Author: azeeadmin

Bird just announced 10 million scooter rides since launching about one year ago. If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because Bird competitor Lime earlier today announced it surpassed 11.5 million rides across its shared bikes and scooters.

Bird, which launched last September in Santa Monica, Calif., currently operates in 100 cities and has over two million unique riders, Bird founder and CEO Travis VanderZanden told TechCrunch. But Bird’s first year of operations has been full of ups and downs.

Many of the downs have been around regulatory issues. Bird faced, and overcame them, in Santa Monica but failed in San Francisco.

“I think anytime you’re doing something new that the cities haven’t contemplated before, there always seems to be gray area on where you fit in in the regulatory environment,” VanderZanden said. “Cities hadn’t thought about electric scooters and electric scooter sharing. We collaborated very closely with the cities we’re in now.”

Although San Francisco did not grant an operating permit to Bird — the city gave them to Scoot and Skip — VanderZanden stressed that “San Francisco is one city. We’re in 100 cities.”

He also said Bird is not looking to appeal the decision in San Francisco. Lime, however, is in engaging in the appeals process.

As Bird enters its second year of operations, the name of the game is to double down on its efforts with cities and building out its government tech platform. Bird is also looking into manufacturing its own scooters to provide more durability to its customers and differentiate itself from other scooters on the market.

“We’ve been investing heavily in that area,” VanderZanden said. “You’ll start to see new vehicles coming from us soon.”

He added, “we want to keep building vehicles that are more ruggedized but also vehicles that have new features for the riders as well.”

And Bird definitely has the funds to do that. To date, Bird has raised $415 million in funding for shared electric scooters.

Workplace training has long been considered one of the key early areas where virtual reality can make a dent in the enterprise. Walmart already made some noise when it announced it would be bringing VR hardware into its training centers, now the company is planning to send Oculus Go headsets to each of its 5,000 stores so that more of Walmart’s employees can get instruction more often.

The big box giant will begin sending four headsets to each Walmart supercenter and two headsets to each Neighborhood Market in the country. That may not necessarily seem like a ton to train a store full of employees, but at Walmart’s scale that amounts to about 17,000 headsets being shipped by year’s end.

The move is the evolution of an announcement that the company made last year that it was working with STRIVR Labs to bring virtual reality training to its 200 “Walmart Academy” training centers. Those training sessions were done on PC-tethered Oculus Rifts, the move to Oculus Go headsets really showcases how much more simple standalone headset hardware is to setup and operate. Just being able to send a few of these to each store and expect that people will be able to navigate them easily is a win for Oculus and Facebook as most early VR hardware has taken a healthy bit of troubleshooting in order to engage with anything.

“Walmart was one of the first companies to benefit from VR’s ability to enrich employee education, and its applications will only grow from here,” Oculus business partnerships head Andy Mathis said in a press release. “What makes it so compelling is that costly, difficult, or otherwise impossible scenarios and simulations become not only possible, but immediately within reach.”

Virtual reality offers a unique opportunity to gain exposure to processes and products before it’s actually go-time. For employees, the experience can be more engaging than existing options and I would imagine people are less prone to distractions or mindlessly clicking through screens.

STRIVR’s instruction videos are largely 360 video-based with interactive onscreen prompts and can offer employees an opportunity to see and feel like they’re interacting with new initiatives before the infrastructure is even in place. In today’s announcement, Walmart specifically highlighted how new store features like “Pickup Towers” for online purchases were able to be get running more quickly as employees had already “interacted” with them in VR before they were installed in the store.

Walmart will start shipping the headsets to stores this month.

More consolidation is afoot in the world of cloud-based voice services. Today, Vonage — once a VoIP pioneer that today offers cloud-based unified communications and other IP services in the business market — announced that it would acquire NewVoiceMedia, a UK startup that builds cloud-based contact center solutions, for $350 million in cash.

Vonage says the price represents 3.8 times NewVoiceMedia’s projected 2019 revenue. But it isn’t a stellar exit for the startup, which has been around since 1998 and was last valued at upwards of $311 million, according to Pitchbook data. That was over two years ago, and we’d heard the valuation was actually closer to $500 million at the time. Its investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and more.

On the other hand, the deal will help Vonage increase the services it provides, and thus the margins it makes, in a wider suite of value-added IP services — which today include office phone systems, marketing automation and an existing call center solution, as well as MPLS and other IP services. Specifically, it gives it the platform to integrate also more deeply with other software providers like Salesforce, an important part of how Vonage sells its services to would be customers.

“We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of NewVoiceMedia, which represents a major step forward in the realization of our strategic vision to deliver a differentiated, fully-programmable communications solution that drives more meaningful customer interactions and better outcomes for businesses,” said Vonage CEO Alan Masarek, in a statement. “This acquisition accelerates Vonage’s growth strategy and leadership position in cloud communications, strengthens our presence with global mid-market and enterprise clients, and deepens our integrations and key go-to-market relationships with CRM providers, especially Salesforce.com.”

Vonage is today a $3.2 billion company traded publicly on the NYSE, and its stock is up slightly in trading today.

Vonage claims NewVoiceMedia is the largest privately-owned, pure-play, cloud contact center company globally, with some 700 customers mostly in the mid- to large-enterprise range, including Adobe, Siemens, Time Inc., FundingCircle, and Rapid7.

Dennis Fois, the CEO of NewVoiceMedia, will stay on and continue to lead NewVoiceMedia business, which has 400 employees today. “Vonage and NewVoiceMedia share a powerful vision to serve businesses with cloud communications that connect employees and enable personalized conversations with their customers and prospects,” Fois said in a statement. “Together, we can help businesses create richer experiences through a state-of-the-art, global, programmable cloud communication platform.”

Vonage said it would finance this deal through a combination of existing revolver capacity, cash on hand and cash on the balance sheet of NewVoiceMedia. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2018, subject to standard regulatory review and customary closing conditions.

Spotify today is taking another step that may make record labels uncomfortable. Fresh off reports that the streaming service is cutting its own licensing deals with independent artists, the company this morning announced it will now allow indie artists to directly upload their music to its service, too.

The upload feature is today launching into beta on Spotify for Artists, the online dashboard that arrived publicly last year. This dashboard and its accompanying mobile app allow artists to track metrics surrounding their streams and their fan base demographics.

Through the new upload tool, artists will now be able to add their own tracks to the streaming service in just a few clicks.

Explains Spotify, artists will upload the music, preview how things will appear, then edit the music’s metadata, if need be. They’ll also be able to choose when those new tracks “go live” on Spotify. (No more new music Fridays, perhaps.)

Most importantly, Spotify says that artists are paid as usual for their uploaded music – the royalty payments will simply be direct deposited to artists’ bank accounts every month.

Another new report in the dashboard will detail how much the uploaded streams are earning and when they can expect to be paid.

The upload option is free, and Spotify says it won’t deduct any fees or commissions of its own.

The move is likely to concern labels, who have traditionally acted as gatekeepers between artists and fans. But through digital media platforms, artists have been exploring new ways to build their audience.

For example, on SoundCloud – a service Spotify once considered acquiring –  indie musicians, DJs, bands and other performers have been able to attract followings. Similarly, YouTube has often served as a discovery vehicle for unknowns.

Both services will be impacted by this move, as it’s one of the reasons they’re used by artists. Now, they’ll be able to point fan bases directly to their Spotify tracks.

Those who are able to gain fans on their own may be able to route around the need for a label, and subsequently keep more of their earnings in the process.

“Artists receive 50% of net revenues from the songs they upload, and Spotify also accounts to publishers and collection societies for additional royalties related to the music composition,” said Kene Anoliefo, the Senior Product Lead for Spotify’s Creator Marketplace, confirming the payout structure.

Meanwhile, according to a recent report by The NYT, artists working with labels may see much smaller percentages. The report said that Spotify typically pays a record label around 52 percent of the revenue generated by each stream. The label, in turn, then pays the artist a royalty of anywhere from 15% to as high as 50%.

If artists are dealing directly with Spotify, they could be making more money.

Labels suggested that they could retaliate against Spotify for overstepping. The NYT had also said. They may do things like withhold licenses Spotify needs for key international expansions, like India, or not agree to new terms after existing contracts expire.

They could also offer more exclusives and promos to Spotify’s rivals, like Apple Music, which has surged ahead in the U.S. and is now neck-and-neck here with Spotify for paid subscribers. (Some reports, as well as Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, have claimed Apple Music is ahead in North America.)

Spotify has historically downplayed these concerns to investors, saying that it’s building a two-sided marketplace, and that it’s always licensed music from creators both “large and small” and will continue to license music from whomever owns the rights.

A music upload feature also means artists who own their own rights could break out big on Spotify if they catch the attention of playlist editors – something that Spotify now makes it easier for them to do, as well.

In addition, having indies upload music directly means Spotify could better compete against Apple Music by attracting more artists and their fans to its platform.

The upload feature is debuting in beta on an invite-only basis in the U.S., Spotify says.

A small handful of independent artists are already on board, including Noname, Michael Brun, VIAA, and Hot Shade. They provided Spotify with some initial feedback in earlier testing ahead of the beta launch, the company says.

“We started off by working with artists who are both deeply engaged in our platform – so they use Spotify for
Artists often –  and they also release music often,” said Anoliefo, adding that music upload has been one of artists’ most requested features.

“We used the test with them to shape the tool and make an upload process that we think is really easy, transparent and flexible. It’ll enable artists to use the tool to upload music through Spotify for Artists whenever they like. There are no barriers or constraints. And they can upload as often as they’d like. And as many times as they like,” she said.

Over the next few months, Spotify will email other artists to ask them to try out the feature, as well.

Initially, it will open up access to a few hundred more, before rolling it out publicly to the over 200,000 monthly active users of the Spotify for Artists platform.

At launch, music upload will be a web-only feature. The company wouldn’t comment on its plans to bring the feature to mobile.

 

 

Three years after its introduction, GoPro is killing its Session camera line.

The cute little cube was dropped today after GoPro revealed its latest lineup of Hero7 cameras.

When the Hero4 Session was first revealed in 2015, it was the action camera company’s first major redesign and signaled some dramatic ethos shifts, some that ultimately found their way to other GoPro cameras and others that it seems to be taking to the grave. It was the first GoPro to have a waterproof/shockproof casing built-in, it dropped the user replaceable battery and it significantly reduced the camera’s footprint.

It was not designed to be the “cheap camera” and was initially positioned at a $399 price point near the high-end of its lineup at the time. The company ultimately failed to really differentiate the Session form factor and despite an ambitious introduction it just kind of ended up becoming the company’s low-end product that didn’t work with any of the existing GoPro accessories that were being sold.

The writing was on the wall when the company neglected to refresh the hardware at its Hero6 event last year, but the Hero5 Session kept chugging along as the entry-level GoPro until the company showed off a new $199 Hero camera in March.

The Hero5 Session is not alone singing its swan song, the Hero6 Black and Hero5 Black have also been officially discontinued replaced by the Hero7 White, Silver and Black editions.

Any story about GoPro’s product line is also a story about the health of the public company and this year that story seems to be a more conservative one with the company’s new flagship device the Hero7 Black moving mostly lateral on hardware specs while throwing its focus to software tech like digital video stabilization. The moves seem designed to reduce R&D costs while widening the gap between the low and high-end on the company’s far cleaner new product line.

While there were only so many directions the company could move in technically from the Hero6 Black which shot 4K at 60 frames, the H7 Black is treading water on more than a few specs as the internals take only minor updates all powered by the company’s last-gen GP1 chip. It’s still a fantastic little camera that delivers best-in-class footage but beyond a new paint job and some subtle tweaks to the microphone, the most significant hardware differences are a bump from 1GB to 2GBs of RAM and the addition of a MiFi chip.

This phone may have a giant 7 printed on the side of it, but the device is, at its heart, a very capable old dog with some new tricks. While the camera introduction seems to be a step back in bravado, from a business perspective, the moves GoPro is making with their product line seem to be responsible choices for a company that’s stock price has dropped from just under $12 one year ago to just above $6 today.

Where the company has chosen to emphasize the evolution of the H7 Black is in its software, most notably with what it’s calling HyperSmooth, updated digital stabilization tech that makes use of the extra onboard memory and is so good, GoPro claims, that you won’t need to buy a hand stabilizer like the company’s Karma Grip.

In practice, HyperSmooth definitely makes some improvements over the stabilization tech present in previous generations but the advances are much more subtle to a Hero6 Black owner than someone who owned a Hero cam several years ago. Stabilization was one of my favorite things about the last-gen Hero6; it’s an essential action cam feature but one that GoPro pulled off with style. The fact that they’ve further improved it in a notable way is impressive but it’s hard to see it as a device-mover.

Here’s a look at it in action:

The other noteworthy feature in this release is live-streaming which is possible over WiFi and lets users stream directly from the camera, something that hasn’t been possible in any other GoPro.

Other software updates include a cool TimeWarp mode which further crops the camera’s field-of-view for an ultra stabilized time lapse. It’s a fun feature that gives users something cool to export to their phone without worrying about further editing.

Photos haven’t really ever been the Hero line’s strong-suit and while the company has made plenty of moves to become more Instagram-friendly, the device is still a video-first camera that is also capable of capturing stills. The addition of HDR color-matching on the H7 makes for some nicer wide-angle pics especially of landscape shots where the sky dominates the shot.

I am a big fan of general UI improvements that the company has made. Everything feels a lot cleaner and designed to be more smartphone-like. There’s a lot less guessing and it all makes for expedited fumbling when moving through modes.

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Across the board, everything else that was great about the company’s last camera is still worthwhile here. Slow-mo is fantastic, waterproofing and shockproofing still get the job done and voice control is a bit messy but a nice bonus. Even if the updates are less headline-grabbing with the H7, for owners of the Hero5 and earlier, this is a killer upgrade in quality.

You’re still going to struggle with big file sizes that you dread exporting to your phone or laptop and a battery that always seems to die at the worst time, but other features have taken some nice subtle steps forward in this iteration. I would imagine this camera’s introduction is less about getting Hero6 Black or even previous GoPro owners to upgrade and perhaps more about giving new customers more reasons to buy the higher-end devices it its much cleaner product line.

Software features like stabilization definitely aren’t the juiciest features to sell new hardware, but this light update for the H7 Black and GoPro’s revamp of its whole camera line aren’t just about making footage smoother, they’re also about stabilizing a company.

GoPro delivered a big refresh of its cameras today with a lot of new product names but not quite as many hardware updates as we’ve seen in past updates.

The new lineup from GoPro is definitely less confusing from a branding perspective. The Hero7 White, Silver and Black will cost $199, $299 and $399 respectively. Unlike past years, the company will be discontinuing the previous generations rather than just dropping the price. The company did not offer any updates on its Fusion 360-degree camera.

The new cameras ship September 27.

In terms of the new product line, here’s what you’re looking at when it comes to specs.

Hero7 White Specs

• $199
• Max video: 1440p @ 60 frames
• Waterproof up to 10m
• 10MP photos

Hero7 Silver Specs

• $299
• Max video: 4K @ 30 frames
• Waterproof up to 10m
• 10MP photos
• GPS

Hero7 Black Specs

• $399
• Max video: 4K @ 60 frames
• Slow-mo: 2.7K @ 120 frames, 1080p @ 240 frames
• Waterproof up to 10m
• 12MP HDR photos
• Live-streaming
• GPS

While the White and Silver models both have a new color palette, they both have lost the small front LCD status screen that could help you determine what mode you were in. It’s an interesting move that probably offered a drop in bill of materials cost for the cameras and offered a broader range of differences between low and high-end models but they do ultimately kind of feel like downgrades to the Hero5 Black and Hero they are replacing in the lineup.

The flagship Hero7 Black is again the star of the group, but the differences between the newcomer and its preceding model are far less pronounced than in past releases.

You can check out our Hero7 Black review for some more details on how the hardware and software stack up.

Surprise! Amazon’s holding a big hardware event at its Seattle headquarters, and we’re here on site, to bring you the news as it breaks. Unlike Apple, Google and the like, the company isn’t one for announcing these sorts of events in advance, though given that it’s done something similar in recent years, it seemed likely that it had something big planned for this month.

After all, we are in the pre-holiday crunch time for hardware launches. That’s precisely why you’ve seen/will see major events from competitors like Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others. It’s also why I haven’t been sleeping very much this month.

I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that Amazon didn’t pre-announce the event. That’s just the company’s style, for whatever reason. And besides, it took a similar approach with last year’s event, where it refreshed the Echo line and added the Spot, Buttons and a new Fire TV to the stable.

What we do know for sure is that today’s event will be focused on Alexa, the Echo line and Fire TV. As far as specifics, this report seems like a pretty good place to start. It notes that the company is planning to release “at least” eight Alexa hardware devices in the near future, including a hi-fi system, an automotive gadget and, interestingly, an Alexa-powered microwave.

All of the above are interesting for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that they would put the company in direct competition with a number of third-party hardware partners, including Sonos, Garmin and GE. That runs counter to the company’s recent pattern of working with third parties.

A number of other Amazon products seem overdue for refreshes as well, including the Echo Show and Dot. There’s been talk of a HomePod-style competitor from Amazon, as well. That could potentially make its debut at today’s event, as well, though the Sonos-esque product may also fit the bill there.

Designing for digital interfaces has come a long way since the first days of the web, but there remains a place for tech that can help navigate us through what are sometimes still bloated or complicated services (notwithstanding those that are deliberately so). Today, one of the more successful startups working in this area has raised a sizeable round that speaks to the opportunity.

WalkMe — the Israel-based provider of tools that companies and organizations plug into their own apps to help guide people in using them more efficiently — has closed $40 million in funding in a Series F round led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation also from previous investor Mangrove.

WalkMe is not disclosing its valuation, but a source very close to the company confirmed to me that it is now over $1 billion as business continues to “grow rapidly.” WalkMe now has 2,000 customers globally, which includes more than 30 percent of the Fortune 500, including Delta, HP (CEO and co-founder Dan Adika is an alum), T-Mobile and Microsoft (no Clippy jokes, please).

The money — which brings the total raised to $207.5 million — will be used to expand its business further into local markets and also continue to build out its platform, which today includes elements of machine learning and big data analytics along with technologies to read, understand, and guide through user interfaces — a tech stack that has grown through a combination of internal development and acquisitions.

When it was founded in 2011, WalkMe’s focus was primarily on providing help to website visitors, to keep them bouncing away in frustration. Over time, it expanded to other areas. Its remit now also includes B2B, since in many cases an organization’s internal teams can be just as confused or frustrated with its tech servicesmas its external customers might be, and that impacts overall productivity. (Consider employee onboarding, or change management, or the fact that we have multiple services, sometimes as much as 20 different systems, that we need to use daily.)

WalkMe is also doing more in automation, helping fill in information and proceed through other steps to speed up usage, or as Rephael Sweary, the president and other co-founder of the company, describes it, “reducing the steps it takes to do something on a site from 10 to three.” Sweary said that WalkMe’s business is roughly split equally between B2B and B2B2C today, with 40 percent of sales to repeat customers.

Perhaps the best measure of a service that helps you use other services better is if the helping service disappears into the background and becomes a bit invisible. That seems to be something of the modus operandi of WalkMe. Part of the work it does is in creating assistants to help people through user interfaces, and part is observing how interfaces are being used, employing machine learning and big data analytics technology to figure out not just what people are doing, but how to improve it.

It’s this shift to developing services that will help shape how services are built that is an interesting direction for WalkMe, which has up to now nearly profited off the fact that sites and other digital interfaces have not been designed well.

Its most recent acquisition, in June, was of a stealth startup called DeepUI, which uses deep learning analytics around a site’s graphical user interface to understand how sites are used without integrating with a site’s APIs. “DeepUI’s algorithms can anticipate individual user’s needs, automatically create customized step-by-step guidance and complete tasks in the quickest and most efficient way possible,” WalkMe said at the time it announced the deal.

“This will save organizations countless hours of time in building, maintaining and managing instructions, workflows, or other engagement processes for users on any platform.”

That longer-term vision of how WalkMe plans to evolve is what has excited investors in this round, alongside the growth of its existing business.

“WalkMe pioneered and developed the digital adoption platform, with a bold vision of transforming the way users interact with technology, just like navigation systems (GPS) changed the way we drive. With WalkMe, users no longer need to learn or recall how to use any software, application or websites,” said Roy Saar, partner at Mangrove Capital Partners, in a statement. “Although we are traditionally an early stage investor, we decided to take part in WalkMe’s growth round because we are witnessing how more and more of WalkMe’s customers see WalkMe as a strategic enabler of their digital transformation. We look forward to continuing our partnership with WalkMe as they continue to revolutionize the future of work.”

MariaDB, the company behind the eponymous MySQL drop-in replacement database, today announced that it has acquired Clusterix, which itself is a MySQL drop-in replacement database, but with a focus on scalability. MariaDB will integrate Clusterix’s technology into its own database, which will allow it to offer its users a more scalable database service in the long run.

That by itself would be an interesting development for the popular open source database company. But there’s another angle to this story, too. In addition to the acquisition, MariaDB also today announced that cloud computing company ServiceNow is investing in MariaDB, an investment that helped it get to today’s acquisition. ServiceNow doesn’t typically make investments, though it has made a few acquisitions. It is a very large MariaDB user, though, and it’s exactly the kind of customer that will benefit from the Clusterix acquisition.

MariaDB CEO Michael Howard tells me that ServiceNow current supports about 80,000 instances of MariaDB. With this investment (which is actually an add-on to MariaDB’s 2017 Series C round), ServiceNow’s SVP of Development and Operations Pat Casey will join MariaDB’s board.

Why would MariaDB acquire a company like Clusterix, though? When I asked Howard about the motivation, he noted that he’s now seeing more companies like ServiceNow that are looking at a more scalable way to run MariaDB. Howard noted that it would take years to build a new database engine from the ground up.

“You can hire a lot of smart people individually, but not necessarily have that experience built into their profile,” he said. “So that was important and then to have a jumpstart in relation to this market opportunity — this mandate from our market. It typically takes about nine years, to get a brand new, thorough database technology off the ground. It’s not like a SaaS application where you can get a front-end going in about a year or so.

Howard also stressed that the fact that the teams at Clusterix and MariaDB share the same vocabulary, given that they both work on similar problems and aim to be compatible with MySQL, made this a good fit.

While integrating the Clusterix database technology into MariaDB won’t be trivial, Howard stressed that the database was always built to accommodate external database storage engines. MariaDB will have to make some changes to its APIs to be ready for the clustering features of Clusterix. “It’s not going to be a 1-2-3 effort,” he said. “It’s going to be a heavy-duty effort for us to do this right. But everyone on the team wants to do it because it’s good for the company and our customers.

MariaDB did not disclose the price of the acquisition. Since it was founded in 2006, though, the Y Combinator-incubated Clusterix had raised just under $72 million, though. MariaDB has raised just under $100 million so far, so it’s probably a fair guess that Clusterix didn’t necessarily sell for a large multiple of that.