Year: 2019

No one likes to think about death (least of all startup founders), but wills, trusts and estate planning are crucial for ensuring that your material assets get passed to whatever people or organizations you care about. Yet, few processes are more paper-driven than the legal process of getting your affairs in order.

Finally, the estate planning industry itself is getting its digital affairs in order. San Diego-based Trust & Will, a startup that guides users through the process of creating legal guardians, wills and trusts, partnered with Boston-based Notarize to execute the first digital will for Cory McCormick, a police officer in Nevada. Nevada is the only state today that allows for digital wills, although the legal community is increasingly exploring whether computers are here to stay.

Trust & Will also announced that they have closed on a combined $2 million in funding led by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund, which includes $500,000 in pre-seed from TechStars and others. The startup was founded by Cody Bardo along with Daniel Goldstein and Brian Lamb.

From a product perspective, estate planning faces the same challenges as most consumer-oriented fintech startups: there is an incredibly high cost to acquire customers. Plus, unlike credit cards or budgeting, most of us aren’t thinking about how we are going to die every single day, and so the company has to reach users at precisely the moment they are starting to think about planning their estates.

What Bardo and his team have learned over time is that new mothers are one of the key demographics for their business. One of the big challenges with having children is setting up legal guardian status for children, a legal process that, like wills, is almost exclusively based on paper. So Trust & Wills launched a new product called Guardian that allows parents to get that paperwork in order for $39.

The goal is that by drawing parents into thinking about legal guardianship, a broader conversation about estate planning and inheritance can take place.

While estate planning has certainly seen its share of startups over the past few years including companies like Willing, Bardo’s vision for the future is competing with traditional trust asset management behemoths like State Street and Northern Trust. “We are trying to take market share by targeting digital-first customers,” Bardo said, “We can transition and evolve into a modern trust banking platform.”

In trust management and banking, fees are taken on the assets under management, rather than straight fees for services. Trust & Will believes that with all digital processes and a renewed focus on fees, it can offer a much better product with significantly lower fees than incumbents.

I talked a bit about a bankruptcy non-profit startup last week. The lesson from all of this is that there remains huge swaths of the economy that don’t have well-designed products, or aren’t even digital in the first place.

In addition to Rise of the Rest’s seed fund and TechStars, Trust & Will was funded by Western Technology Investment, Haolgen Ventures, Luma Launch, and angels.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Palantir CEO lashes out over Silicon Valley’s anti-defense stance

Alex Karp, the long-time CEO of Palantir, condemned anti-defense tech employees on CNBC. He’s referring to the protests over projects like Google’s Pentagon contract which have withered under sustained protest from Bay Area opponents of the defense industry. Palantir obviously gets huge dollars from defense budgets, and so this isn’t surprising, but it is interesting how Karp frames the debate: “That is a loser position. It is not intelligible. It is not intelligible to the average person. It’s academically not sustainable. And I am very happy we’re not on that side of the debate.”

Meanwhile in Wired, David Samuels argues that Big Tech = Big Brother and the right to privacy is dying quickly as big data merges with the national security apparatus. That’s probably a world that suits Palantir just fine.

Tencent gets to publish a video game while Microsoft can’t get people to Bing

China has cracked down on Microsoft, blocking access to Bing. Despite the hardi-har-har of the announcement (did anyone notice that Bing was unavailable?), the reality is that even a relatively unpopular search engine is no longer safe from Beijing’s censors. Meanwhile, after months of delays in video game licenses, China’s administration has approved two new video games from Tencent. Tencent stock has been hammered over the freeze, and this bit of thaw may push the stock into more positive territory.

Google fights hackers

Not surprising for sure, but the Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile of an elite unit within Google that works to fight off hackers targeting its systems. From the article: “The 27-person team tracks more than 200 hacker groups that pose a threat to Google and its users, analyzing hacking techniques and clues to the groups’ identities to head off attacks.” At Google scale, this makes absolute sense, but how do early-stage startups protect their systems from advanced persistent threats? That to me remains a very important open question in cybersecurity.

What’s next & obsessions

• Arman and I are still focused on societal resilience startups. Send us your ideas and thoughts.

Last year, Huawei marked a notable bright spot in an otherwise flagging smartphone market. It was a remarkable rise for the handset maker, given the slowing pace of sales in China, not to mention the handset maker’s tenuous relationships with the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Reuters notes a 50-percent jump in revenue in 2018, courtesy of a wide range of consumer and telecom products. As Samsung and Apple reckon with their own futures in the smartphone space, Huawei believes it has a reasonable chance of nabbing the number one spot in global sales in spite of on-going spying concerns.

“Even without the U.S. market we will be number one [smartphone maker] in the world,” Huawei Consumer CEO Richard Yu told the service. “I believe at the earliest this year, and next year at the latest.”

The company offered a glimpse into its own 5G plans this week, including a new modem and a chipset, the latter of which is expected to be employed by a foldable smartphone it plans to unveil next month at Mobile World Congress.

Huawei certainly has momentum on its side. The company is also clearly doing something right as it’s been able to buck economic depression, slower upgrade cycles and other factors that have led to a worldwide smartphone slump.

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mixtape, the podcast that goes a bit behind the headlines to bring tech to culture.

This week Megan Rose Dickey and I welcome Tiana Kara, the head of partnerships and growth at #builtbygirls (which, like TechCrunch, is owned by Verizon Media Group). The organization connects girls and women between the ages of 15 and 22 with mentors of all stripes in the tech industry based on their interests.

The idea here is that not all tech jobs include coding, and #builtbygirls wants all young girls who want in the industry to know that. The question that always comes up is why is it so hard hire diverse staffs.

“What we’re doing is making it a little bit polarizing,” Kara tells us. “We’re telling them, go out and become an engineer versus everything that’s a part of you can be amplified by tech. So take that and then add it to your life versus go down this one pathway.”

“Through the programs we’ve created,  we’ve been able to help them see a real future for themselves that they can define.”

We also take a look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her near-perfect ability to troll the GOP through her social media presence. Sparking our conversation, as well as Catherine Shu’s look into Ocasio-Cortez’s internet prowess, was a story about AOC voicing her support of the transgender youth group Mermaids on Twitch.

And finally, we already knew that the algorithms of some of those DNA services can yield different results. But it’s harder to take when they’re twins.

Click play above to listen to the full episode. And if you haven’t subscribed yet, get on over to your favorite podcast platform, whether it be Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Overcast, CastBox, Spotify or whatever else you use.

While many hotel chains offer Netflix on their TVs as a courtesy for their guests, Hilton and Netflix this morning announced a first-of-a-kind partnership that will give Hilton’s guests the ability to log into Netflix and control their streaming experience directly from Hilton’s own Hilton Honors mobile app. This will initially be offered in Hilton’s “Connected Rooms” – a new concept for high-tech guest rooms introduced in December, where guests can control the room’s lighting, temperature, and personalize their TV channels through the Hilton app.

As a part of this Connected Room experience, Hilton also recently did a similar deal with Showtime to offer guests free access to Showtime’s content – again, through a Hilton Honors app integration.

In Netflix’s case, Hilton customers will be able to download the Hilton Honors app, add Netflix along with other streaming services and TV channels to their favorites list, then tap on Netflix to log into their own account and choose what to stream on the hotel room’s TV.

The app logins them into their own Netflix account – not some customized version for hotel goers – so they can access their saved list of shows and movies, pick up where they left off on their latest binge, or browse their personalized recommendations.

Those without a Netflix account will be able to sign up directly from within the Hilton Honors app, as well. For guests who don’t want to use an app, the TV remote’s Netflix button will take them to a login screen instead.

While the “Connected Rooms” concept is a fairly new initiative at Hilton, the hotel chain today has over 1,800 tech-enabled rooms like this available today, and says it’s on track to roll out the technology to “tens of thousands” of rooms across hundreds of its U.S. hotels this year, as well as to its first non-U.S. locations.

“We know our guests want to feel connected while traveling, just as they do at home, so we’re giving them seamless access to their favorite Netflix shows, films and specials while on the road,” said Noelle Eder, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer for Hilton, in a statement about the hotel chain’s partnership with Netflix.

As for Netflix, a partnership like the one gives it a way to reach customers, even when they’re away from home, to maintain that relationship and re-engage them with their content, as well as potentially attract new sign-ups.

 

Astro, the company behind Luna Display and Astropad, is releasing a major software update that will drastically improve performance. According to the company’s own testing, you should expect as much as a 100 percent performance increase when it comes to latency and refresh rate.

Luna Display lets you use your iPad as a second monitor for your laptop. For instance, if you’re traveling and you can’t get any work done without an external display, you can use Luna Display to move macOS windows across your laptop display and your iPad.

Some people have also been using it with a home server. For instance, you can use Luna Display to control a Mac Mini using an iPad, a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse. You’re no longer tied to a desk.

Compared to similar apps, Luna Display relies on a hardware dongle. This tiny USB-C or Mini DisplayPort device emulates a display. In your Mac settings, it looks like you plugged a standard display even though it’s just a tiny key.

Astropad is a separate app for creative professionals. It lets you mirror your Mac display and use Photoshop with your Apple Pencil. They both rely on the same rendering engine.

And today’s update is all about performance. Thanks to a bunch of optimizations, you get an average latency of 11.3 ms when you use one of those apps with a 13-inch MacBook Pro, an 11-inch iPad Pro and a USB cable. Over Wi-Fi, you get a latency of 22.4 ms.

When it comes to frame rate, it’s a bit harder to quantify. But Astro has compared its products with competing solutions and thinks you have a higher chance of hitting 60 frames per second using Astro’s products.

Astro has compared Luna Display with Duet Display and Air Display. And it’s interesting to see that the company reports better performance than Duet.

Duet recently released and update to take advantage of hardware acceleration. At the time, Duet claimed that its solution was faster and cheaper than Luna Display. It’s clear that this space is moving quickly, and the result is better apps for everyone.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here:

1. Apple cuts 200 staff from its Project Titan autonomous car division

Apple’s secretive efforts to develop a self-driving car — its so-called ‘Project Titan’ — have taken a hard turn in 2019. CNBC broke the news that the company has reassigned 200 employees previously involved in the car’s development.

“As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives, across all of Apple,” a company spokesperson said. “We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems, that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute, and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever.”

2. Microsoft confirms Bing is down in China

The Financial Times reported that China Unicom, a major state-owned telecommunication company, has confirmed that the government ordered a block on Bing. A company spokesperson told us Microsoft is “engaged to determine next steps.”

3. Millions of bank loan and mortgage documents have leaked online

A trove of more than 24 million financial and banking documents, representing tens of thousands of loans and mortgages from some of the biggest banks in the U.S., has been found online after a server security lapse.

4. Wag founders ditch dogs for bikes with $37 million in funding

Wheels will join the likes of Uber’s Jump, Lyft’s Motivate and others in competing for the bike-share market. But Wheels says it’s different because of its modular design, which includes swappable parts and batteries.

5. Facebook may proactively close Pages and Groups before they’re in violation of policy

The company also says it will make it harder for users whose Pages have been shut down for violations to return with new Pages featuring the same content.

6. Sequoia goes after early-stage with an accelerator program in India and Southeast Asia

The Surge program is designed to work with a mix of companies; that could include founders with just an idea, those at pre-launch or pre-seed, businesses with an existing product-market fit or even startups intending to pivot.

7. Verizon’s unlimited data carrier Visible starts selling iPhones, announces Android compatibility

Visible is partnering with Affirm and Apple to sell iPhones with 0 percent APR financing. It’s also launching Android compatibility in beta testing (the carrier was iOS-only until now), and is selling Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ devices.

As a frequent podcast host/producer/editor, I found very few things to quibble with when I reviewed Rode Microphone’s Rodcaster Pro. There was, however, one very big issue: multitrack recording. For all of the great things you can do on the fly, the podcasting mixing board wasn’t great when it came to post-production.

Regardless of how many sources you input, they would all record to the same track. The company wouldn’t give me a straight answer about if/when it planned to address the issue. This morning at NAMM, however, Rode announced that it will be adding multi-track record to the board through a firmware update.

Due out some time next month, the feature will bring the ability to record to up to 14 tracks. That breaks down thusly,

• A stereo ‘live mix’ track, as featured on the Rodecaster Pro since its release

• A mono track for each of the 4 microphone inputs

• A stereo track each for the USB, 3.5mm TRRS, Bluetooth and sound pad channels

The company noted early on that the device was designed for on-the-fly recording, but it’s clear from feedback that flexibility is important for most producers. This latest addition should make a great device even better — and makes the Rodecaster Pro even more of a must have for podcasters looking to take the next step.

Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is expanding the investment and collaboration program — called Partner Space — that it launched in 2017 to work with startups.

The Partner Space already houses somewhere between six and eight companies (of which only two are publicly disclosed). That number could almost double to between 12 and 15 companies, according to Verily Life Sciences’ head of business and corporate development and ventures lead, Andy Harrison.

Verily’s move to expand its work with startups in healthcare comes on the heels of the company’s $1 billion cash infusion at the beginning of January.

That round, led by the technology-focused private equity investment firm Silver Lake, and including the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, was designed to support growth in key strategic areas including partnerships, business development and potential acquisitions, according to a statement.

“The companies that are in that space we are equity owners of,” says Harrison. “We want some upside from the things that we contribute that could enhance their business.”

Harrison described Verily’s Partner Space investments as typical Series A or B deals, where the opportunity to work from the company’s South San Francisco campus was a complimentary perk, but not a prerequisite for taking Verily’s cash.

Two companies that have taken Verily up on its offer, are Freenome, which uses artificial intelligence and genomic information for better cancer screening and diagnostics tests, and Culture Robotics, which uses automation and robotics to improve cell cultivation.

“The main thesis is digital health,” said Harrison of the company’s investment strategy. “Combining complex biological processes with very sophisticated informatics. It’s the nexus of biology and informatics that we tend to focus on. We are interested in healthcare innovations that the world needs. That humanity needs.”

The Partner Space is an embodiment of that interest, according to Harrison. Or, as the company put it in a blog post back when it launched the initiative:

Through Partner Space, Verily aims to foster a rich ecosystem for innovation and idea sharing by offering office and lab space, exposure to the Verily team and other collaboration partners, and access to shared amenities.

….

Verily Partner Space is an expansion of the way we have worked at Verily since our inception – inviting our partners, from Onduo, Galvani and Verb for example, to share our workplace, eliminating the natural boundaries of space and distance. In so doing, we can more quickly advance our initiatives and solve really challenging problems in healthcare. We are excited, through Verily Partner Space, to extend our physical space to the start-up community and bring other like-minded entities into our fold with the goal to collectively pursue better health outcomes for humanity.

Subscriptions are booming on the app stores, and particularly subscription video apps thanks to the growing number of cord cutters who are choosing to stream their TV shows and movies, instead of paying for cable or satellite. In the U.S., the top 10 subscription video apps by revenue pulled in $1.27 billion in 2018 across both the iOS App Store and Google Play, according to new data from Sensor Tower – that’s a 62 percent increase over the $781 million spent in 2017.

It’s also three times higher than what was spent in these apps back in 2016.

The top app, not surprisingly, was Netflix – which snagged the spot for the second year in a row. It earned an estimated $529 million in the U.S., the report found. However, Netflix won’t maintain the top spot in the rankings in 2019, as the company recently made a decision to keep more of its subscription revenue to itself.

Netflix in 2018 had dropped in-app subscription sign-ups in its Android app on Google Play, then did the same on the iOS App Store in December. That will decrease its in-app subscription revenues this year, though it won’t immediately to zero because of revenues from existing subscribers.

The No. 2 top grossing app was YouTube, which is maybe more of a surprise to those who don’t realize that the app they use to watch free videos is making quite so much money through in-app purchases. But YouTube offers a couple different types of in-app purchases, including subscriptions to its ad-free tier, YouTube Premium, as well as virtual currency to be used in Super Chat.

Sensor Tower says YouTube took in less than half as much revenue as Netflix at around $223 million, but it grew substantially in 2018 – up 114 percent from $104 million in 2017.

HBO NOW was the No. 3 top grossing app, even though its subscriber base declined. The app generated 12 percent less in 2018 at $166 million, down from $189 million. The reason, naturally, was that the app was without “Game of Thrones” to attract viewers. That doesn’t bode all that well for HBO’s future without “Thrones,” unless its spin-off becomes a hit.

Hulu and YouTube TV were the No. 4 and No. 5, apps respectively. Hulu grew by 68 percent while YouTube TV jumped up a whopping 419 percent. CBS’s streaming app is doing decently, too, with 57 percent year-over-year growth in subscriber spending.

Much of that comes from streamers interest in the new “Star Trek” series. In fact, with the Season 2 premiere this month, CBS said its streaming service hit a new milestone across both subscription sign-ups and unique viewers in a weekend. While the network didn’t share exact numbers, it said the January ’19 weekend when the new season of “Star Trek:Discovery” aired eclipsed 2017’s previous record from the series premiere by over 72 percent, in terms of sign-ups.

 

Combined, 2018’s top 10 subscription streaming apps accounted for a sizable chunk – now 22 percent – of non-game app revenue on the app stores in the U.S. Their 62 percent revenue growth was also more than all the other non-game apps combined, which grew 56 percent year-over-year, the new report said.

Subscriptions – and not just for streaming apps – have become the new driver for non-game spending on the app stores, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon.

According to App Annie’s recent forecast for 2019, 10 minutes of every hour spent consuming media across TV and internet will come from streaming video on mobile. It estimates that total time in video streaming apps will increase 110 percent from 2016 to 2019, with consumer spend in entertainment apps rising by 520 percent over that same period. Most of those revenues will come from the growth in in-app subscriptions, the firm had said earlier.

 

Inventive packaging is more crucial than ever when it come to launching a new brand into a world already clogged with every product imaginable. Think, for example, of the sugary energy drinks that began to appear on the scene roughly 20 years ago — Rockstar, Monster, and Red Bull — that are stuffed with so much caffeine, sugar, legal stimulants and L-Carnitine that you kind of know intuitively that they probably aren’t great for your health, even if they’re no worse than traditional sodas.

Indeed, one West Coast agency creative-turned-entrepreneur, Mike Cessario, is hoping consumers’ love of cans and brands that sound like heavy-metal musical acts can be combined to sell something else: mountain water from the Austrian Alps. The name of his company? Liquid Death.

It’s a bit of a joke, but one in which Cessario very much includes the customer. After all, if people are buying water anyway —  it was a $240 billion market as of 2017 and is expected to continue growing along with fears about contaminated water — why not put in an aluminum can, which can be recycled far more easily than a plastic bottle, and why not give it a brand that’s grimly funny?

The question now is whether people will drink it in. Liquid Death, which is backed with an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the L.A. incubator and fund Science Inc., is about to find out, too, by beginning to sell the cans directly to consumers from its website today and on Amazon.

We talked a couple of weeks ago to Cessario and Science cofounder Mike Jones to learn more about how Liquid Death came together, and how they intend to ensure it sticks around.

TC: I understand Liquid Death started a a side project on Indiegogo but didn’t really catch anyone’s attention until you posted a funny video on Facebook that may remind some of Dollar Shave Club’s earliest video.

MC: Liquid Death was this idea that we thought would be a cool thing if it existed, so we made a funny video that made it seem like it was real on the Internet to see what kind of interest came from it before we started investing money into it. AdWeek picked it up, thinking it was a neat idea. And so we spent the last year building a following online before gearing up to launch an actual product to the people, which happens [today].

TC: And Mike Jones, what was Science’s role in making that happen?

MJ: We partnered with them inside our incubator, and our fund is also an investor in the company. Our team on the incubation side is very focused on direct-to-consumer goods and products, working with aspects of CPG, strategy, growth, finance, margins, etc. So our team fell in love with brand, and as a fund, we recognized what could be a big market opportunity.

TC: Tell us about the manufacturing.

MC: Liquid Death comes 500 milliliter cans that manufactured in Austria because of a lot of things that fell together, including finding a bottler there who could make our product for us and was willing to do it. It was kind of a happy accident that we have a great producer — a contract manufacturer — in a cool place.

TC: You’re marketing this product partly to kids, joking that water is way more dangerous than energy drinks. Kids love flavors. Are there flavored waters in the works?

MC: We don’t have any planned yet. We’re just going to stick with one SKU until it makes sense for us as a brand [to expand].

TC: You’re selling directly to consumers now. What’s the plan for distribution down the road?

MC: After we get the ball rolling, we’ll be in select bars and barber shops and tattoo parlors in L.A. and Philadelphia and potentially Austin, Texas. It’s a little more of a lifestyle play for us, which is why we’re targeting bars and more adult places. After that, we’ll figure out where else it makes sense to offer Liquid Death.

TC: Mike Jones, you’ve worked with launching a number of consumer brands, including Dollar Shave Club, for example. How hard is it to get onto retailers shelves?

MJ: Retail is having challenging time right now and retailers are excited about differentiated brands that get people excited about getting into their stores. One thing that Mike and I talk about a lot is how to introduce the brand to the audience. Similar to the early days of energy drinks. his team is thinking about where are the right places for this. Last night, I was invited to a charitable fundraising event at the [Hollywood] Palladium with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and had Aquafina all night, and I was like, this is the type of environment where this brand would make sense.

TC: Is it fair to say this is a product for teens ultimately?

MC: Possibly. We don’t want to tell people what to do. The healthy food space is generally all about telling people, ‘you need to do this,’ or ‘without these minerals, you aren’t doing it right.’ We’re trying to be a healthy brand that’s not too preachy. I don’t think you need to preach to people to drink more water. I think they get it. But we are taking a jab at all these unhealthy brands that own youth marketing.

TC: How did you settle on cost, and is there a subscription component?

MC: The cans retail for $1.85 a piece for a 16.9 ounce can, which is right around the same price as other premium water brands. And yes, it can be delivered to your door via 12-packs. You save 10 percent by buying [in bulk].