Author: azeeadmin

Intel is showing off a new RealSense camera with a specific focus on enabling hardware-makers to help their products understand where they are in the world. The RealSense Tracking Camera T265 is designed to easily present robotics and AR/VR hardware with inside-out tracking tech.

The Tracking camera utilizes SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) tech to orient the device while producing a detailed spatial layout of whatever environment it is in traversing. The camera is unsurprisingly powered by the Movidius Myriad 2 computer vision chipset, which handles the data processing for the camera.

Inside-out tracking has been getting less and less compute-intensive, this seems to be the area where Intel is making the most strides with the T265.

The T254 will start shipping at the end of February for $199.

Epic Games announced this morning that they’ve acquired Serbia-based 3Lateral, a game studio focused on designing more realistic computer-generated human characters.

The team of 60+ will be continuing their work with existing partners and maintaining their presence in Serbia. 3Lateral founder Vladimir Mastilovic will lead Epic Games’ worldwide digital humans efforts, the company says.

No details on a price or specific deal terms were given.

The non-digital human team behind 3Lateral

Epic Games, which operates Fortnite as well as the Unreal Engine game development platform, has worked with 3Lateral in the past on projects to push the level of realism and detail that are possible with human avatars. Epic has open-sourced this work for developers, the acquisition will likely further expand the capabilities of Unreal Engine users to promote more detailed character design.

“Real-time 3D experiences are reshaping the entire entertainment industry, and digital human technology is at the forefront. Fortnite shows that 200,000,000 people can experience a 3D world together. Reaching the next level requires capturing, personalizing, and conveying individual human faces and emotions,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a statement.

While Netflix is raising prices, Hulu is lowering its own. In a move to better compete with streaming rivals – and pick up new customers who think Netflix just got too expensive – Hulu this morning announced it’s lowering the cost of its streaming service by $2.00 per month. Currently, the service is $7.99 monthly. After the price change goes into effect, it will only be $5.99.

Hulu’s changes come shortly after Netflix’s decision to raise the price for its most popular plan in the U.S. to $12.99 per month, up from $10.99. Its one-device plan is also now going up to $8.99 per month, and the four-device plan is $15.99.

Following Netflix’s announcement, various consumer surveys indicated that at least some Netflix customers may consider dropping the streaming service, as a result, or at least downgrade.

But how many people said they would actually ditch Netflix varied widely, depending on which survey you read. Streaming Observer, for example, said that 10 percent of customers were considering downgrading their plan and 65 percent would consider a discounted ad-supported plan, like Hulu. But Hub Entertainment Research said that 16 percent would downgrade, and only 9 percent said they’d leave Netflix.

In any event, if there are customers on the market now looking for a better deal on streaming, Hulu is ready to pick them up.

As another perk, Hulu in the past has seen higher engagement and retention from its $5.99 per month customers (who signed up for Hulu with a promotional discount). This also contributed to Hulu’s decision to make this its new price.

However, the company isn’t adjusting the price of its ad-free streaming service, which remains $11.99 per month, nor is it dropping the price of its Live TV service – in fact, that’s now going up.

To help make up for the fact that Hulu is using its core package as a loss leader, the price for Hulu with Live TV is increasing by $5, going from $39.99 to $44.99 per month. And the ad-free version of Hulu with Live TV is going up $7, from $43.99 to $50.99 per month.

Those new prices are dangerously close to – and in some cases, exactly the same as – the traditional cable TV package cord cutters are aiming to replace.

That could make it more difficult for Hulu to compete with other live TV packages – especially because some have the advantage of being bundled in with wireless service, like AT&T’s DirecTV Now or WatchTV. Meanwhile, others have found ways to keep prices down, like the sports-free bundle from Philo; the cheap $25/mo base package from Sling TV; or the $40/mo YouTube TV service with all your local channels (which also just became available nationwide).

Hulu’s higher pricing, however, indicates the company believes its service is worth the premium because it not only streams live programming from over 60 channels – it additionally includes Hulu’s large on-demand library of over 85,000 TV episodes, and its original content like The Handmaid’s Tale, Marvel’s Runaways, Future Man and Castle Rock. 

However, Hulu is bringing down the price of some of its Live TV add-ons to make the package price increase more palatable.

Its Unlimited Screens and Enhanced Cloud DVR will each cost $5 less per month, going from $14.99 to $9.99/mo. And subscribers can buy a bundle with both for $14.98 per month.

Hulu says the new pricing will go into effect on February 26, 2019. Existing users are not being grandfathered in to current pricing, but will rather see the changes reflected on their billing cycle after the 26th.

Some call it madness. Others call it the next logical step in smartphone evolution. Meizu calls it, fitting, the “Zero.” It’s equal parts fascinating and maddening. And while being “totally seamless” with “a truly uninterrupted design” is probably not going to enough in and of itself to get people to purchase the thing, it’s hard to shake the idea that all handset manufactures are all heading in that direction anyway. So good on Meizu for getting there first, I suppose.

So, no Sim card slot, and no charging port — thank goodness for eSIM tech and wireless charging. There’s a fingerprint sensor under the front glass and the physical buttons have been replaced with virtual ones. As for the speaker grilles, those have been replaced by something the company calls “mSound 2.0,” which appears to utilize the screen for sound.

How well that will function versus a more traditional method remains to be seen. Honestly,  it sound like a phone created on a dare, but an impressive feat nonetheless. Other specs include a 5.99 inch AMOLED screen and a Snapdragon 845 processor. The rest of the relevant info, like price and if/when it’s coming to the States are still very much up in the air.

Mobile World Congress next month seems as good a time as any to announce all of that. 

Andela, the company that connects Africa’s top software developers with technology companies from the U.S. and around the world, has raised $100 million in a new round of funding.

The new financing from Generation Investment Management (the investment fund co-founded by former Vice President Al Gore) puts the valuation of the company at somewhere between $600 million and $700 million, based on data available from Pitchbook on the company’s valuation following it’s previous $40 million funding.

Previous investors from that financing, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, GV, Spark Capital, and CRE Venture Capital also participated.

“It’s increasingly clear that the future of work will be distributed, in part due to the severe shortage of engineering talent,” says Jeremy Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Andela. “Given our access to incredible talent across Africa, as well as what we’ve learned from scaling hundreds of engineering teams around the world, Andela is able to provide the talent and the technology to power high-performing teams and help companies adopt the distributed model faster.”

The company now has over 200 customers paying for access to the roughly 1100 developers Andela has trained and manages.

Since its founding in 2014, Andela has seen over 130,000 applicants for those 1100 slots. Once a promising developer is onboarded goes through a 6 month training bootcamp at one of the company’s coding campuses in Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, or Uganda they’re placed with an Andela customer to work as a remote, full-time employee.

Andela receives anywhere from $50,000 to $120,000 per developer from a company and passes one third of that directly on to the developer with the remainder going to support the company’s operations and cover the cost of training and maintaining its facilities in Africa. Coders working with Andela sign a four year commitment (with a two year requirement to work at the company) after which they’re able to do whatever they want.

Even after the two-year period is up, Andela boasts a 98% retention rate for developers, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s operations.

With the new cash in hand, Andela says it will double in size, hiring another thousand developers, and invest in new product development and its own engineering and data resources. Part of that product development will focus on refining its performance monitoring and management toolkit for overseeing remote workforces. 

“We believe Andela is a transformational model to develop software engineers and deploy them at scale into the future enterprise,” says Lilly Wollman, Co-Head of Growth Equity at Generation Investment Management, in a statement. “The global demand for software engineers far exceeds supply, and that gap is projected to widen. Andela’s leading technology enables firms to effectively build and manage distributed engineering teams.”

Wag founders Jonathan and Joshua Viner are leaving dogs behind for bikes. Wheels, the Viner brothers’ new electric bike-share startup, is announcing $37 million in funding from Tenaya Capital, Bullpen Capital, Naval Ravikant and others.

The Viner brothers departed dog-walking startup Wag last year to start a fund focused on consumer startups. The departures came after Josh Viner was replaced as Wag CEO by Hilary Schneider, a former Yahoo executive. Now, the brothers are moving on from the fund and taking a stab at bike-share.

“We started our fund, exclusively with our own capital. Wheels quickly became a massive opportunity, and we’re now entirely focused on this business,” Josh Viner told TechCrunch via email. “We still invest passively when great opportunities present themselves.”

Wheels will join the likes of Uber’s Jump, Lyft’s Motivate and others in competing for bike-share market share. But Wheels says it’s different because of its modular design, which includes swappable parts and batteries. The company says that results in a 4x longer product life cycle compared to other bikes on the market.

“When we evaluated this market, we identified a major opportunity to better serve cities with a sustainability-first approach to dockless electric mobility,” Jonathan Viner said in a press release. “We’ve spent countless research and development hours on new manufacturing and servicing models to afford first-ever offerings such as swappable part replacements and removable batteries.”

But bike-share companies are getting privy to the fact that their unit economics will continue to be trash unless they make some changes. Back in December, JUMP unveiled its next generation of bikes with swappable batteries and on-board diagnostics.

Already, Wheels says it has surpassed competitors in daily trips in San Diego’s Gaslamp district. Wheels also says it sees more than seven rides per day, per bike. In the near-term, Wheels has plans to deploy its bikes “rapidly” throughout Southern California, while working with city officials.

Wheels has also brought on a handful of former Bird, Uber and Lyft executives. That includes Ben Shaken, former Director of Product at Lyft, and Marco McCottry, formerly of Uber and Bird.

“I’ve seen the explosion of last mile transportation first hand and understand the importance of keeping a promise of sustainability to consumers and society,” McCottry said in a press release. “And that’s why I’m so excited to be a part of Wheels. The solutions to so many issues experienced by the first wave are baked into the operational approach.”

One way to gain ground on a competitor is to poach their best executives. We’ve seen it time and time again, from high-level Tesla employees fleeing for Lyft or Apple stealing Google’s AI talent.

DoorDash, a well-funded food delivery unicorn, is familiar with this method of staffing. The company announced this morning that it has poached its second Uber employee in the last year to join its growing business. Ryan Sokol, credited with leading and scaling Uber Eats, Uber’s food delivery arm, from its inception, has joined DoorDash as its vice president of engineering.

The news comes shortly after the San Francisco-based company hired Prabir Adarkar, Uber’s former head of strategic finance, as its chief financial officer. The company also recently hired chief people officer Sarah Wagener from Pandora, where she was VP of human resources.

Reporting to co-founder and chief executive officer Tony Xu, Sokol will lead the product, infrastructure and data science teams within DoorDash’s engineering department.

“Ryan comes to DoorDash at a critical inflection point in our business following a breakout year,” DoorDash wrote in an announcement. “In 2018 we 5xed our geographic footprint from 600 to 3,300 cities and tripled our valuation to more than $4 billion.”

“We doubled the engineering team to 200+ last year, working on a variety of problems from machine learning applications to logistics to personalizing consumer experiences,” they added. “This year, we plan to double our team again and continue on our trajectory as the fastest growing last-mile logistics company in the space.”

Six-year-old DoorDash has raised nearly $1 billion in venture capital funding, most recently at a $4 billion valuation, from SoftBank, Sequoia, Coatue Management, DST Global,  Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures, CRV and several others.

Electric.ai, the NY-based startup that offers chat-based IT support, has announced the close of a $25 million Series B round led by GGV. As part of the deal, partner Jeff Richards will be joining the board.

Founder Ryan Denehy launched Electric in 2016. Previously, he’d run two startups which were sold to USA Today Sports and Groupon respectively, where he realized that all of the simplicity that came with using a service like Zenefits simply didn’t exist in the IT world.

“It was all local service providers, and they all charge way too much money,” said Denehy. “I thought ‘this is so nuts!’ Companies are using more and more technology every day.”

With his second startup, Swarm, he saw even more clearly how big of a problem this was as the company sold a product that required hardware installation at retailers.

“We were building a company on top of local IT providers, and I saw up close and personal how difficult it was and how fragmented the industry was.”

And so, Electric was born.

The premise is relatively simple. Most of IT’s tasks focus on administration, distribution and maintenance of software programs, meaning that the individual IT specialist doesn’t necessarily need to be desk side troubleshooting a hardware issue.

Companies using Electric simply install its software on every corporate laptop, giving the top IT employee or the org’s decision-maker a bird’s eye view of the lay of the land. They can grant and revoke permissions, assign roles, and make sure everyone’s software is up to date. By integrating with the APIs of the top office software programs, like Dropbox and G-Suite, most of the day-to-day tasks of IT can be handled through Electric’s dashboard.

This leaves IT professionals time to focus on actual troubleshooting, hardware installation, etc.

For startups that haven’t yet hired an IT person, Electric connects startups who need help with installation or in-person troubleshooting with local vendors.

Electric says it has automated around 40 percent of IT tasks, with plans to automate 80 percent of IT tasks over 2019.

The company currently has around 300 customers, which rounds out to about 10,000 total users, and serves 10 U.S. markets including New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Austin, among others.

The new funding brings Electric’s total funding amount to $37.3 million.

Healthy oceans are on the minds of Marc and Lynne Benioff, and they showed it today with a $1.5 million donation to the Sustainable Oceans Alliance, a new non-profit attempting to promote and incubate conservation-focused startups. The money will considerably expand the organization’s upcoming Ocean Solutions accelerator.

Benioff is due to appear Wednesday evening on a panel at Davos about the “ocean economy,” at which he seems likely to mention the donation. He joins rather a powerhouse lineup to address the issues of environmental dangers threatening wallets as well as whales: Michelle Bachelet (U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights), Enric Sala (an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic), Actress Michelle Yeoh (who also does U.N. work), and indefatigable environmental crusader Al Gore. I certainly wish I could attend.

It’s clear that the Salesforce founder is as concerned about environmental issues as he is about social ones, and as ready to write a check when there’s a compelling reason to do so.

Benioff at Disrupt SF in 2016.

“Our oceans are in grave danger, due to the many consequences of climate change and pollution,” he said in a press release announcing the donation. “These challenges can be solved with investment and innovation. Lynne and I are proud to support Daniela Fernandez and the Sustainable Ocean Alliance’s bold vision to create 100 new startups by 2021 to help heal the ocean.”

The SOA started its accelerator last year with a handful of interesting ocean- and conservation-focused startups: a device to keep fish from getting tangled in nets, wave-harvesting energy tech, materials for oil cleanups, that sort of thing. It’s got another batch planned and the Benioff’s donation will allow it to triple the number of startups included. Several will be going to the “Accelerator at Sea,” an 8-day event aboard a National Geographic ship sailing from Alaska this summer.

Last year the organization also got a sudden cash infusion from a motivated donor: the mysterious Pine, who distributed some $86 million to charity (and nonprofits like SOA) after making a tremendous amount of money on Bitcoin. These are one-off donations, naturally — so of course financial as well as ecological sustainability is on the mind of SOA founder Daniela Fernandez.

“We realize that we cannot simply depend on individual donors or anonymous cryptocurrency gifts. We have had difficulty finding traditional forms of funding for SOA due to the limited amount of funds that are allocated to such a niche sector,” Fernandez, who is at Davos but unfortunately not on the aforementioned panel, told me.

“Instead only having to fundraise, we have had to create new funders by educating them about the importance of protecting the ocean. It is the typical entrepreneurial scenario of building the plane while flying it. However, in our case, we had to build the plane while simultaneously developing the aircraft market.”

As part of that the non-profit now plans to release a yearly “State of Our Ocean” annual report — the first came out today. It’s not so much a scholarly or analytical report like you might have from NOAA or national fisheries or wildlife concerns. Fernandez says this one “takes into account the perspective of young people who are on the ground working to solve the issues at hand. SOA interviewed 3,000 young ocean leaders from around the world who gave their input as to what the ocean priorities should be in 2019 and graded our current world leaders on their efforts to restore the health of the ocean.”

It’s good to ask the un-jaded youngs about things like this, and SOA specifically aims to find and promote young entrepreneurs and activists, so it’s on brand. I’ve read through it and there’s a lot of info about impending disasters, many of which have to do with climate change but plenty are caused by people as well (or rather, caused by people more recently). It’s a bit depressing, but what isn’t?

Hopefully the cash infusion will help scoop up more of those motivated young folks into the program. We’ll probably hear more from the SOA when it finds some more startups to load into the accelerator.

Desktop Metal announced this morning that it’s raised $160 million. That Series E brings the Burlington, Massachusetts-based metal 3D printing company up to a whopping $438 million. The startup’s tagline reads says the company “is reinventing the way design and manufacturing teams print with metal” — and now it undoubtedly has the money to do so.

Koch Disruptive Industries (yes, that Koch) led the round, joined by GV, Panasonic and Techtronic Industries. The latest round follows $65 million last March, which found Ford investing in the technology,  which has applications for both prototyping and manufacturing. Big names like BMW and Lowe’s have also pumped money into Desktop’s impressive additive manufacturing technology.

The company says will be investing the massive funding back into its technology. “This new funding will fuel the continued development of our metal 3D printing technology and rich product roadmap,” co-founder and CEO Ric Fulop said in a press release tied to the news, “the scaling of operations to meet a growing demand of orders, and the financing of major new research and development initiatives”

Desktop Metal’s technology clearly represents a bright spot in the world of 3D printing/additive manufacturing — at least so far as investors are concerned. Much of that is due to the speed and durability of the printing process, which is helping it move from simple prototyping to real-world product manufacturing.