Year: 2018

Startup life is nothing if not full of ups and downs. On the up this week is Cera, the London-based homecare startup advised by former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg, which today is announcing $17 million in Series A funding. Investing in the round is Guinness Asset Management (via its EIS fund), Yabeo (which is also the lead investor in Germany’s biggest care supply company Pflegebox), and Kairos. In addition, a number of Cera’s seed backers have followed on.

Contrast that with last week when a Bloomberg report alleged that fake reviews of Cera had been posted to third-party websites, such as TrustPilot — allegedly written by “Cera Care employees or people close to them” — and that at the time of its report some non-existent or expired NHS partnerships were incorrectly listed on Cera’s website.

The same report also revealed that Cera — which makes a virtue of its ability to collect and take actions on client data — wasn’t registered with the U.K. data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), before February this year, although the company tells TechCrunch it began the process a year earlier. Either way, the startup launched as early as November 2016 and therefore was likely operating for a period without the proper data regulation.

Addressing the alleged fake reviews, and alleged misrepresentation of some NHS partnerships, Cera issued TechCrunch with the following statement:

“We have looked into this, and TrustPilot have removed unverified reviews. We pride ourselves on delivering outstanding, high-quality care, which is demonstrated through our platform’s automated customer feedback, which remains at a 95% satisfaction rate.

“Contrary to certain statements in recent press articles, we have partnered with several NHS organisations over the past year, successfully delivering NHS-funded and referred care services. In 2018 we have delivered NHS CCG funded care with the following CCGs: Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Haringey, Enfield, and previously had partnered with CCGs including Brent, Harrow and Hillingdon, and East London Foundation Trust, in addition to marketing in NHS hospitals including: Central Middlesex, West Middlesex, Northwick Park, Royal Marsden, Whittington and Barnet & Chase Farm. We note that at the time the articles were written, our website was not fully up to date with these materials and have since rectified it – this was in part due to variable contractual expiry dates”.

Meanwhile, Cera says it will use its Series A funding — which is made up of both equity and debt — to expand its services further across the U.K., launching in an additional three cities beyond London, namely Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham, via what it is calling a “buy and build” strategy. This will see Cera buy struggling homecare agencies across the U.K. — many of which it says lack the technology to scale and grow independently — as a more rapid means of expanding.

“In a fragmented market of over 8,000 homecare providers, Cera has built the technology to quickly aggregate U.K. homecare businesses in a scalable manner, in what will be a U.K.-first from a startup in this space. This model will also be used to drive Cera’s expansion to Germany,” says the company.

The injection of capital will also support Cera’s continued investment in “AI”. It has been prototyping a chatbot-styled assistant it calls “Martha,” which it claims can successfully foresee deterioration in patient health, based on carer feedback, such as whether a patient hasn’t been eating, has a fever, or isn’t walking normally. The aim is to pre-empt more serious illnesses and avoid unnecessary admissions to hospital.

Related to this, I understand from Cera’s latest investor email report that Cera has grown its data set to “over 1 million data points” — a 90 percent quarter-on-quarter increase — which it intends to feed into its machine learning-powered predictive analytics tool to help improve health outcomes and reduce preventable hospital admissions. “We are taking active steps to ensure GDPR compliance,” says the company, which is just as well.

The same email details a number of business development updates by Cera, including that it is working on a collaboration with NHS 111 that — if it goes ahead — would permit integration of data records between Cera and the NHS 111 service. The startup is also working on Amazon Alexa integration, and has formed an exclusive partnership with the Daily Mail Group, to offer home care to Daily Mail readers and users.

To that end, the U.K. homecare startup space is pretty crowded already and therefore media partnerships and other more direct ways to market could be quite important beyond simply becoming a partner provider to local health and social care authorities. Cera’s direct U.K. competitors include HomeTouch (backed by Rocket Internet’s GFC, Passion Capital, Bupa, and 500 Startups), and SuperCarers.

Hulu is announcing several new shows this morning at the Digital Content NewFronts, running the gamut from romantic comedy to horror.

On the romance front, the streaming service has placed a series order for an update of Four Weddings and a Funeral, which will be written and executive produced by Mindy Kaling and Matt Warburton. The pair previously worked together on The Mindy Project, which started out as a series on Fox before becoming a Hulu Original.

Will Kaling be appearing on-screen in the new show? Hulu’s announcement doesn’t say.

As for horror, Hulu unveiled a new series called In The Dark, which will be produced by Blumhouse Television, the TV arm of the studio behind horror hits like The Purge, Split and Get Out. Each episode will be a feature-length standalone.

And rather than releasing all of them at once, or even every week, Hulu will air a new episode on the first Friday of each month — apparently each episode of will tie in to a holiday during the month it airs. The first segment, “The Body,” will air on October 5 and tell a selfie-oriented Halloween story.

Hulu also picked up Ramy, a show based on the comedy of Ramy Youssef. This is the streaming network’s first series order from A24, the independent studio that released Lady Bird, Moonlight and Ex Machina.

In addition to announcing new titles, Hulu revealed that The Handmaid’s Tale has been picked up for a third season — no surprise, since the show won Hulu its first Emmy Awards and is also one of the service’s most-watched dramas.

Hulu also said it’s reached a deal to become the exclusive subscription streaming home for ABC’s The Good Doctor, and for future DreamWorks Animation feature films.

And the company announced that it’s passed 20 million subscribers, with plans to add offline viewing.

Developing …

Nearly every aspect of the current ICO market is pay-for-play or otherwise tainted. I do not paint the industry with such a broad brush lightly but this sort of chicanery hasn’t existed since the heyday of print media when journalists – myself included – took long, convoluted trips to distant headquarters where they enjoyed, as I wrote back in 2007, “suckling on the sweet teat of junket whoredom.”

As I said in this post on payola that briefly made waves a few months ago, payola is stupid and everybody should be able to see through it. But many can’t and that’s a big problem.

The ICO market is hot right now and there is money flowing from hand to hand in a torrent. One litigious company I spoke to took $10,000 to write a white paper and then returned a two page squib, refusing ultimately to refund a founder’s money. Another company, below, is sponsoring an all-inclusive trip to Seoul for a press conference. Other companies take $400,000 or more to manage your ICO, offering PR and services look to have been cobbled together in a rush yet promise millions in returns.

Any time there is a gold rush there are carpet baggers. Any time there is a bubble there are those who would take advantage of it. And anywhere there is a new, unregulated way to make – or raise – millions of dollars you’d better believe there is someone skimming.

Arguably not everyone knows the rules. They are, quite simply: don’t take free stuff in exchange for positive coverage and don’t take trips. Most tech journalists have a closet full of junk that needs to go back to manufacturers but they should never expect cash from a manufacturer to smooth things along. Junkets are dangerous primarily because they cloud a journalist’s judgment. You can imagine Syria sponsoring a fancy junket into its war zone to understand the extreme chilling effect and bias this would introduce.

Further, the other services – legal, PR, social media – that are cropping up in the market are taking a huge cut and often stand unchallenged. ICOs are hard work and very confusing. Instructions, to say the least, are unclear and anyone who has done one successfully – including this team that simulated and exit scam to send people to their ICO consultancy – is considered a global expert. It’s as if someone discovered a working Bloomberg terminal an abandoned building and then began telling everyone they could make them millions. It’s not that easy.

Ultimately these barnacles will be shaken off. TechCrunch was born out of the confusion of the second startup boom and, in turn, this created the modern VC industry, the modern pitch-off, and the accelerator. The good guys, so to speak, outnumbered the pay-for-play “incubators” and the rapacious investors and created what you see to day: a tame but useful system for unlocking wealth. Now that that system has been supplanted – and make no mistake: VC is over – the new organism has its own parasites and none of them are particularly new.

This does not mean the current system is perfect. Angel funding is almost impossible to find outside of major cities. Team and a dream has been replaced by team and multi-million dollar revenue. VC has become a spectator sport and its practitioners are – or feel like – rock stars. There is plenty of nastiness in that business.

But crypto is a different beast entirely.

“Everyone I talk to in this space is corrupt,” railed one founder to me last week. He didn’t know where to turn so he did it all himself. It worked, but not without much trial and error.

Another founder is handing out legal documents his legal team produced for him because he was sick they cost so much. Given that the average equity investment in a startup requires one document and a handshake, to spend upwards of $100,000 for documentation galls. Add in an opaque, hype-filled market and a secretive investment class and you get an explosive mixture.

This will not lost. The barnacles will fall off. But until then it’s sad that such a promising technology will be tainted by the behavior of a few growth marketers who are using the techniques they learned selling penis pills to sell securities. Don’t expect financial authorities to cut these cheaters down, either. That can only be done by the market, a market that knows when enough is enough and that it shouldn’t cost dumb money to raise smart money.

You can’t pay for coverage. You shouldn’t charge to pitch. You shouldn’t make profit on wild inequity. But people will do these things and more and things will not change until the entire industry – from the founders to the service companies to the investors to the media – agrees to scrape them off.

 

Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash

DigitalOcean is getting into the container game. While it’s still best known for its affordable virtual private server hosting, the company’s ambition is to become a major player in the cloud computing space. Hosting was just the first part of that plan, and with its Spaces storage services, for example, it signaled its future plans.

Since there’s no way to get around talking about software containers these days, it’s probably no surprise that the company today announced the launch of its Kubernetes -based container service.

The service is now in early preview (and you can sign up here) and the company plans to make it widely available later this year.

“We’ve always been devoted to providing simple solutions for developers — starting with our cloud servers, Droplets,” said DigitalOcean VP of Product Shiven Ramji. “This product is no exception, allowing developers to focus on successfully shipping their applications while not being burdened by the complexity involved with creating and running a highly scalable and secure cluster across multiple apps.”

DigitalOcean Kubernetes, as the service is called, will allow developers to deploy and manage their container workloads on the DigitalOcean platform. Like competing products from virtually every major cloud computing provider, DigitalOcean’s offering will abstract away a lot of the underlying complexity of running Kubernetes. Users will get their own isolated Kubernetes cluster with full access to the Kubernetes API if they need it. The service integrates with the company’s existing storage service, firewall tools and other key features. Developers can choose whether to run their containers on standard DigitalOcean nodes or on more high-powered compute-optimized nodes. There also is support for access control through a new “teams” feature, as well as all of the usual metrics and logging features you’d expect from a service like this.

Misty Robotics has been talking a good game for 10 months now. Back in June, the Colorado-based Sphero spin-off announced its plans to develop a mainstream home robot. At CES in January, it introduced the world to the Misty I, a skeletal robotic development platform.

Four months later, it’s back with Misty II. While it looks like more of a consumer device, Misty II is still pretty far from the mainstream consumer robot the startup has been promising all along. Like its more unassuming predecessor, the Misty II “personal robot” is designed to be a kind of development platform — albeit one that’s a lot easier to write for than traditional robots.

According to Misty,

The Misty II personal robot is easy for non-technical owners to program using the Misty Blockly client, a visual block-based programming interface, to create new skills for the robot that can make it move, talk, roar and more. Pre-set blocks, or skills, will come installed on Misty II to quickly get started. Those owners with programming experience, can utilize JavaScript APIs to create more sophisticated skills and modifications, like integrating with third party services such as Alexa, Microsoft Cognitive Services, Google Assistant, and Cloud APIs.

Among the skills the company is making available through GitHub are the ability to drive autonomously, respond to commands, locate its charger and recognize faces.

In spite of getting $11.5 million in funding early on, the company is still opting to crowdfund the new robot. The campaign, which runs through the end of the month, is designed to establish a community around the robot. Those who pitch in will get the robot at a discount — though it’s still not what you would call cheap, at $1,600. That’s apparently about half of what the company expects the robot to get via retail — a price that will almost certainly keep it out of the mainstream in this early iteration. 

It should start shipping to backers in December.

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Facebook’s attempt to block a series of legal questions relating to a long-running EU privacy case from being referred to Europe’s top court has been throw out by Ireland’s High Court.

Earlier this week the company’s lawyers had asked the Irish High Court to stay the referral to the CJEU of a number of key legal questions pertaining to existing data transfer mechanisms that are being used by thousands of companies (Facebook included) to authorize flows of personal data outside the bloc.

Both the lawfulness of Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Privacy Shield mechanism are now facing questions as a result of this challenge.

However in a ruling today the Irish High Court denied the company’s request for a stay on the CJEU referral — with the judge ordering the referral to be immediately delivered to the Court of Justice, and emphasizing the risk that “millions” of EU data subjects, including privacy campaigner and lawyer Max Schrems whose complaint triggered the court case and subsequent referral, could be having their data processed unlawfully.

“In my opinion very real prejudice is potentially suffered by Mr Schrems and the millions of EU data subjects if the matter is further delayed by a stay as sought in this case,” writes Ms Justice Costello.

She also criticizes Facebook for delaying tactics, and for not making it clear that its appeal against the referral — which Facebook still intends to pursue in the Irish Supreme Court — relates to a time-bound argument that the decision is moot because of an incoming update to EU privacy law (the GDPR).

“The fact that the point is only now being raised gives rise to considerable concern as to the conduct of the case by Facebook and the manner in which it has dealt with the court,” writes the judge in a withering critique.

In a statement on the latest developments in the case, a Facebook spokesperson told us: “We are disappointed not to have been granted a stay on the preliminary reference being made to the CJEU. We intend on continuing with seeking leave to appeal the High Court’s decision to the Irish Supreme Court.”

Schrems’ view is there’s no case for Facebook to make that the legal questions involved here are moot under GDPR, just as he says “no such appeal exists in Ireland” for Facebook to try to appeal against a referral to the CJEU via the Irish Supreme Court — even though the company is trying to do both. (But, as the judge has pointed out, it appears to like trying to buy itself time.)

Depending on how quickly the CJEU rules we’ll soon know for sure — perhaps in a little over a year’s time.

Car makers BMW, General Motors, Ford and Renault are the big names behind a new group announced today to explore the potential of the blockchain in the automotive and mobility space.

MOBI — the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative — launches today with over 30 founding members that also include Bosch, Blockchain at Berkeley, Hyperledger, Fetch.ai, IBM and IOTA. The group has a fairly broad goal of making transportation “safer, more affordable, and more widely accessible using blockchain technology.”

The blockchain has the undoubted potential to impact a range of industries. The distributed ledger component and smart contracts, in particular, could reshape the way organizations and products use and consume data. Along those lines, MOBI said its scope of focus varies from payments, data tracking, and supply management, to consumer finance and pricing, and more futuristic areas like autonomous vehicles and ride-sharing systems.

It isn’t the first time automotive firms have looked at the blockchain. Toyota is already doing its own research, Renault has joined the R3 research consortium, and Daimler is part of the Hyperledger project from the Linux Foundation. With MOBI, however, the group is focusing entirely on the automotive space and potential use cases rather than automotive as one of a number of industries.

“Blockchain and related trust enhancing technologies are poised to redefine the automotive industry and how consumers purchase, insure and use vehicles,” Chris Ballinger, who is MOBI’s first chairman and CEO, said in a statement.

“By bringing together automakers, suppliers, startups, and government agencies, we can accelerate adoption for the benefit of businesses, consumers and communities,” added Ballinger, who was formerly CFO and director of mobility services at the Toyota Research Institute .

Members of the organization’s board include Joseph Lubin, founder of ConsenSys and a co-founder of Ethereum, and Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger .

European dating giant Badoo has added a live video chat feature to its apps, giving users the chance to talk face-to-face with matches from the comfort of their own home — and even before agreeing to go out on a first date.

It’s claiming it’s the first dating app service to add a live video feature, though clearly major players in the space were not holding back because of the complexity of the technical challenge involved.

Rather live video in a dating app context raises some immediate risk flags, including around inappropriate behavior which could put off users.

And for examples on that front you only need recall the kind of content that veteran Internet service Chatroulette was famed for serving straight up — if you were brave enough to play.

(“I pressed ‘play’ last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on ‘Next’ encountered 5 straight up penis shots,” began TechCrunch’s former co-editor Alexia Tsotsis’ 2010 account of testing the service — which deploys live video chat without any kind of contextual wrapper, dating or otherwise. Clearly Badoo will be hoping to achieve a much better ratio of quality conversation to animated phalli.)

But even beyond the risk of moving dick pics, video chatting with strangers can just be straight up awkward for people to jump into — perhaps especially in a dating context, where singles are trying to make a good impression and won’t want to risk coming across badly if it means they lose out on a potential date.

Sending an opening text to a dating match from a cold start can be tricky enough, without ramping up the pressure to impress by making ‘breaking the ice’ into a video call.

So while dating apps have been playing around with video for a while now it’s mostly been in the style of the Snapchat Stories format — letting users augment their profiles with a bit of richer media storytelling, without the content and confidence risks associated with unmoderated live video. Tinder also recently introduced a GIF-style video loops feature. And it’s a big step from curated and controlled video snippets to the freeform risk and rush of live video.

Regardless, Badoo is diving in — so full marks for taking the plunge.

The feature has been introduced with some prudent limits too though. Badoo says video chat will only be switched on once both parties have matched and exchanged at least one message each.

And on the inappropriate content front, it has this guidance: “If a user is not what you expected, you can easily block or report that person so they will no longer be able to contact you again.” So basically if you get flashed, you can block and report the flasher.

To start a video chat with a match they’ve messaged with a user taps the icon in the top right corner of the chat screen — then they have to wait (and hope) for their call to be accepted.

While there are risks here, there is the potential for the feature to be really useful in an online dating context — if enough users can get over the confidence bump to use it.

Video chats could help to solve the core problem for online daters of how to know whether there’s any chemistry with a match before you actually meet them. Because while two people can aesthetically appreciate each other’s Instagram portraits from afar, and even like the cut of each other’s textual jib remotely, they still can’t know for sure ahead of time whether there’s any chemistry until they meet. And by then it’s too late — hence all those awkward first date stories.

Live video chatting isn’t as informative as meeting in person, of course, but it’s the next best thing technology can deliver for now — hence Badoo couching the feature as a way to “audition your date” before you meet. Though that phrasing does risk amping up the pressure.

The company also says live video can help enhance dating app safety — saying the feature can be a way for users to suss out a stranger to see whether seem trustworthy before risking meeting in person, and also help to weed out fake profiles and catfishing attempts — arguing: “It’s a safe way to have clarity on exactly who you’re talking to.”

So it may help to figure out if that stunner you matched with really is a Russian model wanting to date you or some Kremlin-backed scammer. (Though Badoo does already have some features aimed at thwarting catfishing, such as a request a selfie feature and a photo verification option; and, well, fake Russian models are unlikely to ever pick up your incoming call — unless it’s a very sophisticated scam indeed. Or, well, you’re actually talking to a professional dating service who your match has paid to carry out their dating ‘grunt work’ — in which case they’ll make you schedule in a live video hours or days in advance.)

On the flip side, live video chatting will inevitably be more daunting for less confident singles to use, so certain users may end up feeling disadvantaged and/or falling to the back of the dating queue vs more extroverted types who relish the opportunity to express themselves in the moment and in front of a lens.

Or it could just end up being a feature that attracts only a subset of likeminded users and the rest carry on as normal.

Now that Facebook has decided to take inspiration from Bang With Friends and directly cater to date-seekers inside its walled garden — announcing a forthcoming matchmaking service at its f8 conference yesterday — it’s clear that dedicated dating/matchmaking services like Badoo are going to have to up their game to stave off the competitive threat. So offering richer feature sets to further engage their communities of singles is going to be important.

Facebook’s dating foray has been given the unfortunate name of ‘FaceDate’ but will nonetheless benefit from the massive leg over of Facebook’s gigantic reach combined with the gravitational network pull of it owning and operating multiple popular social services.

The company also has oodles of data — thanks to its pervasive snooping on people’s online activities — so if you buy into the theory that love can be algorithmically reverse engineered then Facebook certainly has enough data-points to play at being Emma.

It does not yet have the direct community of daters though — so it’s coming from behind in that sense. And young users have been less engaged on Facebook itself for a while — preferring other social apps like Instagram, for example.

Even so, dating apps like Badoo can’t afford to get complacent and will need to work hard to keep their communities engaged — or risk Facebook spinning up another gravitational blackhole to suck out their USP.  This is why investors punished Match’s stock yesterday.

Right now, Badoo has around 380M users, and names its best markets as Europe and South America. It also says it sees 300,000+ daily sign-ups, along with 60 million swipes and six million matches each day — running a live tracker of usage here. It’ll be hoping the new live video feature keeps those numbers tracking up.

In the world of DevOps, developers ship code and operations deals with all the managing, monitoring and troubleshooting, but Google Cloud has found that it sometimes it makes more sense to put some of these responsibilities back in the hands of the developers. Today, the company announced the Beta release of Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring, a tool designed to give developers a comprehensive way of checking the health of their Kubernetes applications.

The company made the announcement at Kubecon, the conference related to all things Kubernetes going on this week in Copenhagen.

Arpana Sinha, who is the group product manager for Kubernetes at Google says that it’s about helping everyone in the monitoring chain, whether developers, operations or site reliability engineers (SREs). “What we are talking about at Kubecon is that there are a lot of challenges in monitoring modern cloud deployments, particularly hybrid deployments,” she said. This release brings together a couple of key pieces including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and Prometheus, a popular open source tool for monitoring Kubernetes in on-prem installations.

What Google is doing with this new producing is bringing together logs, metrics and events across the various Kubernetes pieces including containers, pods, workloads and clusters, and combining that with signals from underlying infrastructure. That should result in giving developers a much more comprehensive view of their Kubernetes app — and that’s the goal with this release.

By connecting it to Prometheus, it’s really taking the cloud-native ethos to heart by giving a comprehensive view across on-prem and cloud-based Kubernetes installations. “Stackdriver is hosted solution from Google Cloud. It can monitor anything in Google Cloud, but Prometheus is tool you [would] use on prem. When you want single pane of glass, you can pull metrics from GCP and Prometheus on prem,” Sinha explained.

The release of this tool is another example of the company creating products based on ones they created in-house to monitor their own systems. Kubernetes itself was derived from an in-house container orchestration tool called Borg, the company had been using internally for years to manage its massive cloud applications like GMail and Google Docs.

This announcement comes on the heels of the recent Stackdrive APM announcement at the end of last month.

Poq, the London-based startup that offers a SaaS to make it easier for retailers to launch and maintain a consumer-facing shopping app, has raised £9.5 million in Series B funding. Leading the round is Smedvig Capital, with participation from previous backers Beringea, and Revolt Ventures. It brings the total amount raised by Poq to £16.5 million since the company was founded in 2011.

A fairly early entrant into the so-called ‘apps-as-a-service’ space, Poq’s pitch is that it enables retailers — with a particular focus on ‘pureplay’ or multichannel brands — to create their own e-commerce app at a fraction of the price of using a traditional app development agency or doing it all in-house. The company counts the likes of House of Fraser, Missguided, Pretty Little Thing, Holland & Barrett, Hotel Chocolat, Fragrance Direct, and Made.com as clients.

“Our platform is the result of years of focus on retail apps and is proven to increase conversion rates and revenue,” Øyvind Henriksen, CEO and co-founder at Poq, tells TechCrunch. “New code is rolled out every week and major releases delivered every quarter”.

This, he says, is often in contrast to the way retailers engage with a traditional app agency, which typically sees a lot of work and investment go into a version one, only for the app to be left unloved as each update can be costly and has unnecessary friction.

The other option is to not bother with an app and just have a mobile website, but Poq claims these don’t perform well in retail and that apps are proven to provide a better shopping experience, which leads to much better engagement, retention and conversion.

“While everyone would love to have an app, the reality is that apps are typically hard to build and maintain. By using Poq’s SaaS approach, retailers get the product faster to market, keep it up to date easier, [and] have the ability to plug into an ecosystem of pre-built integrations to technology providers,” says Henriksen.

The Poq CEO describes Poq’s typical customer as a large pureplay or multichannel retailer. “Our first major customer was House of Fraser,” he says, “and that’s when we proved ourselves as an enterprise-ready software provider. From then we’ve seen multichannel customers such as Holland and Barrett and House of Fraser use apps as a new digital channel, the apps also power their loyalty programs in the stores”.

Meanwhile, Poq says the new funding will help the company drive growth in the U.K. and Europe, as well as in the U.S., where it plans to open offices. I’m told the U.S. currently makes up 20 percent of Poq’s revenue.