Year: 2018

With I/O just a matter of days away, Google’s gone on the offensive with Assistant. In a blog post this morning, the company is talking up its smart home play in a major way, noting an admitted pretty impressive bump in hardware compatibility. By its count, the number of compatible devices recently hit the 5,000 mark.

That number is up from 1,500 in January — an admittedly impressive jump in a short time frame. That, in itself, was a pretty decent jump since Google Home launched in late 2016 with little to no third-party device compatibility.

And, of course, that number’s set to grow quite a bit in the coming months. We’ll likely get more information on that at the big show next week, but a number of brands are just over the horizon, including Logitech’s Harmony hubs and Dish’s Hopper receivers, the latter of which will be getting Assistant functionality in the coming month. Google says it’s also working with more partners to bake Assistant directly into more smart TVs.

The company’s recently added a number of security devices to its list, including the Nest doorbell, which was the first product to add Assistant-based smart doorbell notifications. ADT, First Alert, Vivint Smart Home, August and Schlage will all be adding Assistant functionality down the road, as well.

The smart home is currently the key battlefield for smart assistants. Amazon made an important step in that direction with the addition of a hub to the Echo Plus, and Apple has been laying the groundwork for some time with its HomeKit offering and, more recently, the HomePod. In many ways, smart speakers are a means to end as companies push to make their assistant the centerpiece of the connected home experience.

Google also recently announced plans to follow in Amazon’s footsteps by making investments in early-stage startups that utilize Assistant.

When blockchain first appeared, especially Ethereuem’s innovation of ‘smart contracts’, a number of people posited that it could be used to trade energy between one source and another, such as power supplies or batteries.

The idea would be to enable consumers to buy and sell renewable energy directly between one another, in a peer-to-peer (P2P) trading manner. Blockchain would be ideally suited to this, creating a transparent, auditable and automated record of energy generation and consumption. As a result energy savings coudl be made, having a positive effect on costs and the climate.

Few, however, have achieved this. Until now.

The Australian-born Power Ledger is now moving beyond trials and into the commercial deployment of its platform. It’s a sign that the market is not only open to the concept of peer-to-peer trading but ready to start implementing.

Power Ledger has partnered with the Clean Energy Blockchain Network, launching its first commercial deployment in the US at the Northwestern University Evanston campus.

Power Ledger’s platform lets consumers buy and sell renewable energy directly between one another, using a blockchain platform, and will enable Northwestern University to trade clean energy both on-campus and between campuses with no hardware, software or subscription fees, by using pre-existing meters.

Power Ledger Co-Founder, David Martin says: “Moving beyond trials and into commercial deployment of the Power Ledger energy trading platform in a historical trading market like Chicago is a major opportunity. We’re excited to demonstrate how the platform can assist with cutting both costs and carbon with a secure, clean energy source.”

The commercial, utility-grade deployment will initially run across four buildings curated by Northwestern University’s Master of Engineering Management Program with plans for implementation to kick off in the coming months. On-campus P2P trading will be followed by connection to external peers across multi-campus universities, museums, laboratories and more.

Almost three years ago Verisart appeared on the scene with an unusual idea. It was going to use the immutability of blockchain to create certification to the fine art market. To literally verify and artwork was what it claimed to be. While the idea seemed a good one, the execution was probably going to be difficult. But founder and CEO Robert Norton, who had made previous attempts to drag the slow-moving and traditional art market into the 21st Century, persisted and has now bagged three major deals, the first in the auction market.

Verisart is now launching the “P8Pass” developed in partnership with Paddle8, to bring blockchain certification and authentication services to the auction market.

The P8Pass will be offered to buyers, consignors and partners in all curated and benefit auctions run on paddle8 .com. Each P8Pass contains detailed provenance information and functions as a unique fingerprint on the Bitcoin blockchain.

Paddle8 co-founder and President Alexander Gilkes says P8Pass “has the potential to significantly reduce transaction costs for the trade with art & collectibles and broaden the market by including new buyers encouraged by authentication process simplicity and transaction safety offered by the P8Pass blockchain product, the risks traditionally being the primary reason for affluent consumers to stay away from the art trade.”

Norton says: “The partnership with Paddle8 and the strategic support from The Native SA further extends our platform reach as the provider of choice for blockchain certification standards for leading artists and galleries and now auction partners.”

Verisart has been busy. It’s partnering with ArtSystems to bring blockchain certification to leading galleries worldwide, making this the first art inventory management platform to integrate this kind of blockhain-based certificate. It’s also launched a hallmark for bronze sculpture called ‘Bronzechain’ in partnership with DACS. This combines the use of a hallmark stamp with Verisart’s blockchain.

Other players are now entering this growing market. Codex Protocol is a new startup also putting art on the blockchain.

Zola, a fast-growing company that invites newly engaged couples to register their guests, shop from 600 different brands, and create customizable checklists, has itself received something a bit extravagant: $100 million in Series D funding.

Earlier investor Comcast Ventures led the round, which also included new investors NBCUniversal and Goldman Sachs Investment Partners. The five-year-old, New York-based, 110-person company has now raised $140 million altogether.

We talked last night with founder and CEO Shan-Lyn Ma to learn more. Ma is a former executive with the e-commerce companies Gilt Groupe and Chloe + Isabel who originally started Zola to reinvent the traditional registry process but who now sees an opportunity to eventually address every need a young couple may have, from caterers to Cuisinarts, to eventually, perhaps, even home mortgages. Our chat has been edited lightly for length.

TC: You’re a decent size-company at this point. Is everyone in New York?

SM: The vast majority, though we also have a small number in Charlottesville, Virginia. Earlier this year, we acquired the assets of a small wedding startup that had shut down and brought some of that team into Zola.

TC: Have you made other acquisitions? Will you now with this giant new round?

SM: No, and it’s possible, but the bigger vision is to cater to couples from the day they get engaged, into their first years of marriage. We’ll be using the funding to accelerate the product development of more wedding planning tools for couples, so we can be that go-to destination. 

TC: How are people learning about Zola?

SM: The biggest growth driver has been people who’ve gone to a wedding where Zola was the registry that the couple used. Everyone who registers has 150 eyeballs on average that see the registry, and if those visitors believe it’s a better product, [they come to us, too]. It’s built-in virality.

We also picked Comcast Ventures to be our lead investor because Comcast and [fellow investor] NBC are market leaders in media with wide reach. They’ll help us with our marketing and awareness goals, which is a big opportunity and area of focus for us in the coming year.

TC: How many people have used the site to date?

SM: More than 500,000 couples have used our wedding registry or else managed their guest list through Zola .

TC: Zola started as a wedding registry product. Now, it’s a full-fledged marketplace, connecting engaged couples to 600 brands and 60,000 products. Are you making a percentage off each sale?

SM: It’s more like a retail model. Couples can register for items or buy them for themselves; we sell to them at retail prices and buy at wholesale.

TC: Are you buying these products and housing them?

SM: No. We learned from our past experiences in other e-commerce [companies] the pitfalls and land mines, and Zola was built to avoid those problems. We have virtually no inventory and we have virtually no returns, and those are the big reasons why e-commerce is such a tough business.

TC: Can you elaborate?

SM: We’ve built our in-house proprietary drop-ship platform that allows us to connect directly with brand partners to offer their products on Zola. So when an order is placed, we are interfacing with the customer, but when it comes time to ship, we transmit that order to the brand’s warehouse, and they ship directly to the customer.

The reason returns are so low is because we built the registry in such a way that we give couples flexibility to not ship something to themselves until they’re sure they want to receive it. We had the insight that couples don’t want to receive gifts until after they get back from honeymoon. That way, they can see what’s being given to them and do a virtual exchange through platform if they like, as well as ship themselves the things they definitely do want.

TC: Are brands giving you a discount for promising to buy a certain amount of their products over the course of a year? Why do they let you pay wholesale?

SM: We’re delivering to them a millennial audience and getting their brands in front of couples just as they are deciding on their brand preferences for the rest of their lives. We also deliver a certain degree of predictability to them. We can forecast how much of each product they should expect to sell through Zola in a month’s time

TC: Will we ever see Zola-branded products?

SM: The only instances where it may make sense for us to develop our own product is if we see demand for something that we can’t get through a brand.

TC: I’ve heard you talk about going after the wedding market, which is a $100 billion market in revenue in the U.S. alone. But you also talk about catering to the every need of couples who are just getting hitched. Does that mean connecting them to caterers and travel experiences and mortgages?

SM: Our ambition is to serve couples on that journey, so all of those things are top of mind, and we believe we can help them in unique ways because of the insights we [glean] thanks to our registries and checklists and other wedding planning tools. of insights we have because of registry or checklist of other wedding tools planning.

TC: How do you weigh profitability versus growth? Do have a timeline for the company to turn profitable that you can share?

SM: One of the big lessons our leadership has learned from past startups and e-commerce [companies] was to build a sustainable business model — and one that can be healthfully profitable in a reasonable time frame.

Right now, we’re investing for growth. But we’re marching toward that goal where we are a huge company, serving companies across the entire wedding-planning journey, and have a business that supports that mission. Absolutely.

After committing $2 billion towards expanding operations north of the border in Canada in February, Salesforce is now doubling down on startups in the country. Salesforce Ventures, the company’s investment arm, today announced the Trailblazer Fund, earmarking $100 million to invest in startups out of Canada, with a special focus on those working in enterprise cloud computing.

It’s also announcing the first four startups to get backed out of the fund. They include Tier1CRM, which develops cloud-based CRM solutions for financial services companies; Traction Guest, which builds visitor management systems (VMS systems power the digital sign-in services you go through when you visit many offices);
Tulip, a retail app developer focused on omnichannel commerce; and OSF Commerce, a customer experience specialist.

“Salesforce Ventures is an incredibly strong partner to Canadian startups,” said Ali Asaria, CEO and founder of Tulip, in a statement. “Their investment and the unique access we get to the Salesforce ecosystem has enabled us to expand our business faster and maintain that rapid pace of growth.”

The news follows several other funds out of Salesforce Ventures also focusing on specific areas or regions. In 2015 it set aside $100 million specifically for European cloud startups; and in 2017 it earmarked $50 million for cloud consulting startups and $50 million for those focused on AI solutions for the Salesforce platform (not unlike its own version of an Alexa or Slack Fund). Salesforce Ventures itself started as a fund, the Salesforce1 fund back in 2014.

Salesforce has invested in a number of startups out of the country before now, including those that do not look like they only indirectly offer a strategic fit into Salesforce itself. They have included the smart wristband company Bionym, video analytics startup Vidyard, and LeadSift.

“There is incredible innovation happening in Canada today and we want to encourage and empower the next generation of enterprise cloud startups in the region,” said John Somorjai, EVP of corporate development and Salesforce Ventures at Salesforce, in a statement. “Salesforce Ventures’ Canada Trailblazer Fund is a commitment to our mission to help startups grow and enable our customers to reach new levels of success.”

Canada plays a key role for Salesforce in its business. Today the company says that it’s the number-one CRM provider in the country, with 6,000 companies including Air Canada, Husky Energy, Loblaws, Manulife, Roots, TD Bank and TELUS among its customers.

The $2 billion investment announced earlier this year, which will be made over the next five years, was aimed at growing headcount, real estate footprint and data center capacity. This startup fund will not only be a boost to small tech businesses in the region; but it could prove to be an interesting dealflow funnel for Salesforce itself to tap into and acquire local talent for that bigger operation.

It’s also tapping into a large economy that is adjacent and tightly connected to that of Salesforce’s home market. It notes that IDC estimates Canada’s public cloud software market will be worth C$4.1 billion ($3.1 billion) by 2019.

“Canada is recognized as an excellent place to start and build globally competitive technology companies,” said the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, in a statement. “Corporate initiatives such as Salesforce Ventures’ new Canada Trailblazer Fund provide valuable support to technology entrepreneurs throughout their start-and-scale journey.”

As SoundHound looks to leverage its ten-plus years of experience and data to create a voice recognition tool that companies can bake into any platform, it’s raising another big $100 million round of funding to try to make its Houndify platform a third neutral option compared to Alexa and Google Assistant.

While Amazon works to get developers to adopt Alexa, SoundHound has been collecting data since it started as an early mobile app for the iPhone and Android devices. That’s given it more than a decade of data to work with as it tries to build a robust audio recognition engine and tie it into a system with dozens of different queries and options that it can tie to those sounds. The result was always a better SoundHound app, but it’s increasingly started to try to open up that technology to developers and show it’s more powerful (and accurate) than the rest of the voice assistants on the market — and get them to use it in their services.

“We launched [Houndify] before Google and Amazon,” CEO Keyvan Mohajer said. “Obviously, good ideas get copied, and Google and Amazon have copied us. Amazon has the Alexa fund to invest in smaller companies and bribe them to adopt the Alexa Platform. Our reaction to that was, we can’t give $100 million away, so we came up with a strategy which was the reverse. Instead of us investing in smaller companies, let’s go after big successful companies that will invest in us to accelerate Houndify. We think it’s a good strategy. Amazon would be betting on companies that are not yet successful, we would bet on companies that are already successful.”

This round is all coming in from strategic investors. Part of the reason is that taking on these strategic investments allows SoundHound to capture important partnerships that it can leverage to get wider adoption for its technology. The companies investing, too, have a stake in SoundHound’s success and will want to get it wherever possible. The strategic investors include Tencent Holdings Limited, Daimler AG, Hyundai Motor Company, Midea Group, and Orange S.A. SoundHound already has a number of strategic investors that include Samsung, NVIDIA, KT Corporation, HTC, Naver, LINE, Nomura, Sompo, and Recruit. It’s a ridiculously long list, but again, the company is trying to get that technology baked in wherever it can.

So it’s pretty easy to see what SoundHound is going to get out of this: access to China through partners, deeper integration into cars, as well as increased expansion to other avenues through all of its investors. Mohajer said the company could try to get into China on its own (or ignore it altogether), but there has been a very limited number of companies that have had any success there whatsoever. Google and Facebook, two of the largest technology companies in the world, are not on that list of successes.

“China is a very important market, it’s very big and has a lot of potential, and it’s growing,” Mohajer said. “You can go to Canada without having to rethink a big strategy, but China is so different. We saw even companies like Google and Facebook tried to do that and didn’t succeed. When those bigger companies didn’t succeed, it was a signal to us that strategy wouldn’t work. [Tencent] was looking at the space and they saw we have the best technology in the world. They appreciated it and were respectful, they helped us get there. We looked at so many partners and [Tencent and Midea Group] were the ones that worked out.”

The idea here is that developers in all sorts of different markets — whether that’s cars or apps — will want to have some element of voice interaction. SoundHound is betting that companies like Daimler will want to control the experience in their cars, and not be saying “Alexa” whenever they want to make a request while driving. Instead, it may come down to something as simple as a wake word that could change the entire user experience, and that’s why SoundHound is pitching Houndify as a flexible and customizable option that isn’t demanding a brand on top of it.

SoundHound still does have its stable of apps. The original SoundHound app is around, though those features are also baked into Hound, its main consumer app. That is more of a personal assistant-style voice recognition service where you can string together a sentence of as many as a dozen parameters and get a decent search result back. It’s more of a party trick than anything else, but it is a good demonstration of the technical capabilities SoundHound has as it looks to embed that software into lots of different pieces of hardware and software.

SoundHound may have raised a big round with a fresh set of strategic partners, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s a surefire bet. Amazon is, after all, one of the most valuable companies in the world and Alexa has proven to be a very popular platform, even if it’s mostly for nominal requests and listening to music (and party tricks) at this point. SoundHound is going to have to convince companies — small and large — to bake in its tools, rather than go with massive competitors like Amazon with pockets deep enough to buy a whole grocery chain.

“We think every company is going to need to have a strategy in voice AI, jus like ten years ago everyone needed a mobile strategy,” Mohajer said. “Everyone should think about it. There aren’t many providers, mainly because it takes a long time to build the core technology. It took us 12 years. To Houndify everything we need to be global, we need to support all the main languages and regions in the world. We built the technology to be language independent, but there’s a lot of resources and execution involved.”

Perennial smartphone struggler HTC has revealed its newest smartphone — the U12/U12+ — will launch on May 23. The big spoiler from the company is that the phone will include… components.

That isn’t exactly an informative teaser, but we do actually have a flavor for what HTC will bring to market.

Serial leaker Evan Blass, writing for VentureBeat, revealed a dual-camera setup on the reverse of the phone, with a Snapdragon 845 chipset, 6GB of RAM and either 64GB or 128GB of internal storage under the hood.

HTC badly needs this device to be a winner. Its most recent results for Q4 2017 were grim with a loss $337 million from total sales of $540 million. The company did get a cash boost from a $1.1 billion deal to sell some of its tech and talent to Google, but that wasn’t reflected in these results.

The firm is putting that capital to use for “greater investment in emerging technologies” that it says will be “vital across all of our businesses and present significant long-term growth opportunities.” The fruits of that aren’t likely to be seen for a while yet.

The first-ever TechCrunch conference in Tel Aviv is just slightly more than a month away, and we couldn’t be more excited to bring this day-long intensive event focused on mobility to one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in the world. TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018, and you have exactly two weeks left to get the best early-bird ticket price — just 265 ILS — so buy your tickets today.

Our excitement is totally justified. Why? Israeli technology’s leading the charge on all things mobility, including autonomous vehicles, sensors, drones, security and so much more. The topics — and the industry leaders who will grace the TechCrunch stage — represent a deep and wide-ranging look at where mobility tech stands now and where it’s going.

We’re still adding great speakers to our agenda, but here’s a taste of the topics and subject experts you can expect to find at TC Tel Aviv.

Discussing the future of transportation: We have Uri Levine, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Waze, the world’s largest traffic and navigation app with more than 250 million drivers around the globe, and Dave Waiser founder of Gett, a global on-demand transportation and delivery company.

Are commercial drones here to stay? Weighing in on this hot topic we have Yariv Bash, CEO and co-founder of Flytrex, maker of the world’s first commercial drone delivery service, and Ran Krauss, CEO and co-founder of Airobotics, maker of a first-of-its-kind pilotless drone solution.

Interested in investing in Israeli tech? Then you won’t want to miss the conversation with Mike Granoff, founder and managing director of Maniv Mobility, a venture capital fund; Chemi Peres, co-founder and managing general partner of Pitango Venture Capital, Israel’s largest VC group; and Yahal Zilka, co-founder and managing partner of Magma Venture Partners, a leading VC fund in Israel.

And while mobility is the main conference focus, we won’t neglect other technologies. Head to the Startup Alley exhibition floor to explore, connect and network with more than 200 early-stage startups. They’ll feature their latest tech products, platforms and services in cybersecurity, AR/VR, mobility, robotics, fintech, biotech, artificial intelligence, blockchain and more.

And while you’re getting ready to buy that early-bird ticket, why not exhibit your startup at TC Tel Aviv? An exhibitor pass costs 1,700 ILS and includes two tickets and a demo table.

TechCrunch Tel Aviv takes place on June 7, 2018 at the Tel Aviv Convention Center, Pavilion 10. It promises to be an exciting exploration of Israeli tech pushing the boundaries of mobility. Early-bird pricing flies away in two weeks. Buy your tickets today.

This year’s TechCrunch event in Tel Aviv is all about mobility and everything around it, from autonomous vehicles, to sensors, drones and security. And that’s including traditional car manufacturers in our agenda was important. I’m happy to announce that Ariella Grinberg from General Motors is going to join us at our event.

Ariella Grinberg in Innovation Manager for GM’s Advanced Technical Center in Israel. She’s the proof that car manufacturers have to work with talented Israeli teams when it comes to smart mobility.

General Motors has been working hard on autonomous vehicles, electric and connected cars, as well as cybersecurity issues. This radical shift is arguably GM’s biggest challenge to date. Newcomers and small startups have the potential to disrupt the car industry and generate more value than established companies like GM.

It’s going to be interesting to hear Ariella Grinberg detail her work at GM and the company’s overall strategy to stay relevant. Her team is working on some of GM’s most interesting projects that are going to shape the future of the company.

You can come and listen to Ariella Grinberg on June 7 at the TechCrunch Tel Aviv conference.

Buy tickets here and see you at the Tel Aviv Convention Center!

On May 25-26, hundreds of Europe’s best and brightest coders, hackers, tech makers and programmers will descend upon Paris, the City of Light, to take part in TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech. And, as if a €5,000 grand prize weren’t enticing enough, our sponsors keep adding contests and prizes. More on that in a minute, but first a reminder. Tickets are free but you must register, so sign up today.

If you’re not familiar with the TechCrunch Hackathon format, listen up. When you arrive, you’ll connect with hundreds of other like-minded techies and form ad-hoc teams. Using BeMyApp, the official Hackathon platform, teams have just 24 hours to plan, design and create something amazing. Then those sleep-deprived teams have a mere 60 seconds to pitch their products to a panel of Hackathon judges. It’s grueling, feverish fun — often fueled by frightening quantities of Red Bull, sugar, pizza and coffee.

Oh, and those judges assign each team a score between one and five. Every team that scores an average three or better wins five tickets to Viva Technology 2019 and two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018 in November. That’s a sweet deal.

OK, we promised you an update on new contests and prizes. In addition to the €5,000 overall grand prize and another €5,000 for the contest sponsored by leboncoin, we’re thrilled to announce these contests from Renault, GEFCO and Microsoft:

Groupe Renault is developing safe and smooth driving technology to offer trustful Autonomous Driving on mainstream vehicles. This technology aims at making road safer, more enjoyable and maximize time for drivers while delegating. We’re challenging hackers to help us shape the future of Autonomous Vehicle by inventing innovative onboard and offboard services that will contribute to bring new experiences to customers and cars. The best hack project featuring onboard and offboard services will be awarded €5,000.

GEFCO is challenging our hackers to create the car auto-maintenance service of tomorrow by developing a system that will enable cars (or drivers) to request maintenance services directly from the car to GEFCO’s suppliers. Solutions can range from a “dash button” for the final customer to signal issues and an AI predictive maintenance system, to a gamification system allowing the final customer to manage car repair evaluations to self-managed parking. The best car auto-maintenance hack will be awarded €5,000.

Microsoft is inviting hackers to join one of 9 AI for good projects: 2 health projects and 7 existing social good projects  in collaboration with the Station F’s Tech for Good accelerator: ShareIT.IO. The 7 projects are around gender equality, natural disasters, health, education, refugees, and civic rights. They are looking for talented developers and AI engineers to collaborate with them to have a social impact with their contribution. Microsoft will select one of these projects and the winners will receive technical support from the Software Engineering teams of Microsoft to continue working on the project and each member of that team will receive a Microsoft Surface. You can find a brief description of these projects below:

• Hopale foundation Highly specialised in the treatment of neurological and osteo-articular conditions, disabilities, chronic conditions and learning and behavioural disorders.
• G.H Pitié Salpêtrière Therapeutic education project in pneumology.
• Learn Enjoy Learn Enjoy works to keep children with autism in the educational system, using the Internet and new technologies.
• Social Builder Social Builder is an organization whose mission is to develop gender diversity and professional equality in the digital economy.
• Droit d’Urgence Droits d’Urgence works for access to the law, at the heart of the causes of exclusion in France.
• Equal Community Foundation ECF implements programs to educate young Indian boys about gender equality and respect for women.
• Hackers Against Natural Disasters H.A.N.D. is an association whose goal is to use new technologies to prepare people for natural disasters.
• Singa SINGA is working on the integration of socio-economic integration of refugees by creating spaces for dialogue and meetings between refugees and their host society.
• We are not weapons of war We are not Weapons of War (WWoW) is an NGO founded by Céline Bardet, an international jurist who fights for the recognition of rape as a weapon of war in the strategic sense of the word.

Full disclosure: there’s only one qualification bar to clear before you can hack in Paris. All participants in this Hackathon must be a resident of one of these European countries.

TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech takes place on May 25-26, 2018 at the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. Don’t miss your chance to put your tech mettle to the test and come home with some pretty awesome cash and prizes. Register for your free ticket today.