Year: 2018

Box announced today that it has purchased Progressly, a Redwood City startup that focuses on workflow. All 12 Progressly employees will be joining Box immediately. They did not disclose the purchase price.

If you follow Box, you probably know the company announced a workflow tool in 2016 called Box Relay along with a partnership with IBM to sell it inside large enterprises. Jeetu Patel, chief product officer at Box says Relay is great for well defined processes inside a company like contract management or employee on-boarding, but Box wanted to expand on that initial vision to build more complex workflows. The Progressly team will help them do that.

Patel said that the company has heard from customers, especially in larger, more complex organizations, that they need a similar level of innovation on the automation side that they’ve been getting on the content side from Box.

“One of the things that we’ve done is to continue investing in partnerships around workflow with third parties. We have actually gone out and built a product with Relay. But we wanted to continue to make sure that we have an enhancement to our internal automation engine within Box itself. And so we just made an acquisition of a company called Progressly,” Patel told TechCrunch.

That should allow Box to build workflows that not only run within Box, but ones that can integrate and intersect with external workflow engines like Pega and Nintex to build more complex automation in conjunction with the Box set of tools and services. This could involve both internal employees and external organizations and moving content through a much more sophisticated workflow than Box Relay provides.

“What we wanted to do is just make sure that we double down in the investment in workflow, given the level of appetite we’ve seen from the market for someone like Box providing a solution like this,” Patel explained.

By buying Progressly, they were able to acquihire a set of employees who have a focussed understanding of workflow and can help continue to build out that automation engine and incorporate it into the Box platform. Patel says how they could monetize all of this is still open to discussion. For now, the Progressly team is already in the fold and product announcements based on this acquisition could be coming out later this year.

Progressly was founded in 2014 and was headquarted right down the street from Box in Redwood City. The company has raised $6 million, according to data on Crunchbase.

In a delightful bit of irony BitBay, a Central European exchange, has shut down operations in Poland even as it received an invitation by the Polish government to participate in a national blockchain working group. The news, which appeared in a Tweet, states that the group will assess regulations for cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and ICOs.

“Our exchange has received an invitation from the PFSA to participate in the Blockchain Working Group. As we have recently said, we do not want to abandon crypto activity in the Polish community,” wrote BitBay.

Poland has had an odd relationship with Bitcoin. First, some of the central banks funded a YouTube propaganda video that showed a person losing plenty of cash in crypto. Further, the community is fighting back but releasing counter-propaganda to the central bank’s policies.

After being shut out by Polish banks, BitBay moved its headquarters to Malta and stopped serving Polish customers.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Bees need all the help they can get. Thus programmer Mat Kelsey created a bee counter to see just how many of his winged honeymakers are hanging out in his hives. His system, which uses a Raspberry Pi and a machine learning algorithm that recognizes the number of individual bees entering a hive, is used to see bee trends over time and see just how the bees are faring.

“The first thing I thought when we setup our beehive was ‘I wonder how you could count the number of bees coming and going?'” wrote Kelsey. “After a little research I discovered it seems no one has a good, non-intrusive system for doing it yet. It can apparently be useful for all sorts of hive health checking.”

The system looks at sets of pictures of the hive door taken every 10 seconds. It then extrapolates out the background, assesses the objects that have moved in the frame, and then counts the things that are likely to be bees. It’s a fascinating problem to solve since the bees are constantly moving and because it can also ignore bees that are coming out of the hive.

You can download the source on Github and check out his detailed blog post here. Given the need for bee protection as we enter an era of colony collapses, tools like this one are wildly important. Plus it’s cool to see a Raspberry Pi do something so complex.

SV Angel, the seed-stage investment firm, announced today that it’s getting out of the traditional venture business. At least, said the firm, going forward, its founders, meaning famous angel investor Ron Conway and his son Topher, will be investing their own money in startups.

In a follow-up email exchange with TechCrunch, Topher Conway explained that several of the firm’s most recent checks, including to the chatbot startup Hugging Face, the hormone-testing company Modern Fertility, and to the electric skateboard company Boosted Boards, came from SV Angel’s existing, outside-investor-backed funds. He added that those existing funds will now no longer make new investments, but that SV Angel will continue to invest in follow-on rounds in its existing portfolio companies.

The outfit had closed its last fund with $53 million in late 2016. It will now part ways with partners Brian Pokorny, Kevin Carter and Robert Pollak, who it says will remain advisors to SV Angel.

Meanwhile, Ron and Topher Conway will be writing smaller initial checks than they have in recent years — $25,000 to $100,000, says their post —  to “align” themselves better with the “thousands of firms and individuals” who are now investing in seed rounds.

As SV Angel hints at in its new post (and has come up increasingly in our discussions with seed-stage investors), it has grown challenging for  any one outfit to write big checks to the most promising seed-stage companies. There’s simply too much money sloshing around.

SV and its outside investors may also have simply grown wary, with the small outfit going through several iterations over time, some of them more challenging than others.

To wit, when SV Angel was established nine years ago, Conway teamed up with former Googler David Lee, who’d helped lead certain aspects of the search giant’s business development and seemingly took over management of SV Angel with Conway’s blessing.

Soon, it was Conway; Lee; Brian Pokorny, himself a former Googler who’d also worked with Lee at Baseline Ventures for a spell; and one of Conway’s sons, Topher.

Pokorny left SV Angel in 2010 to head up a startup, returning in 2013. In the meantime, despite a growing collection of enviable stakes — including Airbnb, Snap, and Pinterest — not all was well inside SV Angel. Lee and Conway were instead moving toward an acrimonious split that eventually led to a breach-of-contract lawsuit that was filed last seven months ago in which Lee alleged that Conway was withholding millions of dollars from him.

Conway denied the allegations and said he would “vigorously defend” against Lee’s “meritless claims.” No court filings have appeared since, but one can imagine the whole thing leaving a bad taste with the Conways, not to mention outside investors, eager as they may to continue funding tech startups.

Lee, in fact, today runs an L.A.-based seed-stage outfit called Refactor Capital that closed its debut fund with $50 million last year.

Either way, SV Angel’s newest move is, in large part, a return to Conway’s roots. Dating back to 1998, Ron Conway used to write checks, largely on his own behalf, including making early investments in Google and PayPal that established his early reputation as an investor with all the right connections.

There’s a sort of symmetry in the firm’s return to a family business now.

Following what it calls a “cyber incident,” the event ticket distributor Ticketfly took its homepage offline on Thursday morning. The company left this message on its website, which remains nonfunctional hours later:

“Following a series of recent issues with Ticketfly properties, we’ve determined that Ticketfly has been the target of a cyber incident. Out of an abundance of caution, we have taken all Ticketfly systems temporarily offline as we continue to look into the issue. We are working to bring our systems back online as soon as possible. Please check back later.

For information on specific events please check the social media accounts of the presenting venues/promoters to learn more about availability/status of upcoming shows. In many cases, shows are still happening and tickets may be available at the door.”

Before Ticketfly regained control of its site, a hacker calling themselves IsHaKdZ hijacked it to display apparent database files along with a Guy Fawkes mask and an email contact.

According to correspondence with Motherboard, the hacker apparently demanded a single bitcoin (worth $7,502, at the time of writing) to divulge the vulnerability that left Ticketfly open to attack. Motherboard reports that it was able to verify the validity of at least six sets of user data listed in the hacked files, which included names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers of Ticketfly customers as well as some employees. We’ll update this story as we learn more.

Earlier today, General Motors’ Cruise received a $2.25 billion investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. Once that deal closes, GM will invest another $1.1 billion.

SoftBank landed on Cruise because it’s one of “a handful that in our view have a meaningful opportunity in front of them,” SoftBank Vision Fund Managing Partner Michael Ronen told TechCrunch. Cruise’s integrated play of hardware and software attracted SoftBank, Ronen said, as well as the fact that Cruise’s spirit, creativity and energy “has not been diminished at all.”

These investments are expected to enable Cruise to deploy commercially starting next year. But what’s most important about this investment to Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, he told TechCrunch, is the fact that Cruise — which sold to GM for more than $1 billion in 2016 — now has stock and equity in the company again.

That’s because “we’re in a war right now to attract the greatest minds in the world to work on this,” Vogt told me. And in order to keep those great minds on board and continue attracting new ones, Vogt said he wants to give them a chance to “participate in the value we create.”

“From my standpoint, it’s like we’re a startup all over again,” he told me.

Based on Cruise’s rate of improvement in self-driving testing, the company is still on track to commercialization next year, GM President Dan Ammann told TechCrunch. Regarding what that commercialization looks like has yet to be determined.

While Cruise’s service will be a consumer-facing experience and network, “we remain open to other opportunities to partner with folks if and when that makes sense,” Ammann said. He added that partnering with SoftBank, which has invested in ride-hailing companies like Didi, Uber and Grab, brings an ecosystem and relationships along with it.

TOKYO, JAPAN – MAY 10: SoftBank Group Corp. Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Masayoshi Son speaks during a press conference on May 10, 2017 in Tokyo, Japan. SoftBank announced net profit for its fiscal year ending 31 March today reporting a record profit of 1.43 trillion yen ($12.5 billion). (Photo by Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images)

But before Cruise gets to commercialization, the company needs to be confident in its safety abilities — especially in light of the fatal crash in March involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars.

“Our ultimate decision to go fully driverless will be gated by safety and whether we’re operating at a certain level of safety,” Ammann said.

Ammann declined to comment on the specifics of its safety metrics and assessments, but said Cruise is engaged with regulators to make those types of assessment.

“You should assume we have a very deep understanding of what that looks like and how we measure it, but we don’t want to share detail on that at this time,” Ammann said.

SoftBank’s Ronen echoed GM’s Ammann comments about safety and commercial deployment, noting these are early days and it’s important to get the technology and safety right.

Cruise and GM’s fourth generation steering wheel-free car

“This is the first time we’ll all be putting our lives in the hands of robots, literally, daily and if the safety is not there, nothing is going to work, no matter what form you put it in on the road,” Ronen said.

Once Cruise gets to that point, the next step is to determine the best option for deployment. And, as Ronen pointed out, it’s not like the U.S. will suddenly be filled with Cruise’s autonomous cars in 2019. Instead, he said, “it’s going to be a gradual process.”

Earlier this year, Cruise CTO AG Gangadhar, formerly of Uber, left his role at the company. Vogt is currently operating as CEO and CTO of Cruise, and he told me he loves it.

“I’m really enjoying this,” Vogt said about being acting CTO. “So this is the way it’s going to be for the foreseeable future.”

A robot’s got to know its limitations. But that doesn’t mean it has to accept them. This one in particular uses tools to expand its capabilities, commandeering nearby items to construct ramps and bridges. It’s satisfying to watch but, of course, also a little worrying.

This research, from Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, is essentially about making a robot take stock of its surroundings and recognize something it can use to accomplish a task that it knows it can’t do on its own. It’s actually more like a team of robots, since the parts can detach from one another and accomplish things on their own. But you didn’t come here to debate the multiplicity or unity of modular robotic systems! That’s for the folks at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, where this paper was presented (and Spectrum got the first look).

SMORES-EP is the robot in play here, and the researchers have given it a specific breadth of knowledge. It knows how to navigate its environment, but also how to inspect it with its little mast-cam and from that inspection derive meaningful data like whether an object can be rolled over, or a gap can be crossed.

It also knows how to interact with certain objects, and what they do; for instance, it can use its built-in magnets to pull open a drawer, and it knows that a ramp can be used to roll up to an object of a given height or lower.

A high-level planning system directs the robots/robot-parts based on knowledge that isn’t critical for any single part to know. For example, given the instruction to find out what’s in a drawer, the planner understands that to accomplish that, the drawer needs to be open; for it to be open, a magnet-bot will have to attach to it from this or that angle, and so on. And if something else is necessary, for example a ramp, it will direct that to be placed as well.

The experiment shown in this video has the robot system demonstrating how this could work in a situation where the robot must accomplish a high-level task using this limited but surprisingly complex body of knowledge.

In the video, the robot is told to check the drawers for certain objects. In the first drawer, the target objects aren’t present, so it must inspect the next one up. But it’s too high — so it needs to get on top of the first drawer, which luckily for the robot is full of books and constitutes a ledge. The planner sees that a ramp block is nearby and orders it to be put in place, and then part of the robot detaches to climb up and open the drawer, while the other part maneuvers into place to check the contents. Target found!

In the next task, it must cross a gap between two desks. Fortunately, someone left the parts of a bridge just lying around. The robot puts the bridge together, places it in position after checking the scene, and sends its forward half rolling towards the goal.

These cases may seem rather staged, but this isn’t about the robot itself and its ability to tell what would make a good bridge. That comes later. The idea is to create systems that logically approach real-world situations based on real-world data and solve them using real-world objects. Being able to construct a bridge from scratch is nice, but unless you know what a bridge is for, when and how it should be applied, where it should be carried and how to get over it, and so on, it’s just a part in search of a whole.

Likewise, many a robot with a perfectly good drawer-pulling hand will have no idea that you need to open a drawer before you can tell what’s in it, or that maybe you should check other drawers if the first doesn’t have what you’re looking for!

Such basic problem-solving is something we take for granted, but nothing can be taken for granted when it comes to robot brains. Even in the experiment described above, the robot failed multiple times for multiple reasons while attempting to accomplish its goals. That’s okay — we all have a little room to improve.

CancerAid, a self-reporting and symptom monitoring tool for cancer patients, has scored its first major coups in the U.S. healthcare market with its integration into Epic Systems electronic health records at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles and an integration with Apple’s HealthKit.

Cedars, an investor in the company through an accelerator program it ran in conjunction with Techstars, marks the first  U.S. hospital system to incorporate CancerAid’s self-reporting information into a dashboard system for doctors.

It’s been a long road for company co-founders Raghav Murali-Ganesh and Nikhil Pooviah, who first met eight years ago at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse, a Sydney, Australia cancer treatment center.

Pooviah was a resident working with Murali-Ganesh in radiation oncology, positions the two men occupied for several years before venturing off on their own to launch the service that would become CancerAid.

The company’s initial came from years spent checking out the tools that were already in the market for cancer patients. Tools like Chemo Calendar that helped with things like scheduling and monitoring appointments were the initial inspiration.

Instead of studying for some particularly tricky upcoming exams, Pooviah was spending time developing a patient-facing self-reporting symptom tracker and a community portal for cancer patients to discuss, share, and monitor their own symptoms.

CancerAid co-founders Drs. Nikhil Pooviah and Raghav Murali-Ganesh and Martin Seneviratne

It was that first tool that won the company acceptance into the Cedars Sinai accelerator and a competitive position in TechCrunch’s inaugural Startup Battlefield competition in Sydney, Australia.

From its initial development, CancerAid now has four primary functions. On the patient side, there’s personalized cancer information for patients after their initial diagnosis. The company also provides a personal journal and symptom journal for patients to report on how they’re feeling, both emotionally and physically as they progress through their treatment.

A feature the company calls “Champions” was added so that family and friends could keep up with patients and encourage them. And finally, the company added a social networking feature so patients could connect with a broader community of patients and survivors.

Now, the company has added “ClinicianLink”, a clinician-facing dashboard that sits in Epic and integrates with the existing workflows of nurses, oncologists, radiologists and the rest of the hospital administration and operational staff that touches patients as they undergo treatment.

The company expects to lock in six-figure licensing deals for hospital systems to access the entire toolkit and offer it to patients.

For hospitals, there’s some research that suggests simply by reporting their symptoms patients can improve their own outcomes, because doctors have a better sense on more regular intervals of the potential problems their patients face, the company said.

“Patients will be able to use the patient-facing app at home, with a feedback loop back to their care team (physicians, nurses) in the hospital in real-time,” wrote Pooviah in an email. “This feedback loop helps reduce [emergency room] visits and 30 day readmissions (saving $19,000 per patient per year).”

Beyond the Epic integration, CancerAid is also integrating with HealthKit — so that Apple wearables will be able to have the CancerAid functionality, the company said.

The company has 20,000 patients on the app already, and is being used in 80 of the 200 largest U.S. health systems, according to Pooviah.

Backed by $1.9 million in funding from strategic and financial investors including Cedars-Sinai Health System, TechStars, Australia’s Shark Tank, Slingshot Ventures and Artesian Capital, the company is looking to expand in the U.S. through a dedicated subsidiary as it concentrates on one of the world’s largest healthcare markets.

Once a month or so, I’m reminded that my phone has a front-facing camera when I accidentally hit the toggle button, only to be greeted with a closeup image of my own, dumb face.

Honestly, I can’t remember the the last time I used the thing — not intentionally, at least. I tried scrolling through my camera roll to locate the precise moment in which I felt compelled to take a selfie, but ultimately ended up getting tired of the exercise, giving up some time around May of last year.

I have no use for the front-facing camera. I don’t know, maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Every time I see another phone with another notch or hear stories about companies frantically pushing for some workaround, I quietly wonder what it would be like to live in a world where that wasn’t an issue, because there was no camera getting in the way of that precious screen real estate.

I realize for most mainstream manufacturers, this is probably just a pipe dream. Too many companies have invested too much in the technology to make it appear unnecessary. In recent years, the device has taken on an importance beyond the selfie, including, most notably, the big push by Apple, Samsung and countless Android manufacturers to add face unlock.

There are the proprietary apps like FaceTime and Animoji and a powerful lobby of third-party social media companies that rely on the inclusion of as many cameras as humanly possible on a mobile device. I suppose I fall out of that target demographic. I don’t Snapchat or FaceTime, and when the Google app changed from Hangouts to Meet and I suddenly saw video of myself staring back, again, total freak-out.

Perhaps it’s best left to some smaller manufacturer looking to distinguish themselves from a million other Android manufacturers. Someone out there could be the first to go truly full screen, without a silly gimmick like the Vivo’s pop-up, or whatever eight million patents Essential has filed over the past couple of years. Full screen, without the inherent vanity of that unblinking eye staring back at you.

I’m not saying its enough for one company to get me to switch over, but it’s 2018 and 90 percent of smartphones look virtually identical. Why not at least give the consumer the ability to opt out, at least until phone manufacturers solve the notch?  

Walmart’s tech incubator is out with its first experiment. The incubator, known as Store No. 8, just launched Jetblack, a concierge-style service for requesting stuff and getting it really quickly. During its pilot period, the project was known as Code Eight.

To shop with Jetblack, first you need an invite. Right now the service is limited to some customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn who are part of an eight-month pilot program restricted to buildings with a doorman, though that will soon expand and a waitlist is available now. The service is $50 a month — considerably less than some adjacent competitors, while considerably more than Amazon Prime — and promises same-day delivery.

While concierge services like Hello Alfred position themselves as high-end options for people wishing to live more serene lives, Jetblack is focusing on “time-strapped urban parents” seeking “more efficient ways to shop for themselves and their families.” To request something, Jetblack members send a text message and will receive product recommendations sent back in text. Those recommendations are culled from Walmart and Jet.com but also from specialty retailers locally.

That means any product request is fair game and “sourcing a specific beauty cream from a member’s favorite local boutique, curating custom Easter baskets and delivering them once the kids are asleep and rushing beach essentials to a family on vacation” are all within the realm of Jetblack fulfillments.

“Consumers are looking for more efficient ways to shop for themselves and their families without having to compromise on product quality,” said Jetblack co-founder and CEO Jenny Fleiss, formerly of Rent the Runway.

“With Jetblack, we have created an entirely new concept that enables consumers to get exactly what they need through the convenience of text messaging and the freedom of a nearly unlimited product catalogue.”

It’ll be interesting to see if these kind of personal shopping services can differentiate themselves in markets already well-acquainted with same-day shipping. While what makes Jetblack’s proposition unique isn’t that clear, it’s worth noting thanks to its roots in the biggest brick-and-mortar retailer around.