Year: 2018

While everybody is focused on self-driving cars, Shone is working on autonomous technologies for container ships. The startup doesn’t want to turn those giant ships into unmanned vehicles, but it wants to help seafarers and make ships more efficient.

After attending Y Combinator, Shone recently raised a $4 million round from Alven, Liquid 2, Paul Graham, David Marcus and D. Scott Phoenix.

“The basic idea is that autonomous ships are coming. Overall, it seems unavoidable,” co-founder and CEO Ugo Vollmer told me. “And yet, there are still 25 people on the boat and it runs on Windows.”

The team spent a lot of time talking with people working in the shipping industry to understand their needs. After traveling on container ships and buying a tiny boat for prototyping, Shone is already working with a shipping company to retrofit their ships with their technology.

“Our vision is that it’s going to happen progressively,” Vollmer said. “There will be a lot of navigation assistance systems first.”

At first, it could lead to fewer people on the boat. There are around 15 people maintaining the engine and the machinery. These people won’t go away any time soon. But there are also around ten people who are keeping an eye on the radar, on the different tools and also on the sea itself. They rotate as they need to have a small team in the cabin 24/7.

This second team could need some help, and this is where Shone shines. The startup adds a few sensors but mostly hooks their system to existing sensors. While there are a ton of sensors already, none of them communicate together.

Shone can combine all this data and analyze it to give some insights. Eventually, the startup plans to recommend different courses to save some fuel and time. Existing autopilot solutions on ships is more like cruise control in cars. You can follow a predetermined path, but you can’t say “let’s go from A to B”.

And saving fuel is key when it comes to global warning. Each ship carries a mountain of goods, so it’s quite efficient when you think about the impact of one ton of goods. But if you can make a container ship slightly more efficient, it would have a huge impact on the environment.

“If you can make a 1 percent optimization, you have a bigger impact than Tesla today,” Vollmer said. It’s hard to compare those two things as cars and ships are different beasts though.

For now, Shone is only focusing on deep sea. The crew doesn’t handle the first and last mile anyway as someone from the harbor usually comes on board to guide you to the dock.

Shone has signed a partnership with CMA CGM to collect data and add some hardware devices. It’s still early days for Shone as the company is first focusing on situational awareness before moving further into recommendations.

Google Home has learned Spanish. Google announced this morning that its smart speakers are now able to listen and respond to users’ voice commands in Spanish. The update may help the speakers gain more ground against Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, not only in the U.S. where a number of people today speak Spanish as their native language, but also in other international markets.

Related to this, Google says its Google Home products, including the Home, Home Mini and Max, are available in Spanish in Mexico and Spain.

Though today Amazon Alexa devices have the most market share in the U.S., Google may have found Amazon’s Achilles heel by targeting language support to grow its own install base. While Amazon supports English, German and more recently, Japanese, Google has promised its smart assistant will support over 30 languages by year-end.

Those languages – or at least some of them – should roll out over time to Google Home speakers, too, as Google targets new markets with its smart devices.

Today, however, Google’s mobile Assistant speaks more languages than its speakers, which currently support English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese, according to Google’s website, in addition to now, Spanish.

Google also said its Assistant will become multilingual, meaning users will be able to switch between two languages without having to change the settings. This support will initially be available in English, French and German, but it makes sense that Spanish would be a priority here, as well, though Google didn’t say today if that would be the case. (And presumably, the longer-term goal is to also make its smart devices, not just its mobile Assistant, capable of multilingual capabilities across languages.)

To change a Google Home’s language to Spanish, you’ll need to launch the Google Home app, select Preferences, then visit the Settings menu.

With Spanish enabled, you can ask Google Home about your day (“Ok Google, ¿cómo será mi día?”), the World Cup (“Ok Google, ¿cuándo juega México?”), listen to top songs (“Ok Google, reproducir mi lista de reproducción para hacer ejercicio”), adjust your thermostat (“Ok Google, sube la temperatura del termostato”) and more, as you can in other languages.

 

On the busiest nights, a restaurant can’t afford to even lose a dishwasher to getting sick or not being around — or simply ghosting on the company — and end up frustrating the whole experience for the rest of the staff and restaurant goers.

It’s a problem that Will Pacio was acutely familiar with during his time at Spice Kit, and it’s why he and Dave Lu — who didn’t really have much experience other than delivering Chinese food in high school, but wanted to get into the industry — started Pared. It essentially serves as an on-demand tool for restaurant workers, who might find themselves already working across multiple different jobs or multiple different restaurants and are looking for a lifestyle over which they have some more control. The company said it has raised a $10 million financing round led by CRV, with existing investors Uncork Capital and True Ventures also participating. CRV partner Saar Gur is joining the company’s board of directors.

“Even if I go [to Craigslist], it’ll take four to six weeks to get someone to show up,” Wu said. “You hire them, you train them, and then they don’t show up to work the very first day. Even if I paid overtime, I don’t have enough employees to cover the shifts. For [Pacio] it was a nightmare, and I just want to be able to tap an app to get that kid from Safeway across the street who knows how to make sandwiches and make them for me.”

The app largely focuses on back-of-the-house operations like line cooks, prep cooks, and dishwashers, though it could theoretically extend to any part of the restaurant experience. Restaurants go to the app and say they are looking for what the app calls a ‘Pro’ in whatever role they need, and are able to book the employee right away for the slot they have in their schedule. It might come at a slight premium over the typical hire, but restaurants are already willing to pay overtime in order to cover those gaps and keep things moving smoothly, Wu said.

For employees, it’s a pretty similar experience — they see a job posted on the app, with a time slot, and they make themselves available for an hourly wage. The second benefit, Wu said, is that they can start to slowly make a name for themselves if they are able to prove out their skills and move up the ranks at any of those restaurants. The culinary community is a small one, he said, and it offers a lot of room to start building up a reputation as an exceptional chef or just finally get a first shot at a sauté position in the kitchen after working at the back of the house. That, too, might be part of the appeal of jumping on a service like Pared rather than just driving for Uber.

“On our platform, every shift and rating you get, every connection you get in the industry — and it’s a very tight network — you build up your own reputation or identity,” Wu said. “We’re helping them build up, it’s more like a race to the top than a race to the bottom. They start off as a prep cook, and they start getting offers for line cook positions. We might have videos for learning to do this or that. They can work their way up to build that reputation. It’s all about reputation, it’s about people you trust.”

And like Uber, that flexibility is one of the more critical selling points of the application. A line cook might want to spend some time in New York to learn the scene there, and with an app like Pared, they can get access to some potential openings at restaurants in the area. As their experience — and their reputation — builds up over time, Wu hopes Pared gets known as a launching point for many careers, in addition to just offering restaurant workers a more flexible lifestyle.

There are certainly larger platforms that aren’t just targeting the restaurant ecosystem, and look to be a more global hub for hourly workers. Shiftgig, which raised $20 million last year, is one interpretation of that idea. But by offering a more curated and focused experience — one for which a kind of aspirational chef might keep gravitating back toward because they hope to one day end up running their own kitchen — can help build up that reputation for having a reliable workforce that any restaurant can use.

ZenProspect, a startup that emerged from the Y Combinator Winter 2016 class to help companies use data and intelligence to increase sales, announced today that it was rebranding as Apollo. It also announced a $7 million Series A investment.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. Social Capital and Y Combinator also participated. Apparently Y Combinator liked what they saw enough to continue to invest in the company.

Apollo helps customers connect their sales people with the right person at the right time. That is typically a customer that is most likely to buy the product. It does this by combining a number of tools including a rules engine to automate prospect routing, a lead scoring tool and analytics to measure results at a granular level, among others.

The company also uses data they have collected from 200 million contacts at 10 million companies to match sellers to buyers along with the information in the user’s own CRM tools — typically Salesforce. Apollo is making this vast database of company and contact data available for customers to use themselves for free starting today.

Apollo CEO and founder Tim Zheng says the company was born out of a need at a previous venture. He was working at a startup that was floundering and sales had flatlined. When they couldn’t find a product on the market to help them, they decided to build it and saw the number of users increase from 5000 to 150,000 users in just five weeks. That eventually reached a million users.  As he spoke to friends at other Bay area companies about what his company had done, he heard a lot of interest, and decided to turn that sales tool into a company.

[gallery ids="1663275,1663276,1663277,1663278"]

The company launched as ZenProspect in 2015 and went through Y Combinator in 2016. They were the third fastest growing company in that YC batch, generating $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) during their tenure. In fact, they were profitable out of the gate, using their own software to sell the product.

Zheng points out that there are thousands of sales tools out there, but he said, even if you bought every one of them and stitched them together you still wouldn’t have a great sales process. Zheng says his company has figured out how to solve that problem and provide that structure to deliver the best prospects to sales people to close deals.

The company works closely with Salesforce as 80 percent of its customers are using data inside of Salesforce in conjunction with the Apollo tool. It’s worth noting, however, that Apollo is not built on top of Salesforce platform. It just integrates with it.

They target both early stage startups looking to increase sales and established enterprise customers with huge sales teams. So far it’s been working. Today, Apollo has 500 customers and 50 employees. With the current influx of money, they expect to get to 120 in the next 12 -18 months.

There’s a rare moment of cheer for floundering electric car maker Faraday Future after it landed a new investor and a fresh commitment of capital.

Evergrande Health, a division of Hong Kong-listed Evergrande, has taken a 45 percent stake in Faraday Future in a deal worth a total of $2 billion. Evergrande Health has taken over an investment commitment agreed to last November by Season Smart Limited, an investor that swooped in to save Faraday Future when its cash was on the verge of running out.

Season Smart invested an initial tranche of $800 million, according to filings, but now Evergrande Health has taken that over for around $860 million, or HK$6.75 billion. Beyond that money, Evergrande Health has a commitment to complete the overall deal by investing $600 million by the end 2019, and a further $600 million by the end of 2020. 

Aside from Evergrande Health’s 45 percent share, existing investors own a combined 33 percent with the remaining 22 percent allocated to Faraday Future’s 1,000 employees as part of an incentive program. On the subject of staff, founder Yueting Jia (known as JT) will become Faraday Future’s global CEO with immediate effect.

It was widely reported that he was keen to keep majority ownership and remain in charge, but it looks like he’s had to settle for the latter only with this deal — but hey that beats being in the deadpool.

Faraday Future, which is technically a U.S. firm but is heavily backed by Chinese money, said the deal was approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) after the initial agreement from investors in November.

“FF will continue to use the committed funds to accomplish our top priority — finalizing the development and delivering the first production vehicle, FF 91 to both US and China markets,” the company said in a statement.

“The investment will also support Faraday Future to expand its product pipeline, develop cutting-edge technologies and grow the business rapidly in the global marketplace, including our manufacturing facilities in Hanford, California and in Guangzhou Nansha, Guangdong Province, China,” it added.

The deal is a rare boost for Faraday Future which was founded in 2014 as a rival to Tesla but has struggled to deliver on its hype and promise.

The company unveiled its vision for electric cars — the FF 91 — at a glitzy launch event in CES last year, but 2017 was a year to forget.

Following on from reports of financial issues with parent company LeEco in late 2016, Faraday Future paused construction of its new factory and then scaled back its product line due to financial concerns. The company was sued by a visual effects team it didn’t pay and then, when the cash crunch really hit home, it canceled plans for an assembly plant in California and went back on a $1 billion project to develop a massive factory in the Nevada desert.

After abandoning plans for a tailor-made factory, it later inked a deal on a more general facility in Hanford, California.

The drama hasn’t ended for YT, who first founded LeEco, however . He’s been under pressure in his native China over debts that have piled up — to the sum of $890 million — for his Leshi Internet video streaming division. Tencent and JD.com, two large Chinese internet firms, invested in LeEco’s smart TV unit earlier this year, while the parent firm was previously bailed out by property company Sunac in early 2017.

Apple this morning launched Schoolwork, a free app for teachers that was first introduced at Apple’s education event in Chicago back in March. The cloud-based app allows teachers using iPads in the classroom to create and distribute handouts and other assignments, collaborate individually with students, track students’ progress, and – perhaps most notably – allows teachers to assign specific activities within educational apps.

That means instead of pointing students to download an app and then give them instructions on how to access the individual task, teachers can instead guide students directly to a specific lesson with an app.

This lets schools tap into the power of Apple’s App Store ecosystem, which has benefitted from being a more curated, trusted experience, where many kids’ app publishers launch their new and updated apps first and/or keep larger catalogs.

Select educational apps already work with Schoolwork, including Explain Everything, Tynker, GeoGebra, and Kahoot!.

With this ability to assign in-app tasks, teachers can see how well the student is doing with the given assignment, not just their usage of the app overall. And they can also see how well the whole classroom is doing from their own dashboard, too.

Apple additionally emphasized the privacy elements to Schoolwork when it was first announced, and it reiterates them today.

Schools get to “create, own and control” the accounts used by students, says the company, and they get to determine when student progress information is shared.

Apple cannot see the student activity, either, as it stays within the system.

Privacy is a key selling point these days for Apple products. It could spur more adoption of its hardware and software devices in the classroom, even though its new $299 iPads for schools are higher priced than some of the low-end Chromebook options from Google that can range $100 to $150, for example.

The new iPads, along with software for digital book creation, Classroom for Mac, an updated Swift Playgrounds app, and other educational tools were also shown off at the Chicago event earlier this year.

Schoolwork is designed to work with the Classroom app, which now runs on both iPad and Mac.

The Classroom app lets teachers view students’ screen in class, share documents with students, assign shared iPads, and reset student passwords. Students, meanwhile, use Schoolwork to view the content teachers’ share – like announcements, handouts, documents, PDFs, and web links –  and track which of their assignments are due.

Apple’s efforts in education come at a time when Google is winning the market with its Chromebooks, which have a reported nearly 60 percent share in the classroom, according to estimates.

But Apple’s devices may appeal for other activities beyond word processing and web research – its iPads for the classroom, for example, support Apple Pencil, including within iWork, as well as Logitech’s $49 “crayon.” Teachers can create lightweight iPad-based texts using iPad Author, and kids can learn to create AR apps in Swift Playgrounds.

Teachers can learn more about Apple’s educational tools on its dedicated site here.

If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they’ll have to end up Googling “liability insurance” at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.

Inaki Berenguer instead hopes they’ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.

“When we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.” Berenguer said. “I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn’t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they’ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.”

CoverWallet is much like what Berenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn’t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.

But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple – especially if it’s a small- to medium-sized business that isn’t the kind of technically savvy ones you’ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it’ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.

“Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,” Berenguer said. “Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else. It’s like white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.”

There likely isn’t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. But Berenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, and then giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn’t one of the clients, Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.

August Lock is getting into the homesharing industry, making the process of checking in an Airbnb guest a bit easier.

Airbnb has done what it can over the past few months to make checking in plain and simple. For example, the company built out a new tool that lets hosts spell out check-in instructions within the app, all in a simple flow, to make sure guests have all the info they need at their fingertips.

But that hasn’t solved the biggest problem of all: the key.

For one, people don’t often have a lot of interest in meeting strangers, especially when they’re fresh off a plane or road trip. Secondly, it’s annoying to block out that time (sometimes getting off work) to go hand off a key to an Airbnb guest. And then there’s the matter of getting keys copied or re-tooling your smart lock to temporarily offer a stranger access.

That’s where August comes in to play.

August now let’s Airbnb and Homeaway hosts link their accounts to August. When a guest books at their home, August will generate a smart code that lasts for the duration of the stay and no longer, letting the guest easily check-in and come and go without the host having to babysit the process.

Guests will receive their pin code and instructions via email.

Hosts simply need an August Smart Lock and Smart Keypad to start letting technology do the heavy lifting. And, in fact, August is running a deal right now for 25 percent off the Smarter Hosting Bundle, which includes an August Smart Lock, August Connect Wi-Fi Bridge and August Smart Keypad.

This, coupled with other startup services like Handy, should make becoming an Airbnb host as simple as tapping a few buttons.

Mozilla today released version 61 of its Firefox browser. By now, it’s no secret that Firefox is back in contention as a serious competitor to Google’s Chrome browser and while the new release doesn’t offer any groundbreaking new features, all of the new improvements and tools in Firefox 61 are good examples for why Firefox is worth another try.

Two of the new features focus on speed, something Firefox was sorely lacking for a while but now offers plenty of.

The first of these is tab warming, which essentially makes switching between tabs faster because Firefox already preemptively starts loading a tab (after a small delay) when you are hovering over it. Once you do click on that tab, much of the rendering has already been done, so switching between tabs now feels faster.

The other new performance-related feature is ‘retained display lists.’ Whenever Firefox renders a page, it builds a display list that gathers the high-level items like borders, backgrounds and text that need to be displayed on the screen and then organizes them according to the CSS painting rules. Originally, Firefox would build a new list every time the screen changed — maybe because you scrolled down, for example. With high-res screens and complex websites, that process could take a while (though ‘a while’ in this context means 4 or 5 milliseconds). Over the course of the last few months, the Firefox team re-built parts of this system to ensure that this list doesn’t have to be rebuilt every time, which led to a significant reduction in paint times.

Another major new Firefox feature for developers is the Accessibility Tool Inspector, which is part of the built-in set of developer tools in the browser. The idea here is to provide developers with a clearer view of how the browser would expose information to people with visual impairments, for example, so developers can ensure that screen readers work on their sites. This tool is turned off by default because it does have a bit of a performance and memory impact, but it’s easy enough to enable it in the developer tools. You can read a bit more about all of the information it exposes here.

As usual, there are plenty of other tweaks in this release (including the ability for WebExtensions to hide tabs and a more streamlined way to add search engines to the location bar). You can find a full run-down of every change here.

In the age of digital transformation, it’s important to understand your business processes and find improvements quickly, but it’s not always easy to do without bringing in expensive consultants to help. Celonis, a New York City enterprise startup, created a sophisticated software solution to help solve this problem, and today it announced a $50 million Series B investment from Accel and 83North on a $1 billion valuation.

It’s not typical for an enterprise startup to have such a lofty valuation so early in its funding cycle, but Celonis is not a typical enterprise startup. It launched in 2011 in Munich with this idea of helping companies understand their processes, which they call process mining.

“Celonis is an intelligent system using logs created by IT systems such as SAP, Salesforce, Oracle and Netsuite, and automatically understands how these processes work and then recommends intelligently how they can be improved,” Celonis CEO and co-founder Alexander Rinke explained.

The software isn’t magic, but helps customers visualize each business process, and then looks at different ways of shifting how and where humans interact with the process or bringing in technology like robotics process automation (RPA) when it makes sense.

Rinke says the software doesn’t simply find a solution and that’s the end of the story. It’s a continuous process loop of searching for ways to help customers operate more efficiently. This doesn’t have to be a big change, but often involves lots incremental ones.

“We tell them there are lots of answers. We don’t think there is one solution. All these little things don’t execute well. We point out these things. Typically we find it’s easy to implement, ” he said.

It seems to be working. Customers include the likes of Exxon-Mobile, 3M, Merck, Lockheed-Martin and Uber. Rinke reports deals are often seven figures. The company has grown an astonishing 5,000 percent in the past 4 years and 300 percent in the past year alone. What’s more, it has been profitable every year since it started. (How many enterprise startups can say that?)

The company currently has 400 employees, but unlike most Series B investments, they aren’t looking at this money to grow operationally. They wanted to have the money for strategic purposes, so if the opportunity came along to make an acquisition or expand into a new market, they would be in a position to do that.

“I see the funding as a confirmation and commitment, a sign from our investors and an indicator about what we’ve built and the traction we have. But for us it’s more important, and our investors share this, what they really invested in was the future of the company,” Rinke said. He’s sees an on-going commitment to help his customers as far more important than a billion valuation.

But that doesn’t hurt either as it moves rapidly forward.