Year: 2019

In the future everything will be a screen. Glasses, hats, shoes, windows. You’ll turn on the faucet and bath in screens. Sure, most of us have, at best, a love-hate relationship with the things, but we’ll probably never be able to quit them.

The Apex 2019 is Chinese smartphone maker Vivo’s latest bid to go all-in on all-screen. In fact, the concept phone ditches the front-facing camera altogether, rather that the pop-up method the company has previous shown off. As I’ve noted, I wouldn’t be averse to ditching the front-facing camera altogether, and here it seems to in service of another emerging mobile trend: the seamless smartphone.

Meizu was, notably, first out of the gate here with the Zero, which debuted earlier this week. With MWC just over the horizon, we could, perhaps, be seeing more of these in the coming weeks, though “concept” is currently the operative word here. And, as our colleagues at Engadget note, while the handset is devoid of USB ports, speaker grilles, headphone jacks and the like, there’s still a small gap for the microphone. But hey, nobody’s perfect.

Again, all of this appears to be pushing toward the inevitable. There are still potential compromises in service of created a perfect little sliver of a smartphone. There’s wireless charging speeds and the sound quality of a resonant display versus an old fashioned speaker.

But hey, that’s what concept devices are for.

Postmates has made two new hires, both of which hail from Pinterest, in the form of Eric Edge and Andreas Lieber.

Edge joins Postmates as the SVP of Brand & Communications while Lieber joins as SVP of business development and corporate development.

Both come to Postmates from Pinterest where they served as Head of Global Marketing Communications and Head of Consumer Business Development respectively.

“Postmates has a deep understanding of its own business metrics and how to optimize them,” said Lieber. “In the Bay Area, you’ll see different variations of that understanding across companies. But what I saw in terms of level of diligence and understanding what drives the business and how to grow it was really attractive to me.”

In September, Postmates raised $300 million at a reported valuation of $1.2 billion. As part of the announcement, Postmates revealed that it is profitable in 90 percent of its markets and that gross margins improved to nearly 50 percent.

“The biggest challenge for Postmates is to continue to differentiate in a very busy space,” said Edge. “Postmates has become a brand that is synonymous with on-demand. It’s being used as a verb. So as far as being integrated into people’s lifestyle, we’re far ahead of the competition on that.”

Both Edge and Lieber will report directly to CEO Bastian Lehmann .

This past year, Postmates added 250 new cities to the service, bringing the total to 575 cities. The company also said it completed 5 million deliveries since launch.

Just this morning robotic process automation (RPA) firm, Blue Prism, announced enhancements to its platform. A little later the company, which went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2016, announced it was raising £100 million (approximately $130 million) by issuing new stock. The announcement comes after reporting significant losses in its most recent fiscal year, which ended in October.

The company indicated that it plans to sell the new shares on the public market, and that they will be made available to new and existing shareholders including company managers and directors.

CEO Alastair Bathgate attempted to put the announcement in the best possible light. “The outcome of this placing, which builds on another year of significant progress for the company, highlights the meteoric growth opportunity with RPA and intelligent automation,” he said in a statement.

While the company’s revenue more than doubled last fiscal year from £24.5 million (approximately $32 million) in 2017 to £55.2 million (approximately $72 million) in 2018, losses also increased dramatically from £10.1 million (approximately $13 million) in 2017 to £26.0 million (approximately $34 million), according to reports.

The move, which requires shareholder approval, will be used to push the company’s plans, outlined in a TechCrunch article earlier this morning, to begin enhancing the platform with help from partners, a move the company hopes will propel it into the future.

Today’s announcement included a new AI engine, an updated marketplace where companies can share Blue Prism extensions and a new lab, where the company plans to work on AI innovation in-house.

Bathgate isn’t wrong about the market opportunity. Investors have been pouring big bucks into this market for the last couple of years. As we noted, in this morning’s article, “UIPath, a NYC RPA company has raised almost $450 million. Its most recent round in September was for $225 million on a $3 billion valuation. Automation Anywhere, a San Jose RPA startup, has raised $550 million including an enormous $300 million investment from SoftBank in November on a valuation of $2.6 billion.”

The Samsung Galaxy S10 is slowly being revealed through unofficial means. Several leaks have revealed key details and the latest report is the most detailed yet. According to All About Samsung, the upcoming Samsung flagship will have tiny bezels, front-facing cameras that poke through the display, a USB-C port and a headphone jack.

This report meshes with past leaks. There could be three variations of the phone: the S10, S10+ and a new version called the S10E. It’s been reported that Samsung will position the S10 as the main model with the S10+ being the large screen model (and the only with dual-front facing cameras). The S10E will likely be a less expensive version and could even have an LCD screen instead of an OLED screen.

Most of phone’s details have leaked out but a few questions remain. Will the phone have a fingerprint reader embedded into the screen? Will the phones have improved facial recognition to compete more directly with Apple’s Face ID? And lastly, will Samsung jack the prices in line with the latest iPhone prices?

Samsung plans to unveil the Galaxy S10 at an event in San Francisco on February 20. We’ll have a team on the ground to tell you more about the device.

When Verizon stealthily launched a new startup called Visible last year, it operated under a bring-your-own-device model — to sign up, you needed to already have an unlocked iPhone, and Visible would send you a new SIM card.

Today, however, Visible is announcing that it’s 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.

Visible is one of several attempts by companies large and small to rethink the wireless carrier model. In this case, the service is backed by Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) and uses Verizon’s 4G LTE network, but it says it operates as an independent startup.

As for what Visible is actually offering, you pay $40 a month for unlimited text, voice, data and hotspot usage at speeds of up to 5 Mbps. There’s no contract, no extra fees and you manage everything through an app on your phone.

Now, on top of that, Visible is selling 11 different iPhone models, along with two different Samsung Galaxy models. You can either pay the full price upfront or sign up for financing from Affirm — which, again, has a 0 percent APR and, for some consumers, won’t require a downpayment.

The company says there are no hidden fees (like an activation, SIM card kit or restocking fee) either. When asked how Visible is able to offer this kind of pricing, a spokesperson pointed to the company’s “all digital business model” — it has lower costs because it’s not paying for physical infrastructure like stores.

In addition, Visible is introducing a new program called Visible Protect, which covers you (and provides access to Apple Care) in cases of loss, theft or hardware damage after the manufacturer’s warranty expires. To do this, it’s partnering with Assurant. Pricing starts at $10 per month.

“Above anything else, service, quality of product, and simplicity are what matter most,” said Visible CEO Miguel Quiroga in a statement. “From the start of our business, we wanted to set a new bar for the way things are done by re-defining and evolving wireless and the overall retail experience. With every new offering, including our 0% [APR] financing, no fees for device purchase, and Visible Protect, we will advance our mission of removing complicated barriers for all consumers.”

Humio, a startup that provides a real-time log analysis service for on-premises and cloud infrastructures, today announced that it has raised a $9 million Series A round led by Accel. It previously raised its seed round from WestHill and Trifork.

The company, which has offices in San Francisco, the U.K. and Denmark, tells me that it saw a 13x increase in its annual revenue in 2018. Current customers include Bloomberg, Microsoft and Netlify .

“We are experiencing a fundamental shift in how companies build, manage and run their systems,” said Humio CEO Geeta Schmidt. “This shift is driven by the urgency to adopt cloud-based and microservice-driven application architectures for faster development cycles, and dealing with sophisticated security threats. These customer requirements demand a next-generation logging solution that can provide live system observability and efficiently store the massive amounts of log data they are generating.”

To offer them this solution, Humio raised this round with an eye toward fulfilling the demand for its service, expanding its research and development teams and moving into more markets across the globe.

As Schmidt also noted, many organizations are rather frustrated by the log management and analytics solutions they currently have in place. “Common frustrations we hear are that legacy tools are too slow — on ingestion, searches and visualizations — with complex and costly licensing models,” she said. “Ops teams want to focus on operations — not building, running and maintaining their log management platform.”

To build this next-generation analysis tool, Humio built its own time series database engine to ingest the data, with open-source tools like Scala, Elm and Kafka in the backend. As data enters the pipeline, it’s pushed through live searches and then stored for later queries. As Humio VP of Engineering Christian Hvitved tells me, though, running ad-hoc queries is the exception, and most users only do so when they encounter bugs or a DDoS attack.

The query language used for the live filters is also pretty straightforward. That was a conscious decision, Hvitved said. “If it’s too hard, then users don’t ask the question,” he said. “We’re inspired by the Unix philosophy of using pipes, so in Humio, larger searches are built by combining smaller searches with pipes. This is very familiar to developers and operations people since it is how they are used to using their terminal.”

Humio charges its customers based on how much data they want to ingest and for how long they want to store it. Pricing starts at $200 per month for 30 days of data retention and 2 GB of ingested data.

Blue Prism helped coin the term robotic process automation (RPA) when the company was founded back in 2001 to help companies understand the notion of automating mundane business processes. Today, it’s releasing updates to that platform including an updated marketplace for exchanging connectors to extend the main product, and in some cases, adding a layer of intelligence.

The product at its core has allowed non-technical users to automate a business process by simply dragging components into an interface. All of the process coding has been automated on the back end. You could have a process that scans a check, enters a figure in a spreadsheet and sends an automated message to another employee (or digital process) when it’s done.

Moss sees a world in which companies are looking to digitization to stave off growing competition. Big insurance companies, financial services and other workflow-intensive organizations need to look beyond the automation capabilities his company has given them and that is going to require an intelligence layer.

Today, the company wants to extend its core capability by offering more advanced tools in the Blue Prism Digital Exchange marketplace. The Exchange gives partners and customers the ability to create and share tools to enhance Blue Prism. To encourage those entities to add AI capabilities, the company also announced a new AI engine for building connectors to advanced AI tools from Amazon, Google, IBM and other AI platforms.

But the company doesn’t want to simply leave it to partners to provide the innovation. It wants that happening in-house as well, and to that end it has created Blue Prism Labs, where it will work with these same technologies looking for ways to inject its RPA products with artificial intelligence. This could lead to more sophisticated automated workflows down the road such as using image recognition technology to add metadata about a photo automatically.

While Blue Prism has been a public company since 2016, the market has attracted a slew of startups, which have in turn been attracting big bucks from investors on gaudy valuations. UIPath, a NYC RPA company has raised almost $450 million. Its most recent round in September was for $225 million on a $3 billion valuation. Automation Anywhere, a San Jose RPA startup, has raised $550 million including an enormous $300 million investment from SoftBank in November on a valuation of $2.6 billion.

A year ago, Facebook-owned WhatsApp officially introduced its standalone app aimed at small business customers. Today, the WhatsApp Business app has grown to reach 5 million business customers, the company says. And now it’s making the app easier to use on the desktop and the web by porting over several of the most popular features that were previously available only on mobile.

These include tools to organize and filter chats, as well as to quickly reply to customer inquiries.

Quick Replies, as the latter feature is called, lets businesses respond to common questions from customers with pre-written replies. It’s similar to a feature Facebook introduced several years ago, then called “Saved Replies,” that allowed business owners with Facebook Pages to respond to customers with canned messages.

On WhatsApp Business, you can trigger the quick replies by press the “/” button on your keyboard.

The feature joins several other customer service features, like automated greeting messages that are triggered when the customer pings the business account, or away messages that can be scheduled for those times when you’re not able to immediately answer new inquiries.

The other two features now rolling out to web and desktop users are labels and chat list filters.

The former lets you organize contacts using labels, and the latter lets you filter chat list by categories like unread messages, groups, or broadcast lists. Like Quick Replies, these were previously available on mobile.

The idea, the company explains, is to make it easier on business owners who are working from their computer – sending invoices, scheduling appointments, and responding to customer inquiries. They shouldn’t have to turn to their phone to use these sorts of basic customer service features.

The new web and desktop features are rolling out today, says WhatsApp.

Leveraging years of building out white-labeled fitness applications for the health and wellness spokesmodels made Instagram famous, wellness startup, Plankk,  is now launching a digital app called The Plankk Studio where fans can take lessons from their favorite Instagram stars. 

The company spent years building apps for the Instagram set, putting up 37 white-labeled applications which contained the diet plans and exercise regimes of popular influencers like Whitney Johns, Christina Vargas, Kino MacGregor, James Ellis, and Ashley Kaltwasser.

The concept isn’t new. The Nike Training Club App is a free mobile app that offers workouts from Nike trainers, Freeletics, Pear or literally hundreds of other fitness apps that combine coaching and an exercise regime.

Indeed, many of these trainers on Plankk also have classes available on YouTube or on Instagram. What’s different according to chief executive Colin Szopa is the roster of fitness gurus that Plankk can offer, and the incentive to go live on the platform so users can be sure they’re getting time with their favorite Instagram influencer.

Plankk is launching with over 1,000 videos and is available online and on iOS and Android. the company said it will launch on Roku, Apple TV, and other OTT options in the next few weeks. 

The on-demand workouts are available through a $14.99 monthly subscription and the company is creating a token-based payment system for live classes — ideally incentivizing the trainers with a better cut in the token-based economy.

Founded in 2016, the company claims that through its network of white-labeled apps and partnerships with influencers it reaches over 110 million people.

Plankk is also offering more than just fitness classes through its studio. The company is working with MacGregor, a yoga instructor to provide Ashtanga yoga lessions through its link to MacGregor’s Omstars channel.

Plankk Studio provides its influencer creators with an additional revenue stream in which they are paid on a per-user basis for on-demand workouts and live classes. In addition to familiarizing members with trainers’ personalities and content, the platform offers influencers additional monetization options by promoting their personal apps to users who stream their classes.

Apple’s secretive efforts to develop a self-driving car — its so-called ‘Project Titan’ — have taken a hard turn in 2019 after it emerged that the iPhone-maker has reassigned 200 employees previously involved in its development.

That’s according to CNBC which, citing sources, reported that a portion of the 200 staff were moved to other projects inside Apple, while others — and it isn’t clear how many — were let go altogether. The news was enough to prompt Apple to respond with a confirmation that included a rare mention of its automotive ambitions.

“We have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple. 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. 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,” a spokesperson said.

TechCrunch reached out to Apple for additional comment but, at the time of writing, the company had not responded.

CNBC reported that the layoffs had been expected and were seen as an imminent restructuring under Project Titan’s new leadership, long-time Apple veteran Bobs Mansfield and Doug Field, Apple’s former VP of Mac hardware engineering who rejoined from the company in October after a spell with Tesla.

Still, not a lot is known about the project. There have been sneak peaks — including a look at the unorthodox tech stack for the vehicle roof, which included a suite of sensors and autonomous hardware — while the company was said to have doubled its fleet as of last January. CEO Tim Cook previously called Apple’s car push “the mother of all AI projects,” indicating that, despite the mystery, it is certainly taking up a huge amount of focus for the company.

This isn’t the first time Apple has restructured the project. Back in 2016, it was said to have abandoned the bold target of developing its own vehicle instead opting to develop vehicle smarts. Exactly what the strategy is now following Field’s appointment and this restructuring is not unclear.