Author: azeeadmin

If you’ve made any payments with a chip card, you’ve probably had awkward moments — those long seconds after you’ve inserted the card and everyone behind you is (literally or metaphorically) tapping their foot, waiting for the card to be processed.

Well, Square has been working on this problem for a while now. Last fall, for example, CEO Jack Dorsey said the company had gotten the processing time down to under three seconds.

Today, the company is announcing that it’s shaved even more time off, and that Square Readers can now process chip cards in two seconds. To achieve this, it says it’s worked closely with payment partners — and it’s also streamlined the process so that you can remove your card as soon as it’s read, without waiting for the response from the card issuer.

In contrast, when the Wall Street Journal timed chip cards in over 50 transactions a couple years ago, it found that the average processing time was 13 seconds. Those extra seconds might not sound like much in theory, but again, if you’re in a hurry or you’ve got a line of people behind you, the wait can be painful.

Plus, it sounds like this can make a real difference for businesses. In the announcement, Regan Long, co-founder and brewmaster at Local Brewing Co., said that with his brewery’s location near the Giants’ AT&T Park in San Francisco, there’s usually “a rush of customers all ready to close out their open beer tabs at the same time.”

“With Square’s chip card reader update, we’ve cut processing time in half — helping us keep customers happy and on their way to catch the first pitch,” he added.

In addition to faster chip card processing, Square is making another speed-related announcement: With the latest update, Square’s free point-of-sale app will allow sellers to skip collecting signatures if they choose.

Andy Rachleff, who cofounded the venture firm Benchmark back in 1995 and has more recently been leading the wealth management firm Wealthfront and teaching at Stanford, is widely sought out for his startup advice. It has become harder to come by, though, given the demands on Rachleff’s time. Most notably, Rachleff has had to dial back his work at Stanford to just one course during one quarter of the year — a class that we can only guess is heavily oversubscribed by students.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy the work. Right now, he’s helping two longtime friends, AppDynamics cofounder Jyoti Bansal and VC John Vrionis with a new kind of accelerator program they are launching today (more on that here). In a quick call to discuss that program earlier this week, he also fielded a few questions from us about the current state of early-stage startup investing and how founders can best navigate it.

We asked him, for example, about how a glut of seed-stage investment has impacted the way that startups are raising money — often in pre-seed, then seed, then post-seed rounds, before raising Series A funding. We wondered if, nomenclature aside, he felt things had changed fundamentally.

As it turns out, he does not. “While the structure and characters involved are very different than 10 years ago, the steps you need to go through are no different,” said Rachleff. “The whole point is to understand what an investor at the next round expects. You have to determine whether or not you’re ready [for that next meeting], and try to achieve product-market fit as fast as possible before you get to it.” Indeed, Rachleff suggested that he thinks it unwise for founders to raise seed rounds serially. “When companies raise seed funding, [that money] is to prove the dogs want to eat the dog food. If they can’t [prove that], and they have to ask for more seed funding,” the startup becomes “less compelling” to later investors.

We asked him about some of the biggest mistakes that founders make, and he said that many of these center on who founders approach for funding, how they pace the rate at which they approach investors, and how, exactly, they pitch their startups. On that last point, said Rachleff, “People think data is a way to compel people, but it’s the story that compels people, and that has never changed, whether you’re talking about political campaigns or business presentations.” (We asked for more details, but he half-kiddingly suggested that founders will need to hear about the importance of narratives via that aforementioned accelerator program.)

We also asked Rachleff about some now-famous research he prepared some time around 2006 that suggested that every year, about 15 U.S. startups are created that eventually reach $100 million in annual revenue. His point at the time was that VCs can only succeed by getting behind those companies. (It’s largely the premise around which the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz was launched, cofounder Marc Andreessen had told this editor when the firm’s first fund was getting off the ground back in 2009.)

We wondered: is that number still 15 so many years later? Rachleff noted that he hasn’t updated his research, but he said he doesn’t “think it’s much bigger in the U.S. I do think the number is larger with Chinese companies, but here, I bet you it hasn’t changed or maybe it’s 20 companies each year that at some point reach $100 million in annual revenue.”

Before we jumped off the phone, Rachleff had a question for us, which is why there aren’t more articles about seed-funded companies going out of business. (Maybe he thinks this would keep more people from pursuing half-baked ideas.)

“Thousand of companies are raising seed funding — 10 times the amount of companies that were starting with a Series A” during the go-go dot com era of the late ’90s, he said. “But when I ask investor friends what’s happening to them all, the best answer I get is that a small number of them are successful, a slightly larger portion get acqui-hired, and the largest portion keeps raising money to keep the hope alive.”

Some of them “get to $1 million to $2 million in revenue to reach breakeven,” Rachleff continued, but, alas, that’s no reason for celebration. If a startup has raised outside funding and “there’s no money to grow into a business, that’s a failure.”

Airbnb this morning announced the launch of A Fair Share. The initiative promises to donate $10 million to seven organizations, including The New York Immigration Coalition, New York Mortgage Coalition, New York State Rural Housing Coalition Inc., Win, GMHC, CSNYC and Abyssinian Development Corporation.

It’s not all just a goodwill gesture, however. As The New York Times notes, the generosity comes as the popular subletting service is looking to raise the profile of NY Assembly Bill A7520, which would go a ways toward helping legitimize the service within the confines of the country’s largest metropolitan area.

“We wanted to make the point of what the impact of tax collection and remittances would be if we were able to collect on behalf of our community here,” Airbnb public policy manager Josh Meltzer told the paper.

The service handily points out that the donation would be a fraction of the $100 million in tax revenues that could be raised for the state, should the bill go through. But Airbnb has proven unpopular among many tenants for the impacts it has on neighborhoods.

Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed a bill aimed at curbing illegal short term rentals, requiring services like Airbnb to include addresses and names of hosts in listings. City Council, meanwhile, also recently struck a blow to ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft by capping the issue of new licenses.

With so much money being stuffed into Silicon Valley companies these days, it’s hard to stand out as an investor, but John Vrionis and Jyoti Bansal have what they think is a winning approach — one that’s a win for startup founders, too.

A little background first. Back in May, Bansal who sold his company AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion last year, announced that he was teaming up with Vrionis, who’d spent the previous 12 years with Lightspeed Venture Partner. What they created together is a new venture firm called Unusual Ventures.

It launched publicly with a $160 million debut fund and a mission of also creating a startup education program. Fast forward a few months, and the firm will today begin accepting applications for a seven-week accelerator program that promises founders seven different three-hour-long sessions — one each week for seven weeks — with veterans of the startup industry. In return, they receive a convertible note that can range from $250,000 to $1 million, depending on the stage of the company.

Called Unusual Academy, the idea is to help these teams reach so-called product-market fit faster than they could otherwise. It also aims to prevent them from taking on too much seed funding, which can scare off Series A investors who sometimes see a glut of seed funding as a sign that a startup can’t figure out what it’s doing.

For its first batch, Unusual will be looking to work with between six and 10 companies, mostly of the business-to-business variety, and no team is too nascent, according to Vrionis. “It can be anything from a notebook idea, to a company that has already raised $7 million in funding,” he says. Unusual Ventures says it will later choose a second cohort of companies that are more consumer facing, though plans for that next batch haven’t been firmed up just yet.

It is a bit gimmicky? Yes. But given the talent Vrionis and Bansal have assembled to help startups, it’s also compelling. For example, one of the startup veterans who will spend three hours with select startups is Andy Rachleff, one of the cofounders of the storied venture firm Benchmark. Rachleff — who has for years taught entrepreneurship at Stanford while also heading up the wealth advisory startup Wealthfront — will spend three hours offering his insights on fundraising, time that some startup founders might kill for.

Another instructor is Adam Grant, the Wharton psychology and management prof and best-selling author, who will spend several hours with Unusual’s companies talking about culture and leadership. A third is Bansal himself, who will be advising the startups on how to recruit early customers and devise a strong early sales process. “Jyoti is the best I ever saw at finding early customers,” says Vrionis, who was an early supporter of Bansal when he launched AppDynamics. (Lightspeed wrote one of its first checks.) “People want him involved in their startups.”

Unusual Academy’s lessons will be held, for now, in a space in Redwood Shores, Ca., so it’s probably ideal only for Bay Area-based founders who can  travel to the different lessons over the seven-week period, which kicks off in October.

Eventually, says Vrionis, the hope beyond organizing a consumer track is to host the startups in other cities, or, at least, to let them log on remotely to hear from the advisors it assembles.

If you’re a b2b startup interested in applying for the program, just click over here.

Dating and networking app Bumble today announced the launch of Bumble Fund, a new vehicle focused on early stage investments specifically aimed at helping diverse, female entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. Sarah Jones Simmer, Bumble Chief Operating Officer, will lead Bumble Fund’s investment strategy along with Bumble Senior Advisor, Sarah Kunst, the company says.

“Investing in and empowering women in business is something that our founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd is deeply passionate about and is at the very core of what Bumble stands for,” said Jones Simmer, in a statement about the fund’s launch. “Through Bumble Fund we’ll look not only to support those women leaders who have been largely ignored, but we’ll also demonstrate why those investments build smart, successful businesses.”

Bumble Fund’s initial commitments include one of the winners of Bumble’s first “Bizz Pitch” competition, Sofia Los Angeles, a swimwear company founded by Anasofia Gomez. Its other commitments so far include Mahmee, a health care platform for coordinating prenatal and postpartum care; Female Founders Fund, another early stage fund for backing female talent; BeautyCon, the digital media company and festival operator focused on the beauty industry; and venture fund Cleo Capital, also focused on female founders.

The new fund will make investments that range from $5,000 to $250,000, in companies that are headed by women and focus on women’s interests. Bumble has committed over a million so far, it says.

The team will also work to identify new, potential investments via Bumble’s own Bumble Bizz platform – the dating app’s business networking platform available within its flagship mobile app. The company will also find new founders to back through its future Bumble Bizz pitch competitions, it says.

The move could help bring more attention to Bumble Bizz, while giving the company a stake in promising companies. Bumble, however, only spoke of the need for more investment in female founders, not the other bottom line advantages to its own operations.

In a blog post, Bumble shared the fact that startups headed by women had only received 2% of all venture capital last year.

“For black, Latinx, and other women from underrepresented groups, that statistic is even more bleak,” the post explained. “Black women are both the most educated and most entrepreneurial demographic in the U.S., but received only 0.2% of all venture funding for their startups last year,” it noted.

Bumble, whose app now has over 37 million users worldwide and has an 85% female workforce, says it wants to help solve the problem of women being “largely ignored by the venture capital establishment” with this fund.

SAP, the German-based enterprise software giant, has unveiled the New York-based cohort from its SAP.io Foundry accelerator programs focused on women-led technology companies.

The first program was launched in San Francisco in July 2017, and while the company has launched additional accelerator programs in Berlin and Tel Aviv (with plans for a Paris accelerator in the Fall), it’s SAP’s San Francisco and New York programs that have a specific focus on women and founders of color, according to Vanessa Liu, a vice president in charge of the New York program.

“The first one launched last summer, with San Francisco that was in July. Berlin launched in the fall with TechStars as a partner, Tel Aviv launched with The Junction,” Liu said. 

The partnerships with Techstars in Berlin and The Junction in Tel Aviv were designed solely to gain exposure to those markets, while the San Francisco and New York programs focused on diversity — as well as building out the SAP network among startups.

The Foundry accelerator programs are independent from the company’s $35 million Foundry fund, according to Liu. Companies that progress through the program give up no equity and receive no capital. Rather, the companies involved get access to the SAP network of partners and customers and the companies various technical and support services, Liu said.

“This is more about how do you work together with SAP and customers like GE, Coca Cola, and Stanley Black & Decker,” said Liu. 

For the New York cohort that demoed their wares yesterday, eight of the nine companies that participated were also based in New York, with one group of founders making the trek up from Georgia for the program.

And while there’s been no instance yet where companies that graduate from the accelerator receive a capital commitment later from the Foundry fund, Liu did not rule out the possibility.

That Foundry fund typically will invest between a quarter of a million and one million dollars into companies focused on machine learning, big data, and other enterprise software related applications. Checks are typically $250,000 at the seed stage increasing to $1 million as a company grows into a Series A investment.

In some ways, Liu said, the Foundry fund was a way for SAP to build on the work it had done with startups through its (now independent) Sapphire Ventures fund. That had been the vehicle SAP had previously used to connect with the startup world and early stage tech companies and entrepreneurs.

“We’re definitely not the first to market,” said Liu. “But we’re looking at it not just only in making investments and thinking about how to do that but it’s also about cultivating investments and making sure that we do that right.”

For the Foundry accelerator programs in the U.S. doing it right means focusing on gender and racial diversity. The criteria for the program is that at least one c-suite executive and member of the founding team be female. And of the nine companies in the cohort, only two companies were admitted where women were not serving in the chief executive role, Liu said.

These are the executives and companies that went through the SAP.io Foundry Accelerator in New York.

Tongtong Gong, founder and COO of Amberdata, a provider of monitoring and analytics for blockchain infrastructure and smart contract applications.

Margaret Martin, founder and CEO of CN2, a software service that transforms the CAD, 3D and 2D content they create everyday into compelling mobile X-Reality (AR+VR=XR) applications.

Ariadna Quattoni and Paul Nemirovsky, founders of DMetrics, which enables non-developers to build machine learning algorithms to extract insights from any text, in mere hours, and with zero coding.

Kate Brandley Chernis, co-founder & CEO of Lately, is selling a machine learning-based marketing dashboard to provide more consistent marketing messages across large platforms.

Shirley Chen, founder & CEO of Narrativ, sells a contextually relevant smart linking and ad placement technology

Lisa Xu, co-Founder & CEO of Nopsec, a provider of threat prediction and cyber risk remediation solutions for enterprises to prevent security breaches.

Jade Huang, co-founder & CEO of StyleSage,  which enriches product listings with attributes and then maps those products to eCommerce sites.

Jag Gill, founder & CEO of Sundar, a software service connecting apparel brands and retailers with suppliers of textiles, raw materials and garments.

Susan Danziger, Co-founder and CEO of Ziggeo, an embeddable video recorder/player that captures video and provides insights.

Descartes Labs, a New Mexico-based geospatial analytics startup, today announced that its platform is now out of beta. The well-funded company already allowed businesses to analyze satellite imagery it pulls in from NASA and ESA and build predictive models based on this data, but starting today, it is adding both weather data to its library, as well as commercial high-resolution imagery thanks to a new partnership with Airbus’ OneAtlas project.

As Descartes Labs co-founder Mark Johnson, who you may remember from Zite, told me, the team now regularly pulls in 100 terabytes of new data every day. The company’s clients then use this data to predict the growth of crops, for example. And while Descartes Labs can’t disclose most of its clients, Johnson told me that Cargill and teams at Los Alamos National Labs are among its users.

While anybody could theoretically access the same data and spin up thousands of compute nodes to analyze it and build models, the value of a service like this is very much about abstracting all of that work away and letting developers and analysts focus on what they do best.

“If you look at the early beta customers of the system, typically it’s a company that has some kind of geospatial expertise,” Johnson told me. “Oftentimes, they’re collecting data of their own and their primary challenge is that the folks on their team who ought to be spending all their time doing science on the datasets — the majority of their time, sometimes 80 plus percent of their time — they are collecting the data, cleaning the data, getting the data analysis ready. So only a small percentage of their work time is spent on analysis.”

So far, Descartes Labs’ infrastructure, which mostly runs on the Google Cloud Platform, has processed over 11 petabytes of compressed data. Thanks to the partnership with Airbus, it’s now also getting very high-resolution data for its users. While some of the free data from the Landsat satellites, for example, have a resolution of 30m per pixel, the Airbus data comes in at 1.5m per pixel across the entire world and 50cm per pixel over 2,600 cities. Add NOAA’s global weather data to this, and it’s easy to imagine what kind of models developers could build based on all of this information.

Many users, Johnson tells me, also bring their own data to the service to build better models or see

While Descartes Labs’ early focus was on developers, it’s worth noting that the team has now also built a viewer that allows any user (who pays for the service) to work with the base map and add layers of additional information on top.

Johnson tells me that the team plans to add more datasets over time, though the focus of the service will always remain on spatial data.

As summer comes to a close and the leaves begin to brown, the gaming world goes through its own sort of transition. A handful of new titles prep for launch, including Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. But unlike previous CoD titles, Black Ops 4 represents a counter-attack on the world’s biggest game, Fortnite Battle Royale.

For the first time, Call of Duty is ditching a campaign and opting to introduce a new Battle Royale mode to the first-person shooter.

It’s a risky approach, which could potentially put off long-time CoD players and likewise disappoint the Fortnite crowd who have already invested time and money in an already-dominant Battle Royale game.

Time shall surely tell, but luckily we’ll get a sneak peek at the new Black Ops 4 Battle Royale, called Blackout, in September.

Prepare accordingly.#Blackout pic.twitter.com/X70KVQ75gU

— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) August 14, 2018

Activision and Treyarch confirmed that Blackout will be available via a limited beta on September 10 for the PS4. The companies did not confirm if or when the Blackout beta will be playable on other platforms.

Thus far, we know very little about how Blackout will work. Here’s what we do know: The game can be played in solos, duos, or quads. Treyarch built its biggest CoD map ever, which is 1,500x bigger than Nuketown. There will also be vehicles within the Black Out mode.

To participate in the beta, users need to pre-order Black Ops 4.

A few months ago, Google announced Google One, its new subscription program for getting more Google Drive storage and other perks. Over the course of the last few weeks, Google slowly rolled existing Drive subscribers over to a Google One membership and starting today, new users can sign up for a One subscription, too.

Google One plans start at 100 GB for $1.99. There’s also a 200 GB tier for $2.99 and a 2 TB option for $9.99. If you need even more storage space, Google will happily sell you 10 TB, 20 TB and 30 TB plans for between $99.99 and $299.99 per month.

One nice feature of these new plans is that you can share your storage allotment with up to five family members.

While storage is the main feature here, Google also promises additional perks. The most important of these may be access to live 24/7 support. These Google experts at the other end of the line will help you with figuring out any question you may have about a Google product.

Another perk here is that you get deals on hotels when you search for them in Google Maps. Recently, Google also gave all One members credits on Google Play and the company today said that it’ll soon offer members deals for purchases in the Google Store and through Google Express, too.

It’s worth noting that One is very much a consumer product. For businesses, Google’s G Suite remains the way to get additional service and features.

For now, Google One is only available in the U.S., but it’ll roll out to more countries soon.

XYZPrinting may have finally cracked the color 3D printing code. Their latest machine, the $1,599 da Vinci Color Mini is a full color printer that uses three CMY ink cartridges to stain the filament as it is extruded, allowing for up to 15 million color combinations.

The printer is currently available for pre-order on Indiegogo for $999.

The printer can build objects 5.1″ x 5.1″ x 5.1″ in size and it can print PLA or PETG. A small ink cartridge stains the 3D Color-inkjet PLA as it comes out, creating truly colorful objects.

“Desktop full-color 3D printing is here. Now, consumers can purchase an easy-to-operate, affordable, compact full-color 3D printer for $30,000 less than market rate. This is revolutionary because we are giving the public access to technology that was once only available to industry professionals,” said Simon Shen, CEO of XYZprinting.

The new system is aimed at educational and home markets and, at less than a $1,000, it hits a unique and important sweet spot in terms of price. While the prints aren’t perfect, being able to print in full color for the price of a nicer single color 3D printer is pretty impressive.