “continue with the student outreach and getting a wide cross-section of classes this fall,” he said. The startup now has a team of six based in New York City.

As a result of the larger cord-cutting trend, more consumers are watching TV streamed over the internet. And the size of this streaming TV audience is rapidly growing. According to a new report from Conviva, out this morning, streaming TV content consumption has more than doubled over the last 12 months, and is continuing to accelerate, with streaming TV viewing hours up 115 percent in Q2 2018 compared with the same time last year.

In addition, the World Cup had a remarkable impact on metrics like viewing hours, plays, and peak concurrent plays, the firm found. 7.9 million people tuned in for the World Cup online, which led to a 118 percent growth in peak concurrent plays over Q2 2017.

But the metrics aren’t just up year-over-year because of this special event. When Conviva pulled out the views attributed to the World Cup, it still found that peak concurrency was up by 45 percent year-over-year, to reach 5.3 million concurrent plays. This occurred during another large sporting event – the 7th game of the NBA Western Conference Finals.

The report also indicated that North America remains the largest and fastest-growing audience for streaming TV. In this market, plays were up 124 percent and viewing hours were up 139 percent year-over-year, as of Q2.

Asia, for comparison’s sake, saw a 63 percent increase in plays but more modest growth in viewing hours at 22 percent year-over-year. Also of note, while China drives much of the traffic, it had one of the lowest percentages in terms of long-form content viewing at 8 percent, versus 14 percent for short-form, and 16 percent for live event viewing.

Different types of content is being viewed on different devices, the report found. Streaming TV, in general, is shifting away from PCs (24% of plays) to mobile devices (49% of plays), especially for short-form content. But connected TVs (51% of viewing hours) are favored for long-form content. This supports findings from individual streaming TV providers as well – for example, Hulu recently said that 78 percent of its viewing takes place in the living room.

The new research additionally supports earlier reports that put Roku in the lead of other TV platforms. According to Conviva, Roku accounted for 22 percent of all viewing hours on connected TVs, and 8 percent of all plays. Fire TV is the fastest growing, with a 140 percent increase year-over-year.

Other platforms – including Sony’s PlayStation, Google’s Chromecast, and Amazon’s Fire TV – all gained as well, and combined saw more than two times video consumption, versus the year-ago period. Some of their growth is coming from the decline of native TV platforms, like Samsung’s smart TV, as consumers shifted to Roku, Chromecast, and Fire TV. 

The full report delves into the metrics in more detail, and includes stats on video quality, which is also increasing in North American and European markets.

Conviva’s customer base includes a large number of streaming TV, subscription video and other providers, including names like Hulu, Sky, Sling TV, HBO, AT&T, Playstation Vue, and many more.