Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The Galaxy Note Ultra is a $1,399 smartphone. Even by Samsung’s standards, this is a high-end luxury device. It’s the phone for people who board the plane early and derive a sense of pride in watching the rest of us slowly shuffle onto the plane, wondering just how close to the back we’ll get.

Sure, most or all of these features will eventually trickle their way down into less-expensive models, but this is the phone for those willing to pay a premium to get a year ahead of the competition.

5G is the perfect example of the phenomenon. Still a luxury on last year’s models, it’s now standard across the Note line (and almost certainly will be with the Galaxy S when the new models arrive in six months). The world’s cellular networks may not have been ready to support it at the time, but it was yet another bleeding-edge tech available for early adopters willing to pay a premium.

The truth of the matter is you’d be getting a nice phone whether you opt for the Note 20 or Note 20 Ultra — or, for that matter, any member of the S20 line. In spite of the $400 gulf, there are only a few key differences between the Note 20 and the Ultra. The first and most immediate difference is the screen. That’s how you know you’ve got a truly premium device. It’s really, really big.

Here that means the difference between a 6.7-inch (2,400×1,080) and 6.9-inch (3,088×1,440) display. It’s a far smaller difference than the gulf between the 6.2-inch and 6.9-inch S20 options. It’s ultimately to the detriment of the Note line that its largest screen size is the same as the S20, and that there’s relatively little size difference between the two Notes. I would say that the high-end is really starting to bump up against the ceiling on smartphone screens, but we’ve said that time and again, and yet here we are.

The primary factor that has facilitated the Note’s growth from what seemed like an impossible large 5.3 inches to 6.9 in its nine-year existence is Samsung’s commitment to reducing the handset’s screen-to-body ratio. Even so, the Ultra is a very large phone. I can’t wrap my hand fully around it. Honestly, depending on the size of your hands and/or pockets, the sheer size of the product could well be a deal breaker.

The upshot of having such a big phone is that you get more space for a battery. Here that means a 4,500mAh battery life to the 20’s 4,000. That’s good, but still significantly smaller than the S20 Ultra’s 5,000mAh, likely owing to the presence of the S Pen slot, which eats up a chunk of the internal footprint. I was able to make it more than 24 hours on a single charge (closer to 28), definitely hitting the company’s benchmark of “all day” life.

Your results, as ever, will vary. But that goes double in a time when 5G coverage remains spotty in the U.S. Samsung sent a model with a Verizon SIM (TC’s parent company, for the record). I wasn’t able to get onto the 5G network in Queens where I live, but things did flick on when I walked across the bridge into Manhattan over the weekend. In a more ideal situation, I would be able to do a more controlled test between LTE and 5G battery ratings, but it’s 2020 and ideal is far too much to hope for.

The other major difference between the Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra is, of course, the camera. Once again, the camera module is massive. Samsung’s freshened up the industrial design a bit, but it’s frankly still pretty massive. That’s forgivable, however, when you factor in what the handset is packing here. Both new Notes sport a triple camera system, but the Ultra swaps the 12-megapixel wide lens for a 108-megapixel, joining the 12-megapixel ultra wide and 12-megapixel telephoto.

The setup is similar to the S20 Ultra’s, with a few important distinctions. For starters, the time-of-flight depth camera has been swapped out for a laser autofocus. The TOF definitely feels like a more future-proofing aspect. In addition to current portrait mode demands, it will likely play an important role as augmented reality becomes an increasingly important aspect of mobile software, going forward. That said, laser autofocus just feels more pragmatic for the demands of everyday picture taking. And even without portrait mode enabled, the camera setup has a real and effective bokeh on images and is pretty effective with close-up macro photos.

The other big update here are some tempered expectations on the Space Zoom front. Introduced for the S20 Ultra, the feature promised a mind-boggling 100x zoom. The truth of the matter was less exciting, as anything approaching that top number was ultimately unusable. Most shots ended up looking like a work of abstract impressionism. The Note Ultra keeps things to a still-impressive, but more manageable, 50x.

You’re still risking some fairly serious image degradation at that number, but overall, the results are going to be more pleasing than going double that number. And overall, the zoom on this thing is really excellent. Using the default photo software, I’d recommend sticking to the three tree icons to switch between the three primary cameras. That will keep it at a maximum 10x optical zoom. But if you need a bit more than that, go for it.

Samsung’s approach to camera quality has been largely hardware-focused, and the results are clear in the images it takes. It’s a contrast to Google’s approach, which seeks to almost exclusively differentiate itself with computational photography. The Pixel’s camera is very good in its own right, but it just can’t compete with the Note on things like quality zoom. Of course, Samsung’s approach costs money. It’s important to remember that we’re talking about a $1,400 phone here, friends.

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The screen is really excellent. The colors can be a bit oversatured for my tastes — particularly when it comes to bright reds, but that’s an easy fix by toggling from “vivid” to “natural” under screen settings. For some the reds might be a bit muddy under the latter setting. Either way, it’s really just a matter of personal preference, but I recommend playing around with it. The 120Hz refresh rate makes for some extremely fluid animations, but this is also one of those features you can easily disable when you need to conserve battery.

The directional mic was one of the more underrated features introduced on the S20, allowing you to determine the focus of the audio recording based on the device’s positioning. Cooler still is the ability to use the Galaxy Live Buds as mics while recording. That’s something that will come in handy for standup interview videos, particularly in noisy environments.

The Note 20 is among the first devices to sport the Snapdragon 865+ — essentially an overclocked version of the flagship 865 you’ll find on the S20. The clock speeds are a bit souped up here and graphic performance has been improved by about 10%. Mobile processors don’t really get better than this in 2020. I plan to post something a bit more complete on the Microsoft partnership that brings some exclusive Game Pass content to handset (honestly, I’m waiting on one of those Bluetooth mobile Xbox controllers at the moment).

But this thing sings for most of your everyday tasks, and will likely be one of the better handsets for cloud gaming, as the latest flagship Snapdragon has been paired with 12GB of RAM. There’s also a good 128GB of storage here, expandable to a very good 512GB. Better still, that can be expanded to a ridiculous 1TB courtesy of the microSD slot (also available on both S20 models, but absent in the regular Note).

I probably write this every time a new Note comes out, but I’m not really a stylus person, even after nearly a decade of playing around with Note devices. That said, I continue to be impressed with the device’s ability to recognize my truly terrible handwriting. Maybe I’ll be a convert one of these generations. Stranger things have happened I guess. The S Pen is quite refined and very responsive after all of these generations. Air Actions let you use the stylus as a control even at a distance — a neat enough feature, but once again one I don’t see myself using. Other cool new additions here include Audio Bookmark, which will sync recordings to the notes you’re taking. Definitely helpful, though I anticipate it will be more so when Samsung introduces live transcriptions à la Google Recorder one of these generations.

If you’ve read enough of these bi-annual Samsung flagship reviews, you probably know what’s coming next. The Note represents more of a refinement over its predecessor than something more substantial. If your Note is a year or two old, you certainly don’t need to run out to replace that also very-good phone. That’s just sort of where we’re at in the life cycle of the mobile industry. On the whole, updates just feel more incremental.

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But as with each of these devices, the Note 20 Ultra represents some of the finest mobile hardware you can purchase at this point in time. The camera, especially, deserves to be called out for its truly excellent capabilities. But, as ever, the finest is going to cost you. If you can stomach the idea of a $1,400 Android phone, they don’t come much better than the Galaxy Note Ultra.

Apple is revamping its streaming radio service. Starting today, its flagship radio station Beats 1 will be rebranded to Apple Music 1 — a change that more closely associates the station with Apple’s subscription-based streaming music service, Apple Music. In addition, the company is launching two more radio stations: Apple Music Hits, featuring top songs from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s, and Apple Music Country, focused on country music.

The expansion aims to help differentiate Apple Music from current rivals, like Spotify and Pandora, both known for their personalization efforts with algorithmic-driven playlists tailored to user interests. While Apple Music offers its own, smaller selection of personalized playlists, it also wants to better establish itself in the role of tastemaker and a tool to connect fans with artists. That’s where the streaming radio stations come in.

On Apple Music 1 (previously Beats 1), the company offers artists interviews, global exclusives and premieres, and other breaking music news. The station is led by presenters Zane Lowe, Ebro Darden, Brooke Reese, Dotty, Hanuman Welch, Matt Wilkinson, Nadeska, Rebecca Judd, and Travis Mills, from studios in L.A., New York, Nashville, and London. Its lineup of shows includes those from big names in music, like Action Bronson, Billie Eilish, Elton John, Joe Kay, Lil Wayne, Frank Ocean, Vince Staples, and The Weeknd. New shows from Aitch, Kerwin Frost, HAIM, Lady Gaga, Nile Rodgers, Travis Scott, Young M.A, and others are also available.

More broadly, the idea behind streaming radio is to cater to people who, sometimes, just want to turn on music without having to think about what they want to hear or dig around for a favorite playlist. That was the original promise of terrestrial radio, and Apple believes the formula can still work on modern-day streaming services, as well.

Meanwhile, the addition of the newer stations began to paint a picture of a radio service that caters to specific tastes and interests. The new naming format of “Apple Music X” also leaves room for Apple to continue to expand its radio lineup over time to include more genres and thematic stations.

Apple says the new “Hits” station will be led by on-air hosts ayde Donovan, Estelle, Lowkey, Jenn Marino, Sabi, Nicole Sky and Natalie Sky, George Stroumboulopoulos (“House of Strombo”), along with special shows from Ari Melber and others. Exclusive shows from artists include those from Backstreet Boys, Ciara, Mark Hoppus, Huey Lewis, Alanis Morissette, Snoop Dogg, Meghan Trainor, Shania Twain, and more.

The country station will have hosts Kelleigh Bannen, Ty Bentli, Bree, Alecia Davis, Ward Guenther, Nada, and Tiera, plus weekly shows from Ashley Eicher and Kelly McCartney. Fans can also enjoy new exclusive shows from artists like Jimmie Allen, Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, BRELAND, Luke Bryan, Luke Combs, Morgan Evans, Florida Georgia Line, Pat Green, Willie Jones, Chrissy Metz, Midland, Rissi Palmer, The Shires, Carrie Underwood, and Morgan Wallen, alongside exclusive shows from legendary producers and songwriters like Dave Cobb, Jesse Frasure, and Luke Laird, and journalist Hunter Kelly.

Though Apple Music Radio is a product that helps Apple’s subscription service stand out, it’s not clear to what extent it’s seen by consumers as a huge selling point that has them choosing Apple Music over a competing service, like Spotify. Instead, Apple Music is likely opted for by those who prefer Apple’s design aesthetic, the convenience of a native app that works well with Siri, and those who fully participate in the Apple ecosystem across their devices.

With the expansions and rebranding, music listeners will be able to ask Siri to play “Apple Music 1,” “Apple Music Hits,” or “Apple Music Country,” — a selection that will be easy to remember as it grows over time, thanks to the simplified naming format.

Apple Music Radio is supported across iPhone, iPad, iPod, CarPlay, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, HomePod, and on the web at music.apple.com, the company says.

“For the past five years, if ever there was a meaningful moment in music culture, Beats 1 was there bringing human curation to the forefront and drawing in listeners with exclusive shows from some of the most innovative, respected, and beloved people in music,” said Oliver Schusser, vice president of Apple Music, Beats, and International Content, in a statement. “Now, Apple Music radio provides an unparalleled global platform for artists across all genres to talk about, create, and share music with their fans, and this is just the beginning. We will continue to invest in live radio and create opportunities for listeners around the world to connect with the music they love.”

Walmart reported earnings this morning. Most of the numbers are immaterial to you and I, having little to nothing to do with the world of private capital and startups, but one metric did leap out: In its quarter ending July 31, Walmart’s U.S. “e-commerce sales” grew by 97% compared to the year-ago quarter, with what the company called “strong results across all channels.”

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Walmart’s total revenue grew 5.6%, so you can see the discrepancy between the company’s physical business and its e-commerce efforts, with one managing single-digit gains and the other nearly hitting triple digits. For reference, in its fiscal ending May 1, 2020, Walmart’s e-commerce sales grew by 74%. In the quarter ending January 31, 2020 that figure was a far-slimmer 35%.

The e-commerce acceleration is real, as shown through a host of numbers you can parse, including Walmart’s own. Heck, when The Exchange was digging through recent fintech venture capital results, we noted that rising e-commerce spend was perhaps part of the reason why late-stage fintech shops had such strong results.

So when I was reading Q2 venture capital data on the state of retail tech broadly, and e-commerce tech more specifically, I was expecting a stellar quarter with lots of dollars invested into a great many deals.

And yet, while Q2 2020 was a bit better than Q1 2020 for e-commerce VC results, it wasn’t much of a comeback. And the first half of this year is pretty damn slow overall, when compared to prior results for e-commerce-focused venture capital deals.

What gives? I have an idea or two, but first, let’s parse the data that business market data provider CB Insights compiled, as we extend our apparently never-quite-ending look at the ridiculously interesting first-half of 2020 for startups and VCs.

VCs fall out of love with e-commerce startups?

In 2019, e-commerce saw an average of 314 deals per quarter and just under $5 billion in invested capital, with the four-quarter pace for the year coming in at $4.97 billion per.

Website-building platform Wix is expanding its platform today with the launch of a customer support product called Wix Answers.

Joe Pollaro, the general manager of Wix’s U.S. business, said that while the company has “been expanding into much larger types of users, enterprise-class users,” Wix Answers wasn’t part of that grand strategy. Instead, it’s a product that the company built to meet its own support needs.

“I don’t think there are many companies out there that have gone out there and just decided to build something so critical as customer communications,” Pollaro told me. “That’s part of our DNA: If we don’t feel like we find something out there that fits our needs, we just decide to build it ourselves.”

What was missing from those existing products? Pollaro said Wix “needed something to give us the full picture of customer communication — not just opening tickets and solving problems and moving on.”

Carl Lane, the product solutions expert for Wix Answers, made similar points when he demonstrated the product. For example, he pointed to the platform’s “360 degree of the user,” with things like the company they work for, whether they’re “a VIP user” and showing all the customer service conversations they’ve had across channels, whether that’s via phone call, chat, website ticket or email.

Lane also said that the platform uses AI to help customer support agents respond more quickly, and to recommend ways to make the team more effective (like making customer support articles more accessible).

And with the Wix Answers dashboard, “it doesn’t matter what channel [the customer] used, there’s a consistent experience for our agents.”

That can help with the workflow, for example by flagging when there’s an alarming number of people waiting to have their calls answered (so maybe it’s time to pull some people out of meetings).

“You get complete visibility over your workforce any time,” Lane said. Similarly, on the analytics side, he said, “Analytics are vital to customer support organizations. When customers have one product for chat and one product for email, it’s really hard at the end of the day to see how well did everyone do.”

With Wix Answers, Lane showed me that how a manager could bring up a customer service team member’s record to see the total number of tickets they’d responded to and many customer satisfaction surveys were filled out afterwards.

Clients already using the Answers product include Getty Images, MyHeritage, Guesty, Viber, Fiverr and Yotpo.

“Wix Answers is applicable to a business of any size,” Lane added. “We see successful customers using Answers who are five- or 10-member teams, up to the Wix level. I think that Answers is a platform that can grow with you.”

Amazon today announced an upcoming hiring spree set to bring 3,500 jobs to a half-dozen U.S. cities. The news is, of course, particularly notable amid a pandemic that has cause many industries to freeze hiring, while unemployment claims have soared across the country. It also finds the company doing that hiring in cities — many of which have seen citizens looking to move to less densely populated areas.

While many businesses have suffered the knock-on effects of COVID-19-related lockdowns, however, Amazon has found continued success. The company’s massive e-commerce platform  has been deemed an essential service and its AWS platform has taken on an outsized role as the push for businesses to go all online has further accelerated.

The new jobs are “corporate and tech” per the company’s description, across a number of divisions, including AWS, Alexa, Amazon Advertising, Amazon Fashion, OpsTech and Amazon Fresh. The list of cities includes Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York Phoenix and San Diego, accounting for around 900,000 square feet of office space in all.

The New York location accounts for around 630,000 of that, courtesy of the company’s recent acquisition of Lord & Taylor’s former Fifth Avenue flagship in Manhattan, which it reportedly purchased from WeWork for north of $1 billion. Setting up an office in the former department store flagship isn’t quite confirmation of rumors that the company will turn former Sears and J.C. Penney stores into fulfillment centers, but it’s an equally clear indicator of the State of retail in 2020.

It’s also a much quieter approach than the planned “HQ2” in Long Island City, Queens, which found the company clashing with local protesters. The Manhattan office accounts for far and away the largest number of new jobs, at 2,000 of 3,500. The move comes as many tech workers in places like New York and San Francisco have considered fleeing the city.

Notably, the company is currently letting office employees continue to work from home through next January, Amazon anticipates that many will choose to return to its offices sooner. No specific timeline has been given for the new roles.

An AI-based technique to accelerate MRI scans has been shown to produce as good or better results than traditional methods in a blind comparison by expert radiologists. The system halves or even quarters the time necessary to get a good scan without sacrificing quality, which could reduce wait times and costs correspondingly.

FastMRI is a project that began in 2015 at NYU and became a team effort with Facebook AI Research (FAIR) almost exactly two years ago. The medical and imaging expertise on NYU’s side was a good match the AI expertise on FAIR’s, and the collaboration has been fruitful.

The idea behind it is simple enough to grasp. MRIs can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour depending on how much data must be collected, from what angles, and so on. This can be a very difficult process for the patient, since they have to remain immobile inside a large, loud machine, and of course that means a machine can only scan so many people per day, driving costs and wait times up.

It was theorized by the FastMRI team that some of the data collected is essentially redundant and a well-trained machine learning system could fill in the gaps if less information was collected in the first place. It would only work because MRIs (of knees in this case) are very orderly and predictable in many ways, and there’s a large body of imagery for an AI to learn from.

Over the last two years the team put together a study whereby clinical radiologists examined both traditionally generated MRIs and the ones created by an AI using substantially (about 75 percent) less source data — never aware of which was which, naturally, and at least a month apart from one another.

The results were quite promising:

The study found there were no significant differences in the radiologists’ evaluations. They found the same abnormalities and pathology regardless of whether they were examining the standard or AI-generated MRIs. All the examiners judged the AI-accelerated images to be of better overall quality than the traditional ones. Five of the six radiologists were not able to correctly discern which images were generated using AI.

It’s interesting that the AI group of images was universally rated better than the ground truth group, but only one person was able to say which was which at a better-than-chance rate.

“There are slight differences in the amount and type of ‘noise’ in the AI-generated and traditional MRIs that the one radiologist may have potentially noticed,” said FAIR’s Larry Zitnick, one of the authors of the paper. I was curious about how the AI might produce “better” images, and he obliged me with some details:

“Since the AI learns on prior MRI knees, i.e., what typical knees look like, it can improve the appearance of the MRI by removing noise or other artifacts,” Zitnick said. “So, for example, white noise looks like a random pattern to the AI, so it’s difficult to learn how to reproduce it. However, the structure of human knees is similar across patients making it easier to learn and reconstruct. As a result, when the AI reconstructs the knee, it tends to reduce the noise (what it has trouble learning) and increase the structures (what it learns).”

The research comes with a couple small caveats. For one, it’s only shown to work for knees at present, though brain scans are the next stop and there’s no reason to think it won’t work for those and other types.

More importantly, the study is based on partly synthetic data, in that the undersampled scans were traditional scans with data removed (so the AI version can easily be compared to the original) rather than scans that never collected the “extra” info in the first place. Due to the nature of MRIs, however, removing the information and never collecting it are pretty much the same thing, so this may not actually matter at all. But there’s a certain amount of confidence necessary for a hospital to not do a full scan, since it may be the only chance to get that scan.

The study is an important step towards making this practice actually usable in a medical facility with real patients in a hurry. If it’s accepted in this way, it could reduce not only the time someone might have to spend in the machine considerably, but aid radiologists in turning diagnoses around faster and helping more patients.

Movable Ink, a company that helps businesses deliver more personalized and relevant email marketing, is announcing that it has raised $30 million in Series funding.

The company will be 10 years old in October, and founder and CEO Vivek Sharma told me that it’s always been “capital efficient” — even with the new round, Movable Ink has only raised a total of $39 million.

However, Sharma noted that with COVID-19, it felt like “a good idea to have some dry powder on our balance sheet … if things turned south.”

At the same time, he suggested that the pandemic’s impact has been more limited than he anticipated, and has been “really focused” on a few sectors like travel, hospitality and “old line retailers.”

“Those who are adopting to e-commerce really quickly have done well, financial services has done well, media has done well,” he said.

The company’s senior vice president of strategy Alison Lindland added that clients using Movable Ink were able to move much more quickly, with campaigns that would normally take months launching in just a few days.

“We really saw those huge, wholesale digital transformations in a time of duress,” Lindland said. “Obviously, large Fortune 500 companies were making difficult decisions, were putting vendors on hold, but email marketers are always the last people furloughed themselves, because of how critical email marketing is to their businesses. We were just as critical to their operations.”

The company said it now works with more than 700 brands, and in the run up to the 2020election, its customers include the Democratic National Committee.

The new funding comes from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Silver Lake Waterman. Sharma said the money will be spent on three broad categories: “Platforms, partners and people.”

On the platform side, that means continuing to develop Movable Ink’s technology and expanding into new channels. He estimated that around 95% of Movable Ink’s revenue comes from email marketing, but he sees a big opportunity to grow the web and mobile side of the business.

“We take any data the brand has available to it and activate and translate it into really engaging creative,” he said, arguing that this approach is applicable in “every other channel where there’s pixels in front of the consumer’s eyes.”

The company also plans to make major investments into AI. Sharma said it’s too early to share details about those plans, but he pointed to the recent hire of Ashutosh Malaviya as the company’s vice president of artificial intelligence.

As for partners, the company has launched the Movable Ink Exchange, a marketplace for integrations with data partners like Oracle Commerce Cloud, MessageGears Engage, Trustpilot and Yopto.

And Movable Ink plans to expand its team, both through hiring and potential acquisitions. To that end, it’s hired Katy Huber as its senior vice president of people.

Sharma also said that in light of the recent conversations about racial justice and diversity, the company has been looking at its own hiring practices and putting more formal measures in place to track its progress.

“We use OKRs to track other areas of the business, so if we don’t incorporate [diversity] into our business objectives, we’re only paying lip service,” he said. “For us, it was really important to not just have a big spike of interest, and instead save some of that energy so that it’s sustained into the future.”

The restaurant industry has been slammed hard by the coronavirus outbreak, with venues in many cities in the US and beyond shuttered or restricted in how they can serve customers — to say nothing of the comfort level of customers themselves to dine in public venues — in the name of helping contain the spread of infections. But today, a startup that has built a platform to help them manage their bookings business better is announcing a round of funding and an acquisition to help those restauranteurs on the road to recovery.

Seated, which provides a restaurant booking platform that rewards customers with credits for gift cards at selected other retailers like Amazon, Nike, Sephora and Uber when they show up to eat, has raised $30 million in funding, and alongside that it is also announcing that it has acquired another industry startup, VenueBook, a platform for event planners to reserve space at restaurants and other venues. Today VenueBook has some 120,000 event planners using its service across the New York tristate area, Denver, San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, and the wider Washington, D.C. region.

The terms of the deal are not being disclosed, nor is the valuation of Seated. The funding is being led by Insight Partners and Craft Ventures, Greycroft (where Seated’s co-founder and executive chairman Bo Peabody is also a venture partner) and Rho Capital Partners are also participating. This appears to be the first funding disclosed by Seated since being founded in 2017 by Peabody and Brice Gumpel, although it had previously raised a seed round.

New York-based Seated had its start in the world of booking tables for in-restaurant eating — a business that has to date racked up some 900,000 reserved seats and $37 million in revenue for its restaurant partners across NYC, Boston, Atlanta and Chicago (covering around 800 independent restaurants in all at the moment), with some additional $7 million in tips for staff.

But in recent months it’s been recalibrating what it does to meet the needs of the moment, which include diversifying beyond providing reservations to in-restaurant individual diners. That’s included the launch of Seated at Home, a takeout service that is positioned as a competitor to the likes of GrubHub and UberEats with a 0% commission on orders. And now, the acquisition of VenueBook adds an event planning service into the mix that takes its booking platform beyond the walls of local eateries.

“We are always looking for new ways to support restaurants’ profitability and longevity, and with the acquisition of VenueBook, Seated Events offers a new way for restaurants to drive demand in yet another revenue stream,” said Gumpel, who is the startup’s CEO, in a statement. “COVID-19 has proved to be one of the toughest challenges the restaurant industry has ever faced and this funding will help us refine our current products to ensure we’re doing whatever we can to help our restaurant partners keep their doors open and remain profitable.”

In terms of just how hard restaurants have been hit, the statistics speak for themselves. Researchers from Harvard Business School noted in a recent essay that 40% of restaurants in the US shuttered two months into the pandemic, putting 8 million people out of work, three times more job losses than any other industry.

And when some started to reopen, they were facing major investments as they retooled their businesses to cater to how people are “eating out” now — significantly more takeout and delivery, and a lot of eating outdoors. Even so, diner numbers in June were down more than 65% versus a year ago, with the National Restaurant Association in the US predicting a drop of $240 billion in revenue for the year, with more than $120 billion during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic alone.

Some countries are trying to offset this huge hit: in the UK, the government has started its “Eat Out to Help Out” scheme, which essentially subsidises the cost of meals by up to 50% when people eat out at participating restaurants.

That’s not the case in the US at large, however, with federal government relief programs like the Paycheck Protection Program targeted across industry verticals.

That has opened an opportunity for startups that are building tech to at least make what business opportunities are available more accessible to a wider number of users at both ends of its two-sided marketplace, those looking to eat out or meet in restaurants, and the restaurants (and now, other venues) themselves.

The tech is about measuring footfall, providing analytics and more insights into how to fill venues and kitchen utilisation in a more efficient way, but that is at the backend. On the surface, the startup makes a point of touting how low-tech it is, requiring little more than a smartphone to use it. That sets it apart from a number of other restaurant service startups, which often sell specific tablets and other hardware to be able to use their software.

Indeed, the restaurant business is not known for being high-tech — one reason why you might argue many get taken for a ride by delivery and other startups that promise to handle all the fussy tech stuff on their behalf. So in an industry where typically profits are no more than 4-5% of revenue (and those are the lucky ones), the shift into events is a critical way of improving margins at a time when restaurants’ prime revenue generation has been pulled out from under them. Events are estimated to make up 10-15% of a restaurant’s revenue, and up to 20% of a restaurant’s profit, Seated notes. , Seated Events provides a seamless way for restaurants to begin rebuilding this critical revenue stream, allowing families or smaller groups of people who would like to take extra precautions while dining out to book private rooms.

“Events are not only an important part of a restaurant’s revenue stream, but they’re important for internal operations. Restaurant events help to increase employee retention because both front and back of the house employees are able to exercise creativity and tap into different skill sets while planning and executing events,” said Peabody in a statement (Peabody himself also owned and been on the boards of a number of restaurant businesses, in a long entrepreneurial career that has also included founding Tripod — a verrrry early social network sold to Lycos in 1997 and being the founding chairman of Everyday Health, which was sold to Ziff Davis). “We are thrilled to be able to offer yet another way for restaurants to maximize their profitability. With Seated Events, Seated at Home, and Seated, restaurants can drive demand to their three primary sources of revenue in a single, easy to use rewards platform.”

All this means that even at a time when restaurants feel like a risky bet, investors are interested:

“Restaurants are a vital part of our culture and communities, and the industry has been completely upended by COVID-19. It’s been impressive to watch Seated’s unwavering commitment to help restaurants thrive as they quickly adapted their rewards platform to offer delivery, and now events, in order to continue to meet restaurants’ needs,” said Thilo Semmelbauer, Managing Director at Insight Partners, in a statement. “Seated’s expanded vision is compelling and this one-stop platform will be an important piece of the restaurant industry’s recovery and evolution.”

Current smartphone-based exposure notification systems (ENS) like the one created jointly by Apple and Google are a clever way of leveraging modern technology to support comprehensive contact tracing efforts by health agencies worldwide. But the COVID-19 pandemic is not what anyone had in mind when the Bluetooth standard was created, so the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is working to create a new specification that would allow wearable devices to work in tandem with smartphones to expand the reach of ENS tech.

That would mean that devices like wristworn smartwatches and activity/health trackers could also participate in systems that track potential exposure and provide notifications about potential COVID-19 contact events. It may seem like a small tweak if you assume that most smartphone users are seldom without those devices, but Bluetooth SIG points out that expanding to wearables could help include groups of people who aren’t typically smartphone users – including young, school-aged children, and older adults in care facilities – in ENS efforts.

You could easily see how that would be useful, once this new spec is completed and incorporated into deployed Bluetooth standards. Schools could potential mandate use of simple, cheap Bluetooth-enabled wearables to track potential exposure as they return to physical classroom education, for instance.

It’s too early to say exactly how and when this will be deployed – the Bluetooth SIG says that it plans to have an initial draft of the new spec available “in the next few months” for its members to review. But the group has powerful members including Apple, Microsoft, Intel and others, and the technology proposed would allow Apple and Google to incorporate wearables into their existing exposure notification platform, while preserving the privacy-protecting aspects of the tech, as illustrated in the infographic below.

Launch startup Skyrora had a successful test launch of its Skylark Micro rocket from Iceland on Sunday, with the rocket achieving its highest ever altitude at a height of 26.86 km (just under 17 miles). The four meter (13 foot) sub-orbital rocket took off from a mobile launch site at Iceland’s Langanes Peninsula that was set up in just a few days prior to the flight.

Skylark Micro is a vehicle that Skyrora is using to prepare the way for its eventual orbital small payload launch vehicle Skyrora XL, which it hopes to begin flying sometime in 2023. The purpose of this launch in Iceland, aside from demonstrating the flexibility of the company’s mobile launching model, was to test the electronics and communications on board the Skylark Micro, which will eventually be used for the company’s larger operational launch craft as well.

Skyrora flew a similar rocket earlier this year, with a launch from a small island off the coast of Scotland in June. That rocket only climbed to around 6 km (3.7 miles), however, making this its highest flight attempt by a wide margin. This attempt also included a recover attempt for both stages of the two-stage Skylark Micro rocket, which separated and deployed parachutes to return to an ocean splashdown, but the startup says that they haven’t been able to find either stage yet, though the search continues.

The ability to stand up and launch from another site so quickly is another key demonstration of this test. That could be a significant advantage – one that’s being pursued by a number of small payload launch startups. It’s a key capability that government and military customers are looking for in responsive launch services providers, though of course it’ll need to scale up significantly to support larger vehicles like the planned Skyrora XL rocket this company hopes to eventually field.