Year: 2018

Today at Microsoft’s Day 1 BUILD keynote, AR and VR has definitely been a sideshow so far, but the company did have some announcements related to enterprise apps on the HoloLens. The company detailed two new apps, Remote Assist and Layout which will be coming May 22.

The new Remote Assist app from Microsoft is the company’s realization of a use case that has long been a core promise of AR in the workplace, hands-free telepresence that lets the other person see what you’re seeing. This sort of screen sharing of the real world can allow a worker in a manufacturing facility to ping a specialist and get quick annotations and advice about tackling a particular problem.

This problem has been one that numerous companies in the AR enterprise space have been tackling, though Remote Assist is still more rudimentary than products from startups like ScopeAR which allow users to integrate CAD files that can be mapped directly onto machinery.

The advantage with Microsoft’s offering is of course its deep integration within the ecosystem. Remote Assist is built closely with Teams so it will be easy to grab the relevant person that you have a question for. Microsoft also boasts “industry-leading identity and security measure” thanks to Azure Active Directory login and Mobile Device Management.

Microsoft also announced an applications called Layout, which basically allows HoloLens users to drop 3D objects into rooms based on the geometry of the space. This is essentially similar to what a lot of the ARKit and ARCore apps for you phone have done with furniture retailers for sizing stuff in the context of your own home. With Layout’s enterprise skew, there’s more of a focus on designing spaces with CAD models that you are sent. The app has support for both HoloLens and the company’s VR headsets.

Both of these apps should be launching at the end of the month.

Instagram is preparing to let you add music to your Stories, judging by code found inside its Android app. “Music stickers” could let you search for and add a song to your posts, thanks to licensing deals with the major record labels recently struck by Facebook.

Music stickers would make Instagram Stories much more interesting to watch. Amateur video footage suddenly looks like DIY MTV when you add the right score. The feature could also steal thunder from teen lip syncing app sensation Musically, and stumbling rival Snapchat that planned but scrapped a big foray into music. And alongside Instagram Stories’ new platform for sharing posts directly from third-party apps including Spotify and SoundCloud, these stickers could make Instagram a powerful driver of music discovery.

TechCrunch was tipped off to the hidden music icons and code from reader Ishan Agarwal. Instagram declined to comment. But Instagram later confirmed three other big features first reported by TechCrunch and spotted by Agarwal that it initially refused to discuss: Focus mode for shooting portraits, QR-scannable Nametags for following people, and video calling which got an official debut at F8.

Facebook and Instagram’s video editing features have been in a sad state for a long time. I wrote about the big opportunity back in 2013, and in 2016 called on both Facebook and Instagram to add more editing features including soundtracks. Finally in late 2017, Facebook started testing Sound Collection, which lets you add sound effects and a very limited range of not-popular aritsts’ songs to your videos there. But since then, Facebook has secured licensing deals with Sony, Warner, Universal, and European labels.

For years, people thought Facebook’s ongoing negotiations with record labels would power some Spotify competitor. But streaming is a crowded market with strong solutions already. The bigger problem for Facebook was that if users added soundtracks themselves using editing software, or a song playing in the background got caught in the recording, those videos could be removed due to copyright complaints from the labels. Facebook’s intention was the opposite — to make it easier to add popular music to your posts so they’d be more fun to consume.

Instagram’s music stickers could be the culmination of all those deals.

How Instagram Music Stickers Work

The code shows that Instagram’s app has an unreleased “Search Music” feature built in beside its location and friend-mention sticker search options inside Instagram Stories. These “music overlay stickers” can be searched using tabs for “Genres”, “Moods”, and “Trending”. Instagram could certainly change the feature before it’s launched, or scrap it all together. But the clear value of music stickers and the fact that Instagram owned up to the Focus, Nametags, and Video Calling features all within three months of us reporting their appearance in the code lends weight to an upcoming launch.

It’s not entirely clear, but it seems that once you’ve picked a song and added it as a music sticker to your Story, a clip of that song will play while people watch. These stickers will almost surely be addable to videos, but maybe Instagram will let you include them on photos too. It would be great if viewers could tap through the sticker to hear the song or check it out on their preferred streaming service. That could make Instagram the new Myspace where you fall in love with new music through you friends, there’s no indicators in the code about that.

Perhaps Instagram will be working with a particular partner on the feature like it did with Giphy for its GIF stickers. Spotify, with its free tier and long-running integrations with Facebook dating back to the 2011 Open Graph ticker, would make an obvious choice. But Facebook might play it more neutral, powering the feature another way, or working with a range of providers potentially including Apple, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Amazon.

Several apps like Sounds and Soundtracking have tried to be the “Instagram For Music”. But none have gained mass traction because it’s hard to tell if you like a song quickly enough to pause your scrolling, staring at album art isn’t fun, users don’t want a whole separate app for this, and Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms can bury cross-posts of this content. But Stories with original visuals that are easily skippable, natively created and consumed in your default social app could succeed.

Getting more users wearing headphones or turning the sound on while using Instagram could be a boon to the app’s business, as advertisers all want to be heard as well as seen. The stickers could also get young Instagrammers singing along to their favorite songs the way 60 million Musically users do. In that sense, music could spice up the lives of people that otherwise might not appear glamorous through Stories.

Music stickers could let Instagram beat Snapchat to the punch. Leaked emails from the 2014 Sony hack showed Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was intent on launching a music video streaming feature or even creating Snapchat’s own record label. But complications around revenue sharing negotiations and the potential to distract the team and product from Snapchat’s core use case derailed the project. Instead, Snap has worked with record labels on Discover channels and augmented reality lenses to promote new songs. But Snapchat still has no sound board or soundtrack features, leaving some content silent or drowned in random noise.

With the right soaring strings, the everyday becomes epic. With the perfect hip-hop beat, a standard scene gains swagger. And with the hottest new dance hook, anywhere can be a party. Instagram has spent the past few years building all conceivable forms of visual flare to embellish your photos and videos. But it’s audio that could be the next dimension of Stories.

For more in the future of Stories, reader our feature pieces:

Printify, a startup all the way from Riga, Lativia, has raised $1 million in seed funding led by Google AdSense pioneer Gokul Rajaram as it looks to expand its services in the U.S. and build out its team in Latvia

Today, roughly 50,000 e-commerce stores use Printify’s services for printing-on-demand, according to the company.

Together with Lumi, which can handle packaging for consumer facing startups, Printify is making the notion of becoming a brand as seamless as possible by taking much of a vendor’s legwork out of the equation.

The company keeps its customers billing information on file and links with the back end ordering system of almost any e-commerce platform.

When an order comes in Printify gets an API notification to begin working on a product. The company then sends print-ready files to an on-demand manufacturer that can print a design and ship a product within 24 hours.

Printify founder James Berdigans came up with the idea for the company after starting a business making accessories for Apple products.

“We wanted to print custom phone cases and we thought we’d find an on-demand manufacturer and it would be easy,” says Berdigan. That’s when Printify was born.

The company first integrated through Shopify and began to see some traction in November 2015, but because the company didn’t own its own manufacturing quality became a concern.

In 2016, Berdigans pivoted to the marketplace model because he saw demand coming from a growing number of small business owners like himself that needed access to a selection of good quality printing houses.

New direct-to-garment printing and digital printing on t-shirts is going to grow very rapidly over the next few years, according to Berdigans.

A graduate from the 500 Startups accelerator program, the company is already profitable and hoping to capitaliz on its success with this new funding to expand its engineering team.

“In just two years, Printify has become profitable and is growing at a rapid pace. With this
investment, we plan to double our Riga team in 2018. That will create at least 30 new jobs,
most of which will be in programming, design, and customer support,” said Printify co-founder
Artis Kehris in a statement.

Purple Carrot announced this morning that it has raised $4 million in strategic funding from Fresh Del Monte Produce.

The company, which delivers completely plant-based (vegan) meal kits to subscribers, was founded in 2014. It has, in part, gotten attention through celebrity involvement, first by enlisting food writer Mark Bittman as its chief innovation officer (Bittman departed in 2016), then by partnering with football star and notorious strawberry hater Tom Brady to launch TB12 meal kits.

Purple Carrot had previously raised $6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The company says that this new investment will allow it to improve its supply chain, get access to more retail opportunities and explore expansion into other categories.

“Securing this strategic investment from Fresh Del Monte is a huge validation of our business model, and an important step forward for our company,” said Purple Carrot founder and CEO Andy Levitt in the announcement. “Helping people eat more plant-based foods represents our differentiated, purpose-driven commitment to making the planet and the people who live on it healthier.”

Fresh Del Monte (which is the company behind Del Monte pineapples and other produce) is the just latest established player in the food and grocery world to invest in meal delivery startups. Last year, for example, Unilever backed Sun Basket and Nestlé led a $77 million round for Freshly.

Oculus Research is getting a new name. As the AR/VR-focused research group grows more instrumental to the future of Facebook at large, the group will now be called Facebook Reality Lab. The announcement was made by Oculus Chief Scientist Michael Abrash in a post on his personal Facebook page.

It’s just a name change, but the announcement marks a further entrenching of AR/VR initiatives once confined to Oculus inside the Facebook org.

Oculus Research doesn’t just work on new types of VR hardware, a lot of the group’s research also touches on foundational AR/VR software and environment tracking tech. With Facebook’s AR Camera Effects tech now integrated across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger, perhaps this name change signifies that the technologies being developed are no longer just falling into Oculus’s purview and Facebook wants to make that more clear.

In addition to the Camera team, it’s clear from announcements at F8 that Facebook is also tapping a lot of new research to strengthen its work on avatars inside its Spaces virtual reality app.

Oculus has been growing closer to Facebook organizationally since a leadership shakeup in late 2016 saw then-CEO Brendan Iribe step down to lead a PC-focused VR division with Hugo Barra later being hired as VP of VR at Facebook inside Zuckerberg’s inner circle. Ads exec Andrew Bosworth became the VP of AR/VR in August and is now leading the company’s consumer hardware efforts being worked at inside the Building 8 group.

“This new name (Facebook Reality Labs) is reflective of the new role our research and development group plays not only at Oculus, but also across Facebook’s AR/VR organization, which includes Building 8, Camera, and Social VR,” an Oculus spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Android Things, Google IoT platform for developers who want to build connected devices, is now out of beta, as the company today announced. After eight release candidates, the last of which launched less than a month ago, Google now deems Android Things ready for primetime. Despite its beta status, quite a few companies started building products for the platform a while ago, including Google’s launch partners for its Android smart displays, which are based on this platform.

Android Things provides hardware and software developers with all the necessary SDKs to build all kinds of IoT devices. The company has partnered with a number of hardware manufacturers to offer developer kits and also offers a developer console that allows for managing devices and pushing over-the-air updates to both prototype and production devices.

The general idea here is to give hardware manufacturers a managed operating system and certified hardware that free developers from worrying about the system and its maintenance and allows them to focus on building their product. Google promises that it will ship stability fixes and security patches for three years, though manufacturers will have options for extended support, too.

Google says it saw over 100,000 SDK downloads during the preview and that over 10,000 developers provided feedback during the beta phase.

Non-commercial users can manage up to 100 devices in the Android Things Console to work on getting their product to market. Once they go over 100 devices or plan to roll out a commercial product, they’ll have to sign an agreement with Google.

As part of today’s launch, Google announced support for a couple of new System-on-Modules for Things based on the NXP i.MX8M, Qualcomm SDA212, Qualcomm SDA624 and MediaTek MT8516 hardware platforms. These join the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and NXP i.MX7D devices that were previously supported. If you bet on the NXP i.MX6UL, you’re out of luck, though, as support for that platform is being phased out.

Given that Google’s I/O developer conference starts tomorrow, it’s a bit curious that Google decided to make the 1.0 announcement a day early. Since Microsoft is kicking off its Build developer conference today, though, which has its own emphasis on IoT, it’s probably a fair guess that Google wanted to get its own announcement out of the way as soon as possible, too.

Given the downright deluge of news over the past couple of weeks, one has to wonder what, precisely, Google is keeping up its sleeve for I/O. The big event doesn’t kick off until tomorrow morning, but the company just dropped another interesting announcement: JBL Link Bar.

Created in partnership with Google, the living room entertainment device plugs into a set via HDMI, delivering Assistant and Android TV, in the process. It’s a interesting addition to Google’s smart home offerings, a bit like building a Chromecast directly into the soundbar. It’s a way to deliver the new version of Android TV introduced with Oreo, without having to upgrade the set.

The addition of Assistant, meanwhile, comes as Google is looking to compete with the living room footprint Amazon has built by way of the Fire TV. Saying “Hey Google” will fire up the usual array of video content, and when the set is off, the sound bar can double as a Google Home.

According to Google, this is “the first in a series of hybrid devices that delivers a full Assistant speaker and Android TV experience.” So we may be seeing more of those this week at I/O, along with the Link Bar, which will be on display at the event. The speaker’s set to hit stores at some point this fall, for a still TBD price.

Transcripts, diplomas, resumes — simple documents with enormously important economic consequences for their holders. The right classes or GPA on a transcript can radically change the career prospects of a young graduate, and yet, the infrastructure that manages these critical documents still centers on mailing official paper to processing centers.

Now, a startup called Learning Machine wants to completely migrate these documents into the digital era by placing them on the blockchain. Its design partner is MIT, which launched the Learning Machine technology at the MIT Media Lab and the Sloan School of Management last year. Now, it is announcing a $3 million seed fundraise to build out this vision, led by Dave Fields of PTB Ventures.

Learning Machine is behind an initiative called BlockCerts, an open source and open standard securing credentials on the blockchain. Institutions like MIT can cryptographically sign a credential and place it on the blockchain, then another person (say an employer) can use the BlockCerts app to verify that the credential is valid. The project was jointly conceived by the MIT Media Lab and Learning Machine, and will continue to develop as an open-source project.

Chris Jagers, the founder and CEO of Learning Machine, has deep expertise in the space. He previously founded SlideRoom, a platform that evaluates applicants in college admissions, particularly in science and technology. He built a long-term partnership with MIT, and even had an office on the MIT campus.

While admissions is certainly more digital than it once was, forms like letters of recommendations and transcripts are often still sent via paper. “We saw first-hand the difficulty of getting official records sent to admissions,” Jagers explained. “These kids started to Snapchat their grades and send them in [and they] didn’t understand why it wasn’t that easy.”

Jagers founded SlideRoom in 2007, and built it into a growing business across university admissions departments. This continued for years until the rise of blockchain tech. “Then when bitcoin started getting big, we were hanging around the Media Lab,” Jagers said. “And we were thinking, ‘How cool would it be to use the blockchain as a decentralized verification network?’”

After 10 years of building SlideRoom, Jagers finally accepted an offer to sell last summer and work on Learning Machine full-time.

While BlockCerts is the open standard, Learning Machine is the enterprise-grade service provider that works with universities to set up and manage the technology. Jagers believes that the focus on open standards and interoperability will give Learning Machine an edge in a market filled with blockchain credentials startups. “Our belief is that records should have no ongoing dependence on the issuer,” Jagers said.

It charges a yearly fee to maintain the systems for the universities. The idea is that once a credential has been processed, there shouldn’t be any more fees to verify its authenticity or to transmit it to other parties. As such, it’s pretty much a traditional enterprise software company, rather than some sort of blockchain/token-based model. That has helped with sales, and “Right now, we are in the midst of our first round of pilots, with a government and a few schools,” Jagers told me.

While the focus is in many ways on transcripts, Learning Machine’s technology is not limited to just one type of document. “It could be diplomas, driver licenses, medical records,” Jagers said. The company has developed a set of schemas that institutions can use to standardize credentials, and Learning Machine is developing more schemas as clients require more flexibility.

The long-term vision, though, is to make these blockchain credentials “smart,” so that credentials could lead to other credentials. For instance, completing the final class of a degree program wouldn’t just give you the class transcript grade, but also the degree itself. Jagers called these “stackable certificates,” and the hope is that the right infrastructure could reduce a lot of the paperwork involved in managing academic and other programs.

Jagers sees the world slowly awakening to the benefits of blockchain for records management and credentials. “By the end of three years, we want to see blockchain-based records … start to enter the public consciousness,” he said. Right now though, “It’s about showing success with this first round of pilots.” If blockchain is going to work in the enterprise, deep expertise, traditional business models, and open standards appears to be a potentially winning formula.

At Kaptivo, a company that’s bringing high-tech image recognition, motion capture and natural language processing technologies to the lowly whiteboard, executives are hoping that the second time is the charm.

The Cambridge, U.K. and San Mateo, Calif.-based company began life as a company called Light Blue Optics, and had raised $50 million in financing since its launch in 2004. Light Blue Optics was working on products like Kaptivo’s white board technology and an interactive touch and pen technology which was sold earlier in the year to Promethean, a global education technology solutions company.

With a leaner product line and a more focused approach to the market, Kaptivo emerged in 2016 from Light Blue Optics’ shadow and began selling its products in earnest.

Founding chief executive Nic Lawrence (the previous head of Light Blue Optics, even managed to bring in investors from his old startup to Kaptivo, raising $6 million in fresh capital from Draper Esprit (a previous backer), Benhamou Global Ventures, and Generation Ventures.

“The common theme has been user interfaces,” Lawrence said. “We saw the need for a new product category. We sold off parts of our business and pushed all our money into Kaptivo.”

What initially began as a business licensing technology, Lawrence saw a massive market opening up in technologies that could transform the humble whiteboard into a powerful tool for digital business intelligence with the application of some off the shelf technology and Kaptivo’s proprietary software.

Kaptivo’s technology does more than just create a video of a conference room, Lawrence says.

“In real time we’re removing the people from the scene and enhancing the content written on the board,”  he said. ”

Optical character recognition allows users to scribble on a white board and Kaptivo’s software will differentiate between text and images. The company’s subscription service even will convert text to other languages.

The company has a basic product and a three year cloud subscription that it sells for $999. That’s much lower than the thousands of dollars a high-end smart conferencing system would cost, according to Lawrence. The hardware alone is $699 and a one-year subscription to its cloud services sells for $120, Lawrence said.

Kaptivo sold over 2000 devices globally already and has secured major OEM partners like HP, according to a statement. Kaptivo customers include BlueJeans, Atlassian, and Deloitte, as well as educational institutions including George Washington University, Stanford University, and Florida Institute of Technology.

The product is integrated with Slack and Trello and Blue Jeans video conferencing, Lawrence said. In the first quarter of 2018 alone, the company has sold about 5,000 units.

The vision is “to augment every existing whiteboard,” Lawrence said. “You can bring [the whiteboard] into the 21st century with one of these. Workers can us their full visual creativity as part of a remote meeting.”

As part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced Project Ink Analysis, a new service under its Cognitive Services brand of AI products that will allow developers to add support for handwriting and other shape recognition to their apps. The company says that this service will be available for Windows and other platforms.

Microsoft already offered handwriting recognition under Windows 10 as part of its overall Windows Ink support. The Cognitive Services Vision API can also read handwritten text, but not in the real-time kind of way that you would expect from an API like this. In addition, the Windows 10 touchscreen keyboard has also long supported handwriting input.

Now, however, it’s opening up this service to developers across platforms, leveraging its AI ink services in the cloud.

The company hasn’t announced any pricing information yet and we expect to hear more about how developers can actually use this API later today. We’ll update this post as we learn more.

In addition to this new API, Microsoft also today announced a new unified speech services API that brings its speech-to-text, text-to-speech, customized voice models and translation services under a single hood.