Author: azeeadmin

FanAI, an audience analysis platform for eSports and streaming, is buying New York-based Waypoint Media to improve its analytics tools for eSports players and streamers.

The deal means that Waypoint’s Twitch Middleware API and the “Raven” tracking and URL shortener will be added to FanAI’s product portfolio. The middleware tech has the ability to track every unique registered Twitch viewer so streamers can monitor average watch time, median watch time, and channel engagement.

Financial terms were not disclosed, but a person with knowledge of the deal called the acquisition a significant all-cash transaction. That likely means a nice outcome for Waypoint’s backers, the New York-based investment firm Grand Central Tech.

FanAI Founder and CEO Johannes Waldstein said of the acquisition, “The way they are able to turn billions of data points into workable information is like nothing else available on the market. We will be able to provide a deeper look at audiences with the new tools and having someone like Kevin join us will cement the FanAI services at the top of the industry.”

Using the Raven URL shortener, FanAI customers can follow the ways in which users browse on online platforms, the company said in a statement.

As part of the acquisition, Waypoint’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Hsu, joins FanAI as Head of Engineering, the company said.

“Combining forces with FanAI is a perfect fit; we work with the same client base and have complementary solutions to the same problem. Traditionally, FanAI has focused on more static information including social and purchasing data, while Waypoint worked to gather digital movements of the audience. Combined, we can provide the best service by giving access to even more detailed and actionable data for clients,” said Hsu, in a statement.

Amazon made its first deal at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on Monday, with its acquisition of the global rights to a coming-of-age drama, Hala. The film, written and directed by Minhal Baig, and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, tells the story of a 17-year old girl, Hala, raised in a conservative Muslim household, who develops feelings for a classmate that puts her at odds with her traditional upbringing.

The girl, played by Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers), will also find herself grappling with the knowledge of secret that threatens to unravel her family, according to a description of the film’s plot.

Other cast members include love interest Jesse (Jack Kilmer, Palo Alto); mother, Eram (Purbi Joshi); father, Zahid (Azad Khan); Gabriel Luna (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.); and Anna Chlumsky (Veep).

The movie itself is an expansion on a short film Baig made back in 2016, which was named to the 2016 Black List.

Baig herself hails from Chicago, and was chosen in 2017 as a directing mentee for Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative – Director Mentorship Program. She previously worked as a story editor on Bojack Horseman, and as a staff writer on the Hulu comedy, Untitled Ramy Youssef Project. She also worked on several shorts, including the precursor to Hala, After Sophie, and Pretext, as well as on music videos.

Of note, during production of the new movie, an inclusion rider was applied to bring women into many department head positions, and to 75 percent of critical below-the-line roles.

The film was co-financed and sold by Endeavor Content and produced by Overbrook Entertainment. Hala producers include Clarence Hammond, Jamal Watson and Minhal Baig, and executive producers Jada Pinkett Smith, Jana Babatunde-Bey, Marsha Swinton, James Lassiter, Caleeb Pinkett, Ari Lubet and Aaron Carr.

Apple has steadily been building up a slate of content for its forthcoming streaming service, set to launch this year. However, many of its deals to date have focused on TV series, not films.

It now has a long lineup of shows, including: a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, a Reese Witherspoon- and Jennifer Anniston-starring series set in the world of morning TV (which just added Steve Carell), an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, a thriller starring Octavia Spencer, another Witherspoon comedy (now minus Kristen Wiig), a Kevin Durant-inspired scripted basketball show, a documentary about extraordinary homes, a series from La La Land’s director, a series about Emily Dickinson, a new Peanuts, a comedy from the It’s Always Sunny gang, Oprah stuff, kids content from Sesame Workshop, an M. Night Shymalan thriller, a sci-fi series from Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore, and many more.

But Apple has also started to pick up films.

It made first feature film buy last year, with the documentary The Elephant Queen, and more recently, it did a deal for a Sophia Coppola-directed movie starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones.

Image credit: Sundance Institute 

The long-simmering battle between the U.S. government and Huawei heated up last night when the U.S. DOJ announced that it is pursuing criminal charges against the Chinese hardware maker.

Huawei has, unsurprisingly, denied all wrongdoing, issuing a statement to the press that wonders aloud why it wasn’t given the opportunity to help clear itself of charges following the arrest of its CFO in Vancouver.

The company writes,

Huawei is disappointed to learn of the charges brought against the company today. company  After Ms. Meng’s arrest, the Company sought an opportunity to discuss the Eastern District of New York investigation with the Justice Department, but the request was rejected without explanation. The allegations in the Western District of Washington trade secret indictment were already the subject of a civil suit that was settled by the parties after a Seattle jury found neither damages nor willful and malicious conduct on the trade secret claim. The Company denies that it or its subsidiary or affiliate have committed any of the asserted violations of U.S. law set forth in each of the indictments, is not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng, and believes the U.S. courts will ultimately reach the same conclusion.

The Chinese government has also been quick to come to the embattled tech giant’s defense.

“For some time now, the United States has deployed its state power to smear and crack down on targeted Chinese companies in an attempt to kill their normal and legal business operations,” Geng Shuang, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, said in a statement. “We strongly urge the US to stop its unreasonable crackdown on Chinese companies, including Huawei, and treat Chinese companies objectively and fairly.”

Huawei (and to a lesser extent ZTE) has long been targeted by the U.S. over its alleged ties to the Chinese government. Tensions have made it all but impossible for the rapidly growing company to conquer the North American market.

What could Google’s parent company Alphabet, and the wealth management office of the likes of Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, understand better than the need for a service to manage all the data their companies are collecting?

As regulations in Europe begin to take effect (and European regulators show their teeth), companies like Collibra, which just raised $100 million at a valuation of over $1 billion from new investor CapitalG (the growth equity investment fund from Alphabet) and returning backers like Iconiq (the family office of Dorsey, Zuckerberg, et al.), are only going to become more important.

Indeed, the recent $57 million fine from France’s data protection watchdog is only a taste of what could be in store for companies like Facebook and Google for non-compliance with new privacy laws. Companies like Colibra and its competitors like Alation, Adaptive Insights, Datum and Informatica are reaping the benefits of this by providing software to oversee how the data that companies are collecting is handled.

The company got its first big boost back in 2008 in the wake of the financial crisis when big banks were confronted with a whole new slew of regulations. Collibra is used to track what data is stored where and how and to ensure that the data is being processed in ways that align with laws on the books.

Colibra’s new round is something of a victory lap for the company — which is coming off a record revenue year, according to a statement.

The company said it would use the new funding to add new products and push sales and marketing.

“Collibra is putting organizations back in control of their data, helping them comply with changing legislation, embrace emerging technologies and capture the information that will enable them to design services and solutions built for the future,” said Derek Zanutto of CapitalG. “We look forward to partnering with Collibra and marrying Google and Alphabet’s machine learning and AI expertise with Collibra’s leadership in data collaboration, workflow management and risk management.”

 Colibra says it has more than 300 customers across industries like financial services, healthcare, retail and technology.

Houzz has built a $4 billion business on the back of a platform and marketplace that lets you plan and execute home improvement projects. But as the startup gears up for its next phase of growth, it is also going through some growing pains. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed the company this month laid off around 110 people in the UK and Germany, along with an additional 70 in its US home market in Q4 of last year.

“We restructured our international marketplace workforce, primarily in our UK and Berlin offices, so that we can double down on the areas that will have the greatest impact for Houzz,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch. “It’s always difficult to go through a restructure at growth stages given the impact on people’s lives. We value and appreciate all of our employees and will do everything we can to retain them. We are introducing as many new opportunities as possible in other parts of the business so that those affected can apply and transition to other positions. For those who will leave Houzz, we are offering a separation package and providing any help we can as they look for a new opportunity. Houzz’s business is strong and we continue to hire and scale teams across our international and U.S. offices.”

Houzz has 1,800 employees, meaning that these two tranches of layoffs account for approximately 10 percent of the company. The spokesperson added that Houzz has been hiring in Q4 in other areas — some 300 people in all — although she did not specify in which department or region.

Houzz is also not providing much information about what departments have been impacted by the layoffs or what happens next, but details posted on social media point to at least one entire international department getting eliminated.

“Purchased items from you in the UK. For the second time one of my orders was canceled. I emailed your offices + tried to call only to find the phone had been disconnected. I tweeted @HouzzUK yesterday & rcv’d a message that all staff had been made redundant,” one customer noted on Twitter.

A source hints to us there could be more layoffs coming, as the company looks to get into the black ahead of a potential IPO.

“The company aims to slash costs in order to be profitable before going public,” the source said.

Starting out as an online community for people redecorating their homes and looking for inspiration and a place to share their ideas — it was co-founded by real-life partners Adi Tatarko (CEO) and Alon Cohen (president) as they were remodelling their own house — Houzz has over the years raised over $600 million from an illustrious group of investors that include DST Global, GGV, Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Sequoia and more. The aim: to build out a much larger and ambitious marketplace to target an industry — home improvement — that’s estimated to be worth well in excess of $1 trillion in North America and Europe alone.

Today, you can buy furniture, decorative items, bathroom and kitchen units and more across some 65 different product areas. Professionals and would-be customers also  use the platform to connect with each other; millions of consumers and over 1 million professionals currently use Houzz.

Over the last several years, the company has also expanded internationally, made acquisitions and launched new technology to fill out that vision. That’s included buying IvyMark to develop a bigger offering for interior designers, and building out an AR-based service, among other moves.

All that rapid growth and development, however, seems to have come with some challenges as Houzz attempted to make the transition from startup to more mature, large business.

Reviews on Glassdoor posted by ex-employees in recent weeks (see here and here) point to issues at the company with how management communicates with staff, the lack of a coherent and consistent strategy, and other operational challenges that can come with building a business with a number of different facets over a relatively crunched period of time.

“The company has fought on many fronts over the last few years — editorial, community, marketplace, vizualization software, paid local marketing,” our source notes. “All promising projects but requiring years of incubation and continued investment.”

Houzz has never commented on IPO plans, but last May it hired Richard Wong from LinkedIn as its CFO. Some took this as a signal of its longer-term intentions to go public.

Companies as diverse as Amazon, Pinterest and Wayfair all compete in one form or another with Houzz, and with its most recent valuation at the $4 billion mark, the question is how Houzz proceeds with its next stage of growth.

A sea of money raised by VCs and PE firms has led to a number of companies in turn raising large, late-stage funding rounds — extending the private life for many a startup.

But on the other hand, a recent run of strong IPOs has also laid the groundwork for more companies to opt for public market exits.

Both of these, as well as a potential acquisition, could all be options for Houzz. In any case, they are all options that could be pushing the company to reassess its cost base and strategy.

We’ll update this story as we learn more. For those impacted by the news, we hope you land on your feet.

As traditional enterprise companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP try to transform into more modern cloud companies, they are finding that making that transition, while absolutely necessary, could require difficult adjustments along the way. Just this morning, SAP announced that it was restructuring in order to save between $750 million and 800 million euro (between approximately $856 million an $914 million).

While the company tried to put as positive a spin on the announcement as possible, it could involve up to 4000 job cuts as SAP shifts into more modern technologies. “We are going to move our people and our focus to the areas where the new economy needs SAP the most: artificial intelligence, deep machine learning, IoT, blockchain and quantum computing,” CEO Bill McDermott told a post-earnings press conference.

If that sounds familiar, it should. It is precisely the areas that IBM has been trying to concentrate on its transformation over the last several years. IBM has struggled to make this change and has also framed workforce reduction as moving to modern skill sets. It’s worth pointing out that SAP’s financial picture has been more positive than IBM’s.

CFO Luca Mucic tried to stress this was not about cost cutting, so much as ensuring the long-term health of the company, but did admit it did involve job cuts. These could include early retirement and other incentives to leave the company voluntarily. “We still expect that there will be a number probably slightly higher than what we saw in the 2015 program where we had around 3000 employees leave the company, where at the end of this process will leave SAP,” he said.

The company believes that in spite of these cuts, it will actually have more employees by this time next year than it has now, but they will be shifted to these new technology areas. “This is a growth company move, not a cost cutting move every dollar that we gain from a restructuring initiative will be invested back into headcount and more jobs,” McDermott said. SAP kept stressing that cloud revenue will reach $35 billion in revenue by 2023.

Holger Mueller, an analyst who watches enterprise companies like SAP for Constellation Research, says the company is doing what it has to do in terms of transformation. “SAP is in the midst of upgrading its product portfolio to the 21st century demands of its customer base,” Mueller told TechCrunch. He added that this is not easy to pull off, and it requires new skill sets to build, operate and sell the new technologies.

McDermott stressed that the company would be offering a generous severance package to any employee leaving the company as a result of today’s announcement.

Today’s announcement comes after the company made two multi-billion dollar acquisitions to help in this transition in 2018, paying $8 billion for Qualtrics and $2.4 billion for CallidusCloud.

Following Amazon’s decision to set up one of its new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, the company announced this morning a plan to fund computer science classes in over 130 New York City area high schools. Specifically, Amazon will fund both introductory and Advanced Placement (AP) classes across all five NYC boroughs, including over 30 schools in Queens, near its new headquarters.

The courses will be supported by the Amazon Future Engineer program, whose stated goal is to bring over 10 million kids to computer science per year, and fund computer science courses for over 100,000 underprivileged kids in 2,000 low-income high schools in the U.S. It also awards 100 students per year with four-year $10,000 scholarships and offers internships at Amazon.

The new funding for the New York area schools will cover preparatory lessons, tutorials, and professional development for teachers, says Amazon, as well as offer sequenced and paced digital curriculum for students, and live online support for both teachers and students.

All participating students will also receive a free membership to AWS Educate, which offers free computing power in the AWS Cloud for coding projects.

It’s no surprise that NYC areas schools would be next on the list of areas to fund by way of Amazon’s Future Engineer program, given Amazon’s need to grow its base and a developer funnel for new tech talent in the NYC area. However, the move also drives home how disappointing Amazon’s “HQ2” decision has been for those areas that lost out when the retail giant opted to split its “second” headquarters between Queens and Arlington, VA.

There are cities across the U.S. that would have benefitted more from Amazon’s ability to fund computer science courses in their school systems. Instead, Amazon is pouring more money into an area that already has a lot of tech talent.

Amazon isn’t exactly being welcomed in NYC, anyway, as its arrival will drive up rents, displace plans for affordable housing, impact small business, and crowd already overcrowded public transportation, along with other issues.

Amazon says it will working with New York-area curriculum provider, Edhesive to bring the courses to the schools. A full list of the schools that will receive the classes is here.

Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn International is backing Carbon Relay, a Boston-based startup emerging from stealth today, that’s harnessing the algorithms used by companies like Facebook and Google for artificial intelligence to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the technology industry’s own backyard — the datacenter.

Already, the computing demands of the technology industry are responsible for 3% of total energy consumption — and the addition of new technologies like Bitcoin to the mix could add another half a percent to that figure within the next few years, according to Carbon Relay’s chief executive, Matt Provo.

That’s $25 billion in spending on energy per year across the industry, Provo says.

A former Apple employee, Provo went to Harvard Business School because he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and start his own business — and he wanted that business to solve a meaningful problem, he said.

Variability and dynamic nature of the data center relating to thermodynamics and the makeup of  a facility or building is interesting for AI because humans can’t keep up..

“We knew what we wanted to focus on,” said Provo of himself and his two co-founders. “All three of us have an environmental sciences background as well… We were fired up about building something that was true AI that has positive value… the risk associated [with climate change] is going to hit in our lifetime we were very inspired to build a company whose technology would have an impact on that.”

Carbon Relay’s mission and founding team including Thibaut Perol and John Platt (two Harvard graduates with doctorates in applied mathematics) was able to attract some big backers.

The company has raised $6 million from industry giants like Foxconn and Boston-based angel investors including Dr. James Cash — a director on the boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE, and State Street; Black Duck Software founder, Douglas Levin; Karim Lakhani, a director on the Mozilla Corporation board; and Paul Deninger, a director on the board of the building operations management company, Resideo (formerly Honeywell).

Provo and his team didn’t just raise the money to tackle data centers — and Foxconn’s involvement hints at the company’s broader goals. “My vision is that commercial HVAC systems or any machinery that operates in a business would not ship without our intelligence inside of it,” says Provo.

What’s more compelling is that the company’s technology works without exposing the underlying business to significant security risks, Provo says.

“In the end all we’re doing are sending these floats… these values. These values are mathematical directions for the actions that need to be taken,” he says. 

Carbon Relay is already profitable, generating $4 million in revenue last year and on track for another year of steady growth, according to Provo.

Carbon Relay offers two products: Optimize and Predict, that gather information from existing HVAC devices and then control those systems continuously and automatically with continuous decision making.

“Each data center is unique and enormously complex, requiring its own approach to managing energy use over time,” said Cash, who’s serving as the company’s chairman. “The Carbon Relay team is comprised of people who are passionate about creating a solution that will adapt to the needs of every large data center, creating a tangible and rapid impact on the way these organizations do business.”

Game engine maker Unity believes voice communications are going to grow to become a critical part of gaming across platforms and it’s buying one of the top companies in the space to bolster what its customers can build on the its platform.

Unity has acquired Vivox, a company that powers voice and text chat for the world’s most massive gaming titles from Fortnite to PUBG to League of Legends. The company’s positional voice chat enable gamers to hear other players chatting around them directionally in 3D space. The company also provides text-based chat. No details on deal terms.

“We thought, I thought, that voice is just one of those things that we should offer our customers,” Unity CEO John Riccitiello tells TechCrunch. “There are just a lot of places to innovate there and I was excited by the roadmap of Vivox.”

Unity plans to use its cross-platform support expertise to make it easier for developers on platforms traditionally underserved by voice chat tools, like mobile, to take advantage of the deeper communication that’s made possible by Vivox. As Unity looks towards new customers beyond gaming, this acquisition has broader reach as well.

“We’re increasingly supporting industries like architecture, engineering, construction and the auto industry and they talk a lot about collaborating and communicating,” Riccitiello says.

Vivox was originally founded in 2005 and raised over $22 million in venture funding from firms like Benchmark and Canaan Partners before it struck hard times some time after its last reported funding in 2010. The startup’s name and some of its assets were acquired by a new entity, Mercer Road Corp, we are told. The company has maintained much of the original leadership during this time; founder and CEO Rob Seaver will continue on with the company after its acquisition.

For his part, Riccitiello doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to shake things up at the Framebridge, Massachusetts-based company, which will maintain its offices and 50+ employees situated in The Bay State. Seaver will report directly to Riccitiello.

Though the company’s previous customers include studios like Unity-rival Epic Games that used the tool to bolster voice chat in Fortnite, there doesn’t seem to be any plans to cut off non-Unity customers from using the service, “nothing is changing,” Riccitiello tells TechCrunch.

“It can be nerve-racking to count on something from a smaller company when they might get acquired by a competitor or might go out of business,” he says. “I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity going out of business and I don’t think anyone is worried about Unity being bad hands, we’re sort of Switzerland in our world, we support all platforms and virtually every publisher in the world.”

Asked whether he felt the company’s status as an open platform had been harmed by recent feuds with UK-based cloud gaming startup Improbable, Riccitiello minimized the issue saying it was a skirmish based on “them claiming a partnership that didn’t exist,” reiterating that “relative to developers, I think they can count on us morning, noon, and night to do the right things for them.”

Unity has raised more than $600 million and is valued at north of $3 billion.

Over the past few years, mattress company Casper has expanded its product lineup to include everything from dog beds to nap pillows. (It’s also opened its own nap store.) The latest addition: the Glow, an $89 light.

While the company has never made this kind of Internet-connected hardware before, Chief Strategy Officer Neil Parikh pitched the Glow as part of Casper’s mission to improve sleep. And although there’s already whole categories of sleep-friendly light bulbs and smart lamps, the Glow has a couple of smart touches that could make it particularly appealing.

The basic use of the Glow is pretty straightforward. You turn it on by flipping it over, and it fills your room with warm LED light. The light then dims to darkness over a 45-minute period — as Chief Product Officer Jeff Chapin put it, it’s “mimicking the setting of the sun and it helps you get sleepier as it dims into lower and lower amplitudes.”

You can control and customize the Glow with a smartphone app, but Chapin said, “There are some people who are never going to download the app and that’s fine.” That’s because the Glow can also be controlled by gesture — flipping it to turn it on and off again, twisting it (when it’s set on a flat surface) to adjust the brightness and wiggling it to get a low light.

The Glow is also portable, so if you wake up in the middle of the night and need to get a glass of water or use the restroom, you can just pick it up and carry it with you, rather than turning on a bright kitchen light. You can also set a wakeup time so that the Glow gradually lights up again.

“We’ve leveraged the good and the bad of light so that it would help you fall asleep, stay asleep and go back to sleep into the night,” Chapin said.

In fact, if you’re a frequent traveler who struggles with jet lag, you can even “freeze” the settings, pack the Glow in your suitcase and take it with you to your destination, though Chapin admitted, “We don’t know how many people are going to do that.”

In addition to buying a single Glow for $89, you can also get a two-pack for $169. The light comes with a small base for wireless charging.

The Casper team sent me a couple of Glows to try out for myself. I wasn’t able to download the app, but the Glow was indeed largely controllable by gesture. (My only real complaint is that the wiggle-for-dim-light only worked sporadically for me.)

Keep in mind that I didn’t have a particularly sophisticated or sleep-friendly lighting setup before this, and that it’s hard to know how I would have slept on any given night without the Glow. Still, I can say that I found myself getting sleepier as the light dimmed, and I seemed to pass out more quickly and reliably than normal. And since the Glow is pretty small (five inches tall and three inches wide), it was easy to find room for it in my cluttered bedroom, and to carry it around when necessary.

It sounds like Casper has plans more products that go beyond bedding, addressing broader environmental factors that affect sleep.

“You can expect a lot more from us in the same vein, trying to help people [sleep] across the board, in a multivariate way,” Parikh said. “It’s a very complicated problem.”