Author: azeeadmin

For years, marketers have been trying to optimize the online shopping experience to better understand their customers and deliver more customized interactions that ultimately drive more sales. Artificial intelligence was supposed to accelerate that, and today Adobe announced enhancements to Adobe Target and Adobe Experience Manager that attempt to deliver at least partly on that promise.

Adobe has been trying to lift the enterprise side of its business for some time, and even though they are well on their way to becoming a $10 billion company, the potential for even more revenue from the enterprise side of the business remains tantalizing. They are counting on AI to help push that along.

Adobe’s Loni Stark says companies are looking for more sophisticated solutions around customization and optimization. Part of that involves using Adobe’s intelligence layer, which they call Sensei, to help marketers as they tweak these programs to drive better experiences.

For starters, the company wants to help users choose the best algorithms for any given set of tasks. Adobe is bringing AI in to assist with a tool it released last year called Auto-Target. “One of the challenges marketers face has been which algorithms do you use, and how do you map them to your personalization strategy. We are enabling Adobe Sensei to choose the best algorithm for them.” She says giving them a smart assistant to help choose should make this task much less daunting for marketers.

Adobe is also bringing some smarts to layout design with a new tool called Smart Layouts, first introduced in March at Adobe Summit. The idea here is to deliver the right layout at any given time to allow marketing teams to scale personalization and increase the likelihood of action, which in marketing speak means buying something.

Once again the company is letting AI guide the process to generate different layouts automatically for different segments, depending on visitor behavior at any given moment. That means a retailer should be able to deliver ever more granular pages based on what it knows about visitors as they move through the shopping process. The more customized the experience, the more likely the shopper turns into a buyer.

Adobe is also looking at new delivery channels, particularly voice, as devices like the Amazon Alexa become increasingly popular. As with the web, mobile, print and other delivery approaches, marketers need to be able apply basic tasks like A/B testing on different voices or workflows, and the company is building these into their tools.

All of these new features are part of Adobe’s ongoing attempt to streamline its marketing tools to make life easier for its customers. By using artificial intelligence to help guide the workflow, they hope to drive more revenue from the digital experience side of the house. While these tools should help, Adobe still makes the vast majority of its money from Creative Cloud. The Digital segment still lags at $586 million (up 18 percent YoY) out of total quarterly revenue of 2.20 billion in the most recent report in June.

The company spent a hefty $1.68 billion in May to snag Magento. They are due to report their next quarterly report on September 18th, and it will be interesting to see if the Magento acquisition and increasing use of artificial intelligence can help continue to grow this side of the business .

The Boring Company just posted a video on Twitter showing its latest digging machine can be controlled by an Xbox One controller. Because, if you’re going to dig holes, why not make it a bit of fun?

Software makes it easy to map PC controls to an Xbox pad. Instead of developing and fabricating a custom controller, using an Xbox gamepad is a cost-effective alternative for a lot of organizations. The military services agree. In its latest subs the US Navy tapped the Xbox 360 controller to maneuver submarine periscopes and the Army’s anti-drone laser uses an Xbox controller. They’re used to control robots and drones, too.

The reasoning is simple: A lot of research goes into game controllers. Microsoft reportedly spent over $100 million on the Xbox One controller, which, is just an updated version of the Xbox 360 controller. More than that, these controllers, whether of the Microsoft or Sony variant, are already familiar to most users. Operators do not have to learn a new set of controls. They can pick up a controller and be familiar within seconds.

And if the Xbox or Playstation controller doesn’t offer enough buttons, companies could always look to repurposing Steel Battalion controllers.

Another day, and another departure at Snapchat’s parent, Snap. The company has announced in an SEC filing that Imran Khan will be stepping down as chief strategy officer, a role he has held since 2014. This is the latest in a series of executive moves at the company since it went public last year. The latest news has sent Snap’s stock down in pre-market trading to as low as $9.75 — around one-third of the value of the stock when it first listed in March 2017.

The company said that Khan informed Snap on September 6, and he did not give a specific reason except to pursue other opportunities and that “Mr. Khan has confirmed that this transition is not related to any disagreement with us on any matter relating to our accounting, strategy, management, operations, policies, or practices (financial or otherwise).” Khan will stay on as CSO for a transition period, and his last day has not been determined.

Although there is no reason given for his leaving, and it sounds like he’s moving to a new opportunity, the change will raise questions about the health of the company.

In its last earnings in August, Snap showed signs of growing its fledgling ad business and had beat analyst’s financial expectations, but it also lost 3 million users and continues to face stiff competition from Facebook (which keeps copying its best features), and general attrition of interest from its millennial user base as it moves to the next big thing.

Coupled with this, the company’s CEO has had a strong hand in running the company, an approach that has its pros and cons.

“Imran has been a great partner building our business. We appreciate all of his hard work and wish him the best” said Evan Spiegel, CEO and co-founder of Snap, in a statement.

“There is never a perfect time to say goodbye, but we have a stellar leadership team in place to guide Snap through the next chapter, and I plan to stay on to ensure a very smooth transition” said Khan in his own statement noted in the SEC filing.

Snap — then still a very fast-moving startup called Snapchat, hot off the heels of rebuffing a $3 billion offer from Facebook, and just ahead of a reportedly $30 billion offer from Google — made big waves in 2014 when it hired Khan from his role as a star banker at Credit Suisse.

The move turned out to be part a wave of hires by outsized tech companies to bring in financial big guns, ushering in a different wave of thinking as these businesses increasingly interfaced with the finance world as large, multinational businesses. (Other related hires included Anthony Noto at Twitter, and Ruth Porat at Google.)

All being relative, Khan has had a longer run at Snap than many of the other top brass who have come and gone, some staying for little more than a year — a detail that is ironic in the context of the Snapchat app’s ephemerality, but otherwise potentially very destabilising for the company.

Other departures since going public have included losing its CFO in May, head of product Tom Conrad, the head of its Spectacles division, its head of sales (who ended up joining Oath, which owns TC), its engineering lead, and just ahead of going public, its ad tech head.

Snap said that it is now in a transition agreement with Khan regarding his stock units. While with the company he will continue to get RSUs, and that he will continue to get a “pro rata number of unvested RSUs for each day worked after your most recent vesting date as of your last day, provided that you continue to comply with your Employee Confidential Information and Inventions Assignment Agreement signed on December 5, 2014.”

We have reached out to Khan to see if he will give more details about what he is doing next, and will update this story as we learn more.

On the face of it, Bolt represents a kind of return to Sphero — back to the early days of Orbotix. The Colorado startup had a bonifide hit on its hands with its first Sphero robotic ball, enough so that it rebranded the company accordingly.

Announced today, the Bolt returns those core technologies and introduces some new elements, while doubling down on the new-found focus of education. Teaching kids has been an element to Sphero’s products for some time now, but some tough decisions and growing pains forced the company to abandon its branded product portfolio and pivot entirely toward Edu.

The key new hardware feature here is a programmable 8 x 8 LED matrix display inside that can be programmed to display words and show of data in real-time. There’s also an ambient light sensor for programming based on room brightness, a two-hour battery and an infrared module that allows two Bolts to communicate with one another.

The included Sphero Edu app, meanwhile, uses Scratch blocks and JavaScript text to program the robot, creating custom games and drawing. The Bolt also works with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds program, hooking it into Apple’s educational ecosystem. Those who want to just, know, have fun, can do so as well, through apps like Sphero Arcade.

“Our main goal is to teach through play,” CCO Adam Wilson told TechCrunch. “What we’re going to continue to do is build products that take advantage of this ethos.”

The shift toward education comes during what’s amounted to a rocky year for the hardware startup. In January, we reported that the company had laid off 45 staff members following lackluster holiday performances by its growing portfolio of Disney licensed products.

The company tells TechCrunch that licensed products won’t be a part of Sphero’s product line moving forward, though existing products like BB-8 and R2D2 will continue to be available on store shelves through the holidays.

“We realized if we put a lot more energy into getting things perfect, we’d probably get a better return on them,” says Wilson. “Last year and the few years before, we did four or five product a year. It was hard on our company and hard on all of us. It was too much time to make it all work just right, because we’re perfectionists. So we’re going to just focus on a few products and get them to be spectacular.”

We searched high and low to find amazing early-stage startup founders from across the Middle East and North Africa. And we chose only the best of the region to compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018. Our world-famous startup pitch competition takes place on October 3 in Beirut, Lebanon, and we want you to join us to watch it all go down.

This is your chance to be in the room as the top early-stage startup founders of the region compete for the title of the Middle East and North Africa’s best startup. Talk about a networking opportunity. Spectator passes cost $29 (including VAT), and you can buy your tickets right here.

Anyone who loves the tech startup scene will love watching Startup Battlefield unfold. And if you’ve never seen one up close and personal, you’re in for a thrill-packed day.

Fifteen teams compete in three preliminary rounds — five startups per round. They each get six minutes to present a live demo to a panel of technologists and VC investors who are experts in their respective specialties. After each pitch, the judges put each team through their paces with a six-minute Q&A. Stressful? You betcha, but the founders are as prepped as possible, thanks to the free pitch coaching from TechCrunch editors.

Five teams move into the final round — to pitch a new panel of judges and endure more stress-inducing questions.

Finally, after a long, exhausting day of bearing witness to incredible technology, the judges declare one startup as the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 champion and the best startup in the Middle East and North Africa. The winning founders receive a US$25,000 no-equity cash prize and a trip for two to compete in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

It’s a fun, action-packed day that takes place in front of hundreds of influential investors, technologists and entrepreneurs — all the people who make the tech startup scene possible. Witnessing startups launch to the world is exciting for sure, but it’s also a great opportunity for networking with like-minded people. You never know who you’ll meet and what might come of a conversation.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield MENA 2018 takes place October 3 in Beirut, Lebanon — less than one month away. We invite you to be part of the grand adventure. You can purchase your $29 ticket right here.

In what looks like an undeniably good strategic fit, U.K.-based business reporting software startup Supdate has been acquired by equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although I’m told it was an all-cash acquisition.

I understand that Crowdcube is essentially buying the Supdate user base and tech/IP, and that Supdate founder Duane Jackson is not joining Crowdcube but will be helping on the technical side during the handover. The idea is that Supdate will become part of part of the existing suite of “post-funding benefits” available to businesses that raise on Crowdcube, such as access to Amazon’s Launchpad Programme.

Founded out of Jackson’s own frustration as an angel investor, whereby startups he’d backed didn’t always keep him updated regularly, Supdate offers SaaS for businesses to create and share company news and metrics with shareholders. The premise was that well-designed software could help streamline and to some degree automate these updates, helping investors stay in the loop without a founder using up too much bandwidth writing reports.

Jackson — who previously founded and sold online accounting software company KashFlow — says that partnering with a crowdfunding platform was “an obvious route to market” for Supdate, which is why he approached Crowdcube. Those conversations quickly progressed to the possibility of Crowdcube acquiring Supdate. The timing was good, too, since Jackson has already begun working on a new venture in the accounting space. Here we go again, you might well say.

Adds Darren Westlake, co-founder and CEO of Crowdcube: “Crowdcube has funded over 600 companies, averaging 350 investors each and so ensuring businesses can easily connect with their shareholders to keep them updated is really valuable to our investor community. We’ve been fans of Supdate for a long time, and when we recently began talking with Duane in more detail, it quickly became obvious that Supdate would be a natural fit for Crowdcube and our growing Funded Club”.

Meanwhile, Crowdcube is giving its alumni of over 600 funded businesses access to Supdate, as well as providing ongoing access to Supdate’s existing customer base.

OneDegree, a Hong Kong-based insurance technology startup, announced today that it has closed a Series A totaling HKD $200 million (about $25.5 million). Half of that amount was pledged by investors to OneDegree pending regulatory approval through the Hong Kong Insurance Authority’s new fast-track licensing program for online-only insurers. The company, which participated in Cyberport, the Hong Kong government’s startup incubator, claims this is the largest ever fundraising round for a pre-revenue insurance tech startup in Hong Kong.

OneDegree is currently not disclosing its list of investors because its new shareholders are being vetted by the Insurance Authority, founder and CEO Alvin Kwock tells TechCrunch, but it includes institutional investors and family offices. The South China Morning Post reports that speculation among brokers peg Tencent and Alibaba as probable backers.

OneDegree has developed an online insurance platform that lets consumers purchase personal lines and health insurance products without needing to consult with an agent. Instead, they find and buy policies through an app that is connected to a backend that automates claims processing, policy management and customer service.

The startup will initially sell medical insurance plans for pets. While there are more than 500,000 pet dogs and cats in Hong Kong, only about 2% to 3% are covered by insurance, compared to 42% in the United Kingdom, says OneDegree. The startup blames this on ineffective distribution, since pet insurance has relatively low premiums and is therefore overlooked by insurance agents, even though the number of pet dogs and cats in Hong Kong is increasing at an average annual growth rate of 3.5% and their owners are a relatively affluent demographic.

OneDegree plans to use its Series A to on tech development, launching new products and marketing. The funding will also serve as risk capital once it launches its insurance business.

In a press statement, Cyberport chairman George Lam said “As a key driver of digital technology development in Hong Kong, we are definitely excited to see local fintech start-ups like OneDegree successfully securing recognition from renowned institutional investors and attracting sizable funding that will enable faster growth.”

Perlego, which has been dubbed the ‘Spotify for textbooks,’ has closed $4.8 million in finding. Leading the round is ADV, with participation from existing angel investors, including Simon Franks (co-founder of Lovefilm), Alex Chesterman (founder of Zoopla), and Peter Hinssen.

Founded by Gauthier Van Malderen and Matthew Davis, Perlego provides students and professionals unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of academic and professional eBook titles for £12 a month.

To be able to do this, it works with 650 publishers, including big names like Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Macmillan Higher Education, and Cengage Learning. Publishers receive 65 percent of each subscription on a consumption basis.

“Textbook prices have increased more than fifteen-fold since 1970, or three times the rate of inflation,” Perlego co-founder and CEO Van Malderen tells TechCrunch. “In the U.K., the average university student spends £439 a year on textbooks. This is only exacerbating the cost of higher education and the debt burden on students, which is set to rise again this year in the U.K.”.

In turn, Perlego says it helps publishers monetise their content to a large segment of price-sensitive students that would otherwise buy their books from the used-books market or download pirated copies. It also supplies publishers with detailed data on the consumption of titles.

“We are true subscription model,” adds Van Malderen. “For £12 per month you get unlimited access to the best textbooks. We do not operate a complex leasing model and publishers benefit [through] data collection, reduced piracy, no cannibalization from second-hand print sales”.

Meanwhile, Perlego says it will use the new funding to grow the team and support the company’s growth across the U.K. and Europe. It will also further invest in developing its product for students and professionals.

In addition, Perlego has joined Founders Factory this month as part of its edtech accelerator programme, which is backed by Holtzbrinck Macmillan one of the world’s leading academic publishers.

Following speculation about Jack Ma’s imminent retirement, Alibaba Group announced today that its CEO, Daniel Zhang, will succeed Ma as chairman next year. After stepping down as chairman on September 10, 2019 (exactly a year from now), Ma will continue serving as a board member until its annual general shareholders’ meeting in 2020.

After that, Ma will remain a lifetime partner of the Alibaba Partnership, or a group of 36 partners drawn from the senior management ranks of Alibaba Group companies and affiliates. They hold a considerable amount of sway over the company because they have the right to nominate, or in certain situations, appoint up to a simple majority of its board of directors.

Alibaba’s announcement follows reports that Ma’s retirement from the company he co-founded in 1999 as an online marketplace was imminent, with Ma, a former English teacher, planning to dedicate his time to philanthropy in education. Ma downplayed those reports, however, telling the South China Morning Post (which is owned by Alibaba) that instead he will gradually reduce his role in the company through a succession plan.

Ma stepped down as CEO in 2013, handing the position over to Jonathan Lu. Lu was replaced in 2015 by Zhang, Alibaba’s former COO, after Ma reportedly told employees that it’s time for the company to be run by people born in the 1970s and after (Zhang was born in 1972, three years after Lu).

In a letter sent to media outlets today, Ma wrote that Zhang has “demonstrated his superb talent, business acumen and determined leadership” since taking over as CEO. Under his stewardship, Alibaba has seen consistent and sustainable growth for 13 consecutive quarters. His analytical mind is unparalleled, he holds dear our mission and vision, he embraces responsibility with passion, and he has the guts to innovate and test creative business models.”

Ma added that “this transition demonstrates that Alibaba has stepped up to the next level of corporate governance from a company that relies on individuals, to one built on systems of organizational excellence and a culture of talent development.”

Ma also re-emphasized his narrative that his departure from Alibaba Group will be very gradual. “I have put a lot of thought and preparation into this succession plan for 10 years. I am delighted to announce the plan today thanks to the support of the Alibaba Partnership and our board of directors,” he wrote. “I also want to offer special thanks to all Alibaba colleagues and your families, because your trust, support and our joint enterprise over the past 19 years have prepared us for this day with confidence and strength.”

Of his plans after Zhang takes over as chairman next year, Ma said he will continue contributing to the work of the Alibaba Partnership,” before adding “I also want to return to education, which excites me with so much blessing because this is what I love to do. The world is big, and I am still young, so I want to try new things – because what if new dreams can be realized?! The one thing I can promise everyone is this: Alibaba was never about Jack Ma, but Jack Ma will forever belong to Alibaba.”

I spent TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt extravaganza asking questions of various notables onstage, and what struck me most was how fantastically optimistic they were. To pick two examples: Kai-Fu Lee talked about preparing for a world of mass plenitude and abundance 30-50 years from now; Dario Gil waxed enthusiastic about quantum computers simulating life-changing new materials and pharmaceuticals, transforming everyone’s lives for the better.

And then I turned around and returned to the world of hair-trigger outrage, condemnation, consternation, pessimism, gloom and impending apocalypse; which is to say, America and social media, where it sometimes seems an encouraging word is rarely heard without being promptly drowned out by a dozen angry doomsayers prophesying rains of fire and blood. Surely the truth is somewhere in between; surely any rational assessment of the future must include a mixture of both optimism and pessimism. So why do those seem like two entirely separate modes of thought, of late?

Certainly there’s much to be pessimistic about. Our slowly boiling planet; the resurgence of racist nationalism around the global; the worldwide rise of authoritarian demagogues who don’t represent their people. Certainly tech industry folk, and especially investors, are deeply incentivized to be optimistic. If they’re right, they win big, and if they’re wrong, well, there’s no real downside except maybe having their embarrassing pro-Theranos / pro-Juicero tweets paraded out a few years later. Panglossianism is not the path of wisdom.

But neither is apocalypticism. Whisper it, but there is much to be optimistic about. For all of capitalism’s flaws, and there are many, it has reduced the number of people living in extreme poverty by more than a billion since 1990, even while the world’s population has grown by two billion. Fast, far-reaching progressive social change has been proved possible; witness e.g. the attitude change towards gay marriage in America from 2005 to 2015. We’ve connected the planet, put supercomputers in the pockets of a third of the world, made solar/wind power and electric cars both increasingly widespread and increasingly cost-effective, and we’re working hard at replacing most rote human drudgery with robot labor.

Sure, we live with fat-tail risks of various catastrophes of mindnumbing scale; but why do we never speak of the fat-tail chances of benevolent breakthroughs? Why does optimism about the future — not even net optimism, but any optimism — seem so rare these days?

Partly this is  social media’s fault. Facebook and Twitter “optimize,” so to speak, for engagement, which is to say they implicitly amplify that which causes outrage, fury, terror, and insecurity, rather than that which prompts a quiet hope for / confidence in things slowly getting better. From this we get the sense that everyone else is appalled by everything that’s going on, and so we naturally grow more appalled ourselves.

Partly it’s that the fruits of the advances which provoke this optimism remain so unequally distributed. It’s nice to talk about a world full of plenitude, but if 80% of the benefits go to 20% of the population, while the 40% at the bottom see their lives actually get worse as a side effect of the disruptive changes, are our collective lives really getting better? And even if your life is objectively improving a little every year, if you seem to be falling further behind the median, you’ll still feel it’s actually getting worse.

But there’s more to it than that. Optimism is dangerously provocative. It implicitly calls on us to do something, to contribute, to join the spreading wave, whereas pessimism is easier. It only calls on us to endure.

It’s true that the tech industry often seems to handwave that because in the long run, our new technologies will make everything better, we don’t need to bother worrying about its short- and medium-term effects. This is wrong and dangerous and (ironically) spectacularly shortsighted; we need to do better. But at the same time, the pessimists need to do better too, by realizing that there is plenty of room for hope and optimism in any reasonable imagination of the future.