Category: UNCATEGORIZED

We’re going checking out a range of different headphones on TC this week and next as part of our ‘Headphone Week’ series, and today I’m checking out the Shure SRH1540 ($499). These aren’t new – they’ve been a stand-by among audiophiles in their price range for years now. But there’s a great reason for that: They offer fantastic sound quality and value, as well as amazing comfort and wearability.

The basics

The SRH1540 from Shure are closed-back headphones that provide premium sound suitable either just for people who really like high-quality audio, or for those who actually have to work with audio on a regular basis, including sound engineers and podcast producers. They manage to produce a soundstage that’s very comparable to what you get out of open-back headphones, albeit with less noise leakage (great for shared work-from-home offices).

In the box, Shure includes not one but two cables, as well as a spare set of the Alcantara-covered ear-ads. They come with a hard-sided plastic carrying case, and a threaded adapter for using them with a 6.3mm audio jack (the cable is 3.5mm out of the box).

Design and features

Shure’s design with the SRH1450 is all about comfort and quality. The headphones are extremely lightweight – but don’t let that fool you into thinking it’s made of cheap materials. The frame uses aircraft-grade aluminum and carbon fiber to offer the most strength without creating something that’s going to weigh heavy on your head for long listening sessions.

The Alcantara material used in the earpads is also very durable, while offering a pleasantly soft-touch feel. There’s ample padding in the cups, too, and they rest lightly on your head while providing necessary give to accommodate a number of different head and ear shapes.

Shure uses a dual-connector cord design here, with each gold-plated end of the headphone side clipping in securely. They’re color-coded for accurate placement, and the cable itself is kevlar-wrapped to ensure the cord will last a long time. There’s a twin backup in the box as well just in case.

Sound-wise, these are excellent headphones that should please even the most discerning audiophiles, especially when paired with a DAC or USB audio interface like the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 I mostly tested them with. They provide an amazing level of clarity and detail, and great bass without being totally overwhelming or washing out the soundstage. I’ve long used open-back headphones as my standard wired cans for audio editing and all-day wear, but the SRH1450s have converted me.

Bottom line

These are an amazing choice for anyone looking to spend a bit of money (but not too much, in the world of premium audio equipment) in order to get a pair of headphones that offer great sound quality along with durability and all-day comfort. The one caveat to keep in mind is that they aren’t really at all sound-isolating, though they’re better in this regard than open-back headphones.

Celonis began as a company to help customers understand how work flowed through your company by building a process map. This was valuable in itself, but the next logical step was to not only analyze the processes, but find ways to make them more efficient. Today, the company announced it has acquired Czech startup Integromat to help speed up the automation side of the house, which they started building into the platform last year.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Celonis co-founder and CEO Alexander Rinke said the deal was over $100 million. “It was a three digit amount of over $100 million. We can’t disclose the exact price, but we’re just giving this range,” he said. The deal has already closed.

Rinke describes Integromat as an enterprise version of Zapier, one that has been quite successful, building a $10 million business with over 11,000 customers, and will help the company automate processes across applications, something that is difficult to do.

“They really develop what I believe is a disruptive approach to automation. And obviously it’s very important for us because we are we looking to expand our product from being primarily a process mining tool that is focused on surfacing the insights as to how processes executed today, and evolve that into what we call an execution management system, which is on an ongoing basis really helping you to optimize the execution of your key processes,” Rinke explained.

Rinke says that every company has a key set of operations, and if you can begin to automate across these systems, as Integromat enables them to do now, you can begin to squeeze out ways to make your business more efficient through automation.

“We believe that there needs to be a layer that comes in on top of that [key set of operations] to first of all understand what’s going on, measure the capacity that organizations executes with today, measure where the biggest gaps are and where the capacity is trapped, and then also unleash that automation. This is an important piece because when you figure that out, you ideally want to automate as much as possible,” he said.

Integromat’s 60 employees will become part of Celonis, but Rinke says the company’s technology will be both incorporated into the Celonis platform and continue to service current customers as a separate stand-alone product, which has to be good news for those customers.

Celonis launched in 2011 and has raised over $364 million. It raised $290 million last November on a valuation of $2.5 billion. Integromat was launched in 2012 and has not raised any money. Both company’s financial information is according to Pitchbook.

The smartphone industry was in transition well before COVID-19 was a blip on anyone’s radar. More than 13 years after the launch of the original iPhone, these products have long since transitioned from luxury items to commodities, losing some of their luster in the process. The past several years have seen slower upgrade cycles as consumers grew reluctant to pay $1,000 or more for new devices.

And while the iPhone 12 was no doubt in development long before the current pandemic, the pandemic’s global shutdown has only exacerbated many existing problems for smartphone makers. The clearest representation of Apple’s reaction is in the sheer number of iPhones announced at today’s “Hi Speed” event. Long gone are the days when a company could rest on a single flagship or two.

Today’s event brought a grand total of four new iPhone models, ranging in price from $699 to $1,099: the 12, 12 mini, 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max. As with the Apple Watch, the company is keeping last year’s iPhone 11 around and has cut the price to $599. That puts the older model in the high-mid-range for Android devices, but represents a far cheaper entry point than we’re accustomed to for Apple phones.

Google is putting A.I. and machine learning technologies into the hands of journalists. The company this morning announced a suite of new tools, Journalist Studio, that will allow reporters to do their work more easily. At launch, the suite includes a host of existing tools as well as two new products aimed at helping reporters search across large documents and visualizing data.

The first tool is called Pinpoint and is designed to help reporters work with large file sets — like those that contain hundreds of thousands of documents.

Pinpoint will work as an alternative to using the “Ctrl + F” function to manually seek out specific keywords in the documents. Instead, the tool takes advantage of Google Search and its A.I.-powered Knowledge Graph, along with optical character recognition and speech-to-text technologies.

It’s capable of sorting through scanned PDFs, images, handwritten notes, and audio files to automatically identify the key people, organizations, and locations that are mentioned. Pinpoint will highlight these terms and even their synonyms across the files for easy access to the key data.

Image Credits: Google

The tool has already been put to use by journalists at USA Today, for its report on 40,600 COVID-19-related deaths tied to nursing homes. Reveal also used Pinpoint look into the COVID-19 “testing disaster” in ICE detention centers. And The Washington Post used it for a piece about the opioid crisis.

Because it’s also useful for speeding up research, Google notes Pinpoint can be used for shorter-term projects, as well — like Philippines-based Rappler’s examination of CIA reports from the 1970s or Mexico-based Verificado MX’s fast fact checking of the government’s daily pandemic updates.

Pinpoint is available now to interested journalists, who can sign up to request access. The tool currently supports seven languages: English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Google has also partnered with The Center for Public Integrity, Document Cloud, Stanford University’s Big Local News program and The Washington Post to create shared public collections that are available to all users.

The second new tool being introduced today is The Common Knowledge Project, still in beta.

The tool allows journalists to explore, visualize and share data about important issues in their local communities by creating their own interactive charts using thousands of data points in a matter minutes, the company says.

Image Credits: Google

These charts can then be embedded in reporters’ stories on the web or published to social media.

This particular tool was built by the visual journalism team at Polygraph, supported by the Google News Initiative. The data for use in The Common Knowledge Project comes from Data Commons, which includes thousands of public datasets from organizations like the U.S. Census and the CDC.

At launch, the tool offers U.S. data on issues including demographics, economy, housing, education, and crime.

As it’s still in beta testing, Google is asking journalists to submit their ideas for how it can be improved.

Google will demonstrate and discuss these new tools in more detail during a series of upcoming virtual events, including the Online News Association’s conference on Thursday, October 15. The Google News Initiative training will also soon host a six-part series focused on tools for reporters in seven different languages across nine regions, starting the week of October 20.

The new programs are available on the Journalist Studio website, which also organizes other tools resources for reporters, including Google’s account security system, the Advanced Protection Program; direct access to the Data Commons; DataSet Search; a Fact Check Explorer; a tool for visualizing data using customizable templates, Flourish; the Google Data GIF Maker; Google Public Data Explorer; Google Trends; DIY VPN Outline; DDoS defense tool, Project Shield; and tiled cartogram maker Tilegrams.

The site additionally points to other services from Google, like Google Drive, Google Scholar, Google Earth, Google News, and others, as well as training resources.

When Jen Grant joined Turbo Systems, the no-code mobile application platform, as CEO in March, she came on board just as COVID was shutting down businesses, but she went straight to work and over the last six months she has led two major initiatives that the company announced today: a name change and a new app marketplace.

For starters, the company is changing its name to Appify to more accurately reflect its mission around building mobile apps. She says that they found most people related the term “turbo” to cars. They began looking for a better name that was more closely aligned with what they do when her team stumbled across Appify.

“We had been playing around with different names and what are we were about, and a lot of what we’re about is amplifying your business and your systems and your people with apps. And so when we kind of stumbled across Appify and the domain name was available, we moved quite quickly,” Grant explained.

While she was at it, Grant was talking to customers, and while the core company mission is to make it easy to build mobile apps, especially in the field service space, she felt that they could make it even easier. Rather than asking customers to build the apps themselves, they could provide a marketplace with some pre-built apps and simply let them customize them for their workflows.

“What we have done with the Appify Marketplace is instead of saying, here’s a box of parts, now fix your business problem, we’re saying, here’s an app that you can launch in minutes. It has all of the functionality that you will need […] and you can then very easily customize it using this no code platform to make it specific to your business,” she said.

The marketplace is launching today with a couple of apps aimed at the company’s core field service market including Field Sales, which allows salespeople in the field to send a bid or quote from a tablet directly from the field without having to return to the office. The other is a Field Service app for repair people, which provides all of the information about the repair, while allowing the service rep to update the customer record from the field using a mobile device.

Grant says this is just the start and there are many apps on the road map that they will be releasing in the coming months. Eventually, they may have systems integrators use the platform to build apps for specific industries as they move forward.

Appify was born as Turbo Systems in 2017 and has raised over $11 million, according to Pitchbook data.

Playbook, aiming to be the Patreon of fitness content, has raised an additional $9.3 million in Series A funding from E.ventures, Michael Ovitz, Abstract, Algae Ventures, Porsche Ventures and FJ Labs.

The pandemic has hit the personal trainer and fitness industry incredibly hard. With gyms closed, trainers’ primary funnel for new customers has been shut down or slowed. Playbook looks to give them a revenue stream through their content.

Playbook creators are given tools to create videos and grow their audience. Unlike many fitness startups, Playbook really focuses on the creator side of the business rather than the final end user, believing that trainers can attract their own audience if they have the right tools and a platform to monetize them.

The company pays creators who bring their own audience to the platform (via their own unique link) an 80 percent cut of all revenue from those users. If users come to the platform agnostic of a certain creator, the trainer gets paid out based on seconds watched.

For the end user, the pricing is simple — it’s an all-you-can-eat model with a monthly subscription priced at $15/month or $99/year.

Playbook raised $3 million in seed back in June. The company has also attracted an impressive roster of trainers to the platform, including Boss Everline, trainer to Kevin Hart; Magnus Lydgback, trainer to Gal Gadot and Alicia Vikander; and Don Saladino, trainer to Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively.

Playbook cofounder and CEO Jeff Krahel said that the main focus for the company is to double down on the technology services offered to creators, and the rest will follow.

“That’s part of the reason we brought on Michael Ovitz as a strategic investor,” said Krahel. “We are a tech-driven talent agency, a great tech platform with tools for creators. The future of the company is around supporting creators, almost like an accelerator, to maximize impact.”

Krahel is joined by two cofounders: Michael Wojcieszek and Kasper Ødegaard.

This latest round brings Playbook’s total funding to $12.3 million.

New York’s Twentyeight Health is taking the wildly telemedicine services for women’s health popularized by companies like Nurx and bringing them to a patient population that previously hadn’t had access. 

The mission to provide women who are Medicaid or underinsured should not be deprived of the same kinds of care that patients who have more income security or better healthcare coverage enjoy, according to the company’s founder, Amy Fan.

The mission, and the company’s technology, have managed to convince a slew of investors who have poured $5.1 million in seed funding into the new startup. Third Prime led the round, which included investments from Town Hall Ventures, SteelSky Ventures, Aglaé Ventures, GingerBread Capital, Rucker Park Capital, Predictive VC, and angel investors like Stu Libby, Zoe Barry, and Wan Li Zhu.

“Women who are on Medicaid, who are underinsured or without health insurance often struggle to find access to reproductive health services, and these struggles have only increased with COVID-19 pandemic limiting access to in-person appointments,” said Amy Fan, co-founder of Twentyeight Health, in a statement. “We are fighting for healthcare equity, ensuring that all women, particularly BIPOC women and women from low-income backgrounds, can access high quality, dignified and convenient care.”

To ensure that its catering to underserved communities, the company works with Bottomless Closet, a workforce entry program for women, and the 8 colleges in the City University of New York ecosystem including LaGuardia College, which has 45,000 students with 70% coming from families making less than $30,000 in annual income.

The company’s services are currently available across Florida, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and it’s the only telemedicine company focused on contraception services to accept Medicaid.

In another example of how awesome this company is, it’s also working to provide free birth control for women who aren’t able to pay out of pocket and are uninsured through a partnership with Bedsider’s Contraceptive Access Fund. The company also donates 2% of its revenue to Bedsider and the National Institute for Reproductive Health. (Y’all, this company is amaze.)

To sign up for the service, new customers fill out a medical questionnaire online. Once the questionnaire is reviewed by a US board-certified doctor within 24 hours customers can access over 100 FDA-approved brands of birth control pills, patches, rings, shots, and emergency contraception and receive a shipment within three days.

Twentyeight Health provides ongoing care through online audio consultations and doctor follow up messages to discuss issues around updating prescriptions or addressing side effects, the company said.

“Today, low-income women are three times more likely to have an unintended pregnancy than the average woman in the U.S., and nearly one-third of physicians nationwide aren’t accepting new Medicaid patients,” said Bruno Van Tuykom, co-founder of Twentyeight Health, in a statement. “This underscores why offering high-quality reproductive care that is inclusive of people across race, income bracket, or health insurance status is more important than ever.”

Launched in 2018, Twentyeight Health said it would use the new cash to continue to expand its services across the U.S.

Dataloop, a Tel Aviv-based startup that specializes in helping businesses manage the entire data lifecycle for their AI projects, including helping them annotate their datasets, today announced that it has now raised a total of $16 million. This includes a $5 seed round that was previously unreported, as well as an $11 million Series A round that recently closed.

The Series A round was led by Amiti Ventures with participation from F2 Venture Capital, crowdfunding platform OurCrowd, NextLeap Ventures and SeedIL Ventures.

“Many organizations continue to struggle with moving their AI and ML projects into production as a result of data labeling limitations and a lack of real time validation that can only be achieved with human input into the system,” said Dataloop CEO Eran Shlomo. “With this investment, we are committed, along with our partners, to overcoming these roadblocks and providing next generation data management tools that will transform the AI industry and meet the rising demand for innovation in global markets.”

Image Credits: Dataloop

For the most part, Dataloop specializes in helping businesses manage and annotate their visual data. It’s agnostic to the vertical its customers are in, but we’re talking about anything from robotics and drones to retail and autonomous driving.

The platform itself centers around the ‘humans in the loop’ model that complements the automated systems with the ability for humans to train and correct the model as needed. It combines the hosted annotation platform with a Python SDK and REST API for developers, as well as a serverless Functions-as-a-Service environment that runs on top of a Kubernetes cluster for automating dataflows.

Image Credits: Dataloop

The company was founded in 2017. It’ll use the new funding to grow its presence in the U.S. and European markets, something that’s pretty standard for Israeli startups, and build out its engineering team as well.

Vivun’s co-founder and CEO, Matt Darrow used to run pre-sales at Zuora and he saw that pre-sales team members had a lot of insight into customers. He believed if he could capture that insight, it would turn into valuable data to be shared across the company. He launched Vivun to build upon that idea in 2018, and today the company announced an $18 million Series A.

Accel led the round with participation from existing investor Unusual Ventures. With today’s investment, Vivun has raised a total of $21 million, according to the company.

Darrow says that the company has caught the attention of investors because this is a unique product category and there has been a lot of demand for it. “It turns out that businesses of all sizes, startups and enterprises, are really craving a solution like Vivun, which is dedicated to pre-sales. It’s a big, expensive department, and there’s never been software for it before,” Darrow told TechCrunch.

He says that a couple of numbers stand out in the company’s first year in business. First of all, the startup grew annual recurring revenue (ARR) six fold (although he wouldn’t share specific numbers) and tripled the workforce growing from 10 to 30, all while doing business as an early stage startup in the midst of a pandemic.

Darrow said while the business has grown this year, he found smaller businesses in the pipeline were cutting back due to the impact of COVID’s, but larger businesses like Okta, Autodesk and Dell Secureworks have filled in nicely, and he says the product actually fits well in larger enterprise organizations.

“If we look at our value proposition and what we do, it increases exponentially with the size of the company. So the larger the team, the larger the silos are, the larger the organization is, the bigger the value of solving the problem for pre-sales becomes,” he said.

After going from a team of 10 to 30 employees in the last year, Darrow wants to double the head count to reach around 60 employees in the next year, fueled in part by the new investment dollars. As he builds the company, the founding team, which is made up of two men and two women, is focused on building a diverse and inclusive employee base.

“It is something that’s really important to us, and we’ve been working at it. Even as we went from 10 to 30, we’ve worked to pay close attention to [diversity and inclusion], and we continue to do so just as part of the culture of how we build the business,” he said.

He’s been having to build that workforce in the middle of COVID, but he says that even before the pandemic shut down offices, he and his founding partners were big on flexibility in terms of time spent in the office versus working from home. “We knew that for mental health strength and stability, that being in the office nine to five, five days a week wasn’t really a modern model that would cut it,” he said.

Even pre-COVID the company was offering two quiet periods a year to let people refresh their batteries. In the midst of COVID, he’s trying to give people Friday afternoons off to go out and exercise and relax their minds.

As the startup grows, those types of things may be harder to do, but it’s the kind of culture Darrow and his founding partners hope to continue to foster as they build the company.

Amid a rebound in short-distance travel, Getaround, a Silicon Valley car rental startup, has raised some new money to meet demand. The startup, which allows customers to instantly rent cars near them in over 100 cities, announced today that it has raised $140 million in a Series E deal, bringing its total known venture funding to $600 million.

The Series E deal was led by PeopleFund with new investors including Reid Hoffman’s and Mark Pincus’ Reinvent Capital, AmRest founder Henry McGovern, Pennant Investors, VectoIQ partners Steve Girsky, Mary Chan, and Julia Steyn also deploying capital. Participating prior investors include SoftBank Vision Fund, Menlo Ventures, and more.

The money comes after the car-sharing service faced its own set of hurdles before and during the coronavirus pandemic. In January, the startup reportedly laid off 150 employees, reducing field operations and the size of numerous global teams. In March, bookings dropped 75%, according to CEO Sam Zaid. Getaround laid off 100 employees. Zaid pointed to struggles within SoftBank, which did a $300 million Series D round in the company in mid-2018, as part of the reason.

Now, Zaid says that “Softbank has been an extremely supportive partner to Getaround at every critical stage of our journey this year including in January and through COVID,” in a statement to TechCrunch. The investor, noted above, participated in the latest financing.

The pandemic seems to have gone from a pain point to an opportunity for growth at Getaround. After the March layoffs, Getaround saw demand for its service come back in May: people didn’t want to fly because of the risk of catching COVID-19, but they didn’t mind driving. Getaround focused on contactless access to passenger cars and improving the platform. As short-distance travel to local joints became a more attainable option for those seeking a way to travel, Getaround found green shoots. By July 1, Getaround rehired all of its furloughed employees, according to Zaid.

Zaid estimates that Getaround has seen worldwide revenue more than double from its pre-COVID baseline and says gross margins have continued to improve. The financing, which was raised in the summer, will be used to help the business invest in car technology, bring on new partners, and reach global profitability.

Getaround, per Zaid, currently has over 6 million users globally.

Getaround isn’t alone in benefitting from consumers’ new travel tastebuds. Airbnb, which cut 1,900 jobs or 25% of its entire global workforce, is finding hope in focusing on local rentals. In June, according to the WSJ, Airbnb entirely redesigned its website and algorithm to show travelers where they could rent in their neighborhoods. The travel company is rumored to be going public in November.

Along with the financing, Getaround announced four new executives: Head of North American business Dan Kim, who formerly worked as the head of Airbnb plus and head of global sales and delivery at Tesla; CFO Laura Onopchenko, who is the former CFO of NerdWallet; vice president of people and culture Tia Gordon, formerly the director of people operations at Google; and vice president of customer experience Ruth Yankoupe, former vice president of Customer Experience at OYO.