Category: UNCATEGORIZED

If you’ve ever tried buying a bike online, or ski equipment, or any number of expensive goods where it would be useful to know a lot more than you do, you might check out Curated, a two-year-old San Francisco-based startup that wants to help busy shoppers who know generally what they want but don’t necessarily have time to visit a specialty store to learn more.

It isn’t the first startup to help with shopping recommendations. Among its predecessors is Hunch, a company that delivered customized recommendations to users based on signals around the web (and sold to eBay in 2011). Another variation on the same theme can be traced back to the dot.com era company Keen.com, a live answer community where people could get answers to their questions over the phone.

Still, the company made enough sense that Forerunner Ventures, which has established a name for itself as the preeminent investor in e-commerce companies, just led its $22 million Series A round. It was the only venture firm in the round by design, says cofounder and CEO Eddie Vivas, who says the funding was filled out by the same friends and family who’d participated in Curated’s $5.5 million seed round.

As part of the deal, Forerunner cofounder Kirsten Green has also joined the board.

It’s easy to appreciate the company’s appeal. Curated works by matching bewildered shoppers with people who are passionate and knowledgeable and “expert” in their fields. Right now, those experts are mostly athletes or coaches as the platform is launching publicly with a handful of verticals, including golf, cycling, and and a few winter sports, though the idea is to launch new sections on the site every six to eight weeks, including fly fishing, kiteboarding, camping and hiking.

How the economics works: Curated strikes deals with manufacturers — say makers of snowboard equipment or mountain bikes — that sell Curated their goods at wholesale prices. Curated can then sell them at retail prices to its customers. (Curated fulfills the order itself.)

Part of that markup is used to pay its experts, who tend to be people who have jobs in related fields but could use more income and who love sharing what they know about a topic, like ski instructors. To ensure that these experts know as much as they claim, they are vetted by other experts on the platform (they have to answer a battery of questions, as part of that process).

The experts are in no way incentivized to recommend anything in particular to a customer, but customers can tip the experts if they wish. (Curated suggests tips of 5%, 7.5%, or 10%, though Vivas says they are sometimes given much more than that by shoppers who are thankful for their time and effort, especially when their interactions end up leading them to products that cost more than they might have paid otherwise. He says in some cases, these can involve tens of email exchanges.)

The end goal — and Vivas says it’s working — is for customers to complete transactions on the platform that they wouldn’t otherwise feel comfortable completing at a site where they aren’t actively educated.

The platform is seizing on a number of trends that make it a smart idea for this day and age. For one thing, it uses artificial intelligence to connect shoppers with the right advisors. Sure, everyone tosses around AI as a competitive advantage, but Curated seemingly has a genuine competitive advantage on this front, owing to the background of Vivas, who sold an earlier company that used AI to automate the recruiting process to LinkedIn.

At the time, in 2014, it was LinkedIn’s biggest acquisition ever. And Vivas stayed at LinkedIn for another 3.5 years as the head of product within its talent solutions business, which is where LinkedIn derives most of its revenue. In fact, it’s where he met some of the 32 people who now work at Curated.

Curated is also smartly putting to work far-flung knowledge workers who, like a lot of Americans, increasingly work for themselves or in part-time roles that they’re looking to supplement with other part-time roles.

But perhaps most meaningfully, Curated is a kind of antidote to Amazon, where shoppers can turn when they need something fast but that’s incredibly limited when it comes to providing the kind of information needed to comfortably make big purchases. (Consumers may pull the trigger on items anyway, but often, they end up with merchandise that they then have to send back or never wind up using.)

The question now is whether the company can scale. To do so, it’ll need to rise above the din of other e-commerce platforms to attract enough customers to support its network of experts (and vice versa), and it’s a pretty crowded landscape out there, even with the magic of search-engine optimization and Facebook ads. It will also need to strike enough deals with goods manufacturers to make the platform compelling for shoppers, and to ensure that the level of the advice that’s provided to those consumers is, and remains, high.

Vivas doesn’t sound concerned. He thinks he’s built a strong team. He’s also excited about the growing network of experts the team has pieced together since founding the company in the summer of 2017

“You take someone who is passionate about something and you let them make money off it, and good things happen,” he says. “In allowing people to monetize their knowledge, the unlock is just unbelievable.”

The online grocery wars continue. Amazon this week just made grocery delivery free, so Walmart is now touting how its grocery service offers the booze. The retailer today announced a new milestone in terms of giving its customers the ability to shop for alcohol online, noting that over 2,000 Walmart locations across 29 states will now let you pick up wine and beer along with your other grocery purchases.

The alcohol pickup service has to abide by local laws, which limits its expansion in some cases.

In addition, Walmart says that now over 200 stores in California and Florida are also offering alcohol delivery. It plans expansions on this front, as well.

Walmart has been slowly ramping up its online alcohol shopping options, in accordance with local, county and state regulations for some time. Its Sam’s Club subsidiary has offered this option, too, by way of Instacart. In the latter case, Sam’s Club has been able to offer delivery of spirits, like Tito’s vodka or those from Sam’s Club own “Member’s Mark” brand, among others.

Today, there are a number of ways to shop alcohol online, depending on where you live.

Target-owned Shipt delivers alcohol from some of its supported retailers (including Target) in some markets. Instacart, BJ’s and Amazon (Prime Now) do as well, in select cities, states and stores. And finally, services like Drizly, Saucey, Postmates and Uber Eats can help fill in the gaps, in some markets.

The problem with all these services is that consumers often don’t know which retailers will offer alcohol delivery, or which app they should use. If you live in a more permissive state, this may not be as big of a problem — you’ll likely encounter an abundance of choice for same-day alcohol delivery. But in a more conservative state, your options may be more limited — or not available at all. And when consumers have to launch a half dozen apps just to figure out how to order booze online, most people will just give up and drive to the store.

That’s in conflict with Walmart’s larger goal, which is to allow shoppers to take advantage of its online grocery shopping to fully replace the traditional grocery shopping trip to the store. After all, if consumers are driving to the store, they’ll likely choose their local grocer, not necessarily Walmart.

To meet the needs of the online shopper, Walmart Grocery has to offer it all — not just food, but also adult beverages.  If successful on speeding this option to market, Walmart’s brand could become known as the place to order everything you need from the grocery store online. And that, in turn, could help boost sales.

Walmart’s alcohol shopping feature works just like shopping for groceries — you just search for what you want, add it to the cart, then check out. The only difference is that, upon pickup or delivery, you’ll be required to show your ID so the Walmart team member can verify your age.

Alcohol pickup is available in big states like California, Florida, and Texas, and dozens of others, while delivery is limited to the first two states, for the time being.

As much as we’d like to think that we’re entering an era of autonomous robots, they’re actually still pretty helpless. To keep them from falling down all the time, a human’s fast reflexes could be the solution. But the human has to feel what the robot is feeling — and that’s just what these researchers are testing.

Bipedal robots are excellent in theory for navigating human environments, but naturally are more prone to falling than quadrupedal or wheeled robots. Although they often have sophisticated algorithms that help keep them upright, in some situations those just might not be enough.

As a way to bridge that gap, researchers at MIT and the University of Illinois-Champaign put together a sort of hybrid human-robot system reminiscent of either Pacific Rim or Evangelion, depending on your nerd alignment (or Robot Jox, if you want to go that way).

Although the references may be sci-fi, the need for this kind of thing is real, explained U of I’s João Ramos, co-creator of the system with MIT’s Sangbae Kim.

“We were motivated by watching the 2011 Tohoku, Japan, earthquake, tsunami and subsequent Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant disaster unfold. We thought that if a robot could have entered the power plant after the disaster, things could have ended differently,” Ramos said in a U of I news release.

The robot they created is a small bipedal one they call Little Hermes, and it is hooked up directly to a human operator, who stands on a pressure-sensing plate and wears a force-feedback vest.

The robot generally follows the operator’s movements, not in a 1:1 sense (especially since the robot is much smaller than a person), but after interpreting those movements in terms of center of gravity and force vectors, makes a corresponding one almost simultaneously. (The MIT writeup goes into a bit more detail, as does the video below.)

Meanwhile, if the robot were to, say, encounter an unexpected slope or obstacle, those forces are conveyed to the operator via the vest. Feeling pressure indicating a leftward lean, the operator will reflexively take a step in that direction using those excellent instincts we animals have developed. Naturally the robot does the same thing and, hopefully, catches itself.

This feedback loop could make on-site rescue robots and others on uncertain footing more reliable. The technology is not limited to legs, though, or even to Little Hermes. The team wants to set up similar feedback systems for feet and hands, so mobility and grip can be further improved.

The team published their work today in the journal Science Robotics.

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1. HBO Max will cost $14.99 per month and launch in May 2020

AT&T and WarnerMedia announced the pricing, launch timetable and content lineup of their HBO Max streaming service. They also revealed that HBO has placed a straight-to-series order for “House of the Dragon,” a spin-off of “Game of Thrones.”

Even though distinguishing between HBO and HBO Max will probably be a bit of a headache over the next few years, this is a service that I’m genuinely excited about, with a rich library of HBO shows and Warner Bros. films at its core. And while the price is high compared to competing services, there’s no additional cost compared to the existing HBO Now.

2. WhatsApp blames — and sues — mobile spyware maker NSO Group over its zero-day calling exploit

WhatsApp has filed a suit in federal court accusing Israeli mobile surveillance software maker NSO Group of creating an exploit that was used hundreds of times to hack into targets’ phones.

3. Tencent leads $111M investment in India’s video streaming service MX Player

Times Internet, which acquired a majority stake in MX Player in late 2017, also participated in the Series A financing round. The post-money valuation was $500 million, according to a source.

4. Spotify launches a dedicated Kids app for Premium Family subscribers

The app allows children three and up to listen to their own music, both online and offline, as well as explore playlists and recommendations picked by experts. The music selection is filtered so songs won’t have explicit content.

5. Slack investor Index Ventures backs Slack competitor Quill

Quill, a startup led by Stripe’s former creative director Ludwig Pettersson, claims to offer “meaningful conversations, without disturbing your team.”

6. Where top VCs are investing in cybersecurity

Many of the rising cybersecurity startups focus on the same or overlapping problems, which could lead to a “cybersecurity consolidation.” (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Let’s have a word about what3words with Clare Jones at Disrupt Berlin

What3words wants to map the entire world and overhaul addresses, three words at a time. The startup has divided the world into three-meter squares, each one assigned three words as an identifier.

Just as as tangible as airplanes, computers and contraception, The Roman Empire, the Iroquois Confederacy and the United States of America are also human inventions.

Technology is how we do things, and political institutions are how we collaborate at scale. Government is an immensely powerful innovation through which we take collective action.

Just like any other technology, governments open up new realms of opportunity. These opportunities are morally neutral: humans have leveraged political institutions to provide public education and murder ethnic minorities. Specific features like explicit protections for human rights and civil liberties are designed to help mitigate certain downside risks.

Like any tool, systems of governance require maintenance to keep working. We expect regular software updates, but forget that governance is also in constant flux, and begins to fail when it falls out of sync with the culture. Without preventative maintenance, pressure builds like tectonic forces along a fault line until a new order snaps into place, often violently. Malka Older points out that “democracy is not a unitary state that can be achieved, but a continuous process. We need to keep reinventing and refining government, to keep up with changes in society and technology and to keep it from being too easy for elites with resources to exploit.”

What might the future of governance actually look like?

An accidental sweep of the App Store removed over 20 million ratings from the most popular apps — including from well-known brands like Google, Microsoft, Starbucks, Hulu, Nike, and others — as well as from smaller developers. The issue began on October 23, 2019 and wasn’t resolved until yesterday, October 29. Apple hasn’t yet explained how such a sizable and impactful change to app ratings occurred.

This massive ratings drop was spotted by the mobile app insights platform, Appfigures.

The firm found that more than 300 apps from over 200 developers were affected by the sweep, which wiped out a total of 22 million app reviews from the App Store. On average, apps saw a 50% decrease in ratings in the affected countries, which included the U.S.

The U.S. was hit the hardest, however, as some 10 million ratings disappeared. But the sweep was global in nature, hitting all 155 countries Apple supports. China, the U.K., South Korea, Russia, and Australia, also felt a noticeable impact.

A few apps were hit harder than others. Hulu, for example, lost a whopping 95% of ratings in the U.S., while Dropbox and Chase lost 85%. Several companies affected by the bug declined to comment, but told us that the rating removals weren’t done at their request — they were just as surprised as everyone else.

Other big apps that saw their ratings disappear in the U.S. included Chase, Walgreen, Venmo, Amazon Prime Video, Southwest, Hotels.com, Disneyland, Ibotta, ESPN, Amex, Xoom, Fandango, Skyscanner, Google Classroom, Nike SNKRS, My Disney Experience, Old Nav, and others.

Of the over 300 apps that got hit, about half (154) saw a drop of more than 100 ratings, Appfigures said.

With little information about what happened, developers speculated that Apple was possibly trying to clean up fake app ratings. This theory doesn’t seem that likely, though, because Appfigures found that both positive and negative ratings were removed. Had the sweep been focused on fake ratings, then only the positive (fake) ratings would have been removed.

Another theory is that Apple was trying to speed up its ratings system and something just went wrong.

Unfortunately for some of the impacted developers, the bug had a profound effect on their app’s “Overall” rating. Their app may have dropped by several stars as a result of this problem. And that, in turn, could have hurt their ability to get downloads from App Store search results or Search Ads during the week.

Some of the impacted companies (and Appfigures) confirmed to TechCrunch the missing ratings were restored as of yesterday.

Oddly, this isn’t the first time app ratings disappeared nearly overnight.

A similar incident took place last year, when an App Store bug led to thousands of iOS apps losing half their ratings over a weekend. In both cases, Apple quietly resolved the bug, but never offered any statements about what happened.

We reached out to Apple on Tuesday but the company has not yet commented.

However, we hear that Apple spoke directly to some developers to explain the rating removals were done in error and it was working to fix the situation, which now appears resolved.

Chances are you mostly think of Samsung as a consumer-focused electronics company, but it actually has a very sizable B2B business as well, which serves over 50,000 large enterprises and hundreds of thousands of SMB entrepreneurs via its partners. At its developer conference this week, it’s putting the spotlight squarely on this side of its business — with a related hardware launch as well. The focus of today’s news, however, is on Knox, Samsung’s mobile security platform and Project AppStack, which will likely get a different name soon, and which provides B2B customers with a new mechanism to deliver SaaS tools and native apps to their employees’ devices, as well as new tools for developers that make these services more discoverable.

At least in the U.S., Samsung hasn’t really marketed its B2B business all that much. With this event, the company is clearly thinking to change that.

At its core, Samsung is, of course, a hardware company, and as Taher Behbehani, the head of its U.S. mobile B2B division, told me, Samsung’s tablet sales actually doubled in the last year and most of these were for industrial deployments and business-specific solutions. To better serve this market, the company today announced that it is bringing the rugged Tab Active Pro to the U.S. market. Previously, it was only available in Europe.

The Active Pro, with its 10.1″ display, supports Samsung’s S Pen, as well as Dex for using it on the desktop. It’s got all of the dust and water resistance you would expect from a rugged device, is rated to easily support drops from about four feet high, and promises up to 15 hours of battery life. It also features LTE connectivity and has an NFC reader on the back to allow you to badge into a secure application or take contactless payments (which are quite popular in most of the world but are only very slowly becoming a thing in the U.S.), as well a programmable button to allow business users and frontline workers to open up any application they select (like a barcode scanner).

“The traditional rugged devices out there are relatively expensive, relatively heavy to carry around for a full shift,” Samsung’s Chris Briglin told me. “Samsung is growing that market by serving users that traditionally haven’t been able to afford rugged devices or have had to share them between up to four co-workers.”

Today’s event is less about hardware than software and partnerships, though. At the core of the announcements is the new Knox Partner Program, a new way for partners to create and sell applications on Samsung devices. “We work with about 100,000 developers,” said Behbehani. “Some of these are developers are inside companies. Some are outside independent developers and ISVs. And what we hear from these developer communities is when they have a solution or an app, how do I get that to a customer? How do I distribute it more effectively?”

This new partner program is Samsung’s solution for that. It’s a three-tier partner program that’s an evolution of the existing Samsung Enterprise Alliance program. At the most basic level, partners get access to support and marketing assets. At all tiers, partners can also get Knox validation for their applications to highlight that they properly implement all of the Knox APIs.

The free Bronze tier includes access to Knox SDKs and APIs, as well as licensing keys. At the Silver level, partners will get support in their region, while Gold-level members get access to the Samsung Solutions Catalog, as well as the ability to be included in the internal catalog used by Samsung sales teams globally. “This is to enable Samsung teams to find the right solutions to meet customer needs, and promote these solutions to its customers,” the company writes in today’s announcement. Gold-level partners also get access to test devices.

The other new service that will enable developers to reach more enterprises and SMBs is Project Appstack.

“When a new customer buys a Samsung device, no matter if it’s an SMB or an enterprise, depending on the information they provide to us, they get to search for and they get to select a number of different applications specifically designed to help them in their own vertical and for the size of the business,” explained Behbehani. “And once the phone is activated, these apps are downloaded through the ISV or the SaaS player through the back-end delivery mechanism which we are developing.”

For large enterprises, Samsung also runs an algorithm that looks at the size of the business and the vertical it is in to recommend specific applications, too.

Samsung will run a series of hackathons over the course of the next few months to figure out exactly how developers and its customers want to use this service. “It’s a module. It’s a technology backend. It has different components to it,” said Behbehani. “We have a number of tools already in place we have to finetune others and we also, to be honest, want to make sure that we come up with a POC in the marketplace that accurately reflects the requirements and the creativity of what the demand is in the marketplace.”

Google open-sourced its TensorFlow machine learning framework back in 2015 and it quickly became one of the most popular platforms of its kind. Enterprises that wanted to use it, however, had to either work with third parties or do it themselves. To help these companies — and capture some of this lucrative market itself — Google is launching TensorFlow Enterprise, which includes hands-on, enterprise-grade support and optimized managed services on Google Cloud.

One of the most important features of TensorFlow Enterprise is that it will offer long-term support. For some versions of the framework, Google will offer patches for up to three years. For what looks to be an additional fee, Google will also offer engineering assistance from its Google Cloud and TensorFlow teams to companies that are building AI models.

All of this, of course, is deeply integrated with Google’s own cloud services. “Because Google created and open-sourced TensorFlow, Google Cloud is uniquely positioned to offer support and insights directly from the TensorFlow team itself,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Combined with our deep expertise in AI and machine learning, this makes TensorFlow Enterprise the best way to run TensorFlow.”

Google also includes Deep Learning VMs and Deep Learning Containers to make getting started with TensorFlow easier and the company has optimized the enterprise version for Nvidia GPUs and Google’s own Cloud TPUs.

Today’s launch is yet another example of Google Cloud’s focus on enterprises, a move the company accelerated when it hired Thomas Kurian to run the Cloud businesses. After years of mostly ignoring the enterprise, the company is now clearly looking at what enterprises are struggling with and how it can adapt its products for them.