Author: azeeadmin

Google has acquired a small startup building tools for businesses looking to automate their customer service or sales workflows. Onward and some of its key employees including co-founders Rémi Cossart and Pramod Thammaiah as well as CTO Aaron Podolny will be joining Google. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The startup gives businesses an AI-powered chat solution to get customers what they want while making the most efficient use of their resources through automation.

Cossart and Thammaiah pivoted the startup from a more consumer-facing product called Agent Q which was a sort of shopping virtual assistant that people could text and quickly ask for product recommendations. The team billed it as a product marriage of Magic and Consumer Reports.

The co-founders eventually determined that there was more worth in bringing this kind of functionality to businesses who could use it as a way to automate interactions with customers in a tailored manner.

The bot service basically sought to make it easy to answer the simplest questions with answers pulled from a database while building flows that could help more detailed questions get addressed with just a few follow-ups.

For these more complex customer queries, Onward created a visual bot builder to allow users to quickly build chat decision trees that could help address their customers requests while also knowing when it was time to hand things off to a human.

The service could be easily integrated with products like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify and HubSpot.

“Throughout this journey, we’ve remained focused on unlocking the magical experiences that are possible when computers understand the subtleties hidden in a user’s actions and messages.” a blog post on the Onward site reads. “With Google, we’ll be able to expand the reach of the technologies that power Onward.”

Not even Techstars NYC can avoid the end of summer, where 10 startups are wrapping up their participation in the accelerator’s summer program.

This also marks the end of Alex Iskold’s tenure as managing director of the program. He’s certainly going out with a varied groups of startups — these entrepreneurs are working on everything from tampons to spices to skin care, plus more traditional tech categories like finance and security.

Here’s a quick rundown of each company.

• • Aunt Flow helps businesses and schools stock free tampons. Founder and CEO Claire Coder argues that if businesses are providing toilet paper for free, they should do the same with menstrual products. Current customers include Viacom, Twitter, and Brown University. (And it’s also selling products directly to customers.)

• • Burlap and Barrel finds spices from farmers all over the world, selling them to consumers and restaurants (including Dig Inn). The startup emphasizes the stories behind the spices, and it says it currently offers organic black peppercorns from Zanzibar, wild mountain cumin from Afghanistan, smoked pimenton paprika from Spain, plus 40 other spices.
  • Clever Girl Finance offers financial education content and tools for women of color. Founder and CEO Bola Sokunbi is an immigrant, computer science major and a certified financial educator. The startup currently offers more than 20 different courses, covering topics like getting out of debt and managing your wedding on the budget, all accessible for $10 per month.
  • Concert Finance automates financial reporting, starting with sales commissions. This allows sales reps to get real-time updates on the commissions that they’re earning. It works on top of Salesforce with no developer integration work required.
  • FlyThere connects customers with drone operators, allowing those customers to fly drones remotely. The company is pitching this as a way for people to experience locations around the world without actually traveling there. It’s available for visits to eight locations already, including the Big Buddha temple in Thailand and the pirate ship in Cancun.
  • With Le CultureClub, customers can test the “microbiome” of their skin by swabbing their skin and sending a sample to the startup. Le CultureClub can then give them access to a dashboard with personalized skincard recommendations.
  • Pandium aims to make it easier for B2B software companies to support integrations. The platform handles authentication, scheduling and other basic issues. That doesn’t eliminate the work for developers, but it’s supposed to allow them on the core integration logic, and supposedly reduces engineering time by 80 percent.
  • Perch aims to improve physical training and coaching by installing a camera and tablet, which is mounted on gym equipment to track and display data like number of reps and velocity. It’s currently targeting college and professional teams, and plans to expand to commercial and home gyms.

• SeekWell co-founder Mike Ritchie spent 15 years leading analytics teams at Bank of America and at startups. His goal is to change the way analytics teams share code by offering them an analytics platform and common code repository, allowing them to share and reuse SQL queries.
• SIEmonster is focused on security information and event management, using deep learning to detect and defend against attacks. Its partners include HP, which is distributing the platform to financial institutions like Bank of America.

Apple is about to release the public beta version of iOS 12.1. And before everybody freaks out, the company announced that this update will feature new emojis — best feature update ever.

In other words, Apple is releasing its own take on Unicode 11.0 emojis. Other devices and major services will soon all support the same emojis, but with a different design.

Apple already previewed some of these new emoji designs back in July for World Emoji Day. So here’s what you should expect.

Curly hair, grey hair, bald people, red hair…

As always, you’ll be able to find five skin colors in addition to yellow, and all characters come in male and female variants. The Unicode 11.0 specs said that vendors should add "curly hair" emojis. But it looks like Apple concluded "alright let's put a ’stache on that face!"

As for everything else, you’ll find a new emojis for outdoor accessories, such as luggage, compass and hiking shoes. On the food front, you’ll find bagels, salt, cupcakes, leafy greens, mango, moon cake, etc.

And when it comes to animals, there’s finally a mosquito emoji as well as new llama, swan, raccoon, kangaroo, lobster, parrot and peacock emojis.

Animals

Faces

Food

Everything else

Every time I’ve written about emojis, the number one comment has always been about red hair. It took a few years but red hair people, the Unicode consortium has finally heard you!

People procrastinate about buying insurance because it’s such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies. But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it’s easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental, business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more. Now Cover is building powerful onboarding tricks like a driving school that earns you lower car insurance rates, and a way for Shopify merchants to sell warranties for their items.

The potential to use tech to run circles around the old insurance brokers has attracted a new $16 million Series B for Cover led by Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi, who led the Series A and sits on the startup’s board. The round was joined by Y Combinator, Social Capital, Exor and Samsung, and brings the company to a total of $27.1 million in funding.

“Insurance isn’t very different from being a white-collar bookie, where the house’s rake is too high and the dollars at stake are in the hundreds of billions in the U.S. alone,” says co-founder and CEO Karn Saroya. “This, all to the detriment of regular people, who view insurance as a tax. We’re here to change that perception.”

Saroya and his co-founders have deep ties. He went to high school with Anand Dhillon, is engaged to Natalie Gray and hired Ben Aneesh at the team’s previous startup, a high-end fashion marketplace called StyleKick that was eventually acqui-hired by Shopify. “We were tossing around ideas for what we wanted to do after StyleKick/Shopify, running hackathons on weekends. We built a couple different apps, but Cover — the MVP, where we just asked potential customers to take pictures of things they wanted to insure, surprised us” says Saroya. “Our customers sent us walkthroughs of their homes, pictures of their dogs and videos of themselves washing their cars. When you come across behavior that violates your expectations in consumers, that’s usually when you double-down.”

Cover co-founder and CEO Karn Saroya

So they built Cover, where you don’t have to cobble together an endless set of insurance websites or wait on hold. You download the app, pick your item, list how much you paid and where, provide some photos or video of its condition using its TensorFlow-equipped camera and Cover will check across its insurance partners and find you the best quote instantly. You can easily see what is and isn’t covered, learn how to make claims, and text with an agent if you have questions. For example, I was quickly quoted $5 per month to insure my new iPhone against damage but not loss or theft.

Cover earns between 10 to 35 percent per dollar of premium you pay. Its annualized premium already exceeds $8.5 million and is growing 30 percent per month. Thanks to its low-churn business model, easy cross-promotion of products, low training requirements for customers and no need to constantly update its existing subscriptions, Cover starts to look like a very efficient software-as-a-service business.

The big question remains whether Cover can consistently find the best rates for customers so they don’t second guess its quotes and search somewhere else. It will have to outcompete multi-insurance providers, like State Farm and Geico, as well as startups like MetroMile tackling specific insurance verticals with mobile apps. To really earn the big profits, Cover is building out its own in-house insurance plans. But that will put it under constant threat of insuring the wrong risks and ending up paying out too much.

“We built Cover because we saw an opportunity to build elegant products that could deliver on pricing and customer experience in a way that no incumbent insurance entity can,” Saroya concludes. By bringing the service to mobile and making it a seamless part of owning something, Cover could ensure you’re insured, even if insurance is the last thing you want to think about.

We’ve finalized the Vancouver micro meetup for this Thursday. We’ll be holding it at Hoot Suite HQ on 5, East 8th Ave at 7pm on October 4. Extra special thanks to the folks at Hoot Suite for helping out.

You must RSVP here so we know how many are attending. If you’d like to pitch please fill out this form and I will contact you ONLY IF YOU ARE CHOSEN. The best pitch will win a table at Disrupt Berlin.

Since there will be no booze at the event we’ll have an extra special drinkathon at 9pm at a bar of your choosing. I’m open to suggestions.

I love doing these little meetups because it gives me a good view on the startup scene in a city so I hope you’ll join us. See you all soon!

E-cigarette maker Juul recently received a surprise visit from the Food and Drug Administration, CNBC first reported. Last week, the FDA seized thousands of documents from the startup’s headquarters, TechCrunch has confirmed.

The unannounced inspection of the startup’s headquarters on Friday was part of the FDA’s efforts to seek documentation related to Juul’s sales and marketing practices, according to the FDA.

“The purpose of these inspections was to determine compliance with all applicable FDA laws and regulatory requirements,” an FDA spokesperson told TechCrunch. “The new and highly disturbing data we have on youth use demonstrates plainly that e-cigarettes are creating an epidemic of regular nicotine use among teens. It is vital that we take action to understand and address the particular appeal of, and ease of access to, these products among kids.”

This comes after the FDA requested documents from the company in April as part of an inspection of Juul’s marketing practices toward minors. Juul, in a statement to TechCrunch, says it’s committed to preventing underage use and is wanting to engage with the FDA, lawmakers and public health advocates to ensure young people don’t use its products.

Last month, the FDA ordered five companies — Juul being one of them — to outline within 60 days their plans to address underage use of their products. If those companies fail to meet the deadline, the FDA says it will pull its products from shelves.

Walmart is expanding further into apparel with today’s announcement of its plans to acquire the digitally native, women’s plus-size clothing brand ELOQUII for an undisclosed amount. The all-cash deal includes ELOQUII CEO Mariah Chase, her executive team and its 100 employees, who will continue to be based in Long Island City, NY and Columbus, OH. They’ll join Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce organization, reporting to Andy Dunn, SVP of Digital Consumer Brands, Walmart U.S. eCommerce, when the deal closes later this year.

Walmart won’t disclose the deal size, but says it’s larger than its ModCloth acquisition ($75M) but smaller than Bonobos ($310M). That’s in line with Recode’s report claiming the deal is $100 million.

Women’s plus-size fashion is of interest to Walmart because it’s one of the fastest-growing segments of women’s apparel, and an estimated $21 billion market, the retailer explains. More than half of U.S. women ages 18-65 now wear a size 14 or higher, but traditional fashion brands often overlook their needs by limiting clothing options, or failing to address fit.

ELOQUII was founded in 2011 and then relaunched in 2014 as a direct-to-consumer brand catering to this market. Since 2015, the company has seen 3x revenue growth and has achieved a Net Promoter score of near 80.

Beyond simply having the means to address this market with more inventory, ELOQUII is another means for the retailer to reach a segment of online consumers who perhaps wouldn’t have otherwise considered shopping Walmart. This is a similar strategy Walmart made when snatching up other fashion brands, including Bonobos and ModCloth, for example. In fact, Bonobos and ModCloth shoppers were so anti-Walmart in some cases, there was a backlash following their acquisitions.

ELOQUII has grown its online profile thanks to savvy internet marketing and high-profile relationships, like the one with Reese Witherspoon, who partnered on a plus-size collection from her clothing line Draper James. The retailer also tapped other brands like Stone Fox Bridal and Jason Wu – the latter designer who’s a fav of celebs like Karlie Kloss, Diane Kruger, and Lily Aldridge.

It has also listened to and promptly responded to customer feedback as it grew.

“Addressing customers’ vocal requests for fashion-forward styles is something ELOQUII does incredibly well,” notes Dunn, in a blog post about the deal. “For example, they recently uncovered 80% of ELOQUII customers work full-time, and one of the most frequent requests from customers was for fashionable work wear. Embracing the feedback, ELOQUII launched The 9-5 Kit and most recently The Premier Workwear Kit, filling an unmet need in the category and further reinforcing trust with customers in the process,” he says.

Walmart has picked up a number of brands to help it expand its reach and inventory in recent years, including Moosejaw ($51M), ShoeBuy, Jet.com ($3B), Hayneedle, in addition to Bonobos and ModCloth. Most continue to offer their own online stores, though Moosejaw just became the first acquisition to open its own storefront right on Walmart’s site. It also introduced its own Allswell home and bedding digital brand.

The retailer says the ELOQUII deal is expected to close later this quarter. The brand has raised $21 million to date, according to Crunchbase data, from investors including Acton Capital Partners, Greycroft, Grace Beauty Capital, Female Founders Fund, Fabrice Grinda, FJ Labs, Max Ventures, and HDS Capital. However, ELOQUII has actually raised more than that – $42 million, according to Recode.

Remember Prepd? The “lunchbox you won’t be ashamed to carry” raised over $1 million on Kickstarter in 2016, and now it is returning with an iPhone 5c-esque sequel that is both cheaper and more colorful.

Prepd, in case you missed it, isn’t some kind of IOT, smart, next-gen lunchbox. Rather, it’s an unashamedly premium take on the lunchbox built by two designers who were sick of lugging around ugly boxes containing their food. Style aside, it is also designed to keep portions healthy. To date, over 50,000 lunchboxes have been sold worldwide, according to the company.

The new Prepd ‘Colors’ Kickstarter cuts the price of the product to $39 (or $35 for the first 24 hours of the campaign), which is down from $50 in the last Kickstarter . The original version has a recommended retail price of $69 and the new edition is set to sell for $49 after the campaign is over.

The real difference with the new edition is that the elegant bamboo cover of the original version is replaced with a colorful top that uses the same magnetic lock mechanism. Likewise, the same high-quality leak-proof Tritan containers and magnetic reusable cutlery are included in the set.

Founders Chris Place and Will Matters told TechCrunch that they have made a few small optimizations but the goal is to offer some variation — the colors include blue, peach, mint or grey — and make the product more affordable.

“It includes the same benefits of the original product but in a more simple version at a more accessible price point,” Place said in an interview.

“We’re amazed at how many people use it on a regular basis and the changes it makes to their life,” Matters added. “People love it but some say that they can’t justify spending $69 so we wanted to enable more people to get their hands on it.”

Two-and-a-half years is a long time between products, but Hong Kong/U.S-based Place and Matters said they’ve been busy working with retailer and partners, which have included Blue Apron, Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom. Beyond that, they’ve been partnering with content makers and chefs to develop the companion app that works alongside the lunchbox.

The follow-up act is always tricky, particularly when a project massively exceeded its target as was the case with Prepd. The Kickstarter project is again looking to hit a minimum goal of $25,000 which will cover the tooling and processes to actually build the product. Since Prepd uses Kickstarter in the traditional way — as a platform to validate an idea rather than marketing an existing product — the finished product isn’t due to ship to backers until March 2019, although a number of prototypes have already been developed.

Prepd has bootstrapped itself to date, despite Place and Matters admitting that they have fielded interest from VCs. For now, the duo said they are focused on this Kickstarter campaign but they admitted that they are looking to “energize” their community of lunchbox owners by developing new content for the Prepd app that could include cooking shows or chef live streams.

“We’re looking to harness the community and do what Peloton has done [for cycling] but for cooking,” Place said.

Full details on the new Prepd product can be found on Kickstarter here.

Uber has brought on Nikki Krishnamurthy, Expedia’s former chief people officer, as one of its own. Krishnamurthy is coming on board as chief people officer to replace Liane Hornsey, who resigned in July following a racial discrimination investigation.

According to Reuters, a group of Uber employees of color alleged Hornsey discriminated against Bernard Coleman, Uber’s global head of diversity and inclusion, and unfairly criticized and threatened Bozoma Saint John, who left the company in June. In an email to staff in July, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi did not cite specific reasons for Hornsey’s departure, but simply said she had led the team through a “period of enormous positive change.”

As CPO, Krishnamurthy will oversee the human resources department. That means Bo Young Lee, Uber’s chief diversity officer, will report to her.

“Nikki brings unparalleled experience in building a culture centered around transparency, respect and diversity,” Khosrowshahi said in a blog post. “She is a trusted partner who will help our management team as we evolve our culture, ensuring Uber continues to be a place where employees are supported and welcomed, and where they can grow and thrive.”

Krishnamurthy left Expedia back in June after working at the company for eight years. At the time, it wasn’t clear where she was headed, but GeekWire noted that Krishnamurthy had “liked” a LinkedIn post from Khosrowshahi that detailed Uber’s approach to cultural change. She joins former Expedia colleague Barney Harford, who joined Uber as its first chief operating officer last December.

One of the the overlooked tidbits in amongst the flurry of Note 9 news was Samsung’s plan to offer an S Pen SDK for developers. The company made good on its promise today, issuing a full break down of the different functionality over here.

Of course, all of this is made possible by the fact the proprietary stylus has learned a few new tricks for this latest generation of the popular phablet. The addition of bluetooth low energy and an on-board battery that gets around half an hour of battery life (or 200 clicks) from a 40 second charge help the thing double as a remote.

In demos, Samsung showed the pen control things like music playback and slideshow presentations. In my own review, I found it handy — if a bit awkward — to hold a stylus while going for a run.

The SDK opens the pen up to third-parties, and it will be interesting to see what they’re able to do with the “unmatched freedom and functionality” to take selfies and the like with a small piece of plastic and a single button.