Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Opsani, a Redwood City, California startup, wants to go beyond performance monitoring to continually optimizing cloud applications, using artificial intelligence to help the software learn what is the optimal state.

“We have come up with a machine learning technique centered around reinforcement learning to tune the performance of applications in the cloud,” company co-founder and CEO Ross Schibler told TechCrunch.

Schibler says each company has its own unique metrics and that’s what they try to optimize around. “We’re modifying these parameters around the resource, and we’re looking at the performance of the application. So in real time, what is the key business metric that the application is producing as a service? So it might be the number of transactions or it might be latency, but if it’s important to the business, then we use that,” he explained.

He claims that what separates Opsani from a monitoring tool like New Relic or AppDynamics is that they watch performance and then provide feedback for admins, but Opsani actually changes the parameters to improve the application performance in real time, based on what it knows about the application and what the developers want to optimize for.

It is also somewhat similar to a company like Spotinst, which optimizes for the cheapest cloud resources, but instead of simply trying to find the best price, Opsani is actually tuning the application.

The company recently announced a $10 million Series A investment led by Redpoint Ventures. Previous investors Zetta Ventures and Bain Capital also participated.

For now, it’s still early days for the startup. It has a dozen employees and a handful of customers, according to Schibler. With the recent $10 million round of funding, it should be able to hire more employees and continue refining the product.

Google is making it easier to find and listen to audio content specific to your search interests, with playable episodes surfaced in results that start rolling out today.

Playable podcasts will show up in results when you use “podcasts” as a keyword in your search, in combination with other terms. It’s intended to deliver you relevant results freed from the confines of a dedicated podcast player, and Google also intends to extend this search feature to queries that don’t even specify “podcast” in future as it refines its algorithms.

Google is also going to be rolling out this inline playable results feature for the search function in Google Podcasts on the web, and for Google Assistant. If you’re logged in, it’ll also sync your results so that you can pick up from wherever you left off in the dedicated Google Podcasts app.

This should be good for discoverability, since it means that a much broader potential audience can stumble across your podcasts then would be possible with existing tools, and sample them on the spot. But Google still plans to roll out finer controls for publishers, that mean you can specify where people can listen to them, and presumably where they can’t.

It’s yet another sign that podcasts are slowly and surely becoming more prevalent and mainstream than ever, and that Google is very interested in making sure that it doesn’t fall behind on ensuring this content is part of its overall search index and not the exclusive domain of other, more closed ecosystems that exist outside its sphere of influence.

Google is going to be rolling this out gradually beginning today, with initial availability open to U.S. users searching in English.

You probably don’t think too much about your humble office printer. But they’re a prime target for hackers, if any of the dozens of vulnerabilities found by security researchers are anything to go by.

The latest research by the NCC Group just revealed at the Def Con security conference shows just how easy of a target office printers can be.

Think about it: office printers at some of the largest organizations in finance, government and tech all print corporate secrets — and classified material — and often keep a recorded copy in their memory. Printers are also complicated devices — more so than most people realize — with multiple internet-connected components, networking protocols, printer languages and fonts, and connected apps and devices, all of which have vulnerabilities.

No wonder they’re a target; office printers are a treasure trove of sensitive data. And because they often come with a web-based interface or an internet connection, they have a huge attack surface, making them easy to hack.

In the course of three months’ work, researchers Daniel Romero and Mario Rivas found and reported 45 separate vulnerabilities from six of the largest printer makers — HP, Lexmark, Brother, Xerox, Ricoh, and Kyocera — which could have allowed attackers to, among other things, siphon off copies of print jobs to an attacker controlled server.

They also showed they could hijacked and enlist vulnerable printers into botnets — used to overload websites with junk internet traffic. Or, with little effort, they could brick the printers completely, potentially causing havoc for business operations.

“Suppose a criminal developed a work that sought to compromise and permanently corrupt every vulnerable printer; this would severely impact the world’s ability to print, and could be catastrophic for affected sectors that rely heavily on printed documents, such as healthcare, legal and financial services,” said Romero and Rivas.

Not only that, printers can also be used as a way to gain a “method of persistence on a network,” the researchers said, allowing them to gain deeper access into a corporate network from an easy point of entry.

Because in most cases printers aren’t protected by anti-malware services like desktops and laptops, a malicious attacker could gain a permanent backdoor on the devices, giving them long-term access to a target corporate network.

When the researchers reported the bugs, they received mixed responses from the companies. Although every printer maker has since fixed the bugs they found, the researchers said some printer makers didn’t have a way to disclose the vulnerabilities they found, leaving them stranded and unable to make contact with some companies for more than two months.

Lexmark, which fixed nine vulnerabilities and issued its own security advisories, received a special mention for its “mature” vulnerability disclosure effort.

HP also issued a security advisory noting the five bugs it received and later fixed.

But the researchers said there are “probably more” bugs ready to be found. “We stopped searching after a few vulnerabilities,” they said. What makes matters worse is that most printer makers share code from one device to another, likely vastly expanding the number of devices affected by a single vulnerability.

Maybe next time, think before you print.

Customer experience is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit these days. If you can improve the customer experience, you can win more customers. Beynd, a Utah startup, wants to help by providing a better, more automated onboarding workflow. Today, it announced a $2 million seed round.

The round was led by Peak Ventures with participation from Prelude Ventures. The investors seem to be making a good bet. CEO and founder Peter Ord says the company has had a product for just 10 months, but already boasts 121 paying customers with 6800 users on the platform.

Ord says the company’s genesis began, like so many startup ideas, out of frustration he experienced at his previous job. Getting people started on the company’s software was too hard. He thought there had to be a better way, so he built it, and Beynd (pronounced Beyond) was born.

“They say the best companies start with the founders biggest frustration. One of my biggest frustrations at my previous job was that in my everyday life, I could order a pizza and know exactly when that pizza was ready. But when our customers bought our software, we had no thoughtful or meaningful way to help our customers understand when we were going to deliver that,” Ord told TechCrunch.

The customer starts by creating an onboarding workflow template. Each client has its own unique requirements. The first interactions are by email (or communication channel of choice) giving instructions on how to proceed. If the customer gets stuck, there is a button to email the project manager that there is a problem.

The solution includes tools for projected launch dates, so that customers can understand when a product will be ready (or service completed). It also includes an analytics tool, so that customers can understand which processes are most likely to stall.

The company actually uses its own software to onboard its customers. “We drink our own champagne, We use our own products. And so we’re extremely efficient in the way we onboard our customers because they get an immediate sense of how they use the tool through us using our tool to onboard them,” Ord explained.

The company had bootstrapped the business to this point. He says that his goal is to continue to run it as a real business, but the funding will help him expand his vision and improve the experience. He just doesn’t want to get too caught up in the funding culture. “There’s an interesting culture in the VC space where it’s all about raise as much as you can, as fast as you can, and I actually have kind of the opposite opinion, he said.

For now, he has $2 million to try and scale the business further, and he’ll get more only if he feels he needs it. “Let’s continue to prove out the model with this money, then let’s raise more if we have to,” he said.

The UK government has announced it’s rerouting £250M (~$300M) in public funds for the country’s National Health Service (NHS) to set up an artificial intelligence lab that will work to expand the use of AI technologies within the service.

The Lab, which will sit within a new NHS unit tasked with overseeing the digitisation of the health and care system (aka: NHSX), will act as an interface for academic and industry experts, including potentially startups, encouraging research and collaboration with NHS entities (and data) — to drive health-related AI innovation and the uptake of AI-driven healthcare within the NHS. 

Last fall the then new in post health secretary, Matt Hancock, set out a tech-first vision of future healthcare provision — saying he wanted to transform NHS IT so it can accommodate “healthtech” to support “preventative, predictive and personalised care”.

In a press release announcing the AI lab, the Department of Health and Social Care suggested it would seek to tackle “some of the biggest challenges in health and care, including earlier cancer detection, new dementia treatments and more personalised care”.

Other suggested areas of focus include:

• improving cancer screening by speeding up the results of tests, including mammograms, brain scans, eye scans and heart monitoring
• using predictive models to better estimate future needs of beds, drugs, devices or surgeries
• identifying which patients could be more easily treated in the community, reducing the pressure on the NHS and helping patients receive treatment closer to home
• identifying patients most at risk of diseases such as heart disease or dementia, allowing for earlier diagnosis and cheaper, more focused, personalised prevention
• building systems to detect people at risk of post-operative complications, infections or requiring follow-up from clinicians, improving patient safety and reducing readmission rates
• upskilling the NHS workforce so they can use AI systems for day-to-day tasks
• inspecting algorithms already used by the NHS to increase the standards of AI safety, making systems fairer, more robust and ensuring patient confidentiality is protected
• automating routine admin tasks to free up clinicians so more time can be spent with patients

Google-owned UK AI specialist DeepMind has been an early mover in some of these areas — inking a partnership with a London-based NHS trust in 2015 to develop a clinical task management app called Streams that’s been rolled out to a number of NHS hospitals.

UK startup, Babylon Health, is another early mover in AI and app-based healthcare, developing a chatbot-style app for triaging primary care which it sells to the NHS. (Hancock himself is a user.)

In the case of DeepMind, the company also hoped to use the same cache of NHS data it obtained for Streams to develop an AI algorithm for earlier detection of a condition called acute kidney injury (AKI).

However the data-sharing partnership ran into trouble when concerns were raised about the legal basis for reusing patient data to develop AI. And in 2017 the UK’s data watchdog found DeepMind’s partner NHS trust had failed to obtain proper consents for the use of patients’ data.

DeepMind subsequently announced its own AI model for predicting AKI — trained on heavily skewed US patient data. It has also inked some AI research partnerships involving NHS patient data — such as this one with Moorfields Eye Hospital, aiming to build AIs to speed up predictions of degenerative eye conditions.

But an independent panel of reviewers engaged to interrogate DeepMind’s health app business raised early concerns about monopoly risks attached to NHS contracts that lock trusts to using its infrastructure for delivering digital healthcare.

Where healthcare AIs are concerned, representative clinical data is the real goldmine — and it’s the NHS that owns that.

So, provided NHSX properly manages the delivery infrastructure for future digital healthcare — to ensure systems adhere to open standards, and no single platform giant is allowed to lock others out — Hancock’s plan to open up NHS IT to the next wave of health-tech could deliver a transformative and healthy market for AI innovative that benefits startups and patients alike.

Commenting on the launch of NHSX in a statement, Hancock said: “We are on the cusp of a huge health tech revolution that could transform patient experience by making the NHS a truly predictive, preventive and personalised health and care service.

“I am determined to bring the benefits of technology to patients and staff, so the impact of our NHS Long Term Plan and this immediate, multimillion pound cash injection are felt by all. It’s part of our mission to make the NHS the best it can be.

“The experts tell us that because of our NHS and our tech talent, the UK could be the world leader in these advances in healthcare, so I’m determined to give the NHS the chance to be the world leader in saving lives through artificial intelligence and genomics.”

Simon Stevens, CEO of NHS England, added: “Carefully targeted AI is now ready for practical application in health services, and the investment announced today is another step in the right direction to help the NHS become a world leader in using these important technologies.

“In the first instance it should help personalise NHS screening and treatments for cancer, eye disease and a range of other conditions, as well as freeing up staff time, and our new NHS AI Lab will ensure the benefits of NHS data and innovation are fully harnessed for patients in this country.”

Google is building out its travel product with more features to convince you to use it to book flights and plan trips directly, instead of having to go anywhere else. The company is adding more sophisticated pricing features, including historical price comparison for specific itineraries – and notifications about when a price is likely to spike or when it’s at the absolute lowest. It’s also offering a pricing guarantee for bookings made in the next couple of weeks, so you’ll get be refunded the difference if Google says a flight price won’t drop and it subsequently does.

For any flights booked through Google that originate in the U.S. (regardless of destination) between August 13 and September 2, for which Google sends you an alert notifying you that the price is predicted to be at its lowest, the company will alert you if it does drop and then send you a refund on the price difference between what it predicted (ie., what you paid) and the lowest actual fare.

It’s an attractive deal, and the limited time offer is probably only even available because this is new and Google wants to make sure people feel absolutely comfortable trusting their predictions. The company likely has the most readily available, cross-airline information about flight availability, route popularity and price in the world, however, backed by some of the most sophisticated machine learning on the planet, so it sounds like it’s probably a pretty safe bet for them to make.

Google Travel is also adding a number of features once you actually book you trip – it’ll suggest next steps for planning your trip, and then help you find the best neighbourhoods, hotels, restaurants and stuff to do. Plus, reservations and other trip details will automatically carry over to the Google Maps app on your iOS or Android.

Overall, it’s clear that Google is making an aggressive play to own your overall travel and trip planning – and it has the advantage of having more data, better engineering, and a whole lot more in the way of design skills when compared to just about every dedicated travel booking company out there.

Google is launching a beta of its augmented reality walking directions feature for Google Maps, with a broader launch that will be available to all iOS and Android devices that have system-level support for AR. On iOS, that means ARKit-compatible devices, and on Android, that means any smartphones that support Google’s ARcore, so long as ‘Street View’ is also available where you are.

Originally revealed earlier this year, Google Maps’ augmented reality feature has been available in an early alpha mode to both Google Pixel users and to Google Maps Local Guides, but starting today it’ll be rolling out to everyone (this might take a couple weeks depending on when you actually get pushed the update). We took a look at some of the features available with the early version in March, and it sounds like the version today should be pretty similar, including the ability to just tap on any location nearby in Maps, tap the ‘Directions’ button and then navigating to ‘Walking,’ then tapping ‘Live View’ which should appear newer the bottom of the screen.

The Live View feature isn’t designed with the idea that you’ll hold up your phone continually as you walk – instead, in provides quick, easy and super useful orientation, by showing you arrows and big, readable street markers overlaid on the real scene in front of you. That makes it much, much easier to orient yourself in unfamiliar settings, which is hugely beneficial when traveling in unfamiliar territory.

Google Maps is also getting a number of other upgrades, including a one-stop ‘Reservations’ tab in Maps for all your stored flights, hotel stays and more – plus it’s backed up offline. This, and a new redesigned Timeline which is airing on Android devices only for now, should also be rolling out to everyone over the next few weeks.

Back in July it emerged that FlixMobility — the company behind the network of ubiquitous green FlixBus coaches that crisscross Europe and parts of the US — had raised about €500 million in the largest-ever round of funding for a German tech company. That turned out not to be the full story. Today, the company is announcing that the round has now been extended substantially, according to founder and CEO Jochen Engert, with contributions from a new set of investors: Baillie Gifford, Luxor Capital Group, Odyssey 44 and additional investment provided through funds managed by BlackRock.

Engert said FlixMobility will be using the money to “move on from a business perspective” (I don’t think he meant it as a pun, but it’s a good one), and that means growth in a number of ways. They include expanding into new markets in South America and Asia and further into the US; bringing trains onto its network by way of FlixTrain; launching a new group-focused service, FlixBus Charter; and by next year, startup up a long-distance ride-sharing brand, FlixCar. It’s also been working on a smaller “pilot” project, Flix2Fly, to consider how to bring some air routes into the mix as well.

The aim, he said in an interview, is to build a wider “transportation marketplace for customers looking for affordable mobility.”

Engert would not specify the exact size of the round, but he confirmed that it was at the same valuation as the first close of the Series F (which was just over $2 billion), and that the extra funding was “not double” the earlier amount, “but substantial.” (The company has always kept quiet about the exact amount it has raised, and from whom, in part to focus on the business, but also in part to keep competition guessing. We’re still trying to find out the actual number.)

Considering the investors in the round, it means it’s likely it’s added hundreds of millions more to the mix alongside the €500 million from TCV, Permira and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Previous investors in the company have included Silver Lake and General Atlantic.

The company, similar to other on-demand transportation giants like Uber or RedBus in India, does not own a large fleet of vehicles, but works with individuals and companies that own these that want to tap into its logistics platform, which helps build efficient long-distance (intercity) routes — its shortest connection is 50km, most are beyond 100km, and the “sweet spot” Engert said is 200km — and source passengers who collectively want to travel on them.

Typically, Engert said these companies do not go all-in on the Flix platform, but they contribute a proportion of their fleets, which in turn get rebranded with Flix’s distinctive green logo. The idea — similar to a key building block for intracity car services — is to give the operators of those vehicles a steady, predicable stream of usage and business, which offsets the fact that those operators may make smaller margins on those routes because they are not operating them directly. It’s also acquired other companies operating on a similar business model to grow its network.

In 2018, some 45 million people using FlixBus and FlixTrain, along 350,000 daily connections to over 2,000 destinations, the company says. Its network currently spans 29 countries and 300 independent bus and train partners, and it attributes some 10,000 jobs in the industry to its business.

In doing so, FlixBus (and latterly FlixMobility) have tapped into an interesting segment of the world of transportation. While there has been a lot of focus on the next generation of transportation machines — whether that is scooters, or self-driving cars, or electric vehicles, or planes that do not burn as much fuel — Flix is instead working on ways of applying technology to bring some of the dinosaurs of the current (old) generation of vehicles into the 21st century. That has given it an interesting status of working in markets that have typically had less competition, or at least attention, leaving open water for companies like Flix.

That may not be the case longer term. Today companies like Uber are focusing on the urban mobility question, although as it grows to cover all modes of urban transport, there is a clear opportunity for it to extend to the next leg of the journey, too.

A number of startups are bringing technology and innovation to the fertility industry, with a growing few focused specifically on male fertility.

“Society at large doesn’t understand the subject of fertility,” Tom Smith, the co-founder and chief executive officer of men’s sperm storage startup Dadi tells TechCrunch. “People see it as a female issue.”

Dadi has raised a $5 million seed extension led by The Chernin Group, a private equity fund that typically invests in media, with existing investors including London seed-fund Firstminute Capital and New York’s Third Kind Venture Capital also participating. The company, which sends at-home fertility tests and sperm storage kits, closed a $2 million seed round earlier this year.

Dadi’s funding event comes shortly after another men’s fertility business, Legacy, raised a $1.5 million round for its sperm testing and freezing service. Both companies hope to leverage venture capital funding to become the dominant men’s fertility brand.

Bain Capital Ventures -backed Legacy, which won TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield competition at Disrupt Berlin 2018, allows men to get their sperm tested and frozen without visiting a clinic or meeting with a doctor. Founder and chief executive officer Khaled Kteily said the company, which is based out of the Harvard Innovation Labs in Boston, planned to use the capital to expand its sperm analysis and cryogenic storage services.

Sarah Steinle, head of marketing, Khaled Kteily, founder and CEO, and Daniel Madero, head of clinic partnerships at Legacy .

Like many startups today, Dadi and Legacy are capitalizing on the direct-to-consumer business model to educate men about their fertility. Customers of both Dadi and Legacy simply order a DIY sperm collection kit online, collect a sperm sample and send it back to the company for a full fertility report. Both companies offer sperm storage services too. Dadi charges a total of $199.98 for its sperm testing kit and one year of sperm storage, while Legacy asks for $350 for clinical fertility analysis and lifestyle recommendations. To store your sperm in Legacy’s cryogenic storage facilities, it’s an additional $20 per month.

One in six couples struggles to get pregnant after one year of trying. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, one-third of the infertility cases amongst those couples are caused by fertility problems in men, another one-third of issues are connected to women and the remaining cases are a result of a combination of male and female fertility issues. By making sperm storage more accessible, startups hope to encourage a conversation around family planning and fertility among young men.

“Men also have a biological clock,” Smith said. “From your late 20s and onward, your overall sperm count absolutely declines and, more importantly, the number of mutations that can be passed on to that potential child grows.”

Dadi, a New York-based company, plans to use its latest bout of funding to continue developing a number of yet-to-be-announced products, as well as offer new support services to customers who’ve taken Dadi’s fertility tests: “If we are going to live up to our overall objective of being this encompassing business helping men through the fertility stack, the next step for us is investing in next-step support,” Smith explains.

Dadi’s founding team lacks experience in the healthcare sector, which is likely to pose problems as the company expands and forges partnerships in the greater healthcare field. Smith previously led a custom emoji business, Imoji, which was acquired by Giphy in 2017. Dadi co-founder Mackey Saturday, for his part, was previously a graphic designer responsible for creating Instagram’s logo.

Aiming to make up for its lack of expertise, Dadi has formed a Science and Technology Advisory Board with participation from Dr. Michael Eisenberg, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s Medical Center, and Dr. Jacques Cohen, the laboratory director at ART Institute of Washington at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Legacy’s Kteily previously worked as a consultant focused on health & life sciences before serving as a senior manager at the World Economic Forum. Daniel Madero and Sarah Steinle, also Legacy co-founders, previously worked at Medifertil, a Colombian fertility clinic, and Extend Fertility, respectively.

In addition to Dadi and Legacy, other companies close to the space have recently secured notable investments including Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, which raised a $100 million this year. Another seller of ED meds, Ro, has raised a total of $91 million. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round in January from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.

Paytm, India’s biggest mobile payments firm, now has 10 million customers in Japan, the company said as it pushes to expand its reach in international markets.
Paytm entered Japan last October after forming a joint venture with SoftBank and Yahoo Japan called PayPay.

In addition to 10 million users, PayPay is now supported by 1 million local stores in Japan, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm said Thursday. The mobile payment services has clocked 100 million transactions to date, he claimed. In June, PayPay had 8 million users.

“Thank you India for your inspiration and giving us chance to build world class tech…,” he posted in a tweet.

Like in India, cash also dominates much of the daily transactions in Japan. Large medical clinics and supermarkets often refuse to accept plastic cards and instead ask for cash. This encouraged Paytm, which also has presence in Canada, to explore the Japanese market.

And it has the experience, capital, and tech chops to achieve it. The mobile payments app has amassed more than 250 million registered users in India. Most of these customers signed up after the Indian government invalidated much of the cash in the nation in late 2016.

More to follow…