Author: azeeadmin

Qualcomm today announced the launch of its new Snapdragon Wear platforms for wearables, the Snapdragon Wear 4100 and 4100+.

Based on a 12nm process technology, these new platforms promise to breathe new life into the Android Wear ecosystem.

One of the first things users will notice is that, compared to the previous generation of Wear 3100 chips, the 4100+ platform will offer support for a far richer ambient mode, which can now show more colors in this energy-efficient mode all while supporting sleep tracking, live complications and adaptive brightness.

Traditionally, in the Android Wear ecosystem, the ambient mode was quite pared down compared to the live mode, but this new platform is going to change that. According to Qualcomm’s data, most smartwatches spent 95% of their time in ambient mode, so that was an obvious feature to improve upon. For its sports mode, the watch falls back to a similar mode, which now features similar capabilities to keep you up to date while you are on a run, for example, and are using various sensors, maps and the GPS.

As for the actual technology, the 4100+ platform consisted of a main system Cortex A53-powered system on a chip that promises 85% higher performance compared to the previous generation, all while offering 25% longer battery life. The GPU itself is 2.5 times faster than only a generation ago, which should make for a far smoother user experience. Step counting, heart rate monitoring and more is handled by a tiny always-on co-processor, (it measures 5mmx4mm), while a 4G modem provides high-speed connectivity.

One other major advantage, especially for sport-oriented smartwatches, is improved GPS support with significantly lower power requirements.

For connected smartwatches, Qualcomm promises a 25% improvement in battery life (and these connected watches have traditionally had pretty dismal battery life).

If you really want to conserve battery life, a lot of recent Android Wear watches let you switch to a low-battery mode, which until now meant you only got to see the time. This ‘enhanced watch mode’ is getting a major update on the new 4100+ platform with the addition of step and heart rate support, a battery indicator, alarms and reminders (and yes, you can still see the time and date, too. It’s a watch, after all).

It’s worth stressing that Qualcomm will launch two variants of the 4100 platform, the 4100+, which features the main system on a chip, the always-on co-processor and the various connectivity chips, as well as the 4100, which will not feature the always-on co-processor.

The first watches to use the new 4100 chips will come from Mobvoi, the makers of the TicWatch line, and imoo, which will launch a kid-centric smartwatch based on the platform.

The U.S. government is warning that foreign nation-state hackers will “likely attempt” to exploit a new “critical”-rated security vulnerability found in a number of widely used Palo Alto Networks’ network appliances, which if exploited could allow an attacker to break into a company’s network with relative ease.

That’s the warning from US Cyber Command, a division of the Dept. of Defense and former sister-agency to the NSA, which said enterprises should patch their vulnerable devices as soon as possible.

The flaw lies in the software that powers several Palo Alto Networks firewalls and enterprise VPN appliances, which let employees access their corporate network from home — access that is crucial during the pandemic — while keeping unauthorized users out.

Typically employees must enter their corporate username and password, and often a two-factor code. But the flaw could, under certain conditions, let an attacker take control of one of these devices without needing a password, granting them access to the rest of the network.

Palo Alto said that a fix was pushed out in a software update, but enterprises can also switch off SAML — a way of letting a user log in to the network — to mitigate the flaw.

But the clock is ticking on enterprises getting those fixes installed. VPN appliances and firewalls are a huge target for hackers as they can provide unfettered access to a corporate network.

Last year, researchers found flaws in three corporate VPN appliances — including Palo Alto. Although fixes were quickly rolled out, enterprises that were slow to patch found their networks under attack, prompting Homeland Security’s cyber advisory unit to issue an alert. In some cases, hackers used the vulnerability to spread ransomware across the network.

For the time being, Palo Alto says there’s no evidence yet of hackers exploiting this vulnerability. But given the immediate risk to networks, companies should patch as soon as possible.

Venture capital has a long way to go when it comes to investing in underrepresented founders in a meaningful way. But according to The Venture Collective’s Cat Hernandez, the issue is too complex to solve by just cutting checks and spending time with entrepreneurs.

“You have to be maniacally focused on solutions,” Hernandez said.

So, Hernandez has teamed up with a number of operators-turned-investors to tackle tech’s diversity problem from a creative angle.

The Venture Collective, based in London and New York, launches today to make access to capital more equal. Fair warning: its experimental structure is knotty, as TVC is part investment vehicle and part management company. But it’s a creative strategy in a deserving sector that tech struggles to make progress within.

The team is stacked with a variety of experience: Founding partner Nick Shekerdemian is a former YC startup founder who launched a diversity recruitment platform, and his co-founder, Gina Kirch, was one of his investors, as well as a former director at BlackRock. Other partners include former Primary Venture Partners investor Cat Hernandez and Elliot Richmond, who invests out of the United Kingdom and previously worked at Moelis & Company.

TVC’s funding model has two customer bases: startup founders and family offices.

For startups, the business will invest a $100,000 check into one company per month, with the flexibility to do more. TVC intends to reserve between $1 to $5 million for follow-on rounds.

For family offices, TVC charges an annual fee to serve as intel for what they think are lucrative pre-seed deals in the Valley. If a family office or someone within its network wants to invest, TVC will ultimately deploy an allocated amount of capital. It hopes that total capital commitments will increase over time. 

While TVC says the structure model is in stealth, it is reasonable to compare the structures of these family office investments to the structures of special purpose vehicles. SPVs are investment vehicles that exist outside a fund’s capital allotment and are more spur of the moment, versus traditionally syndicated.

The biggest difference is that SPV structure is centered around deals, but TVC’s structure is centered around a capital allotment, deployed into multiple deals. They essentially act as middlemen between promising startups and family offices.

It’s good news for family offices, as they often take the role of institutional investors, which are decade-long relationships. The problem with lengthy bets is that what was hot in 2010 might not be hot in 2020. TVC’s model lets LPs deploy capital in their interest areas on a year by year basis. So an LP who is newly bullish on remote work (for some wild reason) could get their hands in early deals instead of waiting for the AR/VR fund they invested in years ago to make that move.

Putting all these pieces together, TVC gets more funds by:

• traditional equity raise
• annual fee to provide information to its network
• family office checks
• portfolio exits

Because of all of these mechanisms, TVC’s total “fund size” will change depending on the week. It’s a unique example of how first-time fund managers are tackling investing in a volatile landscape.

Today TVC launches with an undisclosed amount of equity-based financing. The company declined to share total assets under management.

So a big factor in TVC’s success is if it can convince both founders and family offices that its perspective is worth the set up. TVC’s flexibility can be a blessing, but it also can be risky and unreliable in case family offices pull out. Or if there is an extended recession, for example.

As a sweetener, the company says that it will donate two-thirds of partner time to helping portfolio companies.

But how does this fit into diversity? It all goes back to TVC’s goal to make access to capital more equal.

According to the team, pre-seed to Series A is where most companies fail, but the very funds that back pre-seed are also the most strapped for resources (small fund sizes, fixed management fees). Thus, firms have to selectively pick the companies they think are outliers and spend time with those companies on a more regular basis. This disproportionately impacts underrepresented founders, who might have a slower start due to lack of access to resources.

TVC thinks its strategy will help grow the number of startups that are venture-backable by heavily supporting them through this time, without competing and driving up valuations for only a few outliers.

The company defined underrepresented founders through diversity, geography, age and social background. When asked if they will publicly disclose diversity metrics, TVC said “it wants to be thoughtful about how we hold our investments accountable in the long-term and we are balancing that with a desire to not be prescriptive.”

“We believe that part of our job as early investors is to ensure that this intent is top of mind as the business scales. That can come in many forms — tracking/reporting on diversity metrics being one of them. At its core, this isn’t about window dressing,” the firm told TechCrunch. Generally, TVC is focused on helping more people get funding, and pointed toward financial optionality as the “flywheel we’re playing for.”

In terms of sourcing, TVC is partnering with tech-focused groups in New York and London and will identify talent at the university and college level. It also said it will build relationships with underrepresented operators “at the most prominent tech companies” and co-invest with diversity-focused founders.

TVC also launched a group called “The Collective” that includes diverse founders, operators and investors, who will help as a deal flow channel.

If you’re a typically terse communicator who could probably benefit from a little more civility in your everyday communications, a new Carnegie Mellon University research project could be the answer. A team at CMU created an automated way to improve the politeness of written requests and communications, which could have a number of potential applications – including eventually providing the basis for a sort of Grammarly but designed for writing tone instead of adherence to grammar rules.

The politeness transfer engine that the CMU research team (including Language Technology Institutes Ph.D student Shrimai Prabhumoye, as well as Master’s students Aman Madaan, Amrith Setlur and Tanmay Parekh) developed is based on similar style transfer mechanisms you may be more familiar with from photography AI projects, where software can apply the style of one photograph to any other. This project used a dataset of half a million emails exchanged by Enron employees, which were made public as part of legal proceedings against the company resulting from its corruption and fraud scandals.

Despite the company’s wrongdoing, many of the emails exchanged between employees were – unsurprisingly, if you’ve ever worked in a large corporation – laden with common niceties and politely formed requests and responses. These proved a good basis form which to train a computational linguistics algorithm that could then be used to take either basic or impolite requests, like ‘Show me last month’s reports,’ and turn that into something with a little more basic human kindness and decency, like ‘Could you please send me the reports from last month?’

It might seem like the task is relatively simple – append a ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to any phase and you’re mostly there, right? In fact, the researchers say that it actually involved a lot more subtlety, since in fact when we are striving to be polite we do a lot more, like rephrase what’s actually an order to be a request, as in the example above.

The automated method that the CMU team developed works only in North American English, as employed in a formal (ie. workplace) setting for now, and there will be lots of work required in order to localize it since regional and linguistic differences regarding what’s considered polite vary greatly. But even in its current form, it could provide a lot of benefit when used for automated customer service chatbots, for instance, or in autosuggesting text in an email client.

There’s clearly an interest in this from companies who make significant use of automated text suggestions – like Apple, which provided support for this research alongside the Air Force Research Laboratory, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation and NVIDIA.

A big problem for companies these days is finding ways to connect to various data sources to their data repositories, and Fivetran is a startup with a solution to solve that very problem. No surprise then that even during a pandemic, the company announced today that it has raised $100 million Series C on a $1.2 billion valuation.

The company didn’t mess around with top flight firms Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst leading the investment with participation from existing investors CEAS Investments and Matrix Partners. Today’s money brings the total raised so far to $163 million, according to the company.

Martin Cassado from a16z described the company succinctly in a blog post he wrote after its $44 million Series B in September 2019, which his firm also participated in. “Fivetran is a SaaS service that connects to the critical data sources in an organization, pulls and processes all the data, and then dumps it into a warehouse (e.g., Snowflake, BigQuery or RedShift) for SQL access and further transformations, if needed. If data is the new oil, then Fivetran is the pipes that get it from the source to the refinery,” he wrote.

Writing in a blog post today announcing the new funding, CEO George Fraser added that in spite of current conditions, the company has continued to add customers. “Despite recent economic uncertainty, Fivetran has continued to grow rapidly as customers see the opportunity to reduce their total cost of ownership by adopting our product in place of highly customized, in-house ETL pipelines that require constant maintenance,” he wrote.

In fact, the company reports 75% customer growth over the prior 12 months. It now has over 1100 customers, which is a pretty good benchmark for a Series C company. Customers include Databricks, DocuSign, Forever 21, Square, Udacity and Urban Outfitters, crossing a variety of verticals.

Fivetran hopes to continue to build new data connectors as it expands the reach of its product and to push into new markets, even in the midst of today’s economic climate. With $100 million in the bank, it should have enough runway to ride this out, while expanding where it makes sense.

Two factors defined OnePlus’s seemingly out-of-nowhere growth in the middle of the last decade: solid specs and a budget price tag. But markets change, and companies must adapt to survive. As someone who’s followed the Chinese smartphone maker since close to the beginning, I can confidently say that it hasn’t wavered from that first part. The second bit, on the other hand, is a bit of a different story.

OnePlus has experienced a bit of a price creep as it’s continued to add features to set itself apart from the competition. In the early days, the smartphone maker was content to wait a generation or two before embracing new tech, for the sake of keeping costs down. But increasingly, it’s come to be pride itself in being among the first first to things like in-screen fingerprint readers and 5G.

Today, however, it’s announcing a bit of a return to its roots with the Nord. The upcoming phone has been the subject of all manner of rumors under a variety of different names in recent months, but OnePlus just confirmed its name and arrival by way of an extended behind-the-scenes documentary on Instagram. Details are pretty slim at the moment, though the company confirmed that it will be priced at under $500.

Cofounder Carl Pei — who discussed the company’s place in the budget market last year at Disrupt last year — noted in the video, “There’s a huge change every two years. Anything can happen. Thousand dollar phones are decreasing in sales.” It’s a pretty well-established phenomenon over the last few years that has led to, among other things, companies like Samsung, Apple and Google to embrace lower-cost device amid stagnant sales figures.

OnePlus’s devices have still remained relatively affordable, compared to the competition, but the addition of the Nord will finds its getting back to where it started from with a line aimed at a wider range of consumers and different markets. More info soon, no doubt.

The summer before Alamin Uddin was set to begin medical school, he worked in a small doctor’s office in the Bronx as a receptionist.

There, dealing with the workflow of managing paper and electronic health records, organizing and scheduling patient’s visits and follow ups, he realized that one of the largest obstacles to quality care for many patients remains the lack of integration of medical records.

In the years since the first electronic medical records laws were passed, the promise of an integrated single source of patient information is still largely illusory.

That’s why Uddin and Waleed Asif, both graduates of City College, founded NexHealth. And why investors were willing to give the pair $12 million to build out their API providing a gateway between patient data in health records from small and medium-sized independent physicians and clinics and developers.

For most small clinics and independent practices, the benefits of opening up EHRs to developers isn’t entirely clear, so NexHealth is proving the use case for them with an initial suite of tools like online scheduling, automated patient communications and payments, the company said.

So far, the company has developed APIs to support around 50 electronic health record integrations, and is managing the caseload for around 10.4 million patients.

Companies like Quip and Doctorlogic are already using the company’s API to integrate with those health records. 

“The need is that developers don’t have the tools they need to innovate in SMB healthcare,” Uddin wrote in an email. “We’re building those tools to help developers rapidly go to market in the SMB healthcare space.”

Backing the company is a collection of super angels including James Beshara of Tilt and Airbnb fame; Joshua Hannah, from Betfair; Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman; Harry Stebbings, from 20minuteVC; AngelList’s Naval Ravikant; Scott Belsky from Adobe and Behance; and Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital.

The independent healthcare market represents 70 percent of a consumer’s interaction with healthcare and no one is servicing those independent offices, according to Uddin. These are places like dentists, chiropractors, small minute clinics and urgent care facilities or independent health care practitioners.

“We want to enable innovation in the healthcare system,” Uddin said, and he thinks these small businesses are the best place to start.

 

Facebook announced this morning that stories with original reporting will get a boost in the News Feed, while publications that don’t clearly credit their editorial staff will be demoted.

The change comes as a number of high-profile companies have said that they will pull their advertising from Facebook as part of the #StopHateforProfit campaign, organized by civil rights groups as a a way to pressure the social network to take stronger steps against hate speech and misinformation.

On Friday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company will start labeling — but not removing — “newsworthy” content from politicians and other public figures that violates its content standards. (He also said that content threatening violence or suppressing voter participation will be removed even if it’s posted by a public figure.)

Today’s blog post from VP of Global News Partnerships Campbell Brown and Product Manager Jon Levin doesn’t mention the ad boycott, and it suggests that these changes were developed in consultation with news publishers and academics. But these certainly sound like concrete steps the company can point to as part of its efforts against misinformation.

What gets prioritized in the News Feed has long been a thorny issue for publishers, particularly after a major change in 2016 that prioritized content from friends over content from publishers.

“Most of the news stories people see in News Feed are from sources they or their friends follow, and that won’t change,” Brown and Levin wrote. “When multiple stories are shared by publishers and are available in a person’s News Feed, we will boost the more original one which will help it get more distribution.”

As for “transparent authorship,” Facebook will be looking for article bylines, or for a staff page on the publisher’s website. As Brown and Levin noted, “We’ve found that publishers who do not include this information often lack credibility to readers and produce content with clickbait or ad farms, all content people tell us they don’t want to see on Facebook.”

While these same like smart, straightforward changes (Google announced similar steps last fall), Brown and Levin also warned publishers not to expect “significant changes” in their Facebook traffic, since there are a “variety of signals” that go into how content gets ranked in the News Feed.

Also worth noting: These changes only apply to news content.

The good ship Extra Crunch Live sails along today, bringing two noted venture capitalists aboard to discuss the world’s investing patterns, their own deals and much more.

Extra Crunch members can join the conversation with Hans Tung and Jeff Richards from GGV Capital at 3:30 p.m. EDT/12:30 p.m. PDT/7:30 p.m. GMT.

We’ll collect audience questions as we go, so buy an Extra Crunch trial now so you can participate. Of course, TechCrunch has a list of its own queries — GGV Capital invests globally, which means it has eyes and ears in a number of different markets. We’ll dig into how different markets are faring: Is China’s VC scene as slow as it seems? Is Europe bouncing back as we’ve been hearing? And what’s the current temperature here in the United States for Series A through C rounds?

With the stock market back to form, exits are hot again, which gives us a new set of topics to explore, including how GGV views M&A appetite today from a price perspective, and whether any of their later-stage companies are looking more closely at the IPO market.

TechCrunch’s Extra Crunch Live series has featured guests like investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban, BLCK VC’s Sydney Sykes and Inspired Capital’s Alexa von Tobel, with more to come.

There are other pressing matters: The COVID-19 pandemic is re-accelerating domestically even as it abates abroad. And GGV spoke out against racism during the early days of protests after the killing of George Floyd, so we’ll ask about the venture capital industry and if its efforts to diversify itself will make more material progress this time.

Extra Crunch subscribers, hit the jump and add the event to your calendar. Zoom links and the rest of the goodies are down there as well. (We’ll also stream live on YouTube). If you aren’t an Extra Crunch subscriber, you can get a cheap trial here.

All set? Great. We’ll see you in a few hours.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) is upping its space industry game with a dedicated business unit called Aerospace and Satellite Solutions (as first reported by the WSJ) that’s focused on space projects, including from customers like NASA, the U.S. military, and private space players including Lockheed Martin and others. AWS has already served satellite and space industry customers, including with its AWS Ground Station offering, which provides satellite communication and data processing as a service, helping customers bypass the need to set up their own dedicated ground stations when establishing their satellite networks and constellations.

The AWS segment will be led by retired Air Force Major General Glint Crosier, who was involved in the set up of the U.S. Space Force arm of the U.S. military. The choice of leadership is a good indicator of what the primary purpose of this unit will be: landing and serving large, lucrative customers mostly form the defense industry.

In a high-profile decision last year, AWS lost out on contract to provide cloud computing services to the Pentagon with an estimated value of up to $10 billion, with Microsoft’s Azure taking the win. Amazon has formally challenged the decision, and the proceedings resulting from that challenge are ongoing. But the contract loss was likely a wake-up call at AWS that it would need to do more in order to bolster its pipeline for dedicated defense agency contracts.

Cloud computing services for satellite and in-space assets is a potentially massive business over the next few years for the defense industry, particularly in the U.S., where part of the strategy of the Space Force and Department of Defense is shifting away from a reliance on large, aging geostationary satellites, and towards more versatile, affordable and redundant networks of small satellites that can be launched frequently and in a responsive manner.

A primary focus on defense customers doesn’t mean startups and smaller new space ventures won’t benefit; in fact, they should be just as able to take advantage of the cost benefits that will accrue from Amazon dedicated more resources to serving this segment as bigger players. In fact, AWS Ground Station already serves smaller startups including Capella Space, which announced today that it would be using AWS for its satellite command and control, as well as for providing data from its imaging satellites to its customers much faster and cheaper than is usually possible for satellite providers.

This new focus could help further defray hard costs that any satellite startup must incur like ground station setup – a much-needed relief as the COVID-19 situation continues to impact startups’ ability to raise, especially in frontier tech areas like space.