Category: UNCATEGORIZED

MongoDB is hosting its developer conference today and unsurprisingly, the company has quite a few announcements to make. Some are straightforward, like the launch of MongoDB 4.2 with some important new security features, while others, like the launch of the company’s Atlas Data Lake, point the company beyond its core database product.

“Our new offerings radically expand the ways developers can use MongoDB to better work with data,” said Dev Ittycheria, the CEO and President of MongoDB. “We strive to help developers be more productive and remove infrastructure headaches — with additional features along with adjunct capabilities like full-text search and data lake. IDC predicts that by 2025 global data will reach 175 Zettabytes and 49% of it will reside in the public cloud. It’s our mission to give developers better ways to work with data wherever it resides, including in public and private clouds.”

The highlight of today’s set of announcements is probably the launch of MongoDB Atlas Data Lake. Atlas Data Lake allows users to query data, using the MongoDB Query Language, on AWS S3, no matter their format, including JSON, BSON, CSV, TSV, Parquet and Avro. To get started, users only need to point the service at their existing S3 buckets. They don’t have to manage servers or other infrastructure. Support for Data Lake on Google Cloud Storage and Azure Storage is in the works and will launch in the future.

Also new is Full-Text Search, which gives users access to advanced text search features based on the open-source Apache Lucene 8.

In addition, MongoDB is also now starting to bring together Realm, the mobile database product it acquired earlier this year, and the rest of its product lineup. Using the Realm brand, Mongo is merging its serverless platform, MongoDB Stitch, and Realm’s mobile database and synchronization platform. Realm’s synchronization protocol will now connect to MongoDB Atlas’ cloud database, while Realm Sync will allow developers to bring this data to their applications. 

“By combining Realm’s wildly popular mobile database and synchronization platform with the strengths of Stitch, we will eliminate a lot of work for developers by making it natural and easy to work with data at every layer of the stack, and to seamlessly move data between devices at the edge to the core backend,”  explained Eliot Horowitz, the CTO and co-founder of MongoDB.

As for the latest release of MongoDB, the highlight of the release is a set of new security features. With this release, Mongo is implementing client-side Field Level Encryption. Traditionally, database security has always relied on server-side trust. This typically leaves the data accessible to administrators, even if they don’t have client access. If an attacker breaches the server, that’s almost automatically a catastrophic event.

With this new security model, Mongo is shifting access to the client and to the local drivers. It provides multiple encryptions options and for developers to make use of this, they will use a new ‘encrypt’ JSON scheme attribute.

This ensures that all application code can generally run unmodified and even the admins won’t get access to the database or its logs and backups unless they get client access rights themselves. Since the logic resides in the drivers, the encryption is also handled totally separate from the actual database.

Other new features in MongoDB 4.2 include support for distributed transactions and the ability to manage MongoDB deployments from a single Kubernetes control plane.

Bay Area-based robotics startup Dishcraft has unveiled a massive robotics and AI-powered dishwashing system. Like much of the rest of the industrial robotics industry, the company’s looking to automate a dull task with a high turnover rate, which amounts to about a month of employment on average.

It’s a beast of a system from the looks of it. Employees drop dishes off into stacks, which are then loaded into the robotic system up to 90 at a time. It uses a vision-based AI system to inspect the plates, cleaning them again if it finds any food remnants left.

It’s probably over the top for a vast majority of kitchens — and while we don’t have quote, it’s almost certainly price-prohibitive, as well. But the startup’s got an interesting pedigree — co-founded by Linda Pouliot and Paul Birkmeyer, who were also involved in the founding of Neato and Dash Robotics, respectively.

Dishcraft has also raised a decent chunk of capital, with more than $25 million in VC, led by Baseline Ventures, First Round Capital and Lemnos. Apparently some of the investors have a personal interest in automating kitchens.

“One of my first jobs was as a dishwasher, so I’ve seen first-hand how outdated and inefficient dishrooms are today and how important they are to the overall operations in a kitchen,” Baseline Ventures founder Steve Anderson said in a press release. “Dishcraft is bringing entirely new thinking, technology, and processes to tackle this problem, and it is long overdue.”

Dishcraft joins a growing number of robotics startups, including Zume and Miso Robotics, that are attempting to automate kitchens with the help of robotic arms. The company is currently selling  customized versions of the solution to kitchen, but has not publicly released pricing.

Google Earth first made use of its rich global 3D visualization as a backdrop for a Carmen Sandiego tie-in back in March, but today there’s a new adventure to explore. After solving The Crown Jewels Caper, amateur home gumshoes are now tasked with finding out the secrets of The Keys to the Kremlin Caper, which kicks off in Russia, as you might’ve guessed from the name.

Google makes use of the Netflix re-imagining of the classic globetrotting Carmen Sandiego character, which debuted in a 1985 computer game released by Broderbund Software. The Google Earth version includes pixelated graphics and gameplay inspired by the original series, with the modern look that’s used in the Netflix show by educational publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The game can be played on Android, iOS or desktop (via Chrome) and has a lot of the same charm and appeal of the original series, with similar educational value in terms of highlighting some key cultural and geographic details along the way as you investigate the case.

Salesforce announced it is making progress toward releasing a Customer Data Platform (CDP) this week at Salesforce Connections in Chicago. While the company is talking in greater detail about the platform, they are calling Customer 360, it won’t be available for pilot customers until this Fall.

The idea behind the CDP isn’t all that different from good old-fashioned CRM, but instead of using a single source of data in a single database, Salesforce’s bread-and-butter product, it draws upon a variety of sources. Martin Khin, SVP for product strategy at Salesforce Marketing Cloud says that the company found that the average customer uses 15 significant sources of data to build a much more comprehensive picture of the customer.

In the 1990s, tracking customer data in a CRM was a fairly straightforward process. You had basic information like company name, address, phone number, main contacts and perhaps a listing of what each customer purchased, but as it has become increasingly crucial to gather enough data to fully understand the customer, it takes a richer set of data.

This whole area of creating a central database like a CDP is something that Salesforce, Adobe and others have begun to discuss in the last year. When you’re dealing with multiple sources of data, it becomes much more than a customer tracking problem. It becomes a serious data integration issue as the data is coming from a variety of disparate sources.

Khin says it comes down to pulling three main areas together. The first is identity management, in the sense that you have to be able to stitch together who this person is as he or she moves across the different data sources. It’s crucial to understand that this is the same individual in each channel and interaction, regardless of the system where the interaction occurs, and even if the customer started out without identifying themselves.

Once you have that identity foundation, which is the key to all of this, you can begin to build that 360 degree picture in the CDP, and with that, you can engage with the customer across multiple channels in a more intelligent way, based on actual detailed data about the person.

If the idea is to provide increasingly customized interactions, it requires as much data as you can gather to offer customized messages across each medium. The danger here is that you’re building a complete picture of each consumer in a central database, which in itself becomes a central point of failure. If a hacker were to breach that database, the prize would be a huge treasure trove of personal customer information.

Khin says Salesforce recognizes this of course, and cites Chairman Marc Benioff’s trust mantra. If that happened, it would be a huge breach of customer trust (and of their customers) and while it’s impossible to full protect any database, Salesforce considers security a huge priority.

The other issue is privacy around this information, especially in light of GDPR customer privacy rules in Europe, and other privacy initiatives coming down the pike in other countries. Khin says Salesforce customers have permission toggles they can turn on or off, depending on the region they are in.

For now, the Salesforce CDP is taking another step towards becoming an actual product. On the plus side, it could mean more meaningful, highly targeted marketing, but on the negative side, it’s a lot of personal information sitting in one place, and that’s something that every vendor building a CDP needs to take into consideration.

Xiaomi, best known for its smartphones, is making serious inroads into Russia as it launched a collection of products in the country where some 145 million people live. That includes its smart TVs featuring 700,000 hours of content, smart wristbands, wireless earbuds, and flagship phone Mi 9T, which is identical to its recently announced Redmi K20 for China under a different identifier.

Customers can find these products online on Xiaomi’s website and offline at its 31 authorized retail stores across the country. Xiaomi aims to boost the number of Mi Stores to 100 this year, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. Russian news outlet Kommersant first reported the plan last week.

Xiaomi began shipping to Russia back in 2017 by introducing three handset models and its offering has since broadened. Russia marks the third international country following India and Indonesia — its biggest markets outside China — where it has rolled out smart TVs, a new area of growth for the Hong Kong-listed company.

The three Mi TV models will be available from June 25th with prices ranging from 11,990 rubles ($186.56) to 33,990 rubles ($528.88).

The TV push comes as Xiaomi copes with a global slowdown in smartphone shipment. TVs, like phones, can be an important channel for Xiaomi — which has long billed its software as a differentiator from conventional hardware companies — to sell app services and ads. It came as no surprise that Xiaomi recently bought a small stake in TCL, the world’s third-largest LCD TV maker, to ramp up its production capability in building next-gen connected TVs.

The expansion in Russia also reflects Xiaomi’s ambition to grow its overseas markets, which in the first quarter made up 38% of its overall revenue.

“These three TV models are a symbol of our sincere devotion to Russian consumers; their user experience is important to us when we are developing new devices and localizing them,” said Janet Zeng, vice president of international development at Xiaomi Mi TV.

The first time I showed the Palm phone to the TechCrunch staff, they were excited. At the very least, it was a unique take on the category, designed to be a second phone for those moments that didn’t require a larger, bulkier device.

But reality set in pretty quickly. The device’s capabilities were severely limited by a number of factors, including size. The biggest issue, however, was a Verizon exclusive that only let users purchase the device as a second handset tied to an existing account.

Back in April, the company announced that the 3.3-inch phone could be purchased as a standalone device — albeit still through Verizon or US Mobile. Today, it’s expanding that, making the handset available unlocked, so it will work with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and MetroPCS SIMs.

The phone’s available “at only” $350. That’s cheap compared to many full-sized, mid-tier handsets, but cheapness is certainly a relative concept. It still seems like a lot for a second phone, and while it’s certainly adorable, I’d strongly advise against anyone using it as a primary handset. Heck, it’s not even all that great as a standalone MP3 player.

If you’re still interested, you can pre-order it today — and Palm will throw in a $30 leather case with neck and wrist lanyards. It starts shipping in six to eight weeks.

Knowledge is the fuel of business. Every decision requires a full understanding of the data underlying it, and that means reaching out not only to an organization’s own staff for insight, but also to experts in the wider world. Management consultants, research agencies, and data providers make hundreds of billions of dollars per year attempting to answer key questions for business executives.

Sometimes they are successful, but many times, finding the right expert can be vexing. For the most important decisions, having multiple experts or even hundreds of experts provide their opinion might be critical to success.

Germain Chastel and Sascha Eder know the problem well. Former McKinsey consultants, they worked with some of the top technology companies in the Valley attempting to answer their questions — but oftentimes struggled to do so given the unique problems that confront those organizations. “We realized it was really hard to find experts who could teach them something and had the insights that were relevant,” Chastel explained.

In early 2017, the two left McKinsey and eventually joined forces with Anuja Ketan, and together the trio formed NewtonX. NewtonX is a “knowledge access platform” which attempts to intelligently answer questions posed to it by business clients. Clients answer a carefully calibrated series of questions to properly vet and scope a query, and then NewtonX farms it out to it network of experts for insight.

That rapid-response network has now gotten the attention of Two Sigma Ventures, the venture wing of the high-flying algorithmic-trading hedge fund, which led a $12 million Series A round into New York City-based NewtonX. That’s a follow up to a $3 million seed round co-led by Third Prime Capital and Xfund last year.

Today, the company offers two main product lines. First is what it calls Expert Calls, which are similar to the traditional expert network offering of companies like GLG. Here, a client answers a series of structured questions to determine a single expert to talk to and get feedback from.

The more interesting product to me, and the one representing 70% of the startup’s revenue right now, is Expert Surveys. With this product, the goal is to ask a business question to a wider number of experts who might provide a variety of responses. So, for instance, NewtonX could potentially answer a query such as how CIOs at large Fortune 500 companies are budgeting for cybersecurity this year.

Where NewtonX gets interesting is that it doesn’t want to just casually facilitate these calls and surveys, but instead, the startup wants to build out a true knowledge graph that can better answer questions faster with each activity on the platform. As the platform gets smarter about knowledge, the idea is that on-boarding a new client or initiating a new survey or question will be faster since the platform will already know many of the nuances of that particular field of business.

Over the two and a half years since the company’s founding, it has found wide support among businesses. It counts Microsoft, 23&Me, and Gartner as public clients, and also has a list of 20 corporates already on the platform. Chastel told me that nine of the top ten management consulting firms have also used NewtonX services, and many top research firms have also used the product.

Early revenues has allowed the company to expand early. It has 32 employees at its offices near Grand Central, and Chastel noted to me that a majority of employees and a majority of managers are women. He said that the firm’s technology to identify experts on the web is also the basis for their own recruiting efforts.

With the new funding, the company intends to grow to 100 head count locally, and also expand out is client success and expert success teams.

Volvo and Nvidia announced a new partnership today aimed at developing the next-generation decision-making engine for Volvo Group’s fully autonomous commercial trucks and industrial service vehicles. The partnership will use Nvidia’s Drive artificial intelligence platform, which encompasses processing data from sensors, perception systems, localization, mapping and path prediction and planning.

Volvo already has some freight vehicles with autonomous technology on board in early service, but these are deployed in tightly controlled environments and operate supervised, as at the Swedish port of Gothenburg. The partnership between Nvidia and Volvo Group is intended to help not only test and deploy a range of autonomous vehicles with AI decision-making capabilities on board, but also eventually ensure these commercial vehicles can operate on their own on public roads and highways.

Transport freight is only one target for the new joint effort – Nvidia and Volvo will also seek to build autonomous systems and vehicles that can handle garbage and recycling pickup, operate on construction sites, at mines, and in the forestry industry, too. Nvidia notes on its blog that its solution will help address soaring demand for global shipping, driven by increased demand for consumer package delivery. It’ll also cover smaller-scale use cases such as on-site port freight management.

The agreement between the two companies will span multiple years, and will involve teams from both companies sharing space both in Volvo’s HQ of Gothenburg, and Nvidia’s hometown of Santa Clara, California.

Nvidia has done plenty with autonomous trucking in the past, including an investment in Chinese self-driving trucking startup TuSimple, powering the intelligence of the fully driverless Einride transport vehicle and working with Uber on its ATG-driven truck business.

A number of incumbent backs are known to be developing new digital-first products in a bid to keep the new wave of challenger banks at bay and now it appears that the latest to make that move is J.P. Morgan.

According to sources, the investment bank has begun recruiting for a secretive skunkworks project within London’s burgeoning fintech industry. Very few details are known about what exactly J.P. Morgan plans to build, although TechCrunch understands the bank is busy hiring high level developers with full-stack and cloud-based dev skills for the new project, along with other personnel.

One source tells me that interested candidates are being asked to sign an NDA, and that the project is still in its formative stages. They say the plan is to essentially build a startup within a corporation that will be run independently and entirely separately from J.P. Morgan’s existing technology and businesses. The bank is only hiring for permanent positions rather than contractors in order to keep it “secret,” another source tells me.

Meanwhile, for the few people I’ve spoken to who have heard about the project there’s speculation that J.P. Morgan is developing a competitor to “Marcus,” the digital bank launched by Goldman Sachs that focuses on savings and offers a competitive interest rate. That would also put it up against challenger banks such as Atom, Tandem and savings marketplace Raisin.

However, one source tells me they’ve heard that J.P. Morgan’s skunkworks project could in fact be a much more ambitious cloud-based banking platform on which numerous products can be launched. That would be more akin to a core banking SaaS platform or “AWS for Banking,” along the lines of Starling’s core banking product or Germany’s solarisBank or London’s 11:FS Foundry.

Optimizely, a platform that offers tools for A/B testing and personalization on the web and in mobile apps, today announced that it has raised a total of $105 million. This includes a $50 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Private Captial, with the participation of Accenture Ventures, as well as $55 million line of credit from Bridge Bank.

Goldman Sachs’s Michael Kondoleon will join Optimizely’s Board of Directors as a board member.

“We’re excited to reach this milestone because these investments cement our leadership position in the market,” Optimizely CEO Jay Larson told me. “We can invest more in products to put an even bigger gap between Optimizely and our competition. We can expand geographically. And we will continue to grow our team of world-class digital optimization experts. This is a big day for Optimizely and a big day for the experimentation and personalization industry.”

The company notes that about a quarter of the Fortune 100 currently uses its services. the company says it now handles over 6 billion events a day and that its customers have tripled their investments in digital experience optimization in the last two years. Current customers include the likes of Gap, Visa, IBM, StubHub, Metromile, Lending Club and Sonos.

In total, Optimizely has now raised more than $200 million, excluding the line of credit. The additional $55 million from Bridge Bank are a bit unusual, but not completely out of the ordinary for companies at this stage. “Bridge Bank is proud to continue working with Optimizely, a global leader at the forefront of the digital experience optimization market,” said Mike Lederman, senior vice president and western region director of Bridge Bank’s technology banking group. “Optimizely is on a path of substantial growth and the additional capital will help them continue to build market-leading products that are used by an increasing number of top global brands.”

As is pretty much standard for companies at this stage, Optimizely will use the new funding to drive growth.