Year: 2018

A third party audit of a controversial patient data-sharing arrangement between a London NHS Trust and Google DeepMind appears to have skirted over the core issues that generated the controversy in the first place.

The audit (full report here) — conducted by law firm Linklaters — of the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust’s acute kidney injury detection app system, Streams, which was co-developed with Google-DeepMind (using an existing NHS algorithm for early detection of the condition), does not examine the problematic 2015 information-sharing agreement inked between the pair which allowed data to start flowing.

“This Report contains an assessment of the data protection and confidentiality issues associated with the data protection arrangements between the Royal Free and DeepMind . It is limited to the current use of Streams, and any further development, functional testing or clinical testing, that is either planned or in progress. It is not a historical review,” writes Linklaters, adding that: “It includes consideration as to whether the transparency, fair processing, proportionality and information sharing concerns outlined in the Undertakings are being met.”

Yet it was the original 2015 contract that triggered the controversy, after it was obtained and published by New Scientist, with the wide-ranging document raising questions over the broad scope of the data transfer; the legal bases for patients information to be shared; and leading to questions over whether regulatory processes intended to safeguard patients and patient data had been sidelined by the two main parties involved in the project.

In November 2016 the pair scrapped and replaced the initial five-year contract with a different one — which put in place additional information governance steps.

They also went on to roll out the Streams app for use on patients in multiple NHS hospitals — despite the UK’s data protection regulator, the ICO, having instigated an investigation into the original data-sharing arrangement.

And just over a year ago the ICO concluded that the Royal Free NHS Foundation Trust had failed to comply with Data Protection Law in its dealings with Google’s DeepMind.

The audit of the Streams project was a requirement of the ICO.

Though, notably, the regulator has not endorsed Linklaters report. On the contrary, it warns that it’s seeking legal advice and could take further action.

In a statement on its website, the ICO’s deputy commissioner for policy, Steve Wood, writes: “We cannot endorse a report from a third party audit but we have provided feedback to the Royal Free. We also reserve our position in relation to their position on medical confidentiality and the equitable duty of confidence. We are seeking legal advice on this issue and may require further action.”

In a section of the report listing exclusions, Linklaters confirms the audit does not consider: “The data protection and confidentiality issues associated with the processing of personal data about the clinicians at the Royal Free using the Streams App.”

So essentially the core controversy, related to the legal basis for the Royal Free to pass personally identifiable information on 1.6M patients to DeepMind when the app was being developed, and without people’s knowledge or consent, is going unaddressed here.

And Wood’s statement pointedly reiterates that the ICO’s investigation “found a number of shortcomings in the way patient records were shared for this trial”.

“[P]art of the undertaking committed Royal Free to commission a third party audit. They have now done this and shared the results with the ICO. What’s important now is that they use the findings to address the compliance issues addressed in the audit swiftly and robustly. We’ll be continuing to liaise with them in the coming months to ensure this is happening,” he adds.

“It’s important that other NHS Trusts considering using similar new technologies pay regard to the recommendations we gave to Royal Free, and ensure data protection risks are fully addressed using a Data Protection Impact Assessment before deployment.”

While the report is something of a frustration, given the glaring historical omissions, it does raise some points of interest — including suggesting that the Royal Free should probably scrap a Memorandum of Understanding it also inked with DeepMind, in which the pair set out their ambition to apply AI to NHS data.

This is recommended because the pair have apparently abandoned their AI research plans.

On this Linklaters writes: “DeepMind has informed us that they have abandoned their potential research project into the use of AI to develop better algorithms, and their processing is limited to execution of the NHS AKI algorithm… In addition, the majority of the provisions in the Memorandum of Understanding are non-binding. The limited provisions that are binding are superseded by the Services Agreement and the Information Processing Agreement discussed above, hence we think the Memorandum of Understanding has very limited relevance to Streams. We recommend that the Royal Free considers if the Memorandum of Understanding continues to be relevant to its relationship with DeepMind and, if it is not relevant, terminates that agreement.”

In another section, discussing the NHS algorithm that underpins the Streams app, the law firm also points out that DeepMind’s role in the project is little more than helping provide a glorified app wrapper (on the app design front the project also utilized UK app studio, ustwo, so DeepMind can’t claim app design credit either).

“Without intending any disrespect to DeepMind, we do not think the concepts underpinning Streams are particularly ground-breaking. It does not, by any measure, involve artificial intelligence or machine learning or other advanced technology. The benefits of the Streams App instead come from a very well-designed and user-friendly interface, backed up by solid infrastructure and data management that provides AKI alerts and contextual clinical information in a reliable, timely and secure manner,” Linklaters writes.

What DeepMind did bring to the project, and to its other NHS collaborations, is money and resources — providing its development resources free for the NHS at the point of use, and stating (when asked about its business model) that it would determine how much to charge the NHS for these app ‘innovations’ later.

Yet the commercial services the tech giant is providing to what are public sector organizations do not appear to have been put out to open tender.

Also notably excluded in the Linklaters’ audit: Any scrutiny of the project vis-a-vis competition law, public procurement law compliance with procurement rules, and any concerns relating to possible anticompetitive behavior.

The report does highlight one potentially problematic data retention issue for the current deployment of Streams, saying there is “currently no retention period for patient information on Streams” — meaning there is no process for deleting a patient’s medical history once it reaches a certain age.

“This means the information on Streams currently dates back eight years,” it notes, suggesting the Royal Free should probably set an upper age limit on the age of information contained in the system.

While Linklaters largely glosses over the chequered origins of the Streams project, the law firm does make a point of agreeing with the ICO that the original privacy impact assessment for the project “should have been completed in a more timely manner”.

It also describes it as “relatively thin given the scale of the project”.

Giving its response to the audit, health data privacy advocacy group MedConfidential — an early critic of the DeepMind data-sharing arrangement — is roundly unimpressed, writing: “The biggest question raised by the Information Commissioner and the National Data Guardian appears to be missing — instead, the report excludes a “historical review of issues arising prior to the date of our appointment”.

“The report claims the ‘vital interests’ (i.e. remaining alive) of patients is justification to protect against an “event [that] might only occur in the future or not occur at all”… The only ‘vital interest’ protected here is Google’s, and its desire to hoard medical records it was told were unlawfully collected. The vital interests of a hypothetical patient are not vital interests of an actual data subject (and the GDPR tests are demonstrably unmet).

“The ICO and NDG asked the Royal Free to justify the collection of 1.6 million patient records, and this legal opinion explicitly provides no answer to that question.”

The chronological news feed has been a bit of a looming specter for Twitter . Sure, it’s their bread-and-butter but it only works for users who are willing to put in the time to prune their own feeds and strip away follows while constantly keeping an eye out for new accounts. For Twitter, a major challenge is discovering how they can update the experience for casual users who follow a few accounts but haven’t gotten deep into the discovery phase yet.

Twitter’s efforts to double-down on surfacing live events coverage and catering to users’ specific areas of interest have been an evolving mission for the company, but today, they are announcing some of their boldest moves yet to change how the app grows to understand a user base on their interactions.

Twitter is making some major updates to the Explore feed, which will now surface curated pages dedicated to news stories surrounding breaking news, live events and stories in a way that will drive a closer fit to individual user’s interests and help them find more of what’s happening across the site. Some of these changes will also be popping up at the top of user home timelines in a bid to draw users down exploratory rabbit holes that expose them to new accounts and new communities.

There’s going to be a big mix of what is being curated by humans and algorithms as the company looks to marry the editorial voice it has built up in Moments with its human curation team with a highly-targeted algorithm that can find interests and grab the latest tweets that meet them. It’s all about striking a balance and understanding the limits of curation in each situation, the company tells me.

“We wouldn’t, for example, set a human on the task of trying to identify all of the relevant live conversations coming out in real time in a particular situation so that’s where algorithmic curation comes in,” Twitter’s Director of Curation Joanna Geary told TechCrunch.

For Twitter, it’s a logical evolution of Moments which were introduced in 2015 to drive conversations and curate stories from the Twitterverse.

Now, for something like a breaking news story, you’ll be able to find what some of the most important tweets that have really driven the story, alongside a tab to explore what is coming in live. The company will be testing a topic feed dedicated to the 2018 World Cup that will organize scores, plug in live video, and integrate photos and reaction in a way curated by man and machine.

Twitter has been exploring the promises of the algorithmic feed for quite some time, but it’s opted to push most of these minor updates to the Explore feed or just to the top of users’ main feeds with brief “what you missed” interactions. This isn’t changing with today’s updates either, the company isn’t shifting the fundamentals of how your feed flows back in time, instead its seeking to offer snippets that help you move on tangents for discovery.

“For us, the heart of Twitter is all about discussing and discovering what’s happening right now,” Twitter Senior Director of Product Management Sriram Krishnan told TechCrunch. “People’s home timelines aren’t changing, we are going to show these experiences at the top of your home timeline but everything below it will continue to be the same.”

While users of the service have gotten used to the frequent changes in the company’s Explore tab, what will be new are the push notifications that Twitter is sending to users to direct them towards new or developing stories. Doing this in a highly targeted capacity is going to be pretty critical for Twitter. People are already annoyed by the constant notifications from social media services that they explicitly okayed, when there’s deviation from that people can get upset. Users will be able to shut off these types of notifications if Twitter surfaces stuff that isn’t relevant or welcome, but there’s a lot of potential for payoff if the company does this well.

All of these changes to the Explore tab will be rolling out to users in the U.S. and Canada in the next few months, the company says, while integrations in the home feed are simply “coming soon.”

The impact for the company could be substantial here as they continue to chase turning MAUs to DAUs, but it all depends on how much they can get to know the person at the tail-end of all of the follows, likes and retweets and see whether they can bring them something that matters.

Way back in October of last year, Ring announced “Ring Protect” — a modular, no contract, DIY home security system.

After a few delays, a bit of legal drama and Ring being acquired for a billion dollars by Amazon, the alarm is finally about to ship — albeit with a slightly different (better!) name.

Ring Protect has been redubbed as the more intuitive Ring Alarm — a better name if only because competitor Nest has both a security product and a totally different product (a smoke detector) called Nest Protect.

Ring’s base level alarm kit starts at $199, which includes a keypad (for arming/disarming the system), one door/window sensor, a motion detector and a range extender. You’ll probably want to add more components, and, fortunately, they’re relatively cheap: another door sensor, for example, is $20, while the motion detectors are $30.

Nest’s competing security system packs a few tricks that Ring’s doesn’t (Nest combined the door/motion sensors into one, for example, and it’s got a fancy RFID system for PIN-free disarming), but it also costs $200 more… and that’s after a $100 price drop that, presumably not by coincidence, just happened yesterday.

The system doesn’t require any sort of contract — but if you want professional monitoring, it’ll be $10 a month. That’s a pretty good deal, especially because if you’ve got any of Ring’s cameras (like its smart doorbell, or its floodlight cameras), that plan includes unlimited video storage for all of ’em.

Ring says it’s got more products on the way to expand the system, including smoke/carbon monoxide detectors and flood sensors.

Ring’s security system is up for pre-order now and, if all goes as planned, will start shipping on July 4th.

BitWall, a Bitcoin-focused startup promising to help online publishers make money, has been acquired.

Its new owner is WatchOut, the company behind an app that sends alerts about things like product and food recalls and weather-realted emergencies. It’s not the most obvious acquirer, but the companies say BitWall can help Watch Out improve its data, payments and loyalty systems.

“We are excited to bring BitWall into the Watch Out! ecosystem,” said Watch Out CEO Michael Lucas in the acquisition announcement. “Our mission is to provide a secure consumer-protection platform while delivering hyper-targeted content when and where it matters most, whether that be a safety alert or a digital reward. BitWall and its team help us do that.”

Apparently there’s a TechCrunch connection to the story, too — BitWall co-founder and CEO Nic Meliones told me he first got connected to Watch Out at our Disrupt SF Hackathon in 2014, and he said the company has already been “a great partner” to BitWall.

I first wrote about the startup before the current craze around Bitcoin and cryptocurrency — all the way back in 2013. The idea was to give visitors different ways to access paywalled content, whether that’s making a small payment, promoting the article on Twitter or viewing an ad.

The company’s biggest win was probably a partnership with the Chicago Sun-Times in 2014, where the Sun-Times tested out a paywall that readers could bypass using Bitcoin or tweets. (The Sun-Times’ current paywall plans don’t appear to include BitWall.)

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Meliones said the company’s paywall product will be shut down, with the technology diverted to a yet-to-be-announced product at WatchOut.

Bitwall’s investors include Boost VC, AngelPad, Tim Draper, the Boost Bitcoin Fund.

Facebook is hoping to avoid another privacy scandal by adding new accountability and transparency requirements for businesses that use its Custom Audiences too to target you with ads based on your email address or phone number. Starting July 2nd, advertisers will have to declare whether contact info uploaded for ad targeting was collected with proper user consent by them, one of their partners, or both. Users will be able to see this info if they opt to block future ads from that business.

Companies can only share Custom Audiences info with partners like ad agencies if they’re formally connected through Facebook’s business manager tool. And Facebook will start to show advertisers reminders that they need consent for contact info ad targeting and force all users connected to an ad account to confirm these terms.

The new consent tool launch confirms TechCrunch’s scoop from March that Facebook would crack down Custom Audiences targeting without consent. Facebook has always technically required consent, but it hasn’t necesssarily done much to enforce those rules. That same approach to API rules produced the Cambridge Analytica debacle.

Custom Audiences is one of Facebook’s most valuable revenue generators because it allows businesses to hit up their former customers to buy more. A scandal surrounding the targeting mechanism could be seriously detrimental to the social network’s business in a way that the rest of its recent public image problems haven’t, judging by the recovery of Facebook’s share price.

Since 2012, Facebook has offered Custom Audiences as a way for businesses to upload privacy-safe hashed lists of customer contact info. Facebook matches that against its users’ info to show them the business’ ads, rather than companies having to pay to try to reach those people through demographic targeting. That way, a company that already sold you a car and got your email signup could targeting you a few years later with ads to trade in and buy a new vehicle. Businesses can also use Facebook’s lookalikes targeting to reach people with similar characteristics to their existing customers.

Now at least Facebook will show this “Original Data Source” field asking who collected the uploaded phone numbers or emails. Users can check out this info if they click the “Why Am I Seeing This Ads?” button in the drop-down. However, Facebook stops short of scanning the lists for suspicious info, such as blocks of contact info that match hacked or purchased data sets.

That means Facebook is trusting advertisers to tell the truth about consent for targeting…despite them having a massive financial incentive to bend of break those rules. Today’s update will give Facebook more plausible deniability in the event of a scandal, and it might deter misuse. But Facebook is stopping short of doing anything to actually prevent non-consensual ad targeting.

Tucked away in a far corner of the West Pavilion of the Los Angeles Convention center among the independent game developers showcased by IndieCade  during E3, is a small booth demonstrating the latest Polymega hardware, a device that’s billing itself as the NES Classic for every old school game released on every old school gaming platform.

The company that’s making the device first debuted last year as Retroblox, and while its name has changed (it’s now called Playmaji) and its hardware has gotten more refined, the vision remains very much the same.

Playmaji debuted the new system and its user interface last year at E3 and it’s back again this year to tout its new pricing, and drum up support for pre-order campaign even as it tries to raise money to license games from publishers.

Last year, Playmaji eschewed going down the crowdfunding route and instead raised $500,000 from undisclosed angel investors, according to chief executive and co-founder Bryan Bernal. This year, Bernal said his company would look to launch a pre-order campaign within the next three months and begin shipping systems by the end of the year.

While there are plenty of consoles (like the Retroengine; or Hyperkin’s SNES clone; or Analogue’s SuperNT) that tout similar capabilities to play retro arcade and console games from gaming’s golden age, Playmaji’s grand designs to provide an all in one networked console for gaming that can stream to Twitch or YouTube may set it apart.

The company wants to ensure that it’s doing everything by the book and not tacitly encouraging piracy, according to Bernal.

Eventually Bernal does envision a move into licensing (aiming for 50 to 100 games when the company launches its first product in the fourth quarter of this year), but for now users are limited to the cartridges that they own — or that they can find somewhere.

Both Bernal and his co-founder Eric Christensen have a history in the games business coming from Insomniac Games where Bernal worked on the Ratchet and Clank title.

The hardware console will sell for $249.99 initially with module sets that allow for users to upload games from different consoles starting at another $59.99. Those modular sets also include controllers that resemble the classic designs from NES and Sega systems.

“We designed new classic controllers packaged with the element modules,” said Bernal. “You can have a retro controller ready to go. To allow the classic feel and emotion of the games to carry on into the future.”

So far, the company has only raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding, but Bernal is gearing up fo ra larger round of $2 million to $3 million for licensing additional games. He said preliminary talks were already underway with companies like Sega, Konami and Capcom.

“The closest corollary on the market is the Classic Mini,” says Bernal. While Sega supports classic cartridges through one of its game platforms, no other console that’s on the market presents a unified device for all of a user’s old games, he said.

“This is supposed to serve as the home base in your living room,” said Bernal.

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Media software maker Plex is the latest live TV service to add a traditional grid-style programming guide as an alternative to browsing through thumbnail images or lists of recommendations. The guide, which is available first on the web, is a nod to cord cutters who may have changed how they want to access live TV – in Plex’s case, via a digital antenna and then through its media software – but aren’t yet ready to give up the old-school grid format for finding what’s on.

Plex is not the only live TV service to embrace the guide. A number of streaming newcomers, including also YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, Sling TV, and DirecTV Now, for example, today offer the grid guide – many also in response to user feedback requests.

It seems that a number of TV viewers don’t think of these services the way they do something like Netflix or Prime Video – that is, they’re not interested in browsing thumbnails, watching preview trailers, parsing recommendation lists, or any of the other means of content discovery associated with streaming video.

Instead, they see these services as a stand-in for traditional TV, with the traditional TV guide in tow.

Plex says the feature is live now on the web version of its service, but will come to other platforms in time.

Its Live TV service and DVR requires a Plex Pass subscription, plus a digital antenna and tuner to work.

Plex itself has been working towards becoming a home to all media content in recent days, not just live TV and home media collections. It has also added on support for news – something cord cutters often miss out on – as well as VR, and, more recently, podcasts.

Details on enabling the new grid program guide are here.

Earlier this year, Amazon introduced “Alexa Blueprints” – a way for anyone to create their own customized Alexa skills for personal use, without needing to know how to code. Today, the company will allow those skills to be shared with others, including through text messages, email, messaging apps like WhatsApp, or social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

The idea is that you could create a skill for your friends or family to use, to save them the work of having to edit Amazon’s provided templates with your own content. Amazon suggests the new sharing feature could be used among study groups, who have built a custom “flashcards” skill, for example, or shared among family for a birthday. (Presumably, the skill is part of your present?)

Blueprints, so far, have been a fun way to play around with Alexa in your home, teaching it to respond to questions like “who’s the best mom?” (me, of course), creating lists of your family’s favorite jokes, playing customized trivia games, and more.

But adoption has been fairly limited – it’s a neat trick, but not a must-have for all Alexa users.

The skills themselves are simple to build: Amazon provides templates, which are basically filled in and ready to go, but you change the answers to suit your needs.

Now, you when you’re viewing the list of skills you’ve made, you can toggle the skill’s status under the “Access” section to either “just me” or “shared.” (You can un-share a skill at any time, too, by choosing “revoke.”)

Sharing creates a link to your skill that you can paste into a text message, email, social media, or anywhere else. When the recipients clicks the link, they’re taken to the Alexa Blueprints site where they can enable the skill for themselves.

While this could make it easier for people to use Blueprints, it would be interesting if there was a way to share the skills more publicly, too – currently, you can’t publish skills to the Alexa Skill Store, as they’re meant for personal use. But having some sort of community section for Alexa owners within the Blueprints site itself could be interesting – maybe you could share your own Blueprints templates here, or ask others to collaborate on creating one with you.

Imagine a Blueprint trivia game built by all the fans of a favorite TV show, for instance. Or maybe you could share a set of Blueprints with your extended family, since, you know, you’re “the techie one.”

Of course, it’s hard to justify investing in a project that still has a niche audience at this time – but on the other hand, building a community of Alexa owners around homegrown skills could prompt that audience to grow, and help to inform professional developers about what kinds of skills people really wanted.

Alexa Blueprints are free to use at blueprints.amazon.com. 

eyeo, the company behind the popular browser-based ad block product Adblock Plus, is no stranger to controversy. Which is just as well given its new “passion project”: A browser add-on that labels news content as ‘trusted’ or, well, Breitbart.

The beta browser extension, which is called Trusted News (initially it’s just available for Chrome), is intended to help Internet users spot sources of fake news when they’re exposed to content online.

And thus to help people avoid falling for scams or down into political sinkholes — at least without being aware of their inherent bias.

The system, which is currently only available for English language content, “democratically scores the integrity and trustworthiness of online news sources”, as eyeo puts it.

After being added to Chrome, the browser extension displays a small green check mark against its icon if a news source is deemed to be trustworthy.

Or you might see an orange colored ‘B’ — denoting ‘bias’ — as in the below example, for the ‘alt right’ news website Breitbart…

The extension can also deploy flags for untrustworthy, satire (denoted with a little blue smilie), clickbait, user-generated content, malicious or unknown — the latter if the site hasn’t yet been classified.

It’s not clear how many sites have been classified via the system at this stage.

So how is Trusted News classifying sites? In the first instance eyeo says it’s leaning on four third party fact-checking organizations to generate its classifications: PolitiFact, Snopes, Wikipedia and Zimdars’ List.

“For now the way that it works is that you have these sources… and what they will do is essentially give their rating on a particular site and then, basically, if everything isn’t all the same — which they usually are — then you would just go by the [majority],” explains Ben Williams, the company’s director of ecosystems.

But the plan is to evolve this approach using user feedback and — you guessed it — blockchain technology.

eyeo has been working with MetaCert Protocol which runs an anti-fraud URL registry (that’s also headed for the blockchain), to maintain the database for the project.

And that database will be decentralized by moving it to the Ethereum blockchain — with a new protocol and built-in game mechanics to reward submissions. MetaCert tokens will also be issued to track rewards and mitigate the risk of bad actors spoiling the quality of the data.

“What we want to do, and where the blockchain comes in, is we want to move that over to incorporate users’ feedback as well,” says Williams. “So initially what we’re going to do in a few weeks is incorporate something where users can just provide feedback through the extension. And they can dispute something. They can say ‘hey I don’t feel like this site should be listed as biased because whatever’. And we’re going to use that feedback to make the product better.

“And then the next step is to decouple that from any server, and from any third party, and give it directly to the blockchain. So that that feedback can live on its own in that place and so that good feedback can be prized and rewarded among users, and people who are providing bad feedback won’t be. So that is the next step.”

Another future step would be to add more “fine-grained detail” — such as being able to say which way on the political spectrum a biased news source swings, for example.

And also easier ways for people to comment on such ratings. But that’s also yet to come.

Indeed, Williams emphasizes that eyeo is testing the waters at this stage — to see whether the approach will be something web users find useful.

To be clear, it’s also not intending to monetize the extension in any shape or form. (And, for the record, Williams confirms there will be no ‘whitelist’ for bypassing ratings, even before blockchain tech gets involved and decentralizes the project.)

“I want to stress, this is a first, humble attempt — this is a beta — we want to see how this goes. We want people to give us honest feedback on it. And we want to improve upon that. So it’s not merely a matter of where the labels are. But also is this what people want?” he says. “We think it’s a good idea but it is, again, just a start.”

Facebook has its own fake news fighting efforts now, of course, but clearly those only apply to content within its walled garden. If you want to fight fakes on the Internet as a whole the browser is the best place to do it, reckons Williams.

“There is a different between the entire Internet and Facebook. Facebook is a way to access certain things on the web and I appreciate the fact that in certain places it’s the only way, unfortunately, that people can reach the web but the web is a very vast place,” he says.

“Most people reach it through the web browsers, so being in that web browser allows users to have that sort of protection and understanding wherever they go on the web. Facebook included.”

On the privacy front, eyeo says that the Trusted News extension updates its own internal database each day so that users’ browsing activity “never touches a central server”.

Support for other browsers is planned, assuming the extension finds fans. It looks pretty safe to assume it’s not going to be popular with certain sections on the far right of the political spectrum.

Though, while Breitbart and the Daily Mail are labeled ‘biased’, Fox News and The Sun, for example, do get a trustworthy tick. Also ‘trusted’ by Trusted News’ current rating system: President Donald Trump’s favorite media target for labeling as ‘fake news’, CNN; and RT (formerly known as Russia Today), one of the Russian state-backed media organizations Twitter banned from its ad platform last year for attempting to interfere in the 2016 US elections…

“In weeks to months or so we should definitely be able to move everything over to the blockchain so it’s all not too far away. I think that the bigger question down the line for us — not months, but maybe a year or so — is if there is demand. If people like it. Again. If people are happy with the beta product then how do we or should we move to mobile? That would be the next really big question,” adds Williams.

Managed by Q, the office management platform based out of NYC, today announced its acquisition of NVS.

Founded by Jason Havens in 2011, NVS is an office space planning and project management service, helping businesses plan their moves or office redesigns from start to finish. The company helps connect with a network of brokers, architects, interior designers, etc. and manage the project on behalf of their clients to ensure it stays on schedule and doesn’t end up costing more than expected.

For Managed by Q, NVS provides an added service layer for existing clients, and has the opportunity to bring new clients into the Managed by Q fold.

This marks Managed by Q’s second acquisition, as the company acquired task management software provider Hivy in September 2017.

Managed by Q, founded in 2014, has raised more than $70 million by providing software to help office managers do their job. From IT support to cleaning to office supplies, Managed by Q offers a centralized ‘operating system’ that connects office managers to various vendors and services.

The acquisition of NVS helps broaden Q’s product portfolio, while bringing in yet another revenue stream. NVS already has a proven record of success, serving more than 100 clients including big names like CBS Radio, the NBA Players Association, Glossier, Grovo, and Intent Media.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Teran confirmed that the entire NVS team would be joining MBQ as part of the deal.