Year: 2018

It was just a matter of time before AMC went head to head with MoviePass. After all, the two companies have been at odds for some time. Back in January, MoviePass dropped out of 10 of the theater chain’s highest traffic theaters in what was seen as a negotiating tactic. But AMC had no interest in playing ball.

The company had already publicly stated that it had “no intention[…]of sharing any […] admissions revenue,” one of many signs that it was working on its own version of the subscription service. That response arrives June 26, in the form of AMC Stubs A-List, an add-on to the company’s loyalty program.

Signs ups for the service start next week, at $20 a month. And at first glance the whole thing actually sounds pretty good, so long as you’re okay sticking with the 660 or so theaters AMC currently operates in the U.S.

Per the press release,

Through AMC Stubs A-List, members can enjoy any available showtime, any AMC location, any format — including IMAX at AMC, Dolby Cinema at AMC, RealD 3D, Prime at AMC and BigD. AMC Stubs A-List can be used at the spur of the moment or also can make planning ahead days or weeks in advance possible, as securing tickets is made easy via reservations capabilities on the AMCTheatres.com web site, or on the AMC Theatres smartphone app.

The membership includes up to three movies a week at any of the chain’s US locations, with no rollovers. Those three movies can be viewed on the same day, assuming you have a “two-hour buffer” between each and nowhere else to be. The same movie can also be viewed multiple times. Tickets can be purchased online for up to three movies at a time.

There are some non-movie ticket perks, as well, including popcorn upgrades, free refills and a rewards program.

Email marketing startup Stensul is announcing that it has raised $7 million.

Stensul spun out of founder and CEO Noah Dinkin’s previous company FanBridge. Dinkin explained via email that the startup isn’t competing with the big email service providers — in fact, it integrates with ESPs including Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Marketo.

Dinkin said that while ESPs include email creation tools, most companies ignore them. Instead, the marketer has to work with specialists like designers, developers and agencies: “That process often takes weeks, everyone hates it, and it is SUPER expensive.”

Stensul, meanwhile, is focused exclusively on the email creation process. Marketers at large enterprises can build the email themselves, without having to rely on anyone else, in less than 20 minutes.

“They don’t need to know how to code, they don’t need to know how to use Photoshop or have memorized the 100 page pdf of brand guidelines,” Dinkin said. “The platform controls for brand governance and rules, and also guarantees that the output will be technically perfect.”

Javelin Venture Partners led the Series A, with participation from Arthur Ventures, First Round Capital, Uncork Capital, Lowercase Capital and former ExactTarget President Scott McCorkle.

“Stensul has zeroed in on a massive problem space hiding in plain sight,” said Javelin’s Alex Gurevich in the funding announcement. “Email Marketing is used by every large company in the world, and the amount of time and money spent on email creation is far more than most people realize. The quality of top-tier customers that stensul has been able to bring on made it clear to us that they have a solution that really delivers value on day 1.”

Companies that have used Stensul include YouTube, Grubhub, BMW, Lyft and Box. Dinkin said he will continue to invest in product, but the big goal with the new funding is to grow sales and marketing.

The small team behind Universe, an iOS app which allows users to build modular, simplistic websites in a minute or two, has scored some new funding as it looks to grow its operations and its ambitions.

The startup has closed a $4 million Series A investment from Javelin Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Box Group, Eniac Ventures, Paul Buchheit, Yuri Sagalov, Louis Beryl and others. Universe has raised $7.2 million to date.

The startup’s focus on building mobile websites has aimed to bypass the more complicated approaches of desktop-first web design companies for a process that feels a bit more like editing an Instagram photo. Over 160 thousand sites have been built with the app.

We covered the Brooklyn-based company when it launched last year and when it graduated from Y Combinator with seed funding. The team is still just 3 full-time employees; with this latest funding the team is looking to grow a bit.

“Javelin got excited about Universe because we saw a massive group of content creators that aren’t sitting at a desk or taking the time and cost to develop a website with the traditional tools,” Noah Doyle, Javelin’s managing director said in a statement. “We loved how Universe’s grid-based interface gives anyone the power to design a high quality web presence, and see it as transformative for artists, free agent professionals, small business owners and individual personal use, too.”

Universe has spent the last few months rethinking how it’s approaching monetization with power users of the service. The company is switching from an a la carte approach that let users use a custom URL or ditch Universe branding on their site for an extra $3 a pop to a Pro tier that’s a flat $10 per month and will gain new functionality over time.

Universe is iOS-only for now, you can check it out here.

Beamery, a London-based startup that offers self-styled “talent CRM”– aka ‘candidate relationship management’ — and recruitment marketing software targeted at fast-growing companies, has closed a $28M Series B funding round, led by EQT Ventures.

Also participating in the round are M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, and existing investors Index Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners and Angelpad Fund. Beamery last raised a $5M Series A, in April 2017, led by Index.

Its pitch centers on the notion of helping businesses win a ‘talent war’ by taking a more strategic and pro-active approach to future hires vs just maintaining a spreadsheet of potential candidates.

Its platform aims to help the target enterprises build and manage a talent pool of people they might want to hire in future to get out ahead of the competition in HR terms, including providing tools for customized marketing aimed at nurture relations with possible future hires.

Customer numbers for Beamery’s software have stepped up from around 50 in April 2017 to 100 using it now — including the likes of Facebook (which is using it globally), Continental, VMware, Zalando, Grab and Balfour Beatty.

It says the new funding will be going towards supporting customer growth, including by ramping up hiring in its offices in London (HQ), Austin and San Francisco.

It also wants to expand into more markets. “We’re focusing on some of the world’s biggest global businesses that need support in multiple timezones and geographies so really it’s a global approach,” said a spokesman on that.

A “significant” portion of the Series B funds will also go towards R&D and produce development focused on its HR tech niche.

“Across all sectors, there’s a shift towards proactive recruitment through technology, and Beamery is emerging as the category leader,” added Tom Mendoza, venture lead and investment advisor at EQT, in a supporting statement.

“Beamery has a fantastic product, world-class high-ambition founders, and an outstanding analytics-driven team. They’ve been relentless about building the best talent CRM and marketing platform and gaining a deep understanding of the industry-wide problems.”

You know you’ve got a problem sleeping when someone tells you that 35-percent of US adults aren’t get seven hours of sleep a night, and the number sounds remarkably low. I’m not a good sleeper. I never have been, and I’m a sucker for any gadget that comes along promising to make things better.

Sleep deprivation costs the US economy $411 billion a year. It’s bad for your health and generally turns you into a cranky piece of garbage no one want to be around. So, naturally, Bose wants to be in the sleep business. Tomorrow, the company launches SleepBuds, its first foray into helping people fall and stay asleep.

The wireless earbuds are the result of Bose’s recent acquisition of Hush, a San Diego startup behind the $150 “smart earplugs.” Among other things, the deal gave the headphone giant expertise in cramming all of the necessary components into a small footprint that sits comfortably in the ear, even when the wearer is sleeping on his or her side. The resulting hardware is roughly half the size of a penny, when you subtract the tip and hook that helps it stay firmly in place.

According to a rep I spoke with at today’s launch event, Bose was also toiling away on its own sleep solution, at the time of the acquisition. The resulting product is essentially those Hush components with the kind of polished finish one expects from Bose products, right down to the brushed aluminum charging case.

Hush’s involvement had another interesting impact on the product, resulting in Bose’s first crowdfunding effort. The original smart earplugs were the result of a Kickstarter campaign, and the companies went back to the well, launching Sleepbuds on Indiegogo as a way of essentially publicly beta testing the product.

The resulting $249 Sleepbuds are a bit of a mixed bag. They’re surprisingly comfortable, and are tough to knock loose. The silicone tips go a ways toward passive blocking ambient sound. There’s no active noise cancelling on-board, unlike Bose’s better known efforts. Instead, the on-board soundscapes (things like leaves rustling and trickling waterfalls) are designed to essentially drown out noise.

The company put us through a brief demo at a Manhattan hotel that felt more like a truncated laboratory sleep study than hands-ons on experience, running through some common New York city ambient sounds like street noise and loud neighbors.

The Sleepbuds never blocked the sound altogether. Instead it was more of a mix of sounds with the strange effect of hearing someone snoring off in the distance in a wind-swept field. You can always adjust the sound levels on the app, but you don’t want to make things too loud, for obvious reasons.

Interestingly, the company opted not to offer streaming here, instead storing files locally. There are ten preloaded sounds, with the option of adding more. This was primarily done for battery reasons. You should get about 16 hours on a charge, with 16 additional hours via the charging case. That’s about four nights of sleep for most people and seven or eight for us perpetual insomniacs.

The downside is pretty clear here. If you like to fall to sleep to music or podcasts or anything aside from the pre-loaded sounds, you’re out of luck. And since there’s no active noise canceling on board, these may not be the best choice for falling asleep on a long flight. In fact, plane noise is actually one of the options on-board. Apparently some people find it soothing.

There aren’t really too many non-sleeping applications here, which makes that $249 price tag a bit more prohibitive. That said, I could certainly see using these to use for meditation, if Bose ever sees fit to include a timer or maybe partner with a Headspace or Calm. But again, no streaming on board, making that a bit tougher to accomplish.

How do you tell your robot not do something that could be catastrophic? You could give it a verbal or programmatic command or you could have it watch your brain for signs of distress and have it stop itself. That’s what researchers at MIT’s robotics research lab have done with a system that is wired to your brain and tells robots how to do their job.

The initial system is fairly simple. A scalp EEG and EMG system is connected to a Baxter work robot and lets a human wave or gesture when the robot is doing something that it shouldn’t be doing. For example, the robot could regularly do a task – drilling holes, for example – but when it approaches an unfamiliar scenario the human can gesture at the task that should be done.

“By looking at both muscle and brain signals, we can start to pick up on a person’s natural gestures along with their snap decisions about whether something is going wrong,” said PhD candidate Joseph DelPreto. “This helps make communicating with a robot more like communicating with another person.”

Because the system uses nuances like gestures and emotional reactions you can train robots to interact with humans with disabilities and even prevent accidents by catching concern or alarm before it is communicated verbally. This lets workers stop a robot before it damages something and even help the robot understand slight changes to its tasks before it begins.

In their tests the team trained Baxter to drill holes in an airplane fuselage. The task changed occasionally and a human standing nearby was able to gesture to the robot to change position before it drilled, essentially training it to do new tasks in the midst of its current task. Further, there was no actual programming involved on the human’s part, just a suggestion that the robot move the drill left or right on the fuselage. The most important thing? Humans don’t have to think in a special way or train themselves to interact with the machine.

“What’s great about this approach is that there’s no need to train users to think in a prescribed way,” said DelPreto. “The machine adapts to you, and not the other way around.”

The team will present their findings at the Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) conference.

Facebook is starting to let Group admins charge $4.99 to $29.99 per month for access to special sub-Groups full of exclusive posts. A hand-picked array of parenting, cooking and “organize my home” Groups will be the first to get the chance to spawn a subscription Group open to their members.

During the test, Facebook won’t be taking a cut, but because the feature bills through iOS and Android, they’ll get their 30 percent cut of a user’s first year of subscription and 15 percent after that. But if Facebook eventually did ask for a revenue share, it could finally start to monetize the Groups feature that’s grown to more than 1 billion users.

The idea for subscription Groups originally came from the admins. “It’s not so much about making money as it is investing in their community,” says Facebook Groups product manager Alex Deve. “The fact that there will be funds coming out of the activity helps them create higher-quality content.” Some admins tell Facebook they actually want to funnel subscription dues back into activities their Group does together offline.

Content users might get in the exclusive version of groups includes video tutorials, lists of tips and support directly from admins themselves. For example, Sandra Mueller’s Declutter My Home Group is launching a $14.99 per month Organize My Home subscription Group that will teach members how to stay tidy with checklists and video guides. The Grown and Flown Parents group is spawning a College Admissions and Affordability subscription group with access to college counselors for $29.99. Cooking On A Budget: Recipes & Meal Planning will launch a $9.99 Meal Planning Central Premium subscription group with weekly meal plans, shopping lists for different grocery stores and more.

But the point of the test is actually to figure out what admins would post and whether members find it valuable. “They have their own ideas. We want to see how that is going to evolve,” says Deve.

Here’s how subscription Groups work. First, a user must be in a larger group where the admin has access to the subscription options and posts an invitation for members to check it out. They’ll see preview cards outlining what exclusive content they’ll get access to and how much it costs. If they want to join, the admin vets their application, and if they’re approved they’re charged the monthly fee right away.

They’ll be billed on that date each month, and if they cancel, they’ll still have access until the end of the month. That prevents anyone from joining a group and scraping all the content without paying the full price. The whole system is a bit similar to subscription patronage platform Patreon, but with a Group and its admin at the center instead of some star creator.

Back in 2016, Facebook briefly tested showing ads in Groups, but now says that was never rolled out. However, the company says that admins want other ways beyond subscriptions to build revenue from Groups and it’s considering the possibilities. Facebook didn’t have any more to share on this, but perhaps one day it will offer a revenue split from ads shown within groups.

Between subscriptions, ad revenue shares, tipping, sponsored content and product placement — all of which Facebook is testing — creators are suddenly flush with monetization options. While we spent the last few decades of the consumer internet scarfing up free content, creativity can’t be a labor of love forever. Letting creators earn money could help them turn their passion into their profession and dedicate more time to making things people love.

A cell atlas. AI that reads science papers. Personalized learning software. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s $45 billion philanthropy organization wants to build technology that can do good at scale rather than just trying to drown problems in cash. Now 2.5 years after its launch, CZI has finally filled out its tech leadership team.

Today CZI announced the hire of Jonathan Goldman as its head of Data. He was formerly the Director of Data Science and Analytics at Intuit after selling it his startup Level Up Analytics. Before that he picked up a PhD in Physics at Stanford, and he’s on the Khan Academy board. Phil Smoot has been named CZI’s head of engineering. He was the VP of eng for Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint, and previously worked on Hotmail and Outlook.

CZI’s tech leadership team with its founders (from left): Sandra Liu Huang, Phil Smoot, Jonathan Goldman, Priscilla Chan, Mark Zuckerberg

Together with CZI’s head of product Sandra Liu Huang who’d been acting as its interim head of technology, they’ll be tackling massive technology products that could improve medicine, research, and education. Critics have asked whether the Zuckerberg family philanthropy has brought its money to issues that might be more complex than just needing funding. But tech is what Zuckerberg does, and Chan’s experience as a doctor and teacher could focus their impact where its most critical.

When asked about the challenges Goldman and Smoot would tackle, a CZI spokesperson told me “Figuring out how to create a strong technical culture within philanthropy, which hasn’t really been done before. Also keeping ourselves rigorous in how we approach the work even though there aren’t conventional market indicators.”

For example, its data coordination platform for the Human Cell Atlas could help doctors map out our biology in a new level of detail that could help fight disease. The Meta tool uses AI to analyze and prioritize research papers so scientists don’t miss out on important new findings. CZI is also supporting the Summit Learning Platform, a tool for teachers to personalize their instruction for students with different learning styles, from those that excel from solo reading to those who prefer group projects.

“We’re putting engineers, data scientists and product managers side by side with bench scientists, educators and policy advocates. Translating these different languages can be challenging at times, but we all know the breakthroughs that come out of these efforts will be well worth it” a spokesperson concluded.

Financial advisors aren’t cheap to use. They aren’t always seen as trustworthy, either, with many advisors receiving — or perceived as receiving — incentives for recommending certain products over others.

Grove, a two-year-old, San Francisco-based startup, is taking on both of these issues through software that makes it easier to its own financial advisors – who are paid a straight salary — to help greater numbers of people, and more cost-effectively.

Specifically, for $600 a year, a customer can talk with or email his or her financial advisor about all kinds of big and small decisions, from which index funds are worth considering, to whether a particular house is within reach given that person’s retirement goals.

So far, the company has just 12 employees, half of whom are financial advisors and the other half of whom are working on the product itself.

Cofounder and CEO Chris Hutchins won’t reveal how many people each financial advisor is working with currently out of fear that it might give away too much about the young company’s revenue. But generally speaking, the number of clients who advisors work with can vary widely, from tens to many hundreds. (In a 2016, Barron’s article of the “best” 1,200 financial advisors in the U.S., the advisors worked on average with a stunning 520 families.)

Either way, Grove’s investors — many of whom are athletes — think the company is on to something. Just five months after announcing $2.1 million in seed funding (money that Hutchins says was raised a bit earlier, in 2017), Grove has closed on $8 million in fresh funding.

Defy Ventures, launched last year by veteran VCs Trae Vassallo and Neil Sequeira, led the financing, with participation from Tusk Ventures, Bullish, and Winklevoss Capital. The round also included, among others, NBA star Kevin Durant; former football player Patrick Kearny; and former football player Ryan Nece, who today runs the venture firm NextPlay Capital.

Asked about Grove’s connection to star athletes, Hutchins — who’d earlier spent several years as an investor with GV — says Grove “struck a chord with them. Many know people who had a lot of money and worked with financial advisors but who didn’t always get the best advice or work with people who had their best interests in mind.”

They like the idea of unbiased advice, suggests Hutchins. They also like that one needn’t be a professional athlete to afford it.