Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Over a year after WhatsApp officially introduced its app for business customers to its first markets, the previously Android-only WhatsApp Business app is today launching on the iPhone. According to the Facebook-owned company, WhatsApp Business has been adopted by millions of businesses worldwide since its debut, but one of its customers’ most frequent requests was to offer the app on the iPhone.

The iOS version, like its Android counterpart, is designed to help small business owners reach their customers on smartphones.

That means it includes the ability for businesses to create profiles that include their description, email, address and website, as well as messaging tools for customer communication like automated greetings, quick replies and away messages.

Businesses can also use WhatsApp Business from their desktop computer, which in January rolled out tools to organize and filter chats as well as quick replies. At the time, WhatsApp said it had 5 million business customers.

The iOS app was spotted in testing last month on the Mexican iOS App Store, but today marks its official launch.

A WhatsApp Business platform is key to WhatsApp’s growth in emerging markets where first-time internet users have skipped over using computers to reach the web, and instead mainly get online through their mobile devices. Here, WhatsApp serves as a portal to the web – even more so than its parent company Facebook does  – for many users.

Through the main WhatsApp app, users can connect with friends and family, join groups focused on their various interests, and even get the news (or, unfortunately, fake news and hoaxes – something that WhatsApp is now trying to clamp down on.) Being able to easily communicate with businesses was an obvious next step for the company not only in terms of serving these customers, but also for revenue generation.

The company makes money by charging Business API customers who have large volumes of incoming messages.

The free WhatsApp Business app for iOS is available today from the App Store in Brazil, Germany, Indonesia, India, Mexico, the U.K. and the U.S.

The company says it will roll out to more markets worldwide in the weeks ahead.

Pi Charging is changing course and changing names. It’ll now be known as “Spansive”.

As Pi, the company had been working on a cone-shaped wireless charger that would sit on a desk and allow the user to charge devices placed within about 12 inches in any direction. It would require a case to work with existing devices, with the trade-off of not requiring the user to place their device directly on top of a charging pad. They showed this device at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2017, where the company won the Startup Battlefield competition.

After extensive user testing, co-founder John MacDonald says they heard two common complaints from testers. First, the cone charger, when surrounded by charging devices, took up too much space on tables and counters. Second, no one wanted to use a dedicated charging case in place of the brand name cases they already had. As built-in wireless protocols like Qi grew more and more commonplace, the company came to realize its current approach wouldn’t work.

“Qi is just not designed, even philosophically if you talk to people at the Qi standard, it’s not focused on one foot, two feet of range.” says MacDonald. “It’s really focused on surfaces and areas rather than volumes.”

MacDonald tells me that while they had let potential buyers sign up for an email list to claim a cone device later, the company never accepted money for pre-orders. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised over $14M from investors; MacDonald says those investors will maintain their stakes in Spansive, with the rebrand changing nothing about its cap table.

As a focus of its rebranding, the company will also be opening up to outside partners who might want to integrate the volumetric tech from Pi’s cone charger into their own products, with wireless headphone makers mentioned as a potential example. MacDonald says the company has seen considerable interest from potential partners, so it’ll be a key part of the brand moving forward.

Though Pi — or, I should say now, Spansive — is dropping plans for its own cone charger, it’s not dropping out of the consumer wireless charging space. It’s working on a product that MacDonald says the company will announce this summer, focusing on charging multiple devices simultaneously without the need for a case, and on compatibility with Qi devices.  Spansive also sent over this teaser-y render, which appears to show an iPhone (or a device with a similar antenna band) resting on top of a charging base:

While it’s disappointing to see the cone charger get shelved, wireless charging is clearly a very tough space. Just last week, Apple canceled plans for its AirPower wireless charger over a year after it was announced, saying the device ultimately wasn’t meeting the company’s standards.

Viva la revolution! And by that we mean the tech revolution taking place in mobility and transportation. If you’re an early-stage startup founder in either field, don’t miss your chance to demo your company in front of top influencers at TC Sessions: Mobility 2019. It’s a prime opportunity to showcase your tech startup in front of a very large, very targeted audience — the mobility and transportation industry’s movers and shakers. Why wait? Book a demo table right now.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place on July 10 in San Jose, Calif. More than 1,000 members of the mobility community — founders, technologists, engineering students and investors — will gather for a day-long intensive event featuring speakers, panel discussions, demos, workshops and world-class networking.

TechCrunch editors will interview some of the best minds and makers in this rapidly evolving field. They’ll challenge assumptions and deflate the hype to provide a clearer understanding of the current state of mobility — and what the future holds.

Exciting as it may be, mobility raises complex issues and challenges — from human impact and infrastructure to regulatory concerns and capital investment. We won’t shy away from the big issues — we’ll dig in and hear from the people who are making it happen.

Case in point, we recently announced our first speaker — Dave Ferguson, the CEO of the autonomous delivery startup Nuro. An early pioneer of self-driving vehicle technology, Ferguson has worked on robotics and machine learning for nearly 20 years, owns more than 100 patents and served as the machine learning and computer vision team lead on Google’s self-driving program (now known as Waymo).

The auto industry alone is undergoing a seismic shift toward investing in car sharing, ride hailing, on-demand shuttles and even subscription services. Traditional paradigms around producing, selling and buying cars are changing and — along with a serious uptick in electric vehicle ownership — creating huge opportunities for tech startups.

Things start to get exponential when you add breakthroughs in AI, robotics, drone technology and autonomous delivery bots. What started as the horseless carriage may soon be a flying taxi. TC Sessions Mobility 2019 is the place to explore the intricacies of these topics and connect with the best minds in your community.

We’re still building our agenda and adding to our roster of speakers, many of whom will demonstrate their technology on our stage. Here’s a radical thought. If you want to be considered for a spot — or nominate someone else — submit your application right here. We’ll announce the participants of our fireside chats, panels and workshops in the coming weeks.

TC Sessions: Mobility 2019 takes place on July 10, and this is your chance to showcase your early-stage mobility startup in front of mobility’s best and brightest founders, investors and technologists. Reserve your demo table today.

Looking for sponsorship opportunities? Contact our TechCrunch team to learn about the benefits associated with sponsoring TC Sessions: Mobility 2019.

Amazon is officially joining the race to create a network of satellites in low earth orbit that will provide high-speed terrestrial internet services.

The company has filed its first papers with the U.S. government for approval to launch a network of 3,236 satellites through a subsidiary called Kuiper Systems LLC, according to a report in GeekWire. 

“Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of Low Earth Orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world,” Amazon confirmed in a statement. “This is a long-term project that envisions serving tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet. We look forward to partnering on this initiative with companies that share this common vision.”

Space satellite orbiting the earth. Elements of this image furnished by NASA.

Named for an astronomer who’s considered “the father of modern planetary science“, Gerard Kuiper; Kuiper Systems is the latest foray into space-based internet networking by a U.S. tech giant.

As private companies look to commercialize space, high speed internet is among the prospects that offer the highest profits in the short term, while providing necessary services to get the remaining 3.8 billion people who don’t have access to the internet online.

In February, OneWeb, another company that’s expecting to create a network of satellites to provide high-speed internet access successfully launched its first satellites. The company has raised at least $3 billion, according to CrunchBase, from investors including Virgin, Coca Cola, and the Bharti Group — and they’re not the only company to raise several billion dollars to develop these services.

SpaceX also has designs on creating a global satellite network — in addition to its leading position as a launch services provider for companies looking to access outer space.

In December, the company set out to raise another $500 million to support its Starlink program, which would create a network of 11,000 satellites to cover the globe with internet connectivity. To date, the company has launched just two prototype satellites, even though earlier reports stated SpaceX, at one time, projected it would have 400 satellites in orbit by the end of 2018.

Finally, the social networking giant, Facebook has been working on satellite capabilities of its own. In a May report, the IEEE Spectrum laid out how Facebook had set up a small subsidiary called PointView Tech, which was developing a new satellite called “Athena” that could deliver data ten times faster than SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

Amazon’s journey Kuiper satellite service compliments the work that another Jeff Bezos company, Blue Origin, is conducting on the design, development and production of launch vehicles to take payloads into orbit.

Blue Origin has already signed contracts for a multi-launch agreement with Telesat — another company that’s . developing a low earth orbit constellation of satellites that will deliver fiber-like broadband services across the globe.

More changes are coming to Pandora, following the $3.5 billion acquisition by SiriusXM last year. The company today launched a new station called Pandora NOW, powered by Pandora listener data, which is available across both Pandora and SiriusXM. On Pandora, the new experience will appear as an interactive station and playlist, while SiriusXM subscribers will be able to access Pandora NOW on Channel 3.

This is the first time a music experience – channel, station, playlist or otherwise – has launched on both platforms.

The Pandora NOW music station will allow all users to interact with the song selections by skipping tracks they don’t like, or hitting the thumbs up or down buttons to give feedback which influences what gets played. Pandora NOW will also be available as a continually-updated playlist for Pandora’s Premium subscribers.

The music the station covers will span genres to pull in both the most listened-to and the fastest trending new tracks across Pop, Hip Hop, R&B, Dance and Latin.

At launch, Cardi B, Post Malone and Khalid were among the most listened-to artists, says Pandora, to give you an idea of the station’s content. As part of the launch, Khalid’s new album “Free Spirit,” set for a release on Friday, will stream on Pandora NOW; the artist will also be at SiriusXM’s Rockefeller Center studios to participate in a launch event.

On Sirius XM, the channel works like any other – streaming across SiriusXM platforms, including its connected devices, radios, mobile apps, media players, smart speakers and more.

“Pandora NOW will be an amazing new experience for both SiriusXM and Pandora listeners,” said Scott Greenstein, President and Chief Content Officer, SiriusXM, in a statement about the launch. “We’re excited to combine, for the first time, the wealth of Pandora listener data with the proven curation expertise of our SiriusXM team to give our combined 100 million listeners a truly unique and unprecedented listening experience. Not only will Pandora NOW give listeners exclusive, up-to-the-moment access to the music people are streaming on Pandora the most, but it will let music fans influence which songs are played,” he added.

Since the merger of the two streaming music companies, SiriusXM has been quick to leverage Pandora’s capabilities and platform. Immediately, it restructured Pandora’s organization which included the exit of CEO Roger Lynch. And in January, the company announced that Pandora-powered channels would arrive on SiriusXM later this year.

More recently, the company said that SiriusXM would lend its programming expertise to Pandora, with the creation of an original content team focused on creating content in music, sports, and talk content ranging across comedy, politics, and entertainment for Pandora listeners.

Pandora NOW is available as of today across all platforms.

Tonal is today announcing its series C financing that it hopes will allow the company to bring its at-home gym to even more homes. The funding round shows investors’ excitement around the new generation of personal exercise equipment that combines on-demand training with smart features. Tonal, like Peloton, offer features previously unavailable outside of gyms and with this injection of capital, the company expects to build new personal features and invest in marketing and retail experiences.

L Catterton’s Growth Fund led the $45 million series C round and included investments from Evolution Media, Shasta Ventures, Mayfield, Sapphire Sport, and others also participated. This financing round brings the total amount raised to $90 million.

Tonal is based out of San Francisco, CA and was founded by Aly Orady in 2015. The company launched its strength-training product in 2018. The wall-mounted Tonal uses electromagnetism to simulate and control weight, allowing the slender device to replicate (and replace) a lot of weight-lifting machines.

The Tonal machine costs $2,995, and for $49 a month, Tonal offers members access to personal training sessions, recommended programs and workouts. Since launching, CEO Orady tells TechCrunch there have been virtually no returns. He says their customer care teams proactively work with members to ensure a good experience.

Orady is excited to have L Catterton participating in this financing round, saying their deep network and unparalleled experience building premium fitness brands globally is an incredibly exciting new resource for the company. The Connecticut-based investment firm helped fund in Peloton, ThirdLove, ClassPass, and The Honest Company.

“As the fitness landscape continues to evolve, we have seen a clear shift toward personalized, content-driven, at-home workout experiences,” said Scott Dahnke, Global Co-CEO of L Catterton said in a released statement. “Tonal is the first connected fitness brand focused on strength training and represents an opportunity to invest behind an innovative concept with tremendous growth potential. We look forward to leveraging our deep knowledge of consumer behavior and significant experience in the connected fitness space to bring Tonal’s dynamic technology and content platform to more homes across the country.”

Tonal shares a market with Peloton, and Orady says a significant amount of Tonal owners also own Peloton equipment. Yet, feature-by-feature, Peloton, and Tonal are different. While they’re both in-home devices that offer on-demand instructors, Peloton targets cardiovascular exercises while Tonal is a strength-training machine. Orady states his customers find the two companies offer complementary experiences.

“The common thread with our members is that they understand the value of investing in their fitness and overall health,” said Aly Orady, “All of our members are looking to take their fitness to the next level with strength training. Tonal offers the ability to strength train at home by providing a comprehensive, challenging full body workout without having to sacrifice quality for convenience.”

This is an enormous market he says the company can rely on for years to come. The majority of Tonal’s customers are between 30 and 55 years old and live in, or adjacent to, the top 10 major metro US markets. There’s an even split, he says, between male and female members.

Tonal is similar to Mirror, another at-home, wall-mounted exercise device that costs $1,495. While Tonal focuses on strength training through resistance, Mirror offers yoga, boxing, Pilates and other exercises and activities with on-demand instruction and real-time stats. Mirror also launched in 2018 and the company has raised $40 million.

Going forward Tonal expects to expand its software to provide new personalization features to its members. The hope is to build experiences that motivate users while serving up real-time feedback. This includes building new workout categories and additional fitness experiences even when users traveling and do not have access to their Tonal machine.

The company sees it expanding its retail and marketing presence. Right now, just eight months after the product’s debut, customers have very limited access to try the Tonal machine. It’s only on display at Tonal’s flagship San Francisco store and is coming to a pop-up store in Newport Beach, California.

Orady tells TechCrunch the company needs new talent to help the company achieve its mission. Tonal is hiring and looking to hire in hardware, software, design, video production, and marketing.

At-home exercise equipment is a massive market and Tonal offers a unique set of features and advantages that should allow it to stand apart from competitors. This isn’t just another treadmill. Tonal is a strength-training super machine the size of a thick HDTV. Challenges abound but the company seemingly has a solid plan to utilize its latest round of financing that should allow it to reach more customers and show them why the Tonal machine is worth the cost.

Fresh from closing a notable investment from Airbnb, India’s OYO has expanded its footprint into Japan. The move comes through a joint venture with investor SoftBank — which led OYO’s $1 billion round last year through its Vision Fund — which will cover hotel-based accommodation and home rentals.

Financial details around the joint venture were not disclosed. An OYO representative declined to go into details when asked.

OYO started out in India, where it initially aggregated budget hotels, and it has since expanded into China, Malaysia, Nepal, the U.K., the UAE, Indonesia, the Philippines and — now — Japan. China, in particular, has shown promise with OYO’s room inventory there reportedly double what it is in India.

The evolution has not just been a geographical one. Its business has moved from a laser focus on the long-tail of budget hotels to a broader ‘hospitality’ play. It now includes managed private homes and, in India, wedding venues, holiday packages and co-working — while its hotel supply is a mixture of franchised and leased. It has also advanced its focus from budget-minded consumers to cover business travelers, too.

The Japanese JV will be led by Prasun Choudhary, who OYO describes as a founding member of its team. Like OYO business elsewhere in the world, the company is appealing to small and medium hotel franchises and owners. On the consumer side, its prime segment is domestic and international travelers who seek “budget to mid-segment hospitality,” to use part of a statement from OYO founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwa, who is pictured in the image at the top of this post.

Agarwal is a Thiel fellow who started the company in 2011 when aged just 18. His original business, called Oravel, was an Airbnb clone that pivoted to become OYO. Today, that company is valued at $5 billion after raising over $1.5 billion from investors.

SoftBank has previously struck joint ventures to bring other Vision Fund companies to Japan. Those include WeWork, Chinese ride-hailing firm Didi Chuxing and India’s Paytm, which launched a payment service in the country.

Alexa is moving into healthcare. Following a trial of Amazon’s smart speakers in patients’ rooms at Cedars-Sinai, the company this morning announced an invite-only program allowing select developers to create and launch HIPAA-compliant healthcare skills for Alexa. The skills allow consumers to ask the virtual assistant for help with things like booking an appointment, accessing hospital post-discharge instructions, checking on the status of a prescription delivery, and more.

Amazon says the program will only allow select covered entities and business associates subject to HIPAA (the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) to create these skills.

This is a significant step for Amazon, as it means voice app developers who follow HIPAA guidelines can now build skills for Alexa.

This is an area Amazon has focused on for some time. According a report from last year by CNBC, Amazon was building out a healthcare team with Alexa in order to make the voice assistant useful in the healthcare industry. This included working through the complex HIPAA regulations that would be required to do so.

In addition, Amazon itself is venturing into healthcare alongside Berkshire Hathaway and JP Morgan Chase, who have teamed up to take on rising healthcare costs for employees. And Amazon last year acquired online pharmacy PillPack for under $1 billion. Its AWS unit is expanding its HIPAA-compliant capabilities, and has introduced Amazon Comprehend Medical, a machine learning tool that gathers information from things like doctor’s notes and patient health records.

Today, Amazon Alexa is providing its “HIPAA eligible environment” to voice app developers on an invite-only basis in the U.S., but says it expects to enable more developers to access this capability in the future.

Developers accepted into the program will be able to use the Alexa Skills Skit, which now supports skills that are able to transmit and receive protected health information.

This expansion to healthcare is likely to raise questions – as well it should. While it’s one thing to allow Alexa to turn on your lights or play some music, allowing our smart speakers and their voice assistants to access to medical information is a much further leap. Consumers will need to understand how Amazon is securing their data before they feel comfortable using health and medical skills.

Amazon today is launching six skills that demonstrate the potential of healthcare-related skills. These come from healthcare providers, payors, pharmacy benefit managers, and digital health coaching companies.

One skill from Cigna, for example, allows eligible employees to manage their health improvement goals and earn wellness incentives; another from Livongo lets members ask Alexa for their last blood sugar reading; parents and caregivers can give their care teams updates at Boston Hospital’s ERAS (Enhanced Recovery After Surgery) program.

And others, from Express Scripts, Atrium Health, and Swedish Health Connect, offer updates on prescription delivery or allow for appointment making.

The healthcare skill publishers are excited about the ability to reach their customers through voice technology.

“Boston Children’s Hospital has long believed that voice technology has the potential to substantially improve the healthcare experience for both consumers and clinicians. We began this journey with one of the first Amazon Alexa skills from a hospital four years ago and are thrilled to participate in the initial launch of Amazon Alexa’s HIPAA-eligible service for developers,” said  John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer, Boston Children’s Hospital, in a statement.

“With our new Express Scripts skill, we are trying to make it easier for people to make better informed health care decisions. In particular, we believe voice technology, like Alexa, can make it easy for people stay on the right path by tracking the status of their mail order prescription, helping us further solve the costly and unhealthy problem of medication non-adherence,” said Mark Bini, Vice President of Innovation and Member Experience, Express Scripts.

We have two great deep dives on the future of scooters and the future of media. Thanks to the many of you who joined our live conference call today with Kate Clark and Kirsten Korosec, where we talked all things Lyft today. If you weren’t able to join us, we will be publishing the transcript in the next few days, and we are going to try to embed the audio as well (we’ve heard your requests and working out a solution as we speak).

The Future of Scooters

Our long-time transportation and scooter aficionado Megan Rose Dickey has all the latest on where the scooter world stands today and what’s in store going forward:

Data rules everything around me (D.R.E.A.M.). Cities are relatively down for this new era of transportation and operators are increasingly more willing to share their data with cities. Now, cities just have to find out what to do with this data and how to extract learnings from it.

“We’re able to share more data with those companies which I think is really helpful for policymaking and decision-making but it also helps us to set up rules of the road that meet the needs of everybody in San Francisco,” Maguire said.

A number of startups have emerged in this space, including Populus, Passport and Ride Report.

The Future of Media

TechCrunch media columnist Eric Peckham has an interview with prominent media venture capitalist Pär-Jörgen Pärson of Northzone. His comments on content exclusivity:

In terms of exclusive content, I do believe that the content market, and the idea of exclusivity, is flawed in many ways. And I think Spotify proved it really well. Proved that what the artists or the content owners really need is maximum distribution — and distribution at a certain minimum RPU (revenue per user), of course. But the thing is when you start to restrict distribution, you can get a higher RPU, but the underlying market is still actually eyeballs. So what is ultimately fueling the interest of Man United or the Patriots is the number of people who want to watch their games. If you restrict that, then you’re undermining the company. We saw that when Twitter had acquired the online rights for the NFL…I think it was the Superbowl, a few years back. It was a total disaster for the NFL. They got no eyeballs for that and it really undermined their OTT business.

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.

French startup OpenClassrooms is announcing a new partnership for a masters-level online program. Students who enroll in this program will access a fully online program about artificial intelligence. Eventually, future graduates will join companies — Microsoft will likely hire some of them.

If you aren’t familiar with OpenClassrooms, the company first started with basic massive open online course content for people willing to learn more about a particular topic. The startup then started offering full-fledged diplomas that require six months, a year or more.

OpenClassrooms is accredited to deliver official degrees in France — and the company plans to do the same in the U.S. and the U.K. It’s not 100 percent just you learning by yourself as you get to talk to a mentor every week to talk about your progress. And it’s been working quite well for the company.

An online path generally costs less than a traditional degree, and you’re more flexible when it comes to hours, days and semesters. The startups is so confident that it guarantees you’ll find a job within six months of graduation.

More recently, OpenClassrooms has been partnering with companies to offer apprenticeship programs. The idea is that you work for a company several days a week and study when you’re not working. It’s a win-win as some companies struggle to find the right candidates, some students want to start working right away and don’t want to pay for their studies. And OpenClassrooms gets paid by companies directly. Uber, Deliveroo, Capgemini, BNP Paribas and dozens of others participate in the apprenticeship program.

Microsoft will help OpenClassrooms design a new degree around data science, machine learning and all things artificial intelligence. The company will provide content and projects. OpenClassrooms will recruit 1,000 candidates in France, the U.K. and the U.S. as part of this program.