Year: 2019

Reserved instances (RIs) have provided a mechanism for companies, who expect to use a certain level of AWS infrastructure resources, to get some cost certainty, but as AWS’s Jeff Barr points out they are on the complex side. To fix that, the company announced a new method called Savings Plans.

“Today we are launching Savings Plans, a new and flexible discount model that provides you with the same discounts as RIs, in exchange for a commitment to use a specific amount (measured in dollars per hour) of compute power over a one or three year period,” Barr wrote in a blog post announcing the new program.

Amazon charges customers in a couple of ways. First, there is an on-demand price, which is basically the equivalent of the rack rate at a hotel. You are going to pay more for this because you’re walking up and ordering it on the fly.

Most organizations know they are going to need a certain level of resources over a period of time, and in these cases, they can save some money by buying in bulk up front. This gives them cost certainty as an organization, and it helps Amazon because it knows it’s going to have a certain level of usage and can plan accordingly.

While Reserved Instances aren’t going away yet, it sounds like Amazon is trying to steer customers to the new savings plans. “We will continue to sell RIs, but Savings Plans are more flexible and I think many of you will prefer them,” Barr wrote.

The Savings Plans come in two flavors. Compute Savings Plans provide up to 66% savings and are similar to RIs in this regard. The aspect that customers should like is that the savings are broadly applicable across AWS products, and you can even move work loads between regions and maintain the same discounted rate.

The other is an EC2 Instance Savings Plan. With this one, also similarly to the reserved instance, you can save up to 72% over the on-demand price, but with this option you are limited to a single region.  It does offer a measure of flexibility though allowing you to select different sizes of the same instance type or even switch operating systems from Windows to Linux without affecting your discount with your region of choice.

You can sign up today through the AWS Cost Explorer.

Plant-based replacements are so hot right now, they’re even hitting the coolest thing in food — ice cream.

The new plant-based dairy replacement maker, Eclipse Foods, has just signed a deal with hipster ice cream brands Humphry Slocombe and Oddfellows to put its dairy replacements into their mixes.

Unlike other plant-based products which provide an alternative to dairy without mimicking its texture and taste, the folks at Eclipse Foods say their product is indistinguishable from milk from animals — and made using allergen-free ingredients.

Starting on Saturday, store shelves in New York and San Francisco will be stocked with the OddFellows and Humphry Slocombe artisanal ice cream brands made from plants.

The company has raised $3.5 million from investors including Alexis Ohanian and his Initialized Capital investment firm, Gmail creator Paul Buchheit and the former chairman of Daiya Foods, Eric Patel.

“I’m excited to be investing in more plant-based foods,” said Ohanian, in a statement. “Aylon and Thomas were immediately impressive as accomplished experts in food science and the quality of the ice cream is already near indistinguishable from its dairy counterpart and it’s only going to get better. This is filling a need in the surging plant-based food space that is competitively priced, sustainably produced, and — most importantly –delicious.”

Compared to some of its competitors, the Eclipse Foods path to market is relatively straightforward — since it’s not using any genetically modified ingredients to make its dairy replacements. It’s more like the Beyond Meat than the Impossible Foods of the dairy industry.

“We’re not using any expensive biotech to get to where we’re going,” says Aylon Steinhart, the company’s chief executive. “We take plants and we use our world class expertise in functional plant proteins and how they work to blend plants together in a quite simple way.”

Founded by Steinhart a former expert at the Good Food Institute, a non-profit focused on plant-based food innovation, and Thomas Bowman, the former director of product development at JUST, Eclipse Foods launched from Y Combinator’s famed accelerator in March of this year.

The low-cost inputs that the company says it uses, including corn and cassava, means that it won’t require as much capital to scale up, says Steinhart.

For now, the company is pursuing the roadmap laid out by Pat Brown’s Impossible Foods and replicated by dozens of other startups going after plant-based or lab-grown replacements to traditional proteins. That means partnering with famous chefs and artisanal brands whose products sell at a higher price point than your McDonalds or Burger King soft serve ice cream cones (or Wendys ultra-delicious Frosty).

Instead of plain vanilla, Eclipse Foods plant-based liquid ice cream base will be showing up in flavors like OddFellows‘ Miso Cherry and Olive Oil Plum ice creams or Humphry Slocombe‘s spiced Mexican Hot Chocolate.

Ultimately, the company has plans to go down market and sell into the same kinds of stores that are offering Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods burgers and patties.

If every Burger King has an Impossible Whopper and every Carls Jr. has a Beyond Famous Star, then every restaurant should have a dairy-free ice cream offering,” says Bowman. “It’s got no allergens. No GMOs … no gums no gels and no stabilizers.”

Security researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Ring doorbells that exposed the password for the Wi-Fi network it was connected to.

Bitdefender said the Amazon-owned doorbell was sending its owner’s Wi-Fi password in cleartext over the internet, allowing for nearby hackers to intercept the Wi-Fi password and gain access to the network to launch larger attacks or conduct surveillance.

Amazon fixed the vulnerability in all Ring devices in September, but the vulnerability was only disclosed today.

It’s another example of smart home technology suffering from security issues. As much as smart home devices are designed to make our lives easier and homes more secure, researchers keep finding vulnerabilities that allow them to get access to the very thing they’re trying to protect.

Earlier this year, flaws in a popular smart home hub allowed researchers to break into a person’s home by triggering a smart lock to unbolt the door.

Amazon has faced intense scrutiny in recent months for Ring’s work with law enforcement. Several news outlets, including Gizmodo, have detailed the close relationship Ring has with police departments, including their Ring-related messaging.

It was reported this week that Ring had bragged on Instagram about tracking millions of trick-or-treaters this Halloween.

The property industry — covering people and businesses that invest in, build, purchase or rent, and maintain property — is hugely fragmented when it comes both to data sources, and the companies that work within it. Today, a New York-based startup that is building a database that helps bring all of that together is raising a round of growth funding to help it expand outside of the US.

Reonomy — a startup that ingests some 100 sources of data, including multiple public and proprietary data feeds and crowdsourced information, and then uses artificial intelligence to crunch it to provide market intelligence that is used by developers, investors, acquirers and anyone else who works in the area of commercial property (otherwise known as commercial real estate, CRE, ranging from buildings zoned for business through to multi-dwelling units, but not single private homes) — has closed a Series D round of $60 million.

Today, the company has over 100,000 customers — with single customers sometimes covering multiple users — along with a database covering some 50 million properties, accounting for some 99% of the commercial inventory in the country. In all, the database also has 80 million companies, 300 million people (those affiliated with the properties), 38 million mortgages, and 68 million property sales.

It’s also continuing to add more data sources: along with this round, Reonomy is announcing new partnerships with CoreLogic, Black Knight and Dun & Bradstreet.

The money comes from a mix of financial and strategic backers — underscoring both the company’s potential, and also the calibre of its current customers. Led by Georgian Partners, the funding also included Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and Citi Ventures (both Reonomy users, as part of its property financing activities), Untitled Investments, and previous investors Sapphire Ventures, Bain Capital and Primary Venture Partners.

Reonomy is not disclosing its valuation, but Rich Sarkis, the founder and CEO, said that it is “definitely an up round.” The startup, founded in 2013, has raised $128 million to date, and according to PitchBook data, it was valued at $153 million post-money in its last round, in 2018. This likely means the valuation is well above $200 million now.

The expression “safe as houses” was borne out of the idea that property is a strong bet, since the price eventually always goes up. But the wider development of the market in modern times has shown that it can e a significantly more volatile area — where arcane algorithms created by quants, a lot of greed and a dose of corruption, and world economics can have much stronger impacts, resulting in huge booms and crushing busts of global proportions.

In that context, Reonomy positions itself both as a tool not just to get a better picture of what is going on now, but to better predict what might happen. Given the many disparate sources of information that are compiled into its bigger database, the pitch is that this is a must-have, but the alternative way to get it — building on your own — might otherwise require many man-hours and dollars of investment to achieve and understand.

While some database platforms require technical knowledge to shape and query, the idea here is to “lead users to the water” and make the proposition very non-technical.

The potential usefulness of Reonomy’s insights can have many endpoints, Sarkis said. While one obvious area is in sales, it’s also just as used in areas of research and more. Its customers include not just mortgage lenders and property acquirers, but those who work in the property industry in a more hands-on way, such as roofers who might want to get a list of buildings developed in a certain range of years, as a way of building a list of leads for properties that might need a roof replacement.

“What our customers have in common is that they are looking for solution to understand something about the property market,” he said. “We take the mess of data out there and make sense of it, whether the person using Reonomy is an investor or a roofer or someone that is underwriting loans.”

The company today, Sarkis said, covers about 99% of all commercial real estate in the US, and the plan is now to take that concept to international markets, including Canada, Asia, Australia and the UK and Europe, markets that are more similar to the US than they are different, he added.

“Reonomy has developed a powerful platform to integrate and resolve sources of commercial real estate data into a single, unique identifier for every CRE asset in the United States,” said Emily Walsh, Principal at Georgian Partners, in a statement. “This unique identifier is being leveraged by some of the largest enterprises in the world to tie together their public, proprietary and 3rd party data sources and to create a level of visibility into real estate assets that was previously unattainable.”

Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.

The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).

In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.

“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”

The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.

Manufacturer already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.

Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ WiFi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.

He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”

In other words, once attendees realize that they have access professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.

This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.

“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”

Evan Rifkin

As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.

But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.

Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.

The Rifkins told me that they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They can also create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.

Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.

The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).

In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.

“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”

The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.

Manufacturer already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.

Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ WiFi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.

He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”

In other words, once attendees realize that they have access professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.

This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.

“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”

Evan Rifkin

As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.

But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.

Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.

The Rifkins told me that they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They can also create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.

LogRocket is a startup on a mission to help companies root out and fix website app errors quickly and efficiently, and it seems to be going well. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures.

The company also announced a new tool called LogRocket Metrics to help developers understand how widespread a particular problem might be. It’s no secret that people tend to be impatient when an app or website isn’t working right, and you can lose a customer over a bad experience.

LogRocket CEO and co-founder Matthew Arbesfeld says the new tool provides deep analytics across the customer experience. “With this new functionality called LogRocket Metrics, the developer can search across all their customers to determine the frequency and the impact of a problem to see if it affected your conversion rate, how many people were affected and who was affected, “Arbesfeld explained.

He says this will work like an error search engine, and in fact, they are actually indexing every interaction to help the developer find wherever that error has occurred. “Let’s say you’re using a site and you see a specific error message on the screen. The developer who’s working on that site can actually search, kind of like Google, across every customer that saw that specific error message,” he said.

Typically the error will come to the attention of the development team after a person reports a problem through the site or by contacting customer service, and this provides a means to find out just how many other people might be seeing the same error.

As for the money, the company has raised over $30 million now. Arbesfeld says it still has most of its $11 million Series A in the bank, but as it grows they wanted to be well capitalized to take advantage, especially as it begins working with larger and larger customers.

He says he will be investing in areas you expect like engineering and sales and marketing, but also wants to start hiring more data scientists to take advantage of the data the company collects as a by-product of their business to build additional features like LogRocket Metrics.

LogRocket is a startup on a mission to help companies root out and fix website app errors quickly and efficiently, and it seems to be going well. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures.

The company also announced a new tool called LogRocket Metrics to help developers understand how widespread a particular problem might be. It’s no secret that people tend to be impatient when an app or website isn’t working right, and you can lose a customer over a bad experience.

LogRocket CEO and co-founder Matthew Arbesfeld says the new tool provides deep analytics across the customer experience. “With this new functionality called LogRocket Metrics, the developer can search across all their customers to determine the frequency and the impact of a problem to see if it affected your conversion rate, how many people were affected and who was affected, “Arbesfeld explained.

He says this will work like an error search engine, and in fact, they are actually indexing every interaction to help the developer find wherever that error has occurred. “Let’s say you’re using a site and you see a specific error message on the screen. The developer who’s working on that site can actually search, kind of like Google, across every customer that saw that specific error message,” he said.

Typically the error will come to the attention of the development team after a person reports a problem through the site or by contacting customer service, and this provides a means to find out just how many other people might be seeing the same error.

As for the money, the company has raised over $30 million now. Arbesfeld says it still has most of its $11 million Series A in the bank, but as it grows they wanted to be well capitalized to take advantage, especially as it begins working with larger and larger customers.

He says he will be investing in areas you expect like engineering and sales and marketing, but also wants to start hiring more data scientists to take advantage of the data the company collects as a by-product of their business to build additional features like LogRocket Metrics.

Autonomous drone-based transportation startup Volocopter has revealed its first partner for its new VoloDrone industrial and commercial electric vertical take-off and landing craft: John Deere . The agricultural and industrial heavy equipment company is working with Volocopter on a VoloDrone-based aerial crop-dusting system.

VoloDrone, which Voloctoper unveiled at the end of last month, has 18 rotors and a fully electric power system that can provide up to 30 minutes of flight time for the aircraft, and carry up to 440 lbs. It’s designed to operate fully autonomously along a set path, or be piloted remotely for manual control if needed. John Deere is equipping the VoloDrone with a sprayer and tank array mounted to its cargo connection points, which will be able to dispense pesticides, liquid fertilizer, anti-frost agents for unseasonable inclement weather and more. Both partners also see potential in applications like sowing seeds for new crops from the air.

The VoloDrone is potentially a better, more precise and more cost-effective alternative to using a helicopter for these applications, Volocopter says. They’ll be working with John Deere to test and prove that out with initial pilots to be conducted during the next agricultural growing season.

Sensitive data leakage is one of the biggest negative side-effects of cloud-based apps and services. Today, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that can detect and take action on that data is coming out of stealth with funding to tackle the issue head-on. Nightfall — which integrates with and then automatically scans structured and unstructured data that appears in apps like Slack, GitHub, AWS and hundreds more for sensitive information, which it then acts to secure — is launching publicly today with $20.3 million in funding.

Nightfall’s CEO Isaac Madan said the startup will use the money to expand the scope of what it can detect and where, and to build out its business overall. The company bills itself as the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform and while in stealth it started out working with high-growth startups like Grofers and Exabeam, later expanding its customer base to Fortune 500 companies.

The company originally launched as Watchtower AI — a name that Madan, who co-founded the company with Rohan Sathe, said was changed to reflect the expanded scope of the company, not just identifying unstructured data but being able to take actions on it. It had raised angel funding of just under $5 million that previously had not been disclosed. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock have co-led this latest, bigger round of $15.5 million, with Pear VC (Pejman Nozad); Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian; and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. of the New York Jets all also participating.

If $20.3 million sounds like a sizeable investment for a company that had yet to build up a public profile, that’s partly because of the nature of what the company is doing, and the people behind it.

Madan studied computer science and specifically worked on machine learning research at Stanford, focusing on HR and recruitment data, and has one exit already under his belt (a networking and advice platform called Chalky) while also working as an investor at Venrock and analyst at Pejman Mar Ventures, while Sathe was the lead engineer who had built and scaled Uber Eats.

Between the two of them, their experience spans a range of use-cases of where teams are handling many petabytes of data across multiple applications, which many opportunities for data leaks. The lack of any products on the market to address this was what led them to building Nightfall, Madan said in an interview.

Nightfall is tackling a specific issue in the market. Cloud-based collaboration platforms have been the making of distributed teams, which can use them to communicate with each other and work together, sharing data from different apps to get things done even when they are not in the same physical space. But they have also opened the door to a potential problem when it comes to data protection: the information shared on these platforms can contain sensitive data, so having it on there becomes a security risk.

“Business-critical data exists across different systems like Slack, Github, AWS and other apps, and that means sensitive and financial information can proliferate broadly across an organization’s systems,” Madan said. “We leverage machine learning to discover and classify that data” — which is often unstructured when it appears on these platforms.

Of course, each platform in itself can be secure, “but they don’t account for how users of these apps store and use data,” said Madan.

And this is a big big-data task: there are petabytes of data at play covering hundreds of different applications. Nightfall has built machine learning models to scan all of this, detect the data, and then either provide automatic or options for manual actions to take on it: typically, the options are either to delete, redact or quarantine the data, or notify the relevant teams of it to take appropriate actions. 

As part of this latest round Enrique Salem — notably, the former CEO of Symantec and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures — is joining Nightfall’s Board of Directors.

“Isaac, Rohan, and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career,” he said. “With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team.”