Author: azeeadmin

InVision continues its slow march toward design world domination, today announcing the hire of Mike Davidson who will take over as Head of Partnerships and Community.

Davidson was previously the VP of Design at Twitter, where he built a 100-person team that was responsible for every aspect of Twitter’s user experience and branding, including web, mobile web, native apps, and business tools.

Before Twitter, Davidson worked at ESPN/Disney until 2005, when he founded NewsVine, which was purchased by NBCNews in 2007. Davidson then took on a Vice President roll for five years before starting at Twitter.

At InVision, Davidson will oversee partnerships, product integrations, strategic acquisitions and community building. This includes leading InVision’s Design Leadership Forum, which hosts private events for design leaders from big companies like Facebook, Google, Lyft, Disney, etc. Davidson will also work with the new Design Transformation team at InVision to help create educational experiences for InVision’s customers.

Davidson says he plans to spend the next 30 to 60 days talking as little as possible, and listening to the feedback he hears from his team around what can be improved.

“InVision has a seamless workflow that includes everyone in the company in the design process,” said Davidson. “If there’s one goal I’d like to realize, it’s that. Design is a team sport these days, which wasn’t the case 10 or 20 years ago.”

In Davidson’s own words, the position at InVision is “less about business to business and more about designer to designer.” Davidson will be meeting predominantly with the design teams from various companies to discuss not only how InVision can help them build better experiences, but how InVision can incorporate those design teams’ personalities into the product.

InVision was built on the premise that the screen is the most important place in the world, considering that every brand and company is now building digital experiences across the web and through mobile applications. CEO Clark Valberg hopes to turn InVision into the Salesforce of design, and partnerships, acquisitions and product integrations are absolutely vital to that.

“We couldn’t be more excited to have an authentic leader like Mike step into this role to help us further build out our design community — which is as important to us as our product — and to help drive design maturity inside of every organization,” said Valberg. “Digital product design is shaping every industry in the world, and as the leader in the space, we see it as our responsibility to support and foster community and advanced education.”

It’s been a few years since Google first launched Classroom, its learning management system for teachers and students. Today, ahead of the start of the new year in many school districts, Google is launching a major redesign of Classroom that introduces a refreshed look and a number of new features for the teachers who use the service.

Classroom now, for example, features a new grading tool that works not just with Google Docs files but also Office files, PDFs, videos and other file types. And because students often make the same mistakes, teachers can now create a “comment bank” so they can reuse commonly used feedback. Google says this is meant to “encourage thoughtful engagement.”

Teachers now also get access to a new site with training materials to bring them up to speed with how to best use its services.

The new Classroom now also features a new “Classwork” page where teachers can organize their assignments and group them into modules and units. It’s now also easier for teachers to re-use previous classes and collaborate with others to design their classes. And because things can get noisy, Google is adding to Classroom some digital well-being features for co-teachers that allows them to turn off notifications for specific classes.

A Google spokesperson also told us that Classroom is getting extended support for Google Form quizzes (and the ability to put a quiz in locked mode to avoid distractions), as well as some new Chrome OS admin features to help manage devices.

And here is some good news for everybody, too: Google is making some changes to how Docs handles margins and indentations “to improve the overall writing experience, especially when making MLA style citations” (and here I thought I never had to think about MLA style again…). Soon, you’ll be able to use hanging indents and set specific indentations. This feature will launch in the fall.

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser announced today a new experimental extension called Advance that uses machine learning to help users more contextually and intuitively surf the web. This extension is part of Firefox’s ongoing Test Pilot program (which users can opt into anytime) and is powered by the machine learning backbone of the startup Laserlike to better understand a user’s browsing habits.

Here’s how it works: Once enabled through the Test Pilot app, you can browse as normal, and Advance will start taking notes and learning about the kind of sites you browse. From what it’s learned, the extension will recommend pages you might want to “Read Next” that complement your current browsing (say you’re searching for a new local hangout) or pages that it thinks you might just like in the “For You” section of the sidebar. But if Advance gets it wrong, users can flag recommendations as boring, off-topic or spam and help fine-tune the extension to their preferences.

This feature is part of the company’s Context Graph initiative that aims to enable the “next generation of web discovery on the internet” and allow users to explore different corners of the web than those they trek daily (read: keep users on the application longer). The first effort in this arena, a new functionality called Activity Stream that helps users more intuitively interact with their history and bookmarks, graduated from Test Pilot and shipped out with the new Firefox Quantum browser in November of this past year.

The introduction of Advance also fills a gap recently left behind by the site StumbleUpon when it closed up shop this May after 16 years of helping users get lost in cyberspace. While Advance offers a smarter option (StumbleUpon had more chance built into its one-click site generation functionality) the spirit of the workplace internet wanderer continues.

But, as is the issue with all life-easing machine learning technologies, in order to help you browse the internet, Advance and, in turn, Laserlike, need to know a lot about your browser history. While this is necessary for the technology to learn, Mozilla acknowledges that fears of misused and manipulated personal data are at a high these days following breaches of privacy and trust by companies like Facebook and Equifax among others in recent months.

To account for this unease, Advance allows users the option to pause the collection of browser history, view it and request Laserlike delete it.

Cowboy Ventures, the early-stage venture firm launched in 2012 by longtime VC Aileen Lee, has lassoed $95 million in capital commitments for its third fund, up from the $55 million that it raised for its second fund and more than twice what it raised for its $40 million debut fund.

That investors are doubling down on the firm isn’t a surprise, given its track record. The firm’s very first check was to Dollar Shave Club, which sold in 2016 for a reported $1 billion. Other early exits include the sale of the nutrition coaching app Rise to One Medical for a reported $20 million; and the sale of the cloud monitoring firm Librato to SolarWinds for $40 million.

More recently, Accompany, a business intelligence startup that drew an early check from Cowboy, sold in May to Cisco for $270 million. (It had raised roughly $40 million from investors.) Tenor, a GIF platform that also received early backing from Cowboy, sold to Google in March (for undisclosed terms). Another Cowboy portfolio company, the smart lock maker August, sold to the Swedish lock giant Assa Abloy last fall (also for undisclosed terms).

Cowboy is a generalist fund that is managed by Lee and Ted Wang, a startup attorney for many years with Fenwick & West who joined as a general partner in January of last year. The outfit added an associate, Samantha Kaminsky, earlier this summer. Among its current bets is the consumer goods company Brandless, the cybersecurity company Area 1 Security, and the mobile linking platform Branch.

The team typically invests in between six to 10 companies each year, writing initial checks on average of $1 million. Its biggest bet to date is on Guild Education, a Denver-based tech-education startup that partners with employers, including Walmart, to offer education as an employee benefit, right alongside healthcare. The company, which closed on $40 million in new funding just two weeks ago, also happens to be the biggest bet to date of another firm that just closed its newest fund, Felicis Ventures.

In a quick exchange earlier this week, we talked with Lee about Cowboy and the market more broadly. (We’ll also be talking on stage with her about this at TC’s upcoming Disrupt show.)

We asked where Cowboy is shopping right now, for example, and she said some areas include back-office tech, including startups that are transforming unglamorous tasks like tax accounting, sales ops and scheduling that can be transformed by modern software; “learning loop software” that builds on prior experiences and on underlying data; and startups that are building tech that’s aligned with improving users’ physical and mental health.

We also asked whether she had concerns about the very long bull market the tech industry has been experiencing, and it sounds like she does as it pertains to “increasing valuations, size of rounds, and dollars going into venture.”

In fact, Lee said Cowboy has turned “extra cautious” with its investment pace over the past year, given that both Lee and Wang have lived through previous cycles.

“It worries me we’re meeting with more startups than ever who are thinking about raising a $4 million seed round,” she said. “Four million dollars is what we used to call a Series A not too long ago. We don’t think bigger and more expensive rounds starting at seed stage will set companies and cultures up for long term success and could also depress returns for everyone on the cap table.”

Still, on the whole, Lee sounded optimistic, both about longer-term startup trends, and about the venture industry as a whole. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she thinks there is little to stop new technology companies from impacting every industry and creating new opportunities for many, while “possibly displacing traditional jobs,” she said. “We just have to work harder to make new technology jobs accessible to the widest set of people possible,” she added.

Lee — who this spring cofounded All Raise, a nonprofit founded by 34 female investors that’s dedicated to diversity in funders and founders — also said she expects the venture-backed startup industry to look fairly different five to 10 years from now, and in a good way.

“I hope and expect because of demographic shifts, the influence of founders and employees, organizations like All Raise, and because diversity is proven to deliver better results that” the ecosystem will change for the better, she said. “We’ll have greater gender balance, and we’ll have more people from historically underrepresented groups in positions of power.”

If you’re curious to learn more, Lee and Wang have written a bit more about the new fund and its intentions here.

In June of this year, Chinese hackers managed to install software into the networks of a contractor for the U.S. Navy and steal information on a roughly $300 million top secret submarine program.

Two years ago, hackers infiltrated the networks of a vendor servicing the Australian military and made off with files containing a trove of information on Australian and U.S. military hardware and plans. That hacker stole roughly 30 gigabytes of data, including information on the nearly half-a-trillion dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

Third party vendors, contractors, and suppliers to big companies have long been the targets for cyber thieves looking for access to sensitive data, and the reason is simple. Companies don’t know how secure their suppliers really are and can’t take the time to find out.

“The Department of Defense can have the best cybersecurity on the planet, but when that moves off to a subcontractor how can the DOD know how the subcontractor is going to protect that data?” says Kelly White, the chief executive of RiskRecon, a new firm that provides audits of vendors’ security profile. 

The problem is one that the Salt Lake City-based executive knew well. White was a former security executive for Zion Bank Corporation after spending years in the cyber security industry with Ernst & Young and TrueSecure — a Washington DC-based security vendor.

When White began work with Zion, around 2% of the company’s services were hosted by third parties, less than five years later and that number had climbed to over 50%. When White identified the problem in 2010, he immediately began developing a solution on his own time. RiskRecon’s chief executive estimates he spent 3,000 hours developing the service between 2010 and 2015, when he finally launched the business with seed capital from General Catalyst .

And White says the tools that companies use to ensure that those vendors have adequate security measures in place basically boiled down to an emailed check list that the vendors would fill out themselves.

That’s why White built the RiskRecon service, which has just raised $25 million in a new round of funding led by Accel Partners with participation from Dell Technologies Capital, General Catalyst, and F-Prime Capital, Fidelity Investments venture capital affiliate.

The company’s software looks at what White calls the “internet surface” of a vendor and maps the different ways in which that surface can be compromised. “We don’t require any insider information to get started,” says White. “The point of finding systems is to understand how well an organization is managing their risk.”

White says that the software does more than identify the weak points in a vendor’s security profile, it also tries to get a view into the type of information that could be exposed at different points on an network,

According to White, the company has over 50 customers among the Fortune 500 who are already using his company’s services across industries like financial services, oil and gas and manufacturing.

The money from RiskRecon’s new round will be used to boost sales and marketing efforts as the company looks to expand into Europe, Asia and further into North America.

“Where there’s not transparency there’s often poor performance,” says White. “Ccybersecurity has gone a long time without true transparency. You can’t have strong accountability without strong transparency.”

In Don Burnette and Paz Eshel’s view, trucking is the killer app for self-driving technology.

It’s what led Burnette to leave the Google self-driving project and co-found Otto in early 2016, along with Anthony Levandowski, Lior Ron and Claire Delaunay.

And it’s what would eventually prompt Burnette to leave Uber — the company that acquired Otto — and co-found with former venture capitalist Eshel a new driverless-trucks startup called Kodiak Robotics.

“It was no secret that Uber was primarily focused on the car project and 80 to 90 percent of my time was focused on the car project,” Burnette told TechCrunch. “But I still felt that trucking was the killer app for self-driving. I still believe that. I wanted to focus 100 percent of my time on trucking.”

Now he and Eshel can. Kodiak Robotics, which was founded in April, is coming out of stealth loaded up with venture capital.

Kodiak Robotics announced Tuesday it has raised $40 million in Series A financing led by Battery Ventures. CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tusk Ventures also participated in the round. Itzik Parnafes, a general partner at Battery Ventures, will join Kodiak’s board.

Kodiak Robotics will use the funds to expand its team and for product development. The company has about 10 employees, according to Eshel, who was a vice president at Battery Ventures, where he led the firm’s autonomous-vehicle investment project.

Burnette noted the core engineering team — many of whom have experience in shipping self-driving vehicles on public roads — has been assembled.

The pair weren’t ready to discuss the company’s go-to-market strategy. They did share the basic vision though: use self-driving technology to ease the current strain on the freight market.

The trucking industry is a primary driver of the U.S. economy. Trucks moved more than 70 percent of all U.S. freight and generated $719 billion in revenue in 2017, according to the American Trucking Association. Meanwhile, “full-truckload, over-the-road nonlocal drivers,” a term used to describe drivers who haul goods over long distances, are in short supply. This long-haul sector, which employs about 500,000, was short 51,000 truck drivers last year — up from a shortage of 36,000 in 2016.

Burnette and Eshel see an opportunity for driverless trucks to help close that gap.

“We believe self-driving trucks will likely be the first autonomous vehicles to support a viable business model, and we are proud to have the support of such high-profile investors to help us execute on our plan,” Burnette said.

They also revealed the company’s technical approach.

Kodiak Robotics plans to use light detection and ranging radar known as LiDAR as well as camera, radar and sonar technologies. “Pretty much everything you can imagine self-driving cars using in a comprehensive sensor fusion type system,” Burnette said.

Engineers will focus on developing the full self-driving system stack from the company’s own hardware and software architectures. However, Kodiak Robotics is not going to build any sensors. Instead it will use sensors from third-party suppliers.

Palm’s smartphone return appears to still be on track for 2018. Last year, an executive at TCL confirmed that the dearly departed mobile brand would be making a comeback as part of the smartphone conglomerate’s portfolio, and with a little less than five months left in the year, the “PVG100” has hit the FCC and Wi-Fi Alliance.

The handset was spotted by Android Police, but we don’t really have much more to go on than a name and a couple of Wi-Fi bands. As the site notes, however, the absence of 5GHz support leads one to surmise that this won’t exactly be a barn-burning flagship. The handset also looks to be running Android 8.1 — not really a surprise, given that Android Pie is still limited to Pixel and a smattering of other devices.

We’ve reached out to TCL for more information, but I don’t anticipate hearing much until the phone is officially official. Meantime, I’d expect we’re looking at something similar to the company’s recent BlackBerry brand reboot. That is to say, some stylistic choices that evoke bygone products like the Treo or Pre, in hopes of triggering some smartphone nostalgia buried deep inside our lizard brains.

Like the KeyOne, however, the homage will only be skin deep. After all, can you really have a true Palm device without Palm OS webOS? Sadly, the latter is mostly found on LG TVs and refrigerators these days, but perhaps a stylish Android skin could help trigger some of those smartphone memories.

TCL’s owned the Palm name since 2014, and the relative success of the reborn BlackBerry line could be exactly the motivation the company needs to dust off the old brand.

Skype Classic is not being killed off…well, not just yet. In July, Microsoft announced Skype 8.0 was launching on the desktop, and that it would be shutting down version 7.0 (aka Skype Classic) as a result. The older version would no longer function after September 1, 2018, it had said. However, the company has now decided to hold off on Skype 7.0’s shutdown for the time being, following significant user backlash.

In a post published to its community forum, Microsoft announced that support for Skype Classic would be extended.

It reads, in full:

******UPDATE******

Based on customer feedback, we are extending support for Skype 7 (Skype classic) for some time. Our customers can continue to use Skype classic until then.

Thanks for all your comments – we are listening. We are working to bring all the features you’ve asked for into Skype 8.

Watch this space.

Beyond the post itself, Microsoft isn’t sharing any further information about the closure or its plans. So it’s unclear at this time when Skype Classic will be closed down for good. From the sounds of things, however, Microsoft’s goal is to bring the features users are demanding to Skype version 8.0 before ending support for version 7.0.

Some Skype Classic users were so upset about the impending shutdown, they even started a Change.org petition, which pleaded with Microsoft to “keep the desktop version of Skype alive for professional users!”

The petition stressed that the way pros used Skype is different from a mainstream audience – the one Microsoft is now seemingly trying to court with things like @mentions and emoji reactions, and a more colorful and youthful user interface.

Professional users were especially concerned about their ability to have multiple conversations happening at the same time across several windows; about losing an app that offers high information density; and about not having control over the application for customization purposes, for example.

There was also a bit of general backlash against the various visual changes, seemingly inspired by other social apps.

As the petition noted: “a professional user know what he needs and what he wants, so do not add, change or remove something unless there is a overwhelming [sic] demand for a change from the current user base.”

To what extent Microsoft will address the needs of this pro user base are unknown, but it seems that until it comes to some sort of decision on the matter, Skype Classic will remain.

Health tech continues to make impressive strides forward, but some pieces of the healthcare puzzle are still lagging way behind.

Communication is one of those pieces. But a startup called Klara, which just received $11.5 million in Series A, is looking to change that.

FirstMark Capital led the round, with participation from existing investors Lerer Hippeau, Project A Ventures, and Atlantic Labs, alongside a few angels including Zac Weinberg and Nat Turner (Flatiron Health founders), Vivek Garipalli (Clover Health founder and CEO) and Clark Valberg (InVision founder and CEO).

Led by founders and co-CEOs Simon Bolz and Simon Lorenz, Klara looks to rethink the way that communication is handled across the healthcare industry.

As it stands now, the vast majority of communication across a practice, both internally and with patients, happens either in person or on the phone. A good deal of this communication is either diagnostic, or part of the treatment, and yet phone calls and one-on-one convos don’t offer a record of the conversation. They also take time.

According to Klara, the average practice misses around 34 percent of calls. Missed calls turn into calls back, which often turns into an endless game of phone tag. These back-and-forth calls take up a good chunk of a practice staff’s time.

But Klara, a HIPAA-compliant messaging service, saves up to two hours of time for a medical practice’s staff each day. The service lets all departments of a practice, from doctors to physician’s assistants to nurses to the payments department and the scheduling department, communicate via text around a patients diagnosis and treatment. The platform also allows medical staff to communicate directly with a patient regarding scheduling and treatment.

Not only does this save time for the staff, and reach patients where they want to be reached, but it also saves money. According to Klara, doctors estimate that phone calls alone cost between $15 and $20 each, and that prescription renewal calls alone cost around $10,000/year.

Klara hasn’t finalized its pricing, but charges on a per-month basis based on the size of the practice.

The long-term vision for Klara is to incorporate complementary services, like payments and scheduling services, as well as insurance carriers and pharmacies. The idea is to turn Klara into the fabric of the healthcare system.

Klara says it currently has thousands of practices on the platform, with hundreds of thousands of patients. As part of the funding deal, FirstMark’s Amish Jani will join the board.

While this animated fellow looks like something out of NBA 2K18, it’s really an AI that’s learning how to dribble in real time. The AI starts out fumbling the ball a bit and by cycle 95 it is able to do some real Harlem Globetrotters stuff. In short, what you’re watching is a human-like avatar learning a very specialized human movement.

To do this researchers at Carnegie Mellon and DeepMotion, Inc. created a “physics-based, real-time method for controlling animated characters that can learn dribbling skills from experience.” The system, which uses “deep reinforcement learning,” can use motion capture date to learn basic movements.

“Once the skills are learned, new motions can be simulated much faster than real-time,” said CMU professor Jessica Hodgins.

Once the avatar learns a basic movement, advanced movements come more easily including dribbling between the legs and crossovers.

From the release:

A physics-based method has the potential to create more realistic games, but getting the subtle details right is difficult. That’s especially so for dribbling a basketball because player contact with the ball is brief and finger position is critical. Some details, such as the way a ball may continue spinning briefly when it makes light contact with the player’s hands, are tough to reproduce. And once the ball is released, the player has to anticipate when and where the ball will return.

The program learned the skills in two stages — first it mastered locomotion and then learned how to control the arms and hands and, through them, the motion of the ball. This decoupled approach is sufficient for actions such as dribbling or perhaps juggling, where the interaction between the character and the object doesn’t have an effect on the character’s balance. Further work is required to address sports, such as soccer, where balance is tightly coupled with game maneuvers, Liu said.

The system could pave the way for smarter online avatars and even translate into physical interactions with the real world.