Year: 2020

Virtual reality has been two years away from mainstream adoption for the past six years. In that time, huge companies have made big VR bets only to walk away, countless VR startups have faded or flared out and investment has slowed significantly.

Building an attractive VR product for large enterprises to train employees remotely has remained one of the few major areas of opportunity, one that has been largely dominated by Strivr, which just locked down new funding.

The VR training startup has raised a $30 million Series B round led by Georgian Partners, a Canadian firm that hasn’t been very active in the AR/VR space. CEO Derek Belch says the company ended up pitching a few dozen firms in this raise, and that while the feedback was “overwhelmingly positive,” there were certainly some skeptics.

“Everyone knows that VR has been slower to adopt and tougher to anticipate,” Belch told TechCrunch.

While AR/VR startups seemed to be raising money left and right in 2016 when Strivr closed its seed round, the market is much sparser in 2020 after years of missed estimates and a relentless parade of shutdowns.

While consumer AR/VR companies have almost unilaterally struggled to get off the ground in recent months, there has still been movement among enterprise offerings. Earlier this month, a competing VR training platform, Talespin, closed $15 million in funding. In late January, enterprise AR/VR teleconferencing app Spatial locked down $14 million. HaptX, which makes a high-end VR glove for enterprise use cases, nabbed $12 million in December.

Landing post-Series A funding has remained a tough challenge for VR enterprise startups where players are often positioning themselves to be judged in relation to their VR peers rather than to a Salesforce, Box or Atlassian.

“Nobody can get beyond a pilot program,” Belch said. “Investors want to know how real this market is and where the target is.”

Strivr emerged from Belch’s research at Stanford back in 2014 as a virtual reality application made to help football players train off the field. CEO Derek Belch had previously been a kicker for Stanford’s football team and his co-founder Jeremy Bailenson led the school’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, a leading research hub that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited while doing diligence on the Oculus deal.

As virtual reality gear was further commoditized and investment in the space grew hotter, Strivr soon pivoted from sports training towards workplace training, pitching their solution as a better way for companies to hand top-down instruction to employees. Their software offering is often a combination of interactive 360 videos and computer-generated scenarios that require more active participation from a trainee.

While other VR startups have pushed to integrate phone or tablet-based experiences, Belch says that he has pushed back on customer requests to move away from headset-only experiences towards phone-based 360-degree videos.

“Those are not our disruption, those are gimmicky and a cheap way to bring a new logo on,” Belch says.

The company’s customer base now includes FedEx, JetBlue, Verizon and BMW. Their biggest get was a deal with Walmart in 2017 that eventually grew into a company-wide rollout across all of their stores, a massive deal that Belch says has been a “blessing and a curse” due to the rollout’s scale.

“You have to be smart in terms of what you do that’s Walmart specific,” Belch told TechCrunch. “They’ll swallow you whole if you let them.”

Alongside the company’s funding news, the startup has announced that they’ve received a patent to use motion data to predict how effective users will be at the real world task post-training. Strivr now has 22,000 VR headsets out in the wild, which Belch says have registered 1.6 million sessions. The hardware is all from Oculus.

Strivr is in the fortunate position of closing this deal ahead of the recent pandemic-related market uncertainty– a situation that has complicated their ability to meet with prospective customers and has raised issues with sanitation that Strivr says they have addressed. While Belch sees this Series B as a validation of the customer feedback he’s gotten, he also knows that the VR industry remains fraught with challenges.

“Thirty million doesn’t last very long if you’re stupid, we’re going to make sure we’re very smart about it,” Belch says.

Nearly 300 million kids are missing school worldwide because of the coronavirus outbreak, including some 54 million in the U.S. alone. That’s left parents scrambling for resources to help continue their children’s education, often while also working from home themselves — an almost insurmountable challenge. Today, the non-profit media organization Common Sense is launching a site to help parents called Wide Open School (WideOpenSchool.org), which combines the best educational resources for publishers, nonprofits, and education companies in one place.

At launch, this free resource includes content from the American Federation of Teachers, Amplify, Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Head Start, Khan Academy, National Geographic, Noggin, PBS, Scholastic, Sesame Workshop, Time for Kids, XQ Institute, and even YouTube.

All the content offered through Wide Open School is freely available.

But it’s not just a list of helpful websites. Instead, Wide Open School actually programs a full school day for the child by grade level, to ensure they’re getting a mix of educational material that aligns with what their day would have been when attending school.

For example, a 4th grader may be pointed to Prodigy’s math games, YouTube art tutorials, and Khan Academy reading resources in the morning, then instructed to read a book, draw, or listen to music during their screen-free lunch break. In the afternoon, they may take social studies via Google Earth, study science through Amplify, and take P.E. by way of GoNoodle.

The site even suggests evening activities that can be done as a family, like bedtime reading or movies to stream, among other things.

In addition, Wide Open School offers a guide to getting started with learning at home, a collection of virtual field trips, a collection with resources for art and music, and one with resources for emotional well-being — the latter especially critical at a time when anxiety levels are high among parents and kids alike.

There’s also a section dedicated to parents of children with special needs

Everything is organized in a colorful grid with picture images so it can be easily used by children on their own.

For struggling parents new to homeschooling, a resource like this will likely be welcome.

However, Common Sense is opening up the tools to educators, as well. Though many U.S. school systems already offer their students a set of digital resources through direct relationships with educational companies, like Nat Geo or Scholastic, those resources were typically meant to supplement the education the child was receiving at school, not replace it. There may still be large holes in the child’s education that aren’t being addressed.

Everything on the site has been hand-curated for educational quality.

This taps into Commons Sense’s key strength, as its focus has always been on promoting safe technology and media for children. Today, its website is known for its trusted reviews of TV, movies, books, games, and apps that help parents understand a given piece of content’s age-appropriateness, as well as concerns with the title in question, if any.

To create the new Wide Open School, Common Sense was able to tap into its existing understanding of the educational media available for families, and then organize it by grade level.

Common Sense says it also worked with key distribution and technology partners Apple, Google, Zoom, Comcast, Salesforce, and Zoom, which have also suggested tools and resources, to ensure they’re aware of and can access the content.

“The coronavirus pandemic has elevated the need for quality learning materials all in one place for families and educators, and Common Sense is proud that trusted experts and partners have joined together to launch Wide Open School so quickly,” said James P. Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense, in a statement about the launch.

“Many organizations have moved swiftly to respond to this crisis with incredible resources and special offers for educators and families. We wanted to use our nearly 20 years of experience as an expert reviewer and curator to create the go-to source of quality content that will provide educators with the support they need to shift to remote teaching and a one-stop, trusted place for families to engage kids who are now learning from home,” he added.

Though many U.S. schools are moving towards remote learning, some aren’t yet ready or fully rolled out. And even those schools that have shifted online aren’t necessarily programming the equivalent of a full school day for the students. That can be difficult for parents working from home, as kids complete their more limited educational activities, then look to be entertained. Left on their own, that’s meant full days of gaming or binging YouTube — much to the exacerbation of parents who don’t consider coronavirus cancellations just an early start to summer break.

Wide Open School can supplement whatever remote learning is taking place, as well, or can be used by teachers who are creating online lessons for the first time.

The new website launched publicly today, but is still considered a beta — meaning it’s not the final product.

Common Sense is still working to expand the site and is forging additional educational partnerships with media and education companies, nonprofits, and teachers, in order to add more content, it says.

The site will be available across platforms, including mobile, desktop and TV, in order to allow everyone — even low-income families — to access its resources.

It’s working to add other resources to aid low-income families as well, including information about accessing free or discounted broadband services, as well as resources for more urgent needs to address health, hunger, shelter, and psychological needs.

Palo Alto Networks announced today that it has an agreement in place to acquire CloudGenix for $420 million.

CloudGenix delivers a software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) that helps customers stay secure by setting policies to enforce compliance with company security protocols across distributed locations. This is especially useful for companies with a lot of branch offices or a generally distributed workforce, something just about everyone is dealing with at the moment as we find millions suddenly working from home.

Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO at Palo Alto Networks, says that this acquisition should contribute to Palo Alto’s “secure access service edge,” or SASE solutions, as it is known in industry parlance.

“As the enterprise becomes more distributed, customers want agile solutions that just work, and that applies to both security and networking. Upon the close of the transaction, the combined platform will provide customers with a complete SASE offering that is best-in-class, easy to deploy, cloud-managed, and delivered as a service,” Arora said in a statement.

CloudGenix was founded 2013 by Kumar Ramachandran, Mani Ramasamy and Venkataraman Anand, all of whom will be joining the company as part of the deal. It has 250 customers across a variety of verticals. The company has raised almost $100 million, according to PitchBook data.

Palo Alto Networks has been on an acquisitive streak. Going back to February 2019, this represents the 6th company it has acquired to the tune of over $1.6 billion overall.

The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter, subject to customary regulatory approvals.

Biotech startup Cue Health has secured a $13 million contract from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’ Biomedical Research and Development Authority (BARDA), which will be used to speed the development and testing of a handheld molecular test that can detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19.

Cue, which broke cover in 2014 with plans for a connected lab in a box for at-home testing and a $7.5 million funding round, is developing a product that pairs cartridge-like test kits with a compact and connected mini lab device that can transmit results to a personalized app-based health dashboard.

The startup received a previous $30 million contract from BARDA in 2018, which was earmarked for the development and validation of an over-the-counter diagnostic test for influenza and multiplex respiratory pathogens. This pre-existing relationship and work will be useful in helping jump-start the effort on developing COVID-19 testing, the company says.

“We have worked with the BARDA team for the past two years developing and testing a 20-minute, molecular influenza test designed for home and point-of-care use,” said Cue Health CEO Ayub Khattak in a statement. “Our connected platform could serve as a critical tool in identifying the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

The company also raised a $45 million Series B funding round the same year, which was designed to help it fund the first set of FDA clinical products used to validate its first products aimed at providing consumer diagnostics.

Cue’s proposed test solution would provide results in under 25 minutes, using samples collected via nasal swab, with all testing done at point-of-care rather than requiring any round-trip shipping.

It’s far from the only rapid, point-of-care test either in development, in testing or already approved for use under the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization, and there’s no specific timeline for this to become available. But the fact remains that the current testing gap needs to be addressed essentially by as many solutions as can be proven effective and viable – and this work should be useful long-term in addressing similar global crises and pandemics in future.

Microsoft today announced the launch of Azure Edge Zones, which will allow Azure users to bring their applications to the company’s edge locations. The focus here is on enabling real-time low-latency 5G applications. The company is also launching a version of Edge Zones with carriers (starting with AT&T) in preview, which connects these zones directly to 5G networks in the carrier’s data center. And to round it all out, Azure is also getting Private Edge Zones for those who are deploying private 5G/LTE networks in combination with Azure Stack Edge.

In addition to partnering with carriers like AT&T, as well as Rogers, SK Telecom, Telstra and Vodafone, Microsoft is also launching new standalone Azure Edge Zones in more than 10 cities over the next year, starting with L.A., Miami and New York later this summer.

“For the last few decades, carriers and operators have pioneered how we connect with each other, laying the foundation for telephony and cellular,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “With cloud and 5G, there are new possibilities by combining cloud services, like compute and AI with high bandwidth and ultra-low latency. Microsoft is partnering with them bring 5G to life in immersive applications built by organization and developers.”

This may all sound a bit familiar and that’s because only a few weeks ago, Google launched Anthos for Telecom and its Global Mobile Edge Cloud, which at first glance offers a similar promise of bringing applications close to that cloud’s edge locations for 5G and telco usage. Microsoft argues that its offering is more comprehensive in terms of its partner ecosystem and geographic availability. But it’s clear that 5G is a trend all of the large cloud providers are trying to tap into. Microsoft’s own acquisition of 5G cloud specialist Affirmed Networks is yet another example of how it is looking to position itself in this market.

As far as the details of the various Edge Zone versions go, the focus of Edge Zones is mostly on IoT and AI workloads, while Microsoft notes that Edge Zones with Carriers is more about low-latency online gaming, remote meetings and events, as well as smart infrastructure. Private Edge Zones, which combine private carrier networks with Azure Stack Edge, is something only a small number of large enterprise companies is likely to look into, given the cost and complexity of rolling out a system like this.

 

There are a number of initiatives by startup companies and entrepreneurs looking to support the healthcare response to COVID-19, and one that’s addressing a need in the realm of personal protective equipment is the COVID Box project launched by a group of volunteers in Toronto that includes startup founders and employees, as well as doctors and healthcare professionals.

The COVID-19 intubation box that this group is working to produce is a polycarbonate box that can be flat-packed for easy shipping, and assembled quickly on the receiving end, for use in healthcare facilities while medical personnel intubate a patient. Intubation is the process of inserting a plastic tube into a patient’s trachea to help keep their airway open, and is specifically necessary when someone needs to be put on a ventilator – a common outcome for patients severely affected by COVID-19.

The intubation box provides healthcare workers with an additional layer of protection, while the transparent plastic used means they can still perform the procedure. The design is based on an open-sourced original plan that was released by Dr. Hsien Yung Lai, a medical practitioner in Taiwan, specifically to address the global challenge of intubating COVID-19 patients worldwide while maintaining care worker safety as much as is possible.

The COVID Box project provides instructions on how to make your own box with the requisite materials, but it is hoping to secure more mass production capacity to deliver them at scale, starting with Canadian hospitals and hopefully expanding to address healthcare needs around the world, too. Project co-founder Jonathan Norris (co-founder and CTO of Taplytics) said the team has been working for a week on prototyping and production.

“Early last week Taplytics Head of Finance, Gloria Cheung, came to us letting us know that a group of Doctors were looking to get a simple plastic box made to protect Medical Providers while intubating patients who have COVID-19,” he said via message. “We were able to connect the doctors with a group of engineers from Taplytics and folks I know from mentoring in the FIRST Robotics program, to design and build multiple prototypes of a flat-packable box designed for this use. We worked with Eventscape to quickly built prototypes and got the final version approved for use in the Trillium Health Network yesterday.”

The group is looking for donations to help scale its efforts, as well as manufacturing partners that can help – especially those who have access to CNC router hardware, which is essentially the only equipment needed to put these out, as well as anyone who can supply 1/4″ polycarbonate sheets.

Roku announced today it’s preparing to roll out the next version of its operating system, Roku OS 9.3, which powers its popular media players, TVs, and other devices. The flagship feature of this latest release is the introduction of Spanish Language Roku Voice support — meaning consumers will be able to speak their voice commands in Spanish to do things like launch channels, search for content, or control media playback. Other notable additions in Roku OS 9.3 include search enhancements, like the new visual search results, and an updated Roku mobile app.

The support for Spanish language voice command will launch in the U.S. and Mexico. In addition to asking Roku to launch channels by name, play or pause or otherwise control the media, voice commands can be used to seek out content by title, actor or genre.

Plus, when those search results appear, they’re now going to be presented in a more visual fashion, starting in the U.S.

Before, search results were a list of matching titles. Following the update, they’re going to be categorized rows of content, including the relevant movies, shows, short-form entertainment and more. These will include results from Roku’s own media hub The Roku Channel and other places to watch, as well as purchases and rentals, sorted by price.

U.S. users will also be able to playback content from search for over 50+ streaming channels, when possible, after issuing a voice command to find a TV show or movie. That is, the content will just launch and start playing instead of presenting you with search results to choose from.

Like other streamers have done in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, Roku has added easier access to live news to its platform. In the U.S., voice commands like “show me the news” or “play the news” will direct users to a Roku Zone with news channels or just start streaming live content from ABC News within The Roku Channel. You can also say “Play the news on…” to launch the named news channel and remember that preference for future commands.

The Roku mobile app is also getting an update with this release.

The app will feature a new navigation bar at the top of the screen when users are connected to a Roku device. This bar will provide easier access to Roku Search, a shortcut to the remote control screen, and a new icon that displays a dropdown menu of devices for switching between the different Roku devices in their home they want to control. There are also quick access icons for launching mobile app features — like browse or launching recent channels —  without exiting the remote screen.

A few updates for international markets include an improved Roku Voice experience in Canada, Ireland, and the U.K.. This introduces a wider variety of commands for search, like “Show me…” or “I want to watch…” These markets will now have media playback controls and device control (e.g. “turn on closed captions), too.

In Canada, Mexico, and the U.K., users will be able to control their Roku players and TVs using Alexa devices or Google Assistant devices.

In more minor changes, Roku has organized Home Screen wallpapers and screensavers under the “Theme” menu and introduced “Theme Packs,” which offer both a wallpaper and screensaver together. The devices will also see performance improvements, specifically reduction to boot times, faster launch times for a number of channels, a more responsive Home Screen, and faster navigation.

For Roku audio devices, including the Roku Smart Soundbar and Roku TV, users will be able to access for soundbar settings from the TV interface; pair external devices (like a phone) for playback via Bluetooth; or pair other Roku audio products to the soundbar, like the Wireless Subwoofer or Wireless Speakers.

The update will roll out to select players in April and to all other streaming players, including audio devices, in the weeks ahead. Roku TVs will get the update in later months.

In recent weeks, millions have started working from home, putting unheard-of pressure on services like video conferencing, online learning, food delivery and e-commerce platforms. While some verticals have seen a marked reduction in traffic, others are being asked to scale to new heights.

Services that were previously nice to have are now necessities, but how do organizations track pressure points that can add up to a critical failure? There is actually a whole class of software to help in this regard.

Monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic and Elastic are designed to help companies understand what’s happening inside their key systems and warn them when things may be going sideways. That’s absolutely essential as these services are being asked to handle unprecedented levels of activity.

At a time when performance is critical, application performance monitoring (APM) tools are helping companies stay up and running. They also help track root causes should the worst case happen and they go down, with the goal of getting going again as quickly as possible.

We spoke to a few monitoring vendor CEOs to understand better how they are helping customers navigate this demand and keep systems up and running when we need them most.

IT’s big moment

Xage, a startup that has been taking an unusual path to secure legacy companies like oil and gas and utilities with help from the blockchain, announced a new data protection service today.

Xage CEO Duncan Greatwood, says that up until this point, the company has concentrated on protecting customers at the machine layer, but today’s announcement involves protecting data as it travels between parties, which is more of a classic blockchain security scenario.

“We are moving beyond the protection of machines with greater focus on the protection of data. And this announcement around Dynamic Data Security that we’re delivering today is really a data protection layer that spans multiple dimensions. So it spans from the physical machine layer right up to business transaction,” Greatwood explained.

He says that what separates his company from competitors is the ability to have that protection up and down the stack. “We can guarantee the authenticity, integrity and the confidentiality of data, as it’s produced at the machine, and we can maintain that all the way to [delivery to the various parties],” he said.

Greatwood says that this solution is designed to help protect data, even in highly complex data sharing scenarios, using the blockchain as the trust mechanism. Imagine a supply chain scenario in which the parties are sharing data, but each participant only needs to see the piece of data they need to complete their part of the transaction and no more. To do this, Xage has the concept of security fabric, which acts as a layer of protection across the platform.

“What Xage is doing is to use this kind of security outsource approach we bring to authenticity, integrity and confidentiality, and then using the fabric to replicate all of that security metadata across the extent of the fabric, which may very well cover multiple locations and multiple participants,” he said.

This approach enables customers to have confidence in the providence and integrity of the data they are seeing. “We’re able to allow all of the participants to define a set of security policies that gives them control of their own data, but it also allows them to share very flexibly with the rest of the participants in the ecosystem, and to have confidence in that data, up to and including the point where they’ll pay each other money, based on the integrity of the data.”

The new solution is available today. It has been in testing with three beta customers, which included an oil and gas customer, a utility and a smart city scenario.

Xage was founded in 2016 and has raised just over $16 million, according to PitchBook data.

Substack is taking several steps to support the writers and publications using its newsletter platform.

After all, just as writers and newsrooms are starting to build real businesses on Substack, the COVID-19 pandemic is dealing a huge financial blow to the media industry.

In response, the startup says it will donate $100,000 in grants — which will range from $500 to $5,000 in cash, “no strings attached” — to independent writers who are experiencing financial hardship. Applications open today and will close next week, on April 7.

The startup also says it will waive its 10 percent fee for publications if they donate their earnings to the effort against COVID-19 (that could mean donating to nonprofits, or to businesses that are threatened by the pandemic). The initial waiver is for one month, but it could be extended for up to three months.

Lastly, Substack publications will soon be able to customize their subscription pages, so that readers do more to support their favorite writers. For example, a publication could add a “super supporters” option that allows subscribers to pay even more than an annual subscription price.

In a blog post, the company said:

Unfortunately, we … know that writers and creatives are among the hardest hit by the economic downturn and are experiencing decreasing job opportunities, canceled projects, and pay cuts. Yet while advertising budgets get slashed, readers are more eager than ever to directly support the creators they care about because they believe, like we do, that journalism and the arts are more necessary than ever in times of crisis.