Year: 2020

MIT has developed a new type of lightweight sensor that can be integrated into flexible fabrics, including the kinds of polyesters often used in athletic wear, to provide constant monitoring of vital signs including body temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate. These sensors are machine-washable and can be integrated into clothing that appears totally normal on the outside, and they can also be removed and re-used in different garments.

The research, which led to the design of a prototype that communicates with a smartphone and that could lead to eventual mass production with partners in China, has potential applications across the health industry, in athletics and even in space for astronaut vital sign monitoring. MIT’s research was funded in part by NASA and the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, but its potential here on Earth has much more widespread benefit potential, particularly in the era of COVID-19 and the healthcare landscape that will result even once it’s more under control.

In particular, this could be a cost-effective and easy way for patients with chronic conditions that require regular monitoring and check-ins with their physicians to keep on top of reporting that is often manual and difficult to maintain consistently. Rather than relying on updates either in-person, or even via telemedicine, these individuals could provide a steady stream of biometric data to the healthcare professionals monitoring their treatment. It could automate the process to an extent that makes it easier for both individual and their caregivers to keep on top of the situation in real-time.

Remote healthcare solutions are already seeing massive spikes in demand due to COVID-19, as patients and healthcare professionals seek ways to continue to manage healthcare needs while lessening COVID-19 exposure risk, especially among the most vulnerable, which includes individuals with chronic or pre-existing conditions.

Some companies are already experimenting with variations of this approach, including U.S. primary care startup Forward, which is distributing biometric sensors to its patients for at-home monitoring. Connected sensor company Kinsa is also showing the value of aggregated anonymized biometric data with a map that employs its sensor data to track a potential leading indicator of COVID-19 spread: the prevalence of fever in a community.

Wearable sensors embedded in clothing have been tried before, and even productized, but MIT’s version looks like the most wearable and least disruptive to the wearer in terms of convenience and comfort yet. In future, always-on health data monitoring could inform the development of more and better pandemic modeling, too, so this is definitely an innovation space to watch.

Own a classic Porsche? Who doesn’t? The German automaker today unveiled a line of head units designed to replicate the vintage look while still featuring modern connectivity such as Bluetooth, DAB+, and Apple CarPlay.

These radios are official Porsche hardware and are available in 1-DIN or 2-DIN variants, allowing them to fit in vehicles from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.

Sure, a touchscreen-only interface would look a little out of place in a ’76 911 Carrera, which is why the units come equipped with buttons and dials to help complete the vintage look. In the ‘90s, Porsche moved to a larger, 2-DIN design, and for these models, the available head unit features a much-larger touchscreen along with buttons and dials.

Both units are available from Porsche dealers and represent the German automaker’s stance keeping vintage Porsches on the road as long as possible. With these units, owners can retrofit vehicles to have the convenience of the latest technology. Automakers have long offered parts for classic cars but few are bringing modern connectivity to the driver.

Own a classic Porsche? Who doesn’t? The German automaker today unveiled a line of head units designed to replicate the vintage look while still featuring modern connectivity such as Bluetooth, DAB+, and Apple CarPlay.

These radios are official Porsche hardware and are available in 1-DIN or 2-DIN variants, allowing them to fit in vehicles from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.

Sure, a touchscreen-only interface would look a little out of place in a ’76 911 Carrera, which is why the units come equipped with buttons and dials to help complete the vintage look. In the ‘90s, Porsche moved to a larger, 2-DIN design, and for these models, the available head unit features a much-larger touchscreen along with buttons and dials.

Both units are available from Porsche dealers and represent the German automaker’s stance keeping vintage Porsches on the road as long as possible. With these units, owners can retrofit vehicles to have the convenience of the latest technology. Automakers have long offered parts for classic cars but few are bringing modern connectivity to the driver.

At a time where all of the news seems to point toward negative economic activity, Synergy Research released a report today that data center M&A activity made a strong showing this quarter, already surpassing 2019 levels.

The surge was mostly related to the $8.4 billion Interxion acquisition by Digital Realty, which Synergy says was the largest data center deal ever. It pushed the deal total this quarter to almost $15 billion on 28 closed deals.

2017 was the best year ever since Synergy has tracked these deals with more than $20 billion trading hands. That record could easily be within reach this year if this level of investment continues.

Of course, in the current economic situation, there is no guarantee that will happen, but it is clear that cloud usage is going strong and data center demand is something that’s not likely to abate any time soon. In fact, Synergy’s chief analyst John Dinsdale believes the numbers will continue to climb with lots more deals ready to close soon. He says that should make it a bumper year for data center M&A activity.

“In less than four months, the M&A value has already surpassed 2019, in addition to which we are aware of 17 more agreed deals that are pending closure plus a few other potential multi-billion dollar deals,” Dinsdale said in a statement.

He added, “Outsourcing trends and the aggressive growth in cloud services are driving ever-growing demand for data center capacity, which in turn is fueling both industry restructuring and a need to find new sources of investment capital.”

Synergy has been tracking the data center M&A market since 2015. Since that time, it has identified 388 deals totaling over $90 billion. Looks like that number is only going to keep growing this year in spite of external economic factors.

In a blog post today, Google’s Director of Product Management, Ads Integrity. John Canfield, announced that the company will be extending its identity verification policy for all advertisers. Introduced in 2018, the feature required political advertisers to go through a verify their identity, which was then displayed as part of the ad itself.

The process was designed to created increased transparency, amid growing mistrust around the sources behind political ad buys in recent years. Moving forward, the company will make identity verification a required part of the ad buying process, regardless of topic.

Personal identification and business incorporation documents will be required for all parties buying an ad on Google’s network. That information will begin popping up in the ad unit units over the summer, letting users click through to view information including the name and location of the party that purchased the ad.

“This change will make it easier for people to understand who the advertiser is behind the ads they see from Google and help them make more informed decisions when using our advertising controls,”  Canfield writes. “It will also help support the health of the digital advertising ecosystem by detecting bad actors and limiting their attempts to misrepresent themselves.”

The political verification process is currently in place in 30 countries. The wider push will begin in the U.S. and build out from there. Google says it expects the entire thing to take “a few years” to be in place globally, given the massive scale of its advertising network. Once advertisers have been notified, they will have 30 days to fill out the form. The documents will then be vetted by a Google employee.

Tying advertisements to real people and businesses could go a long way in identifying bad actors on the massive network.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re taking a look at a bit of data on the European venture capital scene in Q1. As with our looks at other locales like Silicon Valley and other bits of the United States, we’re taking stock of what happened in the first quarter. Q1 2020 includes pre-COVID-19 results, though as some European countries began to lock-down before the United States, there may be more pandemic-impact in the following results than we’ve seen domestically thus far.

Today’s grip of data is via the folks over at PitchBook, who compiled a venture-focused dig through the continent’s first three months of the year. Let’s parse the top numbers, make a comparison or two and then look to what’s next.

Q1: An ok quarter

Despite COVID-19, China’s broad shuttering and an aged bull market deep, Europe’s venture capital activity in Q1 2020 was mostly fine. It wasn’t great, and there were some less-than-winsome results that could be chalked up to the pandemic, but the first quarter provided an alright start to the year.

One of Colorado’s fastest-growing cannabis companies has a new look. Medicine Man Technologies (MMT) is announcing a new brand, Schwazze, which will be an overarching parent company for MMT and its collection of brands. The publicly-traded company is now listed under the OTC ticker symbol “SHWZ.”

Schwazze refers to a cultivation process, and the company’s new CEO told TechCrunch the name change reflects the company’s focus. “It is the core process within nurturing and growing a plant by taking the leaves off very carefully to allow the trunk to grow and widen, providing more nutrients to the flower in the canopy.”

“It’s incredibly important. It spurs growth and health,” Schwazze CEO Justin Dye said, referring to the Schwazze method.

The company will keep the Medicine Man Technologies brand as its professional services arm.

In late 2019 the company announced a handful of planned acquisitions and hired Dye as its new CEO. This week, Dye announced the company had purchased Mesa Organics and Purplebee’s, both Colorado-based cannabis companies founded by James Parco, Ph.D., a tenured professor at Colorado College. Parco is joining Schwazze’s management team. This purchase adds several dispensaries and an advanced extractor to Schwazze’s portfolio.

“They’re [Mesa Organics and Purplebee’s] a great company,” Dye said, “They’re growing quickly, they’re very profitable and have a great management team. They have a great leader who’s joining our team.”

Schwazze isn’t letting the COVID-19 crisis slow its growth. The company intends to scoop up additional dispensaries, cultivators, and manufacturers as it grows with Colorado.

The race to win neighborhood stores is on in India. A day after Facebook invested $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms to serve tens of millions of neighborhood stores in the country, the world’s largest e-commerce firm has launched “Local Shops on Amazon.”

The program will help customers discover products from local shops in their city. These shops will deliver the items themselves. In the event they want to service customers outside their serviceable area, they can work with Amazon to fulfill those orders, the company said.

“This is expected to be a win-win, as customers benefit from access to greater selection, faster deliveries, and additional value-added services, and local shops can transform themselves into digital stores,” said Gopal Pillai, VP of Seller Services at Amazon India, in a statement.

Amazon said it piloted the “Local Shops on Amazon” program six months ago and has already on-boarded 5,000 local shops and retails from over 100 cities across India.

These shops can list a variety of items on Amazon including products ranging from consumer electronics to mattresses, kitchen items to grocery and consumables, apparel and shoes to gifts, and even fresh flowers and cakes.

It’s not the first time Amazon has moved to work with neighborhood stores, locally known as kiranas. In January this year, Amazon announced the “I have space” program wherein it had partnered with thousands of neighborhood stores across India to use them to store and deliver goods.

Amazon also maintains an India-specific program called Amazon Easy that allows customers in smaller markets to get access to the convenience of online shopping. Under the Amazon Easy umbrella, Amazon India helps break down various transaction barriers for first-time online shoppers like trust, lack of internet access, language as well as digital payments, to embrace e-commerce.

The company said today that new shops can also sign up for “I have space” and “Amazon Easy” programs.

These efforts from Amazon and other firms underscore just how vital neighborhood stores remain for shoppers in the country.

These mom-and-pop stores offer all kinds of items, pay low wages and little to no rent. Since they are ubiquitous (there are more than 30 million neighborhood stores in India, according to industry estimates), no retail giant can offer a faster delivery. And on top of that, their economics is often better than most.

On Wednesday, Facebook said it would explore ways to integrate WhatsApp with JioMart, a joint venture between telecom network Reliance Jio and Reliance Retail, the largest retail chain in the country with presence in over 6,500 cities and towns. Both Jio and Retail are subsidiaries of Reliance Industries, India’s most valued firm.

The collaboration may allow users to find local stores around them on WhatsApp, talk to store operators and place orders from within the Facebook-owned instant messaging service, said Ajit Mohan, a Facebook VP who spearheads the company’s business in India, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“You can browse shops and talk to the shop owner. And ultimately, where we do want to take this flow is for you to be able to place your orders,” he said.

E-commerce is still at an early stage in India, accounting for just 3% of total retail sales, according to industry estimates.

Miro is a company in the right place at the right time. The makers of a digital whiteboard are seeing usage surge right now as businesses move from the workplace and physical whiteboards. Today, the company announced a hefty $50 million Series B.

Iconiq Capital led the round with help from Accel and a slew of individual investors. Today’s investment brings the total raised to around $75 million, according to the company. Among the company’s angel investors was basketball star Steph Curry.

What’s attracting this level of investment is that this is a product made for a moment when workers are forced to stay home. One of the primary complaints about working at home is the inability to sit in the same room with colleagues and brainstorm around a whiteboard. This reproduces that to an extent.

What’s more, Miro isn’t simply light-weight add-in like you might find built into a collaboration tool like Zoom or Microsoft Teams; it’s more of a platform play designed to integrate with many different enterprise tools, much like Slack does for communications.

Miro co-founder and CEO Andrey Khusid said the company planned the platform idea from its earliest days. “The concept from day one was building something for real-time collaboration and the platform thing is very important because we expect that people will build on top of our product,” Khusid told TechCrunch.

Image Credit: Miro

That means that people can build integrations to other common tools and customize the base tool to meet the needs of an individual team or organization. It’s an approach that seems to be working as the company reports it’s profitable with more than 21,000 customers including 80% of the Fortune 100. Customers include Netflix, Salesforce, PwC, Spotify, Expedia and Deloitte.

Khusid says usage has been skyrocketing among both business and educational customers as the pandemic has forced millions of people to work at home. He says that has been a challenge for his engineering team to keep up with the demand, but one that the company has been able to meet to this point.

The startup just passed the 300 employee mark this week, and it will continue to hire with this new influx of money. Khusid expects to have another 150 employees before the end of the year to keep up with increasing demand for the product.

“We understand that we need to come out strong from this situation. The company is growing much faster than we expected, so we need to have a very strong team to maintain the growth at the same pace after the crisis ends.”