Year: 2018

Deadlines have a sneaky way of creeping up on you — as busy TechCrunch writers can readily attest. If you’re planning to attend Disrupt San Francisco 2018 at Moscone Center West on September 5-7, you’ve got a major deadline snapping at your heels.

Your chance to purchase passes at our early-bird rate disappears forever at midnight PST on August 1. The savings are significant. Depending on the type of pass you buy, you can save up to $1,200. Be kind to your bottom line, and buy your ticket today.

Not only is Disrupt San Francisco 2018 the biggest, most ambitious Disrupt event we’ve ever produced, it’s also the only Disrupt event in North America this year. An event this special deserves extraordinary trappings, and we’ve got ’em.

Startup Battlefield, the leading startup-pitch competition that’s produced the likes of Dropbox, Mint, TripIt and Yammer — to name a few — promises to be even more intense and exciting than ever. Why? Increasing the non-equity cash grand prize to $100,000 might have something to do with it. This takes epic to a new level.

Our first Virtual Hackathon features thousands of top hackers, programmers, designers, coders and marketers all over the world vying for a $10,000 cash grand prize — plus, challenging contests from our sponsors add thousands of dollars more in cash and prizes.

What’s your startup role? Founder, investor, marketer? Maybe you’re looking for a new job. Regardless of your agenda, Startup Alley is the place you need to explore. The exhibition floor features more than 1,200 early-stage startups showcasing tech products, platforms and talent that spans practically every industry — but with a particular emphasis on AI, AR/VR, Blockchain, Biotech, Fintech, Gaming, Healthtech, Privacy/Security, Space, Mobility, Retail or Robotics.

If you blanch at the idea of sorting through 1,200 startups to find just the right investment opportunity — or to snare the interest of just the right investor — let CrunchMatch make your networking life easier. It’s our free, business match-making service that helps connect founders with investors who share similar business goals. More opportunities; fewer blisters. It’s all good.

That’s just a quick glimpse of the programming you’ll enjoy at Disrupt SF. Need more inducement? Check out the speakers, and take a gander at the conference agenda.

Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place at Moscone Center West on September 5-7. It’s three full days of opportunity, inspiration, networking and fun. But your chance to go at the early-bird price ends in just 72 hours at midnight PST on August 1. This is one deadline you don’t want to miss. Make with the clickety-click and buy your pass right now.

In what amounts to one of the simplest but most baffling forms of social engineering, hackers from China have taken to sending CDs full of malware to state officials, leading the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a government security outfit, to release a warning detailing the scam.

The trick is simple: a package arrives with a Chinese postmark containing a rambling message and a small CD. The CD, in turn, contains a set of Word files that include script-based malware. These scripts run when the victims access them on their computers, presumably resulting in compromised systems.

“The MS-ISAC said preliminary analysis of the CDs indicate they contain Mandarin language Microsoft Word (.doc) files, some of which include malicious Visual Basic scripts,” wrote security researcher Brian Krebs. “So far, State Archives, State Historical Societies, and a State Department of Cultural Affairs have all received letters addressed specifically to them, the MS-ISAC says. It’s not clear if anyone at these agencies was tricked into actually inserting the CD into a government computer.”

While it should be obvious that you shouldn’t stick unrequested storage media into your computer, clearly this scam seemed feasible enough for someone to spend a little cash to make and ship these little CD ROMs. Now they just have to target victims who still use CD readers.

The direct-to-consumer space has some stand-out players, both in newcomers like Brooklinen and old-timers like Warby Parker. But one company, Interior Define, has maintained a low profile over the four years of its existence.

The company offers fully customizable furniture, including couches, dining sets and bed frames, to customers through an online showroom. But ID also has guide shops in Chicago (its home market), LA, New York, and Austin.

Interior Define has also just opened up its biggest retail location yet, right in the middle of Hayes Valley in San Francisco. And this time, the store has a twist.

In the back of the showroom, Interior Define has built out a fully furnished two-story home called Studio ID. Alongside its own pieces, Studio ID includes pieces and products from other digitally native partners including Wright Bedding, Gantri, Snowe Home, Barn & Willow, 57st Design, Revival Rugs, Minted, Fireclay Tile, and Sonos.

The idea here is to show off ID’s pieces in their most natural setting, alongside offering partner companies better exposure via offline retail.

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According to Interior Define cofounder and CEO Rob Royer, there is no exchange of cash for these partnerships.

Royer also told TechCrunch that San Francisco has been a priority market for the company for a while, but that the startup insisted on finding a great place within Hayes Valley, and waited until they found this newest location to move into the market.

When Interior Define first launched, the company simply sold customizable sofas. Users could choose the upholstery, the measurements, and the accents like sofa legs. The company has since expanded into dining sets and bed frames, but has also enhanced the overall experience with an Interior Define app.

The app lets users scan the floor of their home and place the item they’re customizing into the home via augmented reality. Interior Define also took a page out of the Warby Parker playbook, offering a free swatch program for users interested in purchasing online.

Interior Define has raised a total of $27.2 million from investors such as Fifth Wall, Pritzker Group, Breakout Capital, and Greak Oaks.

In October 2017 CEO Nikolay Storonsky’s Revolut raised $71 million at a valuation of $350 million. Today it’s certified unicorn, approaching a $2 billion valuation.

His stake is said to be worth over $510 million. But not all success is a huge mystery. For Storonsky, working hard is his big secret.

Revolut’s core product is a payment card that boasts super-low fees when spending abroad. But, the company has been slowly adding more and more additional financial services, from insurance to cryptocurrency trading and current accounts.

Revolut is becoming a bank by the back door, and it’s a strategy that’s working. Storonsky is aiming for 100 million customers by 2023 and a succession of new features.

Born in a small town on the outskirts of Moscow, Storonsky boxed as a child and then took up swimming as a teenager before studying for a physics masters degree at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a top Russian university. He became a state champion swimmer while at university.

His first job was as a trader at Lehman Brothers, which he joined before finishing his degree, while at the same time completing a separate masters in economics at the New Economic School in Moscow. He left Lehman before it collapsed, joining Credit Suisse at the start of 2008. In 2013 he left to set up Revolut.

In just a few years, Revolut has signed up over 2 million customers, processed over $17 billion in transactions and become one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe.

We’re absolutely thrilled to have Storonsky join us at the Disrupt SF conference in September.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the early-bird rate until August 1 here.

Fabric, a personal journaling app that emerged from Y Combinator’s 2016 batch of startups, is relaunching itself as a Facebook alternative. The app is giving itself a makeover in the wake of Facebook’s closure of the Moves location tracker, by offering its own tool to record your activities, photos, memories and other moments shared with friends and family. But unlike on Facebook, everything in Fabric is private by default and data isn’t shared with marketers.

Instead, the startup hopes to build something users will eventually pay for, via premium features or subscriptions.

The idea for the startup came from two people who helped create Facebook’s core features.

Co-founders Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov worked for several years at the social network, where Vijayvergiya built the product that would later become Facebook Timeline at an internal hackathon. He also worked on products like Friendship Pages, Year in Review and On This Day, while Valtchanov developed integrations between Facebook and fitness applications.

After leaving Facebook, both were inspired to work on Fabric because of their interest in personal journaling – and that became the key focus for the original version of the Fabric app. But while other journaling apps may offer a blank space for recording thoughts, Fabric automates the process by pulling in photos, posts from elsewhere on social media, places you visited, and more, and put those on its map interface.

The longer-term goal is that Fabric users will be able to look back across their personal history to answer any kind of question about where they had been, what they did, and who they were with – but in a more private environment than what’s available on Facebook.

Facebook could have built something similar, but its focus has been more on how personal profile data could be useful to advertisers.

Despite numerous check-ins, posts where you tagged friends, shared photos and more, there’s still not an easy way to ask Facebook about that great Indian restaurant you tried last March, or who was on that group beach trip with you a few years ago, for example. At best, Facebook offers memory flashbacks through its On This Day feature (now available at any time via the Memories tab), or round-ups and collages that appear at various times throughout the year.

As a search engine for your own memories, it’s not that great.

What’s New 

This is where Fabric comes in. It will automatically record your activities, checking you in to places you visit, which you can then choose to add friends to.

While the idea of automatic location gathering may turn a good number of users off, the difference is that Fabric’s data collection is meant for your eyes only, unless you explicitly choose to share something with friends.

Fabric doesn’t use third-party software for its location system – it’s written in-house, so the data is never touched by a third-party. It also uses industry standard encryption for data transfer and storage, and login information is stored in a separate system from the rest of your data as an added precaution.

Notably, Fabric doesn’t plan to generate revenue by selling data or offering it to advertisers for targeting purposes. Instead, the company hopes users will eventually pay for its product – perhaps as a subscription or through premium upgrades. (It’s not doing this yet, however.)

“The whole motivation behind Fabric is that many meaningful parts of your life do not belong in the public sphere,” explains Vijayvergiya. “In order to be able to capture these moments, user trust is essential and is something we have baked into our company culture. Internally, we refer to ourselves as a ‘private-first’ company. Everything on Fabric is private by default. You have to choose to include friends in your moments. We don’t share any data with marketers, and we don’t intend to share personally identifiable information with advertisers,” he says.

Since its 2016 release, Fabric has been downloaded 70,000 times by users across 117 countries, and has seen 112 million automatic check-ins.

The new version of the app has been redesigned to be something users engage with more often, as opposed to the more passive journaling app it was before.

The app now offers an outline of your activities, which it also calls Timeline. Here, you can add people, photos and memorable anecdotes to those automated entries. You can jump back to any day to see your history with any person or place that appears on the Timeline.

You can also turn any moment into one you collaborate on with friends, by allowing others to add photos and comments. That is, instead of broad post to a group of so-called “friends” on Facebook, you share the moment with those who really matter. This isn’t all that different from how people use private messaging apps and group chats today – in order to share things with people that aren’t necessarily meant for everyone to see.

In addition, Fabric allows you to add your friends to the app, so you can be automatically tagged when you both spend time together in the real world. This also simplifies sharing because you won’t have to think about which posts should be shared with which audience.

For instance, Vijayvergiya says, “this means you can add your mom as a friend, and only share with her the moments you spend together in the same place.”

The most compelling feature in the updated app may not be check-ins or sharing, but search.

In Fabric, you can now search for past events in your life similar to how you search the web. That is, you could type in “restaurant rome 2017” or “camila los angeles birthday” and find the matching posts, Vijayvergiya suggests. And because you can import your Facebook, Instagram, and Camera Roll to Fabric, it’s now offering the search engine that Facebook itself forgot to build. (You can import your Facebook Moves history, too, ahead of its shutdown.)

Fabric’s search will also be available on the desktop web, where it’s currently in beta.

Fabric’s real challenger, as it turns out, may not be Facebook, though. It’s Google Photos.

Because of advances in image recognition technology, Google Photos (and some other photo apps) have built advanced search capabilities that let you pull up not places, things, people, and more, using data recognized in the image itself. Users can also share those photos with others, collaborate on albums, and leave notes as comments.

The difference is that Fabric offers import from a variety of sources and encourages journaling. But that may not be enough to attract a large user base, especially when automatic check-ins rely on the app’s use of background location which has some impact on battery life.

Fabric is a free download on iOS.

 

 

Serverless, Inc came to the serverless game early, creating an open source framework for developers back in 2015. Today, they want to build on that earlier product to give developers more control over deployment and delivery of serverless applications. To that end, they announced a $10 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Ventures. They have now raised a total of $13 million, according to the company.

The company also announced the release of the Serverless Platform, which include the Serverless Framework, Serverless Dashboard and Serverless Gateway. The Framework lets developers set up their serverless code across different cloud platforms and set conditions on the deployment such as function rules and infrastructure dependencies. The dashboard gives visibility and information about the deployment, so that you can track and trace serverless functions over time, regardless of the cloud platform you’re using.

The gateway provides a way to pull in legacy tools into a serverless approach. As the company describes it, “The Serverless Gateway allows businesses to easily integrate serverless into their existing mesh of services, including containers, SaaS or other legacy systems. The Event Gateway, along with serverless compute, gives organizations a powerful way to react to all of their business events with code.”

Company founder and CEO Austen Collins says that as companies shift to a serverless-first mindset, we’re going to see a lower cost to build and deploy applications, but that is going to take some tooling to really work across a team or large organization, tooling his company wants to provide.

“I think now we are seeing widespread demand for tools to operationalize serverless development, tools to make developers across an entire team, or even across entire organization all practice serverless development in a safe and standard way,” Collins explained.

The framework and communications gateway are open source and always will be, Collins, explained. They will make money by charging companies to use the dashboard to get insights into their serverless code or to access a hosted version of the gateway. People can host their own version of the gateway through using the open source version of the product.

With serverless, developers no longer have to worry about the infrastructure required to run their applications. Instead, they create functions that trigger events and the cloud vendor takes care of deploying the necessary compute, memory and storage to run that event.

It offers a number of advantages including eliminating the need to worry about deploying the appropriate infrastructure and only paying for the infrastructure you use each time your function triggers a given event. This is in stark contrast to the traditional approach to development where you deploy a server for your application and pay for it 24/7 whether it happens to be in use or not.

While this approach undoubtedly has the potential to remove some of the complexity associated with developing and deploying applications, it doesn’t remove all of the requirements developers have to deploy and manage their code according to a set of defined policies. The kind of tool set Serverless Inc is offering provides some additional control and insight developers could be lacking with such a new approach.

The company launched in 2015 and currently has 22 employees in a distributed office approach. Their main office is in San Francisco. Customers include EA Sports, Nordstrom, Reuters and Coca-Cola. The new money should allow them to expand and build out the platform further.

The number of mobile payments users who tap to pay using a contactless payment solution provided by their mobile device’s maker will grow to 450 million people worldwide by 2020, according to a new forecast from Juniper Research. This includes mobile payment solutions like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and others. By this time, Apple Pay will have amassed the largest audience, with Apple accounting for 1 in 2 of these “OEM Pay” users globally – meaning those using wallets provided by the original equipment manufacturer, as opposed to a third-party app.

The forecast includes newcomers to the market, like Fitbit’s odd entry with Fitbit Pay, offered with select editions of its Versa smartwatch, for example. But not surprisingly, the analysts don’t believe these alternatives will amass much market share over the next few years.

“We believe that growth over the next five years will continue to be dominated by offerings from the major OEM players,” said the research’s author Nitin Bhas, referring to companies like Apple, Google, and Samsung. “Additionally, we now have the likes of Huawei Pay and Fitbit Pay launching in several markets; this is now included in Juniper’s contactless forecasts,” he noted.

By 2020, “OEM Pay” wallets will account for over $300 billion in transactions, representing 15 percent of the total number of contactless in-store transactions.

However, the contactless payments market will still be dominated by contactless card payments, not mobile wallets. Contactless card payments are most popular in parts of Asia, including China, where they account for nearly 55 percent of global contactless payments. Combined, all contactless payments in-store will reach $2 trillion by 2029, which is 15 percent of the total point-of-sale transactions.

Notably, contactless payments will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in 2018 – one year earlier than previously estimated.

Meanwhile, by 2022, Juniper forecasts nearly 10 billion mobile contactless ticketing transactions will take place, with North America leading other regions, followed by parts of Asia, including China.

What’s interesting about this new research report is that Apple Pay has such a large following, given how it’s Android-based smartphones, not iPhones, that dominate the worldwide smartphone market. Android’s scale is thanks to Google’s carrier partnerships and the lower cost of some Android phones, which have allowed Android to make inroads in developing regions as well. Android today accounts for around 85-86 percent of the global smartphone market, compared with Apple’s iOS’s 14-15 percent, according to various measurement firms.

Of course, Android has to contend with something Apple does not – OEMs like Samsung running their own mobile wallets to compete with Google Pay (previously called Android Pay.) That fragmentation could account for, in part, why Apple Pay will soon account for 1 out of every 2 contactless mobile wallet user.

 

In an age where people stream music instead of buying it, how do you build something equivalent to a pre-order campaign for upcoming releases? The answer is to create a “pre-save” campaign, akin to a landing page where fans can authorise you to automatically add a new song, EP or album to their steaming library or playlist of their choice as soon as it becomes available.

However, pre-save tools for Spotify — if you even knew they existed — are often perceived as expensive and solely for use at major labels or established music marketing companies. Now music marketing and technology startup Feature.fm wants to change that with its “Ultimate Pre-Save,’ a free tool for artists or labels of any size.

Better yet, the Ultimate Pre-Save tool also supports Apple’s newly launched “Pre-Add” feature, which works in a similar way to a Spotify pre-save. Deezer’s version of pre-save is supported too.

The set up process is simple. You register with Feature.fm as either an individual artist or label, select the Ultimate Pre-Save tool and click on create new pre-save. Next you are required to give the work a launch date and tell it which of the three services you plan to launch on. You then need to add a title, an image, preview link, and make any changes to the standard text. Later on, once you know the final URL for your new release on each respective service, you add that too.

And that’s pretty much it. Your fully functioning pre-save page is built, ready for you to start sharing/promoting and hopefully have a successful Day One launch.

Meanwhile, any fan who lands on your pre-save page can click “Pre-Save” or “Pre-Add” to get your music into their libraries on release day. They’ll also automatically follow your artist page if they don’t already. You also have the option to re-direct them to a different URL afterwards so you can reward fans with things like exclusive content or contests.

One other useful feature is that the Feature.fm pre-save link automatically converts to a “smart link” once the song/album is released. So up until release the message will be “pre-save on Spotify, Apple Music or Deezer” etc. and then after release day the link automatically switches to a “buy or stream on your preferred service” and pulls in other digital music services too e.g. Amazon and Tidal etc. The idea is that you only need one smart link for the entire life of a campaign.

Other than that, you can capture/collect up to 50 fan emails for free, and get access to click and pre-save counts. There is also the option to pay for some advanced features, such as custom domains, either monthly or as a one-off campaign. And of course Feature.fm wants to up-sell you to a host of other marketing tech features, such as its incredibly easy to use music ad tools, deeper analytics, and the ability to send remarketing data to your Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and other ad programs.

There’s NSFW language in the video above. Enjoy.

Here is the DJI Mavic 2 before you’re supposed to see it. Just like the original, it’s a small, foldable drone with amazing capabilities. This time around, there will two different version, the Zoom and the Pro, though both will reportedly have the ability to fly at 45mph with a range of five miles.

DJI has yet to announce this model. This leak comes from the UK where the drones are described in detail in the latest Argos catalog.

Both editions of the Mavic 2 will reportedly have 360-degree collision detection and sport DJI’s Advanced Pilot Assistance Systems and Active Track 2.0 to assist in flying the drone. The battery life is clocked at 31 minutes.

The DJI Mavic 2 Pro comes equipped with a 1-inch CMOS Hasselblad camera where the Zoom model has a 2x zoom lens. The Argos advertisement doesn’t mention if the gimbals are removable.

Pricing and release date is not mentioned in the advertisement. Chances are both models will be available in the coming weeks as retailers ramp up holiday stock. Expect pricing to be similar to the current Mavic.