Year: 2019

Apple has teamed up with Veteran Affairs (VA) to allow those who’ve served our country to now access their health records via iPhone. Health records access via Apple’s Health app has been available to iPhone users since the beginning of 2018. However, the ability to access that data has been limited to those hospitals and medical systems working with Apple to allow people to access their records.

The VA started working with select patients on iPhone in a test run earlier this summer and is now able to offer this feature to any veteran who is an iOS user receiving care through through the Veterans Health Administration.

For those who don’t know, the Department of Veteran Affairs is the largest federal agency and the largest integrated medical system in the United States, providing service to more than 9 million veterans. The VA also serves a total of 1,243 medical facilities and outpatient clinics to support these veterans.

Though the VA has in the past included other various health apps catering to the needs of our service men and women, they’ve had a mostly singular focus like smoking cessation or self care. Apple’s latest addition to the Health app is much more comprehensive, allowing these veterans to see all of their health records — including lab tests, diagnoses, medications, immunizations and other health information all within the Apple Health app on their phone.

Access to personal health records has been a sore spot for many patients, with some systems requiring them to have to ask permission for their own information to share with other doctors and hospital systems. It’s also been an archaic process of printing out paper records and faxing over information. Compare that to Apple’s Health Records feature, which provides veterans with both comprehensive access and convenience, allowing them to take a more proactive role in their own healthcare in an easy-to-access digital space while keeping it within a privacy compliant environment.

“The Health app continually updates these records giving VA patients access to a single, integrated snapshot of their health profile whenever they want, quickly and privately,” an Apple company statement said.

For the fourth year in a row, Apple has updated its privacy pages.

Every year the tech giant’s refreshes the privacy portion of its website — usually a month or so after its product launches — to keep customers up to date with its latest features and technologies. Since its fight with the FBI, which saw federal agents try to force Apple to create an iPhone backdoor to get the contents of a terrorist’s phone, Apple ditched its historically secretive ways and went full-disclosure on its security and privacy practices.

Its privacy pages have evolved to house the tech giant’s various commitments to privacy, but also user tips and tricks and its twice-yearly transparency report detailing the number of government demands for data it receives.

This year — and for the first time — Apple has published several technical whitepapers detailing how some of its most popular technologies work. So far, the company has released whitepapers on Safari, Photos, Location Services, and Sign In With Apple — which all saw privacy enhancements this year.

Last year the company debuted a “download your data” page, allowing users to obtain all of the data that Apple stores on them, a legal requirement under Europe’s GDPR.

Apple says its privacy pages are the most visited part of its entire site.

As with previous years, the updated privacy pages now includes all of the new privacy and security features in iOS 13 and macOS Catalina, which Apple released earlier this year, including Safari anti-tracking, location awareness, and contact notes protections.

Apple’s new privacy website. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

Immersive Labs, a cybersecurity skills platform, has raised $40 million in its Series B, the company’s second round of funding this year following an $8 million Series A in January.

Summit Partners led the fundraise with Goldman Sachs participating, the Bristol, U.K.-based company confirmed.

Immersive, led by former GCHQ cybersecurity instructor James Hadley, helps corporate employees learn new security skills by using real, up-to-date threat intelligence in a “gamified” way. Its cybersecurity learning platform uses a variety of techniques and psychology to build up immersive and engaging cyber war games to help IT and security teams learn. The platform aims to help users better understand cybersecurity threats, like detecting and understanding phishing and malware reverse-engineering.

It’s a new take on cybersecurity education, which the company’s founder and chief executive Hadley said the ever-evolving threat landscape has made traditional classroom training “obsolete.”

“It creates knowledge gaps that increase risk, offer vulnerabilities and present opportunities for attackers,” said Hadley.

The company said it will use the round to expand further into the U.S. and Canadian markets from its North American headquarters in Boston, MA.

Since its founding in 2017, Immersive already has big customers to its name, including Bank of Montreal and Citigroup, on top of its U.K. customers, including BT, the National Health Service, and London’s Metropolitan Police.

Goldman Sachs, an investor and customer, said it was “impressed” by Immersive’s achievements so far.

“The platform is continually evolving as new features are developed to help address the gap in cyber skills that is impacting companies and governments across the globe,” said James Hayward, the bank’s executive director.

Immersive said it has 750% year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenues and over 100 employees across its offices.

Richard Branson’s small satellite launch company Virgin Orbit announced today that it has secured final approval on a £7.35 million ($9.5 million) grant from the UK Space Agency (UKSA), funds which will be used by Virgin Orbit to help set up its Cornwall-based launch facility. Virgin Orbit has been putting together funding and securing regulatory approvals to establish the new launch site, which will be called Spaceport Cornwall and which will be part of Cornwall Airport Newquay.

This site will provide a UK-based launch site for Virgin Orbit, giving the UK domestic launch capabilities and providing a way for UK-based entities to do everything from build to launch within the country. The company is also working on developing a movable ‘ground operating system,’ which is essentially a series of towable trailers that Virgin Orbit can use to house ground crews that will support the missions of its LauncherOne vehicle, which is the airborne launch platform it’s developing for high-altitude small payload launches.

Virgin Orbit is one of two Virgin-branded space companies founded by billionaire Branson. The other, Virgin Galactic, just went public through an arrangement with Social Capital Hedosophia, a funding vehicle set up by Chamath Palihapitiya and partners specifically for the purpose. While both companies make use of modified terrestrial aircraft used as high-altitude launch platforms for vehicles designed to then reach space. Virgin Orbit’s launch system supports small satellites aiming for orbit, however, whereas Virgin Galactic’s launch vehicle is designed to propel a sub-orbital passenger vehicle just beyond the edge of Earth’s atmosphere.

Orbit’s commercial goals give it a clearer path to revenue generation and profitability, since other companies including SpaceX and Rocket Lab have built businesses on the demand for launch capabilities, with small satellites making up a big percentage of that mix. If all proceeds as planned with Spaceport Cornwall, the company hopes to be launching payloads from the location as early as 2021.

Five years ago, when the Los Angeles-based enterprise software startup Replicated first launched, it was one of a number of contenders looking to bring containerized software development tools to businesses.

The company initially hitched its star to containerized software development toolkit, Docker, but over time developers began to migrate to another containerized software development platform — Kubernetes .

Over time, as Kubernetes has emerged as the dominant toolkit for developers, Replicated’s co-founder, Grant Miller realized that his company needed to adjust to the new reality.

“Realistically when we saw Kubernetes becoming the default platform we wondered what would the next generation of Replicated’s tooling look like,” Miller told me recently.

The solution that the company hit upon was to launch a suite of services — which are available now — that could “operationalize and scale the Kubernetes applications,” Miller said.

Replicated had been focused on third party software written by someone else and delivered to run internally within a company’s on-premise hardware. Now the company is launching what it calls KOTS (Kubernetes Off The Shelf), which is a play on commercial off-the-shelf software, Miller says.

“The future of enterprise software is going to be these Kubernetes applications delivered to enterprises so that they can run privately, securely, in their own environments,”  says Miller.

Replicated has already sold its toolkit to a number of vendors, including: HashiCorp, CircleCI, Gradle, Snyk, GitPrime, Sysdig, Wickr, SignalSciences and many others and has distributed those applications into 1,500 enterprises, including 50 of the Fortune 100.

Now, Replicated KOTS enables vendors to easily package an upstream, and fully-supported distribution of Kubernetes with their application for enterprises who have yet to fully embrace Kubernetes.

Once deployed, KOTS gives administrators the ability to get an application configured and deployed using step-through configuration, automated preflight checks and 1-click updates. 

For more advanced cluster operators, the KOTS tools provide integrations that set up an application for automated day-2 operations. Cluster operators can make last-mile configuration changes as overlays that will persist throughout application updates, the company said.

The tools also integrate with internal enterprise image registries to piggy-back on the image scanning that enterprises conduct. Additionally, administrators can consolidate application updates to be automatically versioned through internal version control systems like GitHub Enterprise or GitLab, enabling GitOps for 3rd-party applications. 

Already, Replicated has four customers who are using its KOTS suite of tools. The idea is to give businesses a way to operationalize and support software developers for alerts and provide tools to manage deployments on premises.

“We’re administrative tooling so you can configure and update and troubleshoot to manage this third party app,” Miller says.

The KOTS tools automate the process of delivering and controlling the delivery of software into a system and help to manage the last-mile configuration.

“There’s a whole level of super neediness that it goes to,” says Miller. “This integrates with enterprises existing first party deployment software management system.”

Salesforce is announcing that it has appointed Adam Blitzer as the new CEO of Marketing Cloud.

Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s suite of digital marketing tools, built around the company’s acquisition of ExactTarget back in 2013. That acquisition is what brought Blitzer to Salesforce — he co-founded marketing automation startup Pardot, which was acquired by ExactTarget the year before the Salesforce deal.

Blitzer recalled the insanity of going through the Pardot acquisition while also having a one-month-old baby: “I was traveling all the time … but I had a great, built-in excuse that I was never going to go through one of these again. Ten seconds later, we sold ExactTarget to Salesforce.”

Since then, Blitzer has overseen Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud before taking over as Marketing Cloud CEO last month. (The previous Marketing Cloud CEO Bob Stutz is now at SAP.) Salesforce is making the official announcement today, ahead of its Dreamforce conference in a couple weeks.

It sounds like Blitzer’s immediate focus is the customer data platform that Salesforce plans to launch next year, designed to help marketers unify their customer data. He told me the CDP is a “key pillar” of the Marketing Cloud strategy, particularly in a fragmented landscape where a marketer is confronted with “7,000 logos.”

He added, “We don’t have to do 7,000 things — we can be the hub of marketing for our customers,” creating the “single source of truth” for customer data that’s used across a variety of products.

Blitzer also said he sees an opportunity to grow the use of Salesforce’s Einstein AI in digital marketing. And while the company’s biggest strength has been in business-to-business marketing, Blitzer said he’ll be working on “bringing that together with all our [consumer marketing]-focused solutions”— particularly since “many, many consumer goods companies have traditionally been B2B, sold through distributors” but are now facing competition from direct-to-consumer brands.

Asked whether he’s looking to expand the Marketing Cloud through more acquisitions, Blitzer deflected, saying that’s a question for acquisitions team — his role is focused on “organic” growth of the products that Salesforce already owns.

“One of the things I love in taking over this role is the adoption of multiple products by customers,” Blitzer said. “Probably in a distant past, it was see a nail, hit a nail — where they I have an email marketing problem, I need an email marketing solution. Certainly, coming into this role, it’s [now] about owning the customer experience.”

Barcelona-based on-demand delivery startup Glovo is beefing up its engineering capacity by opening a second tech hub, its first in Poland — with an initial plan to hire 40 additional engineers and have a total of 50 tech and product experts working predominantly out of its Warsaw office.

Glovo says it expects the Polish engineering hub to make up half of its technology capacity in time. It will have a main focus on developing user-facing features for its marketplace product and for partners operating on the platform, it adds.

It also has plans for further expansion of the facility down the line — and an overarching roadmap for its business of a 300-strong engineering team to support building out its on-demand service offering.

Its pitch is “everything” delivered on-demand, from fast food to groceries or pharmaceuticals, so long as it’s small and light enough to be handled by one of the couriers picking up jobs on its platform.

While there’s little doubt that fast food makes up the bulk of Glovo orders right now the startup has been trying to push into online grocery deliveries, to compete with giants like Amazon — including setting up its own warehouses capable of fulfilling orders within 20 minutes, 24 hours a day. (It calls these ‘dark supermarkets’ SuperGlovo — ‘super’ meaning ‘supermarket’ in Spanish. Though its ‘dark’ model has also attracted attention from Barcelona City Council for lacking a correct permit.)

In August Spanish media reported that Glovo had itself been shopping — picking up Polish food delivery platform, Pizza Portal, for an acquisition price-tag that’s billed as up to €35M (~$39M).

Glovo raised a $169M Series D back in April which included investment from Drake, owner of global pizza franchise Papa John’s — giving it the means and the motive to gobble smaller rivals in the food delivery space.

Poland being one of its existing markets in Europe. (Albeit Pizza Portal offers various types of fast food for delivery, not just pizza.)

In all, Glovo operates in more than 20 countries at this stage, though its densest markets of operation remain its home market of Spain and also Italy.

In Poland it operates in just eight cities — so the Pizza Portal acquisition looks intended to beef up its footprint there, with the latter slated as the largest food-service platform in the market — even as Glovo doubles down on expanding its engineering capacity by tapping up local tech talent.

At the same time, competition for on-demand delivery, and especially food delivery, remains fierce in Europe where a number of players — including the likes of Deliveroo, JustEat and Uber Eats, are battling it out for territory. And, in some instances, consuming each other to carve out a bigger share of lunch in key markets.

Where Glovo doesn’t operate in Europe highlights some of that ongoing food fight, with no offering in Germany or the UK, for instance. Its regional strategy focuses on the South and East. It has also been building up an international business, opening in markets in LatAm and the Middle East and Africa.

Scaling fast is certainly core to Glovo’s playbook, though. It says it launched in a new city every four days on average last year, while the 2015-founded startup now employs over 1,300 people in all.

Glovo founder Oscar Pierre will be joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December to chat about growing an on-demand delivery business — you can find out more about Disrupt conference passes here

Uber will become an ad platform, selling space inside its Eats app to restaurants hoping to lure in more food delivery orders. A recent Uber job listing spotted by TechCrunch seeks an Uber Eats Ads Lead “to lead the team and efforts responsible for creating a new ads business that enables eaters to discover new foods and restaurants to grow their customer base.”

An Uber spokesperson confirmed the company would be entering the ads business, telling TechCrunch “We are exploring relevant ads in Eats.” Selling ads could help it improve margins on Eats, where it only takes 10.7% of gross bookings as adjusted net revenue since it pays out so much to restaurants and drivers.

The fresh opportunity in ads comes at a critical time when Uber is desperate to show its future potential in the face of a sagging share price that closed at $28.02 yesterday, down 40% from a high of $46.38 in June. Today, Uber’s post-IPO stock lock-up expires and early investors are able to sell their shares, putting newfound pressure on its stock.

TechCrunch was the first to discover a prototype of Eats ads in Decembe called Specials, where restaurants could get featured placement in the app in exchange for offering a discount. This demonstrated Uber’s ability to steer hungry users to order from particular restaurants.

I followed up with Uber’s senior director and head of Eats product Stephen Chau, who hinted at the company’s aspiration in the ads business. “There’s a bunch of different ways we can work with restaurants over time. If we have all the restaurants on the marketplace and we give them tools to help them grow, then this will be a very efficient marketplace. They’re going to be spending those ad dollars somewhere,” Chau told me. We’ve been checking on the company’s progress in ads ever since.

As we predicted, now instead of just a quid pro quo where Uber exchanges added visibility to restaurants willing to offer discounts that could keep users loyal to Uber Eats, it plans to formally sell ads.

“As this is a brand new space for Uber” the Toronto-based Eats Ads Lead “will be responsible for defining the vision for this new product area and determining where to start building.”

The job listing also notes whoever takes the role will “Help formulate our business, product and go-to-market strategy for ads” and “Creatively experiment and quickly iterate on early tests”. Signaling global ambitions for Eats ads, the Lead will “Customize and scale this offering across the world.”

The effort is separate from Uber’s own marketing efforts that see it spend over $1 billion per year to recruit riders, drivers, and Eats customers. Uber will start selling the ads, not just buying them.

The potential for Eats ads stems from Uber’s place as a destination for choosing what to eat, not just ordering it. Wherever there is discovery, there are opportunities for paid discovery. And as Uber focuses on cross-promoting Eats inside its main ride hailing app, it could suck in more users that are open to suggestions that restaurants pay to provide.

We don’t have details on exactly how Uber’s ads will look. However, you could imagine them appearing on the home page, the browse section, or even in search results for certain cuisines or restaurants. Restaurants hoping to boost orders could pay to appear to users who are hungry but don’t know what they want to eat, or to appear before competitors in the same food style.

Amazon successfully navigated a similar expansion from marketplace to ad platform. eMarketer expects Amazon’s US ads business will grow 33% this year to reach $9.85 billion, and claim 7.6% of the total US ad market which makes it the biggest search ad player behind Google.

Uber could use any revenue it can get. This quarter the company lost $1 billion, with $316 million of that loss coming from Eats. But Eats’ revenue grew 64% year-over-year, showing it’s increasingly popular, and could command enough user attention to make advertising lucrative.

Ads could also serve as a wedge for Uber to move deeper into business intelligence services for restaurants. It could apply its data on food delivery demand to help kitchens to optimize prices, allocate staff, and improve menus.

To save its share price, Uber’s best bet is to find new streams of cash it doesn’t have to share with drivers or restaurants. It may still be years until self-driving vehicles arrive to rescue Uber from its tremendous costs.

Rocket Lab is one of the extremely small group of rocket launch startups that is actually sending payloads to space, and the company sends all of its spacecraft up from a scenic peninsula located on the East Coast of New Zealand. Why? It’s ideally placed for high frequency launch windows, which should help Rocket Lab send up even more payloads using its Electron spacecraft as it scales. And the side benefits are incredibly stunning views and vistas.

This tour of LC-1 includes a look at where Rocket Lab does final assembly for the spacecraft that it launches, which puts together parts made everywhere from Auckland to Huntington Beach, California. There’s a look at how the rocket is rolled out and lifted for fueling and launch, and some insight into how Rocket Lab goes about partially muting some of the incredible volume of noise that’s produced when it fires up its rocket missions.

Finally, there’s a quick look at LC-2, the second launch pad that Rocket Lab is currently building in Wallops Island, Virginia. This will be the company’s first U.S.-based launch site, which will unlock key launch capabilities for U.S. agency customers, and it’s set to host its first Electron launch sometime early next year.

Add HMBradley to the list of Los Angeles based startups looking to shake up the world of high finance typically dominated by East Coast giants with names like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.

The new Santa Monica, Calif.-based bank joins companies like Aspiration and Acorns in trying to offer consumers new ways to manage their finances.

Founded by a team of fintech veterans and backed by PayPal founder Max Levchin, HMBradley got its start in Levchin’s HVF Labs, a San Francisco-based venture studio.

The idea, according to the company’s founder, Zach Bruhnke, was to provide better incentives to consumers for leaving more of their deposits with his bank. “A Bank CEO wants to get more deposits and consumers want more interest,” says Bruhnke. So the thesis behind HMBradley is to give consumers higher interest rates based on the amount of money they save.

Growing up in Shreveport, La. where his father worked selling fences and his mother oversaw deposits into the local bank vault, high finance was the furthest thing from Bruhnke’s mind. But after the entrepreneur sold his first company he witnessed firsthand how wealth brought privileges.

HMBradley operates differently. “If you have the right habits you will be in the top tier of our customers no matter how many zeroes you have in the account,” Bruhnke says.

Working with him on the project is another Shreveport native, Germain Cassiere, an engineer who has worked with Bruhnke on various startups for the past seven years and Dmitry Gritskevich, a former Goldman Sachs banker who worked on the break up of GE Capital.

Together the three men, with $3.5 million in seed financing from Accomplice Ventures, Walkabout Ventures, Mucker Capital, Index Ventures, and a number of angel investors, intend to change how banking customers are rewarded.

“HMBradley presents an entirely new experience that will change how consumers think about banking,” said Levchin. “Aside from its digital-first design that makes sense for the way people handle money today, it was developed to help anyone be more responsible with their money”

At the core of HMBradley’s value proposition is its saving benefit. The company has set up variable annual percentage yields for accounts based on the rate its customers save. The current industry average yield on savings accounts is a paltry 0.09%, but HMBradley will have a tiered system where savers who bank more  than 20% of their direct deposits will have an annual yield of 3%; customers who save between 15% and 20% of their direct deposits will receive rates of 2.25%; while the bottom two tiers of customers (those who save between 10% and 15% of their deposits and 5% to 10% of their direct deposits) will have rates of 1.5% and 1% respectively.

The company also differs from other banks in some pretty significant ways. Chiefly, it doesn’t distinguish between a checking and a savings account. Any bank account opened with the company will earn interest based on savings rate. HMBradley will also offer one-click free credit scoring and will have a network of 55,000 no-fee ATMs available for its customers through the STAR ATM network.

Finally, the company’s accounts are insured for up to $250,000 by the FDIC through its sponsor bank — Hatch Bank.

Currently, the HMBradley is offering a perk to customers who sign up for the company’s waitlist — giving them the option to commit a certain amount of their direct deposit and earn 3% interest on that amount monthly until they make their first deposit (customers have to deposit their money within thirty days from when HMBradley starts accepting deposits to receive the bonus).

“We want to start account relationships on a positive note and build from there,” said Gritskevich, the company’s co-founder and chief operating officer. “We believe that the best way to do that and to show how serious we are about working for our customers is to enable them to earn a bonus before their money is even with us. HMBradley will build their trust as their balance grows. The best part is that the earlier someone signs up, the larger their bonus becomes.”