Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Plex today is launching a new desktop application for Mac and Windows, with the goal of eventually replacing Plex Media Player as the company’s only desktop solution. The app’s arrival also signals a change in direction for the company, which will also now remove its existing Windows Store application and end support for the traditional home theater PC setup — the latter which involves a desktop computer connected to a TV or home theater.

The company explains this decision was made after examining how people were using Plex today, and found that most would have an equal or even better experience with a streaming device and its new players.

“It marks the end of an era for us, and we’d be lying if we said it wasn’t a little bittersweet,” the company wrote in a blog post about the change.

Home theater PC-style configurations are today a bit of a holdover from an earlier era where there were fewer resources to stream personal media from your PC to your TV. Today, however, Plex’s apps for streaming devices are fairly capable, and a heck of a lot simpler to set up and use by mainstream consumers.

The company also noted that the new Apple TV and Android players support nearly all the same formats and that Plex’s app for streaming devices has come a long way in recent years.

“Modern streaming devices don’t need as much care and feeding as desktop computers. They don’t need to sleep (much), they use a tiny amount of electricity…and they don’t require nearly as much effort to get up and running. They have remotes that work wonderfully out of the box (no more fiddly custom key mappings!) In short, they’re designed for the environment in which you’re using them, and it shows,” the company explained, in hopes of fending off any backlash.

Meanwhile, the new Plex desktop app includes all the capabilities of Plex Media Player along with support for offline access. Previously called “Sync,” this feature has been renamed to “Downloads,” and allows Plex users to take your media with you. Similar support for offline media will come to Plex’s mobile apps, too, at a later date, the company said.

To use the Downloads feature, you’ll need a Plex Pass subscription. But otherwise, the new desktop app is free.

Though the app is meant to replace Plex Media Player, the company says it will continue to update the software until January 2020, to allow time for everyone to make the transition.

New numbers out of Canalys show strong continued growth for the North America wearables market for Q2. The market hit $2 billion value for the quarter, according to the firm, marking a 38% year over year growth.

It’s not exactly earth shattering, but it’s steady for a category that felt almost dead in the water a year or two back. Growth for the quarter was lead by Apple and Samsung, which marked 32% and 121% growth, coming in at first and third place, respectively — at 2.2 million and 400,000 units.

Fitbit, meanwhile, retained its number two position. The company show a modest 18 percent growth, owing the slow down to fewer smartwatches (versus fitness bands) shipped. That tracks with the company’s disappointing quarterly results as the new Versa Lite failed to hit the mark. The move marks a misstep for the Versa brand, which has otherwise contributed well to Fitbit’s bounce back.

Interestingly, while North America is the number two wearables market in terms of units shipped, it continues to be the most valuable. That’s likely due to higher unit prices, with the Apple Watch leading the pack, versus Xiaomi’s super cheap fitness bands, which have a much stronger foothold in their native China.

For a couple years now Virgin Galactic’s Spaceport America was more aspirational than functional, but now it’s been built out with the necessaries for commercial spaceflight — mainly coffee. The company just showed off the newly redesigned space from which it plans to launch flights… sometime.

Much of the undulating, aesthetically rusted building, located deep in the desert of New Mexico, is dedicated to housing the carrier craft and rocket planes that the company has been testing for the last few years.

That was almost certainly the hard part, in fact: Relocating the infrastructure necessary to support the spacefaring vehicles, including engineers, equipment, and supply chain people, as Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides told me in May.

But the spaceport itself must also become a place for humans to arrive, park at, nervously sip coffee and have a pre-flight meal — if that’s really a good idea for your first trip to space. Maybe stick to coffee.

The “first phase” of the consumer-side build-out includes an elegantly appointed little restaurant and cafe, and upstairs can be found “mission control,” which looks more like a conference room than a spaceplane pilot staging area.

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There are a number of little lounge areas for passengers and others to congregate in, and if the scale seems a little small, keep in mind that this isn’t an airport food court. These flights are going to be full, but they’re also going to be six passengers at a time

Jeremy Brown, design director for Spaceport America, explains that the choice of materials and terraced surfaces, leading up to the lighter, airier second story is meant to evoke the landscape outside, which nearly all the seating faces, and draw the attention outwards and upwards.

Although Virgin Galactic has had several successful test flights, there’s no indication when its first actual commercial flight will be.

“The last flight we did, we basically demonstrated a full commercial profile, including the interior of the vehicle,” Whitesides said in May. “Not only did we, you know, go up to space and come down, but because Beth was in the back — Beth Moses, our flight instructor — she was sort of our mock passenger. She got up a couple times and moved around, she was able to verify our cabin conditions.”

The paperwork is in order and the spaceport itself is now equipped with a cafe, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw the first flight from Virgin Galactic before the end of the year.

Most of us, by now, are aware that all sorts of crazy stuff is happening to the planet’s climate and the blame is pretty much universally recognized as lying with humans, pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere. Scientists are now saying tree planting, for instance, has to happen very, very quickly if we are to avert disaster.

A few startups, such as Changers, have tried to incentivize us to do things like walk instead of taking the car, with mixed results.

Now a blockchain startup things it may have the making of one solution, rewarding us with crypto tokens for making the right choices for the planet. Now, before you roll your eyes, hear me out…

Imagine rewarding people for taking the bus instead of their car – and them exchanging that token to offset their carbon by planting a tree? Or incentivizing passengers for sharing their travel data – helping companies to improve their experience in the future? That’s the big idea here.

Here’s how it works: The DOVU platform offers a token, wallet, and marketplace and allows users to earn tokens and spend them to carbon offset their activity and on rewards within the mobility ecosystem, starting with their Uber rides.

Users link their Uber account to their Dovu wallet, enabling them to earn DOV tokens for every journey taken. The startup has connected to Uber APIs, meaning that, once authenticated, the user has to do nothing other than take the journey.

The Dovu CO2 calculator then automatically rewards the value of tokens depending on the length of the journey. The DOV tokens can then be spent within the Dovu Action, and the user can choose the project to back or the user can ask Dovu to choose the project on their behalf to ensure the carbon offsetting happens.

The platform can connect to any published API, meaning it is in a notional position to have an immediate impact on all the new mobility solutions globally.

With Jaguar Landrover as shareholders, Dovu potentially has the backing to try and make this happen.

Mobility-related organizations often have a need to reward, incentivize or nudge their users to do the right thing. It might be sharing their data for better service planning, taking an alternate route to help ease traffic congestion, or charging electric batteries at times that are best for the grid. Whether it’s influencing consumer behavior or encouraging data sharing, the DOVU platform could, in theory, provide a solution that meets the needs of both the mobility provider and the end-user. That at least is their pitch.

Hell, given the state of the planet, it might be worth a shot…

Networking and web security giant Cloudflare says the recent 8chan controversy may be an ongoing “risk factor” for its business on the back of its upcoming initial public offering.

The San Francisco-based company and former Battlefield finalist, which filed its IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, earlier this month took the rare step of pulling the plug on one of its customers, 8chan, an anonymous message board linked to recent domestic terrorist attacks in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, which killed 31 people. The site is also linked to the shootings in New Zealand, which killed 50 people.

8chan became the second customer to have its service cut off by Cloudflare in the aftermath of the attacks. The first and other time Cloudflare booted one of its customers was neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer in 2017, after it claimed the networking giant was secretly supportive of the website.

Cloudflare, which provides web security and denial-of-service protection for websites, recognizes those customer cut-offs as a risk factor for investors buying shares in the company’s common stock.

“Activities of our paying and free customers or the content of their websites and other Internet properties could cause us to experience significant adverse political, business, and reputational consequences with customers, employees, suppliers, government entities, and other third parties,” the filing said. “Even if we comply with legal obligations to remove or disable customer content, we may maintain relationships with customers that others find hostile, offensive, or inappropriate.”

Cloudflare had long taken a stance of not policing who it provides service to, citing freedom of speech. In a 2015 interview with ZDNet, chief executive Matthew Prince said he didn’t ever want to be in a position where he was making “moral judgments on what’s good and bad,” and would instead defer to the courts.

“If a final court order comes down and says we can’t do something… governments have tanks and guns,” he said.

But since Prince changed his stance on both The Daily Stormer and 8chan, the company recognized it “experienced significant negative publicity” in the aftermath.

“We are aware of some potential customers that have indicated their decision to not subscribe to our products was impacted, at least in part, by the actions of certain of our paying and free customers,” said the filing. “We may also experience other adverse political, business and reputational consequences with prospective and current customers, employees, suppliers, and others related to the activities of our paying and free customers, especially if such hostile, offensive, or inappropriate use is high profile.”

Cloudflare has also come under fire in recent months for allegedly supplying web protection services to sites that promote and support terrorism, including al-Shabab and the Taliban, both of which are covered under U.S. Treasury sanctions.

In response, the company said it tries “to be neutral,” but wouldn’t comment specifically on the matter.

After much speculation and no small amount of controversy, Cloudflare, one of the companies that ensures that websites run smoothly on the internet, has filed for its initial public offering.

The company, which made its debut on TechCrunch’s Battlefield stage back in 2010, has put a placeholder value of the offering at $100 million, but it will likely be worth billions when it finally trades on the market.

Cloudflare is one of a clutch of businesses whose job it is to make web sites run better, faster, and with little to no downtime.

Recently the company has been at the center of political debates around some of the customers and company it keeps including social media networks like 8Chan and racist media companies like the Daily Stormer.

Indeed the company went so far as to cite 8Chan as a risk factor in its public offering documents.

As far as money goes, Cloudflare is — like other early-stage technology companies — losing money. But it’s not losing that much money, and its growth is impressive.

As the company notes in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

We have experienced significant growth, with our revenue increasing from $84.8 million in 2016 to $134.9 million in 2017 and to $192.7 million in 2018, increases of 59% and 43%, respectively. As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively. For the six months ended June 30, 2018 and 2019, our revenue increased from $87.1 million to $129.2 million, an increase of 48%, and we incurred net losses of $32.5 million and $36.8 million, respectively.

Cloudflare sits at the intersection of government policy and private company operations and it’s potential risk factors include a discussion about what that could mean for its business.

The company isn’t the first network infrastructure service provider to hit the market. That distinction belongs to Fastly, whose shares likely have not performed as well as investors would have liked.

Cloudflare has raised roughly $332 million to date from investors including Franklin Templeton Investments, Fidelity, Union Square Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Pelion Venture Partners, and Venrock. Business Insider reported that the company’s last investment gave Cloudflare a valuation of $3.2 billion.

The company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “NET.” Underwriters on the company’s public offering include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Jefferies, Wells Fargo Securities and RBC Capital Markets.

Walmart’s relationship with Instacart deepened today with an expansion of their partnership across Canada for grocery delivery. Walmart Canada had previously run a 17-store pilot program with Instacart, starting last September, in both the Greater Toronto area and Winnipeg. With the expansion, Walmart Canada will offer same-day grocery delivery from nearly 200 Walmart stores nationwide.

Canadian Walmart shoppers can now shop online via Instacart’s website or mobile app, select their city and store, then add items to a grocery cart, check out, and choose their delivery window. The delivery can arrive in as fast as one hour, or it can be scheduled as much as five days in advance.

The service is currently live in cities and communities throughout British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, the retailer says.

Walmart Canada isn’t the only Walmart arm to have a relationship with the same-day delivery service. Last year, Walmart’s Sam’s Club also began working with Instacart to offer same-day delivery from its warehouse stores in parts of the U.S. That partnership expanded last fall, and recently began to power Sam’s Club new alcohol delivery service, as well.

Walmart in the U.S. also offers an online grocery service, but has chosen to work with other delivery providers, including Point Pickup, Skipcart, AxleHire, Roadie, and Postmates, after ending relationships with Uber, Lyft, and Deliv. According to reports, Walmart didn’t want to work with Instacart in the U.S. because it only wants to use the provider for last-mile deliveries — and Instacart wanted to list Walmart inventory in its app.

In Canada, however, that arrangement seems to be working out.

With the expansion, Instacart delivery is now available to more than 70% of Canadian households, up from 60% in January of this year. By comparison, Instacart is available in more than 80% of U.S. households.

It’s not the only option for Walmart online grocery in Canada, though.

In addition, Walmart Canada offers grocery pickup at 175 stores, expanding to 190 by the end of January 2020. It also offers pickup at 9 PenguinPickUp locations in the Toronto area and next-day delivery in the Toronto area through Walmart.ca.

“Canadian families are busy. By introducing more online shopping options at Walmart, we’re helping make life easier and more convenient for them,” said Lee Tappenden, President and CEO of Walmart Canada, in a statement released today. “Expanding our relationship with Instacart provides our customers with even more time-saving ways to shop at Walmart in their community.”

To kick off the deal, the code WMTCOAST2COAST can be used at checkout for $10 off a first-time customer’s order of $35 or more.

Honestly, the creativity and quality of early-stage startups and their founders never ceases to amaze us. When we issued the call for applications to our TC Top Picks program for Disrupt San Francisco 2019, the response was overwhelming — and the competition was off the hook. Our editors dug in and managed to narrow the field to the startups they felt best represent their specific category. It wasn’t easy, but we’re thrilled with the results and we think you will be, too.

The TC Top Picks program showcases outstanding early-stage startups across these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

Top Picks founders receive a free Startup Alley exhibitor package, a featured location on the exhibition floor, three free Founder passes and VIP treatment — including invitations to the investor reception. They also receive an interview on the Showcase Stage with a TechCrunch editor — and we’ll promote that video across our social media platforms.

It’s time to announce the early-stage startups we chose as TC Top Picks for Disrupt SF ’19. Can we get a drum roll, please?

AI/Machine Learning

• Greyparrot: Provides cutting-edge computer vision products and services to enterprises looking for AI partners.
• Halos: A fully digital consumer insurance platform designed to make insurance useful for every single consumer.
• Moodbit: People Analytics Technology that analyzes employee emotions and delivers predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve performance.
• OneClick.ai: Automated Deep Learning AI technology to enable businesses with advanced predictive analysis and decision making.
• Voxel51: AI for Video: video analytics platform in the cloud and on-premises enabling fast, rich insights from image and video data sets.

Biotech/Healthtech

• achu health: A predictive health platform that tracks vital patterns to warn you of impending future illnesses.
• FindAir: An award-winning, smart tool for asthma monitoring. Start using FindAir ONE and take control of your asthma today.
• MyMilk labs: An m-health device and app for improving breastfeeding via direct breast-milk sensing.
• Sparkle Innovations: Transforming banana stem agro-waste into all-natural sanitary pads, organic fertilizer and other value added products.
• Theator: An AI-powered surgical decision support company.

Blockchain

• Button Wallet: Multi crypto currency wallet with exchange in Telegram.
• Crypto APIs: SaaS, Blockchain, Crypto.
• Ember Fund: Mobile app to invest like a cryptocurrency hedge fund.
• Planet Nine: Building a new digital economy for microtransactions.

Fintech

• Beam Financial: A best-paying mobile bank account.
• FineprintF Technologies: Make your purchasing experience transparent with FeeBelly. Instantly catch hidden fees, costly terms and critical details hidden in any document.
• Mellow: The first-ever personal finance solution made for children and parents.
• Trio Financial Technologies: World’s simplest way to invest, by letting you earn investment returns on your checking balance.

Mobility

• AirBie: Smart bike lock for bike-sharing systems.
• #Fly: An exciting AI startup disrupting the travel market using patent-pending technology.
• Flugauto: Providing air transportation for industrial applications, and enabling instant access to cargo for everyone, everywhere.
• SparkCharge: Manufactures and develops charging station for electric vehicles.

Privacy/Security

• Alcide: Provides a cloud-native security platform from code to production to continuously secure workloads running in Kubernetes.
• Hacware: Protects employees from getting email hacked.
• MedStack: Deliver healthcare apps to market 60% faster via cloud hosting with security, HIPAA compliance, pre-written policies + your choice of stack.
• Moabi: Cybersecurity, firmware, binary analysis, SaaS, IoT, IIoT.
• Unum ID: Mobile app empowering users to take control over their personal information.

Retail/E-commerce

• Cloosiv: Order ahead from your favorite local coffee shops, skip the line and earn rewards that save you money at hundreds of locations across the country.
• Frills: A fun way to add and extend personal content with your friends!
• Oculogx: Develops AR software on heads-up displays.
• PadPiper: Find furnished apartments and compatible housemates.

Robotics/IoT/Hardware

• 4DAGE: Dedicated to the studies and application of artificial intelligence in the field of 3D reconstruction and digitization algorithm.
• AVA Technologies: Automatically grow year-round herbs, tomatoes and more.
• ilmatic: Spend your cryptocurrency with a secure hardware wallet.
• SeeHow: SeeHow is a sports technology company that transforms sports equipment into sensors.
• Thinker-Tinker: Consumer product, family technology, subscription, edu-tainment.

SaaS

• Cinchy: The data collaboration platform.
• Onna Technologies: Dedicated to providing the best enterprise search and archiving experience across all company data sources.
• Socionado: Matches vetted freelance social media managers to brands.
• Veamly: Your apps centralized with unified search.
• Vertoe: An on-demand, short-term luggage storage service.

Social Impact & Education

• Bidder Construction App: Connects construction workers with construction jobs around them!
• BlueSmart Technology: Specializing in IoT baby products, their first product, BlueSmart mia, is an award-winning smart baby feeding monitor that fits on any baby bottle.
• Oya: An evidence-based, interactive platform for parents that allows them to monitor and improve their child’s development.
• SNAPSHYFT: Mobile platform connecting understaffed food and beverage and hospitality operations with qualified workers, on-demand.

It’s not too late to exhibit your startup at Disrupt. Simply buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and showcase your startup alongside 1,200+ companies and sponsors in Startup Alley. All exhibiting startups have a shot at winning a Wild Card to compete for $100,000 in our famous pitch competition, Startup Battlefield — TechCrunch editors will choose two startups for that thrill ride.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place on October 2-4 at Moscone Center North. Get your early-bird tickets here. Come join us and discover new opportunities. We can’t wait to see you there!

Google today announced a number of new features for students looking for more information about U.S. colleges. Last year, Google Search introduced new widgets with information about 4-year universities. Today, it is expanding this to 2-year colleges.

The company says that searches for ‘community colleges near me’ saw a 120 percent increase in the past two years, with overall searches for college information spiking between August and the fall, as high school students get ready to apply.

With this update, students can now easily compare the tuition cost, acceptance rates and other information of 4- and 2-year schools. The feature will now also show popular certificates and associate programs offered at 4-year universities and students can create lists of schools that specialize in specific fields and filter them based on distance (which often matters because many community college students, for example, stay close to home) and size.

Like before, this extended data set relies on public information from the U.S. Department of Education.

“We’ve continued to work with education researchers, experts and nonprofit organizations, high school counselors, and admissions professionals to build a useful experience that is attuned to the needs of students, and we will continue to find new ways to make information more easily available and helpful as you search for your future education opportunities,” the company notes in today’s announcement.

Croatia has not exactly been known for a huge startup scene in the past, and probably its most famous tech company out of there in recent years has been Rimac Automobili, the $125.9M-raised startup out of Zagreb which created an electric supercar to rival anything Porsche might make. But the technical talent in the country remains high, as is the way with many Eastern European countries, which have a long and deep heritage of engineering and science going back to the bad old Soviet days.

Croatia is about to get a shot in the arm, however, with the arrival of a home-grown dedicated VC fund, Fil Rouge Capital, which plans to invest in young entrepreneurs, start-up and scale-up companies, as well as establishing a local entrepreneurial eco-system in Croatia.

The fund is now fully operational as of last month, having received funding commitments of over €42 million ($46.6M), demonstrating a strong interest of investors in the growing startup economy there.

Stevica Kuharski, of the firm, says: “Start-ups need to be given an opportunity, and opportunities are precisely what Fil Rouge Capital brings to Croatia. Start-up founders, whose projects are in very early, early and growth stages now have a place to go to for mentoring and financial support.”

He says Fil Rouge will invest in a variety of sectors including software, fintech, marketplace, manufacturing, hardware, IOT and logistics.

The fund aims to run over the next four and a half years until the end of 2023, and plans to invest in up to 250 companies operating in Croatia through its three investment stages: “The Startup School” for super-early-stage companies; “The Accelerator Program” for companies that are still early but already up and running; and more full-blown institutional funding-ready companies requiring capital up to €1.5m.