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E-commerce giant Amazon was built on the concept of a large marketplace that could be the home for all online shopping, whether it was for items and services it was selling itself or those sold by third parties. Now — capitalising on the new trend for direct-to-consumer (D2C) selling, it is partnering with Adobe to step up its efforts to play a role in even transactions beyond the Amazon.com web.

Today, Adobe announced that it is working with Amazon on a new program called Branded Stores for Amazon Sellers, to create what they are describing as “branded storefronts” (not described specifically as websites) aimed at smaller merchants that have already been selling through Amazon (and possibly other marketplace platforms) to build their own first-party commerce experiences — while still using some of the transaction and fulfilment tools of the Amazon ecosystem. For now, those tools don’t appear to include Prime, although from what I understand expanding Prime beyond the Amazon.com ecosystem is on the roadmap. Instead, it covers Amazon Pay, fulfilment and hosting on AWS.

This is not an exclusive deal, but Adobe says Amazon is calling it the preferred partner. The Branded Stores offering is rolling out first in North America with plans to expand it to Europe in the coming months. Pricing has yet to be announced.

The timing of the news is interesting on two fronts. On Adobe’s end, it follows on from an announcement made yesterday, where Adobe (which is holding its Imagine event this week in Vegas) noted that Magento was getting integrations with Amazon and Google. Merchants now can use the Magento platform to manage inventory, pricing and other details on Amazon listings. Today’s news is another sign of how Adobe may indeed have a lot of tools for merchants to fuel its new Commerce Cloud effort (launched in March), but it lacks the scale of transactions and merchant customers that Amazon has.

“Small and mid-market businesses are taking direct ownership over how they manage customer experiences to differentiate, grow, and build loyalty,” said Jason Woosley, Vice President of Commerce Product and Platform, Adobe, in a statement. “Our work with Amazon empowers this large community of sellers to get closer to their customers while saving them time and money on development.”

On the part of Amazon, the collaboration with Adobe is a sign of how the company is trying to change with the times, and specifically to respond better to the rise of D2C in the world of e-commerce. In D2C — which has been strong in the fashion world but also appears increasingly in other categories too — brands develop direct relationships with their customers (not via Amazon.com listings) that can span not just websites, but big social media presences on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. In fact, in some cases even websites are being thrown out the window, in aid of reaching customers wherever they happen to be.

“We are excited to support the Branded Stores for Amazon Sellers offering from Magento, which builds on our long running collaboration with Adobe,” said Terry Wise, VP, Channels and Alliances, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Powered by AWS, this launch will provide sellers a seamless way to grow their business and scale for peak shopping periods.”

To be clear, Amazon has been offering the option to create brand stores on Amazon.com since 2017. The downside of these is that they are limited in their interfaces and do not give a lot of control to the sellers in terms of functionality. Navigate beyond the first page, and you are likely to find yourself again in the basic Amazon experience: great for Amazon, and I suppose somewhat helpful in its predictability, but not what every brand wants or needs today.

To continue growing, Amazon has been making gradual steps to expand how the commerce tools that it has built for its own platform can be applied elsewhere. In March, the company announced a partnership with Worldpay to build Amazon Pay into its payment experience: this means that any online merchant using Worldpay to take card and other online payments can now offer Amazon Pay as a payment option.

At the time, Patrick Gauthier, VP of Amazon Pay, hinted to us that while Prime was not part of the proposition then, the company was already quietly making a few third-party websites and brands Prime-eligible, meaning that if you were a Prime member, there would be certain items for sale on participating sites that would qualify for free, often next-day or same-day, shipping.

Coupled with today’s development, you can see a gradual picture building up for how Amazon hopes it can continue to remain relevant in the next phase of online omnicommerce, wherever it happens to be.

Adobe Lightroom is getting its first new slider in a long time today that helps bring out texture in images. This new feature, which will be available in Lightroom, Lightroom Classic and Camera Raw, is part of today’s May release of Adobe’s photo editing and management tool. In addition, the company is also launching a number of new learning tools inside of Lightroom to help novice and advanced photographers edit their photos, as well as shared albums in the cloud-connected version of Lightroom, as well as a number of other smaller updates.

While Adobe is mostly pushing the new tutorials and other learning features in Lightroom, my guess is that the new texture editing control is what most photographers will be most interested in. The last time, Adobe added a major new tool to Lightroom was the Dehaze feature, and that’s a few years ago now. With Texture Control, which should work quite well in conjunction with Dehaze and the Clarity tool, brings out medium-sized detail in an image, including hair, skin and bark.

Adobe’s work on this actually started out as being all about smoothing, not enhancing texture. Indeed, when you set a negative value on the new texture slider, that will markedly smooth skin texture, for example, and ideally do so without fully destroying all of the finer details in a headshot.

As Adobe notes, the tool isn’t all that dissimilar from the existing Clarity tool. “Clarity is a stronger control than Texture, and that’s a good thing,” explains Adobe’s Max Wendt. “Texture is more subtle, and sometimes you need something stronger. Clarity can bring out changes in larger areas of tonality, and will change the luminance and saturation more than Texture. Texture and Clarity are fundamentally different tools, and they each have their own strengths.”

Another new tool the company is launching today is Defringe, which can be used to reduce Chromatic Aberrations that are still visible after using Lightrooms existing tool for removing these fringes. This feature is only available in Lightroom for Mac and Windows.

Lightroom is also getting shared albums with this release, a feature that was long overdue now that Lightroom, in its non-Classic version, has gone cloud-first.

As for the tutorials and other educational materials, Adobe is adding interactive tutorials, starting with the iOS and Android apps, with Mac and Windows following later). The company partnered with a number of photographers to contribute these, as well as ‘inspirational’ photos. The company also expanded its help section and now offers more built-in tutorials.

Hailo, a Tel Aviv-based AI chipmaker, today announced that it is now sampling its Hailo -8 chips, the first of its deep learning processors. The new chip promises up to 26 tera operations per second (TOPS) and the company is now testing it with a number of select customers, mostly in the automotive industry.

Hailo first appeared on the radar last year, when it raised a $12.5 million Series A round. At the time, the company was still waiting for the first samples of its chips. Now, the company says that the Hailo-8 will outperform all other edge processors and do so at a smaller size and with fewer memory requirements. “By designing an architecture that relies on the core properties of neural networks, edge devices can now run deep learning applications at full scale more efficiently, effectively, and sustainably than traditional solutions, while significantly lowering costs,” the company explains.

The company also argues that its chip outperforms Nvidia’s comparable Javier Xavier AGX in some benchmarks, all while using less power and hence running cooler — something that’s especially important in small IoT devices.

We’ll have to see if that works out in practice once more engineers get their hands on these chips, of course, but there can be no doubt that the demand for AI chips on the edge continues to increase. A few years ago, after all, the market shifted away from a focus on centralizing all processing in the cloud to moving to the edge, in an effort to improve latency, reduce bandwidth cost and provide a more stable platform that doesn’t depend on network connectivity.

Like Mobileye before it (which was later acquired by Intel), Hailo is working with OEMs and tier-1 suppliers in the automotive industry to bring its chip to market, but it’s also looking at other verticals, including smart home products and really any industry where a high-performance AI chip is needed for object detection and segmentation, for example.

“In recent years, we’ve witnessed an ever-growing list of applications unlocked by deep learning, which were made possible thanks to server-class GPUs,” said Orr Danon, CEO of Hailo. “However, as industries are increasingly powered and even upended by AI, there is a crucial need for an analogous architecture that replaces processors of the past, enabling deep learning to run devices at the edge. Hailo’s chip was designed from the ground up to do just that.”

Tempo Automation, a San Francisco-based startup that helps shorten the time from prototype to production for electronics manufacturers, announced today that it has raised a $45 million Series C led by returning investor Point72 Ventures. The round also includes new investor Lockheed Martin and existing investors Lux Capital and Uncork Capital.

The company’s turnkey solution allows manufacturers to upload a CAD and have it turned into a circuit board in as little as three days. Founded in 2013, Tempo Automation’s services are tailored for low-volume manufacturers and include customers in a broad range of industries, including aerospace, consumer electronics, automotive and medical tech.

Tempo’s last funding round was $20 million Series B in 2018. In its latest funding announcement, the company said its Series C will be used for hiring and to develop software that will make its manufacturing process quicker and more accurate.

“Tempo is reinventing electronics manufacturing by putting software automation at the center of what they do. Tempo’s interconnected smart factory is modernizing the manufacturing process, which allows them to deliver a far superior customer experience. We see considerable market opportunity for Tempo, and we are pleased to support their continued growth,” said Point72 partner and Tempo Automation board member Sri Chandrasekar in a press statement.

After delaying a promised 2018 arrival (while offering a beta as consolation), Google Assistant is finally arriving on select Sonos speakers. Not an earth shattering bit of news, but certainly a nice little free software upgrade for those who already own a Sonos One speaker or Sonos Beam soundbar.

It’s a mutually beneficial deal for all parties. The addition of another assistant on top of Alexa lets Sonos embrace the growing smart home space without picking sides. For Google, meanwhile, it means getting its smarts on some decent home audio equipment beyond the Home Max speaker it doesn’t talk much about these days.

Initially available just in the U.S., users who download the update can use it for your standard array of smart assistant functions, including music playback, weather and smart home controls, using the speakers’ built-in mic array.

Sonos is clearly enjoying the ability to play both sides here. As it notes in a press release, the hashtag Sonos life means never having to settle for one.

The Google Assistant is Sonos’ second built-in voice assistant. Customers on Sonos will have the ability to choose an assistant for each individual speaker, with multiple voice assistants on a single system. With the Google Assistant on Beam in the living room and Alexa on the Sonos One in the kitchen, start a song with the Google Assistant, ask Alexa what’s playing, and vice versa.

The feature will start rolling out in other countries including the UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, France and The Netherlands in July, with more coming later in the year.

This week, the new $100 million Statue of Liberty Museum opens in the shadow of one of America’s most iconic landmarks. The 26,000 square foot space offers insights into the statue’s storied history, along with context for that majority of visitors who ultimately can’t make it inside the structure.

For those who can’t don’t make it to Liberty Island at all, meanwhile, there’s the brand new Statue of Liberty app, which hits the iOS App Store today. Led by fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, the Yap Studios-developed app offers myriad methods for bringing New York Harbor’s landmark to life.

“I told Apple I would love people who go to the Statue of Liberty to have an Apple experience,” von Furstenberg said in an event ahead of launch. “They invited me to spend two days with full immersion at Apple. The I realized that wasn’t just giving the people who visited an Apple experience, but it was also to Apple a Statue of Liberty experience. And that meant doing an app.”

Augmented reality provides the most fundamental underlying experience. There are a handful of distinct AR experiences in the app designed to offer some insights into the size, scope and history of Lady Liberty for those who aren’t able to experience it first hand.

There’s a torch panorama view, which showcases the the status view of lower Manhattan. Users can also plop a life-size AR reproduction of the statue’s foot directly in front of them or witness a recreating of the making of the statue, glimpsing inside to its struts ad watch its copper material develop the familiar green patina.

There’s an audio component, as well, including a three-part podcast mini-series narrated by von Furstenberg that explores some of the statue’s secret history. For those who end up visiting the island, there’s also a location-based audio tour in the app. Interestingly, Yap opted not to provide an in-person visual AR experience, though one could be coming down the road.

Meantime, the Statue of Liberty app is available now, only to iOS users.

Earlier this year, Spartan, the French manufacturer of a silver-lined underwear designed to block EMF radiation from cell phones and wireless routers, relocated to the U.S. and raised some capital from the Los Angeles-based investment firm, Science.

Now the company has relaunched as Lambs and is adding a radiation-proof silver-lined beanie to its $29-per-pair underwear already on sale in the U.S. The company’s goal is to capitalize on paranoia around the effects of cell phone radiation on health and possible links to cancer.

Any link between exposure to radiation from cell phones or wi-fi and cancer or other deleterious health effects is tenuous at best, according to the American Cancer Society, but that didn’t stop Lambs (nee’ Spartan) from launching at the Consumer Electronics Show in 2017 with a pitch designed to prey on fears about the potential health risks.

Indeed, there are no studies that definitively prove a link between radiation emitted by cell phones and cancer. The most serious health risk associated with cell phones is an accident caused by distracted driving, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The three co-founders Arthur Menard, Pierre Louis Boyer, and Thomas Calichiama were undeterred by the science and — spurred on by capital from Science — are expanding on their product line.

Since relocating to the U.S., the team went back to the drawing board and redesigned their underpants to align more with American tastes.

Now, the new and improved underwear and new beanie are going to be available to anyone who wants bacteria-resistant, silver-lined, underwear and headwear so they can wrap precious metals around their family jewels.

The company also plans to launch a line of t-shirts later this year. A line of women’s underwear is also on the roadmap.

LinkedIn, the social networking platform for the working world that’s now owned by Microsoft, has leveraged its role as a repository for people’s work profiles into making itself a job hunting and recruitment powerhouse.

The company today has amassed more than 20 million job listings — up from a mere 300,000  five years ago — and sees its 600 million users collectively apply to jobs 25 million times per week. That activity also translates to big business: paid subscriptions specifically aimed at recruiters, paid tiers for average users who want to have more access to contacting people for jobs, job ads and more all contribute to LinkedIn’s bottom line, a business that is projected to hit $6.4 billion in revenues for 2019, growing 27 percent in the last quarter.

Now, LinkedIn is stepping up a gear in the operation. After a two-year effort, LinkedIn is today announcing that it has finally integrated its jobs and hiring efforts and announcing a raft of new features for both.

On the jobs front, they include instant job alerts, a redesign of the Jobs home page, and more salary insights available to all users (including free users), with skills assessments coming soon.

On the recruitment front, LinkedIn Jobs, Recruiter, and Pipeline Builder are all coming together to create a more seamless way to manage how you post ads, source candidates and other leads and ultimately  interact with them in the process of hiring them.

“This will mean higher quality candiates, better jobs and a better fit,” VP of product John Jersin said in an interview. When asked why it took so long to integrate these tools — and why the process didn’t happen five years ago, for example, he answered that it was more of a consequence of how expectations have evolved as tech has evolved to question some of the silos that are incumbent to how we do business.

“We designed these systems in a way that worked well, but no one foresaw what we needed,” he said. “Advancements in AI have driven the strategy, and integrating all this means we can all learn better from each other.”

The new features that LinkedIn is bringing to jobseekers are responses to how our communications have evolved with the rise of the smartphone. It notes that jobseekers who respond to ads faster are more likely  to get the job, so now when a job gets posted that meet your search criteria, you can get a ping within minutes of the posting. Meanwhile, the redesign of the Jobs homepage is more mobile friendly, with added search features that take into account how you navigate on handheld devices.

The skill assessments, meanwhile, seems to me to be a direct response to the many new innovations we’ve seen among e-learning and recruitment startups, where companies like Coursera and Triplebyte are offering more tools to people to figure out where the best fit might be for their skills in the working world. LinkedIn notes that these can both be used by individuals to verify their skills — tackling a perennial problem with people putting empty claims on their resumes — and also recruiters to source people for jobs.

Important steps for the company, but there remain a lot of opportunities for smaller and newer upstarts to take bites out of LinkedIn’s business in areas where it is still being slow to develop.

For example, we’ve seen the emergence of interesting, more targeted recruitment startups that focus on, say, recruiting with racial diversity in mind (as in the case of Handshake) or focusing on, say, women returning to work after having children (as in the case of the Mom Project). While LinkedIn has made some baby steps (no pun intended) in this area, there is still a ways to go, opening the door to others to come in.

“This is a challenging and multifaceted problem,” admitted Jersin, “but LinkedIn is committed to trying to solve it.” He said the company has quietly started to work on ways of picking up more information that “could be more useful” in addressing questions like these. “One thing that is important is a sense of trust,” he noted as one of the challenges that needs to be tackled online. “I think we are very lucky to be one of the few companies out there that can say that we would use this information responsibly, in the interests of jobseeker.”

Google.org, the charitable arm of Google, just announced a new grant fund for European organizations. This fund in particular will support nonprofits, universities, research teams and for-profit social enterprises working on safety issues and combatting abuse.

Google .org has already partnered with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue to help organizations in the U.K. But they want to take this program one step further by expanding to other organizations across Europe.

Each eligible organization will receive between €50,000 and €1 million (between $56,000 and $1.12 million). Applications are open until June 28th. Google lists hate, extremism and child safety as key areas for today’s new fund.

The timing of this announcement is interesting. Last week, Google spent a lot of time talking about its efforts when it comes to privacy at its Google I/O developer conference.

Digital ministers of the G7 as well as Australia, India and New Zealand are also meeting in Paris tomorrow to discuss tech regulation. Among other things, they’ll talk about transparency on moderation processes to make sure that big online platforms remain safe.

With Google’s new fund, the company shows that it also cares about these issues and is already acting in order to make the web safer for everyone. But a grant fund doesn’t necessarily replace audit processes and legal requirements.

Founders might not believe it, but managing a venture capital firm isn’t all that dissimilar to a startup. Case in point today: InnoVen Capital, one of Asia’s most prominent venture debt firms, has pulled in $200 million in new money to continue its expansion in the region.

The money comes from InnoVen’s two shareholders — Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and Singapore’s UOB — each of which has added $100 million in additional firepower for the fund, which is popularising debt-based financing within Asia’s startup ecosystems.

The organization came to be in 2015 when Temasek acquired the Indian ‘branch’ of Silicon Valley Bank expressly to offer differentiated financing to startups. The spinout was named InnoVen and it quickly expanded beyond India with the opening of an office in Singapore in 2016 and then an outpost in Beijing in early 2018.

The firm operates without a specific fund size unlike many other investors, but already there are some numbers to indicate its growing role in Asia.

That regional play is still in its early days, but already the business has deployed over $500 million in financing to more than 200 companies, according to Ashish Sharma, the former head of GE Capital India who leads InnoVen’s India business.

The fund operates at Series A and beyond and Sharma told TechCrunch that its investment levels have sped up over the past two to three years, thanks in particular to the addition of offices in Southeast Asia and China.

Recent deals from the fund have included investments in Moglix, Carsome, RedDoorz, Awfis and even a stealthy startup, Indonesia-based logistics venture Kargo which included debt within its first round of funding. Already, the Chinese arm has accrued 30 deals in a little over a year, and some of the biggest names backed across the region include Vision Fund company OYO and Naspers investments Swiggy, which recently raised $1 billion, and Byju’s.

Yet despite InnoVen’s increased profile, there remains confusion on the role of venture debt in Asia. Anecdotally, I’ve heard many misguided opinions from so-called venture capital-focused reporters — and not just in Asia — who see debt-based investment as a ‘last resort’ for companies. Its addition in a round is a tell-tell sign of a struggling business, they claim.

That’s completely wrong, according to InnoVen’s Sharma.

“It doesn’t come in from a position of weakness, that’s a big misconception,” he explained to TechCrunch in an interview. “In fact, venture debt is not available to companies which are in trouble. Most companies that raise venture debt do so from a position of strength.”

“They’ll say ‘We’re raising $100 million, let’s lay in $20 million of venture debt to optimize the dilution,'” Sharma added. “We’ve helped some very large companies use venture debt to get to the next level.”

Ambitious growth story? Check.

A business that’s misunderstood by many? Check.

Who said running a VC firm isn’t like running a startup?