Category: UNCATEGORIZED

CloudBees, the enterprise continuous integration and delivery service (and the biggest contributor to the Jenkins open-source automation server), today announced that it has acquired Electric Cloud, a continuous delivery and automation platform that first launched all the way back in 2002.

The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but CloudBees has raised a total of $113.2 million while Electric Cloud raised $64.6 million from the likes of  Rembrandt Venture Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, RRE Ventures and Next47.

CloudBees plans to integrate Electric Cloud’s application release automation platform into its offerings. Electric Flow’s 110 employees will join CloudBees.

“As of today, we provide customers with best-of-breed CI/CD software from a single vendor, establishing CloudBees as a continuous delivery powerhouse,” said Sacha Labourey, the CEO and co-founder of CloudBees, in today’s announcement. “By combining the strength of CloudBees, Electric Cloud, Jenkins and Jenkins X, CloudBees offers the best CI/CD solution for any application, from classic to Kubernetes, on-premise to cloud, self-managed to self-service.”

Electric Cloud offers its users a number of tools for automating their release pipelines and managing the application lifecycle afterward.

“We are looking forward to joining CloudBees and executing on our shared goal of helping customers build software that matters,” said Carmine Napolitano, CEO, Electric Cloud. “The combination of CloudBees’ industry-leading continuous integration and continuous delivery platform, along with Electric Cloud’s industry-leading application release orchestration solution, gives our customers the best foundation for releasing apps at any speed the business demands.”

As CloudBees CPO Christina Noren noted during her keynote at CloudBees’ developer conference today, the company’s customers are getting more sophisticated in their DevOps platforms, but they are starting to run into new problems now that they’ve reached this point.

“What we’re seeing is that these customers have disconnected and fragmented islands of information,” she said. “There’s the view that each development team has […] and there’s not a common language, there’s not a common data model, and there’s not an end-to-end process that unites from left to right, top to bottom.” This kind of integrated system is what CloudBees is building toward (and that competitors like GitLab would argue they already offer). Today’s announcement marks a first step into this direction toward building a full software delivery management platform, though others are likely to follow.

During his company’s developer conference, Labourey also today noted that CloudBees will profit from Electric Cloud’s long-standing expertise in continuous delivery and that the acquisition will turn CloudBees into a “DevOps powerhouse.”

Today’s announcement follows CloudBees’ acquisition of CI/CD tool CodeShip last year. As of now, CodeShip remains a stand-alone product in the company’s lineup. It’ll be interesting to see how CloudBees will integrate Electric Cloud’s products to build a more integrated system.

 

Soylent is leaving liquids behind as it journeys deeper into the packaged food business with a selection of snack sized bars.

The 100 calorie bar has 5 grams of plant protein, 36 nutrients and probiotics for digestive health. Snack bars come in three flavors — chocolate brownie,  citrus berry and salted caramel.

It’s the second new product launch for Soylent this year. In January the company came out with a single sized version of its pre-packaged meal replacement shakes called the “Soylent Bridge”.

Pitching snack-sized bars opens the company up to an even bigger market than its shakes and liquids. Data from Research and Markets indicates that snack bar sales in the U.S. alone could reach $8.8 billion by 2023.

“It’s very much a step on the road. It’s a  big one for us and one that we’re extremely excited for given the focus for better for you sustainable nutrition. We’re moving into the chewable bar space in a more disruptive way,” says chief executive, Brian Crowley. “We’re on this journey of moving from a morning meal replacement in drink, ready to drink and powder to a complete nutrition platform you can enjoy throughout the day.”

Its expansion into the snack bar scene also serves to differentiate Soylent (whose name is derived from the soy bean and lentil food featured in the 1960’s novel “Make Room! Make Room!” and not the better known version which made its way into the big screen adaptation) from competitors like Huel.

Launched in the UK, but with a strong presence in Los Angeles now, Huel raised $26 million (GBP 20 million) from Highland Europe to expand sales of its powders and packaged drinks into new geographies (chiefly, it would seem, in the U.S.).

Meanwhile, French consumers are already enjoying solid snacks and shakes from Feed — a Soylent-like startup that’s selling in Europe.

Soylent consumers shouldn’t expect to see the company move into some of the more arcane arts practiced by the “self-optimization” crowd. “Look at the Bulletproofs and the functional supplements and the nootropics… There is good science behind them, but it’s serving an affluent audience,” Crowley says.

Crowley wants Soylent to be a low-cost highly nutritional option for every consumer.

The company says all the bars contain the same ingredients as the company’s lines of ready-to-drink liquids and powders — macronutrients combined with 26 vitamins and minerals, 9 amino acids, 2 essential fatty acids, including omega-3 and omega-6.

The bars do add probiotics to support digestive health and contain 3 grams of sugar.

Currently, the bars are only sold online by the case — and each case holds 30 squares.

Shares of Zoom (Nasdaq: ZM) began trading at $65 a pop Thursday morning after the video conferencing unicorn priced its shares at $36 apiece Wednesday, above its anticipated range.

The company initially planned to price its shares at between $28 and $32 per share, but following big demand for a piece of a profitable tech business, Zoom increased expectations, announcing plans to sell shares at between $33 and $35 apiece.

The initial public offering gives Zoom a fully diluted market cap of roughly $10 billion, or 10 times larger than the $1 billion valuation it garnered with its last round of private funding in 2017.

A new report from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo obtained by 9to5mac details the cameras in the next-generation iPhones. The report confirms previous rumors — the successors of the iPhone XS and XS Max will have three camera sensors on the back of the device.

In addition to the main camera and the 2x camera, Apple could add an ultra-wide 12-megapixel lens. Many Android phones already feature an ultra-wide lens, so it makes sense that Apple is giving you more flexibility by adding a third camera.

Kuo thinks Apple will use a special coating on the camera bump to hide the lenses. It’s true that pointing three cameras at someone is starting to look suspicious.

OnLeaks and Digit shared the following render (without any special coating) a few months ago:

The iPhone XR update will feature two cameras instead of one. I bet Apple will add a 2x camera.

On the front of the device, Apple could be planning a big upgrade for the selfie camera. The company could swap the existing camera sensor with 4 layers of glass with a camera sensor that has 5 layers of glass.

Apple could also be giving the camera a resolution bump, jumping from 7 megapixels to 12 megapixels. All three models should get the new selfie camera.

The USDA this morning announced the launch of a pilot program that will open up online grocery shopping to those on public assistance. During a two-year pilot program, those receiving SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits — often referred to as “food stamps” — will be able to shop for groceries from online retailers, including Walmart, Amazon, and soon, ShopRite and others. The pilot is live in New York state at launch, with availability that varies by retailer.

Amazon’s program will encompass the grocery and household selections available on both AmazonFresh and Prime Pantry, the retailer says, without the requirement of a membership fee. This program will operate only in the New York City area, as will ShopRite, when it joins the pilot next week.

Meanwhile, Walmart’s pilot will cover grocery pickup and delivery in upstate New York locations.

The USDA says other retailers are expected to join the pilot in the months ahead. Eventually, the program will also expand to other areas in New York and beyond, including Alabama, Iowa, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, Oregon and Washington.

Plans for the program have been in the works for years. The 2014 Farm Bill authorized the USDA to conduct and evaluate a pilot for online purchasing using SNAP, before rolling out support nationwide. During this pilot, the goal is to test that SNAP benefits are processed safely and securely, and to better understand the challenges involving online acceptance of SNAP.

This is also the first time that SNAP participants will be able to order grocery delivery online  — something that the USDA believes should no longer be considered a luxury.

At times, online retailers can offer lower prices on items, which can benefit budget shoppers. Plus, not all online grocery items are marked up, versus what you can buy in store. That tends to be more true for fast delivery services like Instacart or Shipt. Walmart, for example, charges the same prices for its online groceries as it does in stores. And when free delivery is offered, SNAP recipients can save both time and gas.

These are all the same perks that any e-commerce shopper enjoys, but can be even better appreciated by those who don’t have a car, can’t afford gas, or work multiple jobs trying to make ends meet and don’t have time to shop.

“People who receive SNAP benefits should have the opportunity to shop for food the same way more and more Americans shop for food – by ordering and paying for groceries online. As technology advances, it is important for SNAP to advance too, so we can ensure the same shopping options are available for both non-SNAP and SNAP recipients,” said Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, in a statement. “We look forward to monitoring how these pilots increase food access and customer service to those we serve, specifically those who may experience challenges in visiting brick and mortar stores.”

The pilot program will involve the use of electronic benefit (EBT) cards issued by New York to allow for the online purchasing. Walmart and Amazon are live today, with ShopRite and others joining in the weeks ahead.

Amazon says the program will “dramatically increase access to food for more remote customers and help to mitigate the public health crisis of food deserts,” — a reference to areas where it’s difficult to find healthy food choices, which leads to Americans opting for convenience foods and fast foods instead. This, in turns, can lead to further health problems down the road.

While the USDA proclaimed this is the “first time SNAP customers can pay for their groceries online,” that’s not entirely true. In 2017, Walmart began EBT acceptance for groceries bought online starting in one store in the Houston market and four more in Boise. Its program supported SNAP and EBT Cash / TANF but not WIC. However, those customers could only order grocery pickup, not delivery.

Today, Walmart says it has nearly 275 Grocery Pickup stores in the nine eligible states where the pilot is set to run.

“We are excited to be part of the USDA’s pilot program and to be able to make our Grocery Pickup and Delivery service available to more and more people, regardless of their payment method,” a Walmart spokesperson said. “Access to convenience and to quality, fresh groceries shouldn’t be dictated by how you pay. This pilot program is a great step forward and we are eager to expand this to customers in other states where we already have a great online grocery business.”

Amazon has also rolled out support to those on public assistance before today. In 2017, it launched a low-cost version of Prime for U.S. customers with a valid EBT card, and later followed by offering low-cost Prime to Medicaid recipients last year.

Other retailers who were selected for the USDA pilot include Dash’s Market, FreshDirect, Hy-Vee, Safeway, and Wright’s Markets. They are not yet live.

 

 

 

Pete Curley and Garret Heaton, who previously co-founded team chat app HipChat and sold it to Atlassian, are officially launching their new product Swoot today. The app makes it easy for users to recommend podcasts and see what their friends are listening to.

This might seem like a big leap from selling enterprise software — and indeed, Curley said the company was initially focused to creating another set of team collaboration tools.

What they realized, however, was that HipChat is “actually a consumer product that the company just happens to pay for because the employees demand it” — and he said they weren’t terribly interested in trying to build a business around a more traditional “top-down sales process.”

Meanwhile, Curley said he’d injured his back while lowering one of his children into a crib, which meant that for months, his only form of exercise was walking. He recalled walking around for hours each day and, for the first time, listening to podcasts.

“I was actually way behind the times,” he said. “I didn’t know this, that everyone else was listening to them … This is like the dark web of content.”

The startup has already raised a $3 million seed funding round led by True Ventures .

“Pete and Garret both have incredible product and entrepreneurial experience, plus they have built successful businesses together in the past,” said True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan in a statement. “Their focus of solving the disjointed podcast listening experience through Swoot’s elegant design fills a clear gap in media discovery.”

Discovery — namely, finding new podcasts beyond the handful that you already subscribe to — is one of the biggest issues in podcasting right now. It’s something a number of companies are trying to solve, but in Curley’s view, the key is to make the listening experience more social.

He noted that social sharing features are getting added to “literally everything,” including your bathroom scale, except “the one thing that I actually wanted it for.”

Curley also contrasted the podcast listening experience with YouTube: “We don’t realize how big [podcasting] is because there is no social thing where you see that Gangnam Style has 8 billion views, and you realize that the entire world is watching. There’s no view count, no anything that tells you what’s popular.”

So he’s trying to provide that view with Swoot. Instead of focusing on overall view counts (which might not be that impressive in a new app), Swoot gives you two main ways to track what’s popular among your friends.

There’s a feed that shows you everything that your friends are listening to or recommending, plus a list of episodes that are currently trending, with little icons showing you the friends who have listened to at least 20 percent of an episode.

Curley said the team has been beta testing the app by simply releasing it on the App Store and telling friends about it, then letting it spread by word of mouth until it was in the hands of around 1,000 users. During that test, it found that 25 percent of the podcasts that users listened to were coming from friends.

Curley also noted that this approach is “episode-centric” and rather than “show-centric.” In other words, it’s not just helping you find the next podcast that you want to subscribe to and listen to for years — it also helps surface the specific episode that everyone’s listening to right now.

“In the 700,000 shows that exist, if you’re the 690,000 worst-ranked show, but you have one great episode that should be able to go viral, that’s basically impossible to do right now, because audio is crazy hard to share,” Curley said.

In the course of our conversation, I brought up my experience with Spotify — I like seeing what’s popular, but when a friend recently mentioned specific songs that they could see I’d been listening to on the service, I was a bit creeped out.

“It’s funny, I actually thought, how ironic that Spotify is getting into podcasting now [through the acquisitions of Gimlet and Anchor],” Curley replied. “They actually had this correct mechanism applied to the wrong thing. Music is a deeply personal thing.”

Which isn’t to say that podcast listening isn’t personal, but there’s more of an opportunity to discover overlapping interests, say the fact that you and your friends all listen to true crime podcasts.

Curley also said that the app is deliberately to ensure that “the service does not get worse because a ton of people follow you” — so they see what you listen to, but they can’t comment on it or tell you that you’re an idiot for listening.

At the same time, he also said the team will be adding a mode to only share podcasts you actively recommend, rather than posting everything you listen to.

As for making money, Curley suggested that he’s interested in exploring a variety of opportunities, whether that’s integrating with other subscription or tipping services, or in creating ad opportunities around promoting different podcasts.

“My actual answer is, there are a bunch fo people trying to monetize right now, but I don’t think there’s a platform even close to mature enough to even try to monetize podcasting yet, other than podcasters doing their own advertising,” he said. “I think the endgame, where the real money is made in podcasting, actually hasn’t been come up with yet.”

The Mueller report has been published. It was posted at 11am ET, a month after Special Counsel Robert Mueller submitted his findings to the Justice Department examining Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Per remarks by U.S. attorney general William Barr speaking this morning, there are three major components to the report:

• How the Russian troll farm, the so-called Internet Research Agency sowed social discord among American voters through disinformation efforts across social media;
• The involvement of the Russian government’s intelligence unit, the GRU, in hacking into computers belonging to the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign to steal documents and emails;
• And the investigation of the Trump campaign’s links and connections over possible collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential election,

We’ve uploaded the final redacted report here. You can read below. You can follow along with TechCrunch’s coverage of the Mueller report, and read more about how and why we’re covering it.

Fuzzbuzz, a graduate of the most recent Y Combinator class, got the kind of news every early-stage startup wants to hear when it landed a $2.7 million seed round to help deliver a special class of automated software testing known as fuzzing in the form of a cloud service.

Fuel Capital led the round. Homebrew and Susa Ventures also participated along with various angel investors including Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes, Mesosphere co-founder Florian Leibert and Looker co-founder Ben Porterfield.

What Fuzzbuzz does specifically is automate fuzzing at scale, says co-founder and CEO Andrei Serban. “It’s a type of automated software testing that can perform thousands of tests per second,” he explained. Fuzzbuzz, is also taking advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning underpinnings to use feedback from the results to generate new tests automatically, so that it should get smarter as it goes along.

The goal is to cover as much of the code as possible, much faster and more efficiently than human testers ever could, and find vulnerabilities and bugs. It’s the kind of testing every company generating code would obviously want to do, but the problem is that up until now the process has been expensive and required highly specialized security engineers to undertake. Companies like Google and Facebook are able to hire these kinds of people to build fuzzing solutions, but for the most part, it’s been out of reach for your average company.

Serban says his co-founder, Everest Munro-Zeisberger, worked on the Google Chrome fuzzing team, which has surfaced more than 15,000 bugs using this technique. He wanted to put this type of testing in reach of anyone.

“Today, anyone can start fuzzing on Fuzzbuzz in less than 20 minutes. We hook directly into GitHub and your CI/CD pipeline, categorize and de-duplicate each bug found, and then notify you through tools like Slack and Jira. Using the Fuzzbuzz CLI, developers can then test and fix the bug locally before pushing their code back up to GitHub,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the funding.

It’s still early days, and the startup is working with some initial customers. The funding should help the three founders, Serban, Munro-Zesberger and Sabera Hussain; to hire more engineers and bring a more complete solution to market. It’s an ambitious undertaking, but if it succeeds in creating a fuzzing service, it could mean delivering code with fewer bugs and that would be good for everyone.

Apple announced today a further investment in its recycling programs and related e-waste efforts, which includes an expansion of its recycling program for consumers and the announcement of a new, 9,000-square-foot Material Recovery Lab based in Austin, Texas, focused on discovering future recycling processes. The company also reported the success of its existing efforts around recycling and refurbishing older Apple devices, and keeping electronic waste from landfills.

The expansion of the recycling program will quadruple the number of locations in the U.S. where consumers can send their iPhones to be disassembled by Daisy, the recycling robot Apple introduced last year — also just ahead of Earth Day.

The robot was developed in-house by Apple engineers, and is able to disassemble different types of iPhone models at a rate of 200 iPhones per hour.

Daisy can now disassemble and recycle used iPhones returned to Best Buy stores in the U.S. and KPN retailers in the Netherlands. Customers can also send in iPhones for recycling through the Apple Store or through Apple’s Trade In program online.

When Daisy was first introduced, it could disassemble 9 different iPhone models. Now, it can handle 15. This allows Apple to recover parts for re-use. That includes iPhone batteries, which are now sent back upstream in Apple’s supply chain where they’re combined with scrap, allowing cobalt to be recovered for the first time.

Apple also uses 100 percent recycled tin in the main logic boards of 11 different products, and notes its aluminum alloy made from 100 percent recycled aluminum reduced the carbon footprint of the new MacBook Air and Mac mini by nearly half.

Apple says Daisy can disassemble 1.2 million devices per year, and it has received nearly a million devices through its various programs.

It also in 2018 refurbished over 7.8 million Apple devices for resale, and diverted over 48,000 metric tons of electronic waste from landfills.

This year, aluminum recovered through Apple’s Trade In program will be remelted into the enclosures for the MacBook Air.

The company announced today another significant investment in its recycling efforts with the opening of a Material Recovery Lab in Austin, which will work with Apple engineers and academia on coming up with more solutions to recycling industry challenges. The lab also houses large equipment, typically found at e-waste facilities, to aid in this research. (See above)

“Advanced recycling must become an important part of the electronics supply chain, and Apple is pioneering a new path to help push our industry forward,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, in a statement. “We work hard to design products that our customers can rely on for a long time. When it comes time to recycle them, we hope that the convenience and benefit of our programs will encourage everyone to bring in their old devices.”

Along with the news around recycling efforts, Apple also released its 2019 Environment report, which contains additional information on the company’s climate change solutions.

On Earth Day (April 22), Apple will host environmentally themed sessions at its stores and feature environmentally conscious apps and games on its App Store collections, as well.

After nearly two years of investigation and months of delays — not to mention partisan bickering the whole time, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the president’s campaign and Russian interference in the 2016 election is out today.

We’re not a politics news site but we’re still looking into it — tech has figured more prominently than ever in the last few years and understanding its role in what could be a major political event is crucial for the industry and government both.

The report and discussion thereof is bound to be highly politically charged from the get-go and the repercussions from what is disclosed therein are sure to reach many in and out of office. But there are also interesting threads to pull as far as events and conspiracies that could only exist online or using modern technology and services, and for these the perspective of technology, not politics, reporting may be best suited to add context and interpretation.

What do we expect to find in the report that is of particular interest to the tech world?

The topic that is most relevant and least explored already is the nature of Russia’s most direct involvement in the 2016 election, namely the hack of the Democratic National Committee email server, attributed to Russia’s GRU intelligence unit, and funneling of this information to WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign. The recent arrest of Julian Assange may prove relevant here.

The report will illuminate many things relating to these events, not necessarily technical details — although they may have been furnished by any number of parties — but plans, dates, people involved, and networks through which the hack and resulting data were communicated. Why was this added to Mueller’s pile in the first place? What about Assange? Who knew about the hack and when, and what does that imply?

Another topic, which seems more well trodden but about which we can never seem to know enough, is the origin and extent of Russian “troll farm” activity through the so-called Internet Research Agency. We’ve seen a great deal of their work as part of the ongoing barbecue of Facebook’s leadership, and to a lesser extent other social media platforms, but there’s much we don’t know as well.

Was there coordination with some U.S. entities? How was the content created, and the topics chosen? Was there a stated outcome, such as dividing the electorate or damaging Clinton’s reputation? Was this contiguous with earlier operations? How, if at all, did it change once Trump was named the Republican candidate, and was this related to other communications with his campaign?

The last of our topics of most likely interest is that of the technological methods employed by Mueller in his investigation. Previous investigations of this scale into the activities of sitting presidents and their campaigns have occurred in completely different eras, when things like emails, metadata, and encrypted messaging weren’t, as they are today, commonplace.

How did Mueller pursue and collect privileged communications on, for example, private email servers and hosted web services? What services and networks were contacted, and how did they respond? How were the U.S.’ surveillance tools employed? What about location service from tech giants or telecoms? Was other garden-variety metadata — the type we are often told is harmless and which is often unregulated — used in the investigation to any effect?

We will be poring over the report with these thoughts and ideas in mind but also with an eye to any other interesting tech-related item that may appear. Perhaps that private server used “admin/password” as their login. Perhaps GRU agents were communicating using a cryptographic method known to be unsafe. Perhaps the vice-president uses a Palm Pre?

We’ll leave the politics to cable news and D.C. insiders, but tech is key to this report and we aim to explain why and how.