Year: 2019

Among mobile ad networks, Facebook and Google remain the best bet for advertisers, according to the latest ROI Index from marketing startup Singular.

To pull together this year’s index, Singular says it sampled $1.5 billion in ad spending (from the $10 billion in spending that the company optimizes annually) and measured which networks are delivering the best return on investment. It also kept an eye out for ad fraud, apparently deleting a record 15 companies from the rankings because of “excessive” fraud.

So yes, Facebook followed by Google topped the list. As the report puts it, “Savvy marketers know they need more than just two media partners, but Google and Facebook are in virtually every mobile marketer’s game plan for good reason: they deliver.”

At the same time, Singular noted that Snap improved its rankings on virtually all the lists, and is now the No. 3 network for non-gaming ads on both iOS and Android. And Twitter did respectably as well, ranking second on iOS for retention.

Comparing the two big mobile platforms, it seems that Android is more volatile — one-third of the networks on the Android ROI list are appearing for the first time, and 80 percent of the remaining 10 networks changed position on the list. On iOS, on the other hand, 73 percent of the networks changed positions, but there were only two new ones on the list.

You can download the full index here.

Among mobile ad networks, Facebook and Google remain the best bet for advertisers, according to the latest ROI Index from marketing startup Singular.

To pull together this year’s index, Singular says it sampled $1.5 billion in ad spending (from the $10 billion in spending that the company optimizes annually) and measured which networks are delivering the best return on investment. It also kept an eye out for ad fraud, apparently deleting a record 15 companies from the rankings because of “excessive” fraud.

So yes, Facebook followed by Google topped the list. As the report puts it, “Savvy marketers know they need more than just two media partners, but Google and Facebook are in virtually every mobile marketer’s game plan for good reason: they deliver.”

At the same time, Singular noted that Snap improved its rankings on virtually all the lists, and is now the No. 3 network for non-gaming ads on both iOS and Android. And Twitter did respectably as well, ranking second on iOS for retention.

Comparing the two big mobile platforms, it seems that Android is more volatile — one-third of the networks on the Android ROI list are appearing for the first time, and 80 percent of the remaining 10 networks changed position on the list. On iOS, on the other hand, 73 percent of the networks changed positions, but there were only two new ones on the list.

You can download the full index here.

Nowhere is prompt and effective medical treatment more important than on the battlefield, where injuries are severe and conditions dangerous. DARPA thinks that outcomes can be improved by the use of intelligent bandages and other systems that predict and automatically react to the patient’s needs.

Ordinary cuts and scrapes just need a bit of shelter and time and your amazing immune system takes care of things. But soldiers not only receive far graver wounds, but under complex conditions that are not just a barrier to healing but unpredictably so.

DARPA’s Bioelectronics for Tissue Regeneration program, or BETR, will help fund new treatments and devices that “closely track the progress of the wound and then stimulate healing processes in real time to optimize tissue repair and regeneration.”

“Wounds are living environments and the conditions change quickly as cells and tissues communicate and attempt to repair,” said Paul Sheehan, BETR program manager, in a DARPA news release. “An ideal treatment would sense, process, and respond to these changes in the wound state and intervene to correct and speed recovery. For example, we anticipate interventions that modulate immune response, recruit necessary cell types to the wound, or direct how stem cells differentiate to expedite healing.”

It’s not hard to imagine what these interventions might comprise. Smart watches are capable of monitoring several vital signs already, and in fact have alerted users to such things as heart-rate irregularities. A smart bandage would use any signal it can collect — “optical, biochemical, bioelectronic, or mechanical” — to monitor the patient and either recommend or automatically adjust treatment.

A simple example might be a wound that the bandage detects from certain chemical signals is becoming infected with a given kind of bacteria. It can then administer the correct antibiotic in the correct dose and stop when necessary rather than wait for a prescription. Or if the bandage detects shearing force and then an increase in heart rate, it’s likely the patient has been moved and is in pain — out come the painkillers. Of course, all this information would be relayed to the caregiver.

This system may require some degree of artificial intelligence, although of course it would have to be pretty limited. But biological signals can be noisy and machine learning is a powerful tool for sorting through that kind of data.

BETR is a four-year program, during which DARPA hopes that it can spur innovation in the space and create a “closed-loop, adaptive system” that improves outcomes significantly. There’s a further ask to have a system that addresses osseointegration surgery for prosthetics fitting — a sad necessity for many serious injuries incurred during combat.

One hopes that the technology will trickle down, of course, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s all largely theoretical for now, though it seems more than possible that the pieces could come together well ahead of the deadline.

Game developer Ubisoft today announced that it has partnered with Mozilla to develop Clever-Commit, an AI-based coding assistant that learns from your code base’s bug and regression data to analyze and flag potential new bugs as new code is committed. Ubisoft already uses this tool internally and Mozilla says that it will deploy it to spot bugs in its Firefox code.

Typically, when you think of Mozilla, chances are you are thinking open source, too. Clever-Commit, however, isn’t open source. “It’s being discussed. There are no plans for Clever-Commit to be open sourced right now,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told me. While Mozilla surely uses other proprietary tools to build its open-source software, it’s odd to see the organization say that it is helping to develop a tool that isn’t open source (or currently available to all developers, even for a price).

Ubisoft first demoed the tool — then called Commit-Assistant — last year. Now, Mozilla says it will work with Ubisoft by “providing programming language expertise in Rust, C++ and JavaScript, as well as expertise in C++ code analysis and analysis of bug tracking systems.” Mozilla will first use it during the code review phase and then later, if it turns out to be useful, at other stages during the development process. The organization hopes that Clever-Commit will catch three to four out of five bugs before they are ever introduced into the code.

“With a new release every 6 to 8 weeks, making sure the code we ship is as clean as possible is crucial to the performance people experience with Firefox,” writes Mozilla’s Firefox release manager Sylvestre Ledru today. “The Firefox engineering team will start using Clever-Commit in its code-writing, testing and release process. We will initially use the tool during the code review phase, and if conclusive, at other stages of the code-writing process, in particular during automation.”

Game developer Ubisoft today announced that it has partnered with Mozilla to develop Clever-Commit, an AI-based coding assistant that learns from your code base’s bug and regression data to analyze and flag potential new bugs as new code is committed. Ubisoft already uses this tool internally and Mozilla says that it will deploy it to spot bugs in its Firefox code.

Typically, when you think of Mozilla, chances are you are thinking open source, too. Clever-Commit, however, isn’t open source. “It’s being discussed. There are no plans for Clever-Commit to be open sourced right now,” a Ubisoft spokesperson told me. While Mozilla surely uses other proprietary tools to build its open-source software, it’s odd to see the organization say that it is helping to develop a tool that isn’t open source (or currently available to all developers, even for a price).

Ubisoft first demoed the tool — then called Commit-Assistant — last year. Now, Mozilla says it will work with Ubisoft by “providing programming language expertise in Rust, C++ and JavaScript, as well as expertise in C++ code analysis and analysis of bug tracking systems.” Mozilla will first use it during the code review phase and then later, if it turns out to be useful, at other stages during the development process. The organization hopes that Clever-Commit will catch three to four out of five bugs before they are ever introduced into the code.

“With a new release every 6 to 8 weeks, making sure the code we ship is as clean as possible is crucial to the performance people experience with Firefox,” writes Mozilla’s Firefox release manager Sylvestre Ledru today. “The Firefox engineering team will start using Clever-Commit in its code-writing, testing and release process. We will initially use the tool during the code review phase, and if conclusive, at other stages of the code-writing process, in particular during automation.”

Despite all of the VR over-hyping, for those observing from the inside, the capabilities are still uncharted. VR as a creative medium has probably been one of the more entrancing use cases since the first high-end headsets launched. Products like Google’s Tilt Brush isolated impossible use cases, where VR was the only way to experience that act of creating something mesmerizing from nothing.

Massless has been intrigued by the potential of VR as a way to achieve new precision and more seamlessly shove designers and engineers into their digital workshops. The product they’re working on, the Massless Pen, is a professional stylus that functions with much of the pizzazz you’d expect from a product like the Apple Pencil, featuring things like deep pressure sensing and capacitive touch, in addition to upgrades like haptic feedback.

Indeed, you can use the Massless Pen much like you would any other designer’s stylus, but things get a bit bizarre when you pick it up off the surface and manipulate the space in front of you. That’s because the startup’s product is also a tracked 6DoF VR controller, which users can utilize as a tool to manipulate, edit and further create. It utilizes its own tracking system, which can be mounted below hardware trackers used for VR headsets.

“I think the most important thing about this product is that it works in three-dimensions, but you don’t have to use VR,” CEO Jack Cohen tells TechCrunch. “You can just use it as a standard graphics tablet and you can use it to control 3D software on a monitor… This is a transitional period for everyone, so it’s good to have that bridge that goes between them.”

While a lot of digital ink has been spilled on bringing VR to consumer markets, Massless plans to aim this device firmly at business customers, hoping to attract further attention from customers working in design and visualization-heavy enterprises like commercial architecture and automotive design.

The plights of a hardware startup are well-documented; that’s further true of a VR team. Massless has closed a seed raise of $2 million led by Founders Fund Pathfinder to get things started. Entrepreneur First, Vivi Nevo, Shrug Capital and Wendy Tan-White also participated in the round.

The company is using the new funding to grow its team and finish the Massless Pen and bring it to its first set of production enterprise partners.

Despite all of the VR over-hyping, for those observing from the inside, the capabilities are still uncharted. VR as a creative medium has probably been one of the more entrancing use cases since the first high-end headsets launched. Products like Google’s Tilt Brush isolated impossible use cases, where VR was the only way to experience that act of creating something mesmerizing from nothing.

Massless has been intrigued by the potential of VR as a way to achieve new precision and more seamlessly shove designers and engineers into their digital workshops. The product they’re working on, the Massless Pen, is a professional stylus that functions with much of the pizzazz you’d expect from a product like the Apple Pencil, featuring things like deep pressure sensing and capacitive touch, in addition to upgrades like haptic feedback.

Indeed, you can use the Massless Pen much like you would any other designer’s stylus, but things get a bit bizarre when you pick it up off the surface and manipulate the space in front of you. That’s because the startup’s product is also a tracked 6DoF VR controller, which users can utilize as a tool to manipulate, edit and further create. It utilizes its own tracking system, which can be mounted below hardware trackers used for VR headsets.

“I think the most important thing about this product is that it works in three-dimensions, but you don’t have to use VR,” CEO Jack Cohen tells TechCrunch. “You can just use it as a standard graphics tablet and you can use it to control 3D software on a monitor… This is a transitional period for everyone, so it’s good to have that bridge that goes between them.”

While a lot of digital ink has been spilled on bringing VR to consumer markets, Massless plans to aim this device firmly at business customers, hoping to attract further attention from customers working in design and visualization-heavy enterprises like commercial architecture and automotive design.

The plights of a hardware startup are well-documented; that’s further true of a VR team. Massless has closed a seed raise of $2 million led by Founders Fund Pathfinder to get things started. Entrepreneur First, Vivi Nevo, Shrug Capital and Wendy Tan-White also participated in the round.

The company is using the new funding to grow its team and finish the Massless Pen and bring it to its first set of production enterprise partners.

The use of voice assistants is set to triple over the next few years, according to a new forecast from the U.K.-based analysts at Juniper Research. The firm estimates there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from the 2.5 billion assistants in use at the end of 2018.

The majority of those assistants will live on smartphones, where Google Assistant and Siri offer voice assistants to Android and iOS users, respectively.

In fact, Google already announced its voice assistant would be enabled on a billion devices as of last month, thanks to its integration with Android. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Alexa — which still primarily lives on smart speakers like Echo — has reached more than 100 million devices.

Juniper, however, predicts that the fastest-growing category for voice over the next several years will not be smart speakers. It will be smart TVs.

The firm expects the smart TV voice assistant category to grow by 121.3 percent (CAGR) over the next five years, while smart speakers will grow by 41.3 percent. Wearables will also play a significant role, with 40.2 percent growth, the study found.

Alexa is already the market leader on smart speakers, but in the years ahead it will be challenged by Chinese companies rolling out their own smart devices, the report says.

Also of note, the report challenges the belief that smart speakers aren’t being used for commerce. Instead, it says that voice commerce will grow substantially to reach more than $80 billion per year by 2023. However, there’s a twist to its findings.

Its “voice commerce” figure includes money transfer and purchases of digital goods alongside voice commerce’s use for more traditional purchases. And it doesn’t expect physical purchases to account for the bigger chunk of that $80 billion.

“We expect the majority of voice commerce to be digital purchases, until digital assistants offer truly seamless cross-platform experiences” said research author James Moar, in a statement about the new study. “Connected TVs and smart displays are vital here, as they can provide a visual context that is lacking in smart speakers.”

It’s worth noting, too, that Juniper believes the rise of digital assistants will negatively affect the global mobile app market. Specifically, it says that as consumer demand for multi-platform assistants increases, standalone apps for smartphones and tablets made by independent developers will decline. This will come about because many of the simpler interactions we use apps for today will become outsourced to voice assistants. And this, in turn, will also reduce our screen time.

In addition, there are early indications that smart speakers are becoming a part of users’ daily routines in ways that voice assistants on other platforms are not. This will lead to increased demand for voice-only interactions in the future, the firm says.

The use of voice assistants is set to triple over the next few years, according to a new forecast from the U.K.-based analysts at Juniper Research. The firm estimates there will be 8 billion digital voice assistants in use by 2023, up from the 2.5 billion assistants in use at the end of 2018.

The majority of those assistants will live on smartphones, where Google Assistant and Siri offer voice assistants to Android and iOS users, respectively.

In fact, Google already announced its voice assistant would be enabled on a billion devices as of last month, thanks to its integration with Android. Meanwhile, Amazon’s Alexa — which still primarily lives on smart speakers like Echo — has reached more than 100 million devices.

Juniper, however, predicts that the fastest-growing category for voice over the next several years will not be smart speakers. It will be smart TVs.

The firm expects the smart TV voice assistant category to grow by 121.3 percent (CAGR) over the next five years, while smart speakers will grow by 41.3 percent. Wearables will also play a significant role, with 40.2 percent growth, the study found.

Alexa is already the market leader on smart speakers, but in the years ahead it will be challenged by Chinese companies rolling out their own smart devices, the report says.

Also of note, the report challenges the belief that smart speakers aren’t being used for commerce. Instead, it says that voice commerce will grow substantially to reach more than $80 billion per year by 2023. However, there’s a twist to its findings.

Its “voice commerce” figure includes money transfer and purchases of digital goods alongside voice commerce’s use for more traditional purchases. And it doesn’t expect physical purchases to account for the bigger chunk of that $80 billion.

“We expect the majority of voice commerce to be digital purchases, until digital assistants offer truly seamless cross-platform experiences” said research author James Moar, in a statement about the new study. “Connected TVs and smart displays are vital here, as they can provide a visual context that is lacking in smart speakers.”

It’s worth noting, too, that Juniper believes the rise of digital assistants will negatively affect the global mobile app market. Specifically, it says that as consumer demand for multi-platform assistants increases, standalone apps for smartphones and tablets made by independent developers will decline. This will come about because many of the simpler interactions we use apps for today will become outsourced to voice assistants. And this, in turn, will also reduce our screen time.

In addition, there are early indications that smart speakers are becoming a part of users’ daily routines in ways that voice assistants on other platforms are not. This will lead to increased demand for voice-only interactions in the future, the firm says.

After winding down its consumer-oriented operations last July, mental health startup Lantern has partnered with larger mental health providers to license its IP. In addition to licensing its IP to Omada Health, Lantern has licensed its tech to Spring Health, Ginger.io and two others.

Spring Health, which offers mental health benefits for large employers, provides personalized, clinically proven approaches to mental health care for employees. But Spring Health has always wanted to integrate digital cognitive behavioral therapy into its approach, Spring Health CEO April Koh told TechCrunch.

Spring Health has already offered psychiatry, therapy and self-help tools, but it was wanting to refer people to digital CBT, Koh said.

“There was really only one player that was committed to evidence as deeply as we were and that was Lantern,” she said. “So when the opportunity presented itself, we were thrilled.”

CBT is a clinically validated approach that examines the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Lantern, which proved the clinical validity of its digital CBT tools, offered programs designed to empower people to learn how to manage their anxiety, stress and/or body images on a daily basis.

“We’re in the market of saying one size doesn’t fit all,” Koh said. “One size fits one person. There are so many different options and treatments for people. We shouldn’t try to come up with blanket solutions and expect those solutions to help everybody.”

Omada, which develops tools for people struggling with chronic illnesses like diabetes and obesity-related diseases, was also attracted to Lantern’s IP because of the startup’s demonstration of clinical validity and effectiveness.

“We have known that anxiety and depression are likely co-morbidities for the population we serve, and that they are obstacles to success for those dealing with chronic conditions,” Omada Health president Adrian James said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Thanks to Lantern’s IP, Omada plans to launch a behavioral health program for its customers, as well as integrate more CBT content into its chronic disease prevention and management programs. The money made from selling the IP, Lantern founder Alejandro Foung told TechCrunch, will go back to LPs and investors. Lantern had previously raised more than $20 million in funding.

Meanwhile, Foung has also started a nonprofit organization, All Mental Health, to offer free tools to a group of people sometimes referred to as the “sandwich generation” — those who are caring for kids as well as their aging parents.

“So they’re basically sandwiched in between those two things and that’s a very difficult place to be,” Foung said.

Similar to Lantern, All Mental Health’s tools are CBT-oriented. But rather than focus on selling to employers to offer as an employee benefit or people who can already afford to pay for therapy, Foung told me, “the goal of the not-for-profit is to actually be content and techniques for everyone. And by being a not-for-profit, we’re more able to serve a more macro audience that’s currently not getting anything.”

When Foung and I chatted in July, he said he would be focused on “addressing gaps that exist for underserved populations.” This is where All Mental Health comes in. Its first app, Caring for You, is designed to help support caregivers in caring for themselves. The next app Foung has planned is geared toward breakups, followed by one that’s focused on life after sports.