Year: 2019

Apple is today launching a new feature for Apple Card which allows cardholders to purchase a new iPhone then pay it back over 24 months with no interest. The company had already announced its plans for the program during its October earnings call, but now the program is actually opening up to all Apple Card customers. In addition, Apple is sweetening the deal for purchases made in December. Instead of the usual 3% back on Apple purchases, the company is offering 6% back on all Apple purchases made from December 10 through December 31, 2019.

This includes purchases made at Apple Stores, on Apple.com, or through the Apple Store app.

Apple already offered customers a way to pay for their iPhone purchases interest-free through its existing iPhone Upgrade Program. That program required a 24-month installment loan from Citizens One, but could still charge other fees — like those on late payments, for example.

The new iPhone installment program is a first-party offering with all the advantages that entails, including the 3% or 6% back — depending on when the purchase is made — as well as the ability to manage payments directly within the Apple Wallet app on the iPhone.

Apple says the monthly installment payments will be automatically added to the cardholders’ minimum payment, so customers only have one payment to make per month. The percentage back is added to users’ Apple Cash, and thhis can then be put towards the payment or spent through Apple Pay.

The iPhone installment program lays the groundwork for what could grow to become a larger subscription offering in the future. At a later date, Apple could choose to layer in its other subscriptions along with the iPhone purchase to create a bundle of some sort. By doing so, customers could buy the iPhone and the services they wanted to go along with it — like iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News+, or Apple Arcade.

Already, the iPhone installment program will allow customers to bundle in AppleCare over the 24-month period.

Apple is also experimenting with other subscription bundles on a smaller scale, as it recently announced a bundle for students that offers bot Apple Music and Apple TV+ for the price of a music subscription alone ($5/mo).

The installment program won’t replace the existing Apple Upgrade program, as that will remain available for non-Apple Card users. However, Apple Card owners will likely choose the first-party program the next time they want to upgrade for all its obvious advantages.

Though the installment program was pre-announced this fall, Apple CEO Tim Cook hadn’t offered a timeframe for the program’s availability when he introduced the offering. Instead, he said only that it would arrive sometime later this year. But details about the program were recently added to Apple Wallet app, which hinted that the launch was nearing.

More details about how the program works will be available here: http://www.apple.com/apple-card/monthly-installments.

Crowdsourced navigation app and Google subsidiary Waze is adding new features that allow you to report unplowed roads made more dangerous or inaccessible during snowstorms within the app, and also to see reports posted by other people who have already added their own to the map. This Waze update was also developed by the company after it received a recommendation to build this kind of reporting option from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), working with the municipal agency through its ‘Waze for Cities Data’ partnership and data sharing program.

People can report both unplowed roads through the ‘Hazards -> Weather’ section of the app’s reporting tools, and it’s live and available in all 185 countries where Waze is currently available. In Virginia, specifically, Waze will be providing back data from its crowdsourced snow condition data gathering to the VDOT, which will use it along with other info about snow clearance from its own sources to help better inform its snow removal efforts during future cold seasons.

Snow is a huge factor when it comes to winter driving in areas where conditions allow for it. Waze building this in alongside other reporting options like collisions and construction delays should go over well with anyone living in an area where snowfalls regularly require road clearance.

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Crowdsourced navigation app and Google subsidiary Waze is adding new features that allow you to report unplowed roads made more dangerous or inaccessible during snowstorms within the app, and also to see reports posted by other people who have already added their own to the map. This Waze update was also developed by the company after it received a recommendation to build this kind of reporting option from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT), working with the municipal agency through its ‘Waze for Cities Data’ partnership and data sharing program.

People can report both unplowed roads through the ‘Hazards -> Weather’ section of the app’s reporting tools, and it’s live and available in all 185 countries where Waze is currently available. In Virginia, specifically, Waze will be providing back data from its crowdsourced snow condition data gathering to the VDOT, which will use it along with other info about snow clearance from its own sources to help better inform its snow removal efforts during future cold seasons.

Snow is a huge factor when it comes to winter driving in areas where conditions allow for it. Waze building this in alongside other reporting options like collisions and construction delays should go over well with anyone living in an area where snowfalls regularly require road clearance.

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Los Angeles-based ProducePay has inked a $190 million debt facility from Coventure and TCM Capital, to expand its lending business and marketplace for farmers.

ProducePay offers farmers cash advances throughout the growing season to smooth the sometimes lumpy revenues and give farmers a bit more predictability, the company said. It buys produce ahead of delivery and sets itself up as a middle-man between distributors, growers and grocers.

Since its launch in 2015, the company has seen $1.5 billion worth of produce flow across its marketplace  and $750 million of those transactions were in the last year.

ProducePay’s pitch to farmers is the company’s centralized marketplace, which the company says offers growers higher pricing and certain payment from distributors along with better pricing for supplies and services like seed, equipment and logistics services.

The marketplace service, which only launched in October,  has already seen $100 million in purchases.

“In just four years, ProducePay has had a transformative effect on the financial health and success of scores of farmers and value-additive distributors in Latin America and the U.S.,” said ProducePay Founder and CEO Pablo Borquez Schwarzbeck, in a statement. “This new debt facility will accelerate ProducePay’s impact, empowering more farmers and distributors to run their businesses more profitably, making high quality and affordable fresh produce available throughout the U.S.”

Jeff Bezos -founded space company Blue Origin has a launch scheduled for today, with a liftoff window set for 8:30 AM CST (9:30 AM EST/6:30 AM PST). The launch livestream above will begin at around 30 minutes prior to liftoff.

The launch today will see a New Shepard rocket take off from the company’s West Texas launch facility. There’s a chance that weather won’t cooperate, and the team is monitoring conditions and will provide an update if they have to put off the launch to a. later date.

This launch is notable for a few different reasons, including that it includes a booster that has launched previously five times – making this a record sixth flight for one of the company’s re-usable booster stages. New Shepard is a suborbital launch vehicle, and will seek to deliver cargo including a number of scientific experiments as well as thousands of postcards from children who have submitted them through Blue Origin’s nonprofit Club for the Future organization, which aims to get kids in involved in space science and exploration.

In these waning days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, technologists and investors are beginning to lay the foundations for new, truly transformational technologies that have the potential to reshape entire industries and rewrite the rules of human understanding.

It may sound lofty, but new achievements from businesses and research institutions in areas like machine learning, quantum computing, and genetic engineering mean that the futures imagined in science fiction are  simply becoming science.

And among the technologies that could potentially have the biggest effect on the way we live, nothing looms larger than genetic engineering.

Investors and entrepreneurs are deploying hundreds of millions of dollars to create the tools that researchers, scientists and industry will use to re-engineer the building blocks of life to perform different functions in agriculture, manufacturing and medicine.

One of these companies, 10X Genomics, which gives users hardware and software to determine the functionality of different genetic code, has already proven how lucrative this early market can be. The company, which had its initial public offering earlier this year is now worth $6 billion.

Another, the still-private company is Inscripta, helmed by a former TenX Genomics executive, the Boulder, Colo.-based startup is commercializing a machine that can let researchers design and manufacture small quantities of new organisms. If TenX Genomics is giving scientists and businesses a better way to read and understand the genome, then Inscripta is giving those same users a new way to write their own genetic code and make their own organisms.

It’s a technology that investors are falling over themselves to finance. The company, which closed on $105 million in financing earlier in the year (through several tranches which began in late 2018), has just raised another $125 million on the heels of launching its first commercial product. Investors in the round include new and previous investors like: Paladin Capital Group, JS Capital Management, Oak HC/FT and Venrock.

“Biology has unlimited potential to positively change this world,” says Kevin Ness, the chief executive of Inscripta. “It’s one of the most important new technology forces that will be a major player in the global economy.”

Ness sees Inscripta as breaking down one of  the biggest barriers to the commercialization of genetic engineering, which is access to the technology.

While genome centers and biology foundries can manufacture massive quantities of new biological material  for industrial  uses, it’s too costly and centralized for most researchers. “We can put the biofoundry capabilities into a box that can be pushed to a global researcher,” says Ness.

Earlier this year the company announced that it was taking orders for its first bio-manufacturing product and the new capital is designed to pay for expanding its manufacturing capabilities.

That wasn’t the only barrier that Inscripta felt that it needed to breakdown. The company also developed a proprietary biochemistry for gene editing, hoping to avoid having to pay fees to one of the two laboratories that were engaged in a pitched legal battle over who owned the CRISPR technology (the Broad Institute and the University of California both had claims to the  technology).

Smart glasses maker North announced today that it will be ending production of its first-generation Focals glasses, which it brought to market for consumers last year. The company says it will instead shift its focus to Focals 2.0, a next-generation version of the product, which it says will ship starting in 2020.

Focals are North’s first product since rebranding the company from Thalmic Labs and pivoting from building smart gesture control hardware to glasses with a built-in heads-up display and smartphone connectivity. CEO and founder Stephen Lake told me in a prior interview that the company realized in developing its Myo gesture control armband that it was actually more pressing to develop the next major shift in computing platform before tackling interface devices for said platforms, hence the switch.

Focals 2.0 will be “at a completely different level” and “the most advanced smart glasses ever made,” Lake said in a press release announcing the new generation device. In terms of how exactly it’ll improve on the original, North isn’t sharing much but it has said that its made the 2.0 version both lighter and “sleeker,” and that it’ll offer a much sharper, “10x improved” built-in display.

North began selling its Focals smart glasses via physical showrooms that it opened first in Brooklyn and Toronto. These, in addition to a number of pop-up showroom locations that toured across North America, provided in-person try-ons and fittings for the smart glasses, which must be tailor-fit for individual users in order to properly display content from their supported applications. More recently, North also added a Showroom app for iOS devices, that included custom sizing powered by more recent iPhone front-facing depth sensing camera hardware.

North’s first-generation Focals smart glasses.

To date, North hasn’t revealed any sales figures for its initial Focals device, but the company did reduce the price of the glasses form $999 to just under $600 (without prescription) relatively soon after launch. Their cost, combined with the requirement for an in-person fitting prior to purchase (until the introduction of the Showroom app) and certain gaps in the product feature set like an inability to support iMessage on iOS natively, all point to initial sales being relatively low volume, however.

To North’s credit, Focals are the first smart glasses hardware that manage to have a relatively inconspicuous look. Despite somewhat thicker than average arms on either side where the battery, projection and computing components are housed, Focals resemble thick acrylic plastic frames of the kind popularized by Warby Parker and other standard glasses makers.

With version 2.0, it sounds like Focals will be making even more progress in developing a design that hews closely to standard glasses. One of the issues also cited by some users with the first-generation product was a relatively fuzzy image produced by the built-in projector, which required specific calibration to remain in focus, and it sounds like they’re addressing that, too.

The Focals successor will still have an uphill battle when it comes to achieving mass appeal, however. It’s unlikely that cost will be significantly reduced, though any progress it can make on that front will definitely help. And it still either requires non-glasses wearers to opt for regularly donning specs, or for standard glasses wearers to be within the acceptable prescription range supported by the hardware, and to be willing to spend a bit more for connected glasses features.

The company says the reason it’s ending Focals 1.0 production is to focus on the 2.0 rollout, but it’s not a great sign that there will be a pause in between the two generations in terms of availability. Through its two iterations as a company, Thalmic Labs and now North have not had the best track record in terms of developing hardware that has been a success with potential customers – Focals 2.0, whenever they do arrive, will have a lot to prove in terms of iterating enough to drive significant demand.

Babies have options these days when it comes to what goes in their mouth. No more is it just the standard mush in a jar. Now they’ve got everything from pouches to organic purees delivered right to their parents’ door — and Yumi is one of several startups cashing in.

The company has just announced the raise of another $8 million from several of Silicon Valley’s household names, including Allbirds, Warby Parker, Harry’s, Sweetgreen, SoulCycle, Uber, Casper and the CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee, James Freeman. That puts the total raised now to $12.1 million.

But it’s a tough and saturated market full of products all vying for mom and dad’s attention and that’s not a lot of cash to go on, compared to the billion dollar industry Yumi is up against. According to Zion Market Research, the global baby food market could reach as much as $76 billion by 2021. However, you wouldn’t know Yumi was up against such odds if you ask them and their financial supporters.

The advantage, according to the company, is in providing fresh food alternatives and that “shelf-stable” competitors like Gerber lack key nutrients parents want for their little ones.

“Our goal is to change the standards for childhood nutrition, and completely upend what it means to be a food brand in America,” Yumi co-founder and CEO Angela Sutherland said. “This group of visionary leaders have all redefined their categories and now we have the opportunity to work together to reimagine early-age nutrition for the next generation.”

Will that bet pay off and help this startup standout? Sales continue to rise and have risen by ten times in the last year, according to the company — we’ve asked but don’t know what those sales numbers are, unfortunately. However, Yumi’s bet on fresh and delivered could prove to be just what parents want as the company continues to grow.

“As a parent, Yumi’s mission immediately resonated,” said co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker Neil Blumenthal . “As we’ve seen at Warby Parker, and now at Yumi, there is a massive shift happening in the world of retail. There’s now a new generation of consumers who are actively seeking brands that reflect their values and lifestyle — the moat that big, legacy brands once enjoyed has evaporated.”

The big new round of funding for Passport’s ticketing and parking management tech proves that software can even disrupt something as mundane and seemingly low-tech as the parking lot.

The startup, which just raised $65 million in new financing from investors is a permitting, parking and ticketing management service for cities, office parks and campuses.

The capital commitment more than doubles the North Carolina-based startup’s funding to $125 million and is actually the second big investment round of the year for a parking tech company. SpotHero, the Chicago-based marketplace for parking raised $50 million earlier in the year and other services related to auto care and servicing in parking lots or on-demand have raised tens of millions of dollars as well.

“In the future, almost everyone in the world will live in a city, so there’s no more important challenge to work on than how people move throughout communities and transact with cities,” said Bob Youakim, Passport co-founder and chief executive in a statement. “We envision a world where mobility is seamless. To bring this vision to life, we are creating an open ecosystem where any entity — a connected or autonomous vehicle, a mapping app, or a parking app — can leverage our transactional infrastructure to facilitate digital parking payments.”

Passport’s application interfaces allow any government to set up electronic payments for parking tickets and with mobile readers can scan licenses to check for permits and approvals that car owners have through the companies management service.

With the close of the new round, Habib Kairouz from Rho Capital Partners and Scott Hilleboe from H.I.G. will . both take seats on the company’s board of directors.

The company processes more than 100 million transactions per-year and will see $1.5 billion pass through its system this year.

Some of the nation’s top healthcare-focused venture capital firms are banding together to form an advisory council with the technology security certification provider, Hitrust, to create best practices for data security for startups developing digital health technologies.

The conversations, spearheaded by the Nashville-based, healthcare-focused investment fund, Frist-Cressey, were designed to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies throughout the healthcare industry by creating best-practices around data security that large healthcare organizations demand before adopting a new service.

“Our service or our software want to be taken nationwide and everybody gets excited and thats’ when you get in front of the Chief security officer’s office and they ask if you’re HiTrust certified,” says Frist-Cressey partner Chris Booker. 

“It makes [startups] more marketable or more viable,” says Daniel Nutkis, the chief executive of Hitrust. “Organizations tend to be reluctant to work with startups… [Our certification] gave venture capital firms a level of comfort and we saw it as an opportunity.. Chris approached us to better develop a program more targeted at early stage companies… so that this becomes an easier program and can make it more wide-scale.”

So far investors including Ascension Ventures, Bain Capital . Ventures, Echo Health Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Blue Cross Blue Shield Ventures, Heritage Group, New Enterprise Associates and 7wire Ventures have all signed on to the venture capital advisory council.

For the firms, it’s simply a matter of protecting what is an increasing percentage of capital commitments. Investors have poured $50 billion into healthcare startups, according to data pulled from CB Insights, and nearly $16 billion of those investments were in digital health companies. Meanwhile, early stage startups are increasingly vulnerable to data breaches and lax security practices — failures of oversight that can mean the difference between life and death for early stage startups.

“Data breaches and privacy violations… these things can destroy a company,” says Booker.