Month: September 2020

A startup called Vibe, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, wants to make it easier for businesses to collaborate remotely. Its system, which combines a large interactive digital whiteboard and cloud service, allows users to host remote brainstorming sessions, client presentations, virtual trainings and more. Vibe also works with a large ecosystem of popular workplace apps, like Slack, Dropbox, Teams, Zoom, OneDrive, Chrome, Asana, and many others, allowing businesses to continue to use the tools they’re already invested in, instead of having to learn an entirely new workflow or switch apps.

The Bellevue, Washington-headquartered startup was founded in 2016 by a team looking for the ideal remote collaboration solution. Initially, they believed this would mean VR devices with headsets, but later came to realize that what they really wanted was a single tool that would serve as a platform for real-time collaboration.

Today, the Vibe system includes a 55-inch, 4K touchscreen device that integrates with third-party apps in full-screen or split-screen modes, allowing customers to videoconference, chat or use the apps while whiteboarding.

Users can also annotate on top of presentations, pictures and files from other apps, then save them into whiteboard projects. Vibe’s high-resolution rendering engine offers an unlimited canvas, low latency, and a cross-app annotation experience, the company says.

The Vibe board can also function as a second screen via screencasting or an HDMI cable while supporting annotation. The company’s cloud service for Vibe, meanwhile, is based on AWS.

Vibe promises low latency drawing response time of fewer than 7 milliseconds for sketching and writing, as well as a collaboration experience that lets participants collaborate across devices, including via their web browser, iPad or Android tablet, in addition to the Vibe board itself.

The product stealth-launched in late 2019 and has sold to over 400 customers so far. Vibe is officially launching to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield.

The company says many of its existing customers opted for Vibe so they can continue to use apps like Zoom and Slack, which aren’t integrated with Microsoft’s Surface Board, Google’s Jamboard, Samsung’s Flip, or Cisco’s WebEx brand boards.

This is an important feature for customers who need to work with clients over the apps their clients use, the company notes. It also helps Vibe sell to school system I.T. departments, as its open ecosystem means it’s easier for teachers, students, and admins to adopt its technology.

The board itself is $2,999 and doesn’t have any ongoing monthly or annual service fees. That significantly undercuts the competition. Google Jamboard today is $4,999, plus a $600 annual subscription; Cisco WebEx Board is $4,990, plus a $199 monthly subscription); and Microsoft’s Surface Hub is $8,999, plus an Office 365 Subscription.

The company tells TechCrunch it got to the lower price point by using an IR touch sensor instead of a P-CAP touch sensor to reduce 20% of the cost. The trade-off here is Vibe has worse palm rejection, but they believe it will satisfy most collaboration scenarios. In addition, the company customizes its OS and rendering engine to work on an all-in-one ARM chip instead of Intel-based Windows. The trade in this case is that users won’t need to buy an extra mini PC for Vibe to work with, but the performance could be worse in some scenarios.

The Vibe co-founding team has backgrounds in engineering, image processing, computer vision and supply chain logistics.

Vibe CEO Charles Yang is a serial entrepreneur who studied Computer Science at Zhejiang University, where he met his co-founders. Vibe VP Jian Zhao has a background in image processing, computer vision, multimedia, and machine learning, and spent five years at Microsoft as a software engineer after completing his PhD in computer and electrical engineering at the University of Kentucky.

Vibe CTO Jiulong Wang brings experience in distributed systems, architecting, debugging and performance tuning, and has spent time at Microsoft and Twitter as a developer. Vibe COO Susie Deng, who spent 11 years at BYD, utilizes her background in international economics and trade to tackle the supply chain and financial challenges to help bring the price of the Vibe whiteboard down.

Today, the company has offices in Hangzhou, Shenzhen, and Shanghai, China, in addition to its Bellevue HQ.

Vibe has raised funding from Cherubic Ventures, Unity Ventures, InnoLink Ventures, and Challengers Capital.

Let’s face it, email security is something a lot of people would rather think less about. When you’re not deluged with a daily onslaught of phishing attacks trying to steal your passwords, you’re also expected to dodge the simulated phishing emails sent by your own company all for the sake of checking a compliance box.

One security startup wants that to change. Tiffany Ricks founded HacWare in Dallas, Texas, in 2017 to help bring better cybersecurity awareness to small businesses without getting in the way of the day job.

“We’re trying to show them what they don’t know about cybersecurity and educate them on that so they can get back to work,” Ricks told TechCrunch, ahead of the company’s participation in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield.

Ricks, a former Pentagon contractor, has her roots as an ethical hacker. As a penetration tester, or “red teamer,” she would test the limits of a company’s cybersecurity defenses by using a number of techniques, including social engineering attacks, which often involves tricking someone into turning over a password or access to a system.

“It was just very easy to get into organizations by social engineering employees,” said Ricks. But the existing offerings on the market, she said, weren’t up to the task of educating users at scale.

“And so we built the product in-house,” she said.

HacWare sits on a company’s email server and uses machine learning to categorize and analyze each message for risk — the same things you would look for in a phishing email, like suspicious links and attachments.

HacWare tries to identify the most at-risk users, like those working in finance and human resources, who are more vulnerable to business email compromise attacks that try to steal sensitive employee information. The system also uses automated simulated phishing attacks using the contents of what’s in a user’s inbox already to send personalized phishing emails to test the user.

Email remains the most popular way for attackers to use phishing and other social engineering attacks to try to steal sensitive information, according to Verizon’s annual data breach report. These attackers want your passwords or to try to trick you into sending sensitive documents, like employee tax and financial information.

But as the adage goes, humans are the weakest link in the security chain.

Stronger security features, like two-factor authentication, makes it far more difficult for hackers to break into accounts but it’s not a panacea. It was only in July that Twitter was hit by a devastating breach that saw hackers use social engineering techniques to trick employees into giving over access to an internal “admin” tool that the hackers abused to hijack high-profile accounts and spread a cryptocurrency scam.

HacWare’s approach to email security appears to be working. “We’ve seen a 60% reduction in reducing phishing responses,” she said. The automated phishing simulations also help to reduce IT workload, she said.

Ricks moved the bootstrapped HacWare to New York City after securing a place in Techstars’ accelerator program. HacWare is seeking to raise a $1 million seed round, said Ricks. For now, the company is “laser focused” on email security, but the company has growth in its sights.

“I see us expanding into just trying to understand human behavior and trying to figure out how we can mitigate that risk,” she said.

“We believe that cyber security is an integrated approach,” said Ricks. “But first we definitely need to start with the root cause, and the root cause is we need to really get our people the tools they need to empower them to make sound cybersecurity decisions,” she said.

A young Indian startup that is taking on the country’s antiquated insurance industry with a digital-first product — and which has already received backing from global giant Amazon — today announced a new financing round.

Bangalore-based Acko said on Tuesday it has raised $60 million in its Series D financing round. Germany-based Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, led the financing round, while existing investors Amazon, RPS Ventures and Intact Ventures, corporate venture arm of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurer, participated in it.

The new round, which brings Acko’s to-date raise to $200 million, valued the three-year-old startup at about $500 million (up from about $300 million last year), a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Acko develops and sells bite-sized auto insurance products (aimed at drivers and others in transportation-related scenarios). The startup expanded its catalog six months ago to provide healthcare protections that it sells to businesses and employers. More than 150,000 employees are already covered by Acko’s healthcare protection, the startup said.

Acko founder and chief executive Varun Dua told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup has amassed over 60 million customers and has issued over 650 million policies to date.

Offering a large catalog of bite-sized insurance policies is crucial for firms in India. Only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and most can’t afford sizeable policies.

According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017. An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

“We’re excited to join forces with one of the leading digital insurers in India, as well as other investment partners, to help support Varun and his impressive team as they continue their journey,” said Oshri Kaplan, Director at Munich Re Ventures, in a statement.

“As Munich Re Ventures’ first investment in India, we look forward to the positive impact that digitally native insurance solutions will have on the country with Acko leading the way.”

Acko sells insurance policies directly to customers or through partners such as Amazon, which entered the insurance space in the country earlier this year in collaboration with Acko. (Amazon currently accounts for only a fraction of the insurance Acko sells, people familiar with the matter said.)

Acko’s products have quickly gained popularity in India for three reasons. It does not rely on middlemen, who have proven to slow down innovation for the insurance industry at large, Dua explained. Having direct engagement with a customer allows Acko to offer more competitive and personalized policies, he said.

The second is Acko’s underwriting technology, for which it comb through a range of data points to assess whether someone is eligible for a policy, he said.

Acko has also made it easier for people to access policies and then claim them. As everything is digital, sign-up does not require any paperwork and making a claim is quick, too — factors that keep existing customers happy, Dua said.

Scores of startups and established banks in India have launched products to win this market. Paytm (India’s most valuable startup) and its co-founder and chief executive, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, announced in July they were acquiring insurance firm Raheja QBE for a sum of $76 million.

Dua, who has spent more than a decade in the insurance business, said he was not worried about the competition as the market is large enough.

The startup plans to use the fresh capital to scale its technology and data teams by at least 30 to 40%, Dua said. It also plans to use portion of the capital to invest in branding to reach more customers, especially those living in smaller cities and towns in India.

And rest of the money will be used to finance the insurance policies. Unlike several fintech startups in India that work with banking partners to finance loans, current regulatory rules require insurance firms to underwrite risks themselves.

“We would love to be in a position where we always have a strong balance sheet,” Dua said.

Usually, Apple making a grand entrance to an entrenched market would spell doom for the players there, but when it comes to Apple’s latest digital workout service, it doesn’t look like investors are worried about Fitness+ killing the momentum.

Part of that may be that, expectations were already priced-in to these stocks. The fitness play had been rumored by a report in Bloomberg last month, but few details were public of the service which was announced today and appears to echo offerings from Peloton and Fitbit, but fully leverage Apple’s Watch hardware.

Peloton was already having a great day, currently up more than 5%, though it took a brief hit during Apple’s Fitness+ presentation before rebounding. The stock is currently up a staggering 191% in 2020.

Fitbit’s share price was relatively unchanged in intra-day trading. The company launched a Fitbit Premium service last month, but its stock is flat from the beginning of the year.

Things didn’t look much different for the more entrenched fitness companies. Weight Watchers International, which has seen its share price nearly halved since the beginning of the year, was down less than 1% by time of publication and Planet Fitness, which has had a rough year but is showing signs of recovery, was up nearly 5% at the time of writing.

Why so little movement across the board? Well, Apple is pressing forward on entering a number of digital markets in its services business at the moment, and that spread can mean less focus on dominating an industry. With its Apple One subscription bundling fitness on the higher-end tier, there’s always the danger that consumers won’t leave another subscription to join Apple, but already belonging to the Apple One will prevent them from looking at rival fitness services.

Underestimating Apple is never a wise proposition, but the company is an unprecedented position as it looks to kickstart several digital services and, out-of-the-gate at least, they haven’t all been slam dunks.

Latent AI, a startup that was spun out of SRI International, makes it easier to run AI workloads at the edge by dynamically managing workloads as necessary.

Using its proprietary compression and compilation process, Latent AI promises to compress library files by 10x and run them with 5x lower latency than other systems, all while using less power thanks to its new adaptive AI technology, which the company is launching as part of its appearance in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition today.

Founded by CEO Jags Kandasamy and CTO Sek Chai, the company has already raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures and followed by Autotech Ventures .

Before starting Latent AI, Kandasamy sold his previous startup OtoSense to Analog Devices (in addition to managing HPE Mid-Market Security business before that). OtoSense used data from sound and vibration sensors for predictive maintenance use cases. Before its sale, the company worked with the likes of Delta Airlines and Airbus.

Image Credits: Latent AI

In some ways, Latent AI picks up some of this work and marries it with IP from SRI International .

“With OtoSense, I had already done some edge work,” Kandasamy said. “We had moved the audio recognition part out of the cloud. We did the learning in the cloud, but the recognition was done in the edge device and we had to convert quickly and get it down. Our bill in the first few months made us move that way. You couldn’t be streaming data over LTE or 3G for too long.”

At SRI, Chai worked on a project that looked at how to best manage power for flying objects where, if you have a single source of power, the system could intelligently allocate resources for either powering the flight or running the onboard compute workloads, mostly for surveillance, and then switch between them as needed. Most of the time, in a surveillance use case, nothing happens. And while that’s the case, you don’t need to compute every frame you see.

“We took that and we made it into a tool and a platform so that you can apply it to all sorts of use cases, from voice to vision to segmentation to time series stuff,” Kandasamy explained.

What’s important to note here is that the company offers the various components of what it calls the Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform (LEIP) as standalone modules or as a fully integrated system. The compressor and compiler are the first two of these and what the company is launching today is LEIP Adapt, the part of the system that manages the dynamic AI workloads Kandasamy described above.

Image Credits: Latent AI

In practical terms, the use case for LEIP Adapt is that your battery-powered smart doorbell, for example, can run in a low-powered mode for a long time, waiting for something to happen. Then, when somebody arrives at your door, the camera wakes up to run a larger model — maybe even on the doorbell’s base station that is plugged into power — to do image recognition. And if a whole group of people arrives at ones (which isn’t likely right now, but maybe next year, after the pandemic is under control), the system can offload the workload to the cloud as needed.

Kandasamy tells me that the interest in the technology has been “tremendous.” Given his previous experience and the network of SRI International, it’s maybe no surprise that Latent AI is getting a lot of interest from the automotive industry, but Kandasamy also noted that the company is working with consumer companies, including a camera and a hearing aid maker.

The company is also working with a major telco company that is looking at Latent AI as part of its AI orchestration platform and a large CDN provider to help them run AI workloads on a JavaScript backend.

No iPhone 12 announced today, but Apple unveiled a new chip that will power the next generation of its hardware (including that phone whenever it’s launched). The A14 Bionic, which will ship first with the new iPad Air, is going to be Apple’s fastest yet.

Apple says that it will be the first to use five nanometer process technology, incredibly small-scale but powerful, with 11.8 billion transistors packed into the chip, up 40% on its previous generation seven nanometer chips. This will work out to 11 trillion operations per second.

This translates into a more efficient chip: more power with less battery consumption, with more processes run in parallel across a six-core design.  Apple claims this will make the chip up to two times faster than the most popular Windows laptop, three times faster than the fastest Android tablet and six times faster than the fastest Chromebook.

This makes the iPad Air something that it will market the cheaper device not just at younger users but gamers and others that will heavily use their devices. Photo editing will be faster, and so will any analytical applications, with the chip also featuring a 16-core neural engine.

Chips are at the heart of how the consumer electronics industry compares, and the next generation of how that will play out will be very interesting indeed, with Nvidia this weekend announcing its intent to acquire ARM — an Apple partner — for $40 billion. ARM has positioned itself as a “Switzerland” in the industry, providing its designs to everyone on equal footing, but it has been increasingly taking on a more autonomous role in its chip design over the years, and this A14 is the latest product of that strategy.

More to come.

Apple is launching a fitness subscription service called Fitness+, which for $80 a year will give users access to workouts and instruction delivered through the Apple Watch or iPad.

Fitness+ will cost $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Apple is offering the first three months free with the purchase of a watch. Family will also be able to use Fitness+ for no additional charge.

The launch of Fitness+ builds on the growing number of health metrics already available on the Apple Watch, including heart rate, calories burned, pace and distance. This new service folds in a catalog of the video workouts that can be viewed on a user’s iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. Once a user launches a video, it communicates with and starts the correct workout in their Apple Watch workout app.

The user’s health metrics are sent in real time to whatever screen they’re using to watch the workout video. Those metrics change as the workout progresses. For instance, if a trainer in a particular video tells the user to check their heart rate, those numbers get larger and make it easier to see.

Apple’s in-house trainers will offer fresh workouts each week from its Fitness+ studio. There are also videos geared for yoga, cycling, treadmill walking and running as well strength and core exercises. The aim is for these workouts to be done anywhere and with any equipment.

After the workout, users will get a summary of the data captured from a user’s Apple watch sensors.  Apple Music subscribers can also save music played during their workouts and then listen to them later.

Apple said Tuesday that all of this data will be protected. When using Fitness+, calories and the workouts will not be stored along with their Apple ID.

The Fitness+ service is the latest example of Apple building out an ecosystem of subscription products. Its creation also adds to the increasingly crowded field. Fitbit is just one company that has its own service that’s tied to its hardware. Then there are the host of fitness apps. For instance, Aaptiv, a Netflix-style app-based startup that connects people to a range of trainer-led indoor and outdoor fitness and wellness sessions, raised fresh capital back in April.

At Apple’s (virtual) hardware event today, the company announced a significantly redesigned iPad Air with a new look and tiny bezels. In a move portentous for other Apple products, Touch ID has returned — inside the power button on the top of the tablet.

For the 10th anniversary of the iPad, the new 4th-generation Air is the biggest change to the device in a while. “This is a big year for iPad,” said CEO Tim Cook, before introducing changes to the non-Pro tablets in the lineup. “And today, we’re thrilled to introduce an all new completely redesigned iPad Air.”

The biggest change has to be the next-generation touch ID sensor built into the power button. Time will tell whether this is truly more convenient than having it in the “home” button, but it’s clear now that Apple has seen that demand for the fingerprint-based unlocking method has not abated.

Image Credits: Apple

Could the new Touch ID power button show up on the iPhone 12, or at the very least on the iPad Pro later? It seems likely, as while Face ID has become more reliable over time, sometimes people just prefer the hands-on approach.

The look is new to the iPad Air series, but mainly just resembles the Pro, with flat sides, rounded corners on the screen, and a prominent camera bump. There are also a bunch of hot new colors.

Image Credits: Apple

There’s a new display, with a 2360×1640 resolution, a little higher than the last generation. You probably won’t notice the difference unless they’re side by side, but Apple has always pushed to make sure its devices have among the highest quality screens out there, and the new Air is no exception.

The connector has graduated from Lightning to USB-C like its big brother the iPad Pro, so while on one hand you might need to throw away your cables… again… the new cables aren’t special Apple ones sprinkled with fairy dust, so you’ll be able to use $5 ones from Monoprice instead.

There’s an improved front camera, and the back one gets the iPad Pro’s 12-megapixel, 4K-capable shooter. But no lidar, unfortunately. Speakers also get a boost, with stereo audio in landscape mode.

You’ll be able to pick up the new iPad Air starting next month at $599 for the cheapest version (wi-fi only, with the least amount of storage, exact amount TBD).

The vanilla iPad, now in its 8th generation, also got a computing power bump to the A12 series of chips, but no big design changes. With 500 million iPad devices sold, the traditional design is proven to be just fine. It’ll set you back $329.

Africa may be a diverse continent overflowing with different cultures, languages and customs, but Tuverl co-founder and CEO Hope Ndhlovu says there is one experience — or industry — that is consistent from South Africa up to Egypt and everywhere in between. Public transportation is the same fragmented, disorganized ecosystem of millions of small-to-medium private enterprises throughout Africa.

These public transport operators can be as small as a one-person outfit with a single van or bus up to a larger enterprise of several vehicles. There are no schedules or any coordination, and minibus operators will often wait until they can fill their vehicle with passengers. Meanwhile, the industry only accepts cash and without a means to monitor the number of trips and passengers, fraud and simple poor accounting is rampant.

The upshot: public transportation is unreliable for commuters and unprofitable for the public transport operators. In this chaos, Ndhlovu and co-founder Bahlakoana Mabetha see opportunity.

Their Zimbabwe-based startup Tuverl, which debuted Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is an app aimed at streamlining public transportation. Public operators pay Tuverl a fee to join. From here, operators can use the app to manage their fleets and locate vehicles as well as process fares. Commuters, meanwhile, can use the app to track intra-city buses and minibuses in real time, book trips, hail taxis on-demand and pay for their public transportation. Passengers can also rate and review their trips.

The app was released as a beta version in the Google Play Store in February and has 30 public transport operators and 253 commuters. Tuverl plans to expand as COVID-19 lockdown measures ease.

For now, Ndhlovi and Mabetha are focused on Zimbabwe. But the Harvard University grads have a grander vision for Tuverl.

“My motivation really was to try to improve public transportation for the ordinary person because it really makes a different in their lives,” Ndhlovi told me in a recent interview, adding that as a young student he was typically late for school because of inefficient public transport. “We need to build up operations in Zimbabwe and get some traction there. But we essentially want to make this an African thing. We want to be in every African country.”

Apple said its latest iOS 14 software will be released on September 16, ahead of the company’s release of the next-generation iPhones.

We saw our first glimpse at iOS 14 earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which included home screen widgets and reply threading in Messages. It also comes with new Maps features, including adding cycling as a transportation option, and routing for electric vehicle owners so they can find charging points along the way.

iOS 14 also comes with an in-built translator, an improved and redesigned Siri, and better security and privacy features in the Safari browser.

But one privacy feature promised by Apple will be delayed. Apple said it would allow iPhone users to opt-out of in-app tracking, which the company said would not be immediately enforced when iOS 14 is released. It follows an uproar from ad giants — including Facebook — which lobbied against the proposal. Apple said it would give developers until next year to adjust to the changes.

iOS 14 will be supported on iPhone 6s and later, and lands as a free download.