Year: 2019

23andMe, co-founded by CEO Anne Wojcicki, has deployed its latest update, featuring interactive ancestry details, cultural insights about food, art, language, and the option to order a physical ancestry book. Starting today, customers will be able to see more granular ancestry results from more than 1,000 regions, as well as 33 population-specific pages about cultural information.

Before this update, 23andMe simply said I was 12 percent Brtish and Irish. Now, it’s able to break down where in the U.K. my ancestors likely lived. 23andMe, however, was not able to detect more granular data in Ireland.

It was also unable to detect additional evidence in Nigeria, where 23andMe says 25.2 percent of my ancestry comes from. That’s likely because, even though 23andMe has made efforts to grow the number of African and African-American people in its dataset, it’s still lacking. Though, it’s worth noting no ancestry service has it all.

“The odds of receiving more granular results from a particular region (in your particular case, Ireland or Nigeria) depends on how much Nigerian DNA someone has and how many individuals are in the 23andMe reference dataset,” 23andMeAncestry Group Product Manager Robin Smith told TechCrunch. “The reference dataset is continuously growing, and customers should be seeing even more refined ancestry results later in the year.”

Generally speaking, customers who share exact matches between their DNA and reference individuals from a particular region could potentially see granularity in regions of Anambra, Edo, Imo, Lagos and Ogun State in Nigeria, 23andMe spokesperson Christine Pai told TechCrunch.

It’s worth noting Ancestry says I have just 1 percent of my DNA comes from Nigeria and that the bulk of my African ancestry comes from Cameroon and Congo. But when I first signed up for Ancestry, the company said 39 percent of my ancestry came from Nigeria. This is all to say that these tools are imperfect and always subject to change. And, depending on where the bulk of your ancestry comes from, it may change dramatically.

“I’m not surprised you’ll get different results from different companies,” Dr. Jennifer Raff, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas told TechCrunch back in September. “They have their own proprietary info based on those samples. If one of them has lots of individuals from a particular region and the other company does not, you’re more likely to show up as having ancestry from that region whereas if the other company doesn’t have that data represented in their database, it’s going to show up as a different population.”

This is problematic, given many people turn to these DNA testing tools to figure out more about who they are and where they come from. I’ll keep this brief, but I was pretty frustrated when I went from thinking I was very Nigerian (39 percent, according to Ancestry) to barely Nigerian (about one percent, also according to Ancestry) to then again a fair amount of Nigerian (25 percent, according to 23andme).

“This is a problem and it’s one we need to educate people about — that your genetic ancestry is not your identity,” Dr. Raff said. “Also, those numbers really reflect what is in their database, and what’s in the database is largely reflective of genetic variations we see in present-day populations. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s reflecting your actual ancestors.”

I asked Dr. Raff if DNA testing is just a load of crock, but she said it’s not.

“It’s not complete bullshit but there’s also a lot of uncertainty there,” she said. “We [humans] like definitive answers. We’re trying to use this as a tool for exploring our past. We like to have definite answers when we’re doing these explorations, but unfortunately, it’s not there yet.”

But that’s not entirely the fault of 23andMe and Ancestry. In order to be as accurate as humanly possible, these companies would need to sequence every person on the planet. That’s not currently feasible, so in the meantime, Ancestry points to its confidence levels.

“We take this pretty seriously and we do want people to understand what is something they can put money in the bank on, and what they should take with a grain of salt,” Ancestry Chief Scientific Officer Catherine Ball told TechCrunch back in September.

She added that Ancestry tries to be transparent about confidence levels. And, in Africa specifically, “it’s one of our most exciting opportunities and greatest challenge” due to the enormous amount of genetic diversity on the continent.

Additional reporting by Sarah Buhr.

To compete in a world of on-demand everything right to your door led by the likes of Amazon and Uber, traditional physical retailers and those working with them have been looking for an edge by providing efficient, tech-fuelled delivery services of their own.

Now, a startup that has built a platform to enable last-mile logistics and other delivery features for these businesses has announced a round of funding to fuel its growth. Bringg, which works with the likes of Walmart and McDonalds, as well third-party delivery businesses like DoorDash, to optimise and manage logistics and other aspects of the delivery process, has raised $25 million to expand its business.

A typical example of what Bringg provides to its retail customers is the Spark delivery operation that Walmart launched late last year: it gives the company the ability to optimize driver schedules, automatically dispatch orders, allow drivers to communicate their availability and in turn communicate to drivers by way of smart alerts to make sure deliveries are picked up, queued and delivered on time.  Other services that Bringg can offer to customers include helping them run click-and-collect schemes, manage “crowdsourced” fleets, and returns.

Amazon has set the bar high when it comes to setting customer expectations by providing a service that can deliver anything you want in a faster time than it would take for you to go out and buy it. Across various markets it sells food, or clothing, books, streamed films and thousands of other products this way, by way of its Prime subscription service.

A number of startups have emerged to help businesses that are not Amazon and Uber better compete against them and that proposition.

They include companies like FiveStars to help build loyalty programs; Deliverr (yes, it has chosen to follow the same naming convention…) to help with fulfilment and distribution; OrderGroove to build tools to encourage repeat buying; Deliv to provide businesses with a network of people to run same-day deliveries; and Tookan, which directly competes with Bringg for delivery logistics management.

And there are more in existence and likely coming down the pike, since every company both worries on Amazon encroaching on their business, but also, more simply, will try to provide what their customers want.

The reason investors are interested specifically in Bringg — which is co-headquartered in Chicago and Tel Aviv — is in part because of its extensive customer list but also because of its focus on the lucrative market of logistics, which is widely credited as at the core of why Amazon does so well. (Economies of scale is another, which is where being a big retailer like Walmart or McDonalds, or an aggregating platform like DoorDash, comes in.)

“Bringg [is] a pioneering company that’s providing crucial capabilities to leading organizations looking to connect logistics data across different silos and optimize their last mile of delivery,” said Matthew Cowan, Partner at Next47, in a statement. “With the global logistics market predicted to grow to $15.5 trillion by 2023 and the ‘Amazon effect’ drastically changing customer expectations, Bringg has a massive opportunity to fundamentally transform the logistics industry by enabling seamless automation, greater data transparency, and a more collaborative mental outlook.”

Amazon has created a logistics powerhouse to run its delivery service, and the idea is that now other retailers can, using Bringg, have the same kind of tools at their disposal, letting them not just manage the logistics for a delivery service, but help companies track and manage goods and drivers, and specifically to do so even when they are not providing the delivery services themselves.

This is key: many companies will never want to build and operate their own fleet of delivery people and vehicles to bring things to customers; but they will instead work with the likes of DoorDash or Deliv or Postmates to do this. (Even Amazon doesn’t deliver all of Amazon’s packages, but it still handles the logistics.) This will help those people also continue to manage their products and delivery within that third-party service.

“This new investment enables Bringg to level the playing field in the age of Amazon by enabling large retailers, grocery chains, consumer goods companies, restaurant chains and logistics firms to provide their customers with what they expect from their deliveries, based on the optimized business models required to win in today’s challenging market,” said Guy Bloch, CEO at Bringg, in a statement. “We are on a mission to equip enterprises with the technology platform they need to orchestrate successful delivery operations, providing their management and logistics teams with the visibility and control they need to not only survive but thrive in this exciting new landscape.”

Bringg is already active in 50 markets and the plan will be to take that to more with this Series C, which comes from Siemens’ VC Next47, Salesforce Ventures, Aleph VC, OG Ventures, Cambridge Capital, Coca-Cola, Ituran and Pereg Ventures.

Bringg is not disclosing its valuation with this round although we are trying to find out. It’s raised $53 million to date.

 

The number of U.S. households without a traditional cable or satellite TV subscription that instead receive broadcast stations using a digital antenna has jumped by nearly 50 percent over the past 8 years to reach 16 million homes, according to a new report from Nielsen. Today, 14 percent of all U.S. TV households are watching television over the air, it found.

The measurement firm says there are basically two camps among this group of cord cutters.

One, which tends to consist of older viewers with a median age of 55, exclusively watches TV via their antenna – they don’t subscribe to any streaming service.

This group, totalling 6.6 million homes, tends to be more diverse and have a smaller median income – which makes sense. For them, cord cutting may be more of a cost-saving tool, rather than a way to combine free content with other paid services to create a personalized TV experience.

The other group, totalling 9.4 million homes, has at least one subscription video service, like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video, for example. They tend to be younger, with a median age of 36 – as well as more affluent, and more device-connected, says Nielsen.

Because they’re spending more time on devices doing other things – perhaps gaming or using social networks – they consume less traditional media. That impacts the time spent watching TV.

The group of cord cutters watching over-the-air TV who don’t have access to a subscription video service watches over 6 hours per day. That’s 2 hours more than those with a subscription service, the study found.

The group using subscription services are more active on social media, too, likely as a result of their age and their numerous devices. They spend an hour per day, on average, using social media – 17 minutes more than the group without subscription video.

But both groups tend to watch the majority of “TV” content on their television. Despite the increased use of devices like smartphones and tablets, it seems that TV viewing continues to largely take place on the big screen.

Also of note, there’s a small but growing subgroup among the cord cutters who have subscription services who additionally have access to a virtual provider. These are the streaming services offering live TV – like YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, PlayStation Vue, or Sling TV. This group has grown to over 1.3 million homes as May 2018, Nielsen claims. (Keep in mind Nielsen’s numbers are counting TV households in the U.S., not individual user accounts to these services.)

The full report dug deeper into this third segment, and found they tend to be 56% more likely to have a college degree, 19% more likely to have children, and 95% more likely to have an internet connected device, compared with an average home. They also watch slightly more TV than the other “plus SVOD (subscription video on demand)” group at 3 hours, 27 minutes per day, compared with 3 hours, 22 minutes, Nielsen says.

Even your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man needs a vacation. Between all of the mild-mannered studenting and Avenger-style world saving (not mention what transpired during Infinity War), Peter Parker could clearly use a break.

The first trailer for July’s Far From Home finds Parker going Griswold, for a little European vacation, sans-suit (and Lindsey Buckingham soundtrack). But a surprise visit from Howling Commando Nick Fury, naturally, turns things on their head [implied record scratch sound effect].

This time, Spider-Man does battle with a suitably emo Jake Jake Gyllenhaal as the globe-headed Mysterio, with help from some new suits — including what appears to be an homage to Steve Ditko’s original underarm webbing.

Far From Home has a tough act to follow after the absurdly wonderful Spider-Verse — not to mention some explaining to do following the events of the last Avengers. Though we should be up to speed by the time it rolls around. Endgame is due out in April, with the new Spider-Man arriving on July 5.

That question in the headline was the challenge posed by a group of open knowledge junkies in Germany who wanted to understand how a person’s Schufa was calculated. Schufa is a credit bureau that generates financial scores for potential borrowers in Germany, and it is roughly equivalent to a FICO score in the United States. Schufa is not an open algorithm, and so important financial decisions are mediated by an unknown process that can be quite capricious in its scoring.

So the activists created a platform called OpenSchufa that would attempt to discover the details of this algorithm. Under German law, citizens have the right to request their financial data from companies like Schufa, and so a movement was created to get as many citizens to request their data from the company as possible and then have them donate the data they receive to the project.

Since its launch, several thousand people have donated their scores, and the activists have learned that the algorithm can be quite “error-prone” – creating relatively negative scores without any negative evidence. The release of these results have propelled regulators to argue for more transparency around credit scores in Germany, and has also led Schufa to start offering their disclosures in a digital format, rather than by paper.

These sorts of crowdsourced algorithmic accountability exercises are not unique to Germany, or to deep learning processes. In the United States, there was a bit of a movement for a time around getting access to college admissions data. Under the FERPA law, students who matriculate at a university have the right to their data, including their admissions file. There was an attempt (albeit mostly unsuccessful) to try to collate a large number of these files and figure out how admissions offices made decisions.

I love both of these examples, because I love the idea that we can take our own democratic action to make the world a bit less complicated. Alas, it is not that simple.

One of the biggest challenges today for machine learning is what is known as the “black box problem.” Software engineers can test algorithms to see if their output matches the expectations of a test set, but we have no insight into how the algorithm actually arrived at its final decision. We know that a loan application is denied, but we don’t if it was because of a history of unpaid bills or because the applicant has red hair. Researchers, such as Been Kim at Google Brain, have studied how to open up that black box through the use of a “translator,” but such work remains preliminary.

Algorithms are proprietary though, and monopolistic within their context (a customer can’t select the algorithm they want to use to assess their credit, for instance). Without data, and without publishing the algorithm, it’s extremely difficult to understand how it is making a decision. And in the case of deep learning, it’s basically impossible to understand how it is making a decision even if you do have the data and the algorithm.

That has led to a growing movement of theorists concerned about algorithmic accountability, of ensuring that we both understand how an algorithm makes a decision, and that the decision-making is legally non-discriminatory. Social theorists like Frank Pasquale have warned that we are creating a “black box society” in which key moments of our lives are mediated by unknown, unseen, and arbitrary algorithms. Algorithmic accountability is designed to stop that pattern.

This is a real problem, without easy solutions. I have been riffing on this idea of using technology to increase societal resilience, but this is a good example of how hard that can be. Clearly making algorithms simpler for humans to understand and building trust in these digital decision-makers is good for society, but we have no easy pathways to that outcome.

Consider that an open challenge for startups and entrepreneurs to try to solve.

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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

More on societal resilience

Thanks for the many letters of feedback on my piece last week on societal resilience. Many interesting comments, but there were a few that I thought were interesting.

A reader named Andrew wrote: “I would highlight the reality that the bottom of this bottoms-up solution is self. We are all a startups of one and we choose what measures to gauge ourselves against. Whether it’s our personal GDP (income) or other factors, our personal startup must look inward to determine what’s important in the development of self.”

A reader named Cordula wrote: “I’ve been looking at regenerative design as proposed by Daniel Christian Wahl and others, and the examples you’ve cited fit well into that framework.” Regenerative design is an interesting field I had never heard of, which basically argues that systems should use their energies not only for output, but also to repair and heal themselves.

That’s going to be critical, because climate change appears to be accelerating even faster than predicted. A new report in the leading journal Science found that oceans are warming faster than models predicted.

What’s next & obsessions

• I am reading The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein. About half way through – and it’s quite thought-provoking (and depressing).
• Arman is reading Never Lost Again by Bill Kilday, a history of mapping at Google and beyond.
• Arman and I are interested in societal resilience startups that are targeting areas like water security, housing, infrastructure, climate change, disaster response, etc. Reach out if you have ideas or companies here.

Almost every word in the name of TAG Heuer’s new watch – the Carrera Calibre Heuer 02T Tourbillon Nanograph – is important. Carrera connects it to TAG’s long history of chronographs while Calibre suggests a handmade watch made with some technical prowess. Tourbillon means you can expect this thing to cost more than a car (about $25,000 when it goes on sale) and Nanograph suggests that this thing is doing something quite unique. And it is.

TAG Heuer loves experimenting with new materials and the Nanograph features a new hairspring design that is unique to TAG. The hairspring, which is made of carbon-composite, is lightweight and unaffected by gravity or shock. It also offers “perfect concentric oscillations” and is completely antimagnetic. Couple that with the rotating tourbillon and the suggestion is that this watch will remain accurate under all sorts of pressure.

Further, rest of the movement includes carbon fiber and aluminum which reduces the effects of temperature and looks pretty darn cool. It doesn’t do much – it basically shows elapsed time – but it does it in a decidedly sexy way.

“This new interpretation of the TAG Heuer Carrera with its advanced in-house technology underscores our legacy in achieving watchmaking excellence and proves that we remain true to our values of performance, disruption and avant-garde,” said TAG CEO Stéphane Bianchi.

It is quite fascinating to note the range materials that went into this little mechanical marvel are surprisingly new. Not many manufacturers are using carbon fiber in this way and the fact that it’s going into a chronograph mechanical watch for less than $100,000 is surprising. Now you just have to convince yourself to spend $25,000 on a watch.

Netflix is raising fees for U.S. subscribers in its biggest price increase since the company first launched its streaming service 12 years ago.

Depending on your plan, the cost will go up between 13 percent to 18 percent. For the most popular plan (which includes high-definition streaming for up to two devices simultaneously), the price will increase from $11 to $13 per month.

“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience for the benefit of our members,” the company said in a statement.

It seems inevitable that Netflix would have to raise prices to fund its continually growing bill for original content. Meanwhile, companies like Disney, AT&T/WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal all plan to launch competing services, which probably means they’ll be less willing to license their content to Netflix, and will charge a heftier fee when they do.

At the same time, a price increase risks driving away U.S. subscribers at a time when Netflix may have largely tapped out the domestic market (its real growth opportunities seem to be overseas). Still, Wall Street seems pleased with the news with Netflix shares up 5.9 percent as of 9:53am Eastern.

Updating

CyPhy Works announced this morning that it is shifting focus and rebranding as Aria Insights. The new company is focused on utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning to help analyze data collected by drones. Aria will build upon CyPhy’s tethered drone data collection, to help pull information in dangerous situations from oil tankers and pipelines to natural disasters.

The new platform is designed to detect relevant information, alert the user and collect it on a 3D map, while keeping humans out of harm’s way. As it notes in a press release tied to the announcement, the Aria takes its name from flocks of canaries used to keep coal miners safe.

“A number of our partners were collecting and housing massive amounts of information with our drones, but there was no service in the industry to quickly and efficiently turn that data into actionable insights,” Lance Vanden Brook, former CyPhy and current Aria CEO said in a statement. “Moving beyond just a hardware provider, Aria is now a full-service solution that not only meets customers’ aerial needs, but also processes analytics that enable insightful decision making.”

CyPhy was founded in 2008 by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner. After serving as CEO, then CTO, Greiner left the company last year, as it raised a $4.5 million Series D. That brought the drone company’s total funding up to $39 million, by Crunchbase’s estimation. At the time, it was noted that the founder had left work at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology. 

From the looks of it, however, much of CyPhy’s current team will stay in place, continuing to offer its primary product, the Persistent Aerial Reconnaissance and Communications platform (PARC) under the new banner. New products will be launched as part of the “full-service” offering, as well.

There is a growing demand for stronger security at every point in the IT ecosystem, and today, one of the the more successful enterprise startups to emerge in the last several years is announcing a big round of funding to provide that.

Rubrik, which provides enterprise data management and backup services across on-premise, cloud and hybrid networks, has raised $261 million in funding at a $3.3 billion valuation from Bain Capital Ventures and previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and IVP. It intends to use the funding to build (and buy) tech to expand deeper into security and compliance services alongside its existing data management products.

“As we have demonstrated leadership in data recovery, our customers have been demanding new products and services from us,” CEO and co-founder Bipul Sinha said in an interview, “so we’ve raised capital to double down on that.”

This Series E brings the total raised by Rubrik to $553 million, and is a big leap on the company’s previous valuation: its last raise of $180 million, in 2017, valued Rubrik at $1.3 billion.

Rubrik is not disclosing any other specific financial numbers with the news — Sinha’s response to the question was that he thinks the valuation jump speaks for itself. He also confirmed the company is not profitable, but intentionally so.

“Our goal is to build a long, term iconic company, and so we want to become profitable but not at the cost of growth,” he said. “We are leading this market transformation while it continues to grow.”

That market transformation is to provide services — and up to now, specifically data back-up services — for enterprises that operate their networks across a hybrid environment, with data used and stored on premises, in the cloud, and sometimes in multiple clouds. There are a number of other companies that compete with it in backup including biggies like Druva, CommVault and EMC, but Rubrik was an early mover in identifying a need to backup and provide data recovery across a mix of locations.

Moving into security and compliance is a natural progression for the company.

There has always been a synergy between Rubrik’s core business and security/compliance. Often the need for backup and recovery arises specifically as a result of security breaches or other glitches that result from people accessing data when they are not supposed to, and that issue gets compounded when you have data stored and used across multiple locations.

“The fragmentation across cloud and on-prem services creates issues around security and data management,” Sinha said. “The more fragmentation you have, the more important Rubrik [or other data management services] get.”

Similarly, moving into security and compliance together goes hand-in-hand because both address similar needs at companies to be handling information responsibly. “Security and compliance are joined at the hip from a regulatory perspective,” Sinha said.

Up to now, Rubrik has mostly built all of its service from the ground up. One notable exception has been that it made an acquisition — its first — last year when it acquired NoSQL data backup specialist Datos IO, which helped Rubrik further expand from appliance-based management to cloud-based. In the case of adding on more security and compliance offerings, it’s not clear yet whether that will be built organically or via acquisition (and there are indeed a number of security startups out there that could be candidates if it’s the latter).

“Rubrik is fundamentally an innovation driven company,” Sinha said. “We like coherent and consistent architecture. Having said that, as a responsible and ambitious company, we are always looking at the marketplace, at where there are the teams that we can acquire.”

Notably, the company has started to signal its interest in this area in recent months. The latest build of its flagship Andes data management platform put security features at center stage, and so now we can expect to see more of that.

It’s the existing customer loyalty that has always attracted investors to the company, and that’s been the case here, too: the thinking being that this will help the company as it ventures into newer areas of business.

“Rubrik has won the trust and loyalty of large enterprise customers around the globe by offering a simple and reliable solution that solves the challenge of protecting and managing data in a hybrid cloud world,” said Enrique Salem, former CEO at Symantec and Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, in a statement. “Given my experience leading the largest enterprise data protection company, we are confident that Rubrik is positioned to win and be the market leader in enterprise cloud data management.”

Smartsheet, the project management and collaboration tool that went public last April, announced the acquisition of Seattle-based TernPro, Inc., makers of Slope, a collaboration tool designed for sharing creative assets.

The companies did not share the acquisition price.

Bringing Slope into the fold will enable Smartsheet users to share assets like video and photos natively inside the application, and also brings the ability to annotate, comment or approve these assets. Smartsheet sees this native integration through a broad enterprise lens. It might be HR sharing training videos, marketing sharing product photos or construction company employees inspecting a site and sharing photos of a code violation, complete with annotations to point out the problem.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research, who specializes in collaboration tools in the enterprise sees this as a significant enhancement to the product. “Smartsheet’s focus is on being more than just project management, but instead helping coordinate end-to-end business processes. Slope is going to allow content to become more of a native part of those processes, rather than people having to switch context to another tool,” he explained.

That last point is particularly important as today’s collaboration tools, whether Slack or Microsoft Teams or any other similar tool, have been working hard to provide that kind of integration to keep people focused on the task at hand without having to switch applications.

Mike Gotta, a long-time analyst at Gartner, says collaboration that happens within the flow of work can help make employees more productive, but being able to build specific use cases is even more critical. “The collaboration space remains open for innovation and new ways to addressing old challenges. For organizations though, the trick is how to create a collaboration portfolio that balances broad-based foundational investments with the more domain-specific or situational scenarios they might have where this type of use-case driven collaboration can make more sense,” Gotta told TechCrunch.

That is precisely what Smartsheet is trying to achieve with this purchase, giving them the ability to incorporate workflows involving creative assets, whether that’s including all of the documents required to onboard a new employee or a training workflow that includes learning objectives, lesson plans, photos, videos and so forth.

Smartsheet, which launched in 2005, raised over $113 million before going public last April. The company’s stock price has held up, gaining ground in a volatile stock market. It sits above its launch price of $19.50, closing at $25.24 yesterday.

Slope was founded in 2014 and has raised $1.4 million, according to Crunchbase data. Customers include Microsoft, CBS Sports and the Oakland Athletics baseball team. The company’s employees, including co-founders Dan Bloom and Brian Boschè have already joined SmartSheet.