Category: UNCATEGORIZED

We’re gearing up for another great TC Sessions Robotics+AI March 3 at UC Berkeley, and we’ve got some big names to announce. Last week, it was AI expert Stuart Russell and today we’re pleased to note that we’ll be joined by Amazon Robotics Chief Technologist, Tye Brady.

A co-founder of MassRobotics, Brady has held a number of high profile positions throughout the robotics and aerospace industries, including positions at Draper Laboratory, the Massachusetts Autonomous Air Vehicle Research and Innovation Consortium and IEEE. It’s at Amazon, however, that he’s had his largest impact on the future of robotics and retail.

Founded in 2012 with the acquisition of Kiva Systems, Amazon Robotics leverages fulfillment center robots to transform warehouses across the nation. Amazon has amassed one of the world’s largest robotic workforces, with more than 100,000 deployed across various warehouses across the U.S. The system all present unique potential to help streamline the company’s massive number of packages.

During Brady’s tenure, the robotics have become an increasingly essential element of Amazon’s day-to-day operations, working alongside human counterparts to increase the efficiency of the company’s already speedy services. The executive will join us to discuss the company’s efforts and the future of the automation-driven workforce.

Join our 4th annual TC Sessions: Robotics & AI on March 3 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall for a remarkable day with the world’s top roboticists, investors, founders, and AI engineers. The day features a full day or programming lead by TechCrunch’s editors on the main stage, a pitch-off competition featuring early-stage startups, numerous breakout and speaker Q&A sessions, and much more.

Get your early bird pass here and save $100 before prices go up. Interested in sponsoring? Please get in touch.

An argument could be made that Google has over-indulged in its creation of way too many messaging apps in years past. But today’s launch of a new messaging service — this time within the confines of Google Photos — is an integration that actually makes sense.

The company is rolling out a way to directly message photos and chat with another user or users within the Google Photos app. The addition will allow users to quickly and easily share those one-off photos or videos with another person, instead of taking additional steps to build a shared album.

The feature itself is simple to use. After selecting a photo and tapping share, you can now choose a new option “Send in Google Photos.” You can then tap on the icon of your most frequent contacts or search for a user by name, phone number of email.

The recipient will need a Google account to receive the photos, however, because they’ll need to sign-in to view the conversation. That may limit the feature to some extent, as not everyone is a Google user. But with now a billion some Google Photos users out there, it’s likely that more of the people you want to share will have an account, rather than not.

You can also use this feature to start a group chat by selecting “New group,” then adding recipients.

Once a chat has been started, you can return to it at any time from the “Sharing” tab in Google Photos. Here, you’ll be able to see the photos and videos you each shared, comments, text chats and likes. You can also save the photos you want to your phone or tap on the “All Photos” option to see just the photos themselves without the conversations surrounding them.

Explains Google, the idea with the new direct sharing option is not to replace users’ preferred messaging apps — a strategy that differs from Google’s investments in apps like Hangouts and Allo in previous years. Instead, the feature wants to relocate some of the photo-sharing activity that takes place in messaging apps to Google Photos.

Google had tried a similar idea with direct video sharing and messaging from the YouTube app. But the company later shut down that feature ahead of YouTube’s announcement of the $170M FTC fine for violating U.S. children’s privacy laws, COPPA. Likely, the chat feature there would have complicated YouTube’s product, now under increased regulatory scrutiny, because many kids were using direct messaging as a way to work around parental controls and other blocks on traditional messaging apps.

Google Photos makes more sense as a place to directly message friends and family, though, and the Google account requirement means users will have to be 13 or older to gain access. (Unless parents created a Google account for their child).

Direct messaging was previously announced as “coming soon” alongside Google Photos’ big fall update that also included the launch of Stories and other features.

The new feature is launching today but the rollout will take place over the next week. It will be supported across platforms, including iOS, Android and web.

AWS, the cloud division of Amazon, just announced the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture. It is based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores.

Compared to first-generation Graviton processors (A1), today’s new chips should deliver up to 7x the performance of A1 instances in some cases. Floating point performance is now twice as fast. There are additional memory channels and cache speed memory access should be much faser.

The company is working on three types of Graviton2 EC2 instances that should be available soon. Instances with a “g” suffix are powered by Graviton2 chips. If they have a “d” suffix, it also means that they have NVMe local storage.

There will be :

• General purpose instances (M6g and M6gd)
• Compute-optimized instances (C6g and C6gd)
• Memory-optimized instances (R6g and R6gd)

You can choose instances with up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory and 25 Gbps networking.

And you can see that ARM-powered servers are not just a fad. AWS already promises a 40% better price/performance ratio with ARM-based instances when you compare them with x86-based instances.

AWS has been working with operating system vendors and independent software vendors to help them release software that runs on ARM. ARM-based EC2 instances support Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. It also works with multiple container services (Docker, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service).

When it comes to workplace productivity and communication apps, it can often feel like Slack, Trello and Asana have the market cornered.

But Aydin Mirzaee saw past the crowded space. In his previous work, Aydin often found himself wishing for a better feedback and productivity tool — and one that catered specifically to people managing a team. In 2017, he and his co-founders began working on Fellow, based in Ottawa.

“Account managers have Salesforce,” Aydin says. “We didn’t see the equivalent tool for managers of people, so we decided to build Fellow.”

The idea clearly resonated: in June, Fellow landed Shopify as one of its first customers and closed $6.5 million in seed funding. Aydin offered a lot of great tips for fundraising during our interview. Below, I’ve gathered four pieces of actionable feedback from this Canadian founder.

1. Dig the well before you’re thirsty 

Before working on Fellow, Aydin had already started and sold his first software company, Fluidware. But there was one major difference between Aydin’s first startup and Fellow: Fluidware was entirely bootstrapped.
“Once we sold our first company, I knew that at some point there would be another one,” Aydin says. “So I had to build up my network from scratch, knowing that someday it was going to be useful.”
With the possibility of creating a venture-backed startup on the horizon, Aydin attended VC events and messaged venture firms, introducing himself and asking if they were open to meetings or if they were hosting any events in the near future.

It’s like that proverb: dig the well before you’re thirsty.

“Start now,” he says. “Go to VC-sponsored events, build up that network, and offer to advise companies in their portfolios.”
The key is to create those relationships and offer value long before you’re making any asks of them. Not only will VCs get to know you and value your expertise, but you’ll also get a sense of which partners you really enjoy spending time with — which is even more important in the long run.

2. Use the ‘caller ID test’

Inovia Capital led Fellow’s seed round. The company also got investments from Felicis Ventures, Garage Capital and several angels. How did Aydin choose his seed investors? He chose the partners who he aligned with best.

“It’s not the firm that matters,” Aydin says. “What really matters is who the partner is.”

And when it comes to picking a VC partner, Aydin recommends asking yourself a really simple question to figure out if you’re working with the right one: “Are you excited when your phone rings and you see that person’s name on the caller ID?”

If so, great. If you feel anxiety or dread, however, you may be better off with a different investor. For Aydin, choosing Inovia as a lead investor was a natural fit since he’d known Karamdeep Nijjar for nearly four years after they first met in the startup space (turns out there really is something to the ‘dig the well before you’re thirsty’ thing).

“I always had so much fun talking and working with Karam that it was just like, ‘Oh, this is just another excuse for me to talk to you all the time,’” Aydin says.

At its re:Invent conference, AWS today announced the launch of its Inferentia chips, which it initially announced last year. These new chips promise to make inferencing, that is, using the machine learning models you pre-trained earlier, significantly faster and cost effective.

As AWS CEO Andy Jassy noted, a lot of companies are focussing on custom chips that let you train models (though Google and others would surely disagree there). Inferencing tends to work well on regular CPUs, but custom chips are obviously going to be faster. With Inferentia, AWS offers lower latency and three times the throughput at 40% lower cost–per inference compared to a regular G4 instance on EC4.

The new Inf1 instances promise up to 2,000 TOPS and feature integrations with TensorFlow, PyTorch and MXNet, as well as the ONNX format for moving models between frameworks. For now, it’s only available in the EC2 compute service, but it wil come to AWS’s container services and its SageMaker machine learning service soon, too.

Updating…

Continuing their annual tradition, Apple and Google have released their list of the best apps and games of 2019. Apple, for the first time, held a real-world event to celebrate its winners, where it crowned A.I.-powered camera app, Spectre Camera as its best iPhone app of the year and Sky: Children of the Light as its best game. Google, meanwhile, dubbed teen messaging app Ablo as its app winner and Call of Duty: Mobile as its best game.

Apple’s event held in New York put its winning developers in front of media in order to demonstrate their apps and games. The event was less formal than the Apple Design Awards held at the company’s worldwide developer conference each year, and instead focused on private presentations to press.

Apple said its winners this year sit “at the nexus of digital and pop culture,” but its list really better highlights what Apple thinks are the key selling features for its devices. For example, with Spectre Camera by Lux Optics, it’s about the iPhone’s ability to serve as your main camera even for complicated tasks like long-exposure photos.

The iPad app of the year was Flow by Moleskine, an app that already won a 2019 Design Award. In this case, the digital notebook app shows off a top iPad use case of being a device aimed at creative professionals. Users can take advantage of its digital graphite pencils and chisel-tipped markers to draw and sketch as they could in real life.

The Mac app of the year, Affinity Publisher by Serif Labs, allows users to design and publish books, magazines, brochures, posters, and more — a task that best lends itself to a larger device with a full-sized keyboard.

Finally, the Apple TV app of the year, The Explorers by The Explorers Network, showcases something that works best on your TV’s larger, high-def screen. The app’s community of photographers and videographers are working together to create a visual inventory of the natural world, which you can enjoy on your big screen.

Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year, Sky: Children of the Light by thatgamecompany (makers of Journey, the 2013 Game of the Year), iPad Game of the Year Hyper Light Drifter by Abylight S.L., and Mac Game of the Year GRIS by Nomada Studio, are all the sort of beautiful-designed games that Apple prefers to showcase.

Today’s gaming market has become over-filled with free-to-play titles due to the sort of supported business models that work on the App Store. That’s something Apple Arcade is an attempt to correct, in fact. Apple winners show that even free games can be works of art.

Sky: Children...is a free to play social adventure with in-app purchases, but is also beautiful and creative. Similarly, adventure game Hyper Light, was already a visual arts award winner at the Independent Games Festival. And GRIS has been described as one of the most gorgeous games.

[gallery ids="1919528,1919530,1919526"]

The Apple TV Game of the Year, Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap by DotEmu was developed by LizardCube with the cooperation of series creator Ryuichi Nishizawa, to bring an 80’s cult classic back to life. That’s part of one of Apple’s larger App Store gaming trends — a year of “blockbusters reimagined.”

Apple also gave mention of other launches in this space like Mario Kart Tour, Dr. Mario World, Minecraft Eart, Pokémon Masters, Assassin’s Creed Rebellion, Gears POP!, The Elder Scrolls: Blades, Alien: Blackout, and Google’s Game of the Year, Call of Duty: Mobile.

And in what could be the start of a new tradition, Apple also anointed an Apple Arcade Game of the Year with the gorgeous, fast-paced and music-filled Sayonara Wild Hearts developed by Simogo and published by Annapurna Interactive.

Apple’s year-end list also highlighted App Store non-gaming trend of  “Storytelling,” which featured a variety of apps to tell stories, including visually, as well as through audio and text. Noted apps here were Anchor, Canva, Unfold, Steller, Spark Camera, Over, and Wattpad.

Google doesn’t go all-out as Apple does for its “Best of 2019” picks.

Instead, it simply featured best app Ablo and best game Call of Duty: Mobile as its editorial picks, then leaves the rest to a User’s Choice. Voters selected the same game, but gave the Best App award to a video editor, Glitch Video Effects.

[gallery ids="1919563,1919561,1919562"]

Google’s full list also includes Google Play’s best ebooks, audiobooks, TV shows and Movies, which you can see here.

On December 11 and December 12, some of the brightest mind in fintech are coming to TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin. While we’ll sit down with some of the most famous tech CEOs and investors, the agenda is particularly packed when it comes to fintech.

On the main stage, I’ll interview GoCardless CEO Hiroki Takeuchi about the company’s impressive trajectory. GoCardless has a shot at becoming a global leader when it comes to payments via direct debit. The startup has been building an API that lets you collect payments at a global scale, even if your customers are on the other side of the planet.

Later that day, Sophia Bendz, Siraj Khaliq, Hiro Tamura and Niall Wass, all key partners at London-based VC firm Atomico are here to talk about their investment strategy. And Atomico has invested in many well-known fintech names over the years, such as LendInvest, Klarna and Habito.

Talking about Klarna, the company’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is making his Disrupt debut to talk about how he turned a small Stockholm-based startup into a payment giant. The company is now looking to storm the U.S. and has managed to reach a higher valuation than almost any other privately held company in the world.

Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss from omni:us is going to talk about how she’s using machine learning to turn complicated insurance contracts and legal documents into actionable insights. And if you think cryptocurrencies are part of the fintech industry, we’ll also sit down with Ethereum researcher Justin Drake to talk about scaling the Ethereum blockchain.

Charlie Delingpole, founder and CEO of ComplyAdvantage and Yoni Assia, founder and CEO of eToro will share a stage in a discussion that is pretty self-explanatory, “How to Radically Change Finance Through Fintech Startups”.

These are just some highlights from the Disrupt Berlin agenda. Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to these discussions and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

One of the biggest trends in the world of financial technology has been an ongoing push towards consolidation, where larger fish are snapping up smaller fish (including a proliferation of interesting startups) to get improved economies of scale in a business model where every transaction brings incremental returns. But today, a startup that has built the concept of consolidation into its basic DNA has raised another round of funding to continue doubling down on its business.

Rapyd — a London-based startup that has built an API that lets customers tap into a range of financial services spanning payments, checkout, funds collection, fund disbursements, compliance as a service, foreign exchange, card issuing and soon logistics across a wide range of geographies — has picked up an additional $20 million. Rapyd’s valuation with the funding is now at $1.2 billion (up from just under $1 billion in October).

The $20 million comes from new investment firm Durable Capital Partners.

Notably, it was only in October that Rapyd announced a $100 million raise. CEO and co-founder and Arik Shtilman said that Rapyd has now raised $180 million in total, with previous investors in the startup including Oak HC/FT Tiger Global, Coatue, General Catalyst, Target Global, Stripe and Entrée Capital. (Stripe, itself a fast-growing fintech upstart, remains only a financial investor in the company, Shtilman confirmed.)

Durable is the firm founded by Henry Ellenbogen, formerly a star investor at T. Rowe Price, in what Rapyd said was the firm’s first investment. (Note: Durable was also announced earlier as an investor in Convoy’s $400 million round, some clear signs that it’s open for business now.)

With Rapyd only recently raising a round, Shtilman said that the reason for the — err — rapid follow up was because the company is gearing up to make some acquisitions, as it too moves in on the consolidation trend by adding in more tools into its “Swiss Army Knife” of services.

“We’ve started to look at two acquisitions that were bigger than what we originally planned, with prices more in the range of $100 million,” he said. Up to now, Rapyd has largely built its technology from the ground up, but this will be about “getting at new business very quickly,” he added. Both deals are in progress now and are likely to close in February / March. One is of a card issuing platform (a la Marqeta), and the other is of a company based in Asia Pacific that is a significant player in payments in the region. 

The focus on Asia Pacific both for testing out new services and acquisitions is in part because this, along with Latin America, have shaped up to be important geographies for the company. In the last three months, Rapyd has signed on 20 additional large-scale companies, Shtilman said, with several of them based out of, or serving, customers out of the two regions.

In fact, Rapyd doesn’t talk much about actual customers, but they include e-commerce merchants, gig-economy platforms — including Uber — financial institutions, and technology providers. The basic pitch is that financial services are complex, and providing one like payments often means having to offer others. Building these from scratch if this is not your core competency can be time-consuming and costly, and so that is where a company like Rapyd steps in with its API.

This is what attracted its newest investor, too. “Durable Capital Partners LP has a vision to identify and invest in promising early stage growth companies and invest in teams that have bold ideas but can also execute at a world-class level and build much larger companies,” said Ellenbogen in a statement. “I believe the Fintech-as-a-Service category has tremendous potential as companies seek to embed financial services as an integral part of the next generation technology stack. I believe Rapyd is very well positioned to drive this trend and I believe Arik’s track record in scaling cloud-based businesses will deliver success in this sector.”

When we last talked with Rapyd in October, we asked Shtilman about whether the company would ever move into logistics as part of its range of tools. After all, when you think about the complexities of procuring, storing and moving goods, it’s clear that logistics is one of the cornerstones you need to get right in an online business.

He said that this was on the company’s roadmap, and now Rapyd is in a pilot in Indonesia — an interesting test bed, considering that the country’s is spread across thousands of islands — where it has integrated a logistics service and given access to a single merchant as stage one of its closed beta. It’s also in discussions with other companies about how it can incorporate their services into the Rapyd platform to provide further “logistics as a service” to customers. He also confirmed the Durable has been a help here, by making an introduction to Convoy as part of that wider strategy.

If you can’t stop dreaming about NoSQL databases, AWS re:Invent is the closest thing to heaven that you’ll find today. At 8 AM PT/11 AM ET/4 PM GMT, some of the brightest minds in cloud computing are going to introduce the upcoming features of AWS.

Along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, Amazon is building the infrastructure of the web. Countless startups use AWS as their only hosting provider. So it’s going to be interesting to see what Amazon has in store to beat their competitors on the cloud front.

Michigan-based in-space propulsion startup Orbion is working with a major new partner: The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Orbion has secured a research contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Propulsion Directorate, specifically aimed at helping the DOD “enhance resiliency of U.S. systems in space.”

Basically, it sounds like that will boil down to seeing how Orbion’s propulsion technology can be applied to DOD satellites when used in larger constellation form, to provide those satellites with the ability to move propulsively while in orbit, and to do so at a way that can scale cost-effectively. In a press release announcing the news, Orbion CEO Brad King says that volume is a strategy when it comes to fortifying U.S. systems in space agains potential foreign attack.

“One way to increase the resilience of space systems is to improve our nation’s ability to build and deploy small satellites in large numbers at low costs,” said King in a statement, “Orbion is developing mass-production techniques to build propulsion systems for commercial customers.  With this research contract we are investigating how or if our manufacturing processes must be modified to meet DOD requirements.”

It’s true that in the past, the U.S. and other international powers with access to space have mostly focused on large, expensive, singular pieces of orbital hardware as their strategic assets. Shifting to the small satellite constellation approach currently being pursued by a number of private companies definitely has advantages in terms of redundancy and replaceability.

Orbion’s entire business proposition as a startup is that its applying mass-production to in-space thrusters, which will bring down costs and make their technology accessible to a much wider range of potential clients than ever before, and practical for application in small satellite design. The DOD may not have the same budget-constraint issues as a cash-strapped satellite startup, but long-term cost savings that also comes with a tactical advantage is a hard bargain to pass up.