Siemens, the giant German technology company, today announced that it has acquired Mendix, the popular low-code application development platform, for €0.6 billion (or about $700 million). Mendix, which was founded in the Netherlands but now has its headquarters in Boston, will continue to operate as usual and keep its name, but Siemens notes that it will also use the company’s technology to accelerate its own cloud, IoT and digital enterprise ambitions.
“As part of our digitalization strategy, Siemens continues to invest in software offerings for the Digital Enterprise. With the acquisition of Mendix, Siemens continues to add to its comprehensive Digital Enterprise and MindSphere IoT portfolio, with cloud domain expertise, cloud agnostic platform solutions and highly skilled people,” said Jan Mrosik, CEO of Siemens’ Digital Factory Division.
Mendix’s service is already deeply integrated into IBM’s, SAP’s and Pivotal‘s cloud services. Mendix co-founder and CEO Derek Roos notes that his company and Siemens first discussed a strategic partnership, but as those talks progressed, the two companies moved toward an acquisition instead. Roos argues that the two companies’ visions are quite similar and that Siemens is committed to helping accelerate Mendix’s growth, extend the company’s platform and combine it with Siemens’ existing MindSphere IoT system.
“If you’ve ever wondered which low-code platform will have the viability to invest and win in the long term, you no longer have to guess,” Roos writes. “This commitment and investment from Siemens will allow us to accelerate R&D and geo-expansion investments significantly. You’re going to see faster innovation, more reach and an even better customer experience from us.”
Over the course of the last few years, “low-code” has become increasingly popular as more and more enterprises try to enable all of their employees to access and use the data they now store. Not every employee is going to learn how to program, though, so tools like Mendix, K2 and others now make it easy for non-developers to quickly build (mostly database-backed) applications.
Siemens also today announced a new company structure, dubbed Vision 2020+. The details of that aren’t all that interesting, but the company does note that it was to strengthen its growth portfolio through investments in fields like IoT integration services. The Mendix acquisition is part of that, but I’m sure we’ll see a few similar moves in the near future.
While we’re talking about companies like Apple getting alarmingly close to a $1 trillion market cap, both of Jack Dorsey’s companies — Twitter (at least before its earnings last week) and Square — have been on considerable runs, and it looks like the latter won’t be coming to a major halt after today’s quarterly report.
The company reported its second-quarter results today, which were somewhat mixed compared to what Wall Street was expecting but didn’t appear to raise the kinds of significant red flags Twitter raised last week that sent its stock into a tailspin. The company outpaced what analysts expected for its earnings results, while it brought in slightly less revenue than was expected, as its core gross payment volume continued to rise and its net losses narrowed when compared to its second quarter last year. In a year that’s included some evolution in its hardware products and a bet on Bitcoin, Square has seen its stock more than double in the past 12 months and rise 90% since the beginning of the year.
The stock is down around 2.5% this afternoon after the company posted its report, but for the most part, it isn’t the kind of substantial trip-up that would have been a major setback amid an otherwise high-velocity year.
Square’s additional bets beyond its core business, including subscriptions and what it calls “services-based revenue” also more than doubled year-over-year on an adjusted basis, which was driven by its ancillary products like Caviar, Square Capital, it Cash Card, and its Instant Deposit service. The company said Square Capital facilitated more than 60,000 loans totaling $390 million, which is quickly becoming one of its big businesses to run alongside its typical payments system as it looks to snap up adoption of the entire operational stack for small businesses.
The company also had two other lines of revenue that are showing some growth: its hardware business, which while small, is also growing quickly as a result of Square Register and its other hardware products; and Bitcoin, another play it’s making when it comes to its Cash products. Bitcoin generated $37 million in the second quarter, while its hardware division generated $18 million. All of these are part of a way for Square to diversify beyond just being a transaction tool for businesses and look to crack into all the other operational layers of how money generally moves across different surfaces, primarily focusing on the flow in and out of businesses.
Fitbit’s stock price jumped in after-hours trading and is currently trading around $6.00 a share, off its 52-week intraday high of $7.79.
The company today announced its latest quarterly numbers, which saw the average selling price of its wearables increase 6 percent year-over-year to $106 a device. New devices introduced within the last year represented 59 percent of the company’s revenue.
Smartwatches were a high-point for Fitbit this quarter. The company stated that its higher-priced smartwatch wearables outsold Samsung, Garmin and Fossil smartwatches combined in North America. Smartwatch revenue grew to 55 percent of revenue, up from 30 percent on a sequential basis.
“Our performance in Q2 represents the sixth consecutive quarter that we have delivered on our financial commitments, made important progress in transforming our business, and continued to adapt to the changing wearables market. Demand for Versa, our first ‘mass-appeal’ smartwatch, is very strong. Within the second quarter, Versa outsold Samsung, Garmin and Fossil smartwatches combined in North America, improving our position with retailers, solidifying shelf space for the Fitbit brand and providing a halo effect to our other product offerings,” said James Park, co-founder and CEO.
Fitbit’s stock price rallied earlier this summer, hitting 7.79 — its highest selling price since early 2017. The stock has been slipping since, though this quarterly release could cause the price to jump again.
Tech news aggregator Techmeme is trying out a new way to make money — ad units that are directly tied to the stories on the front page.
The idea is that advertisers can specify company names or news categories that they want to target, then Techmeme will automatically include their message below relevant news stories.
Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera tweeted that this could be a good way to “antagonize a particular company” or “hijack all news concerning that company on Techmeme to insert your rebuttal.” Or you could do something that’s a little less confrontational, like crypto wallet company BRD, which will run ads alongside cryptocurrency news.
The idea of using advertisers to take on your competitors or hijack their message isn’t new — for example, it’s a normal tactic to target competitors’ brand names and other keywords in search campaigns. But this allows advertisers to do so in a way that’s both automated and centered on the latest headlines.
“Why is Techmeme the right venue for ads that react to news in this way? Because it’s where readers go to see ideas in conflict,” Rivera wrote in his announcement. “Techmeme is, after all, the arena where industry-driven news meets critical reaction and analysis. So by letting companies speak out and confront issues in this manner, we provide an additive, even entertaining experience for readers.”
Of course, it can be hard to predict when or how a company or topic will pop up in the news (and to be clear, Rivera said the editorial news mix on Techmeme won’t be affected by who’s purchasing ads). The idea, though, is to keep running the ads alongside relevant stories until Techmeme has delivered the placement hours committed to the advertiser.
And to provide a little extra incentive, Rivera noted that Techmeme won’t allow anyone to buy negative ads targeting current advertisers.
“Gabe has kept Techmeme mostly free of advertising since its inception,” BRD VP of Global Marketing Spencer Chen told me via email. “Despite his Twitter persona, the man actually loves his readers. So anytime he rolls out a new ad product, there’s always a buzz to get in early to reach Techmeme’s highly influential and elevated audience.”
This summer’s wedding season required me to buy a new suit. I vowed to be adventurous and buy a color I normally never would have considered. Alas, I opted for a little more movie-theater usher and a little less Jidenna. Had I known about it at the time, I probably would have used Eison Triple Thread, a company that specializes in creating made-to-order suits.
Working with someone to create a suit can be a hard enough task. You have to consider the occasion the suit is for, body type, taste and other relevant factors. And what other suit company or department store doesn’t already do that? To differentiate itself from the crowd, Eison Triple Thread launched FITS, a web application that creates tailored looks based on clients’ lifestyles and musical preferences.
Eison founder and CEO Julian Eison was the fly kid on the playground and says his parents instilled in him a sense of presentation and to be his best when he was out and about.
“In terms of style and color I was super deliberate about what I wore,” he says. “I was the kid who collected Jordans and wanted to be fashionable because I just cared. I think through that process, and as I grew, I just started to embrace it.”
After six years in private equity, where he says he was able to see tech’s flow from the buy side and the sell side, Eison decided to combine his love of fashion and interest in tech. In 2014, he launched Eison Triple Thread from the garage of his San Francisco home to try his hand at creating an alternative to suit-buying at conventional big-box department stores.
“When we first launched the business, it was about visualization,” Eison says. “How can you visualize your body and think about something going on your body that fits you well?”
But Eison Triple Thread isn’t the only suit company that wants to outfit its customers in sleek styles in a made-to-order fashion. The likes of Indochino, Bonobos and Stitch Fix, all of which came before Eison Triple Thread, ultimately have the same goal. So what’s a suit company do to strike a difference between its competitors? Why, integrate artificial intelligence and Spotify data, naturally.
“Music is at the core of a lot of everyday life; it knows no boundaries or color, and it reveals something about us that we may not know that we kind of project onto people,” Eison says. “So we’re trying to get to the core, the unadulterated piece, and that’s music, and it drives a lot of our decisions, selections, identities and moods.”
During the onboarding process, users first log in to the FITS system with their Spotify credentials and take a lifestyle quiz. Questions include in which industry you work, how you dress for work, what your work commute is, how you spend your free time and which word best describes you. Eison says they can start generating data from this basic information.
“We’ve turned that into a lifestyle quiz that aims to reveal as much about a person in terms of their fashion, their interests, their preferences and how they typically like things to fit. That goes into our analysis and allows us to home in on this fit and this style.”
While you’re busy thinking about yourself to the best of your ability, FITS is trolling Spotify through its API to gather data about your musical tastes: genre, when you tend to listen to music and for how long. The process from beginning to end takes only about 15 minutes — unless, like me, you have a hard time selecting just one word from a list of four to describe yourself. Reflective, intense, upbeat, energetic: I am all of these things.
Once you complete the quiz, the web app returns a list of “looks,” as Eison calls them, based on data gleaned from your best answers to these questions. The looks come from a collection of images that Eison and product director Dario Smith curate regularly from the internet based on styles they deem worthy. Eison tells me they currently have 3,000 images in their database and curate additional ones seasonally to kick back to customers on a regular basis.
They pull the metadata of photos, including color pairing, assumed cloth texture and other similar data, which the algorithm uses, Eison says. In the next release, he said the company will be able to identify skin tone for those who upload the required photos. In addition, the company uses available photo metadata to understand geography of fashion. When available, Eison says, they are able to gain insight into local fashion and trends to further tune the algorithm.
“If there are X amount of styles, we want to make sure we have representation,” Eison says. “We can aggregate all these images and then serve those periodically based on how important or relevant they are.”
For my part, I answered the questions while Spotify worked in the background to make sense of my musical predilections: showtunes (your Hamiltons, your Ragtimes, your Cabarets), Jidenna, Calle 13, selections from Moana (yeah, that’s right), Nathaniel Rateliff & the Night Sweats and a smattering of old R&B.
The result was a list of 25 photos of men of varying ages, races and sizes in a wide range of suits pulled from the Eison database (see five of them below). I was excited about most of them, although there were a few too many double-breasted ones for my liking. That’s on me, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s a look I can pull off. Or maybe that’s the point of a system like this: To present something to someone that he or she might not think they’d ever look good in or visualize themselves even wearing.
Once you select the look you want, there might be further details to tend to, such as number and style of jacket buttons, button-hole color, the color and fabric of the jacket lining, waistband style on the pants and anything else you can possibly think of. One thing I could see in the future is the ability to place these looks on a picture of myself.
Once you make all of these very permanent decisions, you then have to be measured. Or measure yourself if you opted to do this at home. I was in the Eison studio, so Smith did the honors, measuring me in places I never thought needed to be measured. For instance, they noted posture, as well as the way my arms rest on the side of my body. Suddenly I realized why the clothes I’ve worn my entire adult life never fit me very well.
About two weeks later, you have a suit that you picked out not from a rack but one suggested for you based on your lifestyle and musical tastes. And it will fit only you. My suit fits. But because it’s tailored with my measurements, I’m not so surprised by that. The treat here is the unique application of Spotify and machine learning. Having the FITS system tell me to avoid buying a light gray suit is the permission I needed to step outside of my fashion comfort zone and don a look I most likely never would have otherwise.
Not bad for a music-streaming platform and a little AI-style effort.
Rachel Moore, the former Director Of Product at computer vision startup Pilot.AI is suing its co-founders CTO Robert Elliot English and CEO Jonathan Su for sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and wrongful discharge. Pilot.ai’s Human Resources provider Trinet and its Series A investor NEA are also named in the suit filed in San Francisco Superior Court today. The plaintiff, a 24-year-old Master’s graduate of Stanford University, is seeking a trial by jury.
The suit alleges that Su and English created a hostile work environment colored by sexually inappropriate comments, including discussions of pornography, English’s sexual exploits, and that he “participated in an anal sex workshop at Burning Man led by a famous porn star.” Only when Moore agreed to participate in the crude comments was she awarded more status in the company and a $20,000 raise.
English allegedly later invited Moore into his office, closed the door, dropped his pants while talking about his ex-girlfriend, and initially refused to let Moore leave. For rejecting his advance, he then began to retaliate against her in the workplace according to the suit. It states that Moore reported the incident to Su who dismissed the allegations as English being “sexually frustrated.” Su is said to have encouraged Moore to ask English out on a dinner date to resolve the issue, which she eventually declined out of fear for her safety.
Su later urged Moore not to file a formal report about the incident in English’s office because it could “end the company”, according to the suit. She did, prompting an investigation by law firm WilmerHale. Moore agreed to participate only if the law firm remained neutral and did not act as counsel for Pilot.ai. NEA’s Rick Yang, who sits on the board, is said to have overseen the investigation.
The suit calls the investigation “an utter sham and a cover up”. NEA allegedly took the position of refusing to disclose the investigation report claiming attorney-client privilege. Yang is said to have eventually disclosed a summary of the report that confirmed the pants-dropping incident, but found there was nothing sexual about it, and there were no repercussions for the founders. After the investigation, Moore allegedly requested a leave of absence rather than returning to the office where she would have to report to the defendents. When additional leave requests were ignored, she inquired about her employment status, and allegedly ceased to be paid or have access to company systems, and concluded she had been terminated.
The charges filed include quid pro quo sexual harassment, hostile working environment harassment, discrimination based on gender, retaliation, failure to prevent or correct harassment, aiding and abetting harassment, wrongful discharge, intentional infliction of emotional stress, failure to pay wages, waiting time penalities, and violations of labor and business codes.
Requests for comment from English, Su, Pilot.ai, NEA, and Trinet were not returned before press time. Moore’s law firm Arena Hoffman LLP issued this statement to TechCrunch from its attorney’s Ron Arena:
“As alleged in the complaint, Ms. Moore contends that she was subjected to a sexually charged workplace, where Pilot AI’s founders discussed anal sex workshops, boasted of sexual conquests on Tinder, named a server ‘Deep Head,’ and let executives drop their pants in a meeting and call Ms. Moore’s footwear ‘fuck me boots.’ Ms. Moore alleges that her complaints were ignored, then swept aside in a sham investigation – after she declined the CEO’s direction to meet her pants-dropping supervisor alone on a dinner date.”
We’ll have more info as it becomes available and will update with comments from the parties involved.
Lyft, Uber and Via yesterday made an offer to succor New York City’s beleaguered taxi medallion owners: a $100 million relief fund paid over five years to cover the plight of these poor souls. But the city, in its arrogance, refused this generosity! How could they? Perhaps because the money was contingent on New York dropping its proposed regulations of the ridesharing industry. In this light it’s hard to perceive it as much more than city officials rejecting a bribe.
The proposal, as detailed in documents provided to TechCrunch by Lyft, would have the three companies contributing $20 million per year into a “hardship fund” that would be used to bail out taxi drivers who bought into the old system at great cost and are unlikely to recoup their investment.
It’s far from “baffling,” as Lyft put it, that the city rejected this offer immediately. This cadre of companies notorious for ignoring and circumventing regulations offering cash for the city to abandon laws governing them must have come across as a brazen attempt to buy their way out of trouble. That the money would theoretically go to New Yorkers in need only makes it look worse when the city rejects the offer.
The effects of these proposed rules are certainly up for debate, and there’s merit to the arguments by rideshare companies that caps would disproportionately affect the outer boroughs and relatively remote areas. And the city really should do something for medallion holders, many of whom have been left hanging by a shifting and uncertain car-hire market that has arguably been inadequately and inequitably regulated.
More importantly to the companies, however, must be that the regulations could very easily take more than $100 million off their collective bottom lines.
That’s why this offer is being made now, in the middle of the PR push to align people against the proposals with scare stories of longer wait times and higher prices. Some of these stories may even prove to be true, and the City Council should definitely be considering such factors as driver turnover on rideshare services and how to accommodate that in caps, or how to intelligently craft fee structures and wage minimums.
Make no mistake, these are not underdogs fighting an uphill battle, but enormous corporations unloading nine figures on very public lobbying efforts.
Here’s some unexpected fun, courtesy of the man himself. Elon Musk announced via Twitter today, that Teslas will be getting a handful of classic Atari titles in the next four weeks, courtesy of a software update.
Along with already announced self-driving features, Version 9.0 of the electric vehicles’ software update will include “some of the best” old games as an “Easter Egg.” The eccentric CEO appears to be soliciting suggestion via social media at the moment, including Pole Position, Tempest and Missile command, among others.
Tesla has relied pretty heavily on software updates to help push features. Sure, this one is in good fun, but an update arriving late last year brought the fairly necessary addition of FM radio and a tripometer to the Model 3 — both pretty glaring omissions.
Some of best classic @Atari games coming as Easter eggs in Tesla V9.0 release in about 4 weeks. Thanks @Atari!
The games will likely be playable on the cars’ massive center display tablet, which is in positioned in portrait mode on the Model S and X and in landscape on the Model 3. One presumes that the titles will only be playable when the vehicle is parked, so as to avoid having to explain to the officer that you crashed your car because you were playing Frogger.
Speaking of not going anywhere, Pole Position will apparently use the steering wheel as an input — again, when the vehicle is fully parked. $49,000 is an admittedly steep starting price for a new Atari console, but at least you can drive the thing around when you’re done with Missile Command.
It’s been a week since Lenovo’s Google Assistant-powered smart display went on sale. Slowly but surely, its competitors are launching their versions, too. Today, JBL announced that its $249.95 JBL Link View is now available for pre-order, with an expected ship date of September 3, 2018.
JBL went for a slightly different design than Lenovo (and the upcoming LG WK9), but in terms of functionality, these devices are pretty much the same. The Link View features an 8-inch HD screen; unlike Lenovo’s Smart Display, JBL is not making a larger 10-inch version. It’s got two 10W speakers and the usual support for Bluetooth, as well as Google’s Chromecast protocol.
JBL says the unit is splash proof (IPX4), so you can safely use it to watch YouTube recipe videos in your kitchen. It also offers a 5MP front-facing camera for your video chats and a privacy switch that lets you shut off the camera and microphone.
JBL, Lenovo and LG all announced their Google Assistant smart displays at CES earlier this. Lenovo was the first to actually ship a product, and both the hardware as well as Google’s software received a positive reception. There’s no word on when LG’s WK9 will hit the market.
Being a part of the Disney Accelerator is the gift that keeps on giving, apparently. After introducing R2-D2-hacking Droid Inventor Kit last year, LittleBits is back with a new kit featuring The Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Iron Man is the real star of this one, with kids building a wearable “gauntlet” featuring an LED matrix panel based on Tony Stark’s palm Repulsor Beam. The arm features wearable sensors (including a new accelerometer), Avengers sound effects and nine bits in total.
The connected app offers step by step video instructions, led by various familiar Avengers members (with a 50/50 gender split to make the experience more inclusive), including the Hulk, Black Panther, Ant Man and the Wasp. Kids are encouraged to customize the gauntlets from there, and once done, they can proudly display it on the included Iron Man stand.
“From creating circuits to introducing superpowers like stealth mode, rainbow control, power boost, and more, the Avengers Hero Inventor Kit teaches kids about STEAM in a fun, accessible way,” CEO Ayah Bdeir said in a release tied to the news. “We’re thrilled to extend our relationship with Disney to now work with the amazing team at Marvel to give kids the skills — and the confidence — to change the world.”
The partnership’s a no brainer for both companies. The Avengers are about as hot as movie properties get, and LittleBits some of the best STEM toys on the market. Famous technology skeptic John Biggs called the Droid Inventor Kit “the first STEM toy that works.” High praise, indeed.
The new kit starts shipping August 4th, priced at $150 — which puts it $50 above the Star Wars kit.
