Year: 2019

EQT Ventures, Initialized Capital, CRV and Y Combinator have fueled Standard Cognition with another $35 million to help retailers battle Amazon. The deal values the San Francisco-based autonomous checkout startup, founded in 2017, at $535 million.

Standard Cognition implants its AI-powered computer vision platform, which enables the autonomous checkout process, in brick-and-mortar stores. To date, the company has installed its hardware in five stores in the U.S. and Japan, with plans to expand globally using the new investment. Standard Cognition co-founder and chief operating officer Michael Suswal tells TechCrunch the company is counting on support from European VC firm EQT Ventures, which led the deal, to launch its technology in Europe.

Here’s a breakdown of the Standard Cognition autonomous checkout experience: A customer walks into one of Standard Cognition’s partners’ stores and one of 27 overhead cameras (more or less depending on the size of the store) will identify you by shape and movement, not facial recognition. The customer then opens the company’s iOS or Android app and a special light pattern flashes, allowing the cameras to tie you to your account and payment method. Finally, grab whatever items you need and leave the store. No checkout is required for Standard Cognition to bill you. It even works without an app: Shop like normal and then walk up to a kiosk screen, the cameras identify what items you have chosen and you can pay with cash or credit card.

News of Standard Cognition’s Series B comes shortly after Amazon confirmed plans to open three additional Amazon Go stores, the e-commerce giant’s cashierless convenience stores. Amazon opened its first Amazon Go store in Seattle in 2016, though Standard Cognition, which operates only one branded brick-and-mortar store of its own, was first to plant roots in San Francisco. Standard Cognition, however, has no plans to open any more of its own stores because “running stores takes a lot of effort,” said Suswal. Instead, the company plans to bring its cashierless experience to other retail chains with the fresh funds.

Standard Cognition announces its Series B financing just eight months after closing a $40 million Series A. Suswal, justifying the lightning-fast growth, said 2019 has been Standard’s “year of deployment,” next year will be “the year of repeatability” and 2021 will be “the year of scale.” The company has raised a total of $86 million in venture capital funding.

“Traditional brick and mortar retailers are caught in a perfect storm,” EQT partner Alastair Mitchell said in a statement. “From the encroachment of behemoths like Amazon into every inch of the market to changing consumer attitudes, as busy people demand an ever more efficient shopping experience, margins are being squeezed like never before. The talented and driven Standard Cognition team have worked quickly to build a product that allows physical retailers, of all sizes, to tackle these challenges.”

Over the past several years, many have suggested that broadband internet should be regarded as public utility, like water or gas. Staying connected has become an essential part of nearly every facet of of life, but according to a new report, high speed connections may not be as prevalent here in the States as you may think.

In its new Rural America and Technology study, NPD notes that 31 percent of U.S. households don’t have broadband (25Mbps downloads and up) internet connections. The number works out to roughly 100 million per the report. That figure, unsurprisingly, is highly concentrated in rural areas — less than one-fifth of that population has a broadband connection.

While broadband was considered something of a luxury in the not so distant past, it’s grown in an increasingly essential aspect of modern existence, from work to health to entertainment. The concentration of access to the technology in urban vs. rural areas has been a major aspect in what analysts have referred to as the “digital divide.” Rural areas make up nearly 97 percent of the total U.S. land.

On the upside, the report suggests that 5G could have a profound impact on those numbers. “The roll out of 5G will have a significant impact in rural America, disrupting the limited broadband carrier market and delivering broadband to many households that have not previously had access,” NPD’s Eddie Hold said in a statement released with the report. “This will inevitably provide an opportunity for manufacturers and retailers to reach new consumers with advanced devices.”

Given the speed and spottiness with which the technology has been rolled out thus far, however, coupled with the high prices of first-generation handsets, however, it will likely take several years before that comes to pass.

Serverless developers have always faced a steep challenge when it comes to writing code on their laptops, and debugging said code on cloud services. It’s sort of a chicken and egg thing. You can’t deploy until you’re ready, but you can’t know if you’re ready without testing. That requires access to your cloud services on your laptop, something that up until now has been difficult to replicate. Today, Stackery announced a free tool that lets developers test cloud services on their laptops before they deploy.

Abner Germanow, chief marketing officer at Stackery, says the new tool solves a really hard problem for developers. “Local development is difficult because you’re not building on a server. You’re building a set of services that live in the cloud, and you can’t replicate AWS inside your laptop,” he said.

Instead, Stackery has created a clever work-around called Cloudlocal. Today, it is designed to work with AWS Lambda in the Amazon cloud. Stackery CTO and co-founder Chase Douglas says the company has essentially found a way to replicate the cloud on the developer’s local laptop. “We help you take your laptop to the cloud. What I mean by that is that we take some base best practices and tools that AWS provides, which makes it possible to run the runtime of your function on your laptop,” Douglas explained.

He adds, “Then we add on to that the same permissions credentials that your function would use as though it were running in Lambda. Then we go and fetch more about the environment of that Lambda, like environment variable values, which is key for things like service discovery and parameterization.”

He said that before having a tool like Cloudlocal, developers would have to create ways to mimic services on the laptop, which creates a lot of never-ending extra work, and might not match the way the services behave exactly. The company actually came up with the solution by solving a problem it had developing serverless programs locally in-house, and decided to share it with the community.

Stackery was founded in 2016 and has raised over $7 million, according to Crunchbase data. It offers tools free for individual developers, but makes money charging for larger teams for it services.

Netflix has canceled the animated series “Tuca and Bertie” after a single season.

The show, which starred Tiffany Haddish and Ali Wong as the titular friends (a toucan named Tuca and a songbird named Bertie), debuted in May. It shared some creative DNA with Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman — creator Lisa Hanawalt designed the characters on “BoJack” — but it was a different show, with a diverse cast and crazier, dirtier storylines.

Hanawalt announced the cancellation on Twitter, saying that Netflix would not be ordering a second season of the show, but adding, “I’m hopeful we can find a home for Tuca & Bertie to continue their adventures.”

The news came on the same day that Netflix announced its cancellation of “Designated Survivor,” the Kiefer Sutherland-starring series that was previously canceled by ABC before moving to Netflix.

It also comes shortly after Netflix reported disappointing subscriber growth for its second quarter, and a net loss of subscribers in the United States — something that the streaming service specifically attributed to the failure of its latest content to attract as many additional subscribers as hoped.

Alphabet’s autonomous driving and robotaxi company Waymo does a lot of training in order to refine and improve the artificial intelligence that powers its self-driving software. Recently, it teamed up with fellow Alphabet company and AI specialist DeepMind to develop new training methods that would help make its training better and more efficient.

The two worked together to bring a training method called ‘Population Based Training’ (PBT for short) to bear on Waymo’s challenge of building better virtual drivers, and the results were impressive – DeepMind says in a blog post that using PBT decreased false positives in a network that identifies and places boxes around pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists spotted by a Waymo vehicle’s many sensors by 24 percent. Not only that, but is also resulted in savings in terms of both training time and resources, using about 50% of both compared to standard methods that Waymo was using previously.

To step back a little, let’s look at what PBT even is. Basically, it’s a method of training that takes its cues from how Darwinian evolution works. Neural nets essentially work by trying something and then measuring those results against some kind of standard to see if their attempt is more ‘right’ or more ‘wrong’ based on the desired outcome. In the training methods that Waymo was using, they’d have multiple neural nets working independently on the same task, all with varied degrees of what’s known as a “learning rate,” or the degree to which they can deviate in their approach each time they attempt a task (like identifying objects in a image, for instance). A higher learning rate means much more variety in terms of the quality of the outcome, but that swings both ways – a lower learning rate means much steadier progress, but a low likelihood of getting big positive jumps in performance.

But all that comparative training requires a huge amount of resources, and sorting the good from the bad in terms of which are working out relies on either the gut feeling of individual engineers, or massive-scale search with a manual component involved where engineers ‘weed out’ the worse performing neural nets to free up processing capabilities for better ones.

What DeepMind and Waymo did with this experiment was essentially automated that weeding, automatically killing the ‘bad’ training and replacing them with better-performing spin-offs of the best-in-class networks running the task. That’s where evolution comes in, since it’s kind of a process of artificial natural selection. Yes, that does make sense – read it again.

In order to avoid potential pitfalls with this method, DeepMind tweaked some aspects after early research, including evaluating models on fast, 15-minute intervals, building out strong validation criteria and example sets to ensure that tests really were building better-performing neural nets for the real world, and not just good pattern-recognition engines for the specific data they’d been fed.

Finally, the companies also developed a sort of ‘island population’ approach by building sub-populations of neural nets that only competed with one another in limited groups, similar to how animal populations cut off from larger groups (ie, limited to islands) develop far-different and sometimes better-adapted characteristics vs. their large land mass cousins.

Overall, it’s a super interesting look at how deep learning and artificial intelligence can have a real impact on technology that already is, in some cases, and will soon be even much more involved in our daily lives.

The Void, a developer of immersive virtual reality entertainment centers, is partnering with the multi-national, multi-hyphenate mall developer Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield to build twenty five new locations around the world.

Location-based virtual reality has become the default gateway into the consumer market for virtual reality headsets given that adoption of the consumer wearable device hasn’t been all that robust.

Utah-based The Void has some big intellectual property behind its immersive experiences including ‘Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire’ from Lucasfilm; Walt Disney Animation’s ‘Ralph Breaks theInternet’; and ‘Ghostbusters: Dimension’.

Through the partnership with Westfield in the U.S. the company intends to launch pop-ups at the Westfield World Trade Center in New York,  the Westfield San Francisco Centre, Westfield Santa Anita in the outskirts of Pasadena, and Westfield UTC in San Diego. The Void notes that all of those locations will become permanent going forward.

The companies also intend to take the show on the road with openings planned for Paris, London, Amsterdam, Chicago, Cophenhagen, Oberhausen, San Jose, Calif., Stockholm, and Vienna.

This partnership between the two companies reflects some harsh realities for both businesses. For virtual reality it’s the limited home adoption of headset entertainment and for shopping malls, it’s the rise of ecommerce and the conversion of these public spaces from shopping destinations to broader entertainment hubs.

It’s a fact that Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield chief executive Chrisophe Cuvillier acknowledged in a statement about the partnership. “Over the past years, our industry has evolved dramatically. In a connected world, shopping is not enough anymore,” Cuvillier said in a statement. “Today, our customers expect to be entertained and brought together to share memorable, engaging sensory experiences.”

Hardware developers toying with the idea of building physical stuff that can plug into the decentralized world of blockchain should point their eyes at Elk: A dev board in the making that’s been designed to support all sorts of IoT projects with a blockchain flavor.

Such as, for example, a connected door-lock that doesn’t demand that your ability to access your own property be dependent on the uptime (and accord) of servers of a remote corporate giant, nor your comings and goings be logged by a commercial third party.

Or, in another of their suggested examples, an alarm clock that charges you in bitcoin if you hit the snooze button too much, rather than getting up. Ouch.

The team behind Elk have just launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to bring their prototype to market — with the aim of shipping the board to developers from next Spring.

They’re looking to raise a modest ~$20k. While the gizmo is being priced at $59 for early bird backers, or ten dollars extra for those who failed to, uh, un-snooze their clocks in time.

We covered Elk last year — when it was in an earlier stage of development and being called Elkrem.

At that point the team hoped to get the device to market before the end of the year. As it turns out it’s taken them a little longer to feel ready to fire up a crowdfunder — hitting various challenges along the way.

It’s worth flagging it’s not the team’s first product for hardware devs. They grabbed attention at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe back in 2013, when they got plucked out of startup alley as an audience choice to participate in our startup battlefield competition — where they pitched their idea to tap into sensors on smartphones as an alternative to Ardunio shields.

They went on to crowdfund and ship the 1Sheeld — and are still selling it to this day.

So there are fewer caveats than can usually apply to a crowdfunded hardware (though, as ever with anything being pitched for sale when still a prototype, it’s always prudent to expect delays).

Here’s a quick Q&A with Elk CEO and co-founder Amr Saleh on the team’s aim and ambition for the device:

TC: What is Elk and what is it for?
Saleh: Elk is a hardware development board for the blockchain and the decentralized web. It combines the simplicity of Arduino with native support for decentralized networks. With only a few lines of code you can build IoT that interfaces with Ethereum, IPFS, Whisper, and more!

Elk empowers developers to build what we call “Decent IoT”. Decent IoT is decentralized, gives users true control and true privacy, and allows entirely new use-cases like payments, oracles, selling your data, and much more.

With Elk you can build a smart door lock that you can control remotely without relying on a cloud provider that tracks and controls your device usage, or build a charging station that you can rent with Ethereum, or lock money into a treadmill that you can only get back when you work out. The possibilities are truly endless.

TC: Why is dedicated hardware necessary for developing blockchain IoT devices? What advantages does the hardware offer over rival dev boards, for eg, using microprocessors like Raspberry Pi?
Saleh: You can certainly use a microprocessor like Raspberry Pi to develop blockchain IoT devices. What differentiates Elk hardware-wise is that we combine both a microcontroller a microprocessor, a WiFi module and persistent storage preloaded with our OS in one breadboard-compatible board, and this allows us to offer a development experience that is plug-and-play just like programming an Arduino.

Unlike using a Raspberry Pi, with Elk you won’t have to deal with wallet and keys management, fuss over setting up nodes, tune their parameters to run well on an embedded device, handle crashes, etc. We are delivering the 10x easier Arduino-like experience to blockchain IoT development, with all the libraries that Arduino already supports. Developers can now focus on their applications and not the overheads.

TC: Who is the Elk for? How large is the blockchain hardware development community right now & how do you see that evolving over the next few years?
Saleh: Currently, blockchain hardware development is small and mostly siloed to building hardware wallets for blockchain enthusiasts.

We believe the potential for blockchain and decentralization extends far beyond that. Elk is not just  for blockchain enthusiasts, but for privacy-conscious makers as well. Decentralization allows us to build IoT that is far more private, far more secure, and far more capable. We call it “Decent IoT”, and that’s what we are set out to introduce with Elk.

Current IoT architecture relies on centralized cloud providers for communication and data storage. This, by necessity, means that cloud providers (and whomever hacks them) can control your devices, deny you access, or tap into your private life.

The new decentralized web enables a completely new paradigm for IoT. A paradigm where your communication flows privately through a decentralized network with no central authority responsible for relaying your communication, no third party that can track your device usage, and no third party that can control your device. It additionally opens the door for other possibilities like payments, oracles, selling your data, and more.

Elk provides the tools and the UX to make building Decent IoT as easy as writing a few lines of code, and we’re hoping that over time this would further drive adoption of decentralization within the hardware community.

TC: Why the delay in launching the KS? What challenges have you encountered as you’ve prototyped Elk & how confident are you of meeting your estimated shipping deadlines?
Saleh: Blockchain and decentralization are very nascent fields, and ensuring that Elk offers the stable plug-and-play experience we want to offer was certainly a challenge.

Another significant challenge we faced was finding the right balance of features to offer in Elk. For example, we initially felt it was paramount for Elk to have a secure hardware enclave and spent months building out a prototype. We decided to later drop hardware security in favor of a stable and superior development experience. The development experience in building Decent IoT, we think, is far more of a bottleneck than pushing the extra mile in security.

At this point, we’ve been through four different iterations of our hardware and have done our diligence to be confident that we can deliver the product we’re offering with no surprises in production. We’ve already been through the process of manufacturing hardware. In our previous Kickstarter we shipped on time to our backers and sold tens of thousands of units in the years that followed.

TC: What’s the business model? Are you intending to make money via distributing/supporting the SDK as well as selling dev hardware?
Saleh: At this point, we are focused on making Elk the standard for building blockchain IoT devices. Beyond the current campaign, we’d be looking at enterprise use-cases that require stricter hardware requirements and support.

Amazon’s Alexa ushered in a new dawn of user interfaces, bringing voice into the mix as a viable option. Dozens of companies have sprouted because of this, not least of which being Airbud.io.

Airbud allows any company to add a voice interface to its website. The company just closed a $4 million round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from ERA and Spider Capital.

Airbud was cofounded by Israel Krush, Uri Valevski, and Rom Cohen after the team saw the growth of voice interfaces and wondered how to capitalize on it.

By allowing companies to add voice/chat bot utility to their websites, Airbud hopes to increase retention of end-users on sites and give them easier access to the information they’re looking for. Krush says that Airbud is focusing on websites that you have to be on, rather than the ones you want to be on.

That means Airbud clients are mostly in the healthcare space and travel space, helping end-users find a physician or book a flight using their voice.

Most importantly, Airbud operates on a plug and play system, meaning that clients don’t have to do the usual heavy lifting involved in creating a chat bot. Most of the time, folks who implement chatbots have to build a conversation tree. Airbud uses existing information scraped from the website, paired with an easy plug-and-play system for clients, to automatically build out a knowledge graph and have conversations with end-users.

Airbud charges based on the number of indexed pages and traffic to those pages.

The company plans to use the funding to double the size of its team from seven to 15.

eBay had a front row seat for Amazon’s historic growth. The auction site does just fine, thank you very much, but in terms of revenue is only a fraction of the e-commerce giant. That ship has almost certainly sailed, but eBay’s finally readying a service to take on Amazon’s offering more directly.

Launching in the U.S. next year, Managed Delivery is an end-to-end fulfillment offering for eBay sellers. The company will store seller merchandise in third-party warehouses, allowing for faster fulfillment, while giving sellers the option to provide free shipping with a turn around time of two or three days.

Those aren’t the only lessons eBay has learned from Amazon, either. There’s also the issue of branding. Per the press release,

With approximately 1.5 million packages being sent daily in the U.S. by eBay sellers, Managed Delivery will also result in hundreds of millions of eBay branded boxes and packages being placed on front porches across the United States within the next few years. These branded packages will not only deliver a better shopping experience for customers, but materially enhance eBay’s brand identity as a popular consumer shopping destination.

Per Reuters, the new offering should apply to up to half of items currently listed on the auction site. Better late than never, perhaps.

If you’ve used Formget in the past few years, there’s a good chance we know about it.

Formget bills itself as an online form maker and email marketing company based in Bhopal, India. The company allows its 43,000 customers to create online forms so others can submit their resumes or apply for a job, or provide proof of address or employment, buy goods online, and more.

How do we know? Because the company left one of its cloud storage servers online and exposed without a password.

A security researcher who asked not to be named found Formget’s exposed Amazon S3 storage bucket and informed TechCrunch in the hope of getting the data secured. Formget pulled the bucket offline overnight after we reached out to the company on Wednesday. But the company’s founder and chief executive Neeraj Agarwal did not respond to several emails and follow-ups requesting comment.

The storage bucket was packed with hundreds of thousands of files and documents. The storage bucket had a folder for each year dating back to 2013 contained sub-folders for each month, filled with user-uploaded documents.

Some of the files we reviewed contained highly sensitive information, including:

• Scans of several passports — including U.S. passports — and other scanned documents, like pay checks, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, national identity cards, and more;

• Letters from Veterans Affairs certifying former veterans of service-connected disability compensation, including the amounts paid;

• Details of obtained loans and mortgages, including amounts, interest rates, and histories, as well as bank account statements, gas bills, military discharge from active duty forms and other similar proof of residency;

• Several internal corporate documents, including cybersecurity assessment summaries for several banks and financial institutions labeled “confidential” and for “internal use only”;

• UPS shipping labels, including names and phone numbers, and the shipping contents;

• Resumes, including names, postal and email addresses, phone numbers, education backgrounds and job histories.

• Invoices from Google, Zoom, and even from Formget itself, for billed services — in some cases including the name, address and partial credit card numbers;

• And several airline and hotel booking receipts.

These kinds of data exposures — where private data is mistakenly made public — has become a common security problem over the years. There have been several cases of inadvertent data exposures from changing storage server permissions to public. Earlier this year millions of mortgage documents were left exposed. Scraped Facebook data was up for grabs in a similar data leak. Last year, an entire Washington state internet provider left its “keys to the kingdom” exposed because of a configuration error.

Although companies often chalk up the exposures to human error, in reality it’s not so easy to inadvertently make private cloud data public.

One senior cloud security engineer who spoke to TechCrunch on background said that the major cloud services have worked hard to keep data safe by default.

“In the case of Amazon, the default settings on an S3 bucket are private — no direct unauthorized internet access is allowed,” the engineer said. Amazon also provides free tools for scanning a user’s cloud infrastructure to look for misconfigurations.

“When there are these reports in the news of massive leaks, it’s getting harder to point the blame at the cloud provider,” the engineer said. “On any installation in the past several years, developers have to go out of their way to expose these records.”

“Once an organization leaks data in a grossly negligent way like this, they have little to blame but themselves,” the engineer said.