Author: azeeadmin

Personal homepage startup About.me has been acquired. Again! The company, once bought by Aol for a reported $35 million, decided a couple years after the deal to go it alone, and spun About.me back out to become an independent company. Today, About.me announced it’s being acquired by the Oakland-based startup Broadly.

About.me founder and True Ventures partner Tony Conrad called the deal “definitely a meeting of the minds,” as About.me has been more recently focused on helping people and companies showcase their professional talents and skills, while Broadly creates tools that help small businesses stay connected to their customers.

Today Broadly offers web chat, text, email, online review collection, and team messaging – all in its own mobile app.

However, it’s biggest draw is its online review platform that makes it easier for happy customers to quickly leave the business a positive review on any review site, including Google, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and others.

Last September, Broadly raised $10 million in Series B funding co-led by original investor Foundry Group and new partner Calibrate Ventures. The funding was allocated towards further product development and hiring – both things which an About.me acquisition can now help to speed up. The company also last year launched its small business-focused web chat feature in its app, and snagged the #107 spot on the 2018 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing private companies in the U.S., which cited its 2017 revenue as $4.7 million.

Terms of the About.me deal were not disclosed, but it is an all-stock acquisition we understand and one Conrad feels positive about.

In addition, the majority of About.me’s team is joining Broadly as a result of the acquisition which will bring Broadly’s total team to over 75. This includes About.me’s CEO Mindy Lauck, whose background includes time at Adobe Systems, NBC-Universal, and E*Trade Financial. She becomes Broadly’s Vice President of Product following the deal’s closure.

Conrad said he wanted to find About.me a new home with a company that was a good fit.

“It was important to the About.me leadership team to join forces with a company that had a strong go-to-market strategy and a similar level of passion for serving small business owners, who are an integral part of
keeping our economy strong and vibrant,” said Conrad. “We found that in Broadly and see the very real potential for powerful future growth as a result of this alignment,” he added.

At Broadly, Lauck will be focused on expanding the company’s existing product suite to support the full range of the small business owners’ needs – that will include About.me’s technology. The plan is to offer the About.me pages to Broadly’s small business user base going forward.

“The About.me product is another frictionless mechanism for helping small businesses promote themselves and start capturing leads, which aligns well with our mission and brand,” said Josh Melick, CEO and Co-founder of Broadly, in a statement. “More personally, we’re thrilled to welcome the About.me team to the Broadly family – we’re even stronger together,” he added.

A new streaming startup called Loop Media is announcing its first acquisition — it’s bought a 30-year-old company called ScreenPlay.

While you may not have heard of ScreenPlay, the company has licensed a library of 200,000 music videos and movie/game/TV trailers, which it broadcasts in thousands of venues for partners like Hard Rock Cafe, Norwegian Cruise Line, Yard House, Buffalo Wild Wing and Caesars Entertainment.

This announcement comes just a week after Loop officially came out of stealth — and in fact, co-founder and CEO Jon Niermann (previously an executive at EA and Disney) said he’s always seen Screenplay’s content library as the foundation for Loop business.

It also sounds like this deepens an existing relationship, with Loop previously making a minority investment in ScreenPlay. The idea is to preserve and even grow ScreenPlay’s existing business — bringing video to out-of-home locations — while also introducing new technology into the mix, including a mobile app for short-form video.

“[ScreenPlay] is a company that generates millions in top-line revenue, it’s profitable,” Niermann said. “As technology has evolved and been updated, we want to come in with our team and really help them grow that.”

There are plenty of other mobile apps featuring short videos, but Niermann said Loop can now take advantage of ScreenPlay’s content library, and also connect the venue experience with the app. In addition, he said Loop is building “a very streamlined, slick app” that offers better curation than most video services, as well as “a strong social component.”

The acquisition was for an undisclosed price, combining both cash and stock. Niermann noted that “the ScreenPlay team remains intact,” with founder and chairman Mark Vrieling joining Loop as its chief content officer.

He added that existing ScreenPlay customers will not experience any interruption in their service. The plan is to launch the Loop app and an improved ScreenPlay screencast system in the next six months.

“[The business] is going to be a hybrid,” he said. “We wanted to continue to have the business roots, so to speak, but everybody’s mobile, everybody’s viewing everywhere. The question for us is, how do you create something that’s unique, that truly is a seamless experience?”

When I interviewed Parrot founder and CEO Henri Seydoux at TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2016, he surprised everyone when he said he was working on a new kind of T-shirt — nobody knew for sure whether he was joking or not. But the connected T-shirt is real, and it’s called wearTRBL.

While the project started as a Parrot subsidiary, the company was spun off in July 2018. Seydoux is still credited as co-founder and Olivier Levy acts as co-founder and CEO. wearTRBL expects to launch its first product in a few months.

The team has been working on a flexible E Ink display that you can seamlessly embed into a T-shirt. Thanks to a mobile app and Bluetooth Low Energy, you can change the image on the display and make a statement.

You can store up to 20 images on the display and the battery should last around 4 days. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to wear your T-shirt for 4 days straight because that would be incredibly gross. But you can remove the display and put it into another T-shirt, sweatshirt or accessory.

If you’re thinking about this product with the expectations of a consumer electronics enthusiast, you’re going to be disappointed. This is a fashion product, a way to express yourself with your T-shirt and show some of your personality using what you wear.

The original idea behind this T-shirt started after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. Many people wanted to express themselves by replacing their online profile pictures with drawings. People wanted to write “Je Suis Charlie” on giant banners.

wearTRBL wants to create a community and a curated library of pictures. You’ll be able to browse a collection of designs and download it to your T-shirt. You’ll also be able to attract followers and broadcast content to other users.

The startup eventually wants to become a brand of iconic clothing items that are all compatible with the E Ink display. It’s an ambitious bet, but Seydoux wasn’t joking when he said “I’m working on a T-shirt that you’ve never seen before.”

Google today announced an update to its Cloud Speech-to-Text and Text-to-Speech APIs that introduces a few new features that should be especially interesting to enterprise users, as well as improved language support and a price cut.

Most of these updates focus on the Speech-to-Text product, but Cloud Text-to-Speech is getting a major update with 31 new WaveNet and 24 new standard voices. The service now also supports seven new languages: Danish, Portuguese/Portugal, Russian, Polish, Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Norwegian Bokmål. These are all in beta right now and extend the list of supported languages to 21 total.

The service now also features the ability to optimize audio playback for specific devices. That sounds like a minor thing, but it allows you to tell a call center application for interactive voice responses and another application for use with a headset.

As for Cloud Speech-to-Text, this update focuses on making the service more usable in situations where developers have to support users on multiple channels — think a phone conference. For this, the company introduced multi-channel recognition as a beta last year and now, this feature is generally available.

Similarly, Google’s premium AI models for video and enhanced phones launched into beta last year with the promise of fewer transcription errors than Google’s other model which mostly focuses on short queries and voice commands. This model, too, is now generally available.

In addition to the new features, Google also decided to cut the price for using the Speech-to-Text service. The company decided to cut the prices of the standard and premium video model for transcribing videos for those who opt in to Google’s data logging program by 33 percent. By opting in, you allow Google to use your data to help train Google’s models. The company promises that only a limited number of employees will have access to the data and that it will solely use it to train and improve its products, but chances are not everybody is going to feel comfortable opting in to this, even if it means there’s a discount.

Thankfully, the regular premium video model is now also 25 percent cheaper without having to log in to Google’s data logging. Like before, the first 60 minutes are still free.

 

We’ve been covering the battle for 5G between the U.S. and China for some time. The White House has made 5G technology a national security priority, and industry leaders have followed up that charge with additional investment in the fledgling technology.

What 5G exactly is though remains mostly a mystery. Is it new bandwidth? Edge computing? Decentralized cloud processing technology? Autonomous vehicles? Something else? I get pitched a dozen stories a day about the “5G revolution” and no one can tell me exactly what’s in it for me other than long presentations in hotel ballrooms about bandwidth (ironically, often without any cell reception).

So imagine my surprise this morning when Trump tweeted that U.S. companies need to work harder and faster on building out the tech behind 5G, but also in the process called for …. 6G technology.

I want to just say that no, 6G isn’t a thing. I have only received one PR pitch for 6G in the last few months, which said: “Waveguide over copper runs at millimeter frequencies(about30 GHz to 1 THz) and is synergistic with 5G/6G wireless. A type of vectoring is applied to effective separate the many modes that can propagate within a telephone cable.” No, not a thing.

But it could be a thing. Maybe the government is secretly pioneering the next generation of the next generation of telecom technology. Or maybe, just maybe, our president, branding expert that he is, realized that if you are going to sell 5G, you might as well inflate the number to 6G and really get people’s taste buds salivating.

No comment from cleaning supplies company Seventh Generation, but if I were them, I’d be getting worried.

Amazon’s recent investments in NYC educational initiatives will continue, despite the company pulling its HQ2 plans for the area. But the company isn’t stopping there. Today, Amazon announced it will bring computer science courses to over 1,000 high schools in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The classes, which are funded through Amazon’s Future Engineer program, will reach tens of thousands of students nationwide.

The Future Engineer program’s goal is to bring computer science courses to more than 100,000 underprivileged kids in 2,000 low-income high schools across the U.S. It also awards 100 students per year with four-year $10,000 scholarships and offers internships at Amazon.

The U.S. high schools will offer the Intro to Computer Science and AP Computer Science classes through the curriculum provider Edhesive, says Amazon. The funding will provide the lessons, tutorials, professional development for teachers, a fully sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support for both students and teachers alike.

All students in the courses also receive a membership to AWS Educate, which gives them free computing power in the AWS Cloud for their class projects and other content to learn about cloud computing.

While Amazon obviously has a vested interest in ensuring the next generation of engineers are learning its own technologies, including AWS, investments like this help to level the playing field some by offering more students the opportunity to study computer science – which can lead to their ability to get into higher-paying jobs down the road, including those outside of Amazon.

The Amazon Future Engineer program itself is part of Amazon’s larger $50 million investment in computer science and STEM education.

Amazon notes that there will be 1.4 million computer science jobs available by 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor statistics, but only 400,000 computer science grads with the skills needed to apply for them. Computer Science is also the fastest-growing STEM profession, but only 8 percent of STEM grads are earning a computer science degree. And only a small fraction of those are from underprivileged background, Amazon says.

“We want to ensure that every child, especially those from underprivileged communities, has an opportunity to study computer science,” said Jeff Wilke, CEO Worldwide Consumer, Amazon, in a statement. “We are excited more than 1,000 schools will now provide these courses, and look forward to adding 1,000 more schools over the coming months.”

A company using advanced technologies to grow and harvest mealworms (larval beetles) at scale is on track to become one of the venture capital industry’s oddest billion dollar investments.

Ÿnsect, (pronounced ‘insect”) is a Paris-based producer of insect protein that has just closed on $125 million as the company looks to expand into North America selling bug-based nutrients to fish farms, animal farms, and the everyday harvesters of vegetables. 

The company isn’t worth $1 billion… yet. But that’s clearly the goal as it bulks up for a global expansion effort.

According to the company’s chief executive Antoine Hubert, a former agronomist turned bug farm maven, the company grew out of efforts to promote sustainability in the food system at foods and companies across France.

“We thought we could make a bigger impact by developing not only education but production,” in the realm of novel proteins for agriculture, Hubert says. 

Since agriculture is a leading producer of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that contribute to global warming, then any steps that are taken to reduce those emissions by making supply chains and production more efficient would be good for the environment.

“The food system has an impact on greenhouse gas. We decided to develop a proper technology to produce large volumes of proteins at competitive prices,” Hubert says. 

The company borrows automation and sensing technologies from areas as diverse as automotive manufacturing and data center heating ventilation and cooling and applies it to the cultivation of mealworms. The company actually has 25 patents on the technologies it has deployed and is on track to book more than $70 million in revenue this year.

Bugs are clearly big business.

Why mealworms, though? Because Hubert says they’re the highest quality insect for pound-for-pound protein production.

The company said that it raised this $125 million (€110m) Series C round to scale up production. Ÿnsect intends to build the world’s biggest insect farm in Amiens Metropole, Northern France and will begin expanding its presence in the North American market. 

The deal, led by Astanor Ventures with participation from Bpifrance, Talis Capital, Idinvest Partners, Finasucre and Compagnie du Bois Sauvage is the largest ag tech deal to date outside of North America and should plant a flag for the role of insect cultivation in the animal feedstock and fertilizer market, which is a combined global market of $800 billion.

That’s good news for competitors like Protix, AgriProtein, EnviroFlight and Beta Hatch, which are all building insect kingdoms of their own with eyes on the same, massive, global market. In fact, before Ÿnsect’s big haul, Protix held the title of the venture-backed bug business with the most cash. The company raised $50 million in financing back in 2017 to expand its insect empire.

Ÿnsect’s bug protein has already found its way into pet and plant food, fish food for aquaculture and other applications, but as demand for sources of high quality proteins continues to grow alongside a rising global population, the company sees one of its largest opportunities in fish and shellfish farming.

“By offering an insect protein alternative to traditional animal and fish-based feed sources, Ÿnsect can help offset the growing competition for ocean fish stock required to feed two billion more people by 2050, while alleviating fish, water and soil depletion, as well as agriculture’s staggering 25% share of global greenhouse gas emissions,” says Hubert. “Our goal is simply to give insects back their natural place in the food chain.”

It was this ability for Ÿnsect to slot itself into the global food chain that attracted Talis Capital as an investor, according to the firm’s co-founder Matus Maar.

“With the global population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050, current acquaculture and animal feeding practices are unsustainable.” Mar said in a statement. “Ÿnsect taps into a huge, yet highly inefficient global market by offering a premium and – above all – sustainable insect-derived product through a fully automated, AI-enabled production process.”

The quality of a financial market is driven by liquidity. Companies want to list on the NYSE, because that’s where the most financial investors in the world are located, and the thicker the market for investors, the better the valuations for companies. The NYSE has “problems” though — its closed most hours of the week, for instance, because humans are lazy, and it has a bunch of rules on what can be listed and how.

So blockchain! Blockchain solves this liquidity problem by allowing traders to operate 24/7, sell assets immediately, yada yada yada. All the stuff that’s been talked about ad nauseam the past few years.

I wanted us to get a better feel for the real liquidity of blockchain technology, and so we had Extra Crunch contributor Galen Moore crunch the numbers. And, my god, these markets are about as liquid as my dining room table.

In his analysis of security token offerings, Moore finds that liquidity can be measured in dollars a day. As in, sometimes there is someone, somewhere that wants to trade a token, but it isn’t all that often! For BCAP and SPICE, there are days that had no liquidity at all despite millions in purported market value.

It’s straight out of my market microstructures textbook that I used to read before going to bed. When you have lightly-traded assets, you want to build a market that concentrates trades in that asset into tight windows, in order to increase the thickness of the market. These securitized tokens would do better with an hour of trading per week when more buys and sells could be matched together, rather than the current model of no one trading ever.

We talk a lot about the user story from a utility token perspective, but we also need to talk about the user story from an investor perspective. Markets are sort of the classic case of network effects. Blockchain technologies are great and I am a “believer” for whatever that means, but if you are going to run a market, there has to be a crowd that shows up — or there is no market.

Why can’t we operate anything?

The Wall Street Journal had a great piece yesterday on the travails of Amtrak, which in addition to being an actual business, needs to get approval from Congress to make operational changes (and you think your board is tough). If you thought we couldn’t build anything, wait until you see how little we can operate anything as well.

This story has everything:

• Train nostalgics want Amtrak to continue running unprofitable, long-distance routes daily
• Congressmen with rural stops want unprofitable routes to continue serving stations that essentially have no passengers
• Unions are opposed to removing dining cars on trains that operate over short distances
• Private rail owners don’t want more frequent service because it makes scheduling freight trains more complicated
• Amtrak’s entire long-distance fleet has aged and needs to be replaced, but no one can agree on what configuration new train sets should have
• Even so, Congress wants Amtrak to become more financially solvent (!)

And so you get to this fact:

Amtrak’s long-distance routes carried about 4.5 million riders in fiscal 2018, down slightly from the previous year. Amtrak reported an adjusted operating loss of $543 million on those routes in 2018, more than offsetting the $524 million in earnings coming from its operations on the Northeast Corridor.

Long distance passengers are just 15% of Amtrak’s total, but hold the company hostage.

We have an infrastructure obsession over here these days, but it’s not just planning and construction that matters — how we operate infrastructure is even more crucial for preserving the quality of the user experience. As Amtrak makes clear, the kinds of sprawling debates that plague the planning process come up just as often in operations.

Quality news from around the web

Google Policy “Reorg”

Dave McCabe at Axios got the scoop yesterday that Google is re-organizing its policy wing. The details are vague and don’t portend huge changes to its model. One interesting note is that the shop will be called “Government Affairs and Public Policy” instead of just “Public Policy,” indicating that Google clearly sees a need to lobby more forcefully on its behalf than it has in the past. The company will also bolster regional teams, which seems critical in emerging markets like India and Indonesia, where massive elections this year threaten to rapidly change the policy environment for large foreign tech companies.

Two internets is increasingly the reality at the protocol level too

We’ve talked a lot about the splitting of the internet into internets due to content firewalls and barriers to competition in the tech sectors in countries like China, India, and elsewhere. Another dynamic is that the very protocols that run the internet are now diverging between these countries. The FT noted that emerging markets have made almost no efforts to migrate to IPv6, the modern Internet Protocol system, from IPv4. With more and more devices coming online and the IP address space exhausted, that split on the core protocol of the internet complicates keeping the world on one platform.

Does Saudi Arabia’s Asia investments paint a blurry picture for the SoftBank Vision Fund?

During his tour across Southeast Asia this week, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has been publicizing his intentions to invest billions in the region. And we’re not talking about chump change here — just yesterday during his visit to India, MBS stated Saudi Arabia was looking to invest at least $100 billion in the country over the next two years, which came just days after Saudi Arabia reportedly signed agreements to pour around $20 billion into Pakistan.

Besides the fact that Saudi Arabia is diving further into the infrastructure race in Southeast Asia and that the country is actively engaged with national rivals, Salman’s statements interestingly came right after reports that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund was growing frustrated with the SoftBank Vision Fund where it has invested $45 billion. Based on the crown prince’s ambitious claims in Southeast Asia, it seems like Saudi Arabia has more than enough alternatives to SoftBank to put its money to work, which might create some more around hopes for a second Vision Fund if the reports of LP discontent are true. ~ Written by Arman Tabatabai

Countries are torn on how to transition to a cashless future

Pieces from Quartz and the New York Times highlighted a developing story of how countries are approaching the swift decline in cash. As regions move closer to cashless societies, policymakers are voicing concerns over equity, data treatment, and the underbanked. Such negative externalities have been well-documented in countries like Sweden, where cash is rarely used, infrequently printed and is no longer accepted in most places.

To avoid the same unintended consequences, the UK will publish a roadmap for handling falling cash usage next month, while policies banning cashless stores have already been passed or discussed in major US cities and states. While other countries like South Korea, India and China have advocated for cashless payments, the UK and the US are hoping to create a more gradual, manageable and predictable transition. ~ Written by Arman Tabatabai

JVP’s new $220 million fund leverages its frontier tech and cyber pedigree

Yesterday, Israel-based Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) announced it had closed on $220 million in committed capital for its eighth fund, which will focus on investing in early and mid-stage companies in frontier tech sectors like AI, cybersecurity, and computer vision. JVP has a long track record of investing in these categories and working with governments. The firm has worked with the Israeli government to help run several leading cybersecurity accelerators, and recently partnered with New York City to help launch the city’s $100 million Cyber NYC program focused on establishing a dominant cybersecurity ecosystem. Israel has long been a source of new innovative cyber solutions while New York’s central financial institutions have been some of the largest customers and stakeholders in cybersecurity. Given its established and expanding presence in these markets, JVP seems well-positioned to source deals and grow companies that fit under the focus of its new fund. ~ Written by Arman Tabatabai

Obsessions

• More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”
• We are going to be talking India here, focused around the book “Billonnaire Raj” by James Crabtree, who we just interviewed and will share more soon
• We have a lot to catch up on in the China world when the EC launch craziness dies down. Plus, we are covering The Next Factory of the World by Irene Yuan Sun.
• Societal resilience and geoengineering are still top-of-mind
• Some more on metrics design and quantification

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

According to a new report from the WSJ, Apple and Goldman Sachs are partnering on a different kind of products for both companies — a credit card. The Mastercard-based card would be focused on Apple Pay and feature some deep integrations in iOS.

This card could launch later this year in the U.S., which would coincide with the next iPhone. An Apple credit card would be a good way to take a bigger cut on Apple Pay transactions. Instead of splitting fees between the card issuer, the card network and Apple, Apple would get a portion of the fees for the card issuer.

It could also be a way to evangelize Apple Pay. While most cards are now compatible with Apple Pay in the U.S., many people still don’t think about paying with their iPhone or Apple Watch.

This is also uncharted territory for Goldman Sachs . According to the WSJ, the new card would represent Goldman’s first card. The company could be investing as much as $200 million to build a support team and the IT infrastructure to handle payments. You could expect a cash back on some purchases.

More interestingly, Apple could also be working on an Apple Wallet overhaul for this credit card. You would be able to set up spending goals (like the rings in the Activity app), get notifications about your spending habits (like Screen Time) and track your rewards. It’s unclear if Apple plans to open up those new features to other banks.

By partnering with Apple, Goldman Sachs would get a great distribution channel. And by launching a card, Apple would prove once again that, given enough time, all companies eventually become banks.