Category: UNCATEGORIZED

After releasing a brief “date announcement” and an equally brief commercial at the Emmys, Netflix has finally launched the full trailer “El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie.”

The trailer shows the film following directly from the “Breaking Bad” finale, with Aaron Paul returning to the role of Jesse Pinkman, the former-student-turned-meth-cooking-partner of Bryan Cranston’s Walter White. Without getting into too many details, the end of “Breaking Bad” saw Jesse making a dramatic escape, but the new trailer makes it clear that his troubles are far from over.

“El Camino” is written and directed by series creator Vince Gilligan, while Matt Jones and Charles Baker are also reprising their roles as Badger and Skinny Pete. (No word yet on whether Gilligan managed to sneak in a Cranston cameo.)

While “Breaking Bad” first aired on AMC, Netflix is widely credited with growing the show’s audience. “El Camino” will premiere on the streaming service and in select theaters on October 11, before airing on AMC sometime next year.

In recent months, Grammarly started expanding beyond its core grammar and spellchecking tools by adding features like a more detailed clarity score, for example. Today, it’s expanding on this work by launching the first beta of its new tone detector that makes sure your email or document sounds just like you want it to. You may want to sound friendly and approachable, for example, but not too informal.

The company says the new tone detector relies on both some set rules and a machine learning algorithm that looks for the signals in a text that contribute to its tone.

Overall, this looks to be a pretty useful feature, especially if you tend to struggle with getting the tone of your emails just right (I definitely know some people who are great in person but whose every email reads like they are accusing me of poisoning their dog). In total, the new feature can detect 40 different tones, covering a range of emotions from “appreciative” to “confident,” “formal,” “informal,” “thoughtful,” “loving” and “sad.” The feature will kick in once you write more than 120 characters.

The beta version of the tone detector is now available in Grammarly’s browser extension for Chrome, with Safari and Firefox support coming soon. Right now, this only works for emails in Gmail and Yahoo, though. Support for all text fields will roll out soon.

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) has successfully launched one of its H-IIB rockets, carrying a payload of supplies, experimental materials and new replacement batteries to help power the International Space Station. The rocket, commissioned by Japan’s Aerospace Exploration Agency, took off from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at its scheduled instantaneous launch window of 12:05 PM EDT (1:05 AM JST), succeeding during its second try after an initial attempt was scrubbed earlier this month.

This is the eighth launch of the H-IIB, and its H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), and it’s the second-to-last planned mission for the H-IIB before this series of MHI rocket is retired. It’s set to be replaced by the higher capacity, lower cost H3, which MHI hopes to fly for the first time next year.

The HTV-8 (aka ‘Kounotori-8’) mission will deliver a load of cargo to the ISS, separated across both a pressurized and an unpressurized cargo compartment on the HTV unpiloted spacecraft, which will dock with the ISS for unloading. Experiments on board include one that will help scientists study how different regoliths (terrain material from extra-terrestrial bodies, including the Moon and Mars) behave in zero gravity environments; an upgrade for the Cell Biology experiment facility on the ISS, and a new small-sat that will be used to research optical communication in space.

There’s also a new set of six lithium-ion batteries on board that will replace nickel-hydrogen power cells on the station, which will involve a number of spacewalks and use of the station’s robotic manipulation devices to install later this year. Nickel-hydrogen batteries have been popular for use in satellites and spacecraft, but lithium-ion has some advantages in terms of recharge and discharge speed, and battery memory, though they aren’t as long-lived as the exiting variety. The ISS is already operating beyond its service life, however, and NASA hopes that I’ll eventually be replaced by a commercial space station, so that’s probably not as much of a concern.

The HTV spacecraft will now continue to the ISS where it will attach to the Harmony module of the station in just a few days, where it’s set to spend about a month as its cargo is unloaded by ISS astronauts.

“It was SoundCloud’s opportunity to lose and now it’s ours” says Audius CEO Roneil Rumberg. Plenty of musicians and fans are sick of SoundCloud’s expensive hosting costs, haphazard content takedowns, and lagging user experience as the site’s status withers. Audius wants to be the opposite, and offer a new home for artists where they’ll eventually earn 90% of revenue earned and the startup itself can’t remove songs.

Today Audius launches its music streaming and free hosting service backed by DJs like Deadmau5 and Zed’s Dead, plus $5.5 million in A-list venture capital. Music makers can upload their songs at no cost, and users can browse, follow, and get listening recommendations. The catalog is small to start with just a few hundred artists, but Audius has big plans for how to lure artists choosing between other SoundCloud alternatives from Mixcloud to YouTube.

The secret sauce is that Audius isn’t just a web and mobile site, it’s an open source protocol built on the blockchain, not that users need to be versed in cryptocurrency or do anything special to signup. Audius doesn’t actually host the music, but decentralizes it across independently operated nodes, which it believes will protect it from lawsuits and record label pressure. It’s distributing its own crypto tokens to incentivize artists that join early as well as the node operators with the insinuation that these might rise in value if the service grows popular.

Audius is completely free for listening at high quality 320kbps. For now, artists can’t make money, though many still can’t on SoundCloud. But in early 2020, the startup plans to let artists opt into requiring users to occasionally listen to ads or pay a few dollars per month for an Audius subscription. 90% of revenue will go to the artists and 10% to the node operators, and their are also plans to cut in playlist curators. Audius itself hopes the value of its tokens will rise so it can sell from its stockpile to generate revenue.

“Audius’ dedication to empowering artists through supporting direct relationships with fans, censorship resistance, and fair pay is so important in a time when artists are being mistreated regularly” writes dance music superstar Deadmau5 aka Joel Zimmerman who’s on the startup’s advisory board. Other artists like Zeds Dead, Mr. Carmack, and Rezz have pledged to put some exclusive music on Audius, ranging from finished tracks to rough drafts. They were attracted by the promise of bigger and faster payouts, plus a transparent copyright takedowns process.

The biggest challenge for Audius will be playing catchup recruiting artists and listeners over a decade after SoundCloud launched and when Spotify already has 108 million paying subscribers from is 232 million users. For now there’s not much special about the user experience, where you can listen to a feed of what you follow or library of saved songs, or check out trending artists and playlists At least sign up is easier than most blockchain apps, requiring merely an email address or Twitter sign-in, though crypto kids can use MetaMask. The lack of native mobile apps won’t help, though.

All the artists-first philosophy won’t matter if it never gains traction. But if Audius does grow, it has a savvy approach to preventing unnecessary content takedowns. Rumberg claims an estimated 80% of takedowns on apps like SoundCloud and YouTube are not actually infringing copyright, leading to great content disappearing. “Audius doesn’t have the ability to deplatform you or censor you” says Audius co-founder Forrest Browning.

Audius co-founders (from left): Forrest Browning, Roneil Rumberg

First, since it doesn’t host the songs itself, it will just pass copyright holder complaints on to the uploaders themselves. Owners can be reassigned the revenue being earned by a song rather than have it taken down. And instead of pulling down a whole DJ set, the rights holder of a 5 minute song in an hour-long mix would get 1/12 of the proceeds. Browning tells me “A lot of artists are completely fine with their content being remixed or mashed up.”

If disputes aren’t resolved, rights holders can approach the operators of nodes hosting the music and file a local equivalent of ta DMCA takedown request, though the music might still live on other nodes beyond the law. In that case, rights holders file a complaint to the Audius arbitration committee made up of users. That group can vote on whether a track legally should be removed or its revenue reattributed, and both plaintiffs and committee members must put up a small financial stake they’ll lose if their claim is frivolous or they make erroneous decisions.

We’ll see if this hands-off approach to censorship actually flies with the law. If so, it could give artists confidence in joining Audius that they lack elsewhere. Many are frustrated after constantly having to rebuild their audience on different platforms from MySpace to iTunes to Spotify to SoundCloud, especially if their tracks are disappearing. One benefit of being open sourced and decentralized is that “Let’s say our company closes up shop in 5 years? Audius and the content will live on forever, as long as folks continue to operate the nodes” Rumberg explains.

To make sure it stays in business as it stretches its venture funding from General Catalyst and Lightspeed, Audius has plans for additional tools that could make it and artists money. From being able to crowdfund future albums to selling merchandise or VIP experiences, Audius could become a gateway to spending on independent music. It could have to compete with itself, though, since Audius’ on-demand streaming site is just one client built on its Open Source protocol. The founders say they hope other people will build Pandora-style radio clients, music discovery apps, and more listening options through its APIs.

Rumberg and Browning met the summer after high school at a camp of Stanford admits. Throughout college, the recent graduates got deeper into dance music subgenres by devouring everything on SoundCloud. But watching their favorite artists get music kicked off that app while their DJ friends struggled to break through the algorithms, Rumberg says they wondered “how can we remove the platform from this equation?”

Music businesses aiming to free art from “the man” so often end up becoming him. But by decentralizing control and funneling money directly to creators, Audius may code its way into music culture.

Vista Equity Partners, which likes to purchase undervalued tech companies and turn them around for a hefty profit, has purchased web content management and digital experience company, Acquia in a deal valued at $1 billion.

Robert F. Smith, who is founder and chairman of Vista Equity Partners, says that increasingly brands understand that  delivering a quality digital experience is essential to their success, and he sees Acquia  as well positioned in the market to help deliver that. “Acquia understands this and is leading the way in providing innovative solutions to its customers while, at the same time, giving back to the open source community,” Smith said in a statement.

Scott Liewehr, principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, says Vista tends to buy companies and then centralize operations so the companies can concentrate purely on growth. “Vista, as a PE firm, tends to make money on companies by standardizing their operations to cut costs. It runs the portfolio companies more like divisions of a larger company than independent entities,” Liewehr wrote in a Tweet.

Tony Byrne, founder and principal analyst at Real Story Group, a firm that keeps a close eye on the digital experience market, points to Marketo as a prime example of how this works. Vista acquired Marketo in May, 2016 for $1.8 billion in cash. It applied the centralization formula and sold the company to Adobe last year for $4.75 billion, a tidy little profit for holding the company for two years, but he cautions there is no guarantee this is how it will play out.

“For customers it depends on whether Vista is looking for mid-term income or pump-up-and-exit a’ la Marketo. For the former it likely means some cost-cutting and potentially staff changes. For the latter, it means more acquisitions and heavy upselling of new services — likely as precursor to long-awaited IPO,” Byrne told TechCrunch. He added, “Tough to imagine any other software firm wanting to buy Acquia, though it’s always possible.”

It’s worth noting that Ping Identity, another firm Vista purchased in 2016, is set to go public soon, so that pathway to IPO is a direction that Vista has also taken.

Acquia, which is the commercial arm for the open source Drupal project, had raised $173.5 million, according to Crunchbase. The Drupal project was started by Acquia co-founder Dries Buytaert in his dorm room at the University of Antwerp in 2000. Acquia launched as the project’s commercial arm in 2007.

Branding is an essential component of every startup. It’s more than publishing a tagline or a mission statement; it’s how your company comes alive in the eyes of customers. Some companies make it look easy, but designing and successfully launching a brand can be a daunting endeavor. How do you develop a brand strategy? What’s your brand positioning? How do you know if your brand is resonating with customers? At this year’s Disrupt SF, we’re bringing together Bumble’s Chelsea Maclin, PR expert Brooke Hammerling, and creative director Ben Pham to provide tactical advice for how to help your brand cut through the competition and stand out.

Each one of our speakers has a unique perspective on how to translate your startup’s values into a compelling brand that customers can engage with and support.

Chelsea Maclin: Chelsea leads Bumble’s global marketing strategies and initiatives, focusing on international campaigns, brand marketing, experiential marketing, and integrated partnerships. Her growing team works cross-functionally to test, develop and implement innovative marketing strategies for the brand across the globe. She helped the company launch its newest vertical, Bumble Bizz.

Brooke Hammerling: Brooke is the Founder of Brew and has over 23 years of experience in technology PR, strategy and communications. She started Brew determined to bring a different style to the PR world and Brew has grown to be a company that provides a unique blend of communications that she had envisioned. Some of the companies Brooke has worked with over the years include Live Nation, Framebridge, Refinery29, Sonos, Splice, GroupMe, SmartThings, August and Oracle. Hammerling is also a successfully exited entrepreneur in her own right, having sold Brew to Freuds for a reported $15 million.

Ben Pham: As a co-founder and creative director at Character, a branding agency based in SF, Ben has worked with numerous brands including Adobe, Uber, Facebook, Google, Samsung, Nike, Fitbit and Amazon. Ben likes to draw inspiration from unexpected places, relying on his personal motto of “look in the wrong place to find the right answer.” When he’s not in the studio in search of the next big idea, he can be found advising young entrepreneurs, snowboarding in Tahoe, and cooking for friends at his home in Oakland.

We’re thrilled to have this conversation, and we can’t wait to see you there. Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here.

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

In a small corner on the second floor of a roughshod maker space in Philadelphia, the founders of Hava Health are plotting the launch of what they call the first vaporizer designed for smoking cessation.

Robots roam the open floors of the offices at NextFab, where Josh Israel and Devin Serago, two serial entrepreneurs and college friends, work on nailing down the technical aspects of vape that would systematically reduce nicotine concentrations over time to ween smokers and vapers alike off of nicotine.

“We’re not revolutionizing a completely new product,” says Israel. “The understanding of vaporizer has been around for 10 years plus… patented a new design to let people do what we set out to do which is to actually help people quit smoking.”

Israel and Serago have already raised a small seed round from some big names in the venture capital investment community, including Global Founders Capital, Make in LA, Backstage Capital, Quake Capital, Ben Franklin Technology Partners and NextFab. 

Indeed, it was the ability to work in the NextFab maker space on an industrial block in Philadelphia next to a plumbing supplier that allowed the two men to rapidly prototype their product.

Unlike other electronic cigarettes that are currently on the market, Hava Health and its Hale vaporizer are in the process of applying for approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be classified as a smoking cessation treatment. The company founders see their competitors not in vaporizer vendors like Juul Labs, but in the patches and gums on offer from brands like Nicorette and NicoDerm.

“We’re not another vape device or another e-cigarette,” says Israel. “Our mission is to actually help people quit their addiction to nicotine.”

The timing for Hava couldn’t be better. Over the summer, regulators appeared to have woken up to the dramatic rise in e-cigarette usage among teens after years of declining cigarette usage. Earlier this month, the Trump administration proposed a ban on flavored e-cigarette products, while the marketing tactics of vaporizer companies came under more intense scrutiny.

Juul Labs, makers of the most widely used electronic cigarette on the market, has borne the brunt of the criticism from health professionals.

Meanwhile, a mysterious lung illness affecting some users of primarily marijuana-based vaporizer products spurred the Food and Drug Administration into action to tighten controls on the distribution, sale and approval of new products.

Israel says that products on the market currently are addiction “alternatives,” giving users a healthier way to use nicotine.

By contrast, Hava Health is pitching a smoking cessation tool. “We have a patented design,” says Israel. “What we do is we separate nicotine from the other compounds. We reduce the nicotine as we leave the other oils the same. Over time we reduce the nicotine and increase the clean oils and we get them to zero percent.”

The dual-chambered cartridge for controlling nicotine levels and the other oils used in vaporization was the technology that received Hava’s first patent. Now the company is making it through the FDA’s clinical trials process with the goal of getting its vaporizers on store shelves by 2024.

Israel and Serago took a circuitous route to become medical device entrepreneurs. Their previous endeavor was a company called ThrillGroup, a group dating app that was acquired by Shabi.com.

After their experience building that company, first in the U.S. and then in India, the two entrepreneurs returned to the states and cast about for their next opportunity.

“We started this because his grandmother died from lung cancer and his little brother expressed frustration that he couldn’t quit using the vaporizers and was smoking more than he would have if he had used a regular cigarette,” says Israel. 

The community perks for Extra Crunch members just got better with an upgrade to our offer from Brex. Earlier this month we announced that annual Extra Crunch members can get 100,000 Brex Rewards points after signing up for a Brex corporate credit card. Now the offer includes an airline miles transfer program headlined by JetBlue TrueBlue and including six other airline partners: Aeromexico Club Premier, Air France/KLM Flying Blue, Avianca LifeMiles, Cathay Pacific Asia Miles, Qantas Frequent Flyer Program and Singapore KrisFlyer. The miles transfer ratio from Brex Rewards points to JetBlue TrueBlue points is 1:1, and Brex is giving away up to five JetBlue round-trip flights for Brex customers who transfer the most Brex Rewards points to TrueBlue points between 9/24 and 10/24.

Brex gives startup teams higher credit limits than what they would get with any other business credit card option, and it does so without requiring a personal credit check or security deposit during the application. There are some impressive reward multipliers across categories like rideshare, travel and restaurants. It also comes with $50,000 worth of partner offers from AWS, Salesforce and many more.

Full benefits with the Brex for Startups credit card include:

• 100,000 Brex Rewards points upon signup (equal to about $1,000)
• 7x points on ridesharing app charges
• 4x points on travel charges, including Airbnb
• Miles transfer program to seven airlines (including JetBlue, Singapore Airlines, Qantas, Air France, Cathay, Avianca and Aeromexico) and their loyalty programs
• 3x points on restaurant charges
• 2x points on recurring software charges like Salesforce, Slack and GitHub
• 1x points on all other charges
• Discounts on the top services for startups, including Zendesk, Google Ads, SendGrid, AWS, WeWork and more
• Automated receipt-capture and expense matching with the Brex mobile app, or via text and email
• Built-in integrations with NetSuite, QuickBooks and Xero
• And more

In order to qualify for the Brex credit card, companies need at least $100,000 in the bank and must meet Brex’s other qualification requirements. This offer is only available to annual Extra Crunch members in the United States. You can sign up for annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Extra Crunch membership offers how-tos and guides on company building, deep dives on successful startups, lists of verified experts in key services, no banner ads on TechCrunch.com, discounts on TechCrunch events and more. You can take a look at the types of articles we produce for Extra Crunch by heading here.

After signing up for an annual Extra Crunch membership, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to the Brex offer. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

Once you receive the link, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for the credit card. As a reminder, companies must have at least $100K in the bank to qualify, be based in the U.S. and meet Brex’s other qualification requirements. 

To sweeten the deal, Brex is also offering anyone that signs up a chance to win one of five round-trip JetBlue flights to any JetBlue destination. Winners will have the option to bring a friend and will be able to book JetBlue Mint or JetBlue Economy tickets (as long as the value per ticket does not exceed $2,000). The contest starts today and runs through October 24. Winners are chosen based on the number of Brex Rewards points transferred to JetBlue TrueBlue points through the Brex dashboard during the contest period. Winners will be announced in November.

Sign up for an annual Extra Crunch membership today to claim this community perk. You can purchase an annual Extra Crunch membership here.

We’re going to try something new at Disrupt Berlin this year, based on the great response we’ve been getting to our startup how-to coverage. We’re going to put experts who work closely with startups on our Q&A stage, where you can talk to them in intimate workshops about key topics like growth, fundraising and recruiting.

To help kick off this experiment, we’ve asked growth marketing expert Asher King Abramson to lead a session where he’ll tear down your landing pages and Facebook/Instagram ads in front of a live audience. He’ll deconstruct how effective they are at (1) conveying what you do (2) and doing so enticingly — so that people click.

Get your Disrupt tickets here (you’ll also get a very large discount on an Extra Crunch subscription).

If you’re attending in Berlin and want to participate, you can submit your assets to ec_editors@techcrunch.com for him to consider.

If you’re not familiar, Abramson is the cofounder of Bell Curve, a growth marketing agency widely used by Y Combinator companies and others around Silicon Valley and the world, the cofounder of Demand Curve (YC s19), and a frequent industry speaker on growth (you can see some of his webinars here). We recently named Bell Curve to Verified Experts, our growing list of service providers who startups love to work with, based on founder recommendations. You may also be familiar with his cofounder, Julian Shapiro, a columnist here at TechCrunch who has covered topics for us including trends in paid channel ad prices, how well different sectors monetize and now a regular column featuring tips from across top growth marketers (like these tips from today on how to sponsor a Youtube influencer, the relative value of SEO link-building in 2019, etc).

This focus on growth is part of our larger orientation towards building great companies via coverage in our new Extra Crunch subscription product.

One additional note: if you’re heading to Disrupt SF instead, you’ll also be able to workshop with Abramson there.

Spotify is expanding its selection of personalized playlists with this morning’s launch of two new additions: On Repeat and Repeat Rewind. Both are focused on helping you revisit the songs you have kept replaying at various times.

The former, On Repeat, will deliver your current obsessions — that is, the tracks you’ve played the most over the past 30 days. This playlist will auto-update as you continue to listen to more music. However, the playlist is not genre-specific, so for those with broad musical tastes and interests, it could be a little disjointed.

Meanwhile, Repeat Rewind is a way to return to your most recently-loved songs from over a month ago. That means it’s not quite as current as On Repeat, but will help you revisit some of your all-time favorites.

Like On Repeat, the playlist isn’t limited by artists, mood or genre. And it will update every five days, Spotify says.

There won’t be any overlap in the two playlists, either, which will make them useful additions for any regular Spotify listeners.

The playlists join Spotify’s growing collection of personalized playlists, headlined by Discover Weekly. They’ll be available in the “Made for You” hub in the Spotify app, where you’ll find Discover Weekly, Release Radar, Your Summer Rewind, Your Daily Drive, and others. The playlists will also sit in the “Uniquely Yours” shelf on the app’s home section.

Spotify’s personalized playlists are one of its top-selling features and a reason why it’s difficult for users to jump ship to a Spotify competitor.

They also tend to inspire rivals’ own efforts in personalized music. Just a few days ago, for example, YouTube Music began rolling out a “Discover Mix” playlist, which is basically its own version of Discover Weekly. And a few years ago, Apple Music did much of the same with its launch of “My New Music Mix.”

The new playlists are live now across platforms.