Year: 2018

In the world of autonomous driving, there exists a layer between the operating system running on the car and the algorithms that make the car truly autonomous. A number of companies use ROS, an open-source middleware for robotics, for prototyping, but you can’t do driverless with it. This is where mobility startup Renovo‘s AWare OS, which is custom-built middleware specifically designed for Level 4 autonomous driving, comes in. As Voyage founder Oliver Cameron described to me, its software and hardware redundancies can ensure a level of safety that ROS can’t match. After being introduced to Renovo, Cameron said he soon realized the value Renovo can offer from the operating system and computer perspective.

“That’s where we saw a ton of value in Renovo, so we ditched our efforts internally and made this switch,” Cameron said.

Cameron envisions this being a long-term partnership with Renovo, which “takes a way a whole bunch of burden from us to manage our resources intelligently and safely think about how we roll out a driverless service.”

The plan is to integrate Renovo’s technology into Voyage’s first fleet of Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans. Those will first be deployed in communities in Central Fla and San Jose, Calif. Cameron says he expects to fully integrate Renovo’s technology into its stack in the next couple of months.

“What we like about Voyage is they have laser focus on who their customer is and what the opportunity it,” Renovo CEO Christopher Heiser told TechCrunch. “They stand out because they’re deploying now and have customers using it in real-world situations.”

Renovo handles low-level safety and security systems, Heiser said said. That way, Renovo can focus on the infrastructure layer while Voyage can focus on the actual self-driving layer.

While companies like Uber and Waymo are taking more of a vertical approach, Voyage is taking a horizontal approach that entails partnering with other companies in the space.

“The vertical approach is one vision,” Heiser said. “You can vertically integrate, but we think there are lots of risks and challenges. If you miss one technology node, you’re kind of out of luck. With the horizontal approach, Voyage is getting to deliver something that customers like.”

It’s been six years since Google acquired VirusTotal, a service that allows users to upload any file to check it for malware and viruses against the databases and algorithms of 70 antivirus and domain blacklisting services. Over the years, VirusTotal, which is now part of Alphabet’s Chronicle, has established itself as a neutral public service that has the trust of both users and developers, who can also access its service through an API.

Today, the company is expanding on its core services by launching a new tool that allows developers to scan new code against the systems of its antivirus partners to help ensure that those partners don’t mistakenly identify their code as malware. These kind of false positives are surprisingly common and can obviously create massive headaches for developers who aren’t in the malware business.

With VirusTotal Monitor, which is now available to all developers, developers can upload their code, have VirusTotal check it and if it’s mistakenly flagged as malware by one of the company’s partners, VirusTotal notifies both its partners and the developers– and connects them to make sure they can figure out a solution.

As VirusTotal tech lead Emiliano Martinez told me, it’s worth noting that false positives are not just a headache for developers but also a potential PR disaster for the antivirus industry. Those companies don’t want to be responsible when users suddenly can’t use the latest version of an application they depend on only because their antivirus tool mistakenly thought it was malware. “So what we came up with is something like a Google Drive to which software developers can upload what they create — and do so before launching a given piece of software — or after,” Martinez explained.

It’s worth noting that this tool is mostly geared toward commercial developers, but it’ll also be useful for developers who write line-of-business apps for larger companies, given that they often need those application to run their businesses.

VirusTotal Monitor is free for the antivirus companies. The company plans to monetize the service by charging developers. “At the end of the day, whenever there is a false positive and you are blacked out, that a huge revenue damage,” Martinez told me when I asked about the reason for this monetization model.

Apple has essentially owned podcasts since their inception. Hell, even the format’s name betrays its close tie to the company’s once ubiquitous player. At best, Google has reluctantly embraced the form, incorporating podcasts into the broader scope of Play, leading many of Android’s billions of users to rely on third-party solutions.

There are plenty of solutions out there, of course — Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts — seemingly as many as there are podcasts. For whatever reason, Google has seemed content to let the competition own the category. Until now, that is. The company just dropped the simply titled “Podcasts.” It’s exactly what you’d expect from Google — a straightforward listening and browsing experience that prioritizes discovery above all else.

I asked Google why it was so late to the draw in terms of fully embracing the medium. I never really got a great answer on that front, but a rep told me the company was driven to create the new standalone app thanks to the “explosion of creativity” that’s occurred in the past few years. Fair enough. The category is undeniably in the midst of a renaissance, making it one of the most exciting entertainment and informational mediums in the world today.

And with its longtime goal of “organizing the world’s information,” certainly Google is well-positioned to provide a unique service for the 500,000+ active podcasts out there. The new app’s mission statement is, fittingly, to “make it really easier for them to discover and listen to the podcasts they love.”

With that in mind, the app’s discovery mechanism is framed differently than Apple’s. In recent years, Cupertino has pushed toward curation, hiring editors to determine which properties to promote in its various channels. In the case of the iOS podcast app, that generally means that the most popular programs are pushed to the top. Publishers like NPR or ESPN tend to get preferential treatment. And the algorithms that control the top podcast lists are anyone’s guess.

That’s all well and good for first-time listeners. That manner of curation generally does a good job assuring that featured shows adhere to a certain expectation of quality. But podcasting is among the most intimate forms of communication — a proxy for a close conversation with friends. Certainly it stands to reason that recommendations ought to be tailored to listeners in a way that respects that relationship.

Of course, the first time you log into the app, Google’s recommendations are anything but. The page that greets you is fairly generic. You’ve got all of the usual “top podcast” subjects in there — This American Life, Radiolab, Serial. You know the deal — if your parent who’s never listened to a podcast has brought it up in casual conversation, it’s probably in there.

Once you start subscribing to shows, however, the home page shifts accordingly. According to Google, “a few factors, such as your listening habits and the podcasts you subscribe to.” That means, theoretically, that it continues to get better the more shows you listen to and subscribe — and the more others use it, as well.

I’ve only had a short time with the app; so far recommendations still feel a bit generic — things like “Top Podcasts by NPR” and “Popular with Listeners of Stop Podcasting Yourself.” There are also kinks here — my friend Robin does the alternative comics podcast Inkstuds, so the app recommended a bunch of other shows by people also named Robin. That strikes me as a very strange way to choose podcasts. Maybe it’s just me.

There’s also no rating system on-board yet. The feature is likely coming, and will probably go a ways toward helping customize those recommendations. It’s one of a number of features that just weren’t ready at launch time. Google’s also experimenting with speech to text podcast transcriptions as a way of both providing additional metadata to crawl and offering up future features like closed captioning for users with hearing loss. That could be big for a larger potential audience that simply isn’t served by the audio-based format.

There’s a lot of room for improvement here, but Podcasts is a solid first effort. The interface is packed without being overwhelming. The shows you subscribe to populate a grid up top. Below this, they’re separated by New Episodes, In Progress and Downloads. It’s a nice way of serving up a lot of information, all at once, unlike the Apple app, which seems to make that more difficult with each update.

When a show is playing, it pops up in a small field at the bottom of the screen, which you can swipe up to enlarge. There’s a time scrubber, 10-second rewind and 30-second fast-forward. And yes, there’s a speed feature, for all you weirdos who listen to podcasts at 2x. Google’s offered a lot of customization on that front, with 15 different time increments between 0.5 and 2.0 speed.

There isn’t a lot to distinguish Podcasts, but it’s a solid first stab at the category. Google would likely be the first to admit that there’s room for improvement here, and based on my conversations with the company, it seems they have a lot planned on that front. Among other things, the company is looking into offering deeper analytics like the kind Apple recently rolled out.

In the meantime, it’s certainly worth the download for Android users who have been looking for another way to listen to their stories. And if you’re looking for a place to get started, why not check out one of these fine TechCrunch podcasts. 

SigFig, the developer of an automated wealth management toolkit, has raised $50 million in a new round of funding.

The company said the new money would be used to continue its research and development.

The new funding was led by General Atlantic and included participation from existing investors like Bain Capital Ventures, DCM Ventures, Eaton Vance, New York Live, Nyca Partners, UBS and Union Square Ventures.

Unlike other tech-enabled advisory services firms like Betterment and WealthFront, which have primarily taken a direct to consumer approach, SigFig sells its tools primarily to financial services firms like Wells Fargo, UBS, and Citizens Bank.

SigFig also has a small direct to consumer business, which the company uses to test new products and services before bringing them to their main, business, customers.

SigFig’s chief executive and co-founder, Mike Sha, says that the blended approach of working with wealth managers actually allows his company to reach more customers than if they were to pitch their services directly to consumers.

Sha isn’t the only executive with that philosophy. Companies like Starburst Labs and FutureAdvisor have a blended, advisory focused approach according to market analysis companies like Owler and CBInsights.

“The market for digitally-native investment advisors continues to grow due to increasing customer demand for accessible and affordable financial advice,” said Paul Stamas, Managing Director at General Atlantic, in a statement.

SigFig makes money by selling its toolkit under a license to financial services firms and by taking a percentage of the assets that are managed through its tech.

 Some of the new services that SigFig will look to develop (now that it’s raised additional capital) include the expansion of its advisory and planning capabilities to look at retirement planning and plan and save for other longterm goals, Sha said.

Sha declined to comment on the company’s valuation, revenue, or exact number of customers, but he did say

Welcome to Bag Week 2018. Every year your faithful friends at TechCrunch spend an entire week looking at bags. Why? Because bags — often ignored but full of our important electronics — are the outward representations of our techie styles, and we put far too little thought into where we keep our most prized possessions.

It’s difficult to show people that you love blockchain. There are no cool hats, no rad t-shirts, and no outward signs – except a libertarian bent and a poster of a scantily-clad Vitalik Buterin on your bedroom wall – to tell the world you are into decentralized monetary systems. Until, of course, the Bitcoin Genesis Block Backpack.

Unlike the blockchain, this backpack will centralize your stuff in a fairly large, fairly standard backpack. There is little unique about the backpack itself – it’s a solid piece made of 100% polyester and includes ergonomically designed straps and a secret pocket – but it is printed with the Bitcoin Genesis Block including a headline about UK bank bailouts. In short, it’s Merkle tree-riffic.

The green and orange text looks a little Matrix-y but the entire thing is very fun and definitely a conversation starter. Again, I doubt this will last more than a few trips to Malta or the Luxembourg but it’s a great way to let Bitcoin whales know your ICO means business.

The bag comes to us from BitcoinShirt, a company that makes and sells bitcoin-related products and accepts multiple cryptocurrencies. While this backpack won’t stand up to 51% attacks on its structural integrity, it is a fun and cheap way to show the world you’re pro-Nakamoto.

So as we barrel headlong into a crypto future fear not, fashion-conscious smart contract lover: the Bitcoin Genesis Block backpack is here to show the world you’re well and truly HODLing. To the moon!

Read other Bag Week reviews here.

Social planning apps are a dime a dozen, but none have risen to become a mainstay in our digital lives. IRL, founded by Abe Shafi and Scott Banister, is looking to break the pattern, focusing on positivity to get people excited about hanging out offline.

When users first sign up, they’re asked a series of multiple choice questions about their friends: “Who is the best at building pillow forts?” or “Who has the best style?” with four of your contacts as possible answers. These ‘nominations’ are meant to catalyze making plans with those friends. Those nominations stay anonymous.

From there, users can choose from a wide variety of interests like “Netflix and Chill,” “Grab Burgers,” or “Watch the World Cup.” Once they’ve chosen an interest, they can mark the time (today, soon, or pick a date) and send an invite to friends, at which point the group comes up with the right time and place for the plans.

According to cofounder and CEO Abe Shafi, the structure of IRL is meant to take the pressure off of any one person from being the ‘host.’

“We designed IRL so that people could send out lightweight invitations,” said Shafi. “We want people to be able to say ‘hey, I want to do something’ and send it out to a larger group of friends, letting people opt in and decide what they want to do. Creating a safe container that lets people opt in helps with social anxiety around making plans.”

This isn’t Shafi’s first go-round in the world of tech startups. Shafi sold his startup GetTalent to Dice in 2013. Shafi said that one of the difficulties in enterprise software was that he felt less and less connected to the problems he was solving, and knew that he felt at his best spending time with friends and family.

“I knew I didn’t want to participate in the distraction economy,” said Shafi. “More and more articles came out saying the healthiest thing you can do is spend time with people. I thought more about creating an app to help people get together, which in many ways is the white whale of consumer web.”

That’s how the idea for IRL started. But it wasn’t always called IRL. In fact, Shafi first launched an app called Gather, which we wrote about in early 2017.

Gather did an incredibly poor job of notifying users when it was sending out texts to their friends and contacts to join the app. While social apps have a limited window to get people on the app with their friends, Gather’s approach was reckless and ended up backfiring.

“That was our biggest mistake,” said Shafi. “We had a lot of really bad UX and UI that didn’t make it clear at all when you were inviting someone to Gather whether they were on or off the app, and it made people really confused.”

Shafi says that he and the team have learned a lot from Gather, and have implemented much more clear notifications around when a button in the app might send a text to someone who isn’t already on the IRL app. For example, during onboarding when the app asks you to send out nominations, it’ll show a couple of people already on the app and a couple of people from your contacts that haven’t downloaded the app. Those who aren’t on IRL will have an asterisk next to their name with a note on the page saying that those with an asterisk will be sent a text.

Some people still don’t do a great job of reading the fine print, so there are still some users in the app’s review section expressing their displeasure. But IRL has done a much better job of clarifying any step or action that might initiate a text send to a contact off the app.

Today, IRL launches its Android app, which you can find in the Google Play store.

IRL has received an undisclosed amount of funding from Floodgate and Founders Fund, and Cyan Banister (Scott Banister’s partner) led the Founders Fund round.

Hub by Amazon has been around for about a year now. The company introduced its package delivery lockers for apartment dwellers with little fanfare, as it no doubt worked out some of the kinks in the process. This morning, it seems, the company is finally ready to officially announce the product, as it begins rolling service out across the country.

The whole thing isn’t too different from what Amazon’s offered for a while with its locker delivery locations. Here, however, the bins are located inside of apartment buildings, with access available through a key pad. The idea is to save people from having to wait for a delivery from building staff or adjust their hours so they can be home to greet the delivery person.

As a resident of an apartment building who regularly finds himself greeted with a missed delivery slip and a long line at the local post office, it’s an idea I can get behind. And honestly, I’m not a huge fan of entrusting front door (or car) access to Amazon — or anyone else for that matter. How well the whole thing will handle irregularly sized packages, on the other hand, is another question entirely.

What’s really interesting in this whole bit of news is that it’s not an Amazon-only deal. The company says it will work with “deliveries from any sender.” So, why go with Amazon versus numerous other companies that offer similar services? No doubt the price is right on this one. Amazon’s always done a great job undercutting the competition, and Hub will no doubt be any different. It’s also providing 24 hour support for the system.

The company says the service is already available to 500k residents, with “thousands more” gaining access to one every month.

CrowdStrike, the developer of a security technology that looks at changes in user behavior on networked devices and uses that information to identify potential cyber threats, has reached a $3 billion valuation on the back of a new $200 million round of funding.

The company’s hosted endpoint security technology has seen tremendous adoption worldwide and its popularity was able to win the attention of General Atlantic, Accel, and IVP which co-led the company’s latest round. Previous investors March Capital and CapitalG both participated in the company’s new financing.

For companies seeing the number of devices that are accessing their corporate networks proliferate rapidly, the CrowdStrike hosted security technology is one of several potential fixes to what’s becoming a significant problem.

For CrowdStrike that’s meant doubling revenues and headcount and winnin contracts with over 16% of the Fortune 1000 companies and 20% of companies in the Fortune 500.

The company claims that its software processes over 100 billion “security events” a day and its automated threat detection service makes 2.3 million decisions each second.

The company has a $1 million warranty offer on its EPP Complete solution.

Other security companies like Cylance and Carbon Black have raised hundreds of millions for similar technologies. Indeed, the security market remains hotly contested in part because no technology has yet come up with a silver bullet for cyber attacks even as the number of attacks continue to proliferate.

Many chief security officers at big companies have mandates to only work with vendors that can replace at least three existing technologies that they’re already deploying, according to sources in the security industry.

In a blog post announcing the company’s new round, chief executive George Kurtz acknowledged the increasingly complex security environment that companies face, calling it “more global and dangerous” with lines blurring between “nation state and criminal adversaries”.

That’s why security companies like Cylance, Carbon Black and CrowdStriike have raised over $800 million between them. And why security remains such an attractive area for new venture investment.

Customer experience management is about getting to know your customer’s preferences in an online context, but pulling that information into the real world often proves a major challenge for organizations. This results in a huge disconnect when a customer walks into a physical store. This morning, Cisco announced it has bought July Systems, a company that purports to solve that problem.

The companies did not share the acquisition price.

July Systems connects to a building’s WiFi system to understand the customer who just walked in the door, how many times they have shopped at this retailer, their loyalty point score and so forth. This gives the vendor the same kind of understanding about that customer offline as they are used to getting online.

It’s an interesting acquisition for Cisco, taking advantage of some of its strengths as a networking company, given the WiFi component, but also moving in the direction of providing more specific customer experience services.

“Enterprises have an opportunity to take advantage of their in-building Wi-Fi for a broad range of indoor location services. In addition to providing seamless connectivity, Wi-Fi can help enterprises glean deep visitor behavior insights, associate these learnings with their enterprise systems, and drive better customer and employee experiences,” Cisco’s Rob Salvagno wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition.

As is often the case with these kinds of purchases, the two companies are not strangers. In fact, July Systems lists Cisco as a partner prominently on the company website (along with AWS). Customers include an interesting variety from Hilton Hotels to the New York Yankees baseball team.

Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says the acquisition is also about taking advantage of 5G. “July Systems gives Cisco the ability to expand its localization and customer experience management (CXM) capabilities pre-5g and post-5g. The WiFi analytics improve CXM, but more importantly Cisco also gains a robust developer community,” Wang told TechCrunch.

According to reports, the company had over $67 billion in cash as of February. That leaves plenty of money to make investments like this one and the company hasn’t been shy about using their cash horde to buy companies as they try to transform from a pure hardware company to one built on services

In fact, they have made 211 acquisitions over the years, according to data on Crunchbase. In recent years they have made some eye-popping ones like plucking AppDynamics for $3.7 billion just before it was going to IPO in 2017 or grabbing Jasper for $1.4 billion in 2016, but the company has also made a host of smaller ones like today’s announcement.

July Systems was founded back in 2001 and raised almost $60 million from a variety of investors including Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital, CRV and Motorola Solutions. Salvagno indicated the July Systems group will become incorporated into Cisco’s enterprise networking group. The deal is expected to be finalized in the first quarter of fiscal 2019.

The days for Yahoo Messenger are now numbered, but Yahoo and its parent Oath (which also owns TC) are still counting on growth for other communications services, specifically Yahoo Mail. Today, the company announced two new versions of Yahoo Mail, optimised for mobile web and an app for Android Go, a version of Android specifically tailored for cheaper handsets.

The launch comes at a time when Yahoo Mail has stagnated in its growth: the company says that it now has 227.8 million monthly active users with some 26 billion emails sent daily, but that user size is only about two million more than it had a year ago. It’s a small number also relatively speaking: as a comparison, Google’s Gmail reported 1.4 billion users this past April.

In other words, one very clear aim of enhancing the mobile web and Android One experience is to try to grow use of Yahoo Mail among new categories of users, specifically among people who are using lower-end devices, either in emerging markets or as more casual mobile users in more mature markets. And given that Yahoo Mail is already available in 46 languages and 70 markets, it’s probably overdue that Yahoo has decided to revamp some features specifically for a large part of those markets.

For the mobile web service specifically, Yahoo’s hoping to ease people into using Yahoo Mail more regularly.

“We’ve heard loud and clear from users that they’re not always ready to make the big leap to downloading an app that takes up any storage space on their phone,” said Joshua Jacobson, senior director of product management for Yahoo Mail. “People with high-capacity phones may want to save that space for photos or videos, while others with entry-level smartphones may just have limited space from the get-go. Further, some folks share devices or borrow a family member’s to access their email. This is all especially true in developing markets.” 

Yahoo is not the only company to focus on how to cater more to emerging markets: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google and many others have developed versions of their platforms and apps tailored for users in these countries (sometimes controversially, when their actions are deemed to be too anticompetitive). Part of the reason for this is because emerging market consumers have been proven to be very enthusiastic users of mobile phones: they use handsets as their primary communications device, often forgoing landlines and computers in the process; but not only do they generally have less money to spend on things like mobile data and devices, but often mobile data represents a higher relative cost overall.

On top of this, as growth has levelled off in mature markets, emerging economies are the drivers of all new adoption: usage outside of the US and other mature markets will grow by over 50 percent by 2025, according to the GSMA. Creating apps and sites that consume less data is a no-brainer if you want to grow your usage in these markets, which is what Yahoo is now trying to do.

Yahoo last year introduced a new version of its Mail app (along with a paid, ad-free option), which it updated earlier this year with faster load times and other features. Today’s new web version and Android Go app are aiming to create more parity with the standard that it set there. Features include “swipe through your inbox”, a Tinder-style gesture to either to mark a mail a ‘read’ or to delete it (if you swipe left); a new option to personalise your inbox with color themes; an enhanced sidebar to create and use folders; autosuggestion on names (a big one that would have felt very onerous to do without, I’d guess); infinite scroll on the inbox (with no need to click on ‘next’).

One issue that I’ve noticed a lot with web apps is that they often don’t seem to work as fast as native apps, and this too seems to be something that Yahoo wants to address: built on React and Redux (similar to the native apps), the responsiveness is much faster now.

Yahoo says that Android Go, meanwhile, will take up only about 10 megabytes of space to install, and is optimised to reduce RAM usage if your device is below 50MB.