Year: 2018

10% Happier, an app offering a series of meditation courses designed especially for those who think it’s all a bit of crock, has raised $3.7 million in new funding. The round brings the company’s total raise to date to $5 million.

The app is now one of many operating in the self-care space, where meditation and other stress-reducing apps are ruling and raking in millions. But unlike some apps on the market today, 10% Happier aims to be meditation for the “rest of us” – that is, those who are turned off by the idea, thinking it’s some kind of hokey, hippie, crystal-waving practice. You know, the skeptics.

The company has a slightly complicated backstory.

Originally it was called Change Collective, and was building out a course platform around meditation and other topics. In 2015, the team brought on ABC News anchor Dan Harris (Nightline, GMA Weekend Edition) to do a single course. But his was so much more interesting than the others that the company ended up bringing Harris on as a co-founder instead, and rebranded itself to 10% Happier – the name of Harris’s book detailing his own discovery of mindfulness techniques for anxiety and stress.

Harris himself had gone from skeptic to believer after having an on-air panic attack, which led him to seek out some kind of solution.

“After 9/11, I spent a lot of time in war zones as a young reporter, and I came home and got very depressed,” he admits. He says he unwisely tried to medicate with recreational drugs, which then culminated in his on-air meltdown. Harris knew he had to find a different way. “It kind of set me off on a weird and winding path that ultimately led me to meditation,” he says. “And I had thought meditation was b**s***, actually.”

His experience is documented in his book, 10% Happier, which is how he got connected with Change Collective founder Ben Rubin to begin with.

The app relaunched under the 10% Happier brand in 2016 as a bare bones meditation app with just a few audio and video courses for meditation. But over the last couple of years, the content library has grown considerably.

Today, 10% Happier has a diverse group of teachers, including scientists, traditional meditation teachers, and even a teacher who specializes in mediation for athletes who has worked with the Chicago Bulls, LA Lakers and NY Knicks. And its instructional video and audio meditation library has grown to some two dozen courses, each with 10 to 14 videos focusing on topics like stress, anxiety, sleep, or becoming more productive.

The courses are available through in-app subscriptions.

The company thinks the quality of its courses is a big differentiator compared with rivals, but so is its tone.

“Most of the meditation apps out there have a very traditional tone – very soft and gooey and loving,” jokes Harris. “And that works for some people. But we’re much more in the no b**s*** category…that doesn’t mean we don’t talk about serious emotional issues, but we do it with a sense of humor, and without a lot of the trappings that have traditionally turned a lot of people off from meditation,” he says.

That’s led 10% Happier to have a broader audience than the sort of young millennials using some other meditation apps. And while the company won’t speak about its user numbers, it will say its users have logged over 50 million mindful minutes in the app to date.

In addition, the 10% Happier podcast has been downloaded over 7 million times and Harris’ follow-up book, Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, is an NYT best seller.

The company also worked with Apple to power its Mindful Minute Challenge, which encourages Apple employees to log mindful minutes using apps and the Health app for iOS. That close relationship also gave 10% Happier the chance to be among the first to test out some of the new Siri technology being introduced with iOS 12, including Siri Suggestions and Siri Shortcuts.

The company demoed Siri Suggestions for both iOS 12 and the WatchOS 5 Siri Watch Face at WWDC on Monday. With Siri Suggestions, the app learns your patterns about where and when you like to meditate. When patterns emerge – for example, you always meditate at bedtime – Siri will suggest playing a relevant 10% Happier meditation at the right time.

With Siri Shortcuts, you’re able to get to the meditation content you want using simple voice commands.

Going forward, the company hopes to launch more content across Facebook, YouTube and even documentary-style projects on streaming services.

As Change Collective, the company had raised $1.4 million in seed funding in 2014 from Founder Collective, NextView Ventures, and Eniac Ventures.

In Q1 2018, 10% Happier closed on $3.7 million in seed II funding in Q1 2018, from new investors Coastal Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Correlation Ventures, along with its prior investors.

Longer-term, 10% Happier aims to be available on other platforms beyond mobile, including perhaps voice-first platforms like Alexa and Google Assistant. In the near term, however, the company will focus on building its team, including video producers, audio producers, developers, product managers, and more.

The app is a free download on both iOS and Google Play.

 

 

 

Nauto, the transportation company that aims to make human drivers safer and train autonomous vehicles for all types of scenarios, has just launched Prevent. Nauto Prevent is designed to prevent distracted driving by notifying drivers when they’ve had their eyes off the road for too long.

Nauto Prevent’s notifications are dependent upon factors like how long you’ve had your eyes averted from the road and how fast you’re driving. If you’ve been distracted for more than five seconds and are driving at 60 mph, you’ll hear a voice notification. But if you continue to be distracted, you’ll hear an alarm.

“We designed the whole thing to be really focused on keeping the driver safe without being intrusive,” Nauto CEO Stefan Heck told TechCrunch. “We want to help human drivers, not just rat them out to their boss.”

This feature is on top of Nauto’s flagship product that helps companies better train their commercial drivers. Nauto’s core offering is a two-way facing camera that sits up near the rear-view mirror to monitor both driver behavior and road conditions. Using computer vision and artificial intelligence, Nauto then provides insights and coaching to drivers around distraction and fatigue. With Prevent, drivers will now receive notifications if they’re distracted, tailgating or if there are other potential risks on the road.

The idea is not to just alert drivers when they’re doing something illegal, but to notify them when there’s actual risk involved.

“Holding a cell phone or looking at a phone makes you susceptible to a ticket,” Heck said. “But if you’re stopped at a red light, the risk is low.”

Nauto’s list price is $499 for the device, with monthly pricing of $39.95, depending on the customer and market. Nauto is not currently disclosing the cost of Prevent, nor how many customers it has. What Heck would tell me is that Nauto is nationwide across various taxi, ride-sharing, rental, package delivery and enterprise service fleets.

Nauto is launching Prevent with the hope to reduce collisions, accidents and injuries on the road before the industry reaches autonomy. But once autonomous officially arrives, Nauto will be ready to provide companies with its driving data and real-world scenarios of what driverless cars can expect from a distracted driver who, for example, runs a red light. Another use case Nauto has stumbled upon pertains to autonomous safety drivers and helping companies ensure its drivers are paying attention.

To date, Nauto has raised $173.9 million from General Motors Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures and BMW iVentures. Its most recent round came last July when it raised a $159 million Series B round from SoftBank and Greylock.

Coya, a Berlin-based insurance startup, has raised $30 million in new cash as investors around the world continue to see opportunities in modernizing the insurance industry.

Founded by two early employees at the European credit and risk assessment unicorn startup Kreditech (which raised EUR110 million from the Naspers subsidiary PayU) and two seasoned executives from the European insurance industry, Coya is coming to market in Germany with a new renter’s insurance service.

For Coya’s co-founder Andrew Shaw, the new company was an opportunity to apply his experience creating credit and risk assessment products to an industry whose cumbersome inability to use technology had affected him personally.

The idea for Coya hit Shaw when he was traveling on the Gili Islands off the coast of Indonesia. It was there, while Shaw was trying to get information on his insurance as he recovered from an illness that he decided to start his technologically enabled insurance business.

“I knew I had one or two [policies] somewhere, but couldn’t find them in email or log into the webpage, I felt left alone and realized how insurers are not concentrating on their product experience,” Shaw wrote to me in an email. “A bad insurance experience, plus the opportunity to create awesome technology in an outdated financial space was a challenge I couldn’t ignore.”

In 2016, Kreditech’s first employee launched the company with co-founders Sebastian Villaroel, a fellow former Kreditech employee; Peter Hagen, the former chief executive of Vienna Insurance Group; and Thomas Muenkel, a longtime executive at Allianz and the former chief operating officer of Uniqa Insurance.

The company has raised a total of $40 million for its service from investors including Valar Ventures (the Peter Thiel-backed investment firm), eVentures, La Famiglia, and a slew of angel investors.

With the money, Coya hopes to establish its footprint in its first market — Germany before expanding to the rest of Europe. Powering that expansion is a German insurance license which the company is close to receiving, according to Shaw. Once that license is acquired, the company can access all 550 million European Union residents under the watchful eye of Germany’s regulators.

Although, Coya is starting with renter’s insurance, Shaw and his co-founders have big plans for the company’s platform with insurance products across property, accident, personal liability and personal finance.

The company has 55 people on staff now, and expects to increase its headcount as a result of the new financing, according to Shaw.

Shaw says that Coya is different from many of the other startups pitching insurance products across Europe thanks to its push to receive regulatory approval and issue its own policies. That’s also created more capital requirements for the business starting out.

There’ve been a slew of insurance startups coming to market with novel twists on the service. Among them, Shaw pointed to Lemonade in the U.S., wefox in the Germany, and the UK-based Sherpa as companies bringing innovation to the old industry.

 

It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted. This was the central thesis brought forward in the late 1990s and prophesied by thinkers like Bill Gates – who expected a beautiful, customized “road ahead” – and Clifford Stoll who saw only snake oil. At the time, it was the most compelling use of the Internet those thinkers thought possible. This concept – that we were to be coddled by a hive brain designed to show us exactly what we needed to know when we needed to know it – continued apace until it was supplanted by the concept of User Generated Content – UGC – a related movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed propriety in the online world.

That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans, supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached audiences. After all, on a UGC site it’s not a lot of fun for Procter & Gamble to have Downy Fabric Softener advertised next to someone’s racist rant against Muslims in a Starbucks .

Still the Valley took these concepts and built monetized cesspools of self-expression. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are the biggest beneficiaries of outrage culture and the eyeballs brought in by its continuous refreshment feed their further growth. These sites are Web 2.0 at its darkest epitome, a quiver of arrows that strikes at our deepest, most cherished institutions and bleeds us of kindness and forethought.

So when advertisers faced either the direct monetization of random hate speech or the erosion of customer privacy, they choose the latter. Facebook created lookalike audiences that let advertisers sell to a certain subset of humanity on a deeply granular level, a move that delivered us the same shoe advertisement constantly, from site to site, until we were all sure we had gone mad. In the guise of saving our sanity further we invited always-on microphones into our homes that could watch our listening and browsing habits and sell to us against them. We gave up our very DNA to companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, a decision that mankind may soon regret. We shared everything with everyone in the grand hope that our evolution into homo ligarus – the networked man – would lead us to become homo deus.

This didn’t happen.

And so the pendulum swings back. The GDPR, as toothless as it is, is a wake up call to every spammer that ever slammed your email or followed you around the web. Further, Apple’s upcoming cookie control software in Safari should make those omnipresent ads disappear, forcing the advertiser to sell to an undifferentiated mob rather than a single person. This is obviously cold comfort in an era defined by both the reification of the Internet as a font for all knowledge (correct or incorrect) and the genesis of an web-based political cobra that whips back to bite its handlers with regularity. But it’s a start.

We are currently in an interstitial period of technology, a cake baked of the hearty camaraderie and “Fuck the system” punk rock Gen X but frosted with millennial pragmatism and desire for the artisanal. As we move out of the era of UGC and Web 2.0 we will see the old ways cast aside, the old models broken, and the old invasions of privacy inverted. While I won’t go as far to say that blockchain will save us all, pervasive encryption and full data control will pave the way toward true control of our personal lives as well as the beginnings of a research-based minimum income. We should be able to sell our opinions, our thoughts, and even our DNA to the highest bidder and once the rapacious Web 2.0 vultures are all shooed away, we will find ourselves in an interesting new world.

As a technoutopianist I’m sure that were are heading in the right direction. We are, however, taking turns that none of us could have imagined in the era of Clinton and the fax machine and there are still more turns to come. Luckily, however, we are coming out of our last major skid.

 

Photo by George Fitzmaurice on Unsplash

Drag-and-drop app builder startup Thunkable has launched a cross-platform version of its product that lets users create apps that work across Android and iOS.

The app builder is targeted at non-coders and first time developers, with the bold claim that the platform lets “anyone create beautiful and powerful apps”.

Users can choose from a variety of features and integrations for their apps, including Google Maps, Microsoft Image Recognition, payments through Stripe, and other APIs — and its capabilities like these that underpin Thunkable’s claim their app builder platform is superior to rival builders which only let people create apps using templates with limited capabilities. 

We covered the YC-backed startup back in 2016 when it had just launched its Android app builder platform, after forking the original interface the team had helped developed at MIT .

The team went on to secure additional seed funding after graduating YC, and now say they’ve raised a total of $3.3M — from Lightspeed Venture Partners, NEA, SV Angel, Y Combinator, PJC, Mandra Capital, Joe Montana’s Liquid 2 Ventures and ZhenFund. 

An iOS beta platform was also subsequently launched, in September 2017 — mainly, according to co-founder and CEO Arun Saigal, to get feedback on what would become the new cross-platform version — which they’re calling Thunkable ✕. (To be clear, that’s not a ‘X’ but a special character intended to denote the cross platform element.) The prior Android app builder is still available — but now called Thunkable Classic Android.

“Traditionally, building an app requires hundreds of thousands of dollars and two teams of engineers — one team for Android and one team for iOS. But now, non-coders can easily build their own apps on one platform, and these apps will work on Android devices, iPhones and iPads,” says Saigal in a statement. 

When we spoke to Thunkable in 2016 their app builder had around 50,000 users. It’s now up to more than 500,000, with more than 1M apps built using its drag-and-drop blocks style interface — apps which have a combined total of 16M monthly active users, across 195 countries.

“Thunkable ✕ is very robust in terms of ecosystem compatibility,” Saigal tells us. “All apps built on Thunkable ✕ are packaged natively for both Android and iOS operating systems, and are compatible with all Android and iOS devices.

“Specifically, Thunkable is compatible with all Android devices that are running Android 4.1 and above and all iOS devices that are running iOS 8.0 and above.”

“Our users have always built a wide variety of apps,” he adds. “On iOS, both the usage and types of apps have been similar to what we have seen on Android.”

Examples of apps built using the DIY platform which the team flags up include a dice throwing app (called Dice), built by two teenagers from Oregon which has gained more than 500,000 downloads on the Google Play Store; an app built by a user in India to help people study for the Indian Railway Exams — which has more than 1M MAUs; and an app created by a teacher from Iraq to help students learn how to speak English, which they say has been downloaded “thousands” of times and is being used throughout Iraq. 

Saigal says they’re seeing “major opportunities for first-time app developers all over the world” — emphasizing what he describes as “tremendous growth” in both emerging and developed markets.

He also says the “vast majority” of developers who come to Thunkable are still looking to build native mobile apps — playing down the notion that interest might be shifting away from building native apps to developing apps for the big tech platforms that are increasingly boxing up mobile users’ attention.

Apple unveiled a handful of pro-privacy enhancements for its Safari web browser at its annual developer event yesterday, building on an ad tracker blocker it announced at WWDC a year ago.

The feature — which Apple dubbed ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ (IPT) — places restrictions on cookies based on how frequently a user interacts with the website that dropped them. After 30 days of a site not being visited Safari purges the cookies entirely.

Since debuting IPT a major data misuse scandal has engulfed Facebook, and consumer awareness about how social platforms and data brokers track them around the web and erode their privacy by building detailed profiles to target them with ads has likely never been higher.

Apple was ahead of the pack on this issue and is now nicely positioned to surf a rising wave of concern about how web infrastructure watches what users are doing by getting even tougher on trackers.

Cupertino’s business model also of course aligns with privacy, given the company’s main money spinner is device sales. And features intended to help safeguard users’ data remain one of the clearest and most compelling points of differentiation vs rival devices running Google’s Android OS, for example.

“Safari works really hard to protect your privacy and this year it’s working even harder,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering during yesterday’s keynote.

He then took direct aim at social media giant Facebook — highlighting how social plugins such as Like buttons, and comment fields which use a Facebook login, form a core part of the tracking infrastructure that follows people as they browse across the web.

In April US lawmakers also closely questioned Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the information the company gleans on users via their offsite web browsing, gathered via its tracking cookies and pixels — receiving only evasive answers in return.

Facebook subsequently announced it will launch a Clear History feature, claiming this will let users purge their browsing history from Facebook. But it’s less clear whether the control will allow people to clear their data off of Facebook’s servers entirely.

The feature requires users to trust that Facebook is doing what it claims to be doing. And plenty of questions remain. So, from a consumer point of view, it’s much better to defeat or dilute tracking in the first place — which is what the clutch of features Apple announced yesterday are intended to do.

“It turns out these [like buttons and comment fields] can be used to track you whether you click on them or not. And so this year we are shutting that down,” said Federighi, drawing sustained applause and appreciative woos from the WWDC audience.

He demoed how Safari will show a pop-up asking users whether or not they want to allow the plugin to track their browsing — letting web browsers “decide to keep your information private”, as he put it.

Safari will also immediately partition cookies for domains that Apple has “determined to have tracking abilities” — removing the 24 window after a website interaction that Apple allowed in the first version of IPT.

It has also engineered a feature designed to detect when a domain is solely used as a “first party bounce tracker” — i.e. meaning it is never used as a third party content provider but tracks the user purely through navigational redirects — with Safari also purging website data in such instances.

Another pro-privacy enhancement detailed by Federighi yesterday is intended to counter browser fingerprinting techniques that are also used to track users from site to site — and which can be a way of doing so even when/if tracking cookies are cleared.

“Data companies are clever and relentless,” he said. “It turns out that when you browse the web your device can be identified by a unique set of characteristics like its configuration, its fonts you have installed, and the plugins you might have installed on a device.

“With Mojave we’re making it much harder for trackers to create a unique fingerprint. We’re presenting websites with only a simplified system configuration. We show them only built-in fonts. And legacy plugins are no longer supported so those can’t contribute to a fingerprint. And as a result your Mac will look more like everyone else’s Mac and will it be dramatically more difficult for data companies to uniquely identify your device and track you.”

In a post detailing IPT 2.0 on its WebKit developer blog, Apple security engineer John Wilander writes that Apple researchers found that cross-site trackers “help each other identify the user”.

“This is basically one tracker telling another tracker that ‘I think it’s user ABC’, at which point the second tracker tells a third tracker ‘Hey, Tracker One thinks it’s user ABC and I think it’s user XYZ’. We call this tracker collusion, and ITP 2.0 detects this behavior through a collusion graph and classifies all involved parties as trackers,” he explains, warning developers they should therefore “avoid making unnecessary redirects to domains that are likely to be classified as having tracking ability” — or else risk being mistaken for a tracker and penalized by having website data purged.

ITP 2.0 will also downgrade the referrer header of a webpage that a tracker can receive to “just the page’s origin for third party requests to domains that the system has classified as possible trackers and which have not received user interaction” (Apple specifies this is not just a visit to a site but must include an interaction such as a tap/click).

Apple gives the example of a user visiting ‘https://store.example/baby-products/strollers/deluxe-navy-blue.html’, and that page loading a resource from a tracker — which prior to ITP 2.0 would have received a request containing the full referrer (which contains details of the exact product being bought and from which lots of personal information can be inferred about the user).

But under ITP 2.0, the referrer will be reduced to just “https://store.example/”. Which is a very clear privacy win.

Another welcome privacy update for Mac users that Apple announced yesterday — albeit, it’s really just playing catch-up with Windows and iOS — is expanded privacy controls in Mojave around the camera and microphone so it’s protected by default for any app you run. The user has to authorize access, much like with iOS.

Drivers of Southeast Asia-based Grab can now become mini convenience stores. That’s because the ride-hailing company, which bought out rival Uber’s local business earlier this year, has teamed up with U.S. startup Cargo to sell a selection of items to passengers during their ride.

New York-based Cargo claims it can help drivers earn up to $300 in additional wages per month by selling items like snacks, drinks, beauty items, phone chargers and more.

Drivers add a Cargo box which includes free samples and paid products to their car for free. (Refills are free, too.) They make a 25 commission on all paid sales, plus $1 every time a passenger places an order or free sample request via the Cargo website.

That’s about it.

Cargo has done deals with Lyft and Uber drivers in the U.S., but this marks its first move overseas. For now the partnership takes effect in Singapore but a Grab representative told TechCrunch that, all being well, it will expand across Southeast Asia, where Grab serves eight countries.

Cargo is targeting 100,000 cars this year, in January it claimed to have 2,500 cars on the road in New YOrk Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis, with 20,000 driver signups from all 50 states. The company raised $5.5 million this year to facilitate that growth.

It’s not often you get the words “Lisbon”, and “$360 million” in the same sentence when it comes to startups, but that’s exactly what’s happening today with the news that OutSystems — a player in low-code rapid application development which is based between Atlanta, London and Lisbon — has raised $360 million in an investment round from KKR and Goldman Sachs. KKR’s investment was made through its Next Generation Technology Growth Fund. That puts it into the Unicorn realm and will be a nice win for previous investors Portugal Ventures and Armilar Venture Partners, both Portugal-based VC funds. Outsystems was originally founded in Lisbon and maintains a large team there but is now HQ’d in Atlanta, USA and has 52 operations around the world. Now, that’s a scale-up. The news will be a shot in the arm for the Lisbon startup-scene which has been growing at a clip.

OutSystems provides an open, rapid application delivery platform that makes it easier and faster to develop apps once and deploy across iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Web. It has over 400 enterprise organizations in 25 countries and includes clients such as Toyota, Logitech, Deloitte, Ricoh, Schneider Electric, and GM Financial.

“We’re attacking one of the biggest problems facing businesses today – the lack of speed and agility of traditional software development that is hindering digital transformation initiatives around the world,” said Paulo Rosado, OutSystems CEO.

“Founded in 2001, OutSystems has always had a strong vision for their platform. their technology is very advanced, creating a high barrier to entry for potential competitors,” said Joaquim Sérvulo Rodrigues, OutSystems Board Member and Partner at Armilar Venture Partners.

Intel is feeling increasing pressure from AMD and Qualcomm and the competition will get even more intense if reports that Apple is working on its own chips to replace Intel processors in Macs are true. In an interview with Engadget last week before Computex, Intel’s client computing head Gregory Bryant said that Intel would reveal an even more powerful chip than last year’s showstopper, the 18-core, 36-thread Intel i9-7980XE.

As it turns out, Intel’s Computex keynote today in Taipei, Taiwan focused more on previewing future launches, but Bryant did reveal that later this year, the company will unveil a single-socket processor with a whooping 28-cores that will run at 5 GHz. In comparison, AMD’s Threadripper processor, one of Intel’s closest competitors, has 16-cores and 32 threads.

Bryant said the new chip will debut in the fourth quarter of this year but did not reveal pricing details (for reference, the Intel i9-7980XE is currently priced at $1,999, so it’s reasonable to assume the new chip will cost at least that).

Intel also released a new limited edition chip, the Core i7-8086K, which runs at 5.0 Ghz (a new milestone for its chips), to mark the anniversary of the first x86 processor, and will give away 8,086 of them in a sweepstake.

Other teasers included Intel’s plans for eighth-generation Core processors nicknamed Whiskey Lake, which will be made using Intel’s 14-nanometer technology and are designed for lightweight laptops that have little room for batteries or cooling fans. Another chip series, called Amber Lake, will also be made on the 14-nanometer production process and be intended for the thinnest laptops and tablets.

Intel also showcased a new iteration of the Optane solid-state drive, the 905P, which will offer up to 1.5 TB in a smaller M.2 design.

In non-chip news, Intel announced it will work with Sprint on devices from its hardware partners, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP , Lenovo and Microsoft, to run on 5G networks. They are expected to launch next year.