Year: 2018

Target this morning announced it’s expanding its same-day shipping and pickup services, Drive Up and Shipt, across the Midwestern U.S. and the Southeast. The expansion will bring Shipt, its Instacart competitor for same-day grocery delivery and pickup, to more than 135 markets in the U.S. by the end of this month. Meanwhile, Target’s Drive Up curbside pickup service will reach more than 600 stores in 20 states this week, as a result of the expansion.

The news follows on Target’s earlier commitment to expand these services to stores nationwide by the 2018 holidays.

In total, the retailer says these current expansions will bring the shipping and pickup services to “tens of millions” of Target shoppers.

The company also offered a brief update on its other delivery and pickup services, Target Restock, a next-day essentials delivery service, and delivery of store purchases, which is available to select stores in urban markets where hauling home larger purchases without a vehicle is difficult.

Restock will reach more than 135 markets by the end of June, allowing Target online customers to stock up on household items like laundry detergent, trash bags, diapers, packaged foods, beauty and health needs, and more, then take delivery the next day. The service competes with Amazon’s Prime Pantry, which quietly introduced a $4.99 monthly subscription fee earlier in 2018 for Prime members who don’t want to pay the otherwise $7.99 flat shipping fee on their orders of $40 or more.

Target Restock, however, became free for Target REDcard purchases and $2.99 for all other orders back in May, undercutting Amazon.

Meanwhile, Shipt and Drive Up’s availability will often overlap as the two expand to Target stores across the U.S.

Drive Up is the newer of the two, allowing customers to place orders in the Target app, then pickup in 2 hours or less. The service was piloted in Target’s home market of Minneapolis-St. Paul, then rolled out to nearly 270 stores across Florida, Texas and the southeast in April.

Delivery of store purchases is not as widely available, as it’s meant to fill a gap in markets Drive Up can’t serve due to lack of parking – like urban Target stores. This service is now available in around 60 U.S. stores across five urban markets, allowing customers to shop the store, then take delivery of in-store purchases later the same day.

Chicago will be the first major market to have access to all four services, Target also notes.

Hey startups! Disrupt SF is in three months exactly. Registration is open for startups looking to showcase their product or company to thousands of people on the Disrupt floor. Last year, according to CrunchBase, startups that exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2017 raised more than $37 million in seed and Series A funding six months post-Disrupt.

For $1,995, you’ll get one full day to exhibit, three full-conference passes to Disrupt SF (if you buy a table before 7/25), and admission to our After Party (as long as you’re over 21). Ready to join us? You can secure your exhibit spot here.

What else do you get with your participation in Startup Alley, you might ask?

Well, you get access to CrunchMatch, Disrupt’s startup and investor-matching program. It’s designed to make it easy for startups to meet investors based on a curated analysis of which startups fit with a given investor’s profile.

In addition to CrunchMatch, Startup Alley companies have the opportunity to be selected as “Wild Card” and participate in the renowned Startup Battlefield competition. Through a combination of attendee votes and TechCrunch editorial votes, one startup will be chosen on each day to participate in Battlefield. At Disrupt NY 2017, RecordGram went from Startup Alley to Wild Card to win the Startup Battlefield competition — and took home $50,000!

Over the course of the three-day conference, you’ll make tons of connections with other tech enthusiasts, listen to panels covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence and machine learning to hardware, and more.

So, if your company is pre-series A, Startup Alley is the place for you. Secure your table here before we sell out!

Hey startups! Disrupt SF is in three months exactly. Registration is open for startups looking to showcase their product or company to thousands of people on the Disrupt floor. Last year, according to CrunchBase, startups that exhibited in Startup Alley at Disrupt SF 2017 raised more than $37 million in seed and Series A funding six months post-Disrupt.

For $1,995, you’ll get one full day to exhibit, three full-conference passes to Disrupt SF (if you buy a table before 7/25), and admission to our After Party (as long as you’re over 21). Ready to join us? You can secure your exhibit spot here.

What else do you get with your participation in Startup Alley, you might ask?

Well, you get access to CrunchMatch, Disrupt’s startup and investor-matching program. It’s designed to make it easy for startups to meet investors based on a curated analysis of which startups fit with a given investor’s profile.

In addition to CrunchMatch, Startup Alley companies have the opportunity to be selected as “Wild Card” and participate in the renowned Startup Battlefield competition. Through a combination of attendee votes and TechCrunch editorial votes, one startup will be chosen on each day to participate in Battlefield. At Disrupt NY 2017, RecordGram went from Startup Alley to Wild Card to win the Startup Battlefield competition — and took home $50,000!

Over the course of the three-day conference, you’ll make tons of connections with other tech enthusiasts, listen to panels covering topics ranging from artificial intelligence and machine learning to hardware, and more.

So, if your company is pre-series A, Startup Alley is the place for you. Secure your table here before we sell out!

Imagine trying to build a business in a country where 90% of the water is undrinkable, electricity only works four hours a day and your travel is restricted to an area four times the size of Manhattan, and where in-person meetings are impossible because your partners can’t enter your country to meet you.

And imagine not having access to capital because of your ethnicity (as many POC entrepreneurs across the globe already do).

That’s the situation for Arab-Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs trying to create businesses and access the enormous engine of wealth creation that has transformed Israel into “startup nation”.

The billions of capital and transformational opportunity that building startups affords to economies has largely been denied entrepreneurs in Israel’s Arab community and in Palestine.

However, two organizations in the country and in the violence-stricken Gaza strip are working to provide access. One is The Hybrid, an Israeli government-backed initiative out of Nazareth that is trying to bring the benefits of the tech economy to Israel’s Arab population. The other is Gaza Sky Geeks, an Alphabet-backed initiative based in Gaza, that provides pre-seed investments, training and technology resources to Palestine’s Gazan population.

For Arab entrepreneurs living in Israel, The Hybrid is a resource to help overcome the broad cultural challenges that they need to combat. Things like a perception that backing their startups is inherently riskier than investing in a company founded by a Jewish Israeli citizen. Or the cultural stigma of failure that’s more prevalent in the Arab community.

These are the things that Fadi Swidan and his Nazareth-based organization are working to combat. “There was the most important miracle that has influenced billions of people and it was the annunciation,” Swidan said. “The next miracle for the world and for the high tech industry will also come from Nazareth.”

The Hybrid invests in early stage Arab-Israeli entrepreneurs and encourages Israel’s technology companies to reach out to the nation’s Arab population and bring them into startups to gain experience, skills, and know-how that the nation has cultivated among its Jewish population for decades.

Meanwhile, Gaza Sky Geeks has set itself out with the no less daunting task of training entrepreneurs that are mostly confined to 140 square miles on how to build successful businesses. It’s there that potable drinking water is scarce; that electricity is intermittent; and that entrepreneurs with the dream of building big businesses are struggling every day to build thriving international businesses.

“The fact that people can’t travel is definitely the biggest obstacle,” says Sturgill. “You can’t meet your investor or partner… or even go out and travel professionally… Most of the entrepreneurs that we’re working with haven’t been more than 20 feet from their home.”

Even with the challenges that entrepreneurs face, both Sturgill and Swidan have successes that can promote. For example, entrepreneurs out of Gaza Sky Geeks are looking to take advantage of the wave of e-commerce growth in the Gulf Countries. Zumrod, which sells high-end makeup online, Izaari, Threadless for the Middle East, and Momyhelper.com, which is a social network for mothers, are all making progress. Meanwhile, Mindolife, an industrial IoT startup, and Optima Design Innovation, focused on bringing safety to autonomous vehicles, are also showing early signs of success.

But the issue still stands. Challenges, ranging from the biases of the establishment to literally locked down borders and isolation, stand between these entrepreneurs and their dreams.

For the Hybrid, and Arab-Israeli founders, one clear example was the Al-Bawader fund. The state-sponsored fund, working in collaboration with Pitango, was created to invest solely in Arab startups, looking to integrate the Arab startup scene into the much larger and more mature Israeli tech scene. But the fund didn’t adapt to the more nascent Arab tech ecosystem, attempting to write larger checks and take more equity than was seemingly appropriate, and not making as many deals as was expected.

For these emerging entrepreneurs it may not be the capital that’s the most important (although the capital is definitely important), rather it’s just an acknowledgement by the entrepreneurs — who are able to enjoy all of the fruit that the technology ecosystem offers — of the obstacles that their fellow startup founders face.

Which is why Sturgill left the audience with this:

“There’s a tendency from the tech community, emanating from the Valley, that tech will bring people together… That can be a ways off…. It’s important… tech is important in that it can build empathy..

There are entrepreneurs in Gaza that are trying to build the exact same thing that businesses here are trying to build.

Try to understand that… if you’re here in this room… there are poeple there who are just like you… they’re facing the same challenges, but also a set of challenges that are really unique and totally outside of their control… I would encourage people here to have conversations around yourselves… The tech community is fairly influential… People can have conversations about whether it’s the right thing to have a place like that that has been closed off for a decade.”

Imagine trying to build a business in a country where 90% of the water is undrinkable, electricity only works four hours a day and your travel is restricted to an area four times the size of Manhattan, and where in-person meetings are impossible because your partners can’t enter your country to meet you.

And imagine not having access to capital because of your ethnicity (as many POC entrepreneurs across the globe already do).

That’s the situation for Arab-Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs trying to create businesses and access the enormous engine of wealth creation that has transformed Israel into “startup nation”.

The billions of capital and transformational opportunity that building startups affords to economies has largely been denied entrepreneurs in Israel’s Arab community and in Palestine.

However, two organizations in the country and in the violence-stricken Gaza strip are working to provide access. One is The Hybrid, an Israeli government-backed initiative out of Nazareth that is trying to bring the benefits of the tech economy to Israel’s Arab population. The other is Gaza Sky Geeks, an Alphabet-backed initiative based in Gaza, that provides pre-seed investments, training and technology resources to Palestine’s Gazan population.

For Arab entrepreneurs living in Israel, The Hybrid is a resource to help overcome the broad cultural challenges that they need to combat. Things like a perception that backing their startups is inherently riskier than investing in a company founded by a Jewish Israeli citizen. Or the cultural stigma of failure that’s more prevalent in the Arab community.

These are the things that Fadi Swidan and his Nazareth-based organization are working to combat. “There was the most important miracle that has influenced billions of people and it was the annunciation,” Swidan said. “The next miracle for the world and for the high tech industry will also come from Nazareth.”

The Hybrid invests in early stage Arab-Israeli entrepreneurs and encourages Israel’s technology companies to reach out to the nation’s Arab population and bring them into startups to gain experience, skills, and know-how that the nation has cultivated among its Jewish population for decades.

Meanwhile, Gaza Sky Geeks has set itself out with the no less daunting task of training entrepreneurs that are mostly confined to 140 square miles on how to build successful businesses. It’s there that potable drinking water is scarce; that electricity is intermittent; and that entrepreneurs with the dream of building big businesses are struggling every day to build thriving international businesses.

“The fact that people can’t travel is definitely the biggest obstacle,” says Sturgill. “You can’t meet your investor or partner… or even go out and travel professionally… Most of the entrepreneurs that we’re working with haven’t been more than 20 feet from their home.”

Even with the challenges that entrepreneurs face, both Sturgill and Swidan have successes that can promote. For example, entrepreneurs out of Gaza Sky Geeks are looking to take advantage of the wave of e-commerce growth in the Gulf Countries. Zumrod, which sells high-end makeup online, Izaari, Threadless for the Middle East, and Momyhelper.com, which is a social network for mothers, are all making progress. Meanwhile, Mindolife, an industrial IoT startup, and Optima Design Innovation, focused on bringing safety to autonomous vehicles, are also showing early signs of success.

But the issue still stands. Challenges, ranging from the biases of the establishment to literally locked down borders and isolation, stand between these entrepreneurs and their dreams.

For the Hybrid, and Arab-Israeli founders, one clear example was the Al-Bawader fund. The state-sponsored fund, working in collaboration with Pitango, was created to invest solely in Arab startups, looking to integrate the Arab startup scene into the much larger and more mature Israeli tech scene. But the fund didn’t adapt to the more nascent Arab tech ecosystem, attempting to write larger checks and take more equity than was seemingly appropriate, and not making as many deals as was expected.

For these emerging entrepreneurs it may not be the capital that’s the most important (although the capital is definitely important), rather it’s just an acknowledgement by the entrepreneurs — who are able to enjoy all of the fruit that the technology ecosystem offers — of the obstacles that their fellow startup founders face.

Which is why Sturgill left the audience with this:

“There’s a tendency from the tech community, emanating from the Valley, that tech will bring people together… That can be a ways off…. It’s important… tech is important in that it can build empathy..

There are entrepreneurs in Gaza that are trying to build the exact same thing that businesses here are trying to build.

Try to understand that… if you’re here in this room… there are poeple there who are just like you… they’re facing the same challenges, but also a set of challenges that are really unique and totally outside of their control… I would encourage people here to have conversations around yourselves… The tech community is fairly influential… People can have conversations about whether it’s the right thing to have a place like that that has been closed off for a decade.”

TCL just dropped the sequel to the KeyOne, the company’s surprisingly good keyboard-sporting BlackBerry handset. We reviewed it roughly this time last year, and it was almost enough to restore our faith in the possibilities of BlackBerry as a brand. Almost. Of course, that had much more to do with TCL’s ability to create solid hardware than any residual BB legacy.

The Key2 builds on the promise of its predecessor, bringing back the physical keyboard and familiar BlackBerry-styled design, constructed around a 4.5-inch touchscreen and aluminum frame. The phone, naturally, runs Android (8.1 to start), loaded up with your standard suite of BlackBerry software, including DTEK. The security app has been updated with an new Proactive Health feature, which offers a full system scan.

As TCL proudly notes, this is the first BlackBerry/BlackBerry-branded device to feature dual rear-facing cameras, so that’s something. The pair of 12-megapixel cameras help deliver the device into 2018 with features like Portait Mode, Optical Super Zoom and Google Lens.

There’s a chunky 3,500mAH battery and a middling Snapdragon 660, coupled with a generous 6GB of RAM and either 64- or 128GB of storage. Not too shabby, but all of that comes with a $649 price tag, which marks a $100 premium over the KeyOne, which should make this a bit of a tougher pill to swallow for what to many no doubt still feels like a bit of a novelty in the smartphone category.

The Key2 starts shipping this month, and TCL tells me that it plans to keep selling the KeyOne as well, for the time being.

Lyft has revamped its rider app in an attempt to help people get where they’re going faster. Instead of first asking for pickup information, the app will now ask where you’re going, which Uber first started asking in 2016. The app is also designed to encourage more shared rides. Oh, and Lyft is now no longer calling its carpool feature Line. Instead, they’re simply shared rides.

“We’re updating [Line] to shared and you’re going to see a suite of options for shared as we evolve over time,” Lyft VP of Design Katie Dill told TechCrunch. “There are multiple different ways of sharing a ride. By calling it shared, we’re a lot more clear with our passengers.”

This new app will roll out to everyone over the next month.

Currently, 35 percent of Lyft rides are shared, but the goal is to reach 50 percent shared rides by 2020, Lyft VP of Government Relations Joseph Okpaku told TechCrunch. Through some early testing of the new design, Lyft says it has already seen a 5 percent increase in shared rides. This is not a direct apples to apples comparison, but in San Francisco, people share rides up to 50 percent of the time with Uber Pool.

“One of our focuses has been the idea of shared rides,” Okpaku said. “Getting people to share a ride with a stranger.”

Lyft has also made it easier to compare prices of its solo versus shared rides. The screen above, Dill said, is where Lyft has seen the five percent increase in choosing a shared ride.

To further promote shared rides, Lyft will notify those who opt to ride solo if there’s an available shared ride heading their way that doesn’t include any detours. The ultimate goal, Okpaku said, is to get more people in a smaller number of cars.

In the near-term, Lyft is launching transit integration with the Transportation Authority of Marin in Marin County, Calif. and the Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica, Calif. In total, Lyft has more than 25 transit partners throughout the country.

“We’ve been really bullish on the fact that transit and ride-sharing are inherently compatible,” Okpaku said.

Lyft isn’t sharing mockups of its transit integration, but the idea is that people will be able to get public transit trip details from within the Lyft app. For now, it doesn’t seem like payments will be part of the experience. Uber, on the other hand, recently announced a partnership with Masabi a mobile ticketing platform for public transit. Masabi handles ticketing for 30 transportation agencies worldwide, including Los Angeles’ Metrolink, New York’s MTA, London’s Thames Clippers and Boston’s MBTA. The idea is that as people will be able to book and use transit tickets from within the Uber app.

UberMasabi partnership

Lyft has also done some work with the city of San Francisco to reduce congestion on some of the city’s highly trafficked streets. Near Valencia Street, for example, Lyft has created a couple of pickup and dropoff spots for passengers off to some side streets. Over the last couple of months, Lyft says it has directed over 20,000 pickups to those side streets.

“This is something we’ve done here and there, but is now something we’ll systemize,” Okpaku said. “We will do this permanently on Valencia and will expand across San Francisco and other parts of the country.”

This redesign comes at a time when Lyft is looking into both bike-share and electric scooters. With the design, it’s clear to see how Lyft could easily add new modes of mobility.

Logtrust is now known as Devo in one of the cooler name changes I’ve seen in a long time. Whether they intended to pay homage to the late 70s band is not clear, but investors probably didn’t care, as they gave the data operations startup a bushel of money today.

The company now known as Devo announced a $25 million Series C round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Kibo Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $71 million.

The company changed its name because it was about much more than logs, according to CEO Walter Scott. It offers a cloud service that allows customers to stream massive amounts of data — think terabytes or even petabytes — relieving the need to worry about all of the scaling and hardware requirements processing this amount of data would require. That could be from logs from web servers, security data from firewalls or transactions taking place on backend systems, as some examples.

The data can live on prem if required, but the processing always gets done in the cloud to provide for the scaling needs. Scott says this is about giving companies this ability to process and understand massive amounts of data that previously was only in reach of web scale companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon.

But it involves more than simply collecting the data. “It’s the combination of us being able to collect all of that data together with running analytics on top of it all in a unified platform, then allowing a very broad spectrum of the business [to make use of it],” Scott explained.

Devo dashboard. Photo: Devo

Devo sees Sumo Logic, Elastic and Splunk as its primary competitors in this space, but like many startups they often battle companies trying to build their own systems as well, a difficult approach for any company to take when you are dealing with this amount of data.

The company, which was founded in Spain is now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has close to 100 employees. Scott says he has the budget to double that by the end of the year, although he’s not sure they will be able to hire that many people that rapidly

Amazon just added another model to its increasingly crowded selection of living room offerings. There’s bound to be some consumer confusion around the line, but the Cube differentiates itself by bridging the gap between Fire TV and Echo. Sure, past set top offerings have incorporated Alexa control, but this latest addition folds in the full smart speaker experience.

In fact, the Cube looks like a big, square Echo Dot. It’s not much to look at, honestly, but the familiar design elements are all there, including the four Echo buttons on top and a glowing blue light that lets you know when Alexa is listening.

The Fire TV Cube follows the lead of the JBL Link Bar announced back at I/O, which has Chromecast built in and effectively doubles as a Google Home when not in use. Here, however, the speaker is only really good for Echo-like functionality. Amazon is largely banking on users bringing their own home theater system to the table.

The upshot of that is that the device runs $120 normally, a price that includes an IR extender capable and ethernet adapter. And those who pre-order the thing in the next two days can get their hands on one for $90. There’s also a $200 bundle that includes Amazon’s Cloud Cam, for those who really want to go all in with Amazon hardware.

Setup is apparently pretty simply, too. You plug it into the TV, and the system will detect the model (or you can enter that info manually). It will ask how you listen to the TV and then set up the audio. From there, you tell it your cable provider and zip code and it’s off the races. Amazon says it’s compatible with 90-percent of cable and satellite subscription service.

Naturally, Alexa can be used to control the TV, and there are eight far-field mics on board, so it will play nicely with other Echo devices.

The Fire TV Cube starts shipping June 21.

Mode, a San Francisco-based startup, came out of stealth today with a new approach to software-defined wide area networks they call software-defined core network (SD-CORE), which they say will dramatically reduce the cost of running these networks over traditional methods.

The company also announced a total of $24 million in funding led by GV and NEA to build on that vision. That vision, according to CEO Paul Hawes, involves spinning up private networks very quickly at a much lower price point than traditional networking typically offered by telcos for a high fee.

“Traditional hardware-defined private networking solutions like MPLS guarantee reliability, but are inelastic, hard to manage and costly. Mode Core was built to enhance SD-WAN, leveraging our breakthrough in routing efficiency to deliver the performance and reliability of networks like MPLS, but with the flexibility, elasticity and affordability of a cloud service,” Hawes explained in a statement.

Some use cases that could benefit from this approach include  interactive streaming, multiplayer gaming, real-time machine learning and remote command and control, according to the company.

The company was formed after a research breakthrough by a couple of researchers at Cornell, Kevin Tang and Nithin Michael. They figured out how to characterize network traffic in mathematical terms, which up to that point was thought to be impossible. “Michael came up with the first math-based description of how a packet-switched network works,” Hawes explained.

This allowed him to build a software-defined, automated way to route traffic on each node on the network. “It doesn’t need any intervention from anybody to tell it how to route packets,” he said. Once he had that figured out, it removed the need for more complex and expensive solutions.

This caught the attention not just of networking theorists, but of investors who saw tremendous business potential in their approach. “A number of VCs familiar with networking problems approached them [and encouraged them] to productize it” he said. NEA was the lead investor on the $8.3 million A round and they also got a grant from the National Science Foundation. More recently they got a $16 million Series B for a total of $24.3 million to date.

To make this all work because they aren’t a telco, they built Mode Core and partnered with Ericsson UDN and 100 other partners to provide that networking power that they lack as a startup. You could think of it as a cloud service for wide area networking, allowing companies access to this kind of advanced networking for a price closer to business internet than private WANs.