Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Pearson, the British education conglomerate, has set aside $50 million to participate in Series A and Series B financings for education startups, including boot camps, next-gen assessment and credentialing platforms, learning tools and augmented reality technology.

“Because education will look very different in 2030, Pearson, like learners all over the world, will need to continue to learn, adapt and reinvent itself: finding new business models, incorporating emerging technologies into its products and services, and finding new ways to collaborate with education institutions, government, and businesses,” the company wrote in a statement announcing Pearson Ventures.

To keep up with the emerging technologies changing the future of education, Pearson Ventures will back up to five companies per year over the next three years. Pearson’s director of portfolio management Owen Henkel tells TechCrunch the team will not lead rounds, purchase large stakes in startups or dictate terms. Pearson Ventures will instead only co-invest alongside experienced institutional investors.

Henkel adds that Pearson Ventures will not operate as an acquisition pipeline.

“The only reason this is worth Pearson’s time is if we can learn important things about markets that are important to us,” Henkel told TechCrunch. “It’s about keeping Pearson’s ear to the ground in relevant markets and verticals. If we don’t have the knowledge of the space, we won’t know where it’s going.”

Pearson will look for potential investments all over the world. In addition to providing capital, it will connect its portfolio companies with its in-house experts in content, product design, business development and market expansion. Pearson Ventures is the latest iteration of Pearson’s Affordable Learning Fund, which has spent $20 million to date on equity stakes in various education companies.

“For us, it’s about learning, not about staking our flag in something we want to buy later,” Henkel said. “We are being really intentional in explaining why we’d be a good partner to startups and why you’d want to have us on your team.”

Google today announced a new services that makes the power of BigQuery, its analytics data warehouse, available in Sheets, its web-based spreadsheet tool. These so-called ‘connected sheets’ face none of the usual limitations of Google’s regular spreadsheets, meaning there are no row limits, for example. Instead, users can take a massive dataset from BigQuery, with potentially billions of rows, and turn those into a pivot table.

The idea here, is to enable virtually anybody to make use of all of the data that is stored in BigQuery. That’s because from the user’s perspective, this new kind of table is simply a spreadsheet, with all of the usual functionality you’d expect from a spreadsheet. With this, Sheets becomes a frontend for BigQuery — and virtually any business user knows how to use a spreadsheet.

This also means that you can use all of usual visualization tools in Sheets and share your data with others in your organization.

“Connected sheets are helping us democratize data,” says Nikunj Shanti, Chief Product Officer at AirAsia. “Analysts and business users are able to create pivots or charts, leveraging their existing skills on massive datasets, without needing SQL. This direct access to the underlying data in BigQuery provides access to the most granular data available for analysis. It’s a game changer for AirAsia.”

The beta of connected sheets should go live within the next few months.

In this context, it’s worth mentioning that Google also today announced the beta launch of BigQuery BI Engine, a new service for business users that connects BigQuery with Google Data Studio for building interactive dashboards and reports. This service, too, is available in Google Data Studio today and will also become available through third-party services like Tableau and Looker in the next few months.

“With BigQuery BI Engine behind the scenes, we’re able to gain deep insights very quickly in Data Studio,” says Rolf Seegelken, Senior ​Data Analyst, Zalando. “The performance of even our most computationally intensive dashboards has sped up to the point where response times are now less than a second. Nothing beats ‘instant’ in today’s age, to keep our teams engaged in the data!”

Google+ for consumers is officially dead, but it’s still alive for enterprise users. Only a few days after completely shutting down the public version of Google+, Google today announced that it is giving the enterprise version a new name. It’s now called Currents.

If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Google once offered another service called Currents, a social magazine app with Google+ integrations that was later replaced by Google Play Newsstand. That history clearly bodes well for the new Currents.

Like before, Google+/Currents is meant to give employees a place to share knowledge and provide them with a place for internal discussions.

Google is probably doing the right thing by completely eliminating the Google+ moniker. The fact that there was still a version of Google+ for the enterprise created a bit of confusion when it announced the shutdown of the consumer version. Maybe this move will also allow the remaining developers on the project to leave the failed legacy of Google+ behind and try something new. Since the only focus is now on business users, that should be fairly easy, even though the code base surely still reflect a time when Google’s leadership thought that social search was the future.

The least said about Google’s messaging strategy, the better. But for better or worse, Hangouts Chat and Meet for G Suite, Google’s work-focused text and video chat tools are here to stay given that the one area where Google’s messaging strategy is clear is in the enterprise. With the end of the old Hangouts experience drawing nearer, the company today announced that it is now essentially replacing classic Hangouts with its business-focused Hangouts Chat tool in Gmail.

That’s a pretty sensible move and doesn’t come as a major surprise, but this marks the first time that Google has clearly laid out its strategy for how it will replace Hangouts in Gmail for its business users.

The experience, as far as we can tell, will be very similar to the current Hangouts one. Unsurprisingly, Hangouts Meet in Gmail will not just feature people, but also rooms and bots, two of the key differentiators between the old and new Hangouts. One difference worth mentioning, though, is that rooms will open into a full-screen experience with threads, which will make for a slightly different experience compared to what you’re probably used to from the classic Hangouts.

For now, this new feature isn’t quite ready to launch yet, though. Google is asking businesses that want to participate in the beta to register their interest here.

Google Cloud announced some new identity tools today at Google Cloud Next designed to simplify identity Access Management within the context of the BeyondCorp Zero Trust security model.

Zero Trust, as the name implies, means you have to assume you can’t trust anyone using your network. In the days before the cloud, you could set up a firewall and with some reasonable degree of certainty assume people inside had permission to be there. The cloud changed that, and Zero Trust was born to help provide a more modern security posture that took that into account.

The company wants to make it easier for developers to build identity into applications without a lot of heavy lifting. It sees identity as more than a way to access applications, but as an integral part of the security layer, especially in the context of the BeyondCorp approach. If you know who the person is, and can understand the context of how they are interacting with you, that can give strong clues as to whether the person is who they actually say they are.

This is about more than protecting your applications, it’s about making sure that your entire system from your virtual machine to your APIs are all similarly protected. “Over the past few months, we added context-aware access capabilities in Beta to C​loud Identity-Aware Proxy ​(IAP) and V​PC Service Controls ​to help protect web apps, VMs and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) APIs. Today, we are making these capabilities generally available in Cloud IAP, as well as extending them in Beta to C​loud Identity​ to help you protect access to G Suite apps,” the company wrote in an introductory blog post.

This Context Aware Access layer protects all of these areas across the cloud. “Context-aware access allows you to define and enforce granular access to apps and infrastructure based on a user’s identity and the context of their request. This can help increase your organization’s security posture while giving users an easy way to more securely access apps or infrastructure resources, from virtually any device, anywhere,” the company wrote.

The G Suite protection is in Beta, but the rest is generally available starting today.

Atlassian today announced a new version of Confluence, its collaboration platform. While the company has recently focused more on tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Trello, Confluence has continued to gain traction as a content collaboration tool for technical and non-technical teams. Indeed, even though it’s been quiet around it, it’s the second-most revenue generating product for Atlassian right now. With this release, Atlassian is once again putting the spotlight on Confluence.

To do this, Atlassian also today announced that it has acquired Good Software, a company that makes analytics tools for Confluence users and admins.

In total, Atlassian is announcing 15 new featueres for the product. Unsurprisingly, given the acquisition of Good Software, one of these new features is extended analytics. With this, Confluence users will be able to see how others in their company engage with their content. The idea here, Atlassian says, is to help everybody write better content and not just see who writes the most popular copy (though that’s surely how this will also be used). There are some other uses here, too, though. An HR manager may notice that a page with outdated information is still getting hits, for example.

Over time, Atlassian will integrate these features more deeply into the rest of Confluence.

Another major new feature is the introduction of an updated editor. The core features of this new editor are actually shared across most Atlassian products now, but as Pratima Arora, the company’s Head of Confluence, told me, that editor is then tweaked for the individual products. For Confluence, this means support for the ever-important feature of adding emojis to your pages, but at the core of that is the new slash (/) command that, similar to Slack, lets you add tables, images and macros to your pages. Other new features include the ability to easily create better looking tables of content, action items, roadmaps and due dates to pages, as well as smartlinks that automatically preview content for services like Google Drive, Dropbox, Trello, GitHub and others. All of this is meant to make organizing content just a little bit easier.

Also new are a set of new templates and a new media experience.

“Once a niche wiki and documentation tool for developers, Confluence has become a universal content collaboration tool that’s easily used by any team, technical or non-technical,” Arora writes in today’s announcement. “In fact, one in four Confluence Cloud customers use it throughout their entire company, according to recent customer data.”

BeyondCorp is Google’s model for securing networks not just through VPNs and other endpoint security techniques, but through a model that focus on context-aware access policies that focus on the user’s identity, hardware and the context of the request. That has been Google’s internal security policy for a while now and over the last few months, it started brining it to its own customers, too, starting with its Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy, which is now generally available, and its VPC Service Controls.

Today, the company is extending these context-aware access capabilities to its Cloud Identity user and device management service, as well as G Suite, its productivity suite. So while earlier implementation centered around protecting a company’s technical cloud infrastructure, this release focuses on devices and cloud-based apps like Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets and Calendar.

In this context, some devices, for example, may be more highly trusted because they have been enrolled in the Cloud Identity service and because a number of security policies are in place for it. That’s a different kind of security posture than a system that simply trusts users because they come through a specific VPN.

Context-aware access for G Suite apps is now in beta, but only for customers who subscribe to Cloud Identity Premium, G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education.

With today’s release, Google also announced the BeyondCorp Alliance, which brings together a number of security and management partners. These include Check Point, Lookout, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and VMware. According to Google, these companies are all working to bring device posture data to Google’s context-aware access engine.

T-Mobile today officially unveiled its forthcoming home TV service, which will now be known as TVision Home. The service is the rebranding of Layer3 TV, a company T-Mobile acquired in 2017 to launch what it said would be a “disruptive new TV service” the following year. That launch, of course, had been delayed. Now it has an arrival date: April 14th, 2019.

According to T-Mobile’s new TVision Home website, the service will first be available in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, L.A., NYC, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington D.C. metro, and Longmont, CO – areas Layer3 had been serving.

The service starts at $100 per month for over 150 channels, minus a $9.99/month discount for T-Mobile customers which will initially be offered to everyone. The channel lineup includes local broadcast stations, regional sports, and other traditional pay TV channels.

The TVision website says the full service has over 275 total channels available.

In addition, TVision Home includes a 400-hour HD DVR (with support for recording multiple programs simultaneously), voice control via either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, access to Nest security cameras,  a range of 4K content, and over 35,000 on-demand movies and shows.

Users will be able to set up profiles, personalize their home screen, and access their own DVR recordings separate from other household members.

Social media content will also be available through the TV, including your Facebook photos and videos and your Twitter feed.

The service itself also includes streaming apps like Pandora, iHeartRadio, XUMO, CuriosityStream, Toon Goggles, and HSN, with plans to add Netflix, YouTube, YouTube Kids, and Amazon Prime Video.

Unlike cable TV which requires running wires in other rooms of the house, TVision will instead offer “Lite Boxes” that connect to the main set-top box over Wi-Fi for $10/month each.

 

What’s missing, however, is the promised “disruption.”

Even T-Mobile’s own press release says the average cable bill today is $107.30 per month. With a service that starts at $90 per month and then charges for additional TVs and premium channels on top of that, it’s not doing much better – even if it removes the hidden fees like activation or early termination fees. (T-Mobile will also help pay off your satellite TV contract up to $500 if you want to switch over without dealing termination fees.)

However, T-Mobile does promise that its prices won’t increase over time – which is something even the modern-day internet TV providers like Sling TV, DirecTV Now, YouTube TV, and others can’t say, as they’ve all rolled out prices increases in the past year.

But those internet TV services still offer a better deal beyond lower prices – they also let you watch through their app wherever you are, not just inside the home. T-Mobile’s service, meanwhile, will include a companion app for iOS and Android for in-home streaming only. When traveling, you’ll have to use the various channels’ standalone apps to access TV content, after authentication.

That means it’s more like a traditional pay TV provider, as users will be directed to apps – like ABC, HBO Go, NBC, ESPN, Starz, or HGTV, for example – when they want to watch TV on the go.

TVision Home today works over a broadband connection, but is designed for the soon-to-come 5G future where TV can be delivered over a wireless service – like, say, the one offered by the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint.

The company touts the promise of the merger, if approved, saying the combined entity would have the power to bring high-speed broadband via 5G to over half of U.S. households by 2024.

“TVision Home is about so much more than home TV… it’s TV built for the 5G era,” said Mike Sievert, COO and President of T-Mobile, in a statement. “With New T-Mobile, we’ll bring real choice, competition, better service, lower prices and faster speeds…right into your living room. And – speaking of speed – while the Cableopoly innovates at the pace of the cable companies, we’ll innovate at the pace of the internet to give customers more value and more freedom more quickly.”

 

 

It shares a name with the biggest little city in the world, and fittingly, the Oppo Reno appears to have a lot going for it. Top level, there’s a nutty pop up camera wedge for selfies, 10x zoom, a 48 megapixel camera, in-display fingerprint reader and an optional 5G version. It’s got a whole lot of everything.

The handset makes its debut in Zurich today, but the company’s offered up just about all of the insight you’ll need earlier this morning There are going to be a few different versions of the handset, including the 6.4 inch standard and the 6.6 inch version, which sports the aforementioned 10x Zoom, along with a Snapdragon 855.

More info on the 5G version is still forthcoming, but Oppo says it will be “one of the first commercially available 5G phones to hit the European market,” using Swisscom’s network. On that note, I would be surprised to see the handset available in the States, as Oppo doesn’t have much of a footprint in this part of the world. More info on availability in places like Europe and India is coming later this month.

As for pricing, the base level model starts at around $450, with the zoom starting at around $600. Pricing on the non-5G versions go up to just over $700.

Creativity knows no geographical borders, which is why we’re inviting countries from around the globe to bring their very best early-stage tech startups to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Join more than 1,000 startups and exhibit your country or region’s innovative tech, talent and expertise in Startup Alley — in your own country pavilion.

Organizing a sponsored pavilion in Startup Alley is an opportunity for your country or region to step onto the international stage, showcase its emerging companies and be recognized as a leader in tech innovation. Country or regional pavilions can include delegations of international startup groups, government innovation centers, incubators and accelerators.

Startup Alley — the pulsing heartbeat of every Disrupt — is about as prime a piece of real estate as you’ll find in the startup world. More than 10,000 Disrupt attendees will flow through the Alley — including hundreds of media outlets looking for a great story and investors looking for the next big thing. It’s networking nirvana, and the connections you make could place your country on the tech startup map.

One of your startups might even be considered for a Startup Battlefield Wild Card spot. Back in 2017, Recordgram earned the Wild Card spot — and went on to win the Startup Battlefield. Might lightning strike twice?

Here’s how country pavilions work. We offer one-day and three-day sponsor options. When you organize a three-day pavilion, you can bring a minimum of eight startups to exhibit in Startup Alley for all three days of Disrupt, and your logo will be included in Disrupt marketing materials. Each delegation startup receives two Founder passes, and each organizer receives four Innovator passes.

Organizers of a one-day pavilion can bring a minimum of eight startups to exhibit for one day in Startup Alley, and your brand will be included in Disrupt marketing materials (no logo). Each delegation startup receives three Founder passes if the pavilion contract is signed by August 30 — if not, they receive two Founder passes each. Each organizer receives two Innovator passes.

Interested in organizing a pavilion? Shoot us an email at startupalley@techcrunch.com, tell us about your delegation and where you’re from. We’ll provide information about the application process, other organizer perks and pricing. There’s only one caveat, and it’s not hard to meet. Each startup in your delegation must qualify as a Pre-Series A company.

When you’re not busy networking in Startup Alley, you and your delegation members can take in all that Disrupt SF 2019 offers. That includes the Startup Battlefield competition, watching the Hackathon winners present their new products, Q&A sessions and programming with the top names in tech across several different stages and interactive workshops and panel discussions focused on (but not limited to) these categories: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Gaming, Investor Topics, Media, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS, Space, Social Impact & Education.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 takes place October 2-4 at Moscone North. This is a great opportunity to show the international startup community the creative genius taking place in your country. Contact us today to learn more about organizing a country pavilion.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt SF? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.