Month: September 2020

After six months of sheltering in place (and now weeks of hiding from wildfire smoke) alongside a toddler who never seems to run out of energy, I’m the last person who would try to make anyone feel bad for giving their kid some screen time.

But if a company wants to build a toy that aims to educate and entertain without the need for a screen, they’ve at least got my attention.

That’s the concept behind Kiri, a company competing in the (first all virtual!) TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield this week. They’ve put a spin on the classic wooden block, packing it with smarts to help kids learn things like shapes, animals, and numbers in multiple languages without involving yet another screen.

Kiri is built to work alongside an expandable set of RFID-enabled tiles, with each tile representing a different animal, food, etc. Touch the block to a tile, and a built-in speaker announces what has been tapped.

A “mode” card, meanwhile, lets you switch things up with a quiz game (where kids are prompted to find and tap a tile that Kiri knows you own), or quickly shift between English, Mandarin, and Spanish.

Image Credits: Often Studio (opens in a new window)

The Kiri block itself is deliberately simple; about 2×2″ of smoothly sanded wood, the only visible externals are a few small holes where the speaker vents, a port for charging, and a translucent, color-shifting Kiri logo. Tap the blue block? The logo turns blue. Got the answer right in quiz mode? Green.

Want to know which words your kid really seems to be getting? A companion app lets parents check in on a kid’s progress (and, of course, order new cards.)

Kiri took its first steps into the world at the end of 2019 with a successfully funded campaign on Kickstarter. They initially intended to ship the first units by April of this year, but the pandemic has thrown a wrench or five in the gears. Kiri’s Nick Porfilio tells me they’re now on track to ship by the holidays.

Kiri’s $99 starter kit comes with the block, a tote bag, and a set of tiles to get you started. The company intends to add more tiles and lesson categories to the mix over time, with an $8 monthly subscription meant to keep things fresh as long as your kid stays interested.

Porfilio also tells me that they’re looking to expand beyond tiles in time, mentioning concepts like Kiri-enabled books and musical instruments. For now, though, they’re focusing on getting their blocks into the hands of those who pre-ordered.

Alexa just read me Monday’s baseball scores. It was great for two reasons. First, the A’s shut out the Mariners 9-0 in the second game of a doubleheader. And second, she did so in Samuel L. Jackson’s voice. With Amazon based in Seattle, I assume they’re happy I’ve chosen to focus on the latter fact for the rest of this post.

Alexa heads Toni Reid and Rohit Prasad joined us onstage today at Disrupt to discuss the smart assistant’s history, biggest obstacles and future. They also used the occasion to announce that the highest-grossing actor of all time now has his own wake word. After installing the Samuel L. Jackson celebrity voice skill, Alexa users can make the “Pulp Fiction” star their default assistant voice, triggering him with the wake words “Hey Samuel.”

I’ve been using the skill on an Echo Show this week, and it’s a fun addition to Alexa that swears sometimes. In fact, there’s a warning when you install it that it’s not particularly family-friendly (like the real Samuel L. Jackson, he uses MFer a fair bit more than your standard voice assistant). Most of the commands are just standard Alexa stuff in Jackson’s voice, but there are some gems on there, like asking questions about reptiles on aircraft. He’s a bit less up on some of the deeper cuts from his filmography.

The addition of Jackson for Alexa follows Google’s own introduction of celebrity voice cameos from John Legend and Issa Rae. It’s clear that both companies believe a little star power goes a long way toward keeping users engaged with a virtual assistant. Honestly though, Jackson is one of the best gets you can imagine, both in terms of name recognition and novelty. It’s hard to think of too many names that might top it (Obama? Oprah? Pee-Wee Herman?).

One of the stories Amazon is interested in telling here is how surprisingly difficult it was to create a secondary wake word. The Samuel L. Jackson skill was available before, but essentially required the user to say ““Hey Alexa, ask Samuel…” Essentially a smart assistant game of telephone. The novelty wears off pretty fast, to be honest.

“The Alexa wake word has billions of interactions every week,” Alexa Senior Machine Learning Manager Shiv Vitaladevuni says in a post tied to the news. “However, there was a paucity of training data for the ‘Hey, Samuel’ wake word. To develop the multi wake word model for ‘Hey Samuel’ and Alexa, we had to develop new training and data modeling techniques, while drawing on learnings from the past.”

While venture capitalists are pouring funding into edtech startups, the surge of interest isn’t coming without pressure.

Edtech companies are searching for new ways to tap into a booming market. As Course Hero co-founder Andrew Graeur put it, the goal for his Q&A platform went from reaching a million subscribers to “many millions” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

One way edtech companies are approaching these unprecedented times is by raising extension rounds that are earmarked specifically to bring on strategic partners from around the world. The approach of trading equity for a chance at globalization is neither rare nor cheap, but comes with new weight given the sector’s boom.

Today, ApplyBoard closed a $55 million extension round for its Series C, which now totals $130 million. ApplyBoard helps international students search and apply to universities and colleges across the world. It wants users to think of it as a Common App for international students, serving as a college undergrad application.

A spokesperson for the startup — which became a unicorn valued at over $1.4 billion in May — says the round did not change its valuation. Instead, the financing was “less about funding, and more about the partners that we were able to bring on board as a result.”

When it comes to pop culture, a company executive or history questions, most of us use Google as a memory crutch to recall information we can’t always keep in our heads, but Google can’t help you remember the name of your client’s spouse or the great idea you came up with at a meeting the other day.

Enter Luther.AI, which purports to be Google for your memory by capturing and transcribing audio recordings, while using AI to deliver the right information from your virtual memory bank in the moment of another online conversation or via search.

The company is releasing an initial browser-based version of their product this week at TechCrunch Disrupt where it’s competing for the $100,000 prize at TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield.

Luther.AI’s founders say the company is built on the premise that human memory is fallible, and that weakness limits our individual intelligence. The idea behind Luther.AI is to provide a tool to retain, recall and even augment our own brains.

It’s a tall order, but the company’s founders believe it’s possible through the growing power of artificial intelligence and other technologies.

“It’s made possible through a convergence of neuroscience, NLP and blockchain to deliver seamless in-the-moment recall. GPT-3 is built on the memories of the public internet, while Luther is built on the memories of your private self,” company founder and CEO Suman Kanuganti told TechCrunch.

It starts by recording your interactions throughout the day. For starters, that will be online meetings in a browser, as we find ourselves in a time where that is the way we interact most often. Over time though, they envision a high-quality 5G recording device you wear throughout your day at work and capture your interactions.

If that is worrisome to you from a privacy perspective, Luther is building in a few safeguards starting with high-end encryption. Further, you can only save other parties’ parts of a conversation with their explicit permission. “Technologically, we make users the owner of what they are speaking. So for example, if you and I are having a conversation in the physical world unless you provide explicit permission, your memories are not shared from this particular conversation with me,” Kanuganti explained.

Finally, each person owns their own data in Luther and nobody else can access or use these conversations either from Luther or any other individual. They will eventually enforce this ownership using blockchain technology, although Kanuganti says that will be added in a future version of the product.

Image Credits: Luther.ai

Kanuganti says the true power of the product won’t be realized with a few individuals using the product inside a company, but in the network effect of having dozens or hundreds of people using it, even though it will have utility even for an individual to help with memory recall, he said.

While they are releasing the browser-based product this week, they will eventually have a stand-alone app, and can also envision other applications taking advantage of the technology in the future via an API where developers can build Luther functionality into other apps.

The company was founded at the beginning of this year by Kanuganti and three co-founders including CTO Sharon Zhang, design director Kristie Kaiser and scientist Marc Ettlinger. It has raised $500,000 and currently has 14 employees including the founders.

Facebook wants to turn the Quest into more than a gaming device. Today, the company shared early demos of “Infinite Office” a new set of features that will bring solo productivity to the Oculus Quest.

The features which will begin rolling out this winter will allow users to work across multiple customizable screens built on top of the Oculus Browser. Users will be able to see live feeds from the onboard cameras so that they can integrate the VR world with their own home.

The company announced a partnership with Logitech that will allow certain keyboards to be recognize, tracked and rendered inside the headset so users can easily input text while in working inside the Quest.

Facebook says that more features will be rolling out over the coming months and that early releases would focus on personal productivity rather than group collaboration.

Integrations are obviously going to be key here, especially when you’re cutting yourself off from your main machines.

ServiceNow today announced the latest release of its workflow automation platform. With this, the company is emphasizing a number of new solutions for specific verticals, including for telcos and financial services organizations. This focus on verticals extends the company’s previous efforts to branch out beyond the core IT management capabilities that defined its business during its early years. The company is also adding new features for making companies more resilient in the face of crises, as well as new machine learning-based tools.

Dubbed the ‘Paris’ release, this update also marks one of the first major releases for the company since former SAP CEO Bill McDermott became its president and CEO last November.

“We are in the business of operating on purpose,” McDermott said “And that purpose is to make the world of work work better for people. And frankly, it’s all about people. That’s all CEOs talk about all around the world. This COVID environment has put the focus on people. In today’s world, how do you get people to achieve missions across the enterprise? […] Businesses are changing how they run to drive customer loyalty and employee engagement.”

He argues that at this point, “technology is no longer supporting the business, technology is the business,” but at the same time, the majority of companies aren’t prepared to meet whatever digital disruption comes their way. ServiceNow, of course, wants to position itself as the platform that can help these businesses.

“We are very fortunate at ServiceNow,” CJ Desai, ServiceNow’s Chief Product Officer, said. “We are the critical platform for digital transformation, as our customers are thinking about transforming their companies.”

As far as the actual product updates, ServiceNow is launching a total of six new products. These include new business continuity management features with automated business impact analysis and tools for continuity plan development, as well as new hardware asset management for IT teams and legal service delivery for legal operations teams.

Image Credits: ServiceNow

With specialized solutions for financial services and telco users, the company is also now bringing together some of its existing solutions with more specialized services for these customers. As ServiceNow’s Dave Wright noted, this goes well beyond just putting together existing blocks.

“The first element is actually getting familiar with the business,” he explained. “So the technology, actually building the product, isn’t that hard. That’s relatively quick. But the uniqueness when you look at all of these workflows, it’s the connection of the operations to the customer service side. Telco is a great example. You’ve got the telco network operations side, making sure that all the operational equipment is active. And then you’ve got the business service side with customer service management, looking at how the customers are getting service. Now, the interesting thing is, because we’ve got both things sitting on one platform, we can link those together really easily.”

Image Credits: ServiceNow

On the machine learning side, ServiceNow made six acquisitions in the area in the last four years, Wright noted — and that is now starting to pay off. Specifically, the company is launching its new predictive intelligence workbench with this release. This new service makes it easier for process owners to detect issues, while also suggesting relevant tasks and content to agents, for example, and prioritizing incoming requests automatically. Using unsupervised learning, the system can also identify other kinds of patterns and with a number of pre-built templates, users can build their own solutions, too.

“The ServiceNow advantage has always been one architecture, one data model and one born-in-the-cloud platform that delivers workflows companies need and great experiences employees and customers expect,” said Desai. “The Now Platform Paris release provides smart experiences powered by AI, resilient operations, and the ability to optimize spend. Together, they will provide businesses with the agility they need to help them thrive in the COVID economy.”

Another day, another video meeting. Or video happy hour. Or video birthday party. Another grid of 30 faces, all sort of trying to have one conversation.

While it’s beyond wonderful to have access to these big group video chat platforms during this pandemic dumpster fire, they’re all a bit… exhausting. Part of that is just the inherent weirdness of talking with a screen, but a big part of it is that video gatherings just don’t flow the way their real world counterparts do. When you get people together for a real-life party, you’re usually not cramming 30 people into one big group, the collective focus silently shifting to whichever face managed to get a word out. You break off into smaller groups. Everyone holds their own little conversations, moving to whichever chat catches their ear on the way to the food/bar/bathroom/whatever.

Rally, a company competing in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield this week, is building a video chat platform with this in mind.

Rally builds group video calls around “tables” – think breakout rooms, except that you can juuuust barely hear the chatter from group to group. Not so much that it’s distracting, but enough that if another table starts talking about the latest episode of a show you love, it might grab your attention. You can hop to another table with a click, then jump right back into your last conversation just as quickly.

Tables live within “rooms,” each of which supports up to 35 users at a time. Larger events can have multiple rooms, allowing for things like live music events where each room plays a different genre.

Image Credits: Rally

The whole approach is meant to give the platform an almost physical feel, without requiring much more complexity than the Zooms and Meets of the world that everyone has already grown used to. There’s no 3D aspect to it, nor virtual animated avatars to learn to control.

Need to keep others from eavesdropping? Maybe you’re at a virtual pub trivia night, for example, and don’t want other teams overhearing your answers. A privacy toggle lets you lock down your tables conversation temporarily, and quickly take the walls back down when the time comes. You can also adjust the volume of the other tables if the background buzz gets too distracting.

Beyond being able to configure things and boot troublemakers from the event, hosts get a few bonus features that guests don’t. They can “take the stage” (alone or with a guest of their choosing) to make announcements to everyone at full volume, or they can opt to randomly shuffle the tables to discourage people from hanging with the same fellow event goers the whole time.

Rally co-founder Ali Jiwani tells me that their initial focus was a bit specific: They were building a platform for hosting live comedy events, so much of which depends on the energy of the crowd. When users started asking to use the platform for other things, they retuned it for broader use cases. People are still welcome to (and do!) host live comedy on the platform — it’s just not the primary focus anymore.

Rally is built to work within the browser without any downloads, with the catch that “browser” here currently means Chrome. It might work in other browsers, but Rally strongly suggests sticking with Chrome for now.

In the midst of Disrupt 2020, we’re busy keeping tabs on all the panels, chats, demos and battling startups, but we’re also prepping for what comes next. Next Tuesday, the Extra Crunch Live series of Q&As with founders and investors resumes, this time with guests Andrew Braccia and Sonali De Rycker from Accel.

If you are just catching up to Extra Crunch Live, we’ve been hosting live discussions since the early COVID-19 days here in the United States with folks like Mark Cuban, Plaid founder Zach Perret and Sequoia’s Roelof Botha taking part.

The Accel chat is going to be interesting for a few reasons, one of which is that Braccia is the opposite of loud — TechCrunch has noted his general reticence to public comment in prior reporting. But Braccia was early money into Slack, which means he’ll have good perspective into the direct listing market, the IPO market writ large, SaaS and the remote-work boom. We’ll make sure to get the latest.

De Rycker is a bit more active in the public sphere and has lead deals into companies like Sennder (which recently did a deal with Uber), Shift Technology and Avito, which sold to Naspers for north of $1 billion last year. As you can tell from that string of deals, De Rycker will be able to give us a working dig into what’s up in the European startup scene.

And as De Rycker worked as an investment banker before VC, we’ll see what she has to say regarding today’s M&A and IPO climes.

All in all, it’s going to be a good time that I am looking forward to hosting. Login details follow for Extra Crunch folks, and you can snag a cheap trial here if you need access.

Until then, enjoy Disrupt and we’ll see you on Tuesday. Don’t forget to bring your best questions, and we might get to one of them!

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Everything we do seems to have an associated app these days, and all day they vie for your attention, pinging and lighting up in their needy ways. TouchWood wants to tone down this exhausting non-stop competition with a quiet, simplified interface built right into the natural material of your desk or wall.

Co-founders Matthew Dworman and Gaurav Asthana were fed up with the idea that making your home or workplace smarter usually meant adding even more stuff: a smart speaker that sits on your desk, a smart watch constantly telling you your step count, a smart fridge that slips advertisements into your morning routine. Not only that but these devices and apps are constantly drawing you away from what you want to do, whether that’s work or trying not to work.

They wanted (they told me) something like the enchanted sword Sting from Lord of the Rings: It’s just a sword 99 percent of the time, but it’s also an orc radar if and when you need it, and even then it just glows. Why doesn’t the digital world similarly only appear when you need it, and in the least obtrusive fashion possible?

Dworman previously worked in high-end furniture design, and with Asthana developed the idea of interacting with tech via “a slab of wood instead of an app,” as the latter put it.

Image Credits: TouchWood

“What we’ve created is a modular tech platform that uses high-intensity LEDs with capacitive touch sensing. This allows us to embed it in essentially opaque material,” Dworman explained. “The wall, countertop, desk, in the home, the office, retail, transportation, we see so many ways to provide information and completely invisible controls.”

The surface would appear completely normal when the display is off, and indeed it is. Mui Labs, which demonstrated at CES its own natural material display, requires a specially perforated wood surface that you probably wouldn’t want to spill coffee on. A TouchWood display is just that: wood — or many other common surface materials.

A TouchWood surface in action. (The lines are an artifact of the camera’s framerate.)

It’s not meant to be a second display, but a friendly overflow for the information avalanche presented to us via our desktops, laptops, and phones… and speakers, watches, coffee makers, robot dogs, and so on.

“We’re not trying to put a computer in a surface — we want to provide you with a better touchpoint for your existing devices, to enhance their capabilities by taking away some of the information pressure that’s put on them,” said Asthana.

Image Credits: TouchWood

Perhaps you, like me, constantly flick your eyes towards the tabs in your browsers, or the apps arrayed on the bottom of your screen, to see if there’s any change — a new email, a message on Slack, a calendar item. A TouchWood desk would let those notifications take alternative routes, like a glowing circle off where you put your coffee or mouse. Tap it there and get a summary, or go to the content, or swipe it away — but you never have to switch tabs, or go to a different app, or unlock your phone. And when it’s done, the desk is just a piece of wood again.

Dworman sees the transition as natural. “Touchscreens the way we know them have really only been around for 10 or 11 years. But because they’re so ubiquitous we kind of take them for granted,” he said. “When you watch sci-fi films, this tech is still being used 500 years in the future! But it shouldn’t be. In car terms, the iPhone as it is now is like the Model T.”

TouchWood aims to be a platform eventually, but needs to launch a product of its own first. It plans to have a nice sit/stand desk with two large display areas available next year for somewhere in the $2,000 region. Expensive, yes — but you may be surprised what people will happily spend on new furniture, especially something like a major component of a newly important home office.

After proving out the concept with a flagship product, they can start working their way into other niches and working with partners. Embedding an invisible display in a countertop, wall, or of course a restaurant table leads to all kinds of use cases. Here’s hoping TouchWood’s tech leads to a future with slightly fewer screens in it — at least ones we can see.

Facebook is adding a fitness tracker, Oculus Move, to its sweet suite of software for its latest version of the Quest.

Announced today as part of the Facebook Connect event outlining the company’s augmented reality and virtual reality plans for the future, the Move fitness tracker is an attempt by Facebook to get in on the fitness and health tracking craze that’s yielded hundreds of millions of dollars and billions in valuation to companies like Peloton and Zwift.

The announcement follows Apple’s own announcement yesterday of a fitness workout service called Fitness+.

It’s a way for Oculus users to check on how many calories they’re burning in Beat Saber or in dedicated fitness apps. The Oculus Move dashboard will allow Quest and Quest 2 owners keep track of their fitness goals across their VR apps. Using the Move feature, Quest wearers can set daily fitness goals, check how many calories have been burned and how long they’ve been active while wearing the headset.

The new feature will put Facebook’s Quest headsets more in the same realm as fitness hardware and software companies like Tonal, F45, Strava, Zwift, and Peloton.

The feature will be rolled out soon and will be available in the Quest 2, which is taking pre-orders now. With the company’s new challenges feature that’s also rolling out today, Facebook is definitely looking to put the fitness hardware and software startups in the sights of its Quest devices.