Author: azeeadmin

It sometimes feels like the price of Bitcoin rises and falls on the turn of a speculative dime, and yesterday we saw one such moment come to pass, when it was reported that Goldman Sachs was planning to drop a plan to build a Bitcoin trading platform, causing the price of the cryptocurrency to crash. But today, at TechCrunch Disrupt, the CTO of Goldman Sachs described the story as “fake news,” and said that in fact the bank is still considering how to offer services that involved physical Bitcoin, but that it has not yet set a timeline for it.

“I was in New York yesterday and I was co-chairing our risk committee, and I saw the news article,” said CTO Marty Chavez, referring to the report yesterday. “It wasn’t like we announced anything or that anything had changed for us… I never thought I’d hear myself actually use this term, but I’d really have to describe that as fake news.”

As Chavez described it, Goldman Sachs had been building a Bitcoin trading platform modelled on a commodities futures trading platform, where there is never any Bitcoin traded, but more the promise of how the currency might move.

“Our institutional clients said, ‘We would love for you to clear these new Bitcoin-linked futures contracts offered by the exchanges,’ so we’ve been doing that, and then clients since May [started to ask], ‘We would like for you also to provide us liquidity and trade the principal as principal the futures contracts, not just clear them,’ and so we’ve been doing that, the next stage of the exploration, what we call ‘non-deliverable forwards.’

“These are derivatives, over the counter derivatives,” he continued. “They’re settled in U.S. dollars and the reference price is the Bitcoin U.S. dollar price established by a set of exchanges, the same one that’s referenced in the futures contracts, and we’re working on that now because the clients wanted physical Bitcoin — something tremendously interesting and tremendously challenging. From the perspective of custody, we don’t yet see an institutional grade custody cases custodian solution for Bitcoin.”

While companies like Coinbase are trying to tap into that demand by offering custodial services aimed squarely at institutional money, but Goldman itself still has no timeline for when its own offering might be ready.

“We’re interested in having that exist, and it’s a long road and so I would just be speculating. Maybe someone who was thinking about our activities here got very excited that we would be making markets as principal and physical Bitcoin, and as they got into realizing that that’s part of the evolution but it’s not here yet.”

Bitcoin — and the crypto market generally — suffered significant price losses this week off the back of reports of Goldman’s aborted plans, but that wasn’t the sole trigger. Reuters also reported that EU is looking into regulating crypto and is preparing a report that proposes to regulate exchanges and ICOs.

Bitcoin hit a record valuation of nearly $20,000 in January, and it has struggled to return to those highs during the rest of this year. The cryptocurrency was priced at $6,536 at the time of writing, some way short of a months-long high of $8,266 on July 26, according to information from Coinmarketcap.com.

Over the past two days, 21 companies have taken the stage at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield. We’ve now taken the feedback from all our expert judges and chosen five teams to compete in the finals.

These teams will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of judges and answer even more in-depth questions. Then one startup will be chosen as the winner of the Battlefield Cup — and they’ll also take home $100,000.

Here are the finalists. The competition will be livestreamed on TechCrunch starting at 1:35pm on Friday.

CB Therapeutics

CB Therapeutics is a new biotech company that aims to change the game with cannabinoids produced cleanly and cheaply in the lab, out of sugar. What it’s done is bioengineer microorganisms — specifically yeast — to manufacture cannabinoids out of plain-old sugars.

Read more about CB Therapeutics here.

Forethought

Forethought has a modern vision for enterprise search that uses AI to surface the content that matters most in the context of work. Its first use case involves customer service, but it has a broader ambition to work across the enterprise.

Read more about Forethought here.

Mira

Mira is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile.

Read more about Mira here.

Origami Labs

Origami Labs wants to bring voice assistants right to your ear without requiring you to wear a device like a Bluetooth headset or Apple AirPods. Instead, the startup is using a ring on your finger combined with bone conduction technology to allow you to use your smartphone’s built-in assistant – whether that’s Google Assistant or Siri – in an all-new way.

Read more about Origami Labs here.

Unbound

Unbound makes fashion-forward vibrators, and their latest is the Palma. The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. And the team plans to add accelerometer features.

Read more about Unbound here.

 

The startup behind the Meural art frame has been acquired by Netgear. The deal was announced during the router company’s analyst day and was confirmed to TechCrunch by a Meural spokesperson. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Netgear may feel like an odd suitor for this consumer hardware startup, but they were an early investor in them and the buy is certainly no more strange than the last exit in this smart art space, when Giphy bought Electric Objects, torched the hardware business and made the subscription content free to existing users.

Meural has built some very nice hardware. At $595 the company’s art frames are a bit pricier than other products in the market, though its $40 annual subscription to its art network is much more palatable. The device’s gesture controls also offer some quality controls beyond the mobile app.

Netgear seems to have some real interest in bringing the Meural hardware into its plans to hide wifi routers in plain sight in people’s homes, an analyst at the event noted in Forbes.

It’s certainly an interesting prospect, this seems like an odd product to exercise this strategy with though. Smart art frames are at their ugliest when the power cord can’t be hidden and it’s probably going to be a tad difficult for you to hide ethernet cords on your wall unless you’re hiding them in the wall which doesn’t work great when so many smart home hubs need a direct connection to your router.

Meural raised $9.3 million in funding from investors including Corigin Ventures, Bolt, Forefront Ventures, Firstrock Capital and Netgear.

Knowing what’s going on in your warehouses and facilities is of course critical to many industries, but regular inspections take time, money, and personnel. Why not use drones? Vtrus uses computer vision to let a compact drone not just safely navigate indoor environments but create detailed 3D maps of them for inspectors and workers to consult, autonomously and in real time.

Vtrus showed off its hardware platform — currently a prototype — and its proprietary SLAM (simultaneous location and mapping) software at TechCrunch Disrupt SF as a Startup Battlefield Wildcard company.

There are already some drone-based services for the likes of security and exterior imaging, but Vtrus CTO Jonathan Lenoff told me that those are only practical because they operate with a large margin for error. If you’re searching for open doors or intruders beyond the fence, it doesn’t matter if you’re at 25 feet up or 26. But inside a warehouse or production line every inch counts and imaging has to be carried out at a much finer scale.

As a result, dangerous and tedious inspections, such as checking the wiring on lighting or looking for rust under an elevated walkway, have to be done by people. Vtrus wouldn’t put those people out of work, but it might take them out of danger.

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The drone, called the ABI Zero for now, is equipped with a suite of sensors, from ordinary RGB cameras to 360 ones and a structured-light depth sensor. As soon as it takes off, it begins mapping its environment in great detail: it takes in 300,000 depth points 30 times per second, combining that with its other cameras to produce a detailed map of its surroundings.

It uses this information to get around, of course, but the data is also streamed over wi-fi in real time to the base station and Vtrus’s own cloud service, through which operators and inspectors can access it.

The SLAM technique they use was developed in-house; CEO Renato Moreno built and sold a company (to Facebook/Oculus) using some of the principles, but improvements to imaging and processing power have made it possible to do it faster and in greater detail than before. Not to mention on a drone that’s flying around an indoor space full of people and valuable inventory.

On a full charge, ABI can fly for about 10 minutes. That doesn’t sound very impressive, but the important thing isn’t staying aloft for a long time — few drones can do that to begin with — but how quickly it can get back up there. That’s where the special docking and charging mechanism comes in.

The Vtrus drone lives on and returns to a little box, which when a tapped-out craft touches down, sets off a patented high-speed charging process. It’s contact-based, not wireless, and happens automatically. The drone can then get back in the air perhaps half an hour or so later, meaning the craft can actually be in the air for as much as six hours a day total.

Probably anyone who has had to inspect or maintain any kind of building or space bigger than a studio apartment can see the value in getting frequent, high-precision updates on everything in that space, from storage shelving to heavy machinery. You’d put in an ABI for every X square feet depending on what you need it to do; they can access each other’s data and combine it as well.

This frequency and the detail which which the drone can inspect and navigate means maintenance can become proactive rather than reactive — you see rust on a pipe or a hot spot on a machine during the drone’s hourly pass rather than days later when the part fails. And if you don’t have an expert on site, the full 3D map and even manual drone control can be handed over to your HVAC guy or union rep.

You can see lots more examples of ABI in action at the Vtrus website. Way too many to embed here.

Lenoff, Moreno, and third co-founder Carlos Sanchez, who brings the industrial expertise to the mix, explained that their secret sauce is really the software — the drone itself is pretty much off the shelf stuff right now, tweaked to their requirements. (The base is an original creation, of course.)

But the software is all custom built to handle not just high-resolution 3D mapping in real time but the means to stream and record it as well. They’ve hired experts to build those systems as well — the 6-person team already sounds like a powerhouse.

The whole operation is self-funded right now, and the team is seeking investment. But that doesn’t mean they’re idle: they’re working with major companies already and operating a “pilotless” program (get it?). The team has been traveling the country visiting facilities, showing how the system works, and collecting feedback and requests. It’s hard to imagine they won’t have big clients soon.

Don’t call Wingly the “Uber of the Sky” — Wingly co-fonder Emeric de Waziers would like to nip that little misinterpretation in the bud as the French startup looks to expand into the U.S. If anything, the startup’s mission is more akin to carpooling for small aircrafts, helping pilots fill up empty seats in small passenger planes.

The distinction is an important one, with regard to the company’s ability to operate. After all, allowing private pilots to turn a profit changes the math significantly, both with regard to specific licenses and the company’s ability to operate inside different countries. Ninety-five percent of pilots who use the service don’t have a commercial license.

“What often happens with hobby pilots is they set a budget for the year. They’re going to fly as many times as they can with this money. If they can fly four times cheaper, they can fly four times more. We have many pilots posting what we call ‘flexible flights,’ saying, ‘hey, I’m available for a roundtrip from San Francisco to Tahoe.’ The passenger says they’re interested and they book the flight.”

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Founded in July 2015, the company faced regulatory challenges early on in its native France. It was enough to cause Wingly to relocate operations, setting up shop in Germany in February of the following year. That launch was a sort of a proof of concept for the novel flight booking app. It was successful enough to convince Wingly to take on its home country again, pushing back against French regulatory bodies.

These days, it operates in Germany, France and the UK, with those markets composing 45, 30 and 20 percent of the company’s business, respectively (with the other five percent belonging to various parts of Europe). Wingly’s flight matching service currently hosts around 2,000 passengers a month, with each flight averaging about 1.8 passengers.

It’s not a huge number, but, then, these aren’t huge planes, with the prop and twin-engine crafts sporting between two and six seats each. Profitability for Wingly means pushing into high volume numbers, but the current pace has been successful enough for the startup to begin pursuing the U.S. as its next major market — a move the company plans to begin in earnest as a Battlefield contestant at Disrupt today in San Francisco.

Currently, Wingly takes a 15-percent commission on each flight, along with a €5 charge. The company has also raised €2.5 million including a €2 million seed round back in December. It’s been enough funding to help the company thrive in Europe, but coming to the States will require additional cash, particularly its current launch time frame of early 2019. From there, Wingly hopes to reach numbers comparable to the business it’s doing in Europe by August/September of next year.

Google has been heavily focused on serving the needs of Indian web users with the recent launch of apps like Tez for payments, Areo for food ordering, Neighbourly for communities, data-friendly versions of apps like Search and YouTube, and others. Now, the company is launching an app to serve the need of Indian bloggers with an app called “Blog Compass.”

The new app, now in beta, quietly popped up in the Google Play Store this week with a note that’s it’s “only available in India.”

According to its Play Store description, Blog Compass helps bloggers to manage their sites and find topics to write about based on Google’s trending topics. These suggestions will also be based on the bloggers’ interests and posting history, it says.

 

The app also helps bloggers manage their sites by tracking their site stats, approving comments, and reading through tips for how to make their blogs more successful.

It works with both Google’s own Blogger.com blogs, as well as with WordPress sites. These are two of the largest platforms used by bloggers around the world. WordPress alone powers around 30% of websites, in fact.

Blog Compass feels something like an introductory app for those who aren’t as familiar with how the web or blogging works. That may be appropriate for an emerging market like India, where many are coming online for the first time by way of mobile devices, having skipped the PC era of internet connectivity.

However, as any old-school blogger would tell you, writing posts simply to cater to whatever is currently trending on Google is something of a traffic hack – and not necessarily how you want to build an audience for your site. Sure, it may bring you clicks as you chase one hot topic after another – but it’s better to develop your own voice and write what you’re passionate about if you really want to develop a relationship with readers.

On the Blog Compass website, screenshots show some of the sample teachings the app will contain. These include courses on things like getting started with SEO and analytics, for example. And, of course, getting your website listed on Google.

The app is simply designed, with navigation via tabs at the bottom of the screen for moving through sections like Home, Activity, Topics, and Badges.

It seems the idea is to centralize a lot of the topic research and blog management overhead in a central place – something you can’t necessarily do with WordPress or Blogger’s own mobile apps, where the focus is more on using those apps’ publishing tools.

We’ve reached out to Google to ask for more information about its intentions with Blog Compass, including whether it intends to roll it out to more markets in the future, or if it’s been developed specifically for India.

Kinta AI aims to make manufacturers smarter about how they deploy their equipment and other factory resources.

The company, which is presenting today at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, was founded by a team with plenty of experience in finance, tech and AI.

CEO Steven Glinert has held management and AI roles at fintech startups, CTO Rob Donnelly is studying the intersection of machine learning and economics as a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford and VP of Engineering Ben Zax has worked at both Facebook and Google.

Glinert told me that when factory owners are making production decisions, they’re usually relying on “dumb software” to decide which machines should be used when, which can result in machines being deployed at the wrong time or in the wrong sequence, or sitting idle when they shouldn’t be. As a result, he said that scheduling errors account for 45 percent of late manufacturing orders.

So Kinta AI tries to solve this problem with artificial intelligence, specifically reinforcement learning. Glinert said the company will run “millions and millions of factory simulations,” where the system gains “a statistical understanding of how your factory works and learning what actions you do to get what result” — and it can then use those simulations to choose the best schedule.

“We run through, not every possible scenario, but we try to go through some of those,” he said.

Glinert added that Kinta AI works with its customers to understand the nuances of each factory. He also compared the technology to Google’s AlphaGo AI and OpenAI’s Dota 2 neural networks — except that instead of using AI to play Go or Dota 2, Gilnert said Kinta AI is utilizing it “to do these detailed production planning decisions that are being made on the factory floor.”

“Not all factories are that dissimilar from each other,” he said — similar to how “if you learned how to play Go, you can easily teach that neural net how to play chess or other game of that type.”

And Kinta AI already has some customers, including chemical manufacturer BASF and a medical device manufacturer.

Ultimately, Glinert said Kinta AI could become a crucial part of the manufacturing process. He predicted that “in the factory of the future, there will be fewer people and more automation, with a vast environment of Internet of Things devices.”

In that environment, he wants Kinta AI to be “the manufacturer execution system.”

Mira, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile. The system is more advanced and accurate than the existing home test kits, the company claims, which can be hard to read and aren’t personalized to the individual.

The company behind Mira, Quanovate, was founded in late 2015 by a group of scientists, engineers, OBGYN doctors, and business execs to solve the problem of the unavailability of advanced home health testing.

“I have a lot of friends who, like me, [prioritized] their career advancement and higher education, and they tended to delay their maternal age,” explains Mira co-founder and CEO Sylvia Kang. “But there’s no education for them about when to try for a baby, and they have no awareness about their fertility health,” she says.

Kang received an MBA at Cornell Johnson, went to Columbia for an MS in Biomedical engineering and received at PhD in Biophysics from University of Pittsburgh, before working as a Business Director at Corning where she was responsible for $100 million in global P&L, which she left to start Mira.

She says that women’s hormones are changing daily, and everyone’s profiles differ due to their lifestyle, stress levels and other factors. The only way to accurately track fertile days, then, is through continuous testing – something that’s been difficult to do at home.

To solve this problem, the team worked to develop the Mira system, which includes a small home analyzer, urine test strips, and an accompanying mobile application. The home analyzer miniaturizes lab equipment for home use, and brings down the cost.

To use the system, the woman places the test strip into the device which then uses immunofluorescence technology to read the results. Currently, the device tests for the presence of luteinizing hormone (LH), which is an indicator of ovulation. However, the company has already has plans to update the device so it can test for other hormones in the near future. (It’s FDA-cleared to detect estrogen, for example, but that won’t be available at launch.)

The system instead is $199 and ships with 10 test strips. After analyzing the strip, information about the hormone levels is displayed on the screen and sent to the Mira app via Bluetooth.

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The app offers women more information about what this data means – like whether they should attempt to conceive today or wait. A subscription service will also offer them access to doctors so they can ask questions, but this will be free at launch.

“This technology is completely different from all the test strips on the market. It’s more accurate, but more importantly, this one is quantitative – that means we give you your actual, formal concentrations,” says Kang. “The [existing] tests strips only give you positive or negative. Since we have your numbers, our A.I. can do pattern recognition. Our algorithm prediction is based on your pattern specifically, not the average of all the population.”

What this means, in practice, is that women struggling to conceive will have more accurate, more actionable, and more personalized results with Mira. During a clinical trial with 400 patient samples, Mira reached 99 percent accuracy, compared with lab equipment, the company says. They also have 18 IPs covering hardware, software, database management and more, including utility patents and models, design patents, trademarks and copyrights.

The company is now working on a portal for doctors, so they could access their own patients’ data for further analysis. Mira may also eventually make its collected data, once anonymized, available to researchers, as well. But Kang says no formal decisions have been made on that front yet.

Longer-term, Kang explains that the same system can be adapted to track pregnancy and menopause, and eventually similar technology could be put to use for analyzing other conditions, like those related to kidney problems or the thyroid.

The Pleasanton, Calif.-based company, is currently a team of 36 and has raised $4.5 million from investors including Gopher Ventures, and two other cross-border investors Mira doesn’t want to disclose publicly.

At Disrupt, the company announced the Mira device is now available for pre-order and will begin shipping in October 2018.

It’s sold online via the Mira website, but is in discussions with doctors and retailers to broaden its availability going forward.

Crossing Minds, which is launching in our Disrupt SF 2018 Battlefield today, is an AI startup that focuses on recommendations. The company’s app, Hai, provides you with a wide range of entertainment recommendations, including books, music, shows, video games and restaurants, based on the data it can gather about you from services like Spotify, Netflix, Hulu and your Xbox.

The company’s co-founders Alexandre Robicquet (CEO) and Emile Contal (CTO) tell me that they want Hai, which is available for iOS and on the web, to become people’s central hub for their entertainment needs. Both founders have extensive experience in machine learning and also managed to bring Sebastian Thrun on as an advisor. The team describes Hai as the “first pure cross-domain recommendation engine truly focused on the user.”

Ahead of its launch, Crossing Minds raised $3.5 million from Index Ventures, Sound Ventures and You & Mr Jones Brandtech Ventures.

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As the team told me, the idea for Crossing Minds and Hai came from their own need of wanting a smart recommendation engine that went beyond a single domain. To get started, they downloaded a few data sets and started experimenting. That was 2016. Those first experiments were successful, but to build a full-scale product, the team needed more data and cleaner data sets. That’s what Crossing Minds focused on over the course of the last year or so, which really isn’t a surprise, given that we’re dealing with rather messy data here, yet there’s no way to build a machine learning-based recommendation system without a lot of data.

Then, using techniques like transfer learning and other modern machine learning approaches, the team is able to take what it knows about you and apply that to other domains as well. “For example, when you read a biography of a band’s member, we can extract information that we can then relate to a movie or restaurants and so on,” Contal explained.

The app itself is organized around three tabs: A discovery tab that surfaces its recommendations; the “Ask me” tab for when you are looking for very specific recommendations (a movie on Netflix, maybe); and the training tab that allows you to train Hai’s algorithm. For movies and other content that’s immediately accessible on your phone or on the web, Hai will also show a “Watch Now” button.

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On the technical side, Crossing Minds uses all of the usual machine learning frameworks, but one interesting twist here is that the team decided to build its own hardware infrastructure with off-the-shelf GPUs to train its models and for inference. In part that’s because renting GPUs from a major cloud provider by the hour can quickly get expensive, but the team also noted that owning the hardware allows them to have full control over it and also offers security benefits (though I’m sure the cloud providers would disagree with that last part).

Over the course of the last few months, the team tested Hai with about 1,000 beta testers. The company isn’t quite ready to launch Hai to everybody, but it’s now taking beta sign-ups and plans to open the service to a wider audience over time.

Unbound founders Polly Rodriguez and Sarah Jayne Kinney have long and varied careers. Rodriguez worked for U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill on Capitol Hill before heading to Deloitte Consulting and dating startup Grouper. Kinney was a graduate of University of Cincinnati worked at Puma and then at Esquire and O, Oprah’s magazine. She worked shooting products for fashion houses in New York.

The duo met in 2014.

Now they make fashion-forward vibrators. Their latest, the Palma, is the most fashion-forward yet and it just launched at TechCrunch Disrupt.

“Unbound is closing the very real orgasm gap by putting knowledge and product in the hands of women all over the world,” said Rodriguez. “Unbound is the first brand taking sexual wellness mainstream through elevated design and accessible pricing.”

The new device masquerades as a ring, offers multiple speeds, and is completely waterproof. It’s made of surgical grade steel and comes in silver or gold. Further, the team plans to add accelerometer features to the device. It will ship in 2019.

The team has raised $3.3 million in seed funding to date and are on track to hit $4 million in revenue in 2018.

They’ve been working on improving the state of the art when it comes to vibrators. They are, it seems, tired of the status quo.

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“It’s important to note that vibrators are used in one of the most absorbent parts of the body and not regulated by the FDA. The lack of regulation results in manufacturers using carcinogens in their materials like parabens and phthalates. Unbound only uses medical grade silicone,” said Rodriguez.

Rodriguez’s message is simple: she wants to destroy the negative stereotypes around sex and health. And she has good reason.

“Each of us is motivated to change the stigmas associated with sexual health for different reasons. For me, it was going through menopause at 21 as a result of radiation treatment for cancer and ending up at a seedy shop on the side of the highway trying to buy lube and a vibrator. My doctors didn’t tell me I was going through menopause, only that I wouldn’t have children. As I got older, I realized that had I been a man, that conversation would have gone very differently… because we view male sexuality has a health need and female sexuality as a vice,” she said. “To put it in perspective, think about the fact that Bob Dole, a former presidential candidate was the spokesperson for Viagra. Can you imagine Hillary Clinton being the spokesperson for a vibrator brand? That’s the difference in how we view male vs. female (cis, femme, non-gender identifying) sexuality.”

“Our dream at Unbound is for female sexual health to be viewed through the same lens as male sexuality — as a part of our overall health that deserves a conversation, platform, and shopping experience that doesn’t feel like a flaming pile of garbage,” she said.