Year: 2018

French startup Alan has been mostly focused on its main health insurance product — a standard package for companies of all sizes and shapes. The company is launching a second offering on this market with Alan Blue.

Companies can now choose between two levels of insurance — Alan Green and Alan Blue. Alan Green is the existing health insurance product with a new name. It still costs the same and offers the same level of coverage. Alan Blue is a higher-end product with better coverage for companies who want to retain talent using better benefits.

French employees automatically get basic coverage from the national healthcare system. But companies also need to provide a health insurance from a private company to pay for part of the health expenses. It’s a hybrid system with a strong legal framework.

This is where Alan comes along as your employer signs a deal with an insurance company to cover all their employees. Usually, insurance companies provide multiple offerings. But Alan has historically focused on a single plan.

With Alan Green, you get good coverage starting at $59 (€50) per month per employee if you’re under 36 years old. It gets more expensive if you’re over 36, and then over 45, and then over 56 years old. Plans for employees over 56 cost $100 per month (€85).

Companies have to pay at least 50 percent of those plans. The rest is deducted from your pay. Some companies also choose to pay 100 percent of everyone’s health insurance to show that they really care about their employees.

Employees can also choose to cover their spouse and kids with Alan. Plans for a second adult cost the same as plans for employees. And you can cover all your kids for a $47 flat monthly fee (€40).

While you won’t pay anything if you see a normal medial practitioner, Alan Green couldn’t necessarily cover an expensive pair of glasses or extensive dental work.

Alan Blue is a second option for companies looking for a premium health insurance product. Companies now have to decide between the two plans for the entire staff. You can’t let employees decide between one plan or the other.

Alan Blue starts at $82 per month (€70) for young employees and also gets more expensive depending on the age of the employee. While there’s only a €20 difference between the two offerings for employees under 36 years old, the price difference is higher the older you get. Similarly, you can cover all your kids for a slightly more expensive $64 flat monthly fee (€55).

For companies that choose to fully pay for health insurance, it depends if you’re willing to spend more to provide better insurance. But some companies only pay part of the health insurance package. Employees will end up paying more if their companies switch from Alan Green to Alan Blue.

“Overall, companies that are growing rapidly tend to invest a lot for their employees and switch to Alan Blue,” co-founder and CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian told me. “We already noticed that with companies in our existing clients. Some companies are also switching to Alan because they wanted something very high end before switching.”

Alan still plans to target small companies. The startup thinks that small companies are underserved by big insurance companies and tend to pay more for health insurance.

Alan Green is not going away anytime soon. Samuelian thinks you can combine Alan Green with Alan Map to find the perfect doctor around you and get fully reimbursed.

Alan Blue is already available to selected Alan customers. All companies will be able to sign up in September. You can already view all pricing and insurance details on Alan’s website.

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 is bringing the world together, one hack at a time. With our flagship conference doubling in size this year, we decided to expand our Hackathon, too. Our first-ever Disrupt Virtual Hackathon is for developers, designers, hackers and marketers worldwide to show off their skills with a chance of getting a free pass to Disrupt SF, as well as several other great prizes. There’s about a month left to submit projects, so sign up today and start building!

So how does it work? First you’ve got to sign up here and submit your hack by August 2. Then, we’ve gathered some great hackathon judges from Pinterest, Slack and more who will score all of the hacks submitted virtually. They’ll assign a rating from 1 to 5 based on the quality of the idea, technical implementation of the idea and the product’s potential impact. Teams with scores in the top 100 will receive up to 5 Innovator Passes to Disrupt SF for each of the members of their team. The top 30 of that group will move on to the semi-finals and be able to demo their creations at Disrupt SF. Then, 10 of the semi-finalists will take their team to The Next Stage to demo their product to the world. The “Best in Show” team will win a grand prize of $10,000 and be crowned as TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon’s first champion.

We have tons of great sponsor challenges to earn additional prizes and cash, from AI for autonomous vehicles to an interactive 360 VR experience. We’re excited to announce two new sponsor contests from Sony Pictures and United Airlines.

Sony Pictures

“Searching” from Sony Pictures is a hyper-modern thriller told via the technology devices we use every day. Director Aneesh Chaganty, formerly of Google, uses webcams, iPhone front cams and computer screen capture to immerse the audience in the storyline.

In Searching, tech is both at the heart of the problem and also the tool used to reunite father and daughter. Some of the world’s most exciting technological advances have had unintended consequences on vulnerable minors.

Cyber safety is now a legitimate concern of the modern parent. How can this movie engage and challenge tech professionals to think of new, innovative ways to safeguard minors online?

Challenge: The goal of our participation in the hackathon is to actively seek Chrome Extensions that will help parents and children be more mindful of their digital lives.

Sponsor Prize: First place – $9,000

United Airlines

United Airlines is not only one of the world’s largest airlines that generates revenue of more than $42 billion and employs approximately 85,000 employees, they also have a Digital organization that supports many of our digital assets (United.com, MobileWeb, Mobile App, Kiosk). United.com is one of the largest e-commerce sites by sales volume of more than $15 billion, and daily visitors of more than 1 million.

United’s NDC (New Distribution Capability) APIs enable clients to shop for and purchase travel on United. Clients can shop for flights meeting their criteria (trip origin-destination, dates, cabin, etc.), shop for United ancillaries like Economy Plus extra leg room seating and United ancillary bundles, and submit payment to create bookings for their travel. United’s NDC 17.2 APIs are industry-standard SOAP XML APIs similar to those used by other prominent carriers around the world.

Challenge: Create an app that helps provide customers with a unique experience with United flight and ancillary offers, to book and pay for reservations and to view reservations.  

Sponsor Prize: Best Use of United APIs: Round trip ticket voucher, eligible for anywhere United flies, for all members of the winning Hackathon team (up to $2,400 per person).

It’s 100 percent FREE to participate in our virtual hackathon and we’re pumped to see what everybody will create. Sign up today and let the hacking begin!

TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018 is bringing the world together, one hack at a time. With our flagship conference doubling in size this year, we decided to expand our Hackathon, too. Our first-ever Disrupt Virtual Hackathon is for developers, designers, hackers and marketers worldwide to show off their skills with a chance of getting a free pass to Disrupt SF, as well as several other great prizes. There’s about a month left to submit projects, so sign up today and start building!

So how does it work? First you’ve got to sign up here and submit your hack by August 2. Then, we’ve gathered some great hackathon judges from Pinterest, Slack and more who will score all of the hacks submitted virtually. They’ll assign a rating from 1 to 5 based on the quality of the idea, technical implementation of the idea and the product’s potential impact. Teams with scores in the top 100 will receive up to 5 Innovator Passes to Disrupt SF for each of the members of their team. The top 30 of that group will move on to the semi-finals and be able to demo their creations at Disrupt SF. Then, 10 of the semi-finalists will take their team to The Next Stage to demo their product to the world. The “Best in Show” team will win a grand prize of $10,000 and be crowned as TC Disrupt Virtual Hackathon’s first champion.

We have tons of great sponsor challenges to earn additional prizes and cash, from AI for autonomous vehicles to an interactive 360 VR experience. We’re excited to announce two new sponsor contests from Sony Pictures and United Airlines.

Sony Pictures

“Searching” from Sony Pictures is a hyper-modern thriller told via the technology devices we use every day. Director Aneesh Chaganty, formerly of Google, uses webcams, iPhone front cams and computer screen capture to immerse the audience in the storyline.

In Searching, tech is both at the heart of the problem and also the tool used to reunite father and daughter. Some of the world’s most exciting technological advances have had unintended consequences on vulnerable minors.

Cyber safety is now a legitimate concern of the modern parent. How can this movie engage and challenge tech professionals to think of new, innovative ways to safeguard minors online?

Challenge: The goal of our participation in the hackathon is to actively seek Chrome Extensions that will help parents and children be more mindful of their digital lives.

Sponsor Prize: First place – $9,000

United Airlines

United Airlines is not only one of the world’s largest airlines that generates revenue of more than $42 billion and employs approximately 85,000 employees, they also have a Digital organization that supports many of our digital assets (United.com, MobileWeb, Mobile App, Kiosk). United.com is one of the largest e-commerce sites by sales volume of more than $15 billion, and daily visitors of more than 1 million.

United’s NDC (New Distribution Capability) APIs enable clients to shop for and purchase travel on United. Clients can shop for flights meeting their criteria (trip origin-destination, dates, cabin, etc.), shop for United ancillaries like Economy Plus extra leg room seating and United ancillary bundles, and submit payment to create bookings for their travel. United’s NDC 17.2 APIs are industry-standard SOAP XML APIs similar to those used by other prominent carriers around the world.

Challenge: Create an app that helps provide customers with a unique experience with United flight and ancillary offers, to book and pay for reservations and to view reservations.  

Sponsor Prize: Best Use of United APIs: Round trip ticket voucher, eligible for anywhere United flies, for all members of the winning Hackathon team (up to $2,400 per person).

It’s 100 percent FREE to participate in our virtual hackathon and we’re pumped to see what everybody will create. Sign up today and let the hacking begin!

Back in April, Facebook announced that it would be working with a group of academics to establish an independent research commission to look into issues of social and political significance using the company’s own extensive data collection. That commission just came out of stealth; it’s called Social Science One, and its first project will have researchers analyzing about a petabyte’s worth of sharing data.

The way the commission works is basically that a group of academics is created and given full access to the processes and datasets that Facebook could potentially provide. They identify and help design interesting sets based on their experience as researchers themselves, then document them publicly — for instance, “this dataset consists of 10 million status updates taken during the week of the Brexit vote, structured in such and such a way.”

This documentation describing the set doubles as a “request for proposals” from the research community. Other researchers interested in the data propose analyses or experiments, which are evaluated by commission. These proposals are then granted (according to their merit) access to the data, funding, and other privileges. Resulting papers will be peer reviewed with help from the Social Science Research Council, and can be published without being approved (or even seen) by Facebook.

“The data collected by private companies has vast potential to help social scientists understand and solve society’s greatest challenges. But until now that data has typically been unavailable for academic research,” said Social Science One co-founder, Harvard’s Gary King, in a blog post announcing the initiative. “Social Science One has established an ethical structure for marshaling privacy preserving industry data for the greater social good while ensuring full academic publishing freedom.”

If you’re curious about the specifics of the partnership, it’s actually been described in a paper of its own, available here.

The first dataset is a juicy one: “almost all” public URLs shared and clicked by Facebook users globally, accompanied by a host of useful metadata.

It will contain “on the order of 2 million unique URLs shared in 300 million posts, per week,” reads a document describing the set. “We estimate that the data will contain on the order of 30 billion rows, translating to an effective raw size on the order of a petabyte.”

The metadata includes country, user age, device and so on, but also dozens of other items, such as “ideological affiliation bucket,” the proportion of friends vs. non-friends who viewed a post, feed position, the number of total shares, clicks, likes, hearts, flags… there’s going to be quite a lot to sort through. Naturally all this is carefully pruned to protect user privacy — this is a proper research dataset, not a Cambridge Analytica-style catch-all siphoned from the service.

In a call accompanying the announcement, King explained that the commission had much more data coming down the pipeline, with a focus on disinformation, polarization, election integrity, political advertising, and civic engagement.

“It really does get at some of the fundamental questions of social media and democracy,” King said on the call.

The other sets are in various stages of completeness or permission: post-election survey participants in Mexico and elsewhere are being asked if their responses can be connected with their Facebook profiles; the political ad archive will be formally made available; they’re working on something with CrowdTangle; there are various partnerships with other researchers and institutions around the world.

A “continuous feed of all public posts on Facebook and Instagram” and “a large random sample of Facebook newsfeeds” are also under consideration, probably encountering serious scrutiny and caveats from the company.

Of course quality research must be paid for, and it would be irresponsible not to note that Social Science One is funded not by Facebook but by a number of foundations: the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, The Democracy Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Charles Koch Foundation, Omidyar Network’s Tech and Society Solutions Lab, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

You can keep up with the organization’s work here; it really is a promising endeavor and will almost certainly produce some interesting science — though not for some time. We’ll keep an eye out for any research emerging from the partnership.

Back in April, Facebook announced that it would be working with a group of academics to establish an independent research commission to look into issues of social and political significance using the company’s own extensive data collection. That commission just came out of stealth; it’s called Social Science One, and its first project will have researchers analyzing about a petabyte’s worth of sharing data.

The way the commission works is basically that a group of academics is created and given full access to the processes and datasets that Facebook could potentially provide. They identify and help design interesting sets based on their experience as researchers themselves, then document them publicly — for instance, “this dataset consists of 10 million status updates taken during the week of the Brexit vote, structured in such and such a way.”

This documentation describing the set doubles as a “request for proposals” from the research community. Other researchers interested in the data propose analyses or experiments, which are evaluated by commission. These proposals are then granted (according to their merit) access to the data, funding, and other privileges. Resulting papers will be peer reviewed with help from the Social Science Research Council, and can be published without being approved (or even seen) by Facebook.

“The data collected by private companies has vast potential to help social scientists understand and solve society’s greatest challenges. But until now that data has typically been unavailable for academic research,” said Social Science One co-founder, Harvard’s Gary King, in a blog post announcing the initiative. “Social Science One has established an ethical structure for marshaling privacy preserving industry data for the greater social good while ensuring full academic publishing freedom.”

If you’re curious about the specifics of the partnership, it’s actually been described in a paper of its own, available here.

The first dataset is a juicy one: “almost all” public URLs shared and clicked by Facebook users globally, accompanied by a host of useful metadata.

It will contain “on the order of 2 million unique URLs shared in 300 million posts, per week,” reads a document describing the set. “We estimate that the data will contain on the order of 30 billion rows, translating to an effective raw size on the order of a petabyte.”

The metadata includes country, user age, device and so on, but also dozens of other items, such as “ideological affiliation bucket,” the proportion of friends vs. non-friends who viewed a post, feed position, the number of total shares, clicks, likes, hearts, flags… there’s going to be quite a lot to sort through. Naturally all this is carefully pruned to protect user privacy — this is a proper research dataset, not a Cambridge Analytica-style catch-all siphoned from the service.

In a call accompanying the announcement, King explained that the commission had much more data coming down the pipeline, with a focus on disinformation, polarization, election integrity, political advertising, and civic engagement.

“It really does get at some of the fundamental questions of social media and democracy,” King said on the call.

The other sets are in various stages of completeness or permission: post-election survey participants in Mexico and elsewhere are being asked if their responses can be connected with their Facebook profiles; the political ad archive will be formally made available; they’re working on something with CrowdTangle; there are various partnerships with other researchers and institutions around the world.

A “continuous feed of all public posts on Facebook and Instagram” and “a large random sample of Facebook newsfeeds” are also under consideration, probably encountering serious scrutiny and caveats from the company.

Of course quality research must be paid for, and it would be irresponsible not to note that Social Science One is funded not by Facebook but by a number of foundations: the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, The Democracy Fund, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The Charles Koch Foundation, Omidyar Network’s Tech and Society Solutions Lab, and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

You can keep up with the organization’s work here; it really is a promising endeavor and will almost certainly produce some interesting science — though not for some time. We’ll keep an eye out for any research emerging from the partnership.

Facebook is getting guide bots to help tourist bots explore Hell’s Kitchen in New York in a new research paper published today that’s looking to examine how AI systems can orient themselves and communicate observed data.

The setup for Facebook’s “Walk the Talk” experiment involves throwing a “tourist” bot onto a random street corner of NYC and getting a “guide” bot to direct them to a spot on a 2D map which they have access to. This involved Facebook capturing 360 photos of a bunch of different street corners in random spots in NY and feeding them to the tourist bot who then had to peer around at the behest of the guide bot who would gain a sense of where the tourist was based and try to direct them through a text conversation.

It’s indeed quite the novel experiment, which plays out like this in practice.

Facebook isn’t doing all of this to give you a virtual guide in some unannounced mapping product, this is Facebook AI Research as opposed to their applied machine learning arm so this stuff really resides in the long-term, less product centric sphere. What this experiment is helping Facebook’s AI researchers approach is a concept called “Embodied AI.”

Embodied AI basically entails giving AI models the ability to learn while on-the-go gathering data that is present around them that can help them make sense of what they already do know. In “Talk the Walk,” the guide AI bot had all of this 2D map data and the tourist bot had all of this rich 360 visual data but it was only through communication with each other that they were able to carry out their directives.

The real goal was to work on the two agents gathering information through natural language, but the researchers found that the bots did a better job of completing the task when they used “synthetic language” which relied more on them using more simplistic symbols to convey information and location. This less natural way of communicating data not only outperformed a more human-like chat, it also enable the bots to find their way more concisely than humans would in a natural language chat.

What made this environment particularly difficult was the fact that it was the real world. The 360 snapshots were, of course, much more cluttered than what would appear in a simulated model that a lot of these experiments would typically run in. Putting this into words is hard enough when two humans are already vaguely familiar with a location, for two bots that have access to different data, this can be awfully difficult to communicate efficiently.

To tackle this, Facebook built a mechanism called MASC (Masked Attention for Spatial Convolution) that basically enables these language models the agents are running to quickly parse what the keywords are in responses that are probably the most critical to getting a sense of what’s being conveyed. Facebook said that utilizing the process doubled the accuracy of results that were being tested.

For Facebook’s part, this is foundational research in that it seems to raise far more questions than it seeks to answer about best practices, but even grasping at those is an important milestone and a good direction to point the broader community in taking on hard problems that need to be tackled the company’s researchers say.

“If you really want to solve all of AI, then you probably want to have these different modules or components that solve different subproblems,” Facebook AI research scientist Douwe Kiela told me. “In that sense this is really a challenge to the community asking people how they would solve this and inviting them to work with us in this exciting new research direction.”

Twitter is making a major change aimed at cleaning up the spammy legacy of its platform.

This week it will globally purge accounts that it has previously locked — after suspecting them of being spammy — removing those accounts from users’ follower metrics globally.

Which in plain language means Twitter users with lots of followers are likely to see their follower counts take a noticeable hit in the coming days. So hold tight for the drop.

Late last month Twitter flagged smaller changes to follower counts, also as part of a series of platform-purging anti-spam measures — warning users they might see their counts fluctuate more as counts had been switched to being displayed in near real-time (in that case to try to prevent spambots and follow scams artificially inflating account metrics).

But the global purge of locked accounts from user account metrics looks like it’s going to a rather bigger deal, putting some major dents in certain high profile users’ follower counts — and some major dents in celeb egos.

Hence Twitter has blogged again. “Follower counts are a visible feature, and we want everyone to have confidence that the numbers are meaningful and accurate,” writes Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde, legal, policy and trust & safety lead, flagging the latest change.

It will certainly be interesting to see whether the change substantially dents Twitter follower counts of high profiles users — such as Katy Perry (109,609,073 Twitter followers at the time of writing) Donald Trump (53,379,873); Taylor Swift (85,566,010); Elon Musk (22,329,075); and Beyoncé (15,303,191), to name a few of the platform’s most followed users.

Check back in a week to see how their follower counts look.

“Most people will see a change of four followers or fewer; others with larger follower counts will experience a more significant drop,” warns Gadde, adding: “We understand this may be hard for some, but we believe accuracy and transparency make Twitter a more trusted service for public conversation.”

Twitter is also warning that while “the most significant changes” will happen in the next few days, users’ follower counts “may continue to change more regularly as part of our ongoing work to proactively identify and challenge problematic accounts”.

The company says it locks accounts if it detects sudden changes in account behavior — such as tweeting “a large volume of unsolicited replies or mentions, Tweeting misleading links, or if a large number of accounts block the account after mentioning them” — which therefore may indicate an account has been hacked/taken over by a spambot.

It says it may also lock accounts if we see email and password combinations from other services posted online and believe that information could put the security of an account at risk.

After locking an account Twitter contacts the owner to try to confirm they still have control of the account. If the owner does not reply to confirm the account stays locked — and will soon also be removed from follower counts globally.

Twitter emphasizes that locked accounts already cannot Tweet, like or Retweet, and are not served ads. But removing them from follower counts is an important additional step that it’s great to see Twitter making — albeit at long last…

Twitter also specifies that locked accounts that have not reset their password in more than one month were already not included in Twitter’s MAU or DAU counts — so it today reiterates the CFO’s recent message, saying this change won’t affect its own platform usage metrics. 

The company has been going through what — this time — looks to be a serious house-cleaning process for some months now, after years and years of criticism for failing to tackle rampant spam and abuse on its platform.

In March, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also put out a call for ideas to help it capture, measure and evaluate healthy interactions on its platform and the health of public conversations generally — saying: “Ultimately we want to have a measurement of how it affects the broader society and public health, but also individual health, as well.”

Uber SVP and Chief People Officer Liane Hornsey has resigned from the transportation company, Reuters reports. Hornsey’s resignation comes after a previously unreported investigation into Hornsey’s alleged systematic dismissals of racial discrimination complaints within Uber.

In Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s email to staff, obtained by TechCrunch, he did not provide specific reasons for her departure.

“I am writing to let you know that earlier today Liane told me that she is leaving the company,” Khosrowshahi wrote in a company-wide email. “Liane joined Uber in January 2017, and since then she has led our People & Places teams through a period of enormous positive change.”

According to Reuters, a group of Uber employees of color allege Hornsey discriminated against Bernard Coleman, Uber’s global head of diversity and inclusion, and unfairly criticized and threatened Bozoma Saint John, who left the company in June.

“We are confident that the investigation was conducted in an unbiased, thorough and credible manner, and that the conclusions of the investigation were addressed appropriately,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement.

When Saint John left in June, I asked her if anything horrible happened that led to her departure. While she told me, “nothing horrible or terrible happened,” she did say that the corporate culture has not “righted itself 100 percent,” noting that it’s not where it needs to be today. I’ve reached out to Saint John and will update this story if I hear back.

Hornsey joined Uber last January, about a month before former Uber engineer Susan Fowler publicly detailed her account of sexual harassment and mismanagement at the company. Shortly after that, Hornsey conducted a survey of Uber employees to find out what they wanted performance reviews to look like moving forward, Hornsey told me last August.

In Hornsey’s email, obtained by TechCrunch, she told staff that she’s “been thinking about this for a while” and knows she’ll be leaving the company in good hands. In the interim, Pranesh Anthapur, Uber’s VP of HR, will take over the reigns.

In April, Uber released its first diversity report under Khosrowshahi. Compared to last year, Uber has increased the percentage of women from 36.1 to 38 percent. But Uber’s black representation has gone down a bit, Latinx representation increased from 5.6 to 6.1 percent.

Valimail, a company that focuses on preventing fake and fraudulent emails from reaching your inbox, today announced that it is extending its anti-impersonation platform with a couple of new features that will make it even harder for hackers to pretend they are somebody they are not.

While Valimail’s original focus was mostly on ensuring that your outgoing email was trustworthy, the new solution, dubbed Valimail Defend, centers around two types of attacks that use fake incoming emails: those that come from lookalike domains (think tech-crunch.com) and those that rely on “friendly-from spoofing,” where attackers manage to make the incoming email address look like it’s from a legitimate user, often within your company.

“We’ve built our cloud-first anti-impersonation solution to be completely automated from the ground up, and the data is clear: We have the highest rate of effectiveness in protecting our customers’ domains from impersonation,” said Valimail CEO and co-founder Alexander García-Tobar. “Valimail Defend is the latest step in the evolution of our deep industry expertise, giving enterprises and government organizations the most advanced protection against email impersonation.”

The new service will become available in Q3 and will complement the company’s existing solutions under its Valimail Enforce brand, which provides services like email authentication for outgoing messages through DMARC enforcement and a number of other techniques.

Since a large number of security breaches rely on spoofed emails, preventing those kinds of scams is now something that many a company’s chief information security officer is looking at. Often, these scams can be prevented with some basic rule-based approaches, but Valimail argues that its machine learning-driven approach is significantly more effective.

Current Valimail customers include the likes of Splunk, City National Bank and Yelp. “Valimail’s automated approach has proven to be both effective and efficient, as it’s saved us countless employee hours compared with other approaches and got us to enforcement effortlessly,” said Vivek Raman, the director of engineering at Yelp. “We are excited about this next generation of automated anti-impersonation technology from Valimail, which will give us the full end-to-end solution.”

Kairos, the face recognition technology used for brand marketing, has announced the acquisition of EmotionReader.

EmotionReader is a Limerick, Ireland-based startup that uses algorithms to analyze facial expressions around video content. The startup allows brands and marketers to measure viewers emotional response to video, analyze viewer response via an analytics dashboard, and make different decisions around media spend based on viewer response.

The acquisition makes sense considering that Kairos core business is focused on facial identification for enterprise clients. Knowing who someone is, paired with how they feel about your content, is a powerful tool for brands and marketers.

The idea for Kairos started when founder Brian Brackeen was making HR time-clocking systems for Apple. People were cheating the system, so he decided to implement facial recognition to ensure that employees were actually clocking in and out when they said they were.

That premise spun out into Kairos, and Brackeen soon realized that facial identification as a service was much more powerful than any niche time clocking service.

But Brackeen is very cautious with the technology Kairos has built.

While Kairos aims to make facial recognition technology (and all the powerful insights that come with it) accessible and available to all businesses, Brackeen has been very clear about the fact that Kairos isn’t interested in selling this technology to government agencies.

Brackeen recently contributed a post right here on TechCrunch outlining the various reasons why governments aren’t ready for this type of technology. Alongside the outstanding invasion of personal privacy, there are also serious issues around bias against people of color.

From the post:

There is no place in America for facial recognition that supports false arrests and murder. In a social climate wracked with protests and angst around disproportionate prison populations and police misconduct, engaging software that is clearly not ready for civil use in law enforcement activities does not serve citizens, and will only lead to further unrest.

As part of the deal, EmotionReader CTO Dr. Stephen Moore will run Kairos’ new Singapore-based R&D center, allowing for upcoming APAC expansion.

Kairos has raised approximately $8 million from investors New World Angels, Kapor Capital, 500 Startups, Backstage Capital, Morgan Stanley, Caerus Ventures, and Florida Institute.