Year: 2018

Those Galaxy Note 9 rumors have been coming fast and furious in recent weeks, and now we know why. Samsung just sent out invites for its next big event in New York City, and its beloved phablet seems all but guaranteed to show up. The timeframe certainly lines up.

The pen-enabled device was first announced at IFA back in 2011, and while the company has moved away from the trade show toward its own stage in recent years, announcements have more or less stayed within that August/September timeframe. And holding the event on August 9, well, that’s likely more than just a numerological coincidence. As if all that weren’t confirmation enough, the handset appears to have also recently passed through the FCC (alongside theTab S3 tablet), a surefire sign that it’s just over the horizon.

The phone was the subject of a big leak earlier this week, that hinted at an update to line’s iconic S Pen stylus. Exact details are pretty thin at the moment, though one leaker called it “the biggest update” in the peripheral’s history, for what that’s worth. And the close up shot on this morning’s invites do appear to confirm a focus on the stylus. Samsung has refined the S Pen’s writing system in the seven years since the first device was announced, but it’s largely taken a backset to things like screen design and camera specs.

Otherwise, however, Note 9 reports paint a picture of fairly minor upgrades over the Note 8, with plenty of features cribbed from the S9 announced back in February at Mobile World Congress.

 

 

 

MongoDB‘s Atlas service has been giving companies a managed database service in the cloud for some time. Mongo deals with all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, relieving the developer of creating it all themselves. Today the company announced it was taking that a step further by allowing customers to have granular control over where the data lives with a new feature called Global Clusters.

This allows companies to choose a cloud provider, then move data from a MongoDB database running in Atlas to any location in the world. As MongoDB CTO and co-founder, Eliot Horowitz explained, it doesn’t matter who the cloud provider is, you can set a data location policy, select a cloud vendor and data center location, and see what the results will look like on a graphical representation of the world map. When you give the OK, Mongo moves the data automatically for you in the background without shutting anything down to do it.

Lots of countries are requiring proof of data sovereignty, including the EU’s GDPR rules that went into effect last month. It has been challenging for many businesses to comply with these kinds of rules on their own. Horowitz said he created geographic partitions before Atlas and it required a tremendous amount of engineering effort. By providing it as a service in this fashion, the company is putting this kind of data migration in the hands of the smallest business owners, giving them that geographic granularity from the start.

“I think what you’re going to see is a lot of [small businesses], who feel they can now compete with some of the larger websites and actually have that high level of service on day one, rather than having to wait to hire a team of engineers.”

The beauty of this approach from Mongo’s perspective is that they don’t even have to worry about building a worldwide data center presence of their own. Instead they simply piggy back on the global locations of each of the main public cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft and Google.

“The cool thing is that those data centers come from any of the cloud providers. So you can actually do this on any cloud provider that you want in any region [they support],” he said.

This feature will be available starting today for all Atlas users.

MongoDB‘s Atlas service has been giving companies a managed database service in the cloud for some time. Mongo deals with all the heavy lifting behind the scenes, relieving the developer of creating it all themselves. Today the company announced it was taking that a step further by allowing customers to have granular control over where the data lives with a new feature called Global Clusters.

This allows companies to choose a cloud provider, then move data from a MongoDB database running in Atlas to any location in the world. As MongoDB CTO and co-founder, Eliot Horowitz explained, it doesn’t matter who the cloud provider is, you can set a data location policy, select a cloud vendor and data center location, and see what the results will look like on a graphical representation of the world map. When you give the OK, Mongo moves the data automatically for you in the background without shutting anything down to do it.

Lots of countries are requiring proof of data sovereignty, including the EU’s GDPR rules that went into effect last month. It has been challenging for many businesses to comply with these kinds of rules on their own. Horowitz said he created geographic partitions before Atlas and it required a tremendous amount of engineering effort. By providing it as a service in this fashion, the company is putting this kind of data migration in the hands of the smallest business owners, giving them that geographic granularity from the start.

“I think what you’re going to see is a lot of [small businesses], who feel they can now compete with some of the larger websites and actually have that high level of service on day one, rather than having to wait to hire a team of engineers.”

The beauty of this approach from Mongo’s perspective is that they don’t even have to worry about building a worldwide data center presence of their own. Instead they simply piggy back on the global locations of each of the main public cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft and Google.

“The cool thing is that those data centers come from any of the cloud providers. So you can actually do this on any cloud provider that you want in any region [they support],” he said.

This feature will be available starting today for all Atlas users.

Cordial, a San Diego startup building what CEO Jeremy Swift described as a “truly next-generation platform” for email marketing, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

Swift and his co-founders come from email marketing company BlueHornet/Mapp Digital, which he said gave them the background to see “the market was really screaming: There needs to be a better way.”

We’ve written about plenty of other email marketing products. For example, last week I covered Stensul, which focuses on the email creation process. But Swift argued that most startups are building “point solutions” that sit on top of existing email platforms, whereas Cordial is “unequivocally” taking on the big marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce.

“Cordial has gone to market to say you don’t need a legacy solution, plus a whole host of other point solutions, to try and do real-time messaging in a better way,” he said.

When Swift and Sales Engineering Manager Justin Soni gave me a quick demo of the Cordial platform, one of the big distinctions they pointed to was the way it uses customer data. Rather than targeting and customizing emails based on broad customer segments, they showed me how a Cordial email can incorporate dynamic elements that are updated with real-time, personal data — as Soni clicked around on different products on the merchant website, the email he was creating changed based on that behavior.

In addition, Cordial applies machine learning technology to optimize the emails — not just testing out variations on a one element, but every part of the email, from the subject line to the call-to-action button.

And while Cordial started out with email, Swift said it’s expanded to include other messaging channels like push notifications and SMS. All of that can be coordinated from within a tool called Podium, where a marketer uses a visual interface to build different communication flows based on customer actions.

Cordial previously raised $6 million in Series A funding. Companies using the platform include Freshly, La Quinta and 1-800-Contacts.

The new funding was led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. Swift said this will allow Cordial to continue adding new marketing channels (the goal is one per quarter) and to continue investing in the technology.

Cordial, a San Diego startup building what CEO Jeremy Swift described as a “truly next-generation platform” for email marketing, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

Swift and his co-founders come from email marketing company BlueHornet/Mapp Digital, which he said gave them the background to see “the market was really screaming: There needs to be a better way.”

We’ve written about plenty of other email marketing products. For example, last week I covered Stensul, which focuses on the email creation process. But Swift argued that most startups are building “point solutions” that sit on top of existing email platforms, whereas Cordial is “unequivocally” taking on the big marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce.

“Cordial has gone to market to say you don’t need a legacy solution, plus a whole host of other point solutions, to try and do real-time messaging in a better way,” he said.

When Swift and Sales Engineering Manager Justin Soni gave me a quick demo of the Cordial platform, one of the big distinctions they pointed to was the way it uses customer data. Rather than targeting and customizing emails based on broad customer segments, they showed me how a Cordial email can incorporate dynamic elements that are updated with real-time, personal data — as Soni clicked around on different products on the merchant website, the email he was creating changed based on that behavior.

In addition, Cordial applies machine learning technology to optimize the emails — not just testing out variations on a one element, but every part of the email, from the subject line to the call-to-action button.

And while Cordial started out with email, Swift said it’s expanded to include other messaging channels like push notifications and SMS. All of that can be coordinated from within a tool called Podium, where a marketer uses a visual interface to build different communication flows based on customer actions.

Cordial previously raised $6 million in Series A funding. Companies using the platform include Freshly, La Quinta and 1-800-Contacts.

The new funding was led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. Swift said this will allow Cordial to continue adding new marketing channels (the goal is one per quarter) and to continue investing in the technology.

A new subscription service will now let you chat with a vet from your smartphone for $10 per month. This telemedicine vet care plan is the latest from Fuzzy Pet Health, a subscription vet care service providing in-home vet visits to subscribers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. But while in-home pet care may take time to properly scale, on-demand vet Q&A is something that can be offered nationwide.

Fuzzy Pet Health Connect, as the new telemedicine service is called, works over the Fuzzy Pet Health mobile app, allowing customers to send text, pictures and videos to a vet at any time, then receive real-time medical help.

The vets can help with behavioral advice, training tools, new pet questions, or other concerns that may have normally required a vet visit to diagnose – like a cat that just vomited, or a dog with runny stool.

As Fuzzy Pet Health co-founder Eric Palm explains, the new service can serve as the initial triage that may actually save pet owners a visit to the vet, at times.

“It turns out that 80 percent of the time when people think there’s an emergency issue, it’s not actually critical,” he says. “We can triage – we can share pictures and videos, and that’s really helpful.”

If the issue requires an in-person visit, the vet will recommend it.

Unfortunately, laws in most states won’t allow for diagnosis and medications to be subscribed over telehealth services when it comes to pets – a bit unusual, given that people now have access to a variety of video chat doctors-on-demand offerings. But Palm says laws are starting to change.

“Each state has its own Veterinary Medical Board, and there are active discussions on most of these boards on how to relax the rules around telemedicine,” Palm notes. “Our lead veterinarian and co-founder [Dr.] Robert Trimble is part of the conversation with the state boards, and how to best shape the laws to enable better care for pets.”

Today, there are only three places in the U.S. that permit this – Washington D.C., Alaska, and Connecticut. The U.S.’s neighbor to the north, Canada, also allows vets to diagnose and prescribe digitally.

In the meantime, vet chat is the best most U.S. pet owners can hope for. But at $10 per month, it’s not too expensive to gain access to that additional level of vet care.

“The average pet parent goes to the vet only 1.6 times a year, while our members get in touch with us roughly once a month. We’re excited to expand telemedicine across the country, and provide pet parents the peace of mind and education that come with easy and unlimited access to high quality care,” said Dr. Trimble, in a statement.

Fuzzy Pet Health is one of several startups capitalizing on advances in technology to offer more affordable care to pet owners. A Swedish startup, FirstVet, also announced its funding today to expand its own local operations. There’s also Seattle-based Petriage, UK’s Pawsquad, as well as providers of telehealth tools to existing vet clinics, like TeleVet, to name a few.

But many vet-on-demand services have already failed.

“We’ve learned a lot from those that have come before us in this space. On-demand vet care is super hard – just like any sort of on-demand business,” says Palm. “The amount of staffing you need to do that is sort of prohibitive from a unit economics or margin standpoint,” he continues. “So our on-demand product is telemedicine. That allows us to be much more efficient with scheduling and staffing.”

Longer term, however, Fuzzy Pet Health plans to scale its housecall subscription service, albeit fairly slowly. (Its head of operations, Alex Aguilera, comes from Lyft and Wash.io, and understands market expansions like this.)

“We know if we go to six markets tomorrow, we’ll fail…we have to build demand and awareness ahead of launch, and we have to have on board a veterinarian team to service that market,” adds Palm.

That said, the company is already talking to vets in larger cities like L.A., New York and Chicago to see where it might go next.

To date, Fuzzy Pet Health has raised $4.5 million in funding from Eniac Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Crosscut Ventures, SV Angel Accelerator Ventures, and FJ Labs.

 

 

A new subscription service will now let you chat with a vet from your smartphone for $10 per month. This telemedicine vet care plan is the latest from Fuzzy Pet Health, a subscription vet care service providing in-home vet visits to subscribers in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. But while in-home pet care may take time to properly scale, on-demand vet Q&A is something that can be offered nationwide.

Fuzzy Pet Health Connect, as the new telemedicine service is called, works over the Fuzzy Pet Health mobile app, allowing customers to send text, pictures and videos to a vet at any time, then receive real-time medical help.

The vets can help with behavioral advice, training tools, new pet questions, or other concerns that may have normally required a vet visit to diagnose – like a cat that just vomited, or a dog with runny stool.

As Fuzzy Pet Health co-founder Eric Palm explains, the new service can serve as the initial triage that may actually save pet owners a visit to the vet, at times.

“It turns out that 80 percent of the time when people think there’s an emergency issue, it’s not actually critical,” he says. “We can triage – we can share pictures and videos, and that’s really helpful.”

If the issue requires an in-person visit, the vet will recommend it.

Unfortunately, laws in most states won’t allow for diagnosis and medications to be subscribed over telehealth services when it comes to pets – a bit unusual, given that people now have access to a variety of video chat doctors-on-demand offerings. But Palm says laws are starting to change.

“Each state has its own Veterinary Medical Board, and there are active discussions on most of these boards on how to relax the rules around telemedicine,” Palm notes. “Our lead veterinarian and co-founder [Dr.] Robert Trimble is part of the conversation with the state boards, and how to best shape the laws to enable better care for pets.”

Today, there are only three places in the U.S. that permit this – Washington D.C., Alaska, and Connecticut. The U.S.’s neighbor to the north, Canada, also allows vets to diagnose and prescribe digitally.

In the meantime, vet chat is the best most U.S. pet owners can hope for. But at $10 per month, it’s not too expensive to gain access to that additional level of vet care.

“The average pet parent goes to the vet only 1.6 times a year, while our members get in touch with us roughly once a month. We’re excited to expand telemedicine across the country, and provide pet parents the peace of mind and education that come with easy and unlimited access to high quality care,” said Dr. Trimble, in a statement.

Fuzzy Pet Health is one of several startups capitalizing on advances in technology to offer more affordable care to pet owners. A Swedish startup, FirstVet, also announced its funding today to expand its own local operations. There’s also Seattle-based Petriage, UK’s Pawsquad, as well as providers of telehealth tools to existing vet clinics, like TeleVet, to name a few.

But many vet-on-demand services have already failed.

“We’ve learned a lot from those that have come before us in this space. On-demand vet care is super hard – just like any sort of on-demand business,” says Palm. “The amount of staffing you need to do that is sort of prohibitive from a unit economics or margin standpoint,” he continues. “So our on-demand product is telemedicine. That allows us to be much more efficient with scheduling and staffing.”

Longer term, however, Fuzzy Pet Health plans to scale its housecall subscription service, albeit fairly slowly. (Its head of operations, Alex Aguilera, comes from Lyft and Wash.io, and understands market expansions like this.)

“We know if we go to six markets tomorrow, we’ll fail…we have to build demand and awareness ahead of launch, and we have to have on board a veterinarian team to service that market,” adds Palm.

That said, the company is already talking to vets in larger cities like L.A., New York and Chicago to see where it might go next.

To date, Fuzzy Pet Health has raised $4.5 million in funding from Eniac Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Crosscut Ventures, SV Angel Accelerator Ventures, and FJ Labs.

 

 

For any company built on top of machine learning operations, the more data they have, the better they are off — as long as they can keep it all under control. But as more and more information pours in from disparate sources, gets logged in obscure databases and is generally hard (or slow) to query, the process of getting that all into one neat place where a data scientist can actually start running the statistics is quickly running into one of machine learning’s biggest bottlenecks.

That’s a problem Intermix.io and its founders, Paul Lappas and Lars Kamp, hope to solve. Engineers get a granular look at all of the different nuances behind what’s happening with some specific function, from the query all the way through all of the paths it’s taking to get to its end result. The end product is one that helps data engineers monitor the flow of information going through their systems, regardless of the source, to isolate bottlenecks early and see where processes are breaking down. The company also said it has raised seed funding from Uncork Capital, S28 Capital, PAUA Ventures along with Bastian Lehman, CEO of Postmates, and Hasso Plattner, Founder of SAP.

“Companies realize being data driven is a key to success,” Kamp said. “The cloud makes it cheap and easy to store your data forever, machine learning libraries are making things easy to digest. But a company that wants to be data driven wants to hire a data scientist. This is the wrong first hire. To do that they need access to all the relevant data, and have it be complete and clean. That falls to data engineers who need to build data assembly lines where they are creating meaningful types to get data usable to the data scientist. That’s who we serve.”

Intermix.io works in a couple of ways: first, it tags all of that data, giving the service a meta-layer of understanding what does what, and where it goes; second, it taps every input in order to gather metrics on performance and help identify those potential bottlenecks; and lastly, it’s able to track that performance all the way from the query to the thing that ends up on a dashboard somewhere. The idea here is that if, say, some server is about to run out of space somewhere or is showing some performance degradation, that’s going to start showing up in the performance of the actual operations pretty quickly — and needs to be addressed.

All of this is an efficiency play that might not seem to make sense at a smaller scale. the waterfall of new devices that come online every day, as well as more and more ways of understanding how people use tools online, even the smallest companies can quickly start building massive data sets. And if that company’s business depends on some machine learning happening in the background, that means it’s dependent on all that training and tracking happening as quickly and smoothly as possible, with any hiccups leading to real-term repercussions for its own business.

Intermix.io isn’t the first company to try to create some application performance management software. There are others like Data Dog and New Relic, though Lappas says that the primary competition from them comes in the form of traditional APM software with some additional scripts tacked on. However, data flows are a different layer altogether, which means they require a more unique and custom approach to addressing that problem.

For any company built on top of machine learning operations, the more data they have, the better they are off — as long as they can keep it all under control. But as more and more information pours in from disparate sources, gets logged in obscure databases and is generally hard (or slow) to query, the process of getting that all into one neat place where a data scientist can actually start running the statistics is quickly running into one of machine learning’s biggest bottlenecks.

That’s a problem Intermix.io and its founders, Paul Lappas and Lars Kamp, hope to solve. Engineers get a granular look at all of the different nuances behind what’s happening with some specific function, from the query all the way through all of the paths it’s taking to get to its end result. The end product is one that helps data engineers monitor the flow of information going through their systems, regardless of the source, to isolate bottlenecks early and see where processes are breaking down. The company also said it has raised seed funding from Uncork Capital, S28 Capital, PAUA Ventures along with Bastian Lehman, CEO of Postmates, and Hasso Plattner, Founder of SAP.

“Companies realize being data driven is a key to success,” Kamp said. “The cloud makes it cheap and easy to store your data forever, machine learning libraries are making things easy to digest. But a company that wants to be data driven wants to hire a data scientist. This is the wrong first hire. To do that they need access to all the relevant data, and have it be complete and clean. That falls to data engineers who need to build data assembly lines where they are creating meaningful types to get data usable to the data scientist. That’s who we serve.”

Intermix.io works in a couple of ways: first, it tags all of that data, giving the service a meta-layer of understanding what does what, and where it goes; second, it taps every input in order to gather metrics on performance and help identify those potential bottlenecks; and lastly, it’s able to track that performance all the way from the query to the thing that ends up on a dashboard somewhere. The idea here is that if, say, some server is about to run out of space somewhere or is showing some performance degradation, that’s going to start showing up in the performance of the actual operations pretty quickly — and needs to be addressed.

All of this is an efficiency play that might not seem to make sense at a smaller scale. the waterfall of new devices that come online every day, as well as more and more ways of understanding how people use tools online, even the smallest companies can quickly start building massive data sets. And if that company’s business depends on some machine learning happening in the background, that means it’s dependent on all that training and tracking happening as quickly and smoothly as possible, with any hiccups leading to real-term repercussions for its own business.

Intermix.io isn’t the first company to try to create some application performance management software. There are others like Data Dog and New Relic, though Lappas says that the primary competition from them comes in the form of traditional APM software with some additional scripts tacked on. However, data flows are a different layer altogether, which means they require a more unique and custom approach to addressing that problem.

RetailMeNot is suing rival Honey over patent infringement, the company announced this week. Honey is the maker of a deal-finding browser extension that helps consumers shopping online get the best price by automatically applying coupon codes at checkout. It also helps with finding the best price on Amazon purchases, doles out digital coupons, offers cash back, helps you track price drops, and more.

According to RetailMeNot’s suit, Honey infringes on U.S. Patent 9,626,688; 9,639,853; 9,953,335; and 9,965,769, which detail technologies related to things like facilitating access to promotional offers, merchant offers, and coupon codes.

“These valuable patents protect RetailMeNot’s pioneering developments in computer-related technologies, and Honey’s unauthorized use of them enables key features of Honey’s website and browser extensions,” RetailMeNot stated in a press release about the lawsuit, which is how Honey first heard the news.

The suit comes at a time when Honey is growing in popularity among online shoppers, while RetailMeNot is getting a bit long in the tooth. The latter has been around since 2006, while L.A.-based Honey was founded in 2012, and is backed by over $40 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. It had a reported 5 million monthly active users as of last fall, and said users were saving an average of $32 per month with its help.

Honey has also dabbled with expanding its deal-finding efforts to other verticals, including as of last year, travel.

Meanwhile, RetailMeNot, a subsidiary of Harland Clarke Holdings, claims $4.8 billion in retailer sales were attributable to consumer transactions from paid digital offers in its marketplace last year, with over $560 million which were attributable to its in-store solution. (The company operates a number of websites, including RetailMeNot.com in the U.S. and .ca in Canada, plus VoucherCodes.co.uk in the United Kingdom; ma-reduc.com and Poulpeo.com in France; and GiftCardZen.com and Deals2Buy.com in North America.)

Reached for comment, Honey called the lawsuit “baseless.”

“We were disappointed to learn of this lawsuit from a press release and are in the process of reviewing the documents with our legal counsel,” said Honey spokesperson, Kelly Parisi, VP, Communications. “The lawsuit is baseless and the claims are irrelevant to how consumers use and experience our services. It’s unfortunate that they’ve taken this tactic to try to thwart innovation that helps consumers save time and money when shopping online.”