Year: 2019

Squad could be the next teen sensation because it makes it easy to do nothing… together. Spending time with friends in the modern age often means just being on your phones next to each other, occasionally showing off something funny you found. Squad lets you do this even while apart, and that way of punctuating video chat might make it the teen girl “third place” like Fortnite is for adolescent boys.

With Squad, you fire up a video chat with up to six people, but at any time you can screenshare what you’re seeing on your phone instead of showing your face. You can browse memes together, trash talk about DMs or private profiles, brainstorm a status update, co-work on a project or get consensus on your Tinder swipe. It’s deceptively simple, but remarkably alluring. And it couldn’t have happened until now.

Squad takes advantage of Apple’s ReplayKit for screensharing. While it was announced in 2015, it wasn’t until June 2018’s iOS 12 that ReplayKit became stable and easy enough to be built into a consumer app for teens. Meanwhile, plus-size screens and speedy LTE and upcoming 5G networks make screensharing watchable. And with Instagram aging and Snapchat shrinking, there’s demand for a more intimately connected social network.

Squad only launched its app last week, but droves of Facebook and Snap employees have signed up to spy on and likely copy the startup, co-founder and CEO Esther Crawford tells me. Screensharing would fit well in group video chat startup Houseparty too. To fuel its head start, Squad has the $2.2 million it raised before it pivoted away from Molly, the team’s previous App where people can make FAQs about themselves. That cash came from betaworks, Y Combinator, BBG Ventures, Basis Set Ventures, Jesse Draper, Gary Vaynerchuk, Niv Dror, and [Disclosure: former TechCrunch editor] Alexia Bonatsos. Next, Squad wants to let people tune in to screenshares via URL to unlock a new era of Live broadcasting, and equip other apps with the capability through a Squad SDK.

“People under 24 do video chat way different than people 25 and above” says Crawford. Adding screensharing is “an excuse for hanging out.”

Serious ideas are preludes to toys

Screensharing has long been common in enterprise communication apps like Webex, Zoom and Slack. I even called a collaborative browsing and desktop screensharing app my favorite project from Facebook’s 2011 college hackathon. But we don’t just use our screens for work any more. Teens and young adults live on the digital plane, navigating complex webs of friendships, entertainment and academia through their phones. Squad makes those experiences social — including the “social” networks we often scroll through in isolation. Charles and Ray Eames said “Toys are preludes to serious ideas,” but this time, it is happening in reverse.

“The idea came from a combination of things — a pain we were experiencing as a team,” Crawford recalls. My development team is constantly sending each other screenshots and screen recordings. It seemed ridiculous that I can’t just show you what’s on my screen. It was a business use case internally.” But then came the wisdom of a 13-year-old. “My daughter over the summer was bugging me. ‘Why can’t I just show what’s on my screen with my friends?’ I said I think it’s not technically possible.” That’s when Crawford discovered advances in ReplayKit meant it suddenly was possible.

Crawford had already seen this cycle of tool to toy before, as she was an early YouTuber. Back in the mid-2000s, people thought of YouTube as a place to host videos about eBay listings, professional presentations or dating profile supplements. “They couldn’t imagine that if you let people just reliably and easily upload video content, there’d be all these creative enterprises.”

After stints in product marketing at Coach.com and Stride Labs, she built Estherbot — a chatbot version of herself that let people learn about her. Indeed, 50,000 people ended up trying it, convincing her people needed new ways to reveal themselves to friends. She met Ethan Sutin through the project and together they co-founded FAQ app Molly before it fizzled out and was shut down. “Molly wasn’t working; it had high initial engagement sessions, but then they would drop off. Maybe it’s not the right time for the augmented version of you,” noted Crawford.

Crawford and Sutin pivoted Molly into Squad to keep exploring new formats for vulnerability. “What excited Ethan and I was this mission to help people feel less lonely.”

Alone, together

Squad worked, thanks to a slick way to activate screensharing. The app launches to the selfie camera similar to Snapchat, but with a + button for inviting friends to a video call. Tap the screenshare button at the bottom, select Squad and start the broadcast. To guide users toward the best screensharing experiences, a menu of apps emerges encouraging users to open Instagram, TikTok, Bumble, their camera roll and others.

People can bounce back and forth between screensharing and video chat, and tap a friend’s window to view it full-screen. And when they want another friend to see what they’re seeing, Squad goes viral. One concern is that Squad breaks privacy controls. You could have friends show you someone’s Instagram profile you’re blocked by or aren’t allowed to see. But the same goes for hanging out in person, and this is one reason Squad doesn’t let you download videos of your chats and is considering screenshot warnings.

What’s so special about Squad is that it lacks the intensity of traditional video chat, where you constantly feel pressured to perform. You can fire up a chat room, and then go back to phoning as you please with your screen displayed instead of your blank face (though the Android version in beta offers picture-in-picture so you can show your mug and the screen).

“There’s no picture-in-picture on iOS, but younger users don’t even really care. I can point it at the bed and you can tell me when there’s something to look at,” Crawford tells me. A few people, alone in their houses, video chatting without looking at each other, still feel a sense of togetherness.

The future of Squad could grant that feeling to a massive audience of a celebrity or influencer. The startup is working on shareable URLs that creators could post on other social networks like Twitter or Facebook that their fans could click to watch. Tagging along as Kylie Jenner or Ninja play around on their phone could bring people closer to their heroes while serving as a massive growth opportunity for Squad. Similarly, colonizing other apps with an SDK for screensharing could allow Squad to recruit their users.

The startup will face stiff technical challenges. Lag or low video quality destroy the feeling of delight it delivers, Crawford admits, so the team is focused on making sure the app works well even in rural areas like middle America where many early users live. But the real test will be whether it can build a new social graph upon the screensharing idea if already popular apps build competing features. Gaming tools like Discord and Twitch already offer web screensharing, and I suggested Facebook should bring the feature to Messenger when in late-2017 it launched in its Workplace office collaboration app.

In June I wrote that Instagram and Snapchat would try to steal the voice-activated visual effects at the center of an app called Panda. Snapchat started testing those just two months later. Instagram’s whole Stories feature was cloned from Snapchat, and it also cribbed Q&A Stories from Polly. Overshadowed, Panda and Polly have faded from the spotlight. With Facebook and Snap already sniffing around Squad, it’s quite possible they’ll try to copy it. Squad will have to hope first-mover advantage and focus can defeat a screensharing feature bolted on to apps with hundreds of millions or even billions of users.

But regardless of who delivers this next phase of sharing, it’s coming. “Everyone knows that the content flooding our feeds is a filtered version of reality. The real and interesting stuff goes down in DMs because people are more authentic when they’re 1:1 or in small group conversations,” Crawford wrote.

Perhaps there’s no better antidote to the poison of social media success theater that revealing that beyond the Instagram highlights, we’re often just playing around on our phones. Squad might not be glamorous, but it’s authentic and a lot more fun.

The style transfer craze kicked off by an app called Prisma a couple of years ago led to a tsunami of painterly selfies flooding social feeds for several months, as we reported at the time, before the rapacious, face-snapping hoards shifted their attention toward fresh spectacles. But that’s not the end of the story.

The same tech is now creeping into (paper) kids’ books, via a partnership between children’s publisher startup, Kabook, and Prisma Labs: aka the b2b entity that the original app makers pivoted to in late 2017.

So instead of AI sending robots into a human-slaying frenzy, per the usual dystopian sci-fi storyline, we find ourselves confronted with neural nets being used to serve up contextual illustrations of children so parents can gift personalized books that seamlessly insert a child’s likeness into the story, thereby casting them as a character in the tale.

Not the end of the world then. Well, not unless you view this kind of self-centered content manipulation as a threat to children’s imaginations and developing sense of empathy. (The research on any ‘little princes in training’ will, unfortunately, have to wait a few decades to come through though.)

The Kabook integration is the first consumer product partnership that Prisma Labs has scored, according to a press release from the pair.

And while they note there are other publishing services that offer the chance to insert a bit of custom text and photography into a book they claim their collaboration is the only publishing technology that does this “seamlessly”, i.e. thanks to the AI’s style blending fingers.

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“We are excited to be able to work directly with the team at Kabook! to create a truly unique user experience; one that has offered young readers a completely personalized way to enjoy reading,” said Andrey Usoltsev, CEO of Prisma Labs, in a statement.

“Part of our mission at Prisma Labs is to develop new ways for people to express their emotions through digital creations, and through this partnership with Kabook! we are able to take that one step further and bring that to life on the pages of an actual book.”

Kabook, which was set up last year — describing itself as “a technology-based” children’s book publisher, with a focus on kids aged 0-7 years — is currently offering four stories that can be personalized with a kid’s AI-generated likeness.

Three of the books incorporate just one custom image into the story. While a fourth, called Hornswoggled!, makes uses of seven photos in a pirate-themed buried treasure adventure. 

The personalized stories start at $24.99 per book, with hard and soft cover versions available. 

Backblaze started out as a backup solution for consumers, but over the course of the last few years, it also added cloud storage and other services to its lineup. Today, however, the company is going back to its roots with the launch of Backblaze Cloud Backup version 6.0, its flagship service that offers unlimited storage and data transfers.

 

The updated backup service promises a number of speed increases (with backup being up to 50 percent faster depending on the network conditions) and less overhead, as well as the ability to keep the service from using certain networks to help users avoid overage charges when they are using a mobile hotspot, for example (or when their ISP only gives them a certain bandwidth allotment). Backblaze now also offers single sign-on support for Google.

 

The other major new feature is the ability to save snapshots to Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage service. This allows users to store all the data from their old computer and migrate it to a new one, for example, or save a set of files to the cloud as a permanent archive (or simply to free up space for all those Steam downloads). Just like when users restore files from their backups, they can opt to download it directly or get a USB drive shipped to their door.

Talking about those USB drives, Backblaze how now doubled the capacity of its USB keys to hold up to 256GB and its hard drives can now hold up to 8TB (and you can always return those and get a full refund from the company).

Immersive Games Lab, a new venture from Tough Mudder co-founder and Chairman Will Dean, has picked up around £2.5 million in seed funding, TechCrunch has learned. According to sources, London-based Index Ventures has led the round.

In a call confirming the close, Dean told me Sweet Capital, and JamJar Investments (the VC fund set up by the 3 Innocent Drinks founders) also participated.

Developing the “next generation” of immersive group gaming, Immersive Games Lab describes itself as “part indoor theme park, part video game, part escape room” and says it will launch a new breed of “captivating group experiences” in London in early 2019.

Little else is known regarding what Immersive Games Lab’s first experience will be, although Dean told me it will be sold in retail spaces, in ticket form, and will be a blend of technology and in-person group activity. It is currently being prototyped and tested in a warehouse in North London.

More broadly, he said the idea of creating a new kind of immersive gaming experience is partly based on the sentiment that we spend too much screen time on our devices, consuming social media in a way that isn’t always good for our mental health.

His previous and hugely successful venture Tough Mudder was all about creating a new, fun experience around exercise — and ultimately helping people become more physically active. Dean says he is keen for Immersive Games Lab to also make a positive dent on people’s lives.

The new venture also builds nicely on Dean’s track record of creating an experience and community-led consumer proposition — and implementing the type of go-to market strategy that requires. Which is undoubtedly what caught the interest of Index and other investors, in what I understand was an oversubscribed round.

Immersive Games Lab’s other co-founder is David Spindler, who also played a key role at Tough Mudder.

All most of us will see from Jeff Bezos’s secretive MARS conference are a few photo shoots of the world’s richest man attempting to look as cool as possible around some very cool robotics. This summer, however, Amazon will be spinning the event out into a more public facing conference.

Re:MARS retains the original event’s acronymic focus of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space, bringing them to a larger scale for three days in Vegas. It’s a pretty solid looking lineup, though admittedly somewhat self-serving. Per Amazon, already announced speakers include

Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer at Amazon; Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering; Ken Goldberg, William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, UC Berkeley; Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Kate Darling, Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab.

Beyond those sessions, the event will also feature sessions focusing on a number of Amazon’s offerings, including Alexa, AWS, Robotics, Go and Prime Air. Notably, astronauts will have free admission, so you’ve got about six months to train for space if you don’t want to foot the bill.

Word about the next member of the Pixel family started leaking out just after Christmas. Now the rumored Pixel 3 Lite is getting some more time to shine, courtesy of a three minute YouTube video that highlights what appears to be a budget addition to Google’s flagship hardware line.

Perhaps most interesting here (aside from the mere existence of a third Pixel 3 model) is the apparent return of the headphone jack. After making a stink about including the port on the first Pixel, the company quickly reversed course for its predecessor.

The addition of a mid-range handset would, however, be the ideal reason to bring back the port (likely for a limited time). After all, while bluetooth headset have become far more accessible in recent years, specialized headphone are still a big ask for folks looking to save a few (or few hundred) bucks.

There are some cost cutting measures throughout, including a Snapdragon 670, plastic body and no second selfie-camera. In all, the device is a bit like Google’s take on the iPhone XR, though it notably appears to have roughly the same rear-facing camera configuration as its more expensive siblings. That could well owe to the fact that AI — not hardware — is doing most of the heavy imaging lifting on the new handsets.

Notably, Pixel devices are generally already lower cost than flagships from Apple and Samsung, but a new addition could be a nice opportunity for Google to show how Android can shine on lower cost devices.

IBM is one of the world’s biggest system integrators, but to get closer to where enterprises are actually doing their work, it’s been inking partnerships with companies that build devices and run the networks enterprises are using for their IT, and today comes the latest development on that front.

IBM is announcing a new venture with mobile carrier Vodafone, in a deal that will comes in two parts. First, IBM will supply Vodafone’s B2B unit Vodafone Business with managed services in the areas of cloud and hosting. And second, the two will together work on building and delivering solutions in areas like AI, cloud, 5G, IoT and software defined networking to enterprise customers.

The latter part of the deal appears to be a classic JV that will see both sides bringing something to the table — employees from both companies will be moving into a separate office together very soon that will essentially be “neutral” territory. The former part, meanwhile, will see Vodafone paying IBM some $550 million in an eight-year agreement.

That price tag alone is a strong indicator that this deal is a big one for both companies.

The agreement follows along the lines of what IBM inked with Apple several years ago, where the two would work together to develop enterprise solutions that would have been more challenging to do on their own.

Indeed, while IBM does provide systems integration services, it hasn’t moved as deeply into mobile-specific solutions for businesses, even as its other operational units — doing research and other work in AI, cloud, quantum computing and other areas — are making strong headway on specific projects, some of which involve mobile technology.

What the Vodafone deal will tap is taking more of those cutting-edge developments that IBM has built and worked on in specific projects, and productise them for a wider audience of businesses and other organisations, which might already be Vodafone customers.

“To deliver multi-cloud strategies in the real world, enterprises need to invest at many levels, ranging from cloud connectivity to cloud governance and management. This new venture between Vodafone and IBM addresses the ‘full stack’ of real-world multi-cloud concerns with a powerful combination of capabilities that should enable customers to deliver multi-cloud strategies in all layers of their organizations,” noted Carla Arend, senior program director for European software at IDC.

The Apple / IBM deal is more than instructive in this case; it will help fuel this new venture. From what I understand, several fruits of that labor will be making their way into the IBM / Vodafone deal, too, which makes sense, considering Vodafone’s position as a mobile carrier and the iPhone making some strong headway into the business market.

“IBM has built industry-leading hybrid cloud, AI and security capabilities underpinned by deep industry expertise,” said IBM Chairman, President and CEO Ginni Rometty in a statement. “Together, IBM and Vodafone will use the power of the hybrid cloud to securely integrate critical business applications, driving business innovation – from agriculture to next- generation retail.”

“Vodafone has successfully established its cloud business to help our customers succeed in a digital world,” said Vodafone CEO Nick Read, in the statement. “This strategic venture with IBM allows us to focus on our strengths in fixed and mobile technologies, whilst leveraging IBM’s expertise in multicloud, AI and services. Through this new venture we’ll accelerate our growth and deepen engagement with our customers while driving radical simplification and efficiency in our business.”

I’ve been told that the first joint “customer engagements” are already happening with an unnamed energy company. Thinking about what kinds of services Vodafone may be providing to end users today — they will cover mobile data and voice connectivity, mobile broadband, IoT and 5G services — this first deal will involve tapping all four, with an emphasis on 5G and IoT.

Coursera, the online learning startup valued at $850 million, has made its name primarily around its classes and degrees in information technology, data science and business. Now nearly seven years into its life, it’s tackling a new vertical. To tap into shifting economic and societal trends, Coursera is moving into health, with around 100 courses in 30 areas, along with two master’s degrees in public health, to help train people to fill current and future talent shortages in health informatics, healthcare management, public health and related roles.

Universities that will be offering courses include top schools like Columbia University, Emory University, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University, University of Colorado, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota, with Imperial and the University of Michigan offering the first masters degrees with applications opening this month. Subscriptions to take courses will range from $39 to $79 per month, depending on the specialization.

Daphne Koller, Coursera’s co-founder, is leading the company’s move into this area. “This is an area I’ve been involved with for many years,” she said in an interview. “We need more trained health professionals, and we think Coursera can help with amazing content to train new health workers and those who are already in this area.”

While Koller may be known best for her work in AI and computer science — it was while working in the computer science labs at Stanford, where she is a professor, that she first paired up with Andrew Ng to co-found the company — she is also a professor of pathology there and has in recent years worked as a chief computing officer at health tech startup Calico labs and has now founded a drug discovery startup called Insitro.

But this isn’t just about Koller promoting a subject she is interested in; there is a clear need and Coursera thinks it can fill it.

The big talent gap in the area of healthcare work is fuelled by a number of developments.

They include a population that is living longer, and in some countries growing at a fast pace; and a corresponding rising number of health issues, since even as we find cures and treatments for viruses and other diseases and conditions, new ones arise.

Following from these, there is a not-insubstantial administrative and management layer to healthcare: as we gain more advanced knowledge and technology to treat more people, the systems surrounding those treatments — from delivering them to figuring out how to pay for them — become more complex.

These areas require specific skill sets that other educational disciplines do not teach, and in some cases smart people in the job market are overlooking as lucrative jobs in tech and other emerging areas beckon. (We’re starting even to see examples of schools even offering degrees for free.)

But that doesn’t mean that the demand goes away: Coursera cites research from McKinsey that estimates the healthcare job market could grow to 130 million by 2030, from 80 million today.

To be clear, Coursera’s health vertical does not include medicine and courses that a would-be doctor or nurse or other front-line health worker might take. These newer jobs are also seeing a critical talent crunch, globally and not just in the US according to the World Health Organization. For now at least, these areas have large practical components that require students to have hands-on interactions. But kicking off health courses opens the door to considering what Coursera could offer to complement practical learning segments.

“There is a tremendous opportunity in content that surrounds a basic medical degree whether it’s for a doctor or nurse or other front-line professional,” Koller said, citing non-clinical studies alongside those degrees or continuing education for those already in the workforce to give them access to new learnings as two examples. “I think there is multiple uses of our platform.”

Coursera’s big product developments over the last few years have been more about expanding the kinds of students it targets. That’s included adding an enterprise vertical for corporate e-learning and teaming up more with third parties like Google to expand its reach to more captive audiences. This move into health is a sign that it could be looking for new content expansion now, too.

Health, of course, is a big one, especially if Coursera adds on courses for clinical professionals as well (and starts to see competition from other online education providers; for example, Lambda School has said that it wants to move into nursing courses alongside coding). But there are other areas in its sites as well. Koller, for example, said another subject that is of big interest is cognition.

“Basic cognitive skills are something that our education system doesn’t teach as it should,” she said. “One of our most successful courses is learning how to learn, and I do think we’ve put too much emphasis on content versus thinking skills. That may be a need.”

On Coursera as a startup business, she notes the company — which is backed by the likes of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, GSV and Learn Capital and last raised money back in 2017, first grabbing $64 million and then quietly supplementing that with another $20 million later in the year according to PitchBook, bringing its total raised to $230 million — is “doing well, growing rapidly, and starting to see serious revenue.”

That said, she declined to comment on whether it’s going to raise a new round to compete more with Udacity, LinkedIn, Khan Academy and the rest.

“It’s like that expression you hear,” she said. “We’re always fundraising but never raising a round.”

In 2016, Serkan Piantino packed up his desk at Facebook with hopes to move on to something new. The former Director of Engineering for Faceboook AI Research had every intention to keep working on AI, but quickly realized a huge issue.

Unless you’re under the umbrella of one of these big tech companies like Facebook, it can be very difficult and incredibly expensive to get your hands on the hardware necessary to run machine learning experiments.

So he built Spell, which today received $15 million in Series A funding led by Eclipse Ventures and Two Sigma Ventures.

Spell is a collaborative platform that lets anyone run machine learning experiments. The company connects clients with the best, newest hardware hosted by Google, AWS and Microsoft Azure and gives them the software interface they need to run, collaborate, and build with AI.

“We spent decades getting to a laptop powerful enough to develop a mobile app or a website, but we’re struggling with things we develop in AI that we haven’t struggled with since the 70s,” said Piantino. “Before PCs existed, the computers filled the whole room at a university or NASA and people used terminals to log into a single main frame. It’s why Unix was invented, and that’s kind of what AI needs right now.”

In a meeting with Piantino this week, TechCrunch got a peek at the product. First, Piantino pulled out his MacBook and opened up Terminal. He began to run his own code against MNIST, which is a database of handwritten digits commonly used to train image detection algorithms.

He started the program and then moved over to the Spell platform. While the original program was just getting started, Spell’s cloud computing platform had completed the test in under a minute.

The advantage here is obvious. Engineers who want to work on AI, either on their own or for a company, have a huge task in front of them. They essentially have to build their own computer, complete with the high-powered GPUs necessary to run their tests.

With Spell, the newest GPUs from NVIDIA and Google are virtually available for anyone to run their test.

Individual users can get on for free, specify the type of GPU they need to compute their experiment, and simply let it run. Corporate users, on the other hand, are able to view the runs taking place on Spell and compare experiments, allowing users to collaborate on their projects from within the platform.

Enterprise clients can set up their own cluster, and keep all of their programs private on the Spell platform, rather than running tests on the public cluster.

Spell also offers enterprise customers a ‘spell hyper’ command that offers built-in support for hyperparameter optimization. Folks can track their models and results and deploy them to Kubernetes/Kubeflow in a single click.

But, perhaps most importantly, Spell allows an organization to instantly transform their model into an API that can be used more broadly throughout the organization, or or used directly within an app or website.

The implications here are huge. Small companies and startups looking to get into AI now have a much lower barrier to entry, whereas large traditional companies can build out their own proprietary machine learning algorithms for use within the organization without an outrageous upfront investment.

Individual users can get on the platform for free, whereas enterprise clients can get started for $99/month per host you use over the course of a month. Piantino explains that Spell charges based on concurrent usage, so if the customer has 10 concurrent things running, the company considers that the ‘size’ of the Spell cluster and charges based on that.

Piantino sees Spell’s model as the key to defensibility. Whereas many cloud platforms try to lock customers in to their entire suite of products, Spell works with any language framework and lets users plug and play on the platforms of their choice by simply commodifying the hardware. In fact, Spell doesn’t even share with clients which cloud cluster (Microsoft Azure, Google, or AWS) they’re on.

So, on the one hand the speed of the tests themselves goes up based on access to new hardware, but, because Spell is an agnostic platform, there is also a huge advantage in how quickly one can get set up and start working.

The company plans to use the funding to further grow the team and the product, and Piantino says he has his eye out for top-tier engineering talent as well as a designer.