Author: azeeadmin

Twitter is abuzz with the news that Topps, a company perhaps best known for making collectible trading cards, is going public via a SPAC.

The reverse merger with its chosen blank-check company values the combination on an equity basis at $1.163 billion. That makes Topps some sort of unicorn. And because it has both e-commerce and digital angles, Topps is technically a fruit tech company.

---

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

---

Why do we care? We care because Topps and its products are popular with the same set of folks who are very excited about creating rare digital items on particular blockchains. Yes, the baseball card company is going public in a debut that could easily be read as a way to put money into the NFT craze without actually having to buy cryptocurrencies and go speculating itself.

And Topps apparently owns a number of assets in the candy space, which I find whimsical.

So let’s have a small giggle as we go through the Topps deck and then ask if the company is being valued on its actual, and modestly attractive, present-day business or on possible revenues from future NFT-related activities.

So, trading cards

What is Topps? A mix of business units that it breaks down into four categories: Physical Sports and Entertainment (trading cards), Digital Sports and Entertainment (digital collectibles, apps and games), Gift Cards (gift cards for external brands), and Confections (candy).

In terms of scale, the company’s physical goods and confection businesses are by far its leading revenue drivers. Here’s the data:

First, observe that the company’s pro forma adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020. That’s an aggressive expansion in hyper-adjusted profitability. And note how much the company’s physical sports business grew from 2019 to 2020; a nearly 50% gain helped the company grow nicely last year.

Facebook confirms it’s testing a new QR code feature and payment links for use with Facebook Pay to make it easier for people in the U.S. to send or request money from one another. The QR code feature, similar to Venmo’s QR codes and others, will allow a user to scan a friend’s code with their smartphone’s camera to send or request money, while the sharable payment links will let you publish your payment address outside of Facebook itself.

The addition was first spotted on Monday by MacRumors, which noted that users were being presented with a new “Scan” button in the Facebook Pay carousel at the top of the screen. When you tap this button, you’re launched into an experience where you can scan the other person’s code. The screen that displays the QR code also introduces the personalized payment URL in the format of “https://m.me/pay/UserName,” which can also be sent to others when you’re making a payment or sending a request.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the feature’s launch, but characterized it as a “test” that’s currently taking place in the U.S.

“To make payments on Messenger even easier, we’ve begun testing the ability for people to use QR codes and payment links when they want to send or request money,” the spokesperson said.

Only U.S. users are able to send payments through Messenger at this time, they also noted.

Users who want to be able to send and receive money in Messenger have to be at least 18 years old, and will have to have a Visa or Mastercard debit card, a PayPal account, or one of the supported prepaid cards or government-issued cards, in order to use the payments feature. They’ll also need to set their preferred currency to U.S. dollars in the app.

Facebook first launched its Facebook Pay service in November 2019, as a way to establish a single payment system that can extend across the company’s apps. However, the service as it stands today is not necessarily a rival to other apps like PayPal, because Facebook currently partners with PayPal as one of the supported payment methods.

Currently, Facebook Pay powers the payments experience across a number of areas in Facebook, which are focused on commerce, donations and tipping  — like Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Shop, Buy on Instagram, and for other activities — like buying Stars to support gaming Creators, buying tickets to live events, making donations to causes, and more. Users can also send money to friends on Messenger through a built-in button.

For the time being, this payments experience is separate from Facebook’s cryptocurrency wallet, Novi, though one could imagine that in time the two will become more integrated.

Facebook declined to share further details about the test, including how many or what percentage of users will see the new QR codes and links or when tests began and when they’ll end.

 

While it’s true the VC world has gone SPAC-happy, the reverse merger method hasn’t been a huge driver in robotics thus far, with some notable exceptions like Berkshire-Grey. This morning, however, Utah-based Sarcos Robotics announced plans to board the SPAC train, courtesy of Rotor Acquisition Corp.

The deal could potentially value the robotic exoskeleton maker and blank check co. at a combined $1.3 billion, along with a potential $281 million earn out. Sarcos is, of course, one of a number of companies currently exploring the robotic exoskeleton category. So, what sets the company apart, beyond some heavy-duty James Cameron-style design language?

Partnership are always a big motivator. Sarcos lined up a pretty big one way back at CES 2020. It was positioned at the center of Delta’s big tech push at the trade show.

“Delta’s employees are the key ingredient to our success, and we are committed to reducing on-the-job injuries as well as fostering workforce diversity and improving worker longevity for a healthier and safer team,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in today’s announcement. “My enthusiasm for Sarcos’ potential has only grown since then as we continue to work closely with Sarcos to turn our everyday heroes into superheroes, making their jobs safer and easier than ever.”

At the time, the airline announced that it would be partnering with the company to pilot these exoskeletons among its staff. The robotics-maker noted then that the tech can be used to lift 200-pound payloads for up to eight hours, without tiring the wearer. It’s in line with Sarcos’ more industrial-minded approach to wearable robotics.

Later that same year, the company announced a $40 million raise aimed at commercializing its Guardian XO unit. In today’s release, it adds that it expects to deliver the system at some point in the middle of next year, with the teleoperated Guardian XT arriving the following.

In October of last year, the Sarcos was awarded a grant from the U.S. Navy to produce remote-operated versions of its XO system, as military funding continues to be a big driver of the robotics industry.

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in the European Union is seeking answers from the tech giant over a major data breach reported on over the weekend.

The breach was reported on by Business Insider on Saturday which said personal data (including email addresses and mobile phone numbers) of more than 500M Facebook accounts had been posted to a low level hacking forum — making the personal information on hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ accounts freely available.

“The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533M Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32M records on users in the US, 11M on users in the UK, and 6M on users in India,” Business Insider said, noting that the dump includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and some email addresses.

Facebook responded to the report of the data dump by saying it related to a vulnerability in its platform it had “found and fixed” in August 2019 — dubbing the info “old data” which it also claimed had been reported on in 2019. However as security experts were quick to point out, most people don’t change their mobile phone number often — so Facebook’s trigger reaction to downplay the breach looks like an ill-thought through attempt to deflect blame.

It’s also not clear whether all the data is all ‘old’, as Facebook’s initial response suggests.

There’s plenty of reasons for Facebook to try to downplay yet another data scandal. Not least because, under European Union data protection rules, there are stiff penalties for companies that fail to promptly report significant breaches to relevant authorities. And indeed for breaches themselves — as the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) bakes in an expectation of security by design and default.

By pushing the claim that the leaked data is “old” Facebook may be hoping to peddle the idea that it predates the GDPR coming into application (in May 2018).

However the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Facebook’s lead data supervisor in the EU, told TechCrunch that it’s not abundantly clear whether that’s the case at this point.

“The newly published dataset seems to comprise the original 2018 (pre-GDPR) dataset and combined with additional records, which may be from a later period,” the DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle said in a statement.

“A significant number of the users are EU users. Much of the data appears to been data scraped some time ago from Facebook public profiles,” he also said.

“Previous datasets were published in 2019 and 2018 relating to a large-scale scraping of the Facebook website which at the time Facebook advised occurred between June 2017 and April 2018 when Facebook closed off a vulnerability in its phone lookup functionality. Because the scraping took place prior to GDPR, Facebook chose not to notify this as a personal data breach under GDPR.”

Doyle said the regulator sought to establish “the full facts” about the breach from Facebook over the weekend and is “continuing to do so” — making it clear that there’s an ongoing lack of clarity on the issue, despite the breach itself being claimed as “old” by Facebook.

The DPC also made it clear that it did not receive any proactive communication from Facebook on the issue — despite the GDPR putting the onus on companies to proactively inform regulators about significant data protection issues. Rather the regulator had to approach Facebook — using a number of channels to try to obtain answers from the tech giant.

Through this approach the DPC said it learnt Facebook believes the information was scraped prior to the changes it made to its platform in 2018 and 2019 in light of vulnerabilities identified in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

A huge database of Facebook phone numbers was found unprotected online back in September 2019.

Facebook had also earlier admitted to a vulnerability with a search tool it offered — revealing in April 2018 that somewhere between 1BN and 2BN users had had their public Facebook information scraped via a feature which allowed people to look up users by inputting a phone number or email — which is one potential source for the cache of personal data.

Last year Facebook also filed a lawsuit against two companies it accused of engaging in an international data scraping operation.

But the fallout from its poor security design choices continue to dog Facebook years after its ‘fix’.

More importantly, the fallout from the massive personal data spill continues to affect Facebook users whose information is now being openly offered for download on the Internet — opening them up to the risk of spam and phishing attacks and other forms of social engineering (such as for attempted identity theft).

There are still more questions than answers about how this “old” cache of Facebook data came to be published online for free on a hacker forum.

The DPC said it was told by Facebook that “the data at issue appears to have been collated by third parties and potentially stems from multiple sources”.

The company also claimed the matter “requires extensive investigation to establish its provenance with a level of confidence sufficient to provide your Office and our users with additional information” — which is a long way of suggesting that Facebook has no idea either.

“Facebook assures the DPC it is giving highest priority to providing firm answers to the DPC,” Doyle also said. “A percentage of the records released on the hacker website contain phone numbers and email address of users.

“Risks arise for users who may be spammed for marketing purposes but equally users need to be vigilant in relation to any services they use that require authentication using a person’s phone number or email address in case third parties are attempting to gain access.”

“The DPC will communicate further facts as it receives information from Facebook,” he added.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment about the breach.

Facebook users who are concerned whether their information is in the dump can run a search for their phone number or email address via the data breach advice site, haveibeenpwned.

According to haveibeenpwned’s Troy Hunt, this latest Facebook data dump contains far more mobile phone numbers than email addresses.

He writes that he was sent the data a few weeks ago — initially getting 370M records and later “the larger corpus which is now in very broad circulation”.

“A lot of it is the same, but a lot of it is also different,” Hunt also notes, adding: “There is not one clear source of this data.”

 

The last year has put a spotlight on mental health, and startup Real is looking to shake up the space with a product that makes group therapy available on-demand.

Founded by CEO Ariela Safira, Real is inspired by a long-standing methodology in the world of mental health: Group therapy. AA, for instance, has been around for decades and proven to be incredibly effective for some. But that format isn’t as readily available across a variety of issues beyond the disease of addiction.

To deploy this service, Real has raised $10 million in Series A financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from existing and new investors, including Megan Rapinoe and Minnesota Vikings Linebacker Eric Kendricks.

Real employs full-time therapists to lead group therapy across a variety of issues, including exploration of sexuality, anxiety, managing anger with family members, and other real-world issues. With Real, users pay $28/month to have access to these pathways (as Real calls them), letting users watch these group therapy sessions on-demand and get journal prompts and other resources.

One of the benefits of this platform is that users can get more tactical advice on these things, rather than trying to explore the problems. They also feel less alone, as they see others are struggling with the same things.

Perhaps most importantly, Real allows users to tap into the conversations and therapy they need at the time they want it.

Safira explained that she might be deep in her thoughts and feelings on Wednesday at 11pm, but can’t get a one-on-one therapy session until 2pm on Monday. Her state may have changed. With Real, she can get online and access the right pathway in the moment.

Interestingly, Real’s research shows that most people doing one-on-one therapy said they went for general anxiety, relationship problems, and career advice. However, on Real, the top pathways are sexuality, motherhood, and intimacy. The conclusion is that the things people want to work on the most are not always the things they’re most comfortable digging into in a one-on-one setting.

By scaling group therapy sessions to an on-demand audience, Real has been able to bring the cost of this type of service way down, especially when compared to one-on-one therapy.

Real is the product of many years of work in the mental health space. While she was studying for her undergrad at Stanford, Safira’s friend attempted suicide. It was her first time confronting the mental health system and it made her wonder why the system was designed the way it was. She threw herself in.

“I spent two to three years working on how to redesign the mental health care system,” she said. “That entails, visiting and flying to rehab centers, therapy offices, architecture firms that have built those spaces to learn why we make the decisions in mental health care that we make. Things like is there research behind the bright white walls in inpatient mental health facilities, and if not, is that based on legal hurdles or financial hurdles? I really wanted to get into the foundation of how to build a system.”

She dropped out of Stanford, then returned to Stanford, then went to Columbia for her masters, and then dropped out of Columbia to start Real. And the time seems to finally be right. Real has attracted investment from big names in institutional VC and big names in general.

“[Ariela] looked at something that has been around for so long, therapies in the traditional sense, and flipped it on its head to break up the status quo, and I thought that was really interesting and innovative,” said Megan Rapinoe in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are obviously a lot of barriers to access mental health services, for a lot of different reasons. Hopefully, this platform can make it easier for people to get the help that they need.”

Rapinoe is but one of the big names invested in Real. She is joined by Gwyneth Paltrow and Eric Kendricks.

Kendricks explained that he had never been averse to therapy but that he learned a lot after meeting his now-fiance and hearing about her struggles and the struggles of her family, which has dealt with a variety of mental health issues.

“Everything was going was going well for me,” he said. “I was always playing well in the field, and financially, I’m making more money than when I was a kid. But I did have moments where I was questioning myself and in my head a lot and it’s kind of a weird feeling. I had to take a step back and I realized that I was going through a little bit of something. But based on the conversations I had with my fiance, I used my resources to to find the help that I needed and it was amazing.”

He explained that the shift in society’s mentality around mental health has paved the way for a product like Real, which is a more proactive and preventative approach to mental wellness.

But Real has also been able to react quickly to big events in our world. The company has launched a product called Real to the People, which offers free access to the platform during moments of crisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and most recently, the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

Nicole Quinn, partner at Lightspeed, explained that the firm has had an interest in the mental health space for a long time. In fact, LSVP is an investor in Calm.

“The ‘aha’ moment for me was when I looked at the disease of alcoholism,” said Quinn, who led the round in Calm. “You get to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and you really benefit through having groups. Can we apply that same group method by scaling to other areas. We have a fundamental belief that yes, you can.”

Real has raised a total of $16 million since launch.

TikTok this morning announced the launch of a new feature designed to make its app accessible to people who are hard of hearing or deaf. The company is today debuting auto captions — a feature that, when enabled, will automatically transcribe the speech from a video so viewers can read what’s being said in the video as an alternative to listening. Initially, auto captions will support American English and Japanese, with additional languages coming in the months ahead, TikTok says.

To use auto captions, the creator will select the option on the editing page after they’ve either uploaded or recorded a video. They can then edit the text that’s generated in order to correct any mistakes before the video is published.

Though largely designed for accessibility purposes, auto captions can also help those who want to watch TikTok videos without the sound — for example, when you’re around other people you don’t want to disturb, but lacking headphones. They can also be useful for those watching videos where they’re not fluent in the language being spoken, as it’s sometimes easier to understand what’s said when you can also read the words.

Already, many in the TikTok community had embraced captioning by adding text overlays to their videos or using third-party subtitling tools. The text-to-speech trend, where text on screen is read in a Siri-like voice, has remained a popular technique among creators, too.

But the auto captions tool will work differently from existing options because it can be turned on and off by the viewer. That means you wouldn’t have to see the video captions if you don’t want to. To turn the captions off, you’ll first open the share panel, then tap the captions button to disable them.

TikTok says it will be working to spread the word among its creator community about the new addition to encourage users to make their videos accessible to a wider audience.

Auto captions are now one of several accessibility features TikTok has launched, alongside creator warnings when they produce videos that could trigger photosensitive epilepsy and a photosensitivity feature that allows users to skip photosensitive content. The app also offers a text-to-speech feature and a feature to replace animated thumbnails with static images.

TikTok says it’s currently undergoing an accessibility assessment to identify additional areas for improvement, as well, and has worked with the organization The Deaf Collective, to increase awareness towards the talent and conversations taking place in Deaf communities on its app.

 

A partnership between the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler Entrepreneurship Center, the Opportunity Hub, and 100 Black Angels and Allies Fund, set up to improve representation and support of diverse founders in the tech industry, is getting more heavy-hitting partners from Duke and Stanford.

As part of the partnership, faculty affiliated with Stanford and Duke will join educators to staff the DEIS Practicum Certificate and Black Technology Ecosystem Investment Certificate programs, which, respectively, try to address ways in which management can engage in diversity and inclusion in a systemic way beyond simply human resources hires and equity in compensation and ways in which more Black investors can become involved in backing startups.  

“In order to address issues like DEI at a systemic organizational level and to address the pervasive issues causing the wealth gap, we need to work together to help make this kind of education more readily available,” said Entrepreneurship Center Executive Director Vickie Gibbs, in a statement. “Together, we are taking action and making progress toward creating a more equitable society and entrepreneurial community.”

The addition of affiliated faculty from the Stanford Technology Ventures program and Duke University does more than just further validate the program, according to Rodney Sampson, the executive chairman and chief executive of OHUB and co-founder and general partner of 199 Black Allies & Angels fund. For Sampson, who also serves as a visiting professor at the University of North Carolina and Duke, the addition of the two schools will mean more exposure among the two universities’ alumni

“It also expands the reach of these solutions and insights into the alumni and entrepreneurial communities of these two amazing universities,” said Sampson in a statement. 

The framework that Sampson has developed involves a multi-pronged approach for employers that includes: a review of the extent to which diversity, equity, and inclusion is operationalized in corporate boards and governance; in assessments of hiring, promotion and human resources practices; in procurement and vendor services; in innovation and product development; in resources on going to market to reach diverse audiences; in investments into Black and Latino communities, and in monitoring the impact of the business’ operations on the community.

The framework was recently cited in a report from no less auspicious an organization than the Brookings Institution in a paper authored by Amy Liu and Reniya Dinkins.

“When chief executives demonstrate their own work to dismantle bias and create a culture of true belonging, it provides a level of trust and credibility needed for these firms and leaders to collaborate with others in bringing about broader progress and sustained prosperity in their home regions,” the authors wrote. 

For Stanford University in particular, the opportunity to embrace diversity and education training comes as the university tries to rehabilitate an image tarnished after its rush to embrace policies crafted by the former White House administration that called for universities to limit diversity training. 

“For too long, diversity, equity and inclusion have been an afterthought in entrepreneurship and innovation. I am grateful to be collaborating with thoughtful, action-oriented colleagues to address systemic racism. Together, we’ll be able to create important new network connections between our organizations and to develop learning insights that can be shared with educators and organizations around the world, ” added Tom Byers, Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University and STVP Faculty Director.

 

 

Sonos has a new speaker that starts shipping later this month, and it’s a significant departure from the company’s usual offerings in a number of ways. The all-new Sonos Roam is a compact, portable speaker with a built-in battery and Bluetooth connectivity — but still very much a Sonos system team player, with wifi streaming, multi-room feature, voice assistant support and surprisingly great sound quality.

The basics

Priced at $179, the Sonos Roam is truly diminutive, at just over 6 inches, by roughly 2.5 inches for both height and depth. It weighs under a pound, and is available in either a matte white or black finish, which is par for the course for Sonos in terms of colorways. Roam is also IP67-rated, meaning it’s effectively waterproof, with a resistance rating of up to 30 minutes at depths of up to 1 meter (3.3 feet).

Sonos has placed the speaker’s control surface at one end of the device, including a microphone button, volume controls and a play/pause button. These are actual, tactile buttons, rather than touch-sensitive surfaces like you’d find on other Sonos speakers, which makes sense for a speaker designed to be used on the go, and in conditions where touch controls might get flummoxed by things like rain and water.

The Roam also has a power button on the back, next to a USB-C port for charging. It also offers wireless charging, via a receiver found in the base of the speaker, which can be used with Sonos’ own forthcoming magnetic charging adapter (sold separately), or with any standard Qi-powered wireless charger you want.

In addition to wifi streaming, Sonos Roam can also connect to any device via Bluetooth 5.0. It also features AirPlay 2 for connecting to Apple devices when on wifi, and it works out of the box with Spotify Connect. The built-in battery is rated for up to 10 hours of playback on a full charge, according to Sonos, and can also provide up to 10 days of its sleep-like standby mode.

Design and performance

This is the smallest speaker yet released by Sonos, and that’s definitely a big plus when it comes to this category of device. The dimensions make it feel like a slightly taller can of Red Bull, which should give you some sense of just how portable it is. Unlike Sonos’ first portable speaker with a built-in battery, the Sonos Move, the Roam truly feels like something designed to be thrown in a bag and brought with you wherever you happen to need it.

Despite its small size, the Sonos Roam offers impressive sound — likely the best I’ve yet encountered for a portable speaker in this size class. Inside, it manages to pack in dual amplifiers, one tweeter and a separate custom racetrack mid-woofer, which Sonos developed to help deliver both lows and mids with a faithfulness that normally escapes smaller speakers. The Roam also gets a lot louder than you’d probably expect it could, while keeping audio quality clear and free of distortion at the same time.

One of the keys to the Roam’s great sound quality is Sonos’ Automatic Trueplay tech, which tunes the audio to best suit its surroundings actively and continually. This feature requires that the mic be enabled to work, but it’s well worth having on in most settings, and makes a big difference while streaming in both Bluetooth and wifi modes. This also helps the speaker adjust when it’s switched from horizontal to vertical orientation, and it’s one of the main reasons that the Roam punches above its weight relative to other speakers in this size and price category.

The Roam would be a winner based on audio quality alone for the price, but the extra Sonos system-specific features it boasts really elevate it to a true category leader. These include a standby mode that preserves battery while keeping the Roam available to your system for wifi streaming via the Sonos app (handy, and also optional since you can hold the power button down for five seconds to truly power off and preserve your charge for even longer, which is great for travel).

One of Roam’s truly amazing abilities is a hand-off feature that passes playback of whatever you’re using it to listen to on to the nearest Sonos speaker in your system when you long press the play/pause button. This works almost like magic, and is a great speaker superpower for if you’re wandering around the house and the yard doing chores with the Roam in your pocket.

Bottom line

Sonos waited a long time to release their first travel-friendly portable speaker, but they obviously used that time wisely. The Sonos Roam is the most thoughtfully-designed, feature-rich and best-sounding portable speaker you can get for under $200 (and better than many more expensive options, at that). Even if you don’t already have a Sonos system to use it with, it’s an easy choice if you’re in the market for a portable, rugged Bluetooth speaker — and if you’re already a Sonos convert, the decision gets that much easier.

Machine learning (ML) models are only as good as the data you feed them. That’s true during training, but also once a model is put in production. In the real world, the data itself can change as new events occur and even small changes to how databases and APIs report and store data could have implications on how the models react. Since ML models will simply give you wrong predictions and not throw an error, it’s imperative that businesses monitor their data pipelines for these systems.

That’s where tools like Aporia come in. The Tel Aviv-based company today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round for its monitoring platform for ML models. The investors are Vertex Ventures and TLV Partners.

Aporia co-founder and CEO Liran Hason, after five years with the Israel Defense Forces, previously worked on the data science team at Adallom, a security company that was acquired by Microsoft in 2015. After the sale, he joined venture firm Vertex Ventures before starting Aporia in late 2019. But it was during his time at Adallom where he first encountered the problems that Aporio is now trying to solve.

“I was responsible for the production architecture of the machine learning models,” he said of his time at the company. “So that’s actually where, for the first time, I got to experience the challenges of getting models to production and all the surprises that you get there.”

The idea behind Aporia, Hason explained, is to make it easier for enterprises to implement machine learning models and leverage the power of AI in a responsible manner.

“AI is a super powerful technology,” he said. “But unlike traditional software, it highly relies on the data. Another unique characteristic of AI, which is very interesting, is that when it fails, it fails silently. You get no exceptions, no errors. That becomes really, really tricky, especially when getting to production, because in training, the data scientists have full control of the data.”

But as Hason noted, a production system may depend on data from a third-party vendor and that vendor may one day change the data schema without telling anybody about it. At that point, a model — say for predicting whether a bank’s customer may default on a loan — can’t be trusted anymore, but it may take weeks or months before anybody notices.

Aporia constantly tracks the statistical behavior of the incoming data and when that drifts too far away from the training set, it will alert its users.

One thing that makes Aporio unique is that it gives its users an almost IFTTT or Zapier-like graphical tool for setting up the logic of these monitors. It comes pre-configured with more than 50 combinations of monitors and provides full visibility in how they work behind the scenes. That, in turn, allows businesses to fine-tune the behavior of these monitors for their own specific business case and model.

Initially, the team thought it could build generic monitoring solutions. But the team realized that this wouldn’t only be a very complex undertaking, but that the data scientists who build the models also know exactly how those models should work and what they need from a monitoring solution.

“Monitoring production workloads is a well-established software engineering practice, and it’s past time for machine learning to be monitored at the same level,” said Rona Segev, founding partner at  TLV Partners. “Aporia‘s team has strong production-engineering experience, which makes their solution stand out as simple, secure and robust.”

 

At its Octane21 conference, Okta, the popular authentication and identity platform, today announced a new — and free — developer edition that features fewer limitations and support for significantly more monthly active users than its current free plan.

The new ‘Okta Starter Developer Edition,’ as it’s called, allows developers to scale up to 15,000 monthly active users — up from only 1,000 on its existing free plan. In addition, the company is also launching enhanced documentation, a set of sample apps and new SDKs, which now cover languages and frameworks like Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Vue.js, React Native and Spring Boot.

“Our overall philosophy isn’t, ‘we want to just provide […] a set of authentication and authorization services.’ The way we’re looking at this is, ‘hey, app developer, how do we provide you the foundation you need to get up and running quickly with authorization and authentication as one part of it,’ ” Diya Jolly, Okta’s chief product officer, told me. And she believes that Okta is in a unique position to do so, because it doesn’t only offer tools to manage authorization and access, but also systems for securing microservices and providing applications with access to privileged resources.

It’s also worth noting that, while the deal hasn’t closed yet, Okta’s intent to acquire Auth0 significantly extends its developer strategy, given Auth0’s developer-first approach.

As for the expanded free account, Jolly noted that the company found that developers wanted to be able to access more of the service’s features during their prototyping phases. That means the new free Developer Edition comes with support for multi-factor authentication, machine-to-machine tokens and B2B integrations, for example, in addition to expanded support for integrations into toolchains. As is so often the case with enterprise tools, the free edition doesn’t come with the usual enterprise support options and has lower rate limits than the paid plans.

Still, and Jolly acknowledged this, a small to medium-sized business may be able to build applications and take them into production based on this new free plan.

“15K [monthly active users] is is a lot, but if you look at our customer base, it’s about the right amount for the smaller business applications, the real SMBs, and that was the goal. In a developer motion, you want people to try out things and then upgrade. I think that’s the key. No developer is going to come and build with you if you don’t have a free offering that they can tinker around and play with.”

She noted that the company has spent a lot of time thinking about how to support developers through the application development lifecycle overall. That includes better CLI tools for developers who would rather bypass Okta’s web-based console, for example, and additional integrations with tools like Terraform, Kong and Heroku. “Today, [developers] have to stitch together identity and Okta into those experiences — or they use some other identity — we’ve pre-stitched all of this for them,” Jolly said.

The new Okta Starter Developer Edition, as well as the new documentation, sample applications and integrations, are now available at developer.okta.com.