Month: June 2019

Modern Fertility is a San Francisco-based company that sells fertility tests directly to consumers, but increasingly, those customers will be educating the company, too. Indeed, the two-year-old startup now plans to develop a database of anonymized data about its largely younger demographic.

A fresh $15 million in funding led by Forerunner Ventures should help. Forerunner founder Kirsten Green, who takes a board seat as part of the round, is known for countless savvy bets on a wide number of consumer brands that have taken off with users, from Dollar Shave Club to Bonobos to Glossier. With Forerunner’s help, Modern Fertility may well become a breakout hit, too, though potential customers should also understand its limitations before they click the “buy” button.

First, let’s back up. We’d originally written about Modern Fertility last year, when it began selling a kit from its website that’s sent to women’s doorsteps and allows them to gauge their levels of eight different reproductive hormones by using a finger prick. More specifically, the startup sends off its customers’ panels to CLIA-certified labs, where the tests are conducted, and most prominently, those tests are looking at the women’s level of AMH, or anti-mullerian hormone.

Why that’s relevant: every egg inside a woman’s ovaries sits within a fluid-filled sac full of cells that support egg maturation and produce hormones, including AMH. A woman’s AMH levels can provide one clue about how many of these sacs — or follicles — she has. That in turn provides a clue as to how many eggs she can release, or her ovarian reserve.

The point, says Modern Fertility’s cofounder and CEO, Afton Vechery, is to enable women to learn more about their bodies without having to shell out $1,500 to gain access to a similar picture by turning to a reproductive endocrinologist, of which there are relatively few.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are roughly 500 infertility clinics in the U.S., and 2,000 reproductive endocrinologists.

Mixed feelings in medical community . . .

It’s a compelling pitch, especially given that women are putting off children longer for a variety of reasons, including to secure their financial future. In 2017, for the first time, U.S. women in their early 30s eclipsed younger moms to become the group with the highest birth rate, according to CDC data.

But there is room for pushback. The reality is that AMH and other tests can be conducted elsewhere, including by competing startups, for roughly the same cost that Modern Fertility is charging its customers. (Its kits originally sold from its website for $199; today, they sell for $159.)

Fertility testing is also generally is covered by health insurance plans because fertility problems can be linked to or caused by other health problems like endometriosis. (Not covered, typically: actual infertility treatments.)

A far bigger concern to some doctors is the unnecessary alarm that AMH screening may create for women who haven’t been diagnosed with infertility and who are less than 35 years old.

As Zev Rosenwaks, director of the Center for Reproductive Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian, told the New York Times a couple of years ago, “All it takes is one egg each cycle . . . AMH is not a marker of whether you can or cannot become pregnant.”

Esther Eisenberg, the program director of the Reproductive Medicine and Infertility Program at the National Institutes of Health, has also said that AMH doesn’t dictate a woman’s reproductive potential. In fact, the NIH funded research in 2017 that found a “non-statistical difference” between low and normal AMH levels in a time-to-pregnancy study of women who were between the 30 to 44 years and who did not have a history of infertility.

Asked about such findings, Vechery, who was most recently a former product manager at the genetic testing company 23andMe, has clearly heard such criticisms. She readily acknowledges that AMH is “not an indicator of your ability to get pregnant right now in this moment,” adding that “it has so many other helpful benefits in thinking about your reproductive health in a much broader sense.”

Vechery also notes the company’s team of PhDs. She points to a clinical study that was published in The Green Journal (the official publication from The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists). She also speaks of Modern Fertility’s medical advisory board, which includes dedicated five medical doctors, including reproductive endocrinologists Nataki Douglas, a former associate professor at Columbia University Medical Center, and Scott Nelson, a professor at the University of Glasgow.

All are important pieces to building Modern Fertility, but it’s nevertheless worth mentioning that the company employs just two full-time PhDs currently.

Further, the company’s medical advisory members, including Nelson, are paid consultants.

As for the study, which Modern Fertility sponsored, it doesn’t actually prove anything about the power of AMH testing, though it does underscore that AMH, along with the seven other hormones the company measures on behalf of its customers, can be tested just as effectively with “fingerstick sampling” as a traditional blood draw.

The educator turns the tables . . .

Those curious about Modern Fertility — often younger women eager to get a jump on any later reproductive issues they may face — may well decide that information about their hormone levels is enough to part with the cost of a kit, which includes a one-on-one phone consultation with a nurse.

Interestingly, when they do, they’ll increasingly be asked to opt-in to questions about their health, lifestyles, and more. They may be asked repeatedly, too, as the company recommends that customers re-take the test yearly to track their hormones over time. Indeed, because so many of Modern Fertility’s customers do not have fertility issues, the company hopes to aggregate as much pertinent information from them as possible in order to complement the vast amounts of research that has been conducted on infertility.

“The fertility space needs to catch up, and a huge part of what we’re focused on is moving fertility science forward,” says Vechery. “So much research is primarily done on these women who are having issues; Modern Fertility is interested in flipping that around.”

It’s a strange state of affairs, but we’ve talked with several customers of the company in the past, and one can imagine them supporting it however they can, thanks in part to the sense of community that Modern Fertility has also been fostering. Among other things, for example, the company hosts get-togethers for customers in San Francisco so they can share their thoughts, their fears, and, presumably, their results.

As for whether Modern Fertility is also interested in selling that anonymized data as has happened at genetic testing outfits like Ancestry and Vechery’s former employer, 23andMe, Vechery insists that it will not, that the information will instead be used to inform the company’s product development.

Fertility startups have generally been on a fundraising tear, and little wonder. According to one estimate, the  global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020. In fact, while venture capital has poured into everything from period-tracking apps to sperm storage startups, Modern Fertility has its own direct competitors, excluding obstetricians. Among these is KindBody, a New York-based startup that raised $15 million two months ago, and three-year-old, Austin-based Everlywell, which has garnered $55 million from VCs so far.

Notably, Modern Fertility represents Forerunner’s first foray into the so-called femtech space. Asked about Green’s involvement, Vechery notes she was particularly “excited about the community,” which Phil Barnes of First Round Capital, has also cited as the reason he wrote Modern Fertility an early check.

Ultimately, though, says Vechery, “Our business model is information, and I think for Kirsten, seeing what that trusted brand could do in women’s health and the conversations it could spark” was what she found most compelling about the company.

We understand why. We also can’t help but wonder if those conversations will drive some women to see — unnecessarily — the very specialists that Modern Fertility wants to free them of visiting.

Modern Fertility has now raised $22 million to date. Among its other backers are Maveron and Union Square Ventures as investors.

Pictured above: Modern Fertility cofounders Afton Vechery and Carly Leahy. Vechery is CEO; Leahy is the company’s CCO, or chief commercial officer.

Facebook will not remove the faked videos featuring Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian and President Donald Trump from Instagram, the company said in a statement.

Earlier today, Vice News reported on the existence of videos created by the artists Bill Posters and Daniel Howe and video and audio manipulation companies including CannyAI, Respeecher and Reflect. 

The work, featured in a site-specific installation in the UK as well as circulating in video online, was the first test of Facebook’s content review policies since the company’s decision not to remove a manipulated video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi received withering criticism from Democratic political leadership.

After the late May incident Facebook’s Neil Potts testified before a smorgasbord of international regulators in Ottawa about deep fakes, saying the company would not remove a video of Mark Zuckerberg . This appears to be the first instance testing the company’s resolve.

“We will treat this content the same way we treat all misinformation on Instagram . If third-party fact-checkers mark it as false, we will filter it from Instagram’s recommendation surfaces like Explore and hashtag pages,” said an Instagram spokesperson in an email to TechCrunch.

The videos appear not to violate any Facebook policies, which means that they will be subject to the treatment any video containing misinformation gets on any of Facebook’s platforms. So the videos will be blocked from appearing in the Explore feature and hashtags won’t work with the offending material.

Facebook already uses image detection technology to find content that has been debunked by its third-party fact checking program on Instagram. When misinformation is only present on Instagram the company is testing the ability to promote links into the fact-checking product on Facebook.

“Spectre interrogates and reveals many of the common tactics and methods that are used by corporate or political actors to influence people’s behaviours and decision making,” said Posters in an artist’s statement about the project. “In response to the recent global scandals concerning data, democracy, privacy and digital surveillance, we wanted to tear open the ‘black box’ of the digital influence industry and reveal to others what it is really like.”

Facebook’s consistent decisions not to remove offending content stands in contrast with YouTube which has taken the opposite approach in dealing with manipulated videos and other material that violate its policies.

YouTube removed the Pelosi video and recently took steps to demonetize and remove videos from the platform that violated its policies of hate speech — including a wholesale purge of content about Nazism.

These issues take on greater significance as the U.S. heads into the next Presidential election in 2020.

“In 2016 and 2017, the UK, US and Europe witnessed massive political shocks as new forms of computational propaganda employed by social media platforms, the ad industry, and political consultancies like Cambridge Analytica [that] were exposed by journalists and digital rights advocates,” said Howe, in a statement about his Spectre project. “We wanted to provide a personalized experience that allows users to feel what is at stake when the data taken from us in countless everyday actions is used in unexpected and potentially dangerous ways.”

Perhaps, the incident will be a lesson to Facebook in what’s potentially at stake as well.

 

Tesla wants to show off a prototype of an electric pickup this year and it’s working on bringing the Model Y and Class 8 semi truck into production.

But really, who cares about any of that because Tesla apparently has a design for a submarine car just sitting around collecting dust.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned the electric submarine car in response to a question during the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif. The shareholder asked whether Tesla had considered building an aquatic car, meaning a vehicle that could travel on roads, and then transition into or under water.

It turns out a design exists for a submarine car inspired by the Lotus Esprit featured in the James Bond film, the Spy Who Loved Me.

“I thought that was like the coolest thing,” Musk said, adding that he owns the vehicle from the movie.

Musk said it’s technically possible to make a functioning version, but added “I think the market for this would be small — small, but enthusiastic.”

Building such a a vehicle would be a distraction, Musk said. However, he left the opportunity open that maybe someday Tesla would make it a show car.

The value of all the nickel and iron that scientists believe make up 16-Psyche’s potato-shaped asteroid in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt totals some $10,000 quadrillion.

It’s an astronomical sum, but NASA’s Psyche mission, which has now received approval to enter the final design and development stages before manufacturing begins for its 2022 launch, is actually after a much bigger prize… one of the secrets to how the Earth came to exist.

NASA scientists and researchers at Arizona State University believe that Psyche holds a key to understanding how planetary bodies are formed. The theory is that Psyche is actually the core of a planet which broke apart after a series of cataclysmic collisions.

Scientists hope that they can get a look into the distant past of the solar system, when protoplanet encounters created Earth and destroyed other would-be terrestrial planets —  like the one whose remnants are floating between Mars and Jupiter.

“With the transition into this new mission phase, we are one big step closer to uncovering the secrets of Psyche, a giant mysterious metallic asteroid, and that means the world to us,” said Principal Investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of Arizona State University in Tempe, in a statement.

There are still three more phases of mission planning that the Psyche team needs to clear. Phase D will begin in early 2021 includes the final manufacturing and testing of the spacecraft along with the planned launch in early 2022.

Phase E will happen as soon as Psyche’s exploratory craft hits the vacuum of space, NASA said. It’ll cover the deep space operations of the mission and the collection of data for science. NASA expects Psyche will arrive at its eponymous asteroid on Jan. 31, 2026 after buzzing Mars in 2023 (two years before Elon Musk predicted the first human astronauts would arrive).

Instruments on the Psyche craft will include a magnetometer designed to detect and measure the remnant magnetic field of the asteroid. A multi-spectral imager will be on board to provide high-resolution images to determine the composition of the asteroid (how much is metal vs. how much is a silicate). The craft will also include a gamma ray and neutron spectrometer to detect, measure, and map the asteroid’s elemental composition and a new laster technology that’s designed for deep space communications.

Part of the NASA Discovery Program, the mission is being undertaken in conjunction with Maxar Space Solutions, which is providing the electric propulsion chassis, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Arizona State University.

Tesla might get into the business of mining minerals used in electric vehicle batteries if it wants to expand its product lineup and scale production, CEO Elon Musk said during the company’s annual shareholder meeting.

The comments came after Musk talked about plans for an electric pickup truck and an aim to begin production of its all-electric Class 8 semi truck by the end of 2020. He said those plans were dependent on Tesla’s ability to manufacture a lot of lithium-ion battery cells.

“There’s not much point in adding product complexity if we don’t have enough batteries,” he said. “That is complexity, but without gain.”

Tesla’s massive factory in Sparks, Nevada was built to expand global battery capacity, and in turn reduce the cost of electric vehicles. The plant, called Gigafactory 1, produces Model 3 electric motors and battery packs, in addition to Tesla’s energy storage products, Powerwall and Powerpack. Panasonic, its most important partner as a supplier and partner in that project makes the cells. Tesla then uses the cells to make battery packs for its electric vehicles.

For now, Tesla plans to match product rollout with scaling of factory production. Once Tesla increases production to a “very high level,” it will “look further down the supply chain and get into the mining business, I don’t know, maybe a little bit at least,” Musk exclaimed.

“We will do whatever we have to do to ensure that we can scale at the fastest rate possible,” he added.

Concern about the supply of nickel, copper, lithium and related minerals used in electric batteries is not new. Last month, Tesla’s head of minerals procurement said during a closed meeting at an industry conference that the company expects global shortages of nickel, copper and lithium in the near future, Reuters reported.

While much of the attention has focused on lithium supplies, copper and nickel are also vulnerable. Years of underinvestment have depleted copper supplies, prompting companies like Freeport-McMoRan to expand in the United States and Indonesia.

It’s possible that Tesla will focus on nickel mining, a mineral that Musk has pushed the company to use more of in lieu of cobalt.

It’s going to be a while before players can get their hands on the Breath of the Wild sequel teased at the end of Nintendo’s E3 Direct earlier today. The good news, however, is that Nintendo’s got a few other Zelda-related adventures in the pipeline before that. There’s the compelling beat-based Cadence of Hyrule, due out this Thursday, and later this year, the company is releasing a remastered version of the Game Boy classic, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening.

That one’s due out in September. As is the case with a number of recent titles (see: most of Square’s presser from earlier this week), Link’s Awakening isn’t so much a new game as a revamp of an older one designed to get the most out of the latest technology.

Here that means more than most, however. Released in 1993, the original version of the game was subject to the Game Boy’s 8-bit, monochrome limitations. The title began life as a portable port of the third Zelda game, SNES’s A Link to the Past, but ultimately became a real boy under the direction of long-time Nintendo producer Shigeru Miyamoto.

The Link to the Past connection is very much present. Link’s Awakening feels cut from the same Hyrulian cloth as A Link to the Past. As someone who’s old enough to have played the original title during its first go-round, things came trickling back to me during a gameplay demo at E3. But the graphical advances are pretty substantial. The game is a far cry from the 1998 Game Boy Color reissue, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening DX.

Link’s Awakening is very much a Zelda title through and through, but the visuals are more than enough to make it feel like a fresh title. A direct line for the character design can be drawn to the GameCube’s The Wind Waker, when Link became decidedly more adorable. That’s coupled with the familiar 3/4 RPG perspective that was a staple of the franchise’s early days.

The backgrounds have been refreshed nicely, with a kind of tilt-shift style art that selectively blurs out set pieces. As someone who plays Switch almost exclusively as a handheld, it was refreshing to see it played out on the big screen.

Gameplay came back in a flash. Though a rep had to walk me through a few pieces of the first mission: finding a magic mushroom for a witch’s potion. It’s all very Macbeth. Or the Scottish video game. Nintendo did a much longer walkthrough on Treehouse this morning, all of which should prove familiar if you’ve played the original.

Nothing quite scratches the itch of a new Zelda title, but a full revamp of a Game Boy game more than a quarter century after the original comes close.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the company is in the process of completing a “small acquisition” that will help it release its own insurance product, something it said in April that it was only around “a month” away from bringing to market. One month is at least two months when translated from Musk time to rest-of-us time, so that tracks.

Musk made the remark at Tesla’s Annual Shareholders Meeting, adding that the company is “pretty close to being able to release [its insurance product],” and that in addition to this acquisition in progress, Tesla also has “a bit of software to write” to make it ready for market.

Insurance for Tesla vehicles can be expensive when sourced from traditional insurance providers (it ranked 15th highest in the U.S. in a recent third-party survey) but Tesla says it has a key advantage when compared to third-parties that will help it price insurance for its customers correctly – ample and detailed information about their driving habits.

No word yet on who the acquisition target is, but it makes sense that Apple might seek to pick up a small insurer to supplement its own driving and user data, rather than trying to build an insurance business in-house from scratch.

Tesla is currently installing its solar roof product in eight states, according to Elon Musk speaking at the Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting on Tuesday. The solar roof tile project has had a relatively long genesis, since being first unveiled three years ago in 2016.

In 2017, the company claimed its first ever installations of the Tesla solar roof, after opening up orders for the product in the second quarter of that year. Musk noted during the company’s Q2 2017 earnings call that both himself and Tesla CTO JB Straubel had the tiles installed and operating on their homes

The company also announced last year that it had entered into a partnership with Home Depot to sell its solar panels along with its PowerWall home battery, but that was about its traditional panels specifically, not the new tile product. The tiles are designed to look like high quality home tiles people use currently, with integrated solar panels that are not easily identified from ground level, in order to provide a more aesthetically pleasing solution.

In addition to having installations run in eight states, Musk also said that the solar roof product is currently on version three, and that this version is very exciting to him because it offers a chance of being at cost parity with an equivalent entry-level cheap traditional tile, when you include the cost of utilities you’d be saving by generating your own power instead.

Timelines for wider roll-out of the solar roof products at the costs he anticipates, his own words probably say it best: “I’m sometimes a little optimistic about timeframes – it’s time you knew” he joked at the meeting.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s opening comments went straight to a question that has been looming over the automaker since it reported wider-than-expected losses and a one-third drop in deliveries in the first quarter: demand.

“We get this question a lot. I want to be clear, there is not a demand problem,” Musk said.

But he didn’t stop there. Musk quickly added that sales have far exceeded production. “Production has been pretty good,” Musk said. “So Tesla has decent shot at a record quarter on every level — if not it’s going to be very close.”

Tesla reported in April that it delivered 63,000 of its electric vehicles in the first quarter of the year, nearly a one-third drop from the previous quarter. Tesla cautioned, at the time, that it expected first-quarter profits would be negatively impacted by lower than expected delivery volumes and several pricing adjustments.

And that proved out, when just a few weeks later Tesla reported wider-than-expected loss of $702 million, or $4.10 a share.

Tesla blamed the striking difference in numbers on its efforts to increase deliveries of its Model 3 electric car in Europe and China, which was fraught with challenges and caused delays.

But the losses and lower delivery number prompted widespread speculation that Tesla had what looked like demand issue, a problem it had never experienced before.

Musk tried to quell those concerns during the shareholder’s meeting Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif. He said that 90% of the new orders from coming from non-reservation holders and that 63% of its trade-ins are from non-premium categories. “Which means people are trading up to buy the Model 3,” he added.

During the Tesla Annual Shareholders Meeting that took place on Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk didn’t mince words when he talked about what he thinks of the value proposition of traditional fossil fuel vehicles. He called it “financially insane” to buy any car that isn’t an electric car capable of full autonomy – which, conveniently, currently is type of vehicle that only Tesla claims to sell.

Musk reiterated a claim he’s made previously about Tesla vehicles, that all of its cars manufactured since October 2016 have everything they need to become fully autonomous – with those built before the release of its new autonomous in-car computer earlier this year needing only a computer swap, replacing the new Tesla-built computer for the Nvidia ones they shipped with.

The Tesla CEO also reiterated his claim from earlier this year that there will be 1 million robotaxis on the road as of next year, noting that it’s easy to arrive at that number if you consider that it includes all Teslas, including Model X, Model S and Model 3 sold between October 2016 and today.

Regarding Tesla’s progress with self-driving, Musk noted that by end of year, Tesla hopes to deliver autonomy such that while you’ll still have to supervise the driving in-car, it’ll get you from your garage to your workplace without intervention. He said that by next year, their goal is the same thing but without requiring supervision, and then some time after that, pending regulatory cooperation, they’ll be able to do full autonomy without anyone on board.

Musk ended this musing with a colorful metaphor, likening buying a car that’s powered by traditional fossil fuel and without any path to self-driving to someone today “riding a horse and using a flip phone.”