Category: UNCATEGORIZED

I know, I know.

I will say this about the Galaxy Fold, however: it’s been a hell of a conversation piece. I’ve had a LOT of dialogues with strangers since I started using it as my day-to-day. And let’s be honest, that’s a big part of being an early adopter.

The Galaxy Fold is also the most polarizing device I can recall have used. Everyone who sees the thing wants to play with it, but reaction has been very mixed. I was at a Fedex store the other day and ended up handing it off to two of the four employees during the five minutes I was waiting to get a package.

Interestingly, they all seemed to be aware of the screen issues. Foldables have captured the public imagination like few recent consumer electronics. That’s going to be a mixed bag for Samsung. On the upside, it means a larger potential user base. On the downside, it more people are looking on as the company figures out what to do with a malfunctioning product.

On the whole, people at the FedEx store and the various TSA/airline employees I’ve interacted with have been impressed by the product. One said it was smaller than she expected, which took me back a bit, after so many have commented on how bulky it is. I suppose she was expecting me to unfold an iPad.

Some of the TechCrunch writers/editors were a bit less impressed when I had the product with me at our robotics event last week. Tough crowd, obviously.

I’ve fallen somewhere between the two. The fold is undoubtedly an impressive bit of engineering when it’s working. For now, it seems our early suspicions that the device wasn’t ready for prime time appear to have been on the mark, as the company has shifted from “a limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples” to pushing back the launch indefinitely.

It opens up the field the number of other already announced foldable devices (assuming they don’t experience similar problems). Of course, Samsung’s product lines, it should be noted, have bounced back from worse.

Anyway, this marks the end of my daily notes. I still plan to have a review this week, in spite of, well, everything.

Fintech startup N26 is opening its fourth office in Vienna. Eventually, the company plans to hire 300 software engineers, product managers and IT specialists.

N26 is building a mobile bank and has managed to attract 2.5 million users over the past few years. It raised a $300 million round back in January.

This is interesting news as the company says that the new tech hub will focus on security and in particular detecting fraudulent activity. N26 plans to use artificial intelligence to develop a sort of real-time risk scoring system. The company will compare card transactions with your smartphone location as well.

Multiple articles have highlighted a handful of cases of fraud in recent weeks. Customers tried to use N26 for money-laundering purposes. It took some time before N26 reacted and closed those accounts.

Every bank suffers from this kind of issues. In France, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole and Crédit Mutuel have all been fined in the past for instance. But it’s interesting to see how N26 is reacting to this.

N26 has experienced tremendous growth, and the startup wants to scale its workforce appropriately so that it’s not short-staffed when faced with those issues. Similarly, it creates challenges when it comes to customer support and average response time.

It’s in the company’s best interest to follow strict rules when it comes to fraudulent activity. As a company with a banking license, N26 is regularly audited. N26 sent me the following statement a couple of weeks ago regarding audits:

N26, as all licensed banks, is subject to regular internal and external independent audits, including those by regulatory bodies such as BaFin, the German Financial Authority. Since we have a German bank license, we’re supervised by BaFin and audited on a regular basis. Any findings are promptly reviewed, implemented and monitored in coordination with the BaFin. We strive to meet all requirements consistently and take any required measures as quickly as possible.

As a bank it is imperative to continuously evaluate and improve all our structures, safety measures and service. We continuously invest in our security systems, customer support, and in hiring the right talent. To ensure we have the right talent to handle our responsibilities as a bank, we’ve increased our company size to more than 1,000 employees. The number of employees in customer service alone has tripled in the last year, and we will continue to grow across all departments to ensure regulatory compliance and serve our customers in the best way.

That’s why today’s news makes a ton of sense. There are already hundreds of people working for N26 in Berlin. Opening a new office in Vienna is a way to reach a new talent pool.

The team in Vienna will also work on shared Spaces and peer-to-peer payment improvements so that you can create sub-accounts and share them with other N26 users. The startup also launched local IBANs for new users in Spain today. The company currently has offices in Berlin, Barcelona and New York.

Oracle was founded in 1977. While it’s not exactly IBM or GE, both of which date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries respectively, it is old enough to be experiencing a fair bit of disruption in its own right. For a good part of its existence, it sold databases to some of the biggest companies in the world, but today as the market changes and shifts from on-prem data centers to the cloud, how does a company like Oracle make that transition?

Of course, Oracle has been making the shift to the cloud for the last several years, but it would be fair to say that it came late. Plus, it takes more than building some data centers and pushing out some products to change a company the size of Oracle. The company leadership recognizes this, and has been thinking at the highest levels of the organization about how to successfully transform into a cloud company from a cultural and business perspective.

To that end, Oracle has opened 5 innovation hubs over the last several years with locations in Austin, Texas; Reston, Virginia; Burlington, Massachusetts; Bangalore, India and Santa Monica, California. What are these centers hoping to achieve, and how will it extend the lessons learned to the rest of the company? Those are big questions Oracle must answer to make some headway in the cloud market.

Understanding the problem

Oracle seems to understand it has to do something different to change market perception and its flagging market position. Synergy Research, a firm that tracks cloud marketshare reports that the company is struggling

“For cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) — Oracle has a 2 percent share,” John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy told TechCrunch. He added, “It is a top ten player but it is nowhere near the scale of the leading cloud providers; and its market share has been steadily eroding.”

The news is a bit better when it comes SaaS. “Along with SAP, Oracle is one of the leaders in the ERP segment. But enterprise SaaS is much broader than ERP and across all of enterprise SaaS it is the number 4 ranked provider behind Microsoft, Salesforce and Adobe. Oracle worldwide market share in Q4 was 6 percent,” Dinsdale said.

The company knows that it will take a vast shift to change from an organization that mostly sold software licenses and maintenance agreements. It pushed those hard, sometimes so hard that it left IT pros with a sour taste in their mouths. Today, with the cloud, the selling landscape has changed dramatically to a partnership model. The company knows that it must change too. The question is, how?

That will take an entirely new approach to product development, sales and marketing; and the innovation hubs have become a kind of laboratory where engineers can experiment with more focussed projects, and learn to present their ideas with goal of showing instead of telling customers what they can do.

And the young shall lead

One way to change the culture is to infuse it with fresh-thinking, smart young people and that’s what Oracle is attempting to do with these centers, where they are hiring youthful engineers, many right out of college, to lead the change with the help of more seasoned Oracle executives.

They are looking for ways to rethink Oracle’s cloud products, to pull the services together into packages of useful tools that helped solve a specific business problems from prescription opioid abuse to predicting avocado yields. The idea isn’t just to have a some section of the company where people work on dream projects. They want them to relate to real business problems that results eventually in actual sales and measurable results.

Hamza Jahangir, group vice president for the cloud solution hubs at Oracle says they look for people who want to dig into new solutions, but they want a practical streak in their innovation hub hires. “We don’t want just tinkerers. If the only problem you’re solving is that of your own boredom, that’s not the type of person we are looking for,” he said.

Executive buy-in

The idea of the innovation center actually began with co-CEO Mark Hurd, according to Jahangir. He had been working for several years to change the nature of the sales force, the one that had a reputation of strong-arming IT pros, with a new generation by hiring people right out of college with a fresh approach.

Hurd didn’t want to stop with sales though. He began looking at taking that same idea of hiring younger employees to drive that cultural shift in engineering too. “About two years ago, Mark challenged us to think about how can we change the customer-facing tech workforce as the business model was moving to the cloud,” Jahangir said.

Hurd gave him some budget to open the first two centers in Austin and Reston and he began experimenting, trying to find the right kinds of employees and projects to work on. The funding came without of a lot of strings or conditions associated with it. Hurd wanted to see what could happen if they unleashed a new generation of workers and gave them a certain amount of freedom to work differently than the traditional way of working at Oracle.

Changing expectations

Jahangir was very frank when it came to assessing customer’s expectations around Oracle moving to the cloud. There has been a lot of skepticism and part of the reason for the innovation centers was to find practical solutions that could show customers that they actually had modern approaches to computing, given a chance.

The general customer stance has been, “We don’t believe you have anything real, and we need to see true value realized by us before we pay you any money,” he said. That took a fundamental shift to focussing on actual solutions. It started with the premise that the customers shouldn’t believe any of the marketing stuff. Instead it would show them.

“Don’t bother watching a Powerpoint presentation. Ask us to show you real solutions and use cases where we have solved real material problems — and then we can have a discussion.”

Even Chairman and company founder Larry Ellison recognizes the relationship and selling model needed to change as the company moves to the cloud. Jahangir relayed something he said in a recent internal meeting, “In the cloud we are now no longer selling giant monolithic software. Instead we are selling small bites of the apple. The relationship between the vendor and the buyer is becoming more like a consumer model.” That in turn requires a new way of selling and delivering solutions, precisely what they are trying to figure out at the innovation hubs.

Putting the idea to work

Once you have a new way of thinking, you have to put it to work, and as the company has created these various hubs, that has been the approach. As an example, one that isn’t necessarily original, but that puts Oracle features together in a practical way, is the connected patient. The patient wears a Fitbit-like monitor, uses a smart blood pressure cuff and a smart pill box.

The patient can then monitor his or her own health with these tools in a consolidated mobile application that pulls this data together for them using the Internet of Things cloud service, Oracle Mobile Cloud and Oracle Integration Cloud. What’s more, that information gets shared with the patient’s pharmacy and doctor, who can monitor the patient’s health and get warnings when there is a serious issue, such as dangerously high blood pressure.

Another project involved a partnership with Waypoint Robotics, where they demonstrated a robot that worked alongside human workers. The humans interacted with the robots, but the robot moved the goods from workstation to workstation acting as a quality control agent along the way. If it found defects or problems, it communicated that to the worker via a screen on the side of the unit, and to the cloud. Every interaction between the humans, goods and robot was updated in the Oracle cloud.

One other project worked with farmers and distributors to help stores stay stocked with avocados, surely as good a Gen Z project as you are likely to find. The tool looks at weather data, historical sales and information coming from sensors at the farm, and it combines all of that data to make predictions about avocado yields, making use of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Oracle Analytics Cloud and other services from Oracle cloud stack.

Moving beyond the hubs

This type of innovation hub has become popular in recent years as a way to help stave off disruption, and Oracle’s approach is actually in line with this trend. While companies sometimes isolate them to protect them from negativity and naysayers in an organization, leaving them isolated often prevents the lessons learned from being applied to the broader organization at large, essentially defeating the very purpose of creating them in the first place.

Jahangir says that they are attempting to avoid that problem by meeting with others in the company and sharing their learnings and the kinds of metrics that they use in the innovation center to measure success, which might be different from the rest of the company.

He says to put Oracle on the customer agenda, they have to move the conversation from from religious battles, as he calls how people support or condemn tech from certain companies. “We have to overcome religious battles and perceptions. I don’t like to fight religion with more religion. We need to step out of that conversation. The best way we have seen for engaging developer community is to show them how to build really cool things, then we can hire developers to do that, and showcase that to the community to show that it’s not just lip service.”

The trick will be doing that, and perhaps the innovation centers will help. As of today, the company is not sharing its cloud revenue, so it’s hard to measure just how well this is helping contribute to the overall success of the company, but Oracle clearly has a lot of work to do to change the perception of the enterprise buyer about its cloud products and services, and to increase its share of the growing cloud pie. It hopes these innovations hubs will lead the way to doing that.

Jahangir recognizes that he has to constantly keep adjusting the approach. “The Hub model is still maturing. We are finding and solving new problems where we need new tooling and engagement models in the organization. We are still learning and evolving,” he said.

Netflix is raising another $2 billion in debt to fund its content spending and other expenses, the company announced this morning. The news comes ahead of the launches of new streaming service competitors from Disney, Apple, and AT&T’s WarnerMedia. It also follows Netflix’s offer of another $2 billion in debt back in October 2018.

The streaming service says it plans to use the debt funding for general purposes, including “content acquisitions, production and development, capital expenditures, investments, working capital and potential acquisitions and strategic transactions.”

The funds will be raised through unsecured notes that will be issued in two series in both U.S. dollars and euros, it says.

Netflix spends a lot of cash to stay ahead of the competition and acquire subscribers. It believes that its investment in original content — shows and movies that users can’t find anywhere else, and that it owns the rights to — will help the company to generate revenues in the years ahead.

In January, Netflix said its cash burn would peak in 2019, and its free cash flow deficit for 2019 will end up around $3.5 billion, CNBC notes.

This year, its content budget is expected to reach $15 billion, Variety reported earlier.

The additional $2 billion in debt will bring Netflix’s long-term debt to around $12.3 billion, Variety now points out. It also says Netflix hasn’t paid down any significant amount of that debt to date. Instead, its interest on that debt is increasing — $135.5 million in interest expense in Q1 2019, or around 3% of revenue. That’s up 67% from the $81.2 million a year ago, the report adds.

In a letter to shareholders earlier this year, Netflix warned investors it would continue to raise debt.

“As long as we judge our marginal  after-tax cost of debt to be lower than our marginal cost of equity, we’ll continue to finance our working capital needs through the high yield market,” it read.

The additional funds come just ahead of several notable streaming service launches, including Apple TV+ which is smaller on the content side but will tap into Apple’s massive iPhone user base; AT&T’s WarnerMedia service; and perhaps most significantly, Disney+.

The latter could even end up being a low-cost alternative to Netflix for families, who are looking for more kid-friendly content as well as programming that parents and kids can watch together. There’s not as much of that out there today, as so many shows are now either adult-oriented or only for children, with no middle ground. Disney+, however, will include a range of family fare from Star Wars, Marvel, National Geographic, and Pixar, in addition to its Disney animation. And at $6.99 per month, Disney+ is a big step down in price from Netflix’s entry-level plan, $12.99 per month.

 

Astound, a company selling automated employee help desk services, has raised a new round of $15.5 million from investors led by the Los Angeles investment firm March Capital Partners.

Previous investors Vertex Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, Moment Ventures, and the Slack Fund also participated in the funding, which brings Astound’s total capital raised to $27 million.

The company’s software integrates with ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, Cherwell, and Workday, among others.

For co-founder and chief product officer Dan Turchin, the company is the culmination of decades of work spent developing tools for human resources and employee services. It’s the seventh company that Turchin has been involved in around applying technology to help employees, he says. Most recently Turchin worked at ServiceNow, which he left in 2014 to launch Astound.

Astound said it would use the financing to increase its product development and sales and marketing efforts, according to a statement.

Taking information from structured and unstructured data sources across different information silos within a business and offering it up to employees via automated messages (it’s a chatbot) frees human resources and helpdesk staff to engage at a higher level with employees, companies like Astound say.

Automation is certainly coming to businesses, whether employees like it or not. A study from McKinsey indicates that 70 percent of companies will bring in at least one automation technology by 2030. And those technologies could contribute up to $120 billion in increased economic value, according to the McKinsey study cited by Astound.

 

At the end of the day, Laundroid amounted to little more than a fun show demo. The device was a bit silly and prohibitively large and expensive for most  to consider actually purchasing. All in all, it was a lot of work for the relatively simple task of folding laundry.

Seven Dreamers, which has been a staple at trade shows in recent years, has filed for bankruptcy in Japan. No official word yet on whether the dream is fully dead, but things certainly look bleak for the company, which has racked up in the roughly $22 million in debt as it’s struggled to actually ship its laundry folding machine.

And while Laundroid was reportedly still on track for a 2019 release, according to Seven Dreamers, the product had too many rough edges left to smooth out, struggling with even basic tasks according to hands-on reports.

With Laundroid’s future in doubt, California-based Foldimate seems reasonably well positioned to dominate whatever market might actually exist for such a product. The company got fairly good marks for its own robotic folding technology back at CES.

The automation of household tasks has been a holy grail for consumer robotics in recent years. Aside from the Roomba, however, it’s so far proven an impossible nut to crack.

Mfine, an India-based startup aiming to broaden access to doctors and healthcare using the internet, has pulled in a $17.2 million Series B funding round for growth.

The company is led by four co-founders from Myntra, the fashion commerce startup acquired by Flipkart in 2014. They include CEO Prasad Kompalli and Ashutosh Lawania who started the business in 2017 and were later joined by Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary, Myntra’s former CTO and head of growth, respectively.

The round is led by Japan’s SBI Investment with participation from sibling fund SBI Ven Capital and another Japanese investor Beenext. Existing Mfine backers Stellaris Venture Partners and Prime Venture Partners also returned to follow on. Mfine has now raised nearly $23 million to date.

“In India, at a macro-level, good doctors are far and few and distributed very unevenly,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We asked ‘Can we build a platform that is a very large hospital on the cloud?’, that’s the fundamental premise.”

There’s already plenty of money in Indian health tech platforms — Practo, for one, has raised over $180 million from investors like Tencent — but Mfine differentiates itself with a focus on partnerships with hospitals and clinics, while others have offered more daily health communities that include remote sessions with doctors and healthcare professionals who are recruited independently of their day job.

“We are entering a different phase of what is called health tech… the problems that are going to be solved will be much deeper in nature,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Mfine makes its money as a digital extension of its healthcare partners, essentially. That means it takes a cut of spending from consumers. The company claims to work with over 500 doctors from 100 ‘top’ hospitals, while there’s a big focus on tech. In particular, it says that an AI-powered ‘virtual doctor’ can help in areas that include summarising diagnostic reports, narrowing down symptoms, providing care advice and helping with preventative care. There are also other services, including medicine delivery from partner pharmacies.

To date, Mfine said that its platform has helped with over 100,000 consultations across 800 towns in India during the last 15 months. It claims it is seeing around 20,000 consultations per month. Beyond helping increase the utilization of GPs — Mfine claims it can boost their productivity 3/4X — the service can also help hospitals and centers increase their revenue, a precious commodity for many.

Going forward, Kompalli said that the company is increasing its efforts with corporate companies, where it can help cover employee healthcare needs, and developing its insurance-style subscription service. Over the coming few years, that channel should account for around half of all revenue, he added.

A more immediate goal is to expand its offline work beyond Hyderabad and Bangalore, the two cities where it currently is.

“This round is a real endorsement from global investors that the model is working,” he added.

The market for voice apps has opened up — Amazon Alexa’s platform alone has over 80,000 skills as of earlier this year — and there’s little sign of that growth slowing now that smart speakers have hit critical mass in the U.S. To capitalize on this trend, Voiceflow, a startup making it easier for product teams to build voice applications for Alexa and Google Assistant, has raised $3 million in seed funding.

The round was led by True Ventures, and includes participation from ProductHunt founder Ryan Hoover, Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz, and InVision founder Clark Valberg. The company has previously raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding.

Explains Voiceflow CEO and co-founder Braden Ream, the idea for a collaborative platform for building voice apps came from direct experience as a voice app developer.

The team — which also includes Tyler Han, Michael Hood, and Andrew Lawrence — had decided to build a voice application offering interactive children’s stories for Alexa, called Storyflow.

But as the team began to build out its library of these choose-your-own-adventure stories, they realized the process wasn’t scaling fast enough to serve their user base — they simply couldn’t build the storyboards with all their branches fast enough.

“At some point, we had the idea to just do a drag-and-drop,” says Ream. “I wished I could build the flow chart, the scripting and the actual coding — I wished this was all one step. That led us to build a really early iteration of what is now Voiceflow. It was sort of an internal tool,” he continues. “And being the nerds that we are, we kept making the platform better by adding logic, variables, and modularity.”

The original plan was to make Storyflow’s platform a “YouTube of voice” so anyone could build their stories easily.

But when the Storyflow community got ahold of what the team had built, they very quickly wanted to use it to build their own voice apps — not just interactive stories.

“That’s when the lightbulb went off for us,” notes Ream. “This could easily be the central platform for building voice apps, and not necessarily interactive children’s stories. The pivot was very easy,” he says. “All we had to do was change our name from Storyflow to Voiceflow.”

The platform, officially launched in November, and today has over 7,500 customers who have published some 250 voice apps using its tools.

Voiceflow is designed to be non-technical for those who don’t know how to code. For example, its two basic block types are “speak” and “choice.” Its blocks are organized on the screen through drag-and-drop, as users design the flow of their app. For more technical users, an advanced section allows you to add logic and variables — but it’s still entirely visual.

For enterprise customers, there’s also an API block in Voiceflow that allows the customer to integrate the business’s own API into their voice app.

What’s also interesting about the product is its collaborative features. While Voiceflow is free for individuals, its business model is focused on allowing teams to work together to build voice apps. Priced at $29 per month in its paid workspaces, voice agencies that have a larger staff — including linguists, voice user interface designers, and developers, for example —  can all work together on one board, share projects, and hand of assets more easily.

With the seed funding, Voiceflow plans to grow the team by hiring more engineers, and continue to develop the platform.

Longer-term, the company wants to help people design better, more human-sounding voice apps through its platform.

“The problem right now is you have documentation and best practices by Google. Then you have the exact same on the Alexa side, but there’s no coherent industry standard. And there’s certainly no tangible base of examples, or easy way to put these into practice,” Bream explains. “If we can help spawn another 10,000 voice user interface designers — we can help train them and give them a platform that’s accessible, where they can collaborate with each other — I think you’re going to see a tremendous uplift in the quality of conversations.”

On this front, Voiceflow has started a program called Voiceflow University, which today includes video tutorials but will later become a more standardized training course.

In addition to the videos, Voiceflow networks with its community directly on Facebook, where over 2,500 developers, linguists, educators, designers, and entrepreneurs actively discuss the voice app design and development process.

This interaction between Voiceflow and its user base was one of the key selling points for True Ventures’ Tony Conrad.

“After I left the [pitch] meeting and I started digging around a little bit, the thing that blew me away was the engagement of the community of developers. That’s unlike anybody else. The single biggest differentiator of this platform is actually Braden and the team’s engagement with the community,” Conrad says. “It reminds me of early WordPress.”

Voiceflow also recently worked with another visual design tool Invocable, which has shut down, to allow its users to transition to Voiceflow’s platform.

There is, perhaps, a cautionary tale in there — Invocable, in its farewell blog post, points out that people continue to use smart speakers mainly for things like music, news, reminders and simple commands. It also says that Natural Language Processing and Natural Language Understanding haven’t developed to the point where they can support higher-quality voice apps. That day will likely come to pass, but there’s a bit of a timing issue when it comes to betting on the right platform to support the voice app development market in the meantime, ahead of widespread consumer adoption.

Toronto-based Voiceflow is a team of twelve today and looking to grow.

 

 

 

Starting today, Amazon can drop off packages to your garage. Assuming, of course, you’re cool with that. The massively multiplayer online retailer just expanded its Key delivery options to include garage, a feature it announced at the beginning of the year at CES.

Customers will have to opt-in, of course. And the whole thing requires a specific kind of garage door that uses myQ technology. Coincidentally (not really, though), the company’s offering a deal on the myQ Smart Garage Hub right now, which makes doors Key compatible.

Once that’s squared, eligible Amazon Prime customers can tick the “In-Garage delivery” box on check out. The Key app can also be used to remotely monitor the status of the door.

Amazon’s also using the occasion to announce that Key is available for customers in a number of news cities, including Charlotte, NC; Columbus, OH; Fresno, CA; Grand Rapids, MI; Hartford, CT; Las Vegas, NV; Norfolk, VA; Oklahoma City, OK; Omaha, NE; Rochester, NY; Stockton, CA; Virginia Beach, VA and and Wilmington, DE.

This first expansion of the service brings the total number of Key locations to 50. The company has added a number of new delivery options in addition to home and garage, including businesses and cars.