Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Customs is the sieve of international supply chains. And yet despite its critical role, clearing customs for freight brokers can be a slow and opaque process reliant on manual data entry and prone to errors.

Silicon Valley-based KlearView has developed a platform that aims to bring customs clearance into the digital age. Now, with $16 million new funding, Klearview aims to expand its geographic reach and to improve its product to cover increasingly complex export-import verticals and time-sensitive shipments.

The company is has certification to handle any import into the U.S., no matter what the commodity is. Klearview is close to getting certified in Canada and UK, and plans to expand to Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Germany. Klearview has about two dozen customers.

The Series A funding round was led by GreatPoint Ventures with additional participation from Autotech Ventures, Argean Capital and Monta Vista Capital . Ashok Krishnamurthi, managing partner at GreatPoint Ventures, will join KlearNow’s board. Daniel Hoffer from Autotech Ventures joining as a board observer.

“This is a significant opportunity to transform an archaic industry that is key to global commerce,” Krishnamurthi said in a statement.

The freight ecosystem is filled with different players from the factories and port authorities to the ship lingers and the last-mile delivery companies. Each of them have their own systems.

“There’s no one system that you can transmit the data to,” KlearView founder and CEO Sam Tyagi said in a recent interview. “So everybody dumps technology down to a PDF or a PNG or some sort of format that everybody can read. The broker gets those documents, and then they print it out — so now they become non-digital.”

If you go to any customs brokers office they look like the old doctor’s office where all those folders are there with nicely arranged, really organized but very manual process,” he added. From here, Tyagi said, a broker will read off from those printed out documents and type the information into another system that is communicated to Customs and Border Patrol’s system.

“It is very manual, it’s very small, and they work in a siloed system,” Tyagi said. “There is no visibility for the customer, or the importer and it’s very costly because of the manual intervention.”

KlearNow developed a digital customs clearance platform that aims to be agnostic. This allows importers, customs brokers and freight forwarders to integrate with local customs authorities and conduct business on a single digital platform remotely and in real time. The platform automates this process to eliminate errors and reduces the time to clear customs. KlearView says it can slash customs clearance times from hours to minutes.

The startup is also betting that its platform will find new customers in this remote work era that was caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Custom brokers, who might normally travel into central offices and manage physical paperwork, are now faced with completing that task from home.

“Remote work is impossible for these people,” because they often need to access large format printers, Tyagi said. 

The company said its digital platform can funnel new clients, like these newly remote workers, directly to brokers for global customs clearance.

Tyagi said the company has also added new capabilities in response to COVId-19, such as expediting their FDA module to clear much-needed medical supplies and is temporarily offering free clearance for non-profit organizations that are importing masks, hand sanitizers, and ventilators.

Automatic, makers of a connected car dongle, emailed customers today to announce that the company will shut down all operations May 28. The company says it’s the casualty of the COVID-19 shutdown.

“Like many other companies in the United States, the COVID-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business,” it writes, “and we have made the difficult decision to discontinue the Automatic connected car product, service, and platform.”

The information, also posted to the company’s site, notes that service will remain active until the end of day on May 28, at which point its services will cease. That includes crash alerts, location sharing and roadside assistance. The “Log in with Automatic” service and third-party apps will shut down a month later.

Founded in California in 2011, the startup was purchased by satellite radio conglomerate SiriusXM six years later. Automatic’s $100 dongle gained traction for its easy to use car-monitoring system. It launched an SDK for third-party app developers in May 2015, raising a $24 million round the following month. It also managed to partner with a number of key insurance providers over the years, thanks to its ability to offer additional insights into driving habits.

The company came under fire last May after it announced that it would be ending support for the first two generations of its products. As of this May, support will end for the new products, as well. Automatic will be offering some rebates for a limited number of customers. 

NASA and SpaceX’s most defining moment of our current space era is coming up at the end of this month, with its Demo-2 mission on May 27. The mission will be the first ever launch for SpaceX with humans on board, and for NASA, it’ll mark the first return to U.S.-based astronaut launches since the Shuttle program flew its last flight in 2011. On Friday, representatives from both SpaceX and NASA briefed the media on the mission and the specifics of what it will involve when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley board the Crew Dragon for its debut crewed performance.

The first thing to note about this mission is that it’s still technically a test, as noted in the “demo” name. This is the capstone demonstration in a series of such missions that will fully human-rate the SpaceX Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 for operational use. As noted during today’s press briefings, a big chunk of the actual human rating process occurs during this final mission – in fact, the majority of the actual final human rating happens on this flight, despite the many years of preparation and live tests to date, including the Demo-1 mission which was essentially a full round-trip flight, just without any astronauts on board.

Even though it’s technically a demonstration, the stakes couldn’t be higher – SpaceX has a lot to prove here, and it bears the utmost responsibility n terms of keeping Behnken and Hurley safe for the duration of the mission. Which, it turns out, is actually going to be longer than originally planned: NASA says the mission will last anywhere between 30 days and 119 days, depending on a few different factors, the most significant of which being how quickly the agency ends up being able to launch the first operational Commercial Crew mission, Crew-1, which will carry four astronauts, including two from NASA and one from Japan’s space agency. The Crew Dragon used on this Demo mission could technically remain on orbit for over 200 days, but the purpose of this mission was not originally intended to be staffing the International Space Station, though that’s now part of the plan as a sort of stretch goal.

The teams also revealed today that the Crew Dragon used for Demo-1 will carry not only the astronauts, but also some cargo for the ISS as well. SpaceX also flies dedicated ISS resupply missions using its non-crew Dragon capsule, but this Crew Dragon will bring just a few additional supplies and scientific material along for the ride.

In terms of timeline, the mission begins with a launch and ascent, followed by the second stage separation (with Crew Dragon attached). The first stage booster performs a flip and “boostback burn,” which sets it on its path to return to Earth for a powered landing. Meanwhile Dragon separates from the second stage in space, and heads on to the ISS, which it’ll reach in anywhere from between two and 48 hours after liftoff depending on the position of the space station at the time of launch.

The exact launch time could vary greatly depending on weather, and there are a number of launch opportunities in late May through June in case there’s a need to scrub. Weather during this time in Florida can be a bit hard to accurately predict, as noted by SpaceX’s head of commercial crew, and the conditions necessary to trigger a scrub are less severe than they would be for a mission where there aren’t any humans on board, out of an abundance of caution.

Once the Crew Dragon is in space on its way to the ISS, however, the capsule will rendezvous with the station through as series of phased burns and then an approach, followed by an automated docking process once it reaches close proximity to the station. Crew Dragon has a fully automated docking process, and bypasses entirely even the need for astronauts on board the ISS to capture the spacecraft using the robotic Canadarm, which has been required for the older Dragon capsules and other astronaut-bearing Soyuz craft.

Once docked, Crew Dragon will pressurize and the hatch will open so the astronauts can board and carry on their mission with their colleagues on the station. On board the ISS, Benhken and Doug will perform duties including conducting experiments and running maintenance on the orbital research platform, before they eventually depart by climbing back into Crew Dragon, undocking, jettisoning the “trunk” or cargo compartment of the capsule, performing a deorbit burn to get into reentry position and then deploying parachutes once in the Earth’s atmosphere to slow their final descent into the Atlantic Ocean. From departure to splashdown should take approximately 24 hours.

Other logistics details shared by the teams performing the mission include that the crew will enter a mandatory quarantine beginning on May 16 and lasting until the mission date, and that mission control crew who need to be on site for the launch will be observing a six-foot distancing rule because of COVID-19, and control stations have been arranged to make this possible.

The mission itself doesn’t sound all that complex when broken down step-by-step, but it represents the culmination of years of hard work on both SpaceX and NASA’s part. The U.S. has been without a homegrown ride to the ISS since 2011, and this is the closest yet we’ve gotten to a return to an era of regular human spaceflight from American soil, so it’s definitely going to be something you’ll want to watch live when the launch happens on May 27.

Gaming platforms have earned serious clout with investors in recent years, add in the VC excitement surrounding collaboration tools and it’s no surprised there’s interest in backing another gaming chat app.

Guilded is creating a chat platform designed for competitive gaming and eSports that focuses heavily on keeping gamers organized and connected with their teams.

The startup’s sell is that Discord (currently valued at $2 billion) has moved too broadly in recent years and that their feature set isn’t actually focused on what competitive gamers are looking for, forcing them to turn to spreadsheets and form submissions when they’re looking to get serious about organization.

“Discord is really great for a lot of communities, but we’re building chat specifically for gamers,” Guilded CEO Eli Brown told TechCrunch.

Guilded just announced that they’ve raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners. Initialized Capital, Susa Ventures and Sterling.VC also participated in the deal. Guilded was in Y Combinator’s S17 class.

Guilded is a bit more tightly organized than Discord, with the focus more dialed in on teams and server-based structures. The deep integration of scheduling and calendars is perhaps the biggest differentiation of the platform.

In addition to text chat, users can create inline events, upload documents and post screen captures as well. You can fire up the app while you’re actually playing a game and use voice chat to communicate with your server. Guilded currently supports more than 400 titles.

As with any new communications tool, Guilded’s challenge will be chipping away at competing products, namely Discord, and achieving a critical mass of users and servers that can self-sustain moving forward.

Looking ahead, the platform is looking to get deeper into facilitating gameplay. Users can already browse through public servers to immediately join or apply to be accepted to a private server and these servers can be further broken down into individual groups or channels. Guilded is building out a tournaments feature to match servers with similar skill levels to each other, a feature that’s launching in the coming months.

Back in January, Georgia Tech professor David Joyner got a cryptic email from a student based in Wuhan, China.

“I’m under quarantine, but my internet access is okay so I have more time to spend on classwork, I wanted to let you know,” the message read. Unsure why Wuhan would be under quarantine, Joyner did a quick Google search and saw the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic.

“I thought, there’s something going on in Wuhan so maybe we’ll have some students affected by it,” Joyner said. Fast-forward two months and the coronavirus is a household term. All of Joyner’s students, regardless of geography, have been impacted by the pandemic.

It has been a little over a month since colleges and schools across the country started shutting down due to COVID-19. Edtech startups had a surge in usage and a demand for more resources than ever. Now that the adoption scramble has slowed, the same startups are reckoning with unprecedented use cases.

Everyone knows how they’re expected to behave in a physical classroom, but can you stop a student from cheating when taking a test in their bedroom at home? How should teachers offer 1:1 time and take questions during a lesson?

Piazza founder Pooja Sankar says teachers face more open questions: “What does it mean to record myself? What does it mean to have a camera on my face? How do I know I can hold a class with reliable internet connection?”

Back in March, Bandcamp announced that it was waiving its share of the revenue for a day, in order to support artists whose livelihood have ground to a screeching halt amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The March 20 event pulled in an impressive $4.3 million for artists, amounting to the biggest sales day in the platform’s history. The earnings from music and merchandise amounted to 15x Bandcamp’s normal haul for a 24 period, with 11 items being sold per second.

Earlier this week, the site said that it would continue to do so for the first Friday of the next three months. That includes June 5, July 3 and today. Don’t know where to start? Might I recommend checking out the new album Ultrasonic from Field Works? It’s a lovely and engrossing ambient work built using field recordings of the endangered Indiana bats. Haven’t bats had it rough enough of late?

If you need further recommendations, 150 artists and labels are also participating in a number of different ways. Some, like Arts & Crafts, Kill Rock Stars, Sub Pop, Saddlecreek, Merge and Matador are also giving all of the revenue to artists. Others like Cloud Nothings, Deerhoof and my personal favorite, The Hold Steady, have released new material. Others still like Cooking Vinyl and Sufjan Stevens are giving proceeds to related charity. Here’s the full list. 

Seems like a nice win-win all around. And hey, we could all use a little new music to get through this. 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted Friday that the company’s stock price was “too high” in his opinion, immediately sending shares into a free fall and in possible violation of an agreement reached with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last year.

Tesla shares fell nearly 12% in the half hour following his stock price tweets — just one of many sent out in rapid fire that covered everything from demands to “give people back their freedom” and lines from the U.S. National Anthem to quotes from poet Dylan Thomas and a claim that he will sell all of his possessions.

The SEC declined to comment on whether this was a violation of a settlement agreement. Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

The meltdown on Twitter occurred as SpaceX — Musk’s other company — participated in a live press conference on one of its most important missions ever.

Musk’s tweet comes almost exactly a year after he reached a settlement agreement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that gave the CEO freedom to use Twitter —within certain limitations — without fear of being held in contempt for violating an earlier court order.

Under that agreement, Musk can tweet as he wishes except when it’s about certain events or financial milestones. In those cases, Musk must seek pre-approval from a securities lawyer, according to the agreement filed in April 2019 with Manhattan federal court.

Musk is supposed to seek pre-approval if his tweets include events regarding the company’s securities, including his acquisition or disposition of shares, nonpublic legal or regulatory findings or decisions.

He’s also supposed to get pre-approval on any tweets about the company’s financial condition or guidance, potential or proposed mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures, sales or delivery numbers, new or proposed business lines or any event requiring the filing of a Form 8-K such as a change in control or a change in the company’s directors.

While global stay-at-home orders have been a blow to most companies, they’ve also created opportunities for businesses helping to keep people entertained. So if you’re a YouTube creator hoping to capture some additional eyeballs while everyone’s stuck at home, online video agency Butter Works has released an interactive report outlining the most promising topics for you to focus on.

CEO Paul Greenberg explained that the report is drawn from the ongoing analysis that Butter Works performs to guide companies’ strategies around video production and distribution. (The agency has done work for clients like Apple, Coca-Cola and Netflix)

In this case, it was looking at which video topics were getting the most views and the most engagement from U.S. audiences — and then comparing the topics that are currently attracting audiences with the actual number of videos posted on YouTube in a given topic.

The ideal topic for a video creator, then, is one where there’s a lot of audience interest but not many videos (yet).

Image Credits: Butter Works

So what did Butter Works find? The report points to the biggest opportunities as cooking (especially budget meals), comedy (celebrity talk shows, skits pranks and parodies), memes (particularly boredom cures and K-pop), games (outdoor-to-indoor and group games) and video games (especially coronavirus-related).

Greenberg added that this analysis is based on two recent weeks of audience behavior, and will be updated regularly.

“Normally we’d look over a three-month time … but [given the current situation], we want to refresh it every two weeks,” he said. “I agree that it’s such a fluid situation right now, it’s changing pretty fast.”

You can see the full report, including recommendations about video length, on the Butter Works website.

Apple’s earnings show the impact of COVID-19, NVIDIA’s top scientist shares an open source ventilator design and Amazon anticipates big spending in the coming months.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 1, 2020.

1. iPhone sales are down, ahead of uncertain times for the industry

Apple device sales have taken a hit, but the company’s services are doing swell, according to its latest earnings report. The iPhone, the longtime cornerstone of the company’s hardware portfolio, hit $28.96 billion in revenue for Q2, down from $31.1 billion from this time last year. The iPad and Mac lines saw drops for the quarter, as well.

In fact, a new Canalys report suggests that smartphone sales are down 13% globally.

2. NVIDIA’s top scientist develops open-source ventilator that can be built with $400 in readily-available parts

The mechanical ventilator design developed by NVIDIA’s Bill Daily can be assembled quickly, using off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of around $400 – making it an accessible and affordable alternative to traditional, dedicated ventilators which can cost $20,000 or more.

3. Amazon Q1 beats on net sales of $75.5B but posts net income of $2.5B, down $1B on a year ago

The company’s net sales were up 26% year-year-over. Of those sales, $41 billion was attributable to product sales and $33 billion to services (which includes AWS, but also streaming and other non-physical goods). CEO Jeff Bezos acknowledged the challenges the company is facing, but he also reiterated that it plans to double down on spending in Q2.

4. Walmart is piloting a pricier 2-hour ‘Express’ grocery delivery service

Walmart now hopes to capitalize on the increased demand for speedier delivery with the introduction of a new service that allows consumers to pay to get to the front of the line. The retailer confirmed today it’s launching a new Walmart Grocery service called “Express,” which promises orders in two hours or less for an upcharge of $10 on top of the usual delivery fee.

5. 5 tips for starting a business with a stranger

Co-founder and CEO Sam Pillar argues that his startup Jobber is proof that starting a company with a stranger isn’t just doable, it can even be an advantage. That’s because it allowed them to arrive at big decisions and have productive debate without the baggage and bias of a pre-existing relationship, establishing Jobber’s feedback-oriented culture. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Cliqz pulls the plug on a European anti-tracking alternative to Google search

Cliqz, a Munich-based anti-tracking browser with private search baked in that has sought to offer a local alternative to Google powered by its own search index, is shutting down — claiming this arm of its business has been blindsided by the coronavirus crisis. However, the company is not closing down entirely, and a spokesman confirmed that Ghostery will continue.

7. JetBrains Academy for learning code launches for free during COVID-19 pandemic

Most online coding courses, either free or paid, essentially suggest you download a project or copy-paste code from their snippets going through their courses. Unlike JetBrains, they tend not to include Integrated Development Environments, which are more helpful in the learning process.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

SpaceX is getting ready to launch its first-ever spacecraft with humans on board, the Commercial Crew Demo-2 mission (DM-2) that will take-off from Florida on May 27. There are still a couple things remaining to finish up prior to flight, including a final parachute system test that’s happening later on today. The company also posted a video recap of its most recent uncrewed Crew Dragon flight, the in-flight escape demonstration that it flew on January 19.

The video provides a look at the processes involved in the test, including a look at mission control, with astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley looking on during the flight from the ground. You can see the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch with the Crew Dragon attached, as well as watch it explode in a ball of fire (as intended) during the early emergency separation. Then, watch as the capsule itself speeds descends safety back to the ocean where it’s recovered by a SpaceX vessel at sea.

This is a demonstration of a key system that’s designed as a safety measure, to be used only in the unlikely event of a major malfunction of the rocket during the takeoff phase, but after the spacecraft has left the ground. The system works by quickly and automatically propelling the astronaut-carrying Crew Capsule away from the booster and second stage at a very high speed, to ensure the people aboard are at a safe distance in case of any explosions.

Along with a ground escape system for quickly vacating the capsule and launch area before takeoff, there are a number of safety measures required by NASA for any human spaceflight from U.S. soil with astronauts on board. SpaceX has so far demonstrated that these systems are ready to a degree that has satisfied the agency, and now has only a number of pre-flight checks and run-throughs to get through before the historic May 27 mission.