Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Workplace collaboration software business Slack (NYSE: WORK) has added Sheila Jordan, a senior vice president and chief information officer of Symantec, as an independent member of its board of directors. The hiring comes three months after the business completed a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

Jordan, responsible for driving information technology strategy and operations for Symantec, brings significant cybersecurity expertise to Slack’s board. Prior to joining Symantec in 2014, Jordan was a senior vice president of IT at Cisco and an executive at Disney Destination for nearly 15 years.

With the new appointment, Slack appears to be doubling down on security. In addition to the board announcement, Slack recently published a blog post outlining the company’s latest security strategy in what was likely part of a greater attempt to sway potential customers — particularly those in highly regulated industries — wary of the company’s security processes. The post introduced new features, including the ability to allow teams to work remotely while maintaining compliance to industry and company-specific requirements.

Jordan joins Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield, former Goldman Sachs executive Edith Cooper, Accel general partner Andrew Braccia, Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, Andreessen Horowitz general partner John O’Farrell, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya and former Salesforce chief financial officer Graham Smith on Slack’s board of directors.

“I believe there is nothing more critical than driving organizational alignment and agility within enterprises today,” Jordan said in a statement. “Slack has developed a new category of enterprise software to help unlock this potential and I’m thrilled to now be a part of their story.”

Slack closed up nearly 50% on its first day of trading in June but has since stumbled amid reports of increased competition from Microsoft, which operates a Slack-like product called Teams.

Slack co-founder and chief technology officer Cal Henderson will join us onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco next week to discuss the company’s founding, road to the public markets and path forward. Buy tickets here.

Project A, the Berlin-based VC that backs startups in Europe at seed and Series A stage, has raised a new $200 million fund (€180 million). This brings total assets under management to $486 million (€440 million) and is the third fund Project A has raised.

The venture capital firm, whose investments include the likes of WorldRemit, Catawiki, Voi and Uberall, is also announcing that it will now have a presence in London and Stockholm in order to put people on the ground in what it says are “two of its favourite ecosystems”.

Meanwhile, it is just over two years since Project A raised its last fund. Fund two sat at €140 million, so this new fund is a slight increase in size. As is the initial cheque size the VC plans to write out of fund three: “up to $7 million,” the firm says.

“We are pleased that our approach as an operational venture capital investor convinces both startups and co-investors. Over the next few years, the new fund will enable us to continue backing passionate European founders and their teams at Seed and A stages – working both on B2B as well as B2C innovations,” says Thies Sander, General Partner at Project A, in a statement.

Describing itself as the only European “Operational VC” — which is highly debatable, given that tons of European VCs offer operational support and have Partners that are ex-founders with exits behind them — Project A says its portfolio companies receive support from 100 “functional experts” in engineering, marketing, product, design, communications, business intelligence, sales & customer success, organizational building and hiring.

“Project A can provide support in all critical functions across the entire startup building stack, at all stages of a founding teams’ startup journey,” says the Berlin-based firm.

Sectors that Project A plans to invest span fintech, digital health, proptech, Industry 4.0, enterprise software, mobility and logistics — all areas the VC says it has “deep expertise,” and where European startups are uniquely positioned to build “transformational” global businesses.

And it is certainly true that these are sectors where European startups are punching above their weight, which hasn’t gone unnoticed by venture firms and LPs in the U.S. In fact, with fund three, it is the first time that Project A has attracted LPs from the U.S., with Top Tier Capital Partners now a backer.

Cue a statement from Florian Heinemann, General Partner at Project A: “The European digital ecosystem matured enormously within a few years. We see more and more ambitious serial entrepreneurs working on groundbreaking product innovations based on their experience in the established economy combined with their prior expertise. We also see more and more competence-driven acquisitions and strongly believe that they will increase significantly over the next few years”.

Congratulations to all the motivated hackers, coders, devs and designers who took action and secured their spot in the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. We limited participation to 800 people, and we’re thrilled that the event is completely full.

We can’t wait to see what 800 of the world’s best code warriors create over the course of roughly 24 high-pressure hours. And we’re pretty sure you can’t wait to hear more about our hackathon sponsors and the real-world challenges they’ve created to test your mettle. This is the post you’ve been waiting for.

Each sponsor offers prizes for the team that creates the best solution for the specific challenge — prizes can include cash, and they vary depending on the sponsor. Oh, but wait there is more. On top of the sponsor prizes, TechCrunch will select one team’s project as the best overall hack and award them $10,000 prize. Want more details? Check out the Hackathon website.

Alright, the time has come. Here are the sponsors, contests and prizes for the TechCrunch Hackathon at Disrupt SF 2019. Let the games begin!

Humana

Create a prototype for Humana and win one of three cash prizes. First place: $10,000; second place: $5,000 and third place: $2,500. Examples of a prototype include a mobile app, a website, animations, video, etc. Here are the prototype guidelines.

• The prototype should either demonstrate what a customer would experience visually/in audio or be a technical prototype with basic UX to understand the concept
• Teams are encouraged to showcase a demo with a use case that brings the solution to life, simulating movement/animation of the user experience.

Kinship

We want to see Kinship data used in ways that has never been thought of or explored and applied in a manner that translates into real and positive change for pets. Create a solution that improves the lives of pets or pet parents using at least one Kinship data source and win one of three prizes.

• First prize: $10,000 between the team and a Whistle GO Explore pet tracker for up to five team members
• Second prize: $5,000 between the team and a Wisdom Panel Health canine test for up to five team members
• Third prize: $2,000 between the team

Intersystems

Mapping all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy? InterSystems is there. Providing interoperability for over a billion medical records around the globe? InterSystems has that covered. Processing over a billion transactions a day for a global investment bank? InterSystems is quietly at work in the background. Whether it’s healthcare, business, or government, digital transformation has changed consumers’ expectations about how their data is accessed and managed. Speed, scale, transactional processing, cloud deployment, and high availability, are all cornerstones of what users expect out of their applications. InterSystems challenges you to explore and build your own business solutions using our IRIS Data Platform tools to solve for healthcare, business, or consumer-facing problems. InterSystems will offer a $4,000 prize for the best use of our IRIS for Health platform to solve for healthcare challenges and $4,000 for best use of IRIS Data Platform to solve for business or consumer application challenges. Use of our extensive libraries that enable connectivity both within and between hospital systems is not required for healthcare solution proposals.

But wait…in the coming days we’ll have even more juicy details about contests and prizes sponsored by Plaid and United Airlines!

Disrupt SF 2019 takes place on October 2-4, and we just can’t wait to see what the brilliant minds at the TechCrunch Hackathon will produce under pressure.

Is your company interested in sponsoring the Hackathon at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

At its developer conference Wednesday, Oculus showed off a pair of prototype designs for its next high-end headsets.

Two years ago, Oculus showed off its Half Dome prototype which utilized a technology called varifocal lenses to allow users to adjust where the points of focus were in an image, this is technology similar to what Magic Leap uses on its headset, but is designed to allow for a much greater range of focal planes.

The company showed off tow new prototypes including a “Half Dome 2” prototype and a “Half Dome 3” prototype.

“Half Dome 2” is optimized for weight and size significantly shrinking down the form factor of the previous prototype while reducing the weight by 200 grams. The device is also shrinking the 140 degree field-of-view of the first design, though the company says the headset will still boast a FoV that’s 20% wider than the Rift.

The headset still utilizes a system that mechanically moves the lenses inside the headset to adjust the focus, but Oculus is also looking further down the line.

“Half Dome 3” integrated the technology of its previous designs with an electronic varifocal module that has no moving parts and integrates a number of stacked lenses that can be turned on and off to let users move through various planes of focus (the company detailed the headset could switch between 64 planes of focus with this setup). This will enable users to view items in focus at closer distances and will let headsets function more like human eyes.

There weren’t any timelines thrown around for either prototype being productized, but Oculus is clearly investing in the high-end still inside Facebook Reality Labs.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Kate and Alex were back at TechCrunch’s San Francisco HQ to huddle over the weeks’ biggest news story: WeWork’s infamous CEO exiting his role. Adam Neumann is now merely the non-executive chairman of The We Company, a firm that he helped found and led the public story for over the last half-decade.

His exit comes after a number of revelations made his tenure at the highly-valued WeWork appear chaotic and self-dealing. After WeWork’s valuation tumbled as it raced towards a financially-critical IPO, something had to give. The firm tried to ameliorate investors with changes (read: improvements) to its corporate governance but that wasn’t enough. Snakes don’t rot from the tail, and WeWork needed new leadership, which it got the form of co-CEOs.

WeWork is now led by Sebastian Gunningham and Artie Minson, seasoned executives with stints at Amazon and Time Warner Cable, respectively. They’ve been charged with leading the company into an era of maturity, cost-cutting and maybe even profitability! But probably not. Anyway, we think there are a whole lot of parallels to draw between Uber and WeWork, as we’ve made clear in the past.

Kate and Alex also touched on corporate governance, especially regarding super-voting stock. The TL;DR: private company boards look and operate much differently than public company boards. More often than not, startup boards are made up of venture capitalists focused on protecting their equity and future returns. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, folks.

Wapping, it seems likely that WeWork will look to secure new cash in the short-term as it buttons up its business, divests or kills off non-performing assets (remember this?), and looks to temper both its growth-rate and losses. If that will be enough to allow the company to float in 2020 (2019 seems unlikely) isn’t clear.

Icarus.

We’re back Friday morning with our regular episode and a guest. Stay tuned!

At the end of its hardware event today, Amazon announced a new program for testing and selling its own experimental, limited-volume hardware: Day 1 Editions.

The first of these new products is Echo Frames. These are Alexa-enabled glasses, though unlike Google Glass, there’s no camera and no display, just microphones and a speaker.

The second is the Echo Loop, a rather large Alexa-enabled ring with two built-in microphones and, of course, a tiny speaker. Both of these will be available on an invite-only basis and in limited volumes later this year.

The frames will retail for $179.99 and the Loop will be $99.99.

The glasses, which will sell without any prescription lenses (though you can add those if you want), weigh in at 31 grams. They aren’t especially stylish, though they look pretty acceptable.

The ring is maybe the oddest product Amazon demoed at its event today. It’s pretty large and I can’t quite see people talking into their rings and then listening to what Alexa has to say in response, but I could be wrong. Maybe it’s the next big thing.

“Paired with your phone, this ring lets you access information throughout the day,” Amazon writes. “It’s super easy to connect with Alexa without breaking stride or digging out your phone, for those simple things like turning on the lights or calculating the tip on your lunch bill. Simply press a button, talk softly to Alexa, and then the answer comes discretely through a small speaker built into the ring.”

To be fair, though, these are very much experimental products that are meant to allow Amazon to get feedback from real customers. But that’s what Amazon said about its Alexa-enabled microwave, too, and now it’s the best-selling fridge on the site.

Two years ago, Oculus announced a radical departure in how they were funding virtual reality developers. Instead of partnering with a ton of upstart teams looking to explore the medium and help fund their low-budget pursuits, the company would be pursuing fewer, more expensive projects with established studios. Their crown jewel would be a made-for-VR first-person-shooter coming in 2019 done in partnership with Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment.

After two years with no further details, today, at its Oculus Connect 6 developer conference, it was announced that Respawn will be releasing a World War II shooter titled “Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond” on the Rift platform next year. That release is pushed back from the original 2019 timeline, Respawn wouldn’t nail down the release date any further than “2020.”

The game disappointingly will not be launching on Quest, the company’s all-in-one headset, but with the newly-announced Oculus Link software feature launching November, it seems you’ll be able to play the title still, albeit in tethered mode.

It’s not at all clear how much Oculus invested in this title, thought it was clear from the press event that the scope of the title’s development was extensive and expensive. Oculus has pumped hundreds of million getting developers to bring their products exclusively to their VR platform, though at this point exclusivity is less of a concern as the company’s VR competitors have largely either folded, shifted to higher-end price points, or moved to the enterprise market.

Onto the game itself, I had a chance to demo several levels of “Above and Beyond,” and it’s clear that the title will be a hit among Rift and Rift S users. It very much seems to be a full-game with around a dozen hours of campaign in single-player as well as a robust multi-player mode which I was not able to demo.

The mechanics are crafted for VR — every time you empty a clip you have to eject it from the gun you’re holding and insert a new magazine into the gun then cock your weapon all with the Touch controllers.

So many of the games made for VR haven’t had direct comparisons to console titles, but diving through bunkers shooting up nazis kind of showcased where Oculus pushes boundaries and where it falters. Interaction mechanisms are rich, immersive and where the Rift and Quest shine, but Oculus keeping the recommended PC system specs largely the same since launch hasn’t aged well. The Rift just can’t push pixels with outdated PCs and “Above and Beyond” showcases the max capabilities of the recommended spec systems but it seems like this generation is fully smashed against the glass wall which was the risk Oculus took when it launched the Rift S rather than a fully upgraded class of hardware.

The game is tons of fun, and was clearly thought out to extreme lengths, but one wonders whether Oculus would have invested so much energy into a PC-first title again had they known that two years later they would be pushing standalone experiences with Quest publicly with such fervor.

At its annual hardware event in Seattle, Amazon today announced Sidewalk, a new low-bandwidth, long-distance wireless protocol the company is developing to connect all of the IoT devices in and around your house.

Amazon argues that Bluetooth and WiFi don’t have enough range, while 5F takes too much power and is too complex.

“We came up with something that we call Amazon Sidewalk,” Amazon’s device chief Dave Limp said at the event today. “Amazon Sidewalk is a brand new low bandwidth network that uses the already existing free over the air 900 megahertz spectrum. We think it will be great for keeping track of things, keeping things up to date — but first and foremost, it will extend in the distance at which you can control these kinds of simple, low-cost, easy-to-use devices.

The details here remain a bit vague, but Amazon says that you may be able to use Sidewalk to connect to devices that can be up to a mile away, depending on how the base station and devices are positioned.

Amazon already sent out 700 test devices to households in L.A. to test the access points — and once you have a lot of access points, you create a network with some pretty broad coverage.

Amazon says it’ll publish the protocol so that other device makers can also integrate it into their devices.

The first product that uses Sidewalk? A dog tag, so that you’ll hopefully see fewer lost dogs on your local Nextdoor in the near future because if your dog now leaves the perimeter, you’ll get an alert. This new tag, the Ring Fetch, will launch next year.

Amazon had a lot of surprises at this morning’s big event in Seattle. This one, however, we saw coming from a mile away. Echo Buds are the company’s attempt to compete with the likes of AirPods by bringing its smart assistant directly to wearers’ ears.

Priced at $129, the wireless earbuds are relatively inexpensive as far as brand names go. We can’t really speak to quality right now, but Amazon has teamed up with Bose for these to bring active noise cancelation. That’s accessible with a tap, similar to what Sony introduced with its own earbuds.

The product is clearly designed to help Alexa grow outside of the home, a market the company hasn’t captured as well as native mobile assistants like Siri and Google Assistant. That said, Amazon is also giving users the ability to access those assistants native to the user’s mobile phone.

As with the rest of the products announced at the event, Echo Buds are available for preorder starting today.

We’ve come a long way with voice-based interfaces in the last several years: They can find and play the music you like, tell you jokes, set timers, control your lights and help you shop, among many other things. But the battle lines were drawn from the start when it came to territory. The biggest hardware companies — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung — have up to now built their own voice assistants, taking a proprietary approach to encourage growth of their own ecosystems of services around their devices.

That model limits consumer choice, however, and it limits the kinds of developments that might spring out of a more collaborative, cacophonous approach.

Now we are seeing small signs of how that might be shifting. This week, Amazon announced the formation of a new consortium called the Voice Interoperability Group, which aims to create a set of standards and technology for hardware to handle one voice service, with users able to trigger one voice over another by way of “wake words.”

“Multiple simultaneous wake words provide the best option for customers,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and CEO, in a statement. “Utterance by utterance, customers can choose which voice service will best support a particular interaction. It’s exciting to see these companies come together in pursuit of that vision.”