Author: azeeadmin

That port- and button-free phone Meizu showed off earlier this year? It didn’t even get half of its $100,000 Indiegogo pre-order campaign. But that’s fine, says the company. Turns out it was “messing about”

That’s according a post by CEO Jack Wong on Meizu’s official forum. “This crowdfunding project was just the marketing team messing about,” the executive said in the statement noted by Engadget. “The holeless phone is just a development project from the R&D department, we never intended to mass-produce this project.”

The handset, if you’ll remember, used a combination of tricks to keep the product completely devoid of buttons and ports, including a technology that vibrates the screen for sound, in order to rid the device of speaker grilles.

It’s all novel and more than a little bit silly, but the comments are no doubt a disappointment to backers. Surely not the sort of thing the fans who scraped together ~$45,000 want to hear — and perhaps a bit of sour grapes for a device that generated some buzz, but failed to hit its target in amongst a sea of foldable and 5G phones.

It seems likely the company would be looking at the product in a different light, had the $1,299 handset met its goal.

Tia, the company which launched with an app providing health advice and period tracking for women, has launched its first clinic.

From its first location in New York, the two founders of Tia hope that they can build a network of care facilities that integrate all of the information that their app collects with the benefits of having in-person consultations with physicians that have a holistic view of their patients’ health.

For founders Carolyn Witte and Felicity Yost the hurdles women need to overcome to receive adequate treatment aren’t theoretical — they’ve faced them directly.

Witte and Yost met a decade ago in college and remained friends ever since. It was when Witte had to diagnose herself with polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), a condition which affects nearly one in ten women, that she first realized how broken the healthcare system was for over half of the population of the U.S.

“It’s one of those classic issues in healthcare that’s really difficult to diagnose… I spent three years seeing gynecologists, who were treating the symptom and failing to connect the dots,” Witte recalls. “I found myself at age 25 at a fertility specialist in NYC after I diagnosed myself on the internet… and got this really unfortunate diagnosis.”

As a someone who worked at Google and had access to what was supposed to be the best healthcare services in the world, Witte realized that there was significant gaps between the understanding of healthcare for men and women. “Here i am feeling completely alone and confused… that was the moment for me when I said there has to be a better way.”

Witte moved back to San Francisco and moved in with Yost and began working on what would become the Tia app.

Initially the app was focused on providing advice to women around sexual health and gynecological issues, eventually expanding to include a period tracker and other tools. Now, with the expansion into the clinical space, Tia’s founders see it as the culmination of their evolution as a company.

“I wanted to build a brand company that makes women feel heard,” says Witte. “We wanted to build a one-stop-shop solution that solves the lack of soul in healthcare.”

With that mission accomplished, the next step is to grow.

Growth at the kind of scale that Witte and Yost envision requires capital, which the two women have received in the form of $6 million in capital commitments from a slew of some of venture capital’s best investors including John Doerr, Homebrew, Combine, Compound, Torch Capital, Canaan Partners, and Define Ventures (Lynne Chou O’Keefe from Kleiner Perkins).

“Tia is a revolutionary company that is changing the way women view and access healthcare. Now, with the launch of the first Tia Clinic, they’re introducing a new model of women’s care that will shift the landscape with convenience, compassion, and personalization,” said Lynne Chou O’Keefe, in a statement.

That sentiment is bound up in the branding of the business. Although neither woman is latinx, they called their company tia after the Spanish word for aunt — which, can be expanded to include any trusted relationship among women (whether or not they’re actually related), according to Witte.

The decision to expand from an application into physical clinics was bound up in the use cases that the two women saw when they launched their service. “We found very quickly after launching the product that women were hacking Tia and bringing their phones into their gynecologist’s office,” Witte says.

At the newly launched Tia clinic which opens today at its first location in New York near Madison Square Park, the company is providing full-stack care delivery including gynecological exams, primary care, and wellness.

The company charges a $150 membership fee, but its services are covered under insurance. Tia currently accepts Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Oscar, United Oxford/United Healthcare, and Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield.

Treatment at the Tia Clinic is informed by the data that the company’s application collects on its users, both Witte and Yost say. Women can come to the clinic for services ranging from holistic annual exams to IUD insertions to treatment for chronic migraines, alongside more mundane services like flu shots and strep throat treatments.

If Tia users track their cycle and daily health and wellness through the app, that can be shared with their Tia Clinic physicians to inform care. The medical service at this point doesn’t integrate other period tracking apps into its health data.

At the center of Tia’s clinical care is the notion that the menstrual cycle is broadly associated with physiological and emotional manifestations that can inform and effect treatment. 

Tia isn’t the only company that is trying to bring information and data specific to women’s health into a clinical setting. In Oakland, NextGen Jane is using tampons embedded with sensors to diagnose severe health problems like endometriosis.

And investors are pouring money into period tracking and fertility apps and services around the country and around the world.

As we wrote earlier this month:

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin,  the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

For Tia, the benefits of understanding menstrual health extend far beyond fertility.

“Women’s health is cyclic and changes every single day of a woman’s cycle,” says Yost. With that said, the company is only just now starting to do clinical research to test the validity of its thesis. “For us to be able to do any sort of clinical research on women is very very challenging,” says Yost. “All of these things can take a really long time because it takes so much information to diagnose.”

For investors like Homebrew’s Hunter Walk, companies like Tia sit at the intersection of a few promising trends — but the investment was driven by the passion the founders expressed for the mission they were on.

“Women and specifically millennial women and younger are increasingly becoming targeted by venture backed companies,” says Walk. “For years and years and years that audience was unrecognized and underserved… [But with Tia] what we saw was a checkbox on the founders and their abilities. They checked the box on the audience… and because they were going not just with generic women’s health but cycle-targeted women’s care, we thought that was the right and differentiated approach thinking about healthcare for women.”

Red Cat, a startup that wants to store drone flight data on the blockchain to guarantee immutability, announced the second Beta of its drone data platform today.

Jeff Thompson, CEO of Red Cat says in 2017 he was looking at what was holding back the commercial drone business and the need for a black-box kind of system became apparent to him. The so-called black box is really a flight recorder that tracks data about a flight. He believed he could create a platform to reproduce this capability for drones and store it on the blockchain to take advantage of the immutability of blockchain data.

“People want to be able to have some accountability and trackability to be able to start utilizing our information, whether it’s regulators or insurance companies, guys that have to write checks if you do a lot of damage,” Thompson told TechCrunch.

This tool could help these interested parties should there be an investigation into a crash, a near-miss with a plane or an incident like the drone that shut down Gatwick Airport in London last year. They can check the record in Red Cat and be assured that the data they are viewing is accurate and hasn’t been tampered with in any way.

Thompson believes having a system like this in place is absolutely essential if the industry is going to mature and be able to share airspace with other types of commercial air traffic. The company wants to do more than create the data tracking system, however. It wants to give drone companies detailed insight into exactly what’s happening with their drones as they travel to different destinations.

The goal is to help companies control and monitor their drone traffic and better understand how they are being utilized. The company is still refining all of this. This is actually the second Beta with 200 people actively using it in the first round. The purpose of this new Beta is to elicit additional feedback from the drone community including companies, pilots, regulators and insurance companies who could benefit from having access to data stored in Red Cat.

The company is based in Puerto Rico and has raised $2.2 million to date.

Yesterday’s analysis of the ethical tradeoffs faced by engineers working in the Valley certainly lit up my inbox with responses.

The general thesis of that piece is that startups and tech companies face more — and worse — tradeoffs as they have migrated from the “purity” of the early internet into more socially and ethically complicated spaces like labor, social media, health, and elsewhere. That led me to suggest that:

If you disagree with the ethics of your company, the best course of action — particularly in the strongest employment economy in years — is to find a job more in line with your values.

I was specifically talking about Google’s censored search engine project Dragonfly, but I think the discussion applies to a wide swath of the Valley today.

One subscriber wrote in response:

-1 for this piece as a new Extra Crunch subscriber. If this kind of the theme will be a key part of the Extra Crunch editorial voice, it makes me less likely to renew/recommend. Just a datapoint from one reader.

As always, you can just reply to this email and send me your thoughts, and I appreciate feedback.

One of my major objectives for Extra Crunch is to expand the dialogue around the challenges facing startups and how they conduct disruption. Startups and large tech companies are entering more complicated industries, and the decisions required of founders, engineers, product managers, and everyone are increasingly not black and white.

My sincere hope is that as you read Extra Crunch editorial, you tremendously agree with some articles and vehemently disagree with others. Only be conveying that debate and expanding the range of views can we hope to handle the decisions we face with nuance.

Do tech workers have power to shape the world? What world?

Another reader wrote in:

“I am a resolute defender of human rights, but the world is the world” [a quote from my analysis]

This statement is not only defeatist, it is meaningless. Like saying,”it is what it is”, you convey nothing. You also negate that you are a resolute defender of anything. This statement paints a closer picture to nihilism – nothing is important, everything is meaningless. How do you consider yourself a defender of human beings, when your suggestion to those affected is to move on and find somewhere else to go? You are promoting apathy, not the determinism of a fighter of freedom.

You paint a world in which corporate interests, and ultimately profits, decide how this world will operate. Suggesting that employees find another job is disregarding the power which they have in their current positions. Google hires top tier talent and has enormous influence. Where else can a person have more impact in their role? Like many other companies, Google has a code of ethics that suggests that employees should do exactly what these employees have done in cases where they disagree with corporate guidance. This is the importance of company culture and”culture fit”. Suggesting that good people do nothing when asked to do something that compromises their ethical values promotes the idea that there are no true ethics in business.

This is a fine critique and an important one.

I think one of the secrets of Silicon Valley’s startup success is that there is a large band of innovators who are not apathetic about their ability to change the world. You really can write some software in Xcode, publish it in the App Store, and eventually affect the lives of millions if not billions of people. That is an awesome power.

Yet, the ethics of disruption is complicated. Take Uber, for instance. The company broke the law not just in multiple urban jurisdictions across the United States, but in jurisdictions around the world. They ran an unregulated taxi service in cities where people who have tried to do that for decades were fined and possibly jailed. Breaking the law though meant offering a compelling new service that is clearly popular among consumers.

From a utilitarian perspective, that outcome is for the best, and Uber was right. But from a deontological approach focusing on duties and values, Uber is clearly in the wrong. It conducted possibly criminal actions in order to open up the taxi market and make an enormous profit. Was that ethical?

Uber has its adherents — it has a huge staff after all. But clearly some people would be uncomfortable working for a company that continually flouts the law in order to make disruption happen. Workers have the ability to shape their corporations to some degree, but their ultimate agency is their ability to walk out the door and apply their talents to companies that match their ethical values.

Infrastructure spending

Three pieces on megaproject infrastructure spending, which we have been focused on here for some time, since we seem to spend billions on high-speed rail only to see it evaporate before our very eyes.

First, a subscriber wrote in with thoughts on where the cost drivers are from his own experience in the space:

1. Contracting strategy – what seems like a good plan turns out to drive bad behavior

2. Design – starting construction before the design phase is complete (risk is amplified when the design is first-of-a-kind, and/or if the schedule is aggressive to start with)

3. Rapid pace of change – tech is obviously changing rapidly, but on multi-year, mega-projects even things like codes, laws, regulations, etc. change ”rapidly” relative to the overall duration of the project. And together with tech/software, it can be very difficult to manage. […]

4. Manufacturability or constructibility – design is difficult to manufacture/build

5. Modular – people fall in love with the concept, but it’s another thing to execute it

I think #3 is a particularly interesting one. We might think that construction methods don’t change, or building codes don’t get updated, but at a certain timescale, even those subtle changes over time have a huge impact on projects that might take a decade to complete.

Second, Alon Levy, a long-time commentator on infrastructure, has written up his comprehensive guide on the drivers of infrastructure costs, primarily focused on the United States. His nine factors run the gamut from engineering to management to procurement, but I loved his last factor around global incuriosity:

Incuriosity is not merely ignorance. Ignorance is a universal trait, people just differ in what they are ignorant about. But Americans are unique in not caring to learn from other countries even when those countries do things better.

[…]

Another Caltrain official, confronted with the fact that in Japan trains turn faster than Caltrain thought possible, responded “Asians don’t value life the way we do” – never mind that Japan’s passenger rail safety per passenger-km is about 1.5 orders of magnitude better than the US’s.

The most innovative people constantly work to learn from the smartest people in the world, which perhaps explains America’s appalling state of infrastructure.

Third, Bloomberg Businessweek published a brief interview with President Trump’s former infrastructure czar D.J. Gribbin. The answer he gives on whether an in infra deal could get done in Congress I think is just a perfect example of the challenges in this space:

It wasn’t like there was a deal sitting out there that was baked and could have moved earlier. You didn’t have bipartisan support for a plan. You had bipartisan support for a concept. The concept of, “Yes, we should do more.” Should it be better? Everyone agrees. And then as soon as you start getting into, “How do we make it better,” people balk and go, “Wait a minute. Why can’t someone else just cover the cost of this?”

Obsessions

• Perhaps some more challenges around data usage and algorithmic accountability
• We have a bit of a theme around emerging markets, macroeconomics, and the next set of users to join the internet.
• More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Motif, the startup using machine learning to develop investment strategies for consumers and institutional investors, and Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s leading investment banks, have launched new technology-driven indices to power a series of co-branded exchange traded funds.

“All these [current] indices are built with humans doing research to go in and figure out a methodology to give you exposure to an investment thesis,” says Motif chief executive Hardeep Walia. “And many of those indices are simple market-cap weighting.”

Walia says that Motif Investments is using data science and machine learning to build a better mousetrap for the financial services industry — and no less esteemed a financial services firm than Goldman Sachs has become the company’s first customer.

There is one critical question that financial advisors who are developing new investment strategies need to consider, according to Walia. And that’s whether the index that a financial services firm is creating is diverse enough to take advantage of all of the opportunities a certain thematic investment strategy may present.

To him, most strategies aren’t diversified enough, because they don’t include the breadth of public and proprietary research that Motif has scoured to create its indices.

“If you were to invest in a thesis and wanted to give your clients an opportunity to do that, you could pick the usual suspects,” Walia says. “We look at patent filings and academic papers… the difference is we’re doing it at scale.”

This morning, Motif and Goldman Sachs have launched a suite of five exchange traded funds based off of thematic trends that Goldman Sachs researchers identified as critical.

“They gave us 25 innovations and we packaged them into five ETFs that have consistent relevance,” Walia says.

The two companies will jointly market the products, which are focused on trends like artificial intelligence, big data, and cybersecurity; or the next manufacturing revolution, which includes companies developing robotics, new energy technologies, and three dimensional printing tools. Other funds will focus on the changing face of retail and the disruption of the healthcare industry, and even the ways in which technology is reshaping the financial services industry that Goldman has created.

“What we’re trying to do collectively is, instead of guessing when to buy low and sell high, we are trying to predict what are the things that are going to happen in the future that are going to drive disproportionate earnings growth,” says Walia. 

Walia wouldn’t comment on the revenue split between the two companies, but said that there would be a share of the profits on the 0.5 percent annual management fee that Goldman is charging on assets invested in the fund.

The new exchange traded funds will be available globally and are the first time that Motif will be investing thematically across all major markets rather than just in the U.S.

“Through these products we have access to eleven global markets,” Walia says.

For Motif, the partnership tied together three trends in the financial services sector: the rise of passive investing, the collapse of the market for exchange traded funds thanks to their proliferation and popularity among investors; and finally, the growing numbers of Generation X  (that’s me!) and millennial investors (that’s likely you!) in the customer base of the largest financial services firms.

Ultimately, though, it’s all about the data, says Walia. “90 percent of the data created since the dawn of humanity was created in the last two years and what i find interesting about this industry is that they’re still staring at the same Bloomberg terminal.”

Two years ago, Fitbit was in a rough spot. The company had ridden the wearables boom to an IPO and become virtually synonymous with the fitness tracker space, only to watch its fortunes dwindle as the market shifted almost entirely toward smartwatches.

“That shift happened very rapidly over a year and a half,” CEO James Park said in an interview with TechCrunch. We always had a smartwatch in development — I would have loved to have launched it at least six months earlier. I think that would have helped our numbers dramatically.”

The company threw a Hail Mary. It acquired a trio of prominent startups within a year of each other. It was tens of millions of dollars explicitly invested to accelerate its long simmering smartwatch development.

“Our internal team was totally capable of developing these products,” Park says. “It was the matter of time to market. Buying Pebble, Vector and Coin allowed us to really decrease the amount of time it took to launch Ionic. We developed our plans to launch a smartwatch much, much earlier. It was going to launch at some point, but the acquisitions really accelerated it.”

The acquisitions were viewed by many as a bit of flailing from a company that had lost its way. Sure the smartwatch category was growing, but those numbers were driven almost exclusively by one company and one product. Bigger names like Google and Samsung had attempted to elbow in on that market share without making a dent in Apple’s bottom line.

All told, the first product to emerge out of those deals landed with a bit of a dull thud. The Fitbit Ionic was big, bulky, virtually app-free and not particularly cheap at $299. This time last year, however, the company dropped another device. The Versa was compact and priced to move at $200. Fitbit, meanwhile, had been hard at work putting all of that Pebble money to work developing a more robust app ecosystem.

By June, the company announced that it had shipped more than one million Versas. This past quarter, meanwhile, the company began to see some dramatic returns. “I think the business is turning around,” Park says, with a hint of cautious optimism. “Q4 was the first time in two years that we’ve seen year-over-year growth in devices shipped. So, after two years of working pretty hard to stabilize our financials and our company, I think we’re starting to see a good rebound in the business.”

It was a modest rise, but a rise none the less, with total shipments for the quarter increasing three percent year-over-year to 5.6 million. Average selling prices on the devices had dropped, but the company had managed to return to profitability, thanks in part to various cost-cutting measures.

Smartwatches are only one part of the company’s planned growth. The other major piece, predictably, is healthcare. It’s a category Apple has been going after aggressively, while one-time competitor Jawbone has pivoted into the category entirely. As slow as growth can be on the consumer side, the healthcare industry is downright glacial.

“We see ourselves evenly split between being a consumer company and being a health company,” says Park. “Despite some of the challenges over the past couple of years, our healthcare business has continued to grow. Last year, it grew eight percent year-over-year. This year, we’re projecting double-digit growth to about $100 million in revenue.”

This morning, Fitbit announced several new devices. There’s the Versa Lite, which delivers a stripped-down version of the successful smartwatch at an even lower price point; the Ace 2, an update to the company’s kids tracker; and the Inspire, which finds Fitbit consolidating five devices into two as the Flex, Zip, One, Alta and Alta HR are sunset. It’s a low-cost product fairly targeted at Fitbit’s healthcare offerings. All show a company that has clearly learned the lessons of a rough couple of years, and for the first time in a while, Park and Fitbit have a reason to be optimistic — albeit cautiously so.

Fitness should be its own reward, but sometimes you need a little extra push. Fitbit today announced that it’s been testing a new Rewards program in beta, with plans to launch a premium paid version of the service at some point this year.

The limited beta, which will close at the end of next month, serves up points based on things like steps, active minutes and sleep, rewarding users with discounts as they hit their designated goals. So far, the company’s enlisted a trio of partners: Adidas, Blue Apron and the music service, Deezer.

Adidas has, of course, partnered with Fitbit before with customized bands, as a kind of counterpoint to Nike and Apple’s longstanding deal. Deezer, meanwhile, was the first music service to get on board with Fitbit’s original true smartwatch, the Ionic.

More details on the program will arrive later this year, as the company continues to work out some of the issues with the service via its beta.

There are few things kids love more in this world than a good sequel. As such, Fitbit has returned a year after launching its children’s fitness tracker the Ace with the predictably named Ace 2.

The new version of the product has a bumper designed to protect the display from all of the things that kids throw at it on a regular basis. It’s also water-resistant up to 50 meters, so they can shower with it on or take it for a swim.

There are new colors and patterns, which bring to mind the color scheme of shows like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, coupled with animated clock faces that feature different activities that change throughout the day as activities progress. There’s a monster that grows throughout the day and a rocket ship that takes off, among others.

The Ace 2 hits retail this summer, just in time for all of that outdoor running around. It will be priced at $70.

Clari started out as a company that wanted to give sales teams more information about their sales process than could be found in the CRM database. Today, the company announced a much broader platform, one that can provide insight across sales, marketing and customer service to give a more unified view of a company’s go-to-market operations, all enhanced by AI.

Company co-founder and CEO Andy Byrne says this involves pulling together a variety of data and giving each department the insight to improve their mission. “We are analyzing large volumes of data found in various revenue systems — sales, marketing, customer success, etc. — and we’re using that data to provide a new platform that’s connecting up all of the different revenue departments,” Byrne told TechCrunch.

For sales that would mean driving more revenue. For marketing it would it involve more targeted plans to drive more sales, and for customer success it would be about increasing customer retention and reducing churn.

The company’s original idea when it launched in 2012 was looking at a range of data that touched the sales process such as email, calendars and the CRM database to bring together a broader view of sales than you could get by looking at the basic customer data stored in the CRM alone. The Clari data could tell the reps things like which deals would be most likely to close and which ones were at risk.

“We were taking all of these signals that had been historically disconnected from each other and we were connecting it all into a new interface for sales teams that’s very different than a CRM,” Byrne said.

Over time, that involved using AI and machine learning to make connections in the data that humans might not have been seeing. The company also found that customers were using the product to look at processes adjacent to sales, and they decided to formalize that and build connectors to relevant parts of the go-to-market system like marketing automation tools from Marketo or Eloqua and customer tools such as Dialpad, Gong.io and Salesloft.

With Clari’s approach, companies can get a unified view without manually pulling all this data together. The goal is to provide customers with a broad view of the to-to-market operation that isn’t possible looking at siloed systems.

The company has experienced tremendous growth over the last year leaping from 80 customers to 250. These include Okta and Alteryx, two companies that went public in recent years. Clari is based in the Bay area and has around 120 employees. It has raised over $60M. The most recent round was a $35 million Series C last May led by Tenaya Capital.

The Inspire’s mere existence isn’t news in and of itself. The device was actually announced a couple of weeks back. But back then, it was a corporate exclusive — the latest piece in the company’s bid to get serious about health care.

Today, however, Fitbit announced that the product will be available to everyone, arriving later this month, priced at $70 for the standard version and $100 for the 24/7 heart rate tracking HR model.

The device’s arrival marks yet another line in Fitbit’s already complicated offerings, but the Inspire is effectively canceling a number of earlier models in its wake. The Inspire and Inspire HR will be replacing five Fitbit devices: the Alta, Alta HR, Zip, One and Flex 2.

“When a category is new and it’s growing, you’re always trying to figure out what works. What form factors work, what price points work,” CEO James Park said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Trackers are a pretty mature category at this stage, so I think we’ve been able to figure out what the the minimum number of SKUs is to hit all of the price points and demographics.”

The new device does double duty with a pair of easy release latches on the rear that let it double as a standard wrist-worn tracker or a clip-on with a separate accessory, a la the Zip.

The price is certainly right. Cost is a big factor that keeps users opting for trackers versus smartwatches, but Fitbit’s been experiencing increased competition on the low end, particularly from Chinese device makers like Xiaomi. This isn’t the $15 Mi Band, but it’s a step in the right direction for a one-time ubiquitous brand looking to regain footing.