Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.

The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).

In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.

“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”

The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.

Manufacturer already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.

Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ WiFi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.

He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”

In other words, once attendees realize that they have access professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.

This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.

“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”

Evan Rifkin

As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.

But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.

Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.

The Rifkins told me that they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They can also create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.

Aircam is a new startup that allows anyone to get instant access to pictures taken by professional photographers at weddings, parties and other events.

The company was founded by brothers Evan and Ryan Rifkin, who previously co-founded Burstly, the company behind mobile app-testing service TestFlight (which was acquired by Apple).

In addition to officially launching Aircam today, they’re also announcing that the company has raised $6.5 million in seed funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Comcast Ventures.

“The process of finding a great photographer still sucks and the tools photographers use to share photos are antiquated for an industry worth over $10 billion,” said Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster in a statement. “Aircam provides real-time, location-aware and enhanced photos that today’s consumers expect with booking simplicity that will change the current playing field.”

The Rifkin brothers are pitching Aircam as “a real-time photo-sharing platform for professional and consumer photos.” To try out the technology, I visited the Aircam website and hit a button to see nearby photos. Then, as the Rifkins took photos with a DSLR camera, those photos appeared on the site nearly instantaneously. I, in turn, could send the photos to a printer in their office, or share photos from my phone.

Manufacturer already offer software to transfer photos wirelessly from their cameras to your computer. But with Aircam, the photos became accessible to everyone at an event, without requiring anyone except the photographer to install an app.

Ryan explained that the company is taking advantage of cameras’ WiFi connections (it currently works with Canon, Nikon and Sony devices) to send the photos to an app on the photographer’s phone, which then uploads the photos to the cloud.

He also said the team initially believed that Aircam would become the repository for photos taken by everyone attending an event. But in early testing, they saw that “the opposite is happening — people are putting their phones away.”

In other words, once attendees realize that they have access professional-quality photos, they can spend less time worrying about taking their own pictures with their phones and instead focus on being present at the event.

This should also make life easier for photographers, particularly since Aircam includes automated photo editing — the photos are color corrected (with nice touches like teeth whitening) without requiring any extra work from the photographer.

“If you ask photographers what’s their least favorite part of photography — one, it’s finding new business, and two, it’s the edits,” Ryan said. “Some people limit the number of events they’ll accept because of the editing work … With automatic edits, they shoot and they’re done.”

Evan Rifkin

As for finding new business, Evan said that the company tested this out by allowing photographers to offer Aircam as an additional option for their customers. (The company charges the photographers $50 per event.

But once customers had seen Aircam in action, they wanted to order it again, so Aircam is also launching its own marketplace (currently focused on Southern California) where you can book professional photographers for $99 per hour, with the Aircam service included as part of the package.

Or, if you want to try it out without hiring a pro photographer, you’ll be able to upload photos from your iPhone for free.

The Rifkins told me that they haven’t had any issues around privacy or content moderation so far, but they also noted that customers who are concerned about these issues can limit their guests’ upload capabilities. They can also create a custom URL for their event rather than making it discoverable to anyone nearby.

LogRocket is a startup on a mission to help companies root out and fix website app errors quickly and efficiently, and it seems to be going well. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures.

The company also announced a new tool called LogRocket Metrics to help developers understand how widespread a particular problem might be. It’s no secret that people tend to be impatient when an app or website isn’t working right, and you can lose a customer over a bad experience.

LogRocket CEO and co-founder Matthew Arbesfeld says the new tool provides deep analytics across the customer experience. “With this new functionality called LogRocket Metrics, the developer can search across all their customers to determine the frequency and the impact of a problem to see if it affected your conversion rate, how many people were affected and who was affected, “Arbesfeld explained.

He says this will work like an error search engine, and in fact, they are actually indexing every interaction to help the developer find wherever that error has occurred. “Let’s say you’re using a site and you see a specific error message on the screen. The developer who’s working on that site can actually search, kind of like Google, across every customer that saw that specific error message,” he said.

Typically the error will come to the attention of the development team after a person reports a problem through the site or by contacting customer service, and this provides a means to find out just how many other people might be seeing the same error.

As for the money, the company has raised over $30 million now. Arbesfeld says it still has most of its $11 million Series A in the bank, but as it grows they wanted to be well capitalized to take advantage, especially as it begins working with larger and larger customers.

He says he will be investing in areas you expect like engineering and sales and marketing, but also wants to start hiring more data scientists to take advantage of the data the company collects as a by-product of their business to build additional features like LogRocket Metrics.

LogRocket is a startup on a mission to help companies root out and fix website app errors quickly and efficiently, and it seems to be going well. Today, the company announced a $15 million Series B investment led by Battery Ventures.

The company also announced a new tool called LogRocket Metrics to help developers understand how widespread a particular problem might be. It’s no secret that people tend to be impatient when an app or website isn’t working right, and you can lose a customer over a bad experience.

LogRocket CEO and co-founder Matthew Arbesfeld says the new tool provides deep analytics across the customer experience. “With this new functionality called LogRocket Metrics, the developer can search across all their customers to determine the frequency and the impact of a problem to see if it affected your conversion rate, how many people were affected and who was affected, “Arbesfeld explained.

He says this will work like an error search engine, and in fact, they are actually indexing every interaction to help the developer find wherever that error has occurred. “Let’s say you’re using a site and you see a specific error message on the screen. The developer who’s working on that site can actually search, kind of like Google, across every customer that saw that specific error message,” he said.

Typically the error will come to the attention of the development team after a person reports a problem through the site or by contacting customer service, and this provides a means to find out just how many other people might be seeing the same error.

As for the money, the company has raised over $30 million now. Arbesfeld says it still has most of its $11 million Series A in the bank, but as it grows they wanted to be well capitalized to take advantage, especially as it begins working with larger and larger customers.

He says he will be investing in areas you expect like engineering and sales and marketing, but also wants to start hiring more data scientists to take advantage of the data the company collects as a by-product of their business to build additional features like LogRocket Metrics.

Autonomous drone-based transportation startup Volocopter has revealed its first partner for its new VoloDrone industrial and commercial electric vertical take-off and landing craft: John Deere . The agricultural and industrial heavy equipment company is working with Volocopter on a VoloDrone-based aerial crop-dusting system.

VoloDrone, which Voloctoper unveiled at the end of last month, has 18 rotors and a fully electric power system that can provide up to 30 minutes of flight time for the aircraft, and carry up to 440 lbs. It’s designed to operate fully autonomously along a set path, or be piloted remotely for manual control if needed. John Deere is equipping the VoloDrone with a sprayer and tank array mounted to its cargo connection points, which will be able to dispense pesticides, liquid fertilizer, anti-frost agents for unseasonable inclement weather and more. Both partners also see potential in applications like sowing seeds for new crops from the air.

The VoloDrone is potentially a better, more precise and more cost-effective alternative to using a helicopter for these applications, Volocopter says. They’ll be working with John Deere to test and prove that out with initial pilots to be conducted during the next agricultural growing season.

Sensitive data leakage is one of the biggest negative side-effects of cloud-based apps and services. Today, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that can detect and take action on that data is coming out of stealth with funding to tackle the issue head-on. Nightfall — which integrates with and then automatically scans structured and unstructured data that appears in apps like Slack, GitHub, AWS and hundreds more for sensitive information, which it then acts to secure — is launching publicly today with $20.3 million in funding.

Nightfall’s CEO Isaac Madan said the startup will use the money to expand the scope of what it can detect and where, and to build out its business overall. The company bills itself as the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform and while in stealth it started out working with high-growth startups like Grofers and Exabeam, later expanding its customer base to Fortune 500 companies.

The company originally launched as Watchtower AI — a name that Madan, who co-founded the company with Rohan Sathe, said was changed to reflect the expanded scope of the company, not just identifying unstructured data but being able to take actions on it. It had raised angel funding of just under $5 million that previously had not been disclosed. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock have co-led this latest, bigger round of $15.5 million, with Pear VC (Pejman Nozad); Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian; and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. of the New York Jets all also participating.

If $20.3 million sounds like a sizeable investment for a company that had yet to build up a public profile, that’s partly because of the nature of what the company is doing, and the people behind it.

Madan studied computer science and specifically worked on machine learning research at Stanford, focusing on HR and recruitment data, and has one exit already under his belt (a networking and advice platform called Chalky) while also working as an investor at Venrock and analyst at Pejman Mar Ventures, while Sathe was the lead engineer who had built and scaled Uber Eats.

Between the two of them, their experience spans a range of use-cases of where teams are handling many petabytes of data across multiple applications, which many opportunities for data leaks. The lack of any products on the market to address this was what led them to building Nightfall, Madan said in an interview.

Nightfall is tackling a specific issue in the market. Cloud-based collaboration platforms have been the making of distributed teams, which can use them to communicate with each other and work together, sharing data from different apps to get things done even when they are not in the same physical space. But they have also opened the door to a potential problem when it comes to data protection: the information shared on these platforms can contain sensitive data, so having it on there becomes a security risk.

“Business-critical data exists across different systems like Slack, Github, AWS and other apps, and that means sensitive and financial information can proliferate broadly across an organization’s systems,” Madan said. “We leverage machine learning to discover and classify that data” — which is often unstructured when it appears on these platforms.

Of course, each platform in itself can be secure, “but they don’t account for how users of these apps store and use data,” said Madan.

And this is a big big-data task: there are petabytes of data at play covering hundreds of different applications. Nightfall has built machine learning models to scan all of this, detect the data, and then either provide automatic or options for manual actions to take on it: typically, the options are either to delete, redact or quarantine the data, or notify the relevant teams of it to take appropriate actions. 

As part of this latest round Enrique Salem — notably, the former CEO of Symantec and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures — is joining Nightfall’s Board of Directors.

“Isaac, Rohan, and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career,” he said. “With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team.”

Sensitive data leakage is one of the biggest negative side-effects of cloud-based apps and services. Today, a startup that has built an AI-based platform that can detect and take action on that data is coming out of stealth with funding to tackle the issue head-on. Nightfall — which integrates with and then automatically scans structured and unstructured data that appears in apps like Slack, GitHub, AWS and hundreds more for sensitive information, which it then acts to secure — is launching publicly today with $20.3 million in funding.

Nightfall’s CEO Isaac Madan said the startup will use the money to expand the scope of what it can detect and where, and to build out its business overall. The company bills itself as the industry’s first cloud-native data loss prevention platform and while in stealth it started out working with high-growth startups like Grofers and Exabeam, later expanding its customer base to Fortune 500 companies.

The company originally launched as Watchtower AI — a name that Madan, who co-founded the company with Rohan Sathe, said was changed to reflect the expanded scope of the company, not just identifying unstructured data but being able to take actions on it. It had raised angel funding of just under $5 million that previously had not been disclosed. Bain Capital Ventures and Venrock have co-led this latest, bigger round of $15.5 million, with Pear VC (Pejman Nozad); Sri Viswanath, CTO of Atlassian; and Kelvin Beachum, Jr. of the New York Jets all also participating.

If $20.3 million sounds like a sizeable investment for a company that had yet to build up a public profile, that’s partly because of the nature of what the company is doing, and the people behind it.

Madan studied computer science and specifically worked on machine learning research at Stanford, focusing on HR and recruitment data, and has one exit already under his belt (a networking and advice platform called Chalky) while also working as an investor at Venrock and analyst at Pejman Mar Ventures, while Sathe was the lead engineer who had built and scaled Uber Eats.

Between the two of them, their experience spans a range of use-cases of where teams are handling many petabytes of data across multiple applications, which many opportunities for data leaks. The lack of any products on the market to address this was what led them to building Nightfall, Madan said in an interview.

Nightfall is tackling a specific issue in the market. Cloud-based collaboration platforms have been the making of distributed teams, which can use them to communicate with each other and work together, sharing data from different apps to get things done even when they are not in the same physical space. But they have also opened the door to a potential problem when it comes to data protection: the information shared on these platforms can contain sensitive data, so having it on there becomes a security risk.

“Business-critical data exists across different systems like Slack, Github, AWS and other apps, and that means sensitive and financial information can proliferate broadly across an organization’s systems,” Madan said. “We leverage machine learning to discover and classify that data” — which is often unstructured when it appears on these platforms.

Of course, each platform in itself can be secure, “but they don’t account for how users of these apps store and use data,” said Madan.

And this is a big big-data task: there are petabytes of data at play covering hundreds of different applications. Nightfall has built machine learning models to scan all of this, detect the data, and then either provide automatic or options for manual actions to take on it: typically, the options are either to delete, redact or quarantine the data, or notify the relevant teams of it to take appropriate actions. 

As part of this latest round Enrique Salem — notably, the former CEO of Symantec and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures — is joining Nightfall’s Board of Directors.

“Isaac, Rohan, and the Nightfall team are addressing a deep and profound need in the world of information security, where I have spent nearly three decades of my career,” he said. “With the proliferation of data across the cloud, high accuracy content inspection that is easy to operationalize is more important than ever. Nightfall has built a powerful and elegant solution to this problem. We are delighted to have been investors since the very beginning and to continue deepening our partnership with the team.”

Add another one to the list of companies piloting small wheeled autonomous robots for small package and food delivery: Yandex . Russia’s search and services giant has expanded its ambitions in the world of autonomous transportation, building on its work with self-driving cars to deploy a six-wheeled robot that adopts the popular cooler on wheels style pioneered by Starship Robotics.

The small autonomous robot, appropriately dubbed ‘Rover,’ has a suite of sensors, including that prominent lidar array on top, and it moves at “average walking speed” according to the company. It includes software that can help it avoid people walking in its path, pets, and just about any other objects that might block the sidewalk while it’s in motion on its way to its destination.

The initial pilot includes testing on the main Yandex corporate campus in Moscow, across a range of weather conditions, and during both the day and at night. The Moscow HQ hosts over 7,000 employees, and spans both office buildings, restaurants and parking garages. Ynadex is providing food deliveries and groceries from its own Yandex.Eats and Yandex.Lavka platforms, respectively, and also small goods transportation is another area of potential expansion, since Yandex owns and operates its own e-commerce platform Beru. The company also says Rover could find a home within its warehouses and data centres for in-office transportation.

That’s what most differentiates the Yandex wheeled delivery bot from most of the other ones current in service or in development: At Yandex, there are a lot of other businesses in-house that could benefit from autonomous last-mile transportation. Companies like Postmates and Amazon also have primary businesses that benefit, while Starship and other dedicated companies need to sell to clients to stand up their revenue generation. Yandex might be unique in the breadth of in-house businesses for which an autonomous wheeled small parcel robot could have knock-on benefits.

Salesforce has its fingers in a lot of parts of the customer experience, so why not content management? Today, the company announced a brand new tool called Salesforce Content Management System, which it says is designed from the ground up to deliver a quality customer experience across multiple channels.

The idea is to provide a way for customers to create, manage and deliver more meaningful content across multiple channels from within the Salesforce family of products. The company claims it doesn’t require any kind of deep technical knowledge to do it, meaning marketers and product people should be able to create and deliver content without the help of IT, once the system is properly set up.

Anna Rosenman, Salesforce’s VP of product marketing for Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Salesforce CMS says the company created the new CMS to answer a customer demand. “Our customers have been asking for a dedicated CMS. The systems that they’ve been relying on so far tend to be legacy tools that are hard to use and built for a single-channel or site,” she said.

Photo: Salesforce

While users can create more personalized content based on what they know about the customer based on Salesforce data, Rosenman says the key differentiator here is the ability to connect to third-party systems. “A hybrid CMS provides a native experience channel or touchpoint, but also gives you the flexibility to present content to any touchpoint built on a third-party system,” she explained.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, who has followed the Web CMS space for two decades, says this isn’t the first time that Salesforce has tried content management. The previous iteration was called Salesforce Sites. “They made big promises around that platform, got some major customers on board and then dropped it,” Byrne said.

He says that because it’s a major challenge to build a sophisticated multi-channel CMS. “It’s easy to build a simple CMS. It’s much harder to build an extensible, enterprise platform,” he said. He added, “There’s a lot of work they still need to do to feed other platforms around things like connectors, simulation, tracking, very advanced asset management (e.g., compound assets), object-oriented storage, etc.”

But Rosenman says that the system’s built-in flexibility is designed to provide that, and even be used in conjunction with existing legacy tools if need be.

What’s interesting here is that Salesforce decided to build this tool, rather than buying a company and integrating it into the Salesforce family, an approach it has not been afraid to take in the past. In fact, the company pursues an aggressive acquisition strategy. This year alone it spent more than $15 billion to buy Tableau and another $1.35 billion to buy ClickSoftware.

In this case, in the tension between building and buying, it decided to build instead. Time will tell if that was a good decision or not.

Earlier this year, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced the second generation of its HoloLens augmented reality visor. Today, the $3,500 HoloLens 2 is going on sale in the United States, Japan, China, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Australia and New Zealand, the same countries where it was previously available for pre-order.

Ahead of the launch, I got to spend some time with the latest model, after a brief demo in Barcelona earlier this year. Users will immediately notice the larger field of view, which still doesn’t cover your full field of view, but offers a far better experience compared to the first version (where you often felt like you were looking at the virtual objects through a stamp-sized window).

The team also greatly enhanced the overall feel of wearing the device. It’s not light, at 1.3 pounds, but with the front visor that flips up and the new mounting system that is far more comfortable.

In regular use, existing users will also immediately notice the new gestures for opening up the Start menu (this is Windows 10, after all). Instead of a ‘bloom’ gesture, which often resulted in false positives, you now simply tap on the palm of your hand, where a Microsoft logo now appears when you look at it.

Eye tracking, too, has been greatly improved and works well, even over large distances, and the new machine learning model also does a far better job at tracking all of your fingers. All of this is powered by a lot of custom hardware, including Microsoft’s second-generation ‘holographic processing unit.’

Microsoft has also enhanced some of the cloud tools it built for HoloLens, including Azure Spatial Anchors that allow for persistent holograms in a given space that anybody else who is using a holographic app can then see in the same spot.

Taken together, all of the changes result in a more comfortable and smarter device, with reduced latencies when you look at the various objects around you and interact with them.