Pax Labs CEO Bharat Vassan and serial founder Keith McCarty are coming to Disrupt SF

The legalization of cannabis and hemp for medicinal and recreational use in states across the U.S. and in Canada has opened up a huge vein of green, green cash for startups.

Two entrepreneurs tantalized early on by the smell of dank profits are Pax Labs CEO Bharat Vassan and Eaze and Wayv founder Keith McCarty. They will join us on stage at Disrupt SF to hash out the opportunities for investors and help founders avoid seeing their vision go up in smoke.

Bharat Vassan took over as Chief Executive at Pax Labs in February 2018. Before that, he served as President and COO at August Home, which sold to Assa Abloy in 2017. Prior to August Home, Vassan was cofounder and COO at Basis Science, which sold to Intel in 2018 for a reported $100 million. Vassan was also at Electronic Arts from 2002 to 2010, where he went from Senior Manager of Mergers & Acquisitions to serving as CFO and COO.

Pax Labs’ valuation, as of its latest $420 million funding round in April of this year, was at $1.7 billion. The company, which makes cannabis vaporizers, has plans to use the funding for international expansion and new products, but Vassan also hinted at a data play in this new market.

“People know about different kinds of alcohol,” said Vasan, in an interview in April. “They may know that they’re a beer person or a wine person. But none of that exists within cannabis. They see names like ‘Lemon Haze’ and ‘Cherry Fizz’ and they don’t know what that is. These are all really awesome names for a band but not great to let you know what you’re consuming. We want to provide more clarity around what that means.”

How Pax Labs plans to do this is unclear, but we’re hoping to learn more about it in October.

Keith McCarty, founder and CEO of Wayv, has a rich history in the tech space and as an entrepreneur. After spending five years at Yammer, and then Microsoft following the acquisition, McCarty went on to found Eaze, a legal cannabis delivery platform.

And while Eaze has continued to grow alongside the cannabis market itself, it put a new problem on McCarty’s radar. The supply chain logistics of the cannabis industry, combined with the fast-changing regulatory market, presents an opportunity for one startup to solve for this problem. McCarty wants that to be Wayv, a new venture that has raised $5 million in funding.

Wayv wants to be the Eaze of the enterprise, connecting licensed cannabis companies to licensed brands to provide next-day delivery of Cannabis products.

These two titans will join us at Disrupt SF in October to discuss the changes in this market and the opportunities appearing before the tech world as a result of those changes.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available here.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Demo your startup at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019

Every year hundreds of startups launch with dreams of becoming the next enterprise software unicorn. And it’s no wonder, given the $500 billion market and the rate at which the enterprise giants snap up emerging players. If you’re the founder of an early-stage enterprise startup, join us for TC Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Even better, grab the opportunity by the horns and buy a Startup Demo Package. There is limited space available. This is your chance to plant your company in front of some of the most influential enterprise movers and shakers — we’re talking more than 1,000 attendees. Demo tables are reserved for startups with less than $3 million in funding and are available for $2,000, which includes four tickets to the event.

This day-long intensive event features speakers, panel discussions, demos, workshops and world-class networking. Get ready for a head-on, hype-free exploration of the considerable challenges enterprise companies face — regardless of their size.

TechCrunch editors will interview founders and leaders from both established and up-and-coming companies on topics ranging from intelligent marketing automation and the cloud to machine learning and AI. And they’ll question enterprise-focused VCs about where they’re directing their early, middle and late-stage investments.

The full roster of speakers is still to be announced, but here’s a quick hit of who you can expect at TC Sessions: Enterprise.

You’ll hear from Scott Farquhar, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, a company that’s changed the way developers work. Want to hear more about enterprise and the cloud? Snowflake’s co-founder and president of product, Benoit Dageville, will be on hand to talk about the company’s mission to bring the enterprise database to the cloud.

Have someone you want to hear from our stage? Submit your speaker suggestion here.

Pro Tip: For each TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket you buy, we’ll register you for a complimentary Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place September 5 at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your early-stage enterprise startup in front of leading enterprise software founders, investors and technologists. Buy your Startup Demo Package today.

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


Source: Tech Crunch

Sam Lessin and Andrew Kortina on their voice assistant’s workplace pivot

Sam Lessin, a former product management executive at Facebook and old friend to Mark Zuckerberg, incorporated his latest startup under the name “Fin Exploration Company.”

Why? Well, because he wanted to explore. The company — co-founded alongside Andrew Kortina, best known for launching the successful payments app Venmo — was conceived as a consumer voice assistant in 2015 after the two entrepreneurs realized the impact 24/7 access to a virtual assistant would have on their digital to-do lists.

The thing is, developing an AI assistant capable of booking flights, arranging trips, teaching users how to play poker, identifying places to purchase specific items for a birthday party and answering wide-ranging zany questions like “can you look up a place where I can milk a goat?” requires a whole lot more human power than one might think. Capital-intensive and hard-to-scale, an app for “instantly offloading” chores wasn’t the best business. Neither Lessin nor Kortina will admit to failure, but Fin‘s excursion into B2B enterprise software eight months ago suggests the assistant technology wasn’t a billion-dollar idea.

Staying true to its name, the Fin Exploration Company is exploring again.


Source: Tech Crunch

Netflix’s ‘Stranger Things’ comes to Roblox ahead of its July 4 premiere

Netflix is bringing its hit TV show Stranger Things to Roblox. On Monday, Roblox announced the launch of limited-time, Stanger Things-themed items that will be made available to its over 90 million players, who can earn them by solving daily riddles and puzzles. Other free, limited-time items like a “Scoops Ahoy” hat and Demogorgon mask will also be offered as virtual items for players’ Roblox avatars.

The first of the two themed items are live now and will be free to download through July 12. Four more items can be unlocked by solving daily riddles and puzzles, with a new clue arriving each day ahead of the July 4 premiere of Stranger Things Season 3.

Roblox will also share clues across its social media accounts on FacebookTwitter, and Instagram, it says.

What’s interesting about the Roblox integration is that it may reach children younger than those ages 14 and up — the ages that the series itself is rated for (TV-14). (Likely, some braver tweens are already familiar with the show and are watching alongside mom or dad…or at least with their approval).

However, the Roblox partnership is only one of several gaming-focused initiatives Netflix has planned to market some of its most anticipated programming, including both Stranger Things and other titles.

At this year’s E3, Netflix detailed a series of gaming initiatives, including integrations with partners like Ubisoft, Behavior Interactive, and even Fornite, in addition to Roblox. Already, some Fornite players had found the “Scoops Ahoy” easter egg back when Season 9 launched, Netflix said.

Plus, the company is preparing not one but two new Stranger Things-themed games. The first, called Stranger Things 3: The Game, will launch across platforms including Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, Android and iOS on the same day the third season premieres. Like its predecessor, also by developer BonusXP, the game is meant to be a companion to the current season and features 16-bit action for a nostalgic feel.

Next year, Netflix is planning another new Stranger Things title, with a mobile game for iOS and Android. This one is a location-based RPG/puzzler where players explore The Upside Down hidden all around them, while working with other players to “overcome its emerging evils.”

Netflix is also preparing to launch a turn-based tactics game adapted from the Netflix Original series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC and Mac.

A wave of digital marketing isn’t entirely new for the streaming service.

In the past, it toyed with mobile experiences to advertise its shows — like the standalone Orange is the New Black app it launched back in 2014, or the “FakeBlock” app introduced to advertise the new season of Arrested Development.

The company also toyed around with a cross between games and TV with the 2018 launch of Minecraft: Story Mode, which some could consider a form of gaming. Netflix, however, did not. It even claimed at the time that the company did not have any plans “to get into gaming.”

Well, that’s no longer true.

While many of the integrations and games themselves are built by partnered developers, Netflix is clearly involved. And unlike the throwaways apps from years prior, these are more series efforts on Netflix’s part — not just promotional vehicles for its shows.

The marketing doesn’t stop at digital games either.

Netflix’s Stranger Things is more than just a show, its a whole business unto itself. It’s Baskin Robbins ice cream flavors, and Target exclusives like a Stranger Things bike, toys and apparel. It’s posters, games, and all kinds of other merch, too. And that’s just one show. An analyst previously said Netflix’s merch biz could be a billion-dollar addition to the company’s revenue.

Beyond gaming and other stuff to buy, the Stranger Things empire extends to brand deals with Coke, Levi’s, H&M, Nike, Eggo, Schwinn, Trivial Pursuit, Burger Kind, and more. 

The Roblox and Fornite integrations are live now. The Season 3-themed game arrives July 4.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

NASA picks a dozen science and tech projects to bring to the surface of the Moon

With the Artemis mission scheduled to put boots on lunar regolith as soon as 2024, NASA has a lot of launching to do — and you can be sure none of those launches will go to waste. The agency just announced 12 new science and technology projects to send to the Moon’s surface, including a new rover.

The 12 projects are being sent up as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which is — as NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has emphasized strongly — part of an intentional increase in reliance on private companies. If a company already has a component or rover or craft ready to go and meeting a program’s requirements, why should NASA build it from scratch at great cost?

In this case the selected projects cover a wide range of origins and intentions. Some are repurposed or spare parts from other missions, like the Lunar Surface Electromagnetics Experiment. LuSEE is related to the Park Solar Probe’s STEREO/Waves instrument and pieces from MAVEN, re-engineered to make observations and measurements on the moon.

moonrangerOthers are quite new. Astrobotic, which was also recently awarded an $80 million contract to develop its Peregrine lunar lander, will now also be putting together a rover, which it calls MoonRanger (no relation to the NES game). This little bot will autonomously traverse the landscape within half a mile or so of its base and map it in 3D.

The new funding from NASA amounts to $5.6M, which isn’t a lot to develop a lunar rover from scratch — no doubt it’s using its own funds and working with its partner, Carnegie Mellon University, to make sure the rover isn’t a bargain bin device. With veteran rover engineer Red Whittaker on board, it should be a good one.

“MoonRanger offers a means to accomplish far-ranging science of significance, and will exhibit an enabling capability on missions to the Moon for NASA and the commercial sector. The autonomy techniques demonstrated by MoonRanger will enable new kinds exploration missions that will ultimately herald in a new era on the Moon,” said Whittaker in an Astrobotic news release.

The distance to the lunar surface isn’t so far that controlling a rover directly from the surface is nearly impossible, like on Mars, but if it can go from here to there without someone in Houston twiddling a joystick, why shouldn’t it?

To be clear, this is different from the upcoming CubeRover project and others that are floating around in Astrobotic and Whittaker’s figurative orbits.

“MoonRanger is a 13 kg microwave sized rover with advanced autonomous capabilities,” Astrobotic’s Mike Provenzano told me. “The CubeRover is a 2 kg shoebox sized rover developed for light payloads and geared for affordable science and exploration activities.”

While both have flight contracts, CubeRover is scheduled to go up on the first Peregrine mission in 2021, while MoonRanger is TBD.

Another NASA selection is the Planetary Science Institute’s Heimdall, a new camera system that will point downward during the lander’s descent and collect super-high-resolution imagery of the regolith before, during, and after landing.

heimdall

“The camera system will return the highest resolution images of the undisturbed lunar surface yet obtained, which is important for understanding regolith properties. We will be able to essentially video the landing in high resolution for the first time, so we can understand how the plume behaves – how far it spreads, how long particles are lofted. This information is crucial for the safety of future landings,” said the project’s R. Aileen Yingst in a PSI release.

The regolith is naturally the subject of much curiosity, since if we’re to establish a semi-permanent presence on the Moon we’ll have to deal with it one way or another. So Projects like Honeybee’s PlanetVac, which can suck up and test materials right at landing, or the Regolith Adherence Characterization, which will see how the stuff sticks to various materials, will be invaluable.

RadSatg Deployed w Crop

RadSat-G deployed from the ISS for its year-long mission to test radiation tolerance on its computer systems.

Several projects are continuations of existing projects that are great fits for lunar missions. For example, the lunar surface is constantly being bombarded with all kinds of radiation, since the Moon lacks any kind of atmosphere. That’s not a problem for machinery like wheels or even solar cells, but for computers radiation can be highly destructive. So Brock LaMere’s work in radiation-tolerant computers will be highly relevant to landers, rovers, and payloads.

LaMere’s work has already been tested in space via the Nanoracks facility aboard the International Space Station, and the new NASA funding will allow it to be tested on the lunar surface. If we’re going to be sending computers up there that people’s lives will depend on, we better be completely sure they aren’t going to crash because of a random EM flux.

The rest of the projects are characterized here, with varying degrees of detail. No doubt we’ll learn more soon as the funding disbursed by NASA over the next year or so helps flesh them out.


Source: Tech Crunch

Apple Sans Ive

Well, this has been interesting. After almost 30 years with Apple, Jony Ive is leaving, to found his own firm LoveFrom with his friend and frequent collaborator Marc Newson — also leaving Apple. The response to this news has been predictably histrionic from Apple watchers and press.

The narratives, to summarize, are essentially that:

  • Jony had checked out, become incompetent or just plain lazy
  • Apple is doomed because he is leaving

If those narratives look contradictory then you have eyes.

If you take the sum of the breathless (dare I say thirsty) stories tying together a bunch of anecdotes about Jony’s last couple of years, they are trying to paint a picture of a legendary design figure that has abandoned the team and company he helped build, leading to a stagnation of forward progress — while at the same time trying to argue that the company is doomed without him.

Ok.

Ironically (or perhaps inevitably) even the phrasing of the tweets that accompanied these stories were couched in inflammatory positioning. Tim Cook’s email (actually quite plainly stated) was touted as ‘scathing’, the Journal posited the question: ‘Why hasn’t Apple had a hit product in years? A look at the internal drama around the departure of its design chief helps explain.’ A conclusion that its story only hints at.

Most watchers of the company that I know who were asking and listening to Apple people over the past couple of years are aware that Jony has been on borrowed time with the company. Shocking, this was not — a surprise it was always guaranteed to be given how much control Jony keeps over how and when he does press.

Back in 2015, it was clear that Jony wanted to do less paper pushing and more pencil pushing. And the past decade of Apple has been nothing if not an explosion of management challenges. Enormous growth in product volumes, splintering product lines that made an attempt to leave less room under the pricing and feature umbrella and, yeah, a hell of a lot more people.

“Many of Apple’s critics are purely nostalgic,” Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies puts it. “Wanting Apple to go back to the days when some of the designs were more bold, iconic, possibly polarizing, but in that time Apple was selling tens of millions of products not hundreds of millions of products. This is a crucially important point that many in the public sphere miss. “

All of that growth means that the job of someone like Jony would naturally shift from scooting a pencil around a drafting board to something more like management — or, in Apple’s case, teaching.

I’m not the Journal’s (or any other publication’s, thank god) public editor. So I will not be fisking the stories that have come out about Jony and his work habits. I’ve never been that good at it and I don’t really have the stomach for it these days. I do have thoughts, though about the way that these anecdotes are tied together in a narrative.

Given that I have covered the company closely for years, I know a lot of the people who were involved in some of these situations. Jony did, in fact, move to holding design meetings at his house in SF. They absolutely held design meetings at The Battery to collate device opinion. He has a design studio in other homes like Hawaii and London. He has absolutely spent more time in the city than down at Apple headquarters over the past few years. The design teams, in and out of the industrial design people, absolutely saw less of him than before.

There are also bits and pieces in the various stories over the past few days that are not, as I understand them, accurate, or represented in an accurate context. But the more important point is that no one I know felt that Jony had checked out or abandoned the team.

As he stated himself, Jony was just plain tired. What prolific designer do you know that is excited about doing more management and less design?

Also, I fully reject the narrative that Apple has somehow floundered because Jony has been absentee. During the period, the company has shipped some enormously successful products — including the major category hit Apple Watch. As one note, I found the criticism that Jony wanted a gold watch so that made the Apple Watch a boondoggle to be enormously hilarious.

The gold watch had 2 distinct purposes:

  • Jony wanted to make it
  • It set expectation that this was a product worth wearing all day

I think it is 100% possible and fair to argue that the first point means Jony had too much power or that it was him exercising that power in a way that felt foreign to Apple’s egalitarian ideals about computing. But the fact is that, regardless of how many they sold, it made a splash and did, in fact, push Apple into the world of fashion and wearable conversation in a way that it hadn’t ever before.

That toe-hold gave them time to figure out what the Watch is actually for and it is a very real success for the company. During the same period, Apple shipped the iPhone X months ahead of schedule, and major updates to every line including the iMac.

I can certainly understand one or more members of the design team resenting the lack of intimate one-on-one time that Jony used to spend with the team when Apple shipped fewer products in more time. And not all of Jony’s influence over the past few years is pristine in hindsight. The MacBook keyboards still suck, I’ll give you that one.

Basically, all design is worth critiquing, and Jony isn’t above that. If something doesn’t work consistently or feel human centric, then it doesn’t matter if 1950’s Dieter Rams himself designed it, it’s crap.

But the argument that Jony derailed product at Apple looks like complete nonsense when you observe the facts. And every design team member I’ve spoken to over the last 4 years has said that Jony, while at times difficult, demanding and intense, has also been an enormous enabling force when it comes to spending the time, resources and energy it took them to get a product or feature to the level they wanted. Resources like on-the-ground materials consultation in China, collaborations with artists around the world, research into the effects of a design — the willingness to ‘do the most’ in search of a solution. None of that went away.

That said, if Jony doesn’t like managing, guess what Jony is not going to be enthusiastic about? As Shel Silverstein put it: “If you have to dry the dishes, and you drop one on the floor, maybe they won’t make you dry dishes any more.”

There is certainly calculus in everything an executive at any big company says publicly — but I think you can believe Jony when he says that he feels like he can be useful elsewhere.

“I certainly have an ambition and feel almost a moral obligation to be useful,” he says in this FT piece. “I feel I’ve been fortunate enough to work with remarkable people over the last 30-plus years and have worked on some very interesting projects and solved some very difficult problems. I feel keenly aware of a responsibility to do something significant with that learning.”

He wants out, and that’s what he’s doing. But he’s not leaving the company in terrible shape, from either an overall perspective and from an internal perspective.

Let’s move away from the anecdotal. What’s more interesting to me than any of this Jony shit talking is where Apple design goes from here.

Apple has put Evans Hankey and Alan Dye in charge of design, reporting to Jeff Williams. Wring your hands all you want about Apple becoming an operations company but, like, where have you been for the last 10 years?

Yes, Apple is a different company now, and it should be. While Jony has given us some amazing work (and some amazing what the hell moments) over the years, its going to be fascinating to watch a new leadership tackle the next era at Apple.

I think it’s also smart of Apple not to announce a single ‘Jony replacement’ at this juncture. Any immediate comparison would likely not do them any favors and this gives the team time to find a new center and a new direction over the next couple of years. I think someone will emerge as the design lead here eventually, but I’m not sure who.

Evans, as I understand it, was hand picked by Jony to lead the ID team as a manager, a job she’s already been doing. She’s a capable design manager with hundreds of patents to her name. More importantly, Apple has a historic and systemic policy that they don’t just put people in to do a job, they put them there to learn from them and to teach them. The Apple way of doing things is institutionalized and taught to new hires.

This institutional tissue, I believe, will survive Jony leaving.

One of the things that struck me the most about a lot of the recent stories is that it painted members of the design team as feckless automatons that could not proceed without Jony approving every move. That’s not true and honestly not even possible. There’s no way Apple could ship on the schedule they have done over the past few years if Jony being late to a meeting would handicap them.

There are a lot of very smart and very talented people at Apple and they are not all named Jony.

I’m also very interested to see how Alan Dye gets on with Apple. He’s got a calm, understated demeanor in person that can come across a bit flat, but he’s clearly very engaged with the task. He’s respected by Apple designers who feel that his work speaks for itself internally and that he has the chops. One of the arcs of Dye’s tenure has been to unify the look and feel of iOS across its platforms in terms of typography like San Francisco.

One of the biggest potholes that the software design team has ever hit, in my opinion, was iOS 7. It needed to be a break with the past for some legitimate reasons, like the expansion of iOS onto new platforms like the car, the watch and beyond. But Jony brought print, not interaction, designers from other parts of Apple in to flesh out the final design and that ended up presenting as a radical new but also radically less usable iOS.

iOS 7, to me, has always reminded me of an apocryphal saying I heard but can’t remember where. It’s about the notoriously difficult to drive Porsche 911: Porsche made a beautiful mistake, and it’s spent 50 years fixing it.

The 911 was a car that was designed to be imbalanced from the beginning by placing the engine in the rear, to emphasize power transfer to the ground via weight and traction. Also, no joke, so you could still fit groceries in it.

Unfortunately, it also enabled massive oversteer, with the car swinging wide on corners incredibly suddenly if pushed too hard. Porsche has refined that design with every iteration, improving every other aspect of the vehicle like traction, larger wheelbase, steering, braking and gearing. Just to get it to a place where the original vision remained intact, but, you know, less fire and dying.

Apple has done much the same since iOS 7, taking a concept that it felt was necessary and continuing to pull it back into a place that feels more usable.

Screen Shot 2019 07 02 at 12.58.36 PM

One of the things that stood out to me at the time was that iOS 7 led with a ‘panes of glass’ metaphor. They weren’t all that explicit about it then but it seemed clear to me that they saw this as a way to support all kinds of interfaces from palm first to heads up. An evolution of the information appliance.

Dye and the design team (and Jony, tbf) have spent the last couple of years making big strides fixing the mechanical issues, but it was very exciting to me to see the panes of glass metaphor heavily emphasized at WWDC this year. They’re just panes with depth, texture and hopefully more accessible context this time around.

Even though Jony is a ‘unicorn’ designer, Apple has always thrived on small teams with decision makers, and they’re not all one person. The structure of Apple, which does not rely on product managers, still leaves an enormous amount of power in the hands of the people actually doing the work. I’m not as concerned as a lot of people are that, with Jony leaving, there will suddenly be a slavish hewing to the needs of ‘ops over all’. It’s not in the DNA.

That doesn’t mean however, that there aren’t still question marks. Jony was an enormous force in this company. It is completely natural to be curious, excited and, hell yeah even worried about what his departure will do to the design focused Apple people love to love.

daniel arsham adidas futurecraft 4d bd7400 where to buy 2

An Adidas Futurecraft shoe with a midsole printed by Carbon

As for me, I hope that there can be a balance struck between the established patterns of Apple design and new schools of thought. No company should remain rooted in the past completely. There are wildly interesting things happening in design and manufacturing at the moment. Trends like programmatic or “AI” design that allow designers to define an algorithm and a set of constraints, and then generate ‘impossible’ shapes out of edgy materials to obtain a result unable to be sketched or sculpted by traditional processes.

The shoe pictured above is a collaboration between an artist and an algorithm. Daniel Arsham, Adidas and a startup called Carbon made this with the help of a design program that understands the goals and materials its working with, but charts its own path to getting there. This is the new school of design.

The compression of the design and manufacturing stacks into one segment is going to be the defining characteristic of this age of product development in my opinion. Apple needs to jump on that wave and ride it.

There’s a Steve quote, prominently displayed on the wall of the Infinite Loop 4 building in its old Cupertino headquarters.

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

I’d love to see Apple’s design teams do just that, embrace these new schools of thought and find ways to integrate them into the way that it has always worked. There hasn’t been a more fascinating time to follow this company in years. Whatever happens it won’t be boring.


Source: Tech Crunch

Samsung CEO calls Galaxy Fold mishap ‘embarrassing’

In a meeting with a group of journalists in South Korea, Samsung Electronics CEO DJ Koh candidly addressed the company’s latest hardware mishap. “It was embarrassing,” he told reporters, as quoted by The Independent. “I pushed it through before it was ready.”

That last bit no one can debate, really. After years of preamble, Samsung still managed to jump the gun with the Galaxy Fold. The company was eager to be the first major manufacture to market with the category’s most radical redesign in a decade. Ultimately, however, the company ended up pumping the breaks after multiple reviewers reported problems with their units.

Samsung was quick to place the blame at the hands of reviewers, but eventually shifted tacts after realizing that problems were more widespread. More than two months after the handset was initially expected to hit retail, we’re still very much in a holding pattern with Samsung’s first foldable. Though the company has promised a more concrete date for some time.

Samsung has been quick to deny any rumors that the phone has been altogether canceled, and Koh reiterated that the Fold is still being put through its paces. “I do admit I missed something on the foldable phone, but we are in the process of recovery,” the executive told the press. “At the moment, more than 2,000 devices are being tested right now in all aspects. We defined all the issues. Some issues we didn’t even think about, but thanks to our reviewers, mass volume testing is ongoing.”

Koh didn’t offer specifics with regards to a release date, though the company is reportedly gearing up to launch the next version of the Note at an event in August.


Source: Tech Crunch

Calm raises $27M to McConaughey you to sleep

Meditation app unicorn Calm wants you to doze off to the dulcet tones of actor Matthew McConaughey’s southern drawl or writer Stephen Fry’s english accent. Calm’s Sleep Stories feature that launched last year is a hit, with over 150 million listens from its 2 million paid subscribers and 50 million downloads. While lots of people want to meditate, they need to sleep. The 7-year-old app has finally found its must-have feature that makes it a habit rather than an aspiration.

Keen to capitalize on solving the insomnia problems plaguing people around the world, Lightspeed tells TechCrunch it has just invested $27 million into a Series B extension round in Calm alongside some celebrity angels at a $1 billion valuation. The cash will help the $70 per year subscription app further expand from guided meditations into more self-help masterclasses, stretching routines, relaxing music, breathing exercises, stories for children, and celebrity readings that lull you to sleep.

Calm App

The funding adds to Calm’s $88 million Series B led by TPG that was announced in Februay that was also at a $1 billion valuation, bringing the full B round to $115 million and it’s total funding to about $141 million. Lightspeed partner Nicole Quinn confirms the fund started talks with Calm around the same time as TPG, but took longer to finish due diligence, which is why the valuation didn’t grow despite Calm’s progress since February.

“Nicole and Lightspeed are valueable partners as we continue to double down on entertainment through our content” Calm’s head of communications Alexia Marchetti tells me. The startup plans to announce more celebrity content tie-ins later this summer.

Broadening its appeal is critical for Calm amidst a crowded meditation app market including Headspace, Simple Habit, and Insight Timer plus newer entrants like Peleton’s mindfulness sessions and Journey’s live group classes. It’s become easy to find guided meditations online for free, so Calm needs to become a holistic mental wellness hub.

While it risks diluting its message by doing so much, Calm plethora of services could make it a gateway to more of your personal health spend, including therapy, meditation retreats, and health merchandise from airy clothing to yoga mats. But subscription fees alone are powering a big business. Calm quadrupled  revenue in 2018 to reach $150 million in annual revenue and profitability.

That revenue is poised to keep up it’s rapid growth. After the launch of Sleep Stories, “it was incredible to see the engagement spike up and also the retention” says Quinn. Users can choose from having McConaughey describe the wonders of the cosmosm, John McEnroe walk you through the rules of tennis, fairy tales like The Little Mermaid, and more.

Quinn tells me “Sleep Stories is now a huge percentage of the business, and also the length of time people spend on the app has gone up dramatically.” She tells me that so many startups are “trying to invent a problem where there isn’t one.” But difficulty snoozing is so widespread and detrimental that users are eager to pay for an app instead of a sleeping pill.


Source: Tech Crunch

Video platform Kaltura adds advanced analytics

You may not be familiar with Kaltura‘s name, but chances are you’ve used the company’s video platform at some point or another, given that it offers a variety of video services for enterprises, educational institutions and video on demand platforms, including HBO,  Phillips, SAP, Stanford and others. Today, the company announced the launch of an advanced analytics platform for its enterprise and educational users.

This new platform, dubbed Kaltura Analytics for Admins, will provide its users with features like user-level reports. This may sound like a minor feature, since you probably don’t care about the exact details of a given user’s interactions with your video, but it will allow businesses to link this kind of behavior to other metrics. With this, you could measure the ROI of a given video by linking video watch time and sales, for example. This kind of granularity wasn’t possible with the company’s existing analytics systems. Companies and schools using the product will also get access to time period comparisons to help admins identify trends, deeper technology and geolocation reports, as well as real-time analytics for live events.

eCDN QoS dashboard

“Video is a unique data type in that it has deep engagement indicators for measurement, both around video creation – what types of content are being created by whom, as well as around video consumption and engagement with content – what languages were selected for subtitles, what hot-spots were clicked upon in video,” said Michal Tsur, President & General Manager of Enterprise and Learning at Kaltura. “Analytics is a very strategic area for our customers. Both for tech companies who are building on our VPaaS, as well as for large organizations and universities that use our video products for learning, communication, collaboration, knowledge management, marketing and sales.”

Tsur also tells me that the company is looking at how to best use machine learning to give its customers even deeper insights into how people watch videos — and potentially even offer predictive analytics in the long run.


Source: Tech Crunch

Secret Border Patrol Facebook group is brimming with hate

At a time when immigration and border issues are foremost on Americans’ minds, the integrity of the men and women who enforce those policies is similarly important. Unfortunately, a private Facebook group for Border Patrol officers shows extremely troubling conduct — and shows the limits of such groups for those wishing to engage in bad behavior online.

Documented in a report by ProPublica, which was sent screenshots of a variety of posts and comments from it, the group is known as “I’m 10-15.” That’s code in the Border Patrol agency for “aliens in custody,” i.e. that someone attempting to cross the border illegally has been apprehended.

im1015The group has some 9,500 members; recent reports put the total number of CBP officers at about twice that, so this would seem to be a popular group — but a secret one, visible only if you are invited. ProPublica verified that some of the postings they were sent were associated with accounts owned by officers.

The content apparently posted to the group (again, this can’t be verified without joining) is pretty vile. There’s dehumanization of detained migrant children — “oh well,” commented one member on a story about the death of one Guatemalan teen.

There’s incitement to violence — suggesting some agent “throw a 10-15 burrito at one of these bitches,” referring to Representatives Escobar (D-TX) and Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). “Fuck the hoes,” concurred another.

There’s conspiracy — one post suggests the now-famous image of the father and daughter drowned in the Rio Grande is falsified, saying “We’ve all seen the dems and liberal parties doing some pretty sick things.”

One user posted a manipulated image showing President Trump forcing Ocasio-Cortez to perform oral sex on him. Like I said, pretty vile. Here as elsewhere, the outspoken Congresswoman is a favored target for gendered abuse.

I’ve asked CBP for comment and have not yet heard back from the agency. But it seems unlikely that, with potentially half the force members of the group, that they could be completely ignorant of it or the type of content that’s being posted there.

This isn’t the only law enforcement group with hateful content out there by a long shot. The Plain View Project just posted a large database of posts it had collected from police department groups and accounts, and what’s visible there is more than a little troubling. Smaller exposures of concerning posts from individual departments or officers are commonplace.

It would be unfair to hold Facebook directly accountable for these ugly collections of xenophobic and sexist content. While objectionable they are nevertheless both protected speech and at least in some cases not prohibited by Facebook’s terms of service. Furthermore as a secret group they are unlikely to be reported by a random user, so even violating content will remain up for longer than it might if it were posted publicly.

At the same time it’s also obvious that Facebook and other online platforms provide a venue for this kind of behavior and, especially with the suddenly rediscovered focus on privacy, it is difficult to prevent or detect. The same things that make it possible for an oppressed group to communicate undetected in a totalitarian country allows a totalitarian force to communicate undetected about that oppressed group.

But it only takes one dissenter or security flub to expose the whole operation or bring down the apparatus of oversight on it, as hopefully will be the case with this CBP group. No one begrudges an industry or group the ability to grouse privately about its unique challenges, and maybe even in a way others would find grating or inappropriate. Standards differ. But when it reaches a certain level, especially among a group which we would like to hold to a higher standard of behavior, exposure and condemnation seems not only desirable but inevitable.


Source: Tech Crunch