Year: 2019

Duolingo is one of the most popular apps on the market for folks who want to learn languages. And now, the service is giving users a way to truly ‘carpe diem’ by offering a course in Latin.

If you’re wondering why Duolingo is offering lessons for a language that hasn’t been commonly used since the 8th Century, that’s totally fair. Here’s the scoop: Latin is the backbone for a variety of romance languages, as well as the language of origin for plenty of words across a number of languages, including English.

Studying Latin gives folks a way to study the infrastructure of a handful of other languages.

Moreover, there are plenty of historians, linguists, and professors who wish to read works like The Aeneid by Virgil or Metamorphoses by Ovid or Meditations by Marcus Aurelius in their original Latin form.

Duolingo uses mini-games to help users learn languages. Mini-courses reward users for finishing a course and take away ‘a life’ (like a videogame) when users make a mistake. The company hopes that the end result of a user finishing a course is that they’re able to read, write, speak and comprehend that language.

Moreover, Duolingo has troves of data around how people actually learn languages, and uses machine learning to tweak and improve its service based on that data.

Duolingo has raised more than $100 million across five rounds of funding since it launched in 2011, according to Crunchbase.

At a small event in Manhattan this week, Fitbit laid out its future for the press. Tellingly, the event was far more focus on the company’s software play, with the big hardware announcement feeling almost rushed at the end.

Along with an increased focus on health care providers and enterprise, much of its revenue strategy will be tied up in Fitbit Premium, a $10 a month subscription service. The offering marks a major shift for a company whose identity has been so closely tied to hardware for its first decade of existence.

The announcement comes a year and a half after the release of Versa. The smartwatch has helped the company begin to right the ship after several quarters’ worth of financial struggle. And while last quarter found Fitbit’s valuation stumbling a bit on the heels of a disappointing performance by the Versa Lite, the company says it continues to be committed to its core hardware offering.

Following the announcement of Fitbit Premium and the Versa 2 smartwatch, we sat down with CEO and co-founder James Park to discuss the company’s path and what the future holds for Fitbit.

The state of Fitbit

Brian Heater: The flow of today’s briefing was different. In previous years, the company’s always led with hardware.

James Park: You noticed that it was pretty conscious, and I think it’s just to reinforce the fact that what we’re working on is not just about hardware anymore. But it’s equally important that the services component is an important part of our strategy, and also an important part of an overall solution, again, people healthier.

Coursera, the online education platform now valued at over $1 billion, has made its name through its popular e-learning programs, working with some 190 universities and big names like Google to bring some 3,600 courses and 14 degrees online, attracting 43 million learners to date. Now, it’s taking a significant step in its development.

First, Coursera has made its first-ever acquisition, of a startup called Rhyme Softworks, which has built a platform that lets developers build hands-on, virtual e-learning projects that can be executed from a user’s internet browser. And along with that, Coursera is launching a new offering called Coursera Labs, which will let educational institutions and industry partners (and eventually enterprises) build their own hands-on learning projects, powered in part by the Rhyme technology.

The deal and the Labs product have been in the works for a while before today, and so some partners have already started to build projects around the offering, like this project from the University of London called Sleuth, to help teach programming skills:

The terms of the deal to acquire Rhyme are not being disclosed — and it’s not clear who its investors were, as Crunchbase lists only a pre-seed round for the startup. But Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera, said that it includes not just Rhyme’s IP and related assets, but its team of six, who will now form the basis of a new R&D office for the company out of Sofia, Bulgaria led by Rhyme’s co-founder and CEO, Namit Yadav. Coursera will also be investing millions in the company’s technology as part of its Coursera Labs initiative.

The idea behind developing Coursera Labs is to bring more flexibility as well as customization into the Coursera platform. Aimed at courses that have strong project and development components to them such as programming, math, or perhaps marketing projects — but not, for example, necessarily a course on 20th century history or Japanese literature — the idea is to bring in more of the tools that have become standard in those disciplines as they are taught elsewhere, and as they are used elsewhere (such as in job applications). Tools that are supported to Labs projects include Jupyter Notebook, RStudio, VS Code, cloud software consoles, and native desktop applications, the company said. Educators building courses can use templates from these or create custom courses for their needs.

The new initiative to offer Labs signals an interesting shift for Coursera in another regard: it will be the first time that the company will have a significant amount of content that will require a person to be “online” in order to use it, a change from previously, when leaners could take work offline to do it. Maggioncalda said however that bandwidth is not an issue — very little of it is required — which will be key considering the growth that Coursera has seen in many emerging markets outside of its home base of the US.

What the change could mean is interesting: Coursera will be able to offer more analytics now to course creators  (and to learners) about how long projects take to complete, what questions give people more pause, and more. It will also give those building online courses a new window into making content specifically for the Coursera platform, rather than work that was originally built for consumption in the class being translated into the Coursera (or indeed more generally e-learning) environment. Important to note, though, that Coursera Labs will be one part of a wider toolkit: there will still be a lot of Coursera courses that do not use it, and do not really need to.

Maggioncalda hinted that there will be another chapter coming in how Labs and Coursera will be developing later in the year that could see the initiative scaling up even more. That could in part be down to extending Labs to Coursera Enterprise users, which is a newer area for the company that provides training for knowledge workers and now has 2,000 customers, Maggioncalda said.

The first Versa was a revelation for Fitbit. After falling flat with the Ionic, the company’s second true smartwatch finally delivered on the promise of high-profile acquisitions, including Pebble and Vector, with a smartwatch the could truly compete with Apple’s. In fact, the product helped jump-start Fitbit’s sputtering stock and appeared to be the first step on its road to recovery.

Announced earlier this year, the Versa Lite was widely regarded as a misfire — something CEO James Park admitted in a recent earnings call. Although it was right to have price point at front of mind, it wasn’t enough to justify the loss of several key features. And honestly, the original Versa’s $200 MSRP seems to be right in the sweet spot for those looking for a lower-cost Apple Watch competitor (that also happens to work with Android).

A year and a half after the first Versa, Fitbit finally returns with the follow-up, the apply named Versa 2. The new version of the device isn’t a radical departure, but looks to be a pretty solid upgrade. I don’t anticipate too many Versa 1 owners making the upgrade here, but there’s a lot to like in the new version.

Confirming earlier leaks, Alexa is a key part of the update. Without its own voice assistant, Fitbit turned to the most logical place, partnering with Amazon. Seems like a mutually beneficial team up for both parties — Amazon finally breaks into the wearables space in a meaningful way and Fitbit gets access to an already immensely popular smart assistant.

Interestingly, the Versa 2 marks the first time Fitbit has built a microphone directly into a device. The hardware was added specifically for the purposes of bringing Alexa to the product. The assistant is accessed with the press of a button for a wide variety of features, from weather to smart home control. Answers arrive on-display in text form.

“We actually had to work closely with Amazon because Alexa wouldn’t work out of the box on these devices,” CEO James Park tells TechCrunch. “One, we’re still trying to maintain a low power profile. Two, we’re trying to make our devices still affordable. So we didn’t integrate a speaker. So we had to work with Amazon closely to make Alexa work without voice output. So that actually took a lot of collaborations between the two companies.”

Among the more practical additions is improved battery life. Fitbit says the Versa 2 can get “5+ days” on a charge. The watch should still be able to get several days, even with the new always-on watch face display enabled.

Sleep features get a bit of an overhaul, as well. Sleep Score is pretty much what it sounds like, attaching a number to the quality of one’s sleep. That factors in things like heart rate, restlessness, time awake and sleep stages. The company is promising a higher-quality breakdown of that information via its new Premium subscription offering. Smart Wake is a welcome addition, as well. The feature will be rolling out to all Fitbit smartwatches, waking up users within a 30-minute window, based on sleep cycle.

Design-wise, well, this thing looks even more like the Apple Watch than its predecessor. Here’s what Park told me on that front:

With phones, it’s like every phone starts to look the same. But for us, we try to blend around design and the square design into what we call the squircle design that tries to capture both one that looks more like a traditional watch piece but still has a squareish form factor to display information. So we think we’ve struck the right balance. And I think whether it looks like an Apple Watch or not is kind of irrelevant. We’re trying to look at the customer experience and try to see what’s best for the user.

What a lot of it comes down to is kind of getting out of its own way. Gone are the days when the devices were flashy status symbols. These sorts of wearables have become far more utilitarian, and, as such, are designed to occupy a similar space as a good, old-fashioned dumb watch.

All models of the watch also feature Fitbit Pay built-in, which includes access to a number of different global transit systems, including New York, Vancouver, London and Taiwan.

The Versa is priced at $200, the same as its predecessor. There’s a premium model at $230, which includes a special strap and a 90-day pass to Fitbit Premium.

Services are the future of Fitbit . That was the overarching message from an event this week in Manhattan. The small gathering of media outlets found the company spending most of its stage time on software and services, leaving a small window at the end to discuss the launch of a pair of hardware products, the Versa 2 smartwatch and Aira Air scale.

After a decade of leading with hardware, Fitbit has no doubt seen the writing on the wall in the wearables category. It’s true that devices continue to see growth, but with Xiaomi and other Chinese manufacturers devouring the low end of the market and Apple utterly dominating smartwatches, Fitbit is looking at other ways to leverage its presence in fitness.

Fitbit Premium will be a cornerstone of that play. At $10 a month or $80 annually, the company is eyeing a revenue streaming beyond device sales and enterprise/healthcare partnerships. It’s a play that echoes similar moves by companies like Apple, which has seen services and content become an increasingly important part of its revenue model as sales on devices like the iPhone continue to stagnate.

What does $10 a month get you? Custom insights. That’s the promise here. Bespoke health and sleep information that goes deeper than what users of Fitbit’s free app get. The core of the offering is nine guided health and fitness programs, with names like Intro to Healthy Habits, Get More Zzz’s, Habits for Restful Sleep, Get Active, Beginner Running, Run Training, Understand Calories, Kick Your Sugar Habit and Kick Your Salt Habit.

Health has always been core to what Fitbit does, and everyone’s moving to a subscription model anyway, so the offering makes sense on the face of it. But in a world where we’ve already got thousands of monthly subscription services vying for a piece of our electronic deposits, the company’s got a tough road ahead of it convincing consumers to shell out an additional $10 a month.

“The quick pitch is that it’s a one-stop shop that gives you all of what you really need to eat better, become more active, sleep better,” CEO and co-founder James Park told TechCrunch. “And it’s a service that’s tightly integrated with your Fitbit device. And so with a user base of over 27 million active users, definitely for our user base, it’s a really compelling solution.”

The offering promises a better breakdown of Fitbit’s new Sleep Score feature, thousands of video and audio workouts and various gamified offerings designed to better help the wearer move. Perhaps more compelling are a handful of content partners, including Headspace, Daily Burn and Yoga Studio by Gaiam that supplement Fitbit’s own premium content. Of course, Fitbit Premium isn’t designed to replace any of these services outright and will instead include a selection of content from each.

As ever, I’ll reserve full judgement until we get hands-on time with the service, but my concern is the same as with many fitness content services. Much of the data collected requires user input. I suspect the reminder of a monthly fee will go a ways toward convincing users to keep up, but as with so many of these, accuracy comes down to one key fact: You can’t lie to a fitness tracker, but you can lie to an app.

“A lot of the value that we’re trying to provide as well is that the programs provide and adapt dynamically without you having to really do anything,” says Park. “And we’re trying to provide more nudges and notifications that remind you, throughout the course of the day or through your program, what things you should be doing.”

Getting people to pay for a premium version of content they’ve been offered for free is always a heavy lift — and I say that as someone who works in publishing. I haven’t seen a magic bullet in the Fitbit Premium pitch so far, but I’d be more than happy to be convinced otherwise.

The service has already been piloted in Australia and New Zealand. It will start rolling out to U.S. users this month and will be available in 17 English-speaking countries this fall, with more languages arriving next year.

The service will be exclusively targeted at Fitbit users at launch, but Park says the plan is to move toward a more platform-agnostic model going forward, a move that could foretell a further move away from a hardware-revenue model.

“Long-term, we see Fitbit Premium as something that can be used with other devices as well, whether it’s an Apple Watch, Garmin, etc.” says Park. “But initially we’re focused on our existing users, because we have a lot of them.”

SF-based Elroy Air hopes to transform bulk air cargo shipping with its ‘Chapparal’ vertical take-off and landing craft, the first version of which will be able to carry 250 lbs of cargo as far as 300 miles. The startup, which was founded in 2016 by experienced professionals with track records of working in UAS (uncrewed aerial systems) has just completed its first flights of the ‘Aluminum Falcon’ prototype test craft.

The 1,215 lb aircraft is a full-scale testing version of the eventual planned commercially deployed Chapparal system, and managed to fly to a height of 10 feet, hovering for just over a minute before returning in a controlled landing. The test took place at McMillan Airfield, at the California National Guards Camp Roberts in Central California, and during the test the VTOL was piloted remotely by the company’s lead pilot.

Elroy Air raised $9.2 million in funding in February, but it’s mostly been quietly making progress on bringing its prototype to life after debuting the initial design in 2017. The startup’s goal is to “decouple air cargo from airports” according to CEO David Merrill – which means letting big VTOLs do the work that small cargo planes currently handle for air freight.

The specific approach Elroy Air is taking makes use of hybrid-electric power trains for its aircraft, which help them to travel longer distances vs. fully electric VTOLs, while retaining better fuel efficiency vs. vehicles that only use internal combustion engines. The aircraft is also designed to work with pre-packed pods, so that it can easily and quickly swap its cargo for another shipment at its destination for the return flight.

The company will now carry out further tests of its prototype following this successful hover demonstration, and it’s looking to begin some small commercial service launches as early as next year if all goes well.

ThoughtSpot was started by a bunch of ed-Googlers looking to bring the power of search to data. Seven years later the company is growing fast, sporting a fat valuation of almost $2 billion and looking ahead to a possible IPO. Today it announced a hefty $248 million Series D round as it continues on its journey.

Investors include Silver Lake Waterman, Silver Lake’s late-stage growth capital fund along with existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures and Geodesic Capital. Today’s funding brings the total raised to $554 million, according to the company.

The company wants to help customers bring speed to data analysis by answering natural language questions about the data without having to understand how to formulate a SQL query. As a person enters questions, ThoughSpot translates that question into SQL, then displays a chart with data related to the question, all almost instantly (at least in the demo).

It doesn’t stop there though. It also uses artificial intelligence to understand intent to help come up the exact correct answer. ThoughtSpot CEO Sudheesh Nair says that this artificial intelligence underpinning is key to the product. As he explained, if you are looking for the answer to a specific question like ‘What is the profit margin of red shoes in Portland?” there won’t be multiple answers. There is only one answer, and that’s where artificial intelligence really comes into play.

“The bar on delivering that kind of answer is very high and because of that, understanding intent is critical. We use AI for that. You could ask, ‘How did we do with red shoes in Portland?’ I could ask, ‘What is the profit margin of red shoes in Portland?’ The system needs to know that we both are asking the same question. So there’s a lot of AI that goes behind it to understand the intent,” Nair explained.

Image: ThoughtSpot

ThoughtSpot gets answers to queries by connecting to a variety of internal systems like HR, CRM and ERP and uses all of this data to answer the question as best it can. So far, it appears to be working. The company has almost 250 large company customers, and is on a run rate of close to $100 million.

Nair said that the company didn’t necessarily need the money with $100 million still in the bank, but he saw an opportunity, and he seized it. He says the money gives him a great deal of flexibility moving forward including the possibility of acquiring companies to fill in missing pieces or to expand the platform’s capabilities. It also will allow him to accelerate growth. Plus, he sees the capital markets possibly tightening next year and he wanted to strike while the opportunity was in front of him.

Nair definitely sees the company going public at some point. “With these kind of resources behind us, it actually opens up an opportunity for us to do any sort of IPO that we want. I do think that a company like this will benefit from going public because Global 2000 kind of customers, where we have our most of our business, appreciate the transparency and the stability represented by public companies,” he said.

He added, “And with $350 million in the bank, it’s totally [possible to] IPO, which means that a year and a half from now if we are ready to take the company public, we can actually have all options open including a direct listing, potentially. I’m not saying we will do that, but I’m saying that this kind of funding behind us, we have all those options open.”

YouTube is expanding an experimental tweak to its recommendation engine that’s intended to reduce the amplification of conspiracy theories to the UK market.

In January, the video-sharing platform said it was making changes in the US to limit the spread of conspiracy theory content, such as junk science and bogus claims about historical events — following sustained criticism of how its platform accelerates damaging clickbait.

A YouTube spokeswoman confirmed to TechCrunch it is now in the process of rolling out the same update to suppresses conspiracy recommendations in the UK. She said it will take some time to take full effect — without providing detail on when exactly the changes will be fully applied.

The spokeswoman said YouTube acknowledges that it needs to do more to reform a recommendation system that has been shown time and again lifting harmful clickbait and misinformation into mainstream view. Though YouTube claims this negative spiral occurs only sometimes, and says on average its system points users to mainstream videos.

The company calls the type of junk content it’s been experimenting with recommending less often “borderline”, saying it’s stuff that toes the line of its acceptable content policies. In practice this means stuff like videos that make nonsense claims the earth is flat, or blatant lies about historical events such as the 9/11 terror attacks, or promote harmful junk about bogus miracle cures for serious illnesses.

All of which can be filed under misinformation ‘snake oil’. But for YouTube this sort of junk has been very lucrative snake oil as a consequence of Google’s commercial imperative being to keep eyeballs engaged in order to serve more ads.

More recently, though, YouTube has taken a reputational hit as its platform as been blamed for an extremist and radicalizing impact on young and impressionable minds by encouraging users to swallow junk science and worse.

A former Google engineer, Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on the YouTube recommendation algorithms went public last year to condemn what he described as the engine’s “toxic” impact which he said “perverts civic discussion” by encouraging users to create highly engaging borderline content.

Multiple investigations by journalists have also delved into instances where YouTube has been blamed for pushing people, including the young and impressionable, towards far right points of view via its algorithm’s radicalizing rabbit hole — which exposes users to increasingly extreme points of view without providing any context about what it’s encouraging them to view. 

Of course it doesn’t have to be this way. Imagine if a YouTube viewer who sought out at a video produced by a partisan shock jock was suggested less extreme or even an entirely alternative political point of view. Or only saw calming yoga and mindfulness videos in their ‘up next’ feed.

YouTube has eschewed a more balanced approach to the content its algorithms select and recommend for commercial reasons. But it may also have been keen to avoid drawing overt attention to the fact that its algorithms are acting as de facto editors.

And editorial decisions are what media companies make. So it then follows that tech platforms which perform algorithmic content sorting and suggestion should be regulated like media businesses are. (And all tech giants in the user generated content space have been doing their level best to evade that sort of rule of law for years.)

That Google has the power to edit out junk is clear.

A spokeswoman for YouTube told us the US test of a reduction in conspiracy junk recommendations has led to a drop in the number of views from recommendations of more than 50%.

Though she also said the test is still ramping up — suggesting the impact on the viewing and amplification of conspiracy nonsense could be even greater if YouTube were to more aggressively demote this type of BS.

What’s very clear is the company has the power to flick algorithmic levers that determine what billions of people see — even if you don’t believe that might also influence how they feel and what they believe. Which is a concentration of power that should concern people on all sides of the political spectrum.

While YouTube could further limit algorithmically amplified toxicity the problem is its business continues to monetize on engagement, and clickbait’s fantastical nonsense is, by nature, highly engaging. So — for purely commercial reasons — it has a counter incentive not to clear out all YouTube’s crap.

How long the company can keep up this balancing act remains to be seen, though. In recent years some major YouTube advertisers have intervened to make it clear they do not relish their brands being associated with abusive and extremist content. Which does represent a commercial risk to YouTube — if pressure from and on advertisers steps up.

Like all powerful tech platforms, its business is also facing rising scrutiny from politicians and policymakers. And questions about how to ensure such content platforms do not have a deleterious effect on people and societies are now front of mind for governments in some markets around the world.

That political pressure — which is a response to public pressure, after a number of scandals — is unlikely to go away.

So YouTube’s still glacial response to addressing how its population-spanning algorithms negatively select for stuff that’s socially divisive and individually toxic may yet come back to bite it — in the form of laws that put firm limits on its powers to push people’s buttons.

Michigan-based startup Orbion has secured $9.2 million in Series A funding, which it will use as it undertakes the mass-produced manufacturing of its plasma thrusters for use in small satellites. Orbion’s thrusters are Hall-effect thrusters, which use an electric field to accelerate their propellant and create thrust. Hall-effect thrusters are nothing new, but Orbion’s approach, which uses plasma propulsion, has not previously been available at a cost and volume affordable for smaller satellite operators.

Just as SpaceX has greatly reduced the cost of launch services, Orbion aims to take a technology that was once reserved for the elite few, who could spend hundreds of millions or more on launching gigantic, train car-sized satellites into orbit. That basically limited the addressable market to government, defense and some very deep-pocketed commercial clients.

It’s a shame because plasma propulsion is a fundamental necessity for some types of satellite operations, regardless of budget – and it’s also a much more propellant-efficient method vs. other potential options, and will even enable satellites to have longer operating lives before they fall out of orbit and therefore out of service.

The small sat and cube sat boom we’ve seen and are seeing is due in large part to the increased affordability of key components that make up their construction, from sensors, to optics, to processors, to solar panels and more. But as Orbion points out, in-space propulsion isn’t something that’s gained any cost benefits from advances and mass-production ramp in the computer, smartphone or energy industries here on Earth. Unlocking the ability to manufacture effective, efficient and reliable in-space propulsion systems at scale is therefore a key unlock for ensuring the small sat industry can grow with demand.

Orbion is looking to make it possible to reduce delivery times from six to eight months of testing alone, after the thrusters are manufactured, before a customer even takes delivery, down to just six to eight days from order. It’s working to improve both speed and volume through an end-to-end manufacturing process that makes use of robotic assembly lines – one borrowed in part from the missile industry, so it’s not without proven precedent.

This new round of funding will help Orbion grow to meet the swelling demand it sees from commercial industry, as well as government agencies, and was led by Material Impact and includes contributions from Invest Michigan, Invest Detroit, Wakestream Ventures, Ann Arbor SPARK and Boomerang Catapult.

Microsoft today announced the availability of its cloud regions in Switzerland. The company first announced its plans for two Swiss regions near Zurich and Geneva, called Switzerland North and West, in 2018. Earlier this year, Microsoft noted that it was seeing quite a bit of interest in these regions, especially from companies in highly regulated industries that need to address data residency regulations.

The new regions will feature support for the core Azure cloud computing services, as well as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. With this launch, Microsoft now offers its cloud services in 56 regions worldwide, which is very much part of the company’s overall strategy for Azure.

“Microsoft cloud services delivered from a given geography, such as our new regions in Switzerland, offer scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud services while helping enterprises and organizations meet their data residency, security and compliance needs,” Tom Keane, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure Global, writes in today’s announcement. “We have deep expertise protecting data and empowering customers around the globe to meet extensive security and privacy requirements by offering the broadest set of compliance certifications and attestations in the industry.”

Current customers include enterprises like UBS Group, Swiss Re Group, and Swisscom, as well as BKW, the City of Zug, die Mobiliar, Exploris Health and Skyguide.

While AWS does not currently operate a region in Switzerland, Google Cloud runs a region with three availability zones near Zurich.