Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Hipcamp uses technology to get people away from technology.

The San Francisco-based startup provides a “people-powered platform” that unlocks access to private land for camping, glamping or just a beautiful spot to park your RV, as described by Alyssa Ravasio, founder and chief executive officer. Amid explosive growth in emerging markets, including Florida and Texas, the company has attracted a $25 million Series B investment at a valuation of $127 million.

Andrew Chen, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has led the round and will join Hipcamp’s board of directors as part of the deal. Caterina Fake of Yes VC, Sarah Tavel of Benchmark, August Capital and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures also participated in the financing, which brings Hipcamp’s total funding to $41.8 million. We first covered Hipcamp in 2014, when the nascent startup raised a $2 million seed round led by AlphaTech.

A self-described internet nerd and avid camper, Ravasio loves the outdoors, as you might’ve guessed. She founded Hipcamp after becoming frustrated with the complex process that is identifying and booking campsites across the U.S.

“I couldn’t believe how difficult the whole process was,” Ravasio told TechCrunch. “I had one camping trip where I spent five hours doing research and almost gave up … I realized camping was broken and the internet could fix it.”

In 2013, Ravasio learned to code and built the first iteration of the Hipcamp platform, a comprehensive database of campsites that earns money by taking a commission made from each booking it facilitates. Today, the company has grown to 40 employees, with campsites in 300,000 sites across the U.S. and plans to expand internationally soon.

“We’re committed to getting people outside, and that’s really the guiding light of our expansion plans,” she said.

As for long-term plans, an Airbnb acquisition wouldn’t make sense, Ravasio explained: “I think going public and making Hipcamp a company that anyone can buy and own part of is exciting to me”

LIV, a Prague-based company that wants to make VR gaming more fun to watch, and in turn bring players and spectators closer together, has picked up $1 million in funding. That’s a pretty modest raise as far as ambitious upstarts go — and LIV is certainly ambitious. However, the list of backers includes noteworthy names, such as the founder of Oculus (and designer of Oculus Rift), Palmer Luckey.

Other investors in LIV include Jaroslav Beck, CEO and co-founder of Beat Games (the studio behind VR streaming hit Beat Saber); early-stage VC Seedcamp; accelerator TechStars; Prague’s Credo Ventures; VR company VIVE; and mixed reality production specialist Splitverse.

Founded in 2016, LIV is betting on the premise that VR gaming represents an entirely new platform, and it is new platforms with nascent ecosystems where the biggest opportunities lie. Furthermore, while the watching of video game live streams shows no signs of abating — made popular via sites such as Twitch — the spectator experience hasn’t transitioned very gracefully to VR.

“Creating content in VR is incredibly hard, there are no tools for it, and no shareable content form factor that conveys the experience of being in VR,” says LIV co-founder AJ Shewki, who was previously a professional gamer under the moniker “Dr Doom”.

“LIV empowers developers and content creators to grow their audience through shareable VR content. Developers integrate our SDK, and content creators are then able to create content with those games and experiences using the LIV App. The content format is called ‘Mixed Reality Capture’ (MRC)”.

The “Mixed Reality Capture” experience is inevitably best watched than conveyed through the written word (you can watch an example below). However, what MRC essentially does is to inject a live video or, alternatively, a 3D avatar of the player’s body inside the video game stream so that spectators experience not only what the player sees (the classic VR first person perspective) but can also follow the “in real life” movements the player makes to execute moves within the game. As a player moves their arms, for example, their avatar can be seen replicating the same moves based on sensor data pulled from the VR gear the player is wearing.

It is this ability to closely watch and potentially learn from the best players that has made video game streaming so popular. But, argues Shewki, the move to VR was initially a backwards step in this regard as it required new technology to close the gap between player and spectator.

“The LIV App gives streamers the tools to broadcast themselves as themselves, or as their favourite avatars, inside any of the 100s of games that we support. We support hundreds if not thousands of avatars, including the popular Japanese VRM avatar format,” says Shewki.

“The LIV App also brings utilities like stream chat, stream alerts, scene controls and camera controls natively into the headset using our proprietary 3D overlay system, built specifically with performance in mind (which in VR is already a scarce resource). The LIV SDK is integrated by developers to get their games LIV ready. We support Unity, Unreal as well as custom engines, and have done integrations with all of them”.

Longer term, Shewki says he wants LIV to not only enable a better live streaming experience but to evolve into what the company is describing as a “real-time audience interaction platform” for VR streamers and games developers. The thinking here is that spectators of VR can also become participants beyond the simple chatroom experience that exists today.

Dubbed “LIV Play” and targeting a closed alpha release by the end of the year, the idea is to give audiences the ability to influence what happens in-game and in real-time, such as purchasing health potions when a player most needs them or spawning extra monsters when they least expect it.

“Our hypothesis was: if we give viewers more engaging ways to participate, as opposed to what you have today with chat, polls and donations, they will,” explains Shewki. “We ran experiments with Beat Saber where we let audiences replace cubes with bombs and do more fun donations. Our experiment results over 120 days were incredible. Week 1 and 2: 700% higher revenue/minute through higher engagement. It petered out to 300% higher rev/min at 120 days, where it’s stayed.”

In other words: take the same monetisation approach that we have seen in games like Fortnite, and apply it to the audience side of live gaming spectatorship. “Creativity is our only limit here,” enthuses Shewki.

Netflix has a new plan to win users in India: make its services incredibly cheap. The streaming service today introduced a lower-priced mobile plan in India that costs Rs 199 ($2.8) per month.

The announced comes days after Netflix announced that it added 2.7 million new subscribers in the quarter that ended in June this year, far fewer than the 5.1 million figure it had projected earlier this year.

Netflix started to test a lower-priced subscription plan in India and some other markets in Asia late last year. The plan restricts the usage of the service to one mobile device and offers only the standard definition viewing (~480p). It also supports viewing on tablets. Company executives said they currently have no plan to expand a similar plan to other markets just yet.

At a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday, Ajay Arora, Director of Product Innovation, said mobile devices are increasingly driving consumption in India. Netflix users in India are watching more content on mobile than users in any other country, he said.

Pomona, an Indonesian startup that creates omnichannel marketing and sales software for consumer brands, announced today it has raised a Series A-2 of $3 million led by Vynn Capital. The round also included participation from new investors Ventech China and Amand Ventures, and returning ones Stellar Kapital and Central Capital Ventura.

(As for why it’s an A-2, co-founder and CEO Benz Budiman explained the company already raised an undisclosed pre-A round, which was reported in the media last year as a Series A. To avoid confusion about this funding since it is not a Series B, they are referring to it as an A-2).

Founded in 2016 by Budiman and CTO Ari Suwendi, Pomona’s software enables brands to offer cashback incentives to Indonesian consumers and includes tools for analyzing customer engagement, offline sales conversion and the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns. It was developed specifically for brands in two categories: consumer packaged goods, such as toiletries and cleaning supplies, and fast-moving consumer packaged goods, or items with a short shelf life and high turnover like food and seasonal items.

The company currently works with more than 50 brands, including Unilever, Japfa, ABC President, Sosro, Frisian Flag and Sungai Budi.

Pomona’s new funding will be used to add new services with the goal of becoming an end-to-end solution, says Budiman. “For brands, we want to provide more information and data points so they can better understand local Indonesian consumers and tailor their engagement strategies to improve outreach efficiency, cut costs and better address their needs.”

The company also has plans to expand into new markets in Southeast Asia, but is keeping which countries under wraps for now.

Pomona’s solutions let customers redeem cashback offers by scanning a receipt with the Pomona app, or its partners can use Pomona’s white-label solutions to create their own branded cashback rewards app. In addition to increasing sales, Pomona’s solutions can help increase offline-to-online conversion rates, since most purchases are still made in brick-and-mortar stores. This gives companies a new way to examine what motivates customer engagement and their purchasing behavior.

In a press statement, Vynn Capital founding partner Victor Chua said, “As a major driver for private consumption in Southeast Asia, Indonesia is an increasingly important market for global brands. Understanding the behavioral traits of local consumers is essential for brands entering and operating in this dynamic market as consumers become more educated and preferential in their spending options.”

China is taking steps to regulate its blossoming vaping market as health concerns over electronic cigarettes increase in recent times.

China’s National Health Commission has begun research into e-cigarettes and plans to issue legislation for the industry, said the head of the health authority Mao Qunan at a press conference this week. The attempt came as Chinese e-cigarette startups raised loads of venture capital over the past year in their fight to vie for attention in the world’s largest market of smokers.

Vaping suppliers in China range from little-known workshops that have come under legal attack from industry giant Juul, which is reportedly mulling a China entry itself, to venture-backed startups operating out of manufacturing hub Shenzhen. At least 20 e-cigarette companies in China have raised fundings since the beginning of 2019, according to data collected by Crunchbase.

These players are in effect up against state monopoly China Tobacco, which is the world’s biggest cigarette maker and provides the government with colossal tax revenues.

Some researchers support the use of vaping to help adults quit smoking while others have shown that e-cigarettes are just as addictive as traditional ones. The other major controversy is the growing use of e-cigarettes among teenagers, which has led to California’s plan to ban vaping product sales.

China is also applying more scrutiny to the new smoking technology. Research shows that the aerosol produced by heating up e-cigarettes can contain “a lot of harmful substances” and additives in e-cigarettes can “pose health risks,” said Mao. He also noted that equivocal labeling of nicotine level can misguide smokers and sloppy device standards can result in battery explosion and other safety incidents.

Like the U.S., China has seen a worryingly high vaping rate among young people, which is another reason that urges Beijing to hold the industry in check. The use of e-cigarettes by kids, teens and young adults has been proven unsafe because nicotine, which is highly addictive, can harm brain development.

In May, China drew up a set of standards (in Chinese) for e-cigarettes that specify the level of nicotine, the type of additives and other components and designs allowed in battery-powered cigarette devices.

It’s perhaps not for nothing that The Great Hack – the new Netflix documentary about the connections between Cambridge Analytica, the US election and Brexit, out on July 23 – opens with a scene from Burning Man. There, Brittany Kaiser, a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, scrawls the name of the company onto a strut of ‘the temple’ that will eventually get burned in that fiery annual ritual. It’s an apt opening.

There are probably many of us who’d wish quite a lot of the last couple of years could be thrown into that temple fire, but this documentary is the first I’ve seen to expertly unpick what has become the real-world dumpster fire that is social media, dark advertising and global politics which have all become inextricably, and, often fatally, combined.

The documentary is also the first that you could plausibly recommend those of your relatives and friends who don’t work in tech, as it explains how social media – specifically Facebook – is now manipulating our lives and society, whether we like it or not.

As New York Professor David Carroll puts it at the beginning, Facebook gives “any buyer direct access to my emotional pulse” – and that included political campaigns during the Brexit referendum and the Trump election. Privacy campaigner Carroll is pivotal to the film’s story of how our data is being manipulated and essentially kept from us by Facebook.

The UK’s referendum decision to leave the European Union, in fact, became “the petri dish” for a Cambridge Analytica experiment, says Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr She broke the story of how the political consultancy, led by Eton-educated CEO Alexander Nix, applied techniques normally used by ‘psyops’ operatives in Afghanistan to the democratic operations of the US and UK, and many other countries, over a chilling 20+ year history. Watching this film, you literally start to wonder if history has been warped towards a sickening dystopia.

The petri-dish of Brexit worked. Millions of adverts, explains the documentary, targeted individuals, exploiting fear and anger, to switch them from ‘persuadables’, as CA called them, into passionate advocates for, first Brexit in the UK, and then Trump later on.

Switching to the US, the filmmakers show how CA worked directly with Trump’s “Project Alamo” campaign, spending a million dollars a day on Facebook ads ahead of the 2016 election.

The film expertly explains the timeline of how CA had first worked off Ted Cruz’s campaign, and nearly propelled that lack-luster candidate into first place in the Republican nominations. It was then that the Trump campaign picked up on CA’s military-like operation.

After loading up the psychographic survey information CA had obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University academic who orchestrated the harvesting of Facebook data, the world had become their oyster. Or, perhaps more accurately, their oyster farm.

Back in London, Cadwalladr notices triumphant Brexit campaigners fraternizing with Trump and starts digging. There is a thread connecting them to Breitbart owner Steve Bannon. There is a thread connecting them to Cambridge Analytica. She tugs on those threads and, like that iconic scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ where all the threads pull-up unexploded mines, she starts to realize that Cambridge Analytica links them all. She needs a source though. That came in the form of former employee Chris Wylie, a brave young man who was able to unravel many of the CA threads.

But the film’s attention is often drawn back to Kaiser, who had worked first on US political campaigns and then on Brexit for CA. She had been drawn to the company by smooth-talking CEO Nix, who begged: “Let me get you drunk and steal all of your secrets.”

But was she a real whistleblower? Or was she trying to cover her tracks? How could someone who’d worked on the Obama campaign switch to Trump? Was she a victim of Cambridge Analytica, or one of its villains?

British political analyst Paul Hilder manages to get her to come to the UK to testify before a parliamentary inquiry. There is high drama as her part in the story unfolds.

Kaiser appears in various guises which vary from idealistically naive to stupid, from knowing to manipulative. It’s almost impossible to know which. But hearing about her revelation as to why she made the choices she did… well, it’s an eye-opener.

Both she and Wylie have complex stories in this tale, where not everything seems to be as it is, reflecting our new world, where truth is increasingly hard to determine.

Other characters come and go in this story. Zuckerburg makes an appearance in Congress and we learn of the casual relationship Facebook had to its complicity in these political earthquakes. Although if you’re reading TechCrunch, then you will probably know at least part of this story.

Created for Netflix by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, these Egyptian-Americans made “The Square”, about the Egyptian revolution of 2011. To them, the way Cambridge Analytica applied its methods to online campaigning was just as much a revolution as Egyptians toppling a dictator from Cario’s iconic Tahrir Square.

For them, the huge irony is that “psyops”, or psychological operations used on Muslim populations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks ended up being used to influence Western elections.

Cadwalladr stands head and shoulders above all as a bastion of dogged journalism, even as she is attacked from all quarters, and still is to this day.

What you won’t find out from this film is what happens next. For many, questions remain on the table: What will happen now Facebook is entering Cryptocurrency? Will that mean it could be used for dark election campaigning? Will people be paid for their votes next time, not just in Likes? Kaiser has a bitcoin logo on the back of her phone. Is that connected? The film doesn’t comment.

But it certainly unfolds like a slow-motion car crash, where democracy is the car and you’re inside it.

WeWork chief executive officer Adam Neumann is already rich, but soon all of the early employees and investors of the co-working giant will be too.

The business, now known as The We Company, has accelerated its plans to go public, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. WeWork is expected to unveil is S-1 filing next month ahead of a September initial public offering.

WeWork declined to provide comment for this story.

The New York-based company, valued at $47 billion earlier this year, has long been rumored to be plotting a massive IPO. The WSJ reports it’s now in the process of meeting with Wall Street banks to secure an asset-backed loan upwards of $6 billion in what could be an effort to downsize its upcoming stock offering. WeWork disclosed massive 2018 net losses of $1.9 billion in March on revenue of $1.8 billion. To convince Wall Street it’s a business worthy of their investment will be a challenge, to say the least. Seeking capital elsewhere ahead of the IPO manages expectations and ensures WeWork ultimately has the cash it needs to continue its global expansion. Here’s a look at WeWork’s expanding revenues and losses:

• WeWork’s 2017 revenue: $886 million
• WeWork’s 2017 net loss: $933 million
• WeWorks 2018 revenue: $1.82 billion (+105.4%)
• WeWork’s 2018 net loss: $1.9 billion (+103.6%)

WeWork has raised a total of $8.4 billion in a combination of debt and equity funding since it was founded in 2011. Its IPO is poised to become the second largest offering of the year behind only Uber, which was valued at $82.4 billion following its May IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

WeWork is said to have initially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO in December, in part so it was ready to hit the public markets if other avenues for cash fell through. The business is one of several tech unicorns to attract billions from the SoftBank Vision Fund. Recently, the Japanese telecom giant eyed a majority stake in the company worth $16 billion, but scaled back their investment down to $2 billion at the last minute.

WeWork, despite mounting losses, is growing — fast. The company established a 90% occupancy rate in 2018 as membership totals rose 116%, to 401,000.

Still, whether WeWork, backed by SoftBank, Benchmark, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity and Goldman Sachs, will be able to match its $47 billion valuation when it goes public this fall is questionable. Early investors will be sure to see a nice return, but late-stage investors may be nervous about their prospects.

Neumann, for his part, has reportedly cashed out of more than $700 million from his company ahead of the IPO. The size and timing of the payouts, made through a mix of stock sales and loans secured by his equity in the company, is unusual, considering that founders typically wait until after a company holds its public offering to liquidate their holdings.

Google is just a couple of months away from releasing its first smart home device with an onboard camera.

The company quietly updated one of its support pages today, detailing that the 10″ Nest Hub Max will be available September 9 for $229. After the page was first discovered by Droid Life, the text on the site has reverted to “coming soon.”

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

The product is the first release in Google’s Nest rebrand of its smart home line. Compared to the company’s previous smart display — the Google Home Hub — the Nest Hub Max packs an onboard camera, which can function as a security camera in addition to enabling video calls.

One of the main differentiating factors of the Home Hub (now called the Nest Hub) was its lack of camera, something that positioned it better for privacy-conscious users wary to place a Google device on their nightstand. With the rebranding and the security camera repositioning, Google may have better luck in convincing users that it’s in their best interest to put a Google-connected camera in their home.

If we’re going to map the world, we’re not going to do it with ever-greater volumes of elbow grease. There’s just too much work to do. AI and computer vision are helpful assistants in this task, however, as a collaboration between Facebook and OpenStreetMaps has shown, laying down hundreds of thousands of miles of previously unmapped roads in Thailand and other less well-covered countries.

The problem is simply that there’s a whole lot of Earth and only a handful of people actually making maps of it. Sure, Google and Apple have dueling products — but their focus is on businesses in cities and accurate navigation, not including every dirt path and gravel road.

Yet for millions of people, those dirt paths and gravel roads are important thoroughfares, and ought to be clearly marked on maps so that they can be reached by other modern services or, you know, get directions. With thousands and thousands of miles not just unmarked but difficult to make out, the mapping community has its work cut out for it.

“Most modern algorithms, training sets, and techniques were invented to work for the areas with highly developed infrastructure. In the developing world — for example, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America — where roads are not well-defined, maintained, or developed, even the best-trained human eye can struggle to identify and properly classify features,” said Dmitry Kuzhanov, a mapping expert in the ride-sharing industry, in a Facebook blog post about the AI-powered effort.

Facebook, of course, wants these far-flung folks to engage with its modern services. Over the last year and a half the company has collaborated with OpenStreetMaps and its users to map 300,000 miles of roads in Thailand, more than doubling what OSM had to begin with. The Map With AI effort resulted in RapiD, a machine learning-enhanced labeling tool that vastly accelerates the process of laying computer-readable roads on top of satellite imagery.

As you can see in the first part of the video below, creating a road for the OSM system (called iD) ordinarily involves basically drawing the road on top of the satellite imagery using simple lines and curves. The second half of the video shows how in RapiD, the AI has already filled in what it suspects are roads, and the human’s job is more to confirm, negate, or slightly adjust them.

Clearly the latter method is considerably faster, even though the machine learning agent that labels the roads is far from perfect. The team estimated that they did maybe five years of elbow-grease work in 18 months.

The system they created for mapping the missing roads of Thailand was robust and outperformed other street-detecting AIs out there, but the researchers found that it lost a lot of accuracy when applied to other countries. Makes sense — the features and cues that reliably define roads in one country or region may be totally absent in another. Ultimately they had to give the agent slightly fuzzier logic than that which the Thailand-centric approach had arrived at.

The deep learning techniques employed to create that improved agent are detailed in a semi-technical way in these two Facebook blog posts (much more technical information can be found in their paper). The system was trained on a huge number of map tiles from OSM’s already mapped areas, each known to have visible and semi-visible roads on them. It learned the features that define a small road and not, say, a retaining wall or creekbed; you can imagine how from orbit those might look similar.

The fuzzy logic approach panned out and the resulting model works well at a global scale; To show it, the project is releasing AI-powered street grids for Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, with more on the way.

The RapiD tool will be provided for the OSM community to use as well, of course. And it’s hard to put it better than Martijn van Exel, a frequent contributor to the project, who provided the following encomium for Facebook’s post:

The tool strikes a good balance between suggesting machine-generated features and manual mapping. It gives mappers the final say in what ends up in the map, but helps just enough to both be useful and draw attention to undermapped places. This is definitely going to be a key part of the future of OSM. We can never map the world, and keep it mapped, without assistance from machines. The trick is to find the sweet spot. OSM is a people project, and the map is a reflection of mappers’ interests, skills, biases, etc. That core tenet can never be lost, but it can and must travel along with new horizons in mapping.

Of course, unless you want to leave it all to Apple and Google, you could join the ranks of OSM yourself and literally help put some places on the map.