Author: azeeadmin

Lyft has hired Google veteran Manish Gupta as vice president of engineering to build out the ride-hailing company’s business platforms, including enterprise, partnerships, and healthcare.

Gupta will report directly to Peter Morelli. He will work alongside Ran Makavy, who heads up Lyft’s ride-share technology team, CFO Chris Lambert, and Katie Dill, the company’s vice president of design.

In this newly created position, Gupta will also oversee Lyft employees working on payments, fraud prevention, and privacy.

Gupta’s hiring comes amid explosive growth at the ride-hailing company. Two years ago, Lyft’s ride-hailing app was accessible in less than 50% of the U.S. and had only 17% market share—far behind rival Uber.

Today, Lyft has 96% coverage in the U.S. and 35% market share. The company’s driver network has grown from 315,000 in 2015 to 1.4 million drivers in 2017. It’s employee ranks have grow more than fivefold to 3,600 people.

The ride-hailing company’s bookings run rate based on a second quarter estimate is $7.7 billion.

Lyft Business, the company’s enterprise unit, has also expanded in the past two years as it partners with more organizations and companies like Starbucks, LAX, Allstate, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, JetBlue, Delta, and Blue Cross Blue Shield.

The company is increasingly focused on the potential of these business partnerships, particularly with healthcare organizations and non-emergency medical transport. For example, a hospital or doctor’s office, could use a desktop version of the Lyft app to order a ride for a patient. Lyft already has partnerships with some of the largest health systems in the U.S., including Ascension, Denver Health System, Hennepin County Medical Center and El Camino Hospital.

It’s in here where Lyft hopes to tap into Gupta’s experience.

Gupta has been at Google since 2002 in a variety of roles, most recently leading its Google Ads’ buy-side platform. During Manish’s 16-year tenure at Google, he also built AdSense for TV, Video and Display ads, and the billing and payments system for advertisers and publishers.

Amazon may be betting on the convenience of cashier-less stores, but Target is instead focused on order-ahead e-commerce. The company’s Drive Up service, which allows shoppers to place orders online, then pick up at a nearby store without getting out of their car, is now on track to reach nearly 1,000 U.S. stores before the end of the year. Meanwhile, its same-day delivery business is now live at 1,100 stores across 160 markets, and will reach 65% of U.S. households by year-end.

This week, Target said it’s expanding its Drive Up service to two more key markets, Colorado and California, where it will begin to roll out over the next month to 128 stores.

In total, Target Drive Up service is available today at over 800 stores in 25 states.

Like Walmart’s grocery pickup service, Drive Up is popular among parents with small children, where everyday shopping can be difficult. Parents, especially those with babies, have been using Drive Up for restocking their household essentials like diapers, Target says. But other shoppers have been using Drive Up as a means of getting larger, bulky online purchases – like TVs – loaded straight into their vehicles.

The service has grown to be one of the highest-rated services by Target shoppers, since its launch in the retailer’s home market of Minneapolis last fall, the retailer told us.

Drive Up, however, is only one of now several e-commerce initiatives Target has underway.

The company also offers a next-day delivery service called Target Restock, which it recently expanded nationwide. The service also now offers free delivery for all Target REDcard purchases. That means it’s a way to get items faster than Amazon Prime, without Amazon’s ever-increasing Prime membership fee or Pantry surcharge. It arrives, too, at a time when Prime customers are complaining about the speed of their shipments – items labeled Prime are often arriving late these days, and people are noticing.

This leaves room for other e-commerce players like Target and Walmart to go after Amazon’s unhappy customers with services of their own. Walmart, for instance, may be contemplating its own Prime-like program, given the news that it’s building out its own streaming service.

Target, which reported stellar earnings this week, has been working to win back marketshare from Amazon for some time.

Last year, Target said it would invest $7 billion into expanding its e-commerce business and its fix its stores, in order to better cater to shoppers’ changing habits.

The company is now in the process of remodeling 1,100 stores by the end of 2020 to address the order-ahead customer base. The new designs will include more space for customer order pickups, more parking for Drive Up, self-checkout lanes, and grab-and-go essentials near the front. It’s also opening small-format stores, many near college campuses.

Target today now also offers customers online order pick-up in stores, same-day grocery delivery through its Shipt acquisition, same-day delivery of in-store sales in select urban markets, and voice shopping in partnership with Google.

Today, Target shares are surging based on its just reported Q2 earnings where the retailer reported the strongest same-stores sales growth in 13 years, along with Q2 profit and revenue surpassing analyst expectations. Target reported $17.78 billion in revenue vs. $17.28 billion expected, and net income of $799 million, or $1.49 per share, compared with $671 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago.

Target also said digital sales were up more than 40% during the quarter, and raised its earnings outlook for the year as a result.

The retailer has benefitted from the overall healthy e-commerce industry, however. Its one-day sale in July timed with Amazon’s Prime Day, drove its e-commerce sales this quarter, it said. It’s being boosted, too, by the closing of Toys R Us and Babies R Us, by grabbing market share in toys, games, and diapers and other baby needs.

Earth Class Mail, a company that digitizes your physical mail so you don’t have to go to the mailbox every day, today announced that it has acquired receipt scanning and expense tracking service Shoeboxed.

The reason Earth Class Mail would be interested in Shoeboxed is pretty obvious, given that both companies focus on taking the pain out of dealing with paper. Both services will continue to operate as usual, though we’ll likely see some deep integrations between the two over time.

Shoeboxed, which launched eleven years ago, currently digitizes over five million documents per year for its over 1 million customers in 90 countries. Its main market is small businesses in the U.S., though, which make up 500,000 of its users.

“When we started in 2008 and put the first iPhone app in the app store to scan receipts; there was one other powerhouse around helping small business go digital — Earth Class Mail,” the company’s CEO and co-founder Tobias Walter tells us. “The combined power of our two companies will be a massive shift for small businesses to finally become paperless and say goodbye to old workflows that cost them hours of their productivity. I could not be happier with the new home we found for the company, the team, and our customers!”

What sets Earth Class Mail apart from the United States Postal Service’s Informed Delivery service is that it not only scans the outside of the envelopes that you are about to receive but that you can also give the company permission to scan all the documents inside, too (and the price you pay for the service depends mostly on how many of these full scans you want per month). While Oregon-based Earth Class Mail had to file for bankruptcy protection in 2015, its new leadership team turned the company around. The company says that its annual run rate is now $10 million, up 20 percent since Jess Garza become its new CEO last December.

Walter also notes that users would occasionally send unopened envelopes, too, but the company wasn’t allowed to open them. These customers can now easily become Earth Class Mail users.

Over the course of its existence, Shoeboxed only raised a moderate amount of funding, with a $580,000 Series A round led by Novak Biddle Venture Partners in 2008 (when Series A rounds were still much smaller than today) and a $1.4 million Series B round in 2011. The financial details of today’s acquisition were not disclosed.

It was quite a week for Slack, wasn’t it? The enterprise communications platform confirmed this publication’s earlier report that it had scored another $427 million investment on an over-the-moon valuation of over $7 billion. Slack took a market that had once been in the doldrums and turned it into something significant by making itself more than a communications tool.

It changed the game by making itself a work hub. Through APIs and UI updates, it has made it simple for countless third parties (like Evernote) to integrate with Slack and provide the long-sought workplace hub for the enterprise. Instead of task switching, you can work mostly in one place and keep your focus on your work.

It’s quite a value proposition and it has enabled Slack to raise $1.2 billion (with a b) across 11 funding rounds, according to data on Crunchbase. They have grown to 8 million daily active users. They boast 70,000 teams paying to use it. Whatever they are doing, it’s working.

Competing with corporate behemoths

That said, Slack’s success has always been a bit surprising because it’s facing off against giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Cisco, Salesforce and many others, all gunning for this upstart’s market. In fact, Microsoft is giving Teams away for free to Office 365 customers. You could say it’s hard to compete with free, yet Slack continues to hold its own (and also offers a free version, for the record).

Perhaps that’s because it doesn’t require customers to use any particular toolset. Microsoft Teams is great for Microsoft users. Google Hangouts is great for G Suite users. You’re already signed in and it’s all included in the package, and there is a huge convenience factor there, but Slack works on anything and with anything and companies have shown there is great value in that.

The question is can Slack continue to play David to these corporate behemoths or will patience, bushels of cash on hand and a long view allow these traditional tech companies to eventually catch up and pass the plucky newbie. Nobody can see into the future, but obviously investors recognize it takes a lot of capital to keep up with what the competition is bringing to the table.

Expanding their reach

They also clearly have some confidence in the company’s ability to keep growing and keep the titans at bay or they wouldn’t have thrown all of that moolah at them. Up until now, they seem to have always found a way, but they need to step up if they are going to keep it going.

Alan Lepofsky, an analyst with Constellation Research, who keeps a careful eye on the enterprise collaboration market, says in a recent video commentary that it’s great they got all this money, but now that someone has shown them all of this dough, they have to prove they know what to do with it.

“For Slack to continue to be successful, they need to expand beyond what they are currently doing and really, truly redefine the way people communicate, collaborate, coordinate around their work. They need to branch out to project management, task management, content creation — all sorts of things more than just collaboration.”

What comes next?

Lepofsky says this could happen via a build or buy scenario, or even partnering, but they need to use their money strategically to differentiate the product from the hefty competition and stay ahead in this market.

The other elephant in the room is the idea that one of the competing mega corporations could make a run at them and try to acquire them. It would take a boat load of money to make that happen, but if someone had the cojones to do it, they would be getting the state of the art, the market share, the engineering, the whole package.

For now, that’s pure speculation. For now, Slack is sitting comfortably on a huge cash pile, and perhaps they should go shopping and expand their product set with their newly found wealth, as Lepofsky suggests. If they can do that, maybe they can keep the technology wolves from the door and make their way down the path to their seemingly inevitable IPO.

Monument Valley, the award-winning and beautifully designed mobile puzzler from ustwo Games, is being turned into a movie, according to a report from Deadline. While the game involves a manipulating Escher-like architecture in order to guide a princess through her quest, the movie version will feature live-action characters being thrown into the game’s “mind-bending world,” the report says.

Paramount Pictures and Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road Pictures have selected Patrick Osborne to direct the movie, which the studios hope to turn into a franchise. There’s already more material for them to use, if that’s the case – Monument Valley’s sequel continued the story, this time guiding a mother and a child through the magical architecture.

Osborne won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for “Feast,” and is now directing “Nimona” for Fox and Blue Sky, based on the popular graphic novel. That experience could serve him well for this unusual choice.

“Monument Valley is a one of a kind experience, at once small in its meditative, simple gameplay, as well as enormous in its sense of history,” Osborne told Deadline, in a statement. “I’m privileged to be handed the reins to Ida’s mysterious kingdom, to play in her world of impossible architecture where seeing things differently is everything. I am thrilled to bring this unique world to theaters with the talented storytellers of Paramount and Weed Road.”

Dan Gray, Head of Ustwo Games also noted the company has been waiting for the right opportunity to bring the game to the big screen.

While it’s common for movie studios to option game material for their films, in this case, the choice appears to be largely based the name recognition Monument Valley offers, and the success of films with virtual worlds, as in “Ready Player One.” The game itself has been downloaded over 160 million times worldwide, giving the film version a built-in audience, and has won a number of awards from Apple and others.

Still, it’s hard to contemplate how Monument Valley will make for a compelling movie – the game’s storyline is minimal, lacking in dialog, and really only uses the character as a means of moving players from one puzzle to the next. The beauty of the game is its gorgeous animations and overall design, which are combined with a mesmerizing soundtrack to make gameplay more of a meditative experience. Whatever story will be told by the movie will be largely original, then, it seems.

Deadline says the studio is now looking for a screenwriter to craft that tale alongside Osborne. A release date was not announced.

It’s most likely not going to be out until October, but we’ve already seen a lot of Google’s Pixel 3. A lot, a lot. And here’s a lot more.

The umpteenth leak of the upcoming smartphone details just about every nook and cranny you could even want to see of the thing. In fact, there are actually competing leaks of the device this morning , one of which actually took the handset’s camera for a spin, publishing a number of those photos.

It’s tough to say how much of this is controlled leaking is intentional. Ultimately, these leaks keep the product on the radar well ahead of launch, even if they do remove most or all of the surprise. Whatever the case, this thing is all over the place. 

In the case of the Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL, reaction seems to be reasonably positive to everything but that massive notch up top. Of course, Google’s really leaning in on the notch front, having added that functionality with the recent release of Android Pie.

The new photos comport with just about everything we’ve see so far, including the single camera on the rear and the inclusion of what appears to be a wired version of the Pixelbuds, which require the included USB-C dongle/adapter.

There’s a reported 2960 × 1440 pixel display on the 3 XL, beating out the 2 XL’s 2880×1440. That’s due in part to the fact that the new phone has a downright massive 6.7-inch display, per rumors. That towers over even the Note 9’s 6.4 inches.

By all accounts there’s a Snapdragon 845 here, which certainly makes sense. And, of course, the handset will be running Android Pie.

Oh yeah, and then there’s this. 

A “legacy system” was to blame for exposing the contact information of attendees of this year’s Black Hat security conference.

Colorado-based pen tester and security researcher who goes by the handle NinjaStyle said it would have taken about six hours to collect all the registered attendees’ names, email and home addresses, company names, and phone numbers from anyone who registered for the 2018 conference.

In a blog post, he explained that he used a reader to access the data on his NFC-enabled conference badge, which stored his name in plaintext and other scrambled data. The badge also contained a web address to download BCard, a business card reader app. After decompiling the BCard app, the researcher found an API endpoint in its code, which he used to pull his own data from the server without any security checks.

By enumerating and cycling through unique badge ID numbers, he was able to download few hundred Black Hat attendee records from the server. The API was not rate limited either at all or enough to prevent the mass downloading of attendee records, the blog post said.

Security staff at BCard disabled the legacy system’s API within a day of his disclosure, which the researcher later confirmed as fixed.

INT International, which owns BCard, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Black Hat also did not respond when contacted prior to publication.

Although the data exposure was limited to non-sensitive personal information, the fallout is embarrassing for the world’s most popular security meetup where maintaining strong “opsec” is paramount. Not only do security researchers, hackers, and vendors attend the conference, law enforcement and federal agents also attend.

It’s not the first time a security conference was hit with a security snafu. Earlier this year, the official app for the RSA Conference leaked over a hundred attendee records.

Amazon announced this morning a further investment in voice technology with an expansion of its Alexa Fund Fellowship to 14 new universities, up from only 4 in 2017, the Fellowship’s first year. The program, which is designed to support conversational A.I. and speech science research, is now coming to 18 total universities, including new additions, MIT, Dartmouth and Cambridge.

Under the banner of the Alexa Fund Fellowship are two programs: The Alexa Graduate Fellowship, focused on fostering education by PhD and post-doctoral students on topics like machine learning, speech science, and conversational A.I.; as well as the Alexa Innovation Fellowship, which is aimed at helping entrepreneurship center faculty serve as voice experts on campus, Amazon says.

Only 10 of the universities are receiving the 2018-19 Graduate Fellowship – a decision that’s made based on their research interests, planned coursework, and conversational A.I. curriculum, says Amazon.

This list now includes: Carnegie Mellon; the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyperabad, India; John Hopkins; MIT; Cambridge; University of Sheffield (UK); University of Southern California (LA); University of Texas at Austin; University of Washington (Seattle); and University of Waterloo (Ontario, Canada).

Meanwhile, the Innovation Fellowship will help to support on-campus entrepreneurship programs, by offering funding, Alexa devices, hardware kits, and regular training. The goal is to encourage student entrepreneurs to integrate voice technology into their startups, using Alexa’s developer services like ASK and AVS.

There are also 10 universities receiving this funding, as there’s some overlap with the prior list. These include: Arizona State University (Tucson); California State University (Northridge); Carnegie Mellon; Dartmouth; Emerson College; Texas A&M University; University of California (Berkeley); University of Illinois; University of Michigan (Ann Arbor); and University of Southern California.

As a part of this year’s Fellowship, there are already a number of projects underway.

For example, Alexa Graduate Fellow Jessica van Brummelen is exploring ways to make conversational A.I. interfaces easier to create and learn at MIT;  Alexa Innovation Fellow Andrew Singer, the Associate Dean of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is teaching a course on audio and signal processing that uses the Alexa Voice Services development kits; and Alexa Graduate Fellow James Thorne is studying new methods to use A.I. to verify information accuracy by way of follow-up questions at Cambridge.

With this expanded Fellowship, Amazon is seeding the system with entrepreneurs, researchers and academics who are working with voice technology, and specifically, Amazon’s Alexa voice platform. This could also help to serve as a hiring pipeline for Amazon in the future, while bringing Alexa developer tools directly to schools and classrooms.

Amazon, however is not the only company working to promote its technology at the university level. Google created its own PhD Fellowship program in 2009 which supports future faculty, industry researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs across disciplines, including voice.

The Alexa Fund Fellowship is one of several ways Amazon has been investing in Alexa technology and research. It also launched developer tools like the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and Alexa Voice Services (AVS) and allocated $200 million to voice-related startups via the Alexa Fund.

In January, Walmart partnered with Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten on online grocery in Japan, as well as the sale of audiobooks, e-books, and e-readers in the U.S. Today, Walmart is capitalizing on that relationship with the launch of a full e-book and audiobook catalog on Walmart.com, alongside its assortment of physical books.

The new site, called Walmart eBooks, includes a library of over 6 million titles ranging from NYT best-sellers to indie titles and children’s books.

And similar to Amazon’s Audible, Walmart will also now offer a monthly audiobook subscription service.

However, Walmart is undercutting Amazon on pricing. While Audible subscriptions start at $14.95 per month for one audiobook, Walmart’s subscription is only $9.99 per month for the same.

In addition, Walmart aims to capitalize on its brick-and-mortar stores to help boost Walmart eBooks.

The company says it will sell nearly 40 titles in stores by way of digital books cards. These cards will be for popular books, like The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil deGrasse-Tyson and Capital Gaines by Chip Gaines. The cards will roll out to 3,500 Walmart stores starting this week.

Walmart will also sell Rakuten-owned Kobo e-readers both online and in stores. Today, customers will see a variety of Kobo e-readers for sale on Walmart’s e-commerce site, and later this week, Kobo Aura e-readers will hit 1,000 stores.

But customers won’t need to own a Kobo device to read these titles. Instead, the e-books can be accessed through co-branded iOS and Android apps, which also launched today.

Rakuten says its relationship with Walmart is part of the company’s larger vision to serve a worldwide audience. The company, founded in 2009, was built with the goal of operating in multiple markets worldwide, including in different languages and currencies. Today, its content reaches 190 countries, and has localized stores in 24.

“Although we are a company that focuses on selling a digital product, retailers and store experiences have always been an important part of the mix in every country we operate in,” said Michael Tamblyn, Rakuten Kobo President and CEO, in a statement. “That’s why we’re excited to partner with Walmart as we grow in the U.S. market. Together, we can provide even more people with a great reading experience, whether that’s print, digital or both.”

Obviously, Walmart’s partnership with Rakuten is a way for the retailer to better compete with Amazon, when it doesn’t build its own e-readers and tablet devices, or offer its own e-books and audiobooks catalog. But customers – especially the value-minded customers who tend to shop Walmart – may not care where the e-books come from, if they cost less.

Meanwhile, Kobo Aura devices are decent products. For example, some are waterproofed, perfect for poolside or bathtime reading. The devices also come in different screen sizes and price points, starting at $99.

Access to a selection of e-books could also help Walmart later on flesh out its own Amazon Prime competitor – something that seems even more likely, given reports that Walmart is now working on its own streaming video service (outside of Vudu) that could become a part of some such program.

To kick off Walmart eBooks’ launch, the retailer is offering new customers $10 off their first a la carte e-book or audiobook. Plus, audiobook subscription customers can try the service free for 30 days.

Nylas, a startup that helps developers integrate email content into applications via an API, announced a $16 million Series B today led by Spark Capital.

Other investors joining in included Slack Fund, Industry Ventures, and ScaleUp along with existing investors 8VC, Great Oaks Capital, Rubicon Capital and John Chambers’ personal fund. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $30 million.

The Nylas API works in a similar way to Stripe or Twilio, but instead of helping developers connect to payments or communications with a couple of lines of code, Nylas helps them connect to email, calendar and contact information. The idea behind any API like this is to give developers who lack expertise in a particular area outside the core purpose of their application, easy access to a particular type of functionality.

Company CEO Gleb Polyakov says that prior to Nylas, there really wasn’t an effective way to connect to email systems without a lot of technical wrangling. “Every person who is using the Internet has an email address, and there’s an immense amount of data that lives in the mail box, in the calendar, in your address book. And up until now, companies have been unable to effectively use that data,” he told TechCrunch.

It seems like a must-have kind of ability to connect to this type of information from any application, but most companies have shied away from a comprehensive approach because it’s hard to do, says company co-founder and CTO Andrea Spanger.

“We have essentially built adapters for the native protocols for each email system: Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, open source iMap servers and all the different extensions that are available on the different iMap implementations. And the key part is that with these adapters, we can talk to backend providers like Google, GoDaddy and Yahoo, Spanger explained.

Photo: Nylas

This capability could be useful for developers in lots of scenarios such as pulling data for a CRM tool from an email exchange between a salesperson and a customer, or to coordinate meetings around the calendars of several individuals and an open meeting room that works for all of their schedules.

The company, which has been around for five years, currently has 35 employees with offices in New York and San Francisco. With the new funding, they expect to double that number by the end of the year, as it adds engineering and builds out its sales and marketing team. While much of the marketing up to now has been inbound from developers, they want to expand their customer base by marketing directly to companies.

It currently counts 200 customers and thousands of developers using the product. Customers include Comcast, Hyundai, News Corp, Salesloft and Dialpad.