Category: UNCATEGORIZED

As strange as they are, you would be forgiven for getting about the existence of Echo Frames. Amazon announced the smart glasses among a deluge of Alexa-focused products at an event last year that also included an even stranger smart ring.

The experimental product was  Day 1 Edition device — meaning it was available to users on an invite-only basis — a kind of hardware beta test with a fairly wide net. “If customers liked them, we’d double down,” the company noted. “If not, we’d move on.” Seems there was enough interest around the Frames to graduate them to wide release.

The second generation of the smart glasses will be available through Amazon starting December 10. They’re not cheap — running $250 (also available in five monthly installments). Basically the whole thing is a way of putting Alexa on users’ faces, with built-in mics and open ear audio on the stems that give feedback without the need for headphones.

The updated models feature 40% longer battery life, auto volume that adjusts to environmental noise and auto shut off to save battery. They’re also available in more colors.

Amazon’s Echo Loop ring, which Frederic called “maybe the oddest product Amazon demoed at its event today,” won’t be moving past the beta. The system paired up with a smartphone and let users access audio by holding it up to their ears. Amazon’s not the first company to explore a ring form factor — Oura and Motiv are probably the two best-known examples — but it seems pretty clear that there’s more juice to be squeezed from the head-mounted form factor.

Production and sales will be ending for the Loop, though the company says it will continue to offer sales and updates for existing customers.

As your S3 storage requirements grow, it gets harder to understand exactly what you have, and this especially true when it crosses multiple regions. This could have broad implications for administrators, who are forced to build their own solutions to get that missing visibility. AWS changed that this week when it announced a new product called Amazon S3 Storage Lens, a way to understand highly complex S3 storage environments.

The tool provides analytics that help you understand what’s happening across your S3 object storage installations, and to take action when needed. As the company describes the new service in a blog post, “This is the first cloud storage analytics solution to give you organization-wide visibility into object storage, with point-in-time metrics and trend lines as well as actionable recommendations,” the company wrote in the post.

The idea is to present a set of 29 metrics in a dashboard that help you “discover anomalies, identify cost efficiencies and apply data protection best practices,” according to the company. IT administrators can get a view of their storage landscape and can drill down into specific instances when necessary, such as if there is a problem that requires attention. The product comes out of the box with a default dashboard, but admins can also create their own customized dashboards, and even export S3 Lens data to other Amazon tools.

For companies with complex storage requirements, as in thousands or even tens of thousands of S3 storage instances, who have had to kludge together ways to understand what’s happening across the systems, this gives them a single view across it all.

S3 Storage Lens is now available in all AWS regions, according to the company.

The clinical trial management software developer Medable has raised $91 million in a new round of financing as life sciences companies struggle with how to conduct the necessary validation studies of new drugs and devices in a pandemically challenged environment.

Digital and decentralized clinical trials are becoming a necessity given the health and safety guidelines that have been adopted to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, the company said. And those changes are driving a shift to services like Medable’s as companies move through the approval process, the company said in a statement.

The company’s new $91 million financing was led by Sapphire Ventures, with follow-on investment from existing investors GSR Ventures, PPD, Inc. and Streamlined Ventures.

Medable’s software manages recruitment, remote screening, electronic consent, clinical outcomes assessment (eCOA), eSource, telemedicine, and connected devices, the company said.

Its software is already being used to work on vaccines and therapeutics targeting COVID-19 specifically in addition to facilitating the development of other potentially life-saving therapies and treatments.

“The pandemic has made the world aware of the importance of clinical drug development,” said Dr. Michelle Longmire, CEO and co-founder of Medable, in a statement. “We need transformative technologies that break down critical barriers to improve patient access, experience and outcomes. This new funding will enable Medable to continue our aggressive pursuit of new technologies that improve clinical trials to benefit all patients.”

Trials underway in more than 60 countries are using the service and Medable has inked partnerships with companies like Datavant, to integrate multiple data sources for decentralized trials; MRN, to handle home and remote visits, and AliveCor, to track in-home health with electrocardiograms. 

 

For the past year and a half, Google has been rolling out its next-generation messaging to Android users to replace the old, clunky, and insecure SMS text messaging. Now the company says that rollout is complete, and plans to bring end-to-end encryption to Android messages next year.

Google’s Rich Communications Services is Android’s answer to Apple’s iMessage, and brings typing indicators, read receipts, and you’d expect from most messaging apps these days.

In a blog post Thursday, Google said it plans to roll out end-to-end encryption — starting with one-on-one conversations — leaving open the possibility of end-to-end encrypted group chats. It’ll become available to beta testers, who can sign up here, beginning later in November and continue into the new year.

End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — even Google — from reading messages as they travel between sender and the recipient.

Google dipped its toes into the end-to-end encrypted messaging space in 2016 with the launch of Allo, an app that immediately drew criticism from security experts for not enabling the security feature by default. Two years later, Google killed off the project altogether.

This time around, Google learned its lesson. Android messages will default to end-to-end encryption once the feature becomes available, and won’t revert back to SMS unless the users in the conversation loses or disables RCS.

PayPal is expanding its fundraising efforts with today’s launch of the Generosity Network. Unlike the PayPal Giving Fund, which helps people support charities through online donations, the new Generosity Network lets people raise money for themselves, other individuals in need, or organizations like a small business or a charity. This puts the network more directly in competition with other crowdsourced fundraising platforms, like GoFundMe or Facebook Fundraisers, for example.

At launch, the Generosity Network will be open to PayPal customers in the U.S. only and will allow them to create fundraising campaigns of up to $20,000 over a 30-day period.

The company says it was motivated to create the new service after seeing the growth in the peer-to-peer fundraising market following the coronavirus outbreak. It also noted the pandemic has made it difficult for traditional charitable organizations to raise as they had before. More than half of charities in the U.S. now expect to raise less money than in 2019 as a result of the economic hardships driven by the pandemic, PayPal said, citing a survey (PDF) by the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

In addition, over 65 million Americans filed for unemployment at some point over the course of the pandemic, PayPal says, which often led to them turning to family, friends and their community for extra support.

This isn’t the first product PayPal has developed that focused on social fundraisers. A few years ago, it launched Money Pools, which would let friends and family donate towards a shared expense — like a surprise party, group gift, travel fund, and more. The Generosity Network is an expansion on that earlier effort.

The new Generosity Network fundraisers can be created directly from PayPal’s website and donations are deposited directly into the organizer’s account for them to distribute as needed. The campaigns are also more broadly shared on the Generosity Network platform, which allows them to reach millions of more people than the organizer may have been able to reach through their own posts and shares across social media and the web.

Already, PayPal users are raising funds for disaster relief, funeral expenses, medical expenses, community efforts, and other organizations.

Like other fundraising platforms, PayPal’s Generosity Network will include fees. But, at launch, the website says it’s waiving those fees for donations made through credit and debit cards for a limited time. Cross-border fees and currency conversions fees will still apply, however.

For comparison, Facebook doesn’t charge fees for donations to charitable organizations, but does for personal fundraisers. (In the U.S., it’s 2.60% + $0.30). GoFundMe’s U.S. transaction fees are $2.9% + $0.30.

We’ve asked PayPal to disclose its fees schedule for the new platform and will update if one is provided. (The website offers no information about fees, in fact — its FAQ even links to the Money Pools FAQ, which seems to imply this Generosity Network is not yet a fully-fleshed out product.)

PayPal is likely hoping to acquire users during the increased fundraising that generally occurs over the holiday season, and believes that a platform that waives fees will give it an edge against the established competition.

“From collecting money for grocery deliveries to high-risk populations to fundraising campaigns in support of teachers and frontline workers, we’ve seen an outpouring of generosity from the PayPal community using our platform to help one another during this unprecedented year,” said PayPal VP of Giving, Oktay Dogramaci, in a statement. “The Generosity Network was designed to provide an accessible, easy and secure way for our customers to raise money on behalf of causes, and connect them with millions of PayPal customers who can offer their support this holiday season and beyond,” he said.

 

PayPal is expanding its fundraising efforts with today’s launch of the Generosity Network. Unlike the PayPal Giving Fund, which helps people support charities through online donations, the new Generosity Network lets people raise money for themselves, other individuals in need, or organizations like a small business or a charity. This puts the network more directly in competition with other crowdsourced fundraising platforms, like GoFundMe or Facebook Fundraisers, for example.

At launch, the Generosity Network will be open to PayPal customers in the U.S. only and will allow them to create fundraising campaigns of up to $20,000 over a 30-day period.

The company says it was motivated to create the new service after seeing the growth in the peer-to-peer fundraising market following the coronavirus outbreak. It also noted the pandemic has made it difficult for traditional charitable organizations to raise as they had before. More than half of charities in the U.S. now expect to raise less money than in 2019 as a result of the economic hardships driven by the pandemic, PayPal said, citing a survey (PDF) by the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

In addition, over 65 million Americans filed for unemployment at some point over the course of the pandemic, PayPal says, which often led to them turning to family, friends and their community for extra support.

This isn’t the first product PayPal has developed that focused on social fundraisers. A few years ago, it launched Money Pools, which would let friends and family donate towards a shared expense — like a surprise party, group gift, travel fund, and more. The Generosity Network is an expansion on that earlier effort.

The new Generosity Network fundraisers can be created directly from PayPal’s website and donations are deposited directly into the organizer’s account for them to distribute as needed. The campaigns are also more broadly shared on the Generosity Network platform, which allows them to reach millions of more people than the organizer may have been able to reach through their own posts and shares across social media and the web.

Already, PayPal users are raising funds for disaster relief, funeral expenses, medical expenses, community efforts, and other organizations.

Like other fundraising platforms, PayPal’s Generosity Network will include fees. But, at launch, the website says it’s waiving those fees for donations made through credit and debit cards for a limited time. Cross-border fees and currency conversions fees will still apply, however.

For comparison, Facebook doesn’t charge fees for donations to charitable organizations, but does for personal fundraisers. (In the U.S., it’s 2.60% + $0.30). GoFundMe’s U.S. transaction fees are $2.9% + $0.30.

We’ve asked PayPal to disclose its fees schedule for the new platform and will update if one is provided. (The website offers no information about fees, in fact — its FAQ even links to the Money Pools FAQ, which seems to imply this Generosity Network is not yet a fully-fleshed out product.)

PayPal is likely hoping to acquire users during the increased fundraising that generally occurs over the holiday season, and believes that a platform that waives fees will give it an edge against the established competition.

“From collecting money for grocery deliveries to high-risk populations to fundraising campaigns in support of teachers and frontline workers, we’ve seen an outpouring of generosity from the PayPal community using our platform to help one another during this unprecedented year,” said PayPal VP of Giving, Oktay Dogramaci, in a statement. “The Generosity Network was designed to provide an accessible, easy and secure way for our customers to raise money on behalf of causes, and connect them with millions of PayPal customers who can offer their support this holiday season and beyond,” he said.

 

Two companies in the data business are teaming up, with Near announcing that it has acquired French startup Teemo.

Near founder and CEO Anil Mathews told me that his company processes data around the online and offline behavior of 1.6 billion consumers each month: “We marry these two worlds and fill in the gap.”

Teemo, meanwhile, is location intelligence company based in Paris. Mathews said that Singapore-headquartered Near has been expanding “east to west,” so by acquiring Teemo, it will have a beachhead to expand throughout Europe — for example by getting direct access to the numerous big brands headquartered in Paris.

And while Mathews described Near as a company that has “from day one put privacy in the front seat,” he also suggested that Teemo has unique advantages in this area, particularly when it comes to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

“Teemo is very pro-privacy,” he said. “They were the first company certified by the French Data Protection Officer as GDPR compliant.” (That certification came after it was one of the first companies to be admonished under GDPR.)

Teemo’s founder and CEO Benoit Grouchko will become Near’s chief privacy officer, and the rest of the Teemo workforce will be joining Near as well, Mathews said. Another big asset: This will give Near access to Teemo’s GDPR-compliant consumer data (which he said will be stored in European data centers and continue to be handled in fully GDPR-compliant ways).

Near could potentially expand into other markets by making similar acquisitions in the future, Mathews added.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Formerly known as Databerries, Teemo has raised a total of $17.9 million in funding from investors such as Index Ventures and Mosaic Ventures.

“We are very excited to join the Near family with whom we share a common DNA of technology and performance,” Grouchko said in a statement. “This will allow us to be stronger and to grow even faster, beyond the French market.”

Launch provider Rocket Lab has a mission today – codenamed ‘Return to Sender,’ it’s the company’s 16th launch, and it will carry, among other things, a payload that will demonstrate a technology to help safely deorbit satellites. It has a secondary mission that’s potentially more important for Rocket Lab and the launch business in general, however: An attempted recovery of the first stage booster used during the flight. The launch is currently set for 8:44 PM EST (5:44 PM PST), and the webcast above will begin 30 minutes prior.

This is the first time that Rocket Lab will attempt to recover one of its launch vehicle first stages, and it’s significant in part because the company never intended to do this in the first place. Rocket Lab’s Electron was designed as a fully expendable launch vehicle, an intentionally different approach from other launch providers like SpaceX that focused on creating a smaller launch craft that could be constructed more quickly and launched more cheaply, but that sacrificed reusability as a trade-off.

All that changed with the surprise announcement last year that Rocket Lab would be aiming to introduce partial reusability into its existing system. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck explained during his presentation describing the reusability system that it would not involve a propulsive landing, like the kind used by SpaceX, but would instead use a navigation and guidance system to reorient the booster such that it would survive re-entry through an angled descent back into Earth’s atmosphere, and then deploy a parachute to slow it to the point where it could be caught by a helicopter and transported back to land.

Today’s recovery attempt won’t be a full test of that system as described; instead, it’ll see the first stage try to survive re-entry and then deploy its parachute, at which point it will hopefully float down to the ocean, from which Rocket Lab will then attempt to fish it out. The helicopter catch component, which Rocket Lab has demonstrated in a prior partial test, won’t be part of today’s activities.

The recovery attempt will be what most watchers are focused on today, but this mission has 30 total satellite payloads, and will carry a 3D-printed gnome from Valve’s Gabe Newell, which is a tech demo for new manufacturing techniques with potential space-based applications.

As a bonus, Rocket Lab is also donating $1 for every viewer of their livestream feed above to the Paediatric Intensive Care Unit at New Zealand’s Starship Foundation, so just by watching a really cool rocket launch, you’ll also be doing good in the world. That’s at 8:44 PM EST (5:44 PM PST) via the embedded YouTube stream at the top of this post, and they’ll kick off live coverage at around 8:14 PM EST (5:14 PM PST).

Ten years ago a group of young tech founders in Moscow decided to get an apartment together, at Shmitovskiy lane 16.

In time, the ecosystem around the group swelled to the point where today it now encompasses 300 entrepreneurs, executives, artists, and many other industries. The group now organizes the annual ‘Founders for Founders’ conference, in Russia and other locations. Just as in other places around the world, the members decided to help each other.

So they formed the Shmit16 Founder Community, and today they launch the S16 Angel Fund to invest in startups globally. Although tiny by investment standards (the funds first close will be $5 million) firm will focus on ‘founder-in-founder’ investments and has already backed 5 companies under this model. The fund plans to invest in five more companies in the next six months with an average of $250k ticket.

So far the Angel group has invested in AppFollow, Lokalize Simple, a fasting and diet management mobile app, and Anytype, a new operating environment for the modern internet.

The driving ethos of the S16 Fund is a focus on developing human potential and creating a productive peer context where information flows freely and participants can learn from each other.

Founding partners of the fund and community members include serial entrepreneurs Anatoly Marin, co-founder of Payment Systems (a mobile fintech in Eastern Europe); Aleks Shamis -partner at Dostavista (a crowdsourced same-day delivery service operating in 10 countries), Mikhail Peregudov, founder of Partiya Edy, recently acquired by Yandex ($YNDX), Oleg Bibergan, former Executive Director at Goldman Sachs, and others. Prior to this, the partners have invested in over 30 companies as individual angels.

S16 cofounder Anatoly Marin says: “There is a difference between helping a founder as someone whom you relate to on a human level, because you’ve been in these difficult places yourself, and helping a founder to get an ROI on your capital. The former helps shape relations where founders are open to share the most difficult subjects and get help. It is handy here that we’ve founded companies in different areas and can look at things from diverse perspectives.”

“The relationships in our community have always been about friendship, trust, and personal growth, with financial gains being an organic second-order outcome,” says S16 Angel Fund co-founder Aleks Shamis. “After 10 years, starting a fund was a natural next step in helping founders like ourselves.”

Beyond investment, S16 offers access to its network to help founders solve problems, find mentors and operators with business domain expertise such as go-to-market strategy, pricing, coaching for the executive team, and others.

Mitigating the effects of climate change and pollution is a global problem, but it’s one that requires local solutions.

While that seems like common sense, most communities around the world don’t have tools that can monitor emissions and pollutants at the granular levels they need to develop plans that can address these pollutants.

Aclima, a decade-old startup founded by Davida Herzl, is looking to solve that problem and has raised $40 million in new funding from strategic and institutional venture capital investors to accelerate its growth.

“We’ve built a platform that enables hyperlocal measurement. We measure all the greenhouse gases as well as regulated air pollutants. We deploy sensor networks that combine mobile sensing where we use fleets of vehicles as a roving network. And we bring that all together and bring that into a back end,” Herzl said. 

The networks of air quality monitoring technology that exists — and is subsidized by the government — is costly and lacking in the kinds of minute details on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis that communities can use to effectively address pollution problems.

“A typical air quality monitoring station would cost somewhere between $1 million to $2 million. Here in the Bay Area, the regulator is paying less than $3 million for access to all of this for the entire Bay Area,” Herzl said. 

Aclima’s technologies are already being deployed across California, and some of the company’s largest customers are municipalities in the Bay Area and down south in San Diego. 

The company has two main offerings: an enterprise professional software product that’s geared toward regulators, experts, and businesses that want to get a handle on their greenhouse gas emissions and environmentally polluting operations and a free tool that’s available to the public.

A third revenue stream is through partnerships with companies like Google, which have attached Aclima’s sensors to its roving mapping vehicles to capture climate and environmental quality data alongside geographic information.

“You’re seeing a lot of large companies in traditionally who are now investing significant amount into really trying to understand their emissions profile and prioritize emission reductions in a data driven way,” Herzl said.

The company’s data is also providing real world tools to communities that are looking to address systemic inequalities in locations that have been hardest hit by industrial pollution.

West Oakland, for instance, has used Aclima’s data to develop community intervention plans to reduce pollution in the communities that have been most impacted by the regions industrial economy.

“The interconnected crises of climate change, public health and environmental justice urgently require lasting solutions,” said Herzl, in a statement. “Measurement will play a key role in shaping solutions and tracking progress. With this coalition of investors, we’re expanding our capacity to support new and existing customers and partners taking bold climate action.”

As a result of the new round of funding, led by Clearvision Ventures, the fund’s founder and managing partner, Dan Ahn will take a seat on the board of directors.

“They are the clear category leader in an important and emerging field of data and standards at the intersection of climate, public health and the economy,” Ahn said in a statement. “Both governments and industry will need Aclima’s critical data and analytics to benchmark and accelerate progress to reduce emissions.”

Other investors in Aclima’s latest round include the corporate investment arm of the sensor manufacturer Robert Bosch, which views the company as a strategic component of its efforts to use sensor data to combat climate change. 

“Aclima has built an expansive mobile and stationary sensor network that generates billions of measurements about our most critical resources every week,” says Dr. Ingo Ramesohl, Managing Director of RBVC, in a statement. “Bosch invents and delivers connected solutions for a smarter future across transportation, home, industrial, and many other fields. What Aclima has achieved in connected environmental sensing is an impressive feat. Together, we can accelerate Aclima’s ability to support customers in taking decisive and data-driven climate action.”

Another key investor is Microsoft, which has backed the company through one of the first direct investments from the Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund. 

“We established our Climate Innovation Fund earlier this year to accelerate the development of environmental sustainability solutions based on the best available science,” said Brandon Middaugh, Director, Climate Innovation Fund, Microsoft, in a statement. “We’re encouraged by Aclima’s pioneering approach to mapping air pollution sources and exposures at a hyperlocal level and the implications this technology can have for making data-driven environmental decisions with consideration for climate equity.”

Other investors also adding Aclima to their portfolios in this round include Splunk Inc. GingerBread Capital, KTB Network, ACVC Partners, and the Womens VC Fund II. Existing shareholders participating in the round include Social Capital, Rethink Impact, Kapor Capital, and the Schmidt Family Foundation, the company said in a statement.