Category: StartUps

Gone are the days when cities and tech startups are constantly at odds with each other. Passport, a mobility management startup, has partnered with Charlotte, N.C., Detroit, MIch., and Omaha, Neb. to create a framework to apply parking principles, data analysis and more to the plethora of shared micromobility services.

“For many cities, the only option has been to impose bans, fees or permit systems intended to cap the number of scooters allowed on their streets,” Passport CEO Bob Youakim told TechCrunch via email. “While this allows cities to temporarily control scooter deployment, there are greater benefits to achieve by aligning with new mobility providers.”

With Passport, those cities will be able to easily analyze scooter usage, parking patterns and curb utilization. Passport also enables cities to implement real-time curbside pricing and payments and better manage scooter placement. The idea is that cities and mobility providers will work better together if there are economic incentives in place.

“Cities already have a well-established system for charging cars to park on the curb and this same solution should be applied to other modes of transportation,” Youakim said. “By charging scooters to park with usage-based pricing, cities can more effectively manage scooters in their communities and naturally balance supply and demand.”

Passport has also partnered with scooter operator Lime to research ways in which a system of flexible parking charges could replace scooter caps.

“This is a prime example of cities and Lime collaborating to both determine the right fleet size through data and jointly achieve mode shift, sustainability and accessibility objectives,” Lime Director of Transportation Partnerships said in a statement.

In Detroit, the city outlined its official pilot program last October, capping the number of scooters each company could deploy at 400. When the scooters first landed in Detroit, they were very concentrated in the greater downtown area, Detroit Chief of Mobility Innovation Mark de la Vergne told TechCrunch via email.

As part of this program, the hope is to continue to increase the availability of scooters in underserved areas, as well as better manage the supply and demand economics.

“I’m very interested to see how these cities can work together to develop a new business/regulatory model that can be scaled nationally,” he said.

Over in Charlotte, the hope is to learn more about how to implement dynamic pricing and encourage people to wear helmets.

“We will be evaluating how this partnership shapes transportation mobility in Charlotte as it relates to e-scooters,” Charlotte Department of Transportation Deputy Director Dan Gallagher said. “As a city we want to be able to provide our community with the best transportation network that provides access to jobs, education, transit and housing.”

 

Source: Tech Crunch

Google isn’t launching a gaming console. The company is launching a service instead, Stadia. You’ll be able to run a game on a server and stream the video feed to your device. You won’t need to buy new hardware to access Stadia, but Stadia won’t be available on all devices from day one.

“With Google, your games will be immediately discoverable by 2 billion people on a Chrome browser, Chromebook, Chromecast, Pixel device. And we have plans to support more browsers and platforms over time,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said shortly after opening the conference.

As you can see, the Chrome browser will be the main interface to access the service on a laptop or desktop computer. The company says that you’ll be able to play with your existing controller. So if you have a PlayStation 4, Xbox One or Nintendo Switch controller, that should work just fine. Google is also launching its own controller.

As expected, if you’re using a Chromecast with your TV, you’ll be able to turn it into a Stadia machine. Only the latest Chromecast supports Bluetooth, so let’s see if you’ll need a recent model to play with your existing controller. Google’s controller uses Wi-Fi so that should theoretically work with older Chromecast models.

On mobile, it sounds like Google isn’t going to roll out its service to all Android devices from day one. Stadia could be limited to Pixel phones and tablets at first. But there’s no reason Google would not ship Stadia to all Android devices later.

Interestingly, Google didn’t mention Apple devices at all. So if you have an iPhone or an iPad, don’t hold your breath. Apple doesn’t let third-party developers sell digital content in their apps without going through the App Store. This will create a challenge for Google.

Stadia isn’t available just yet. It’ll launch later this year. As you can see, there are many outstanding questions after the conference. Google is entering a new industry and it’s going to take some time to figure out the business model and the distribution model.

Source: Tech Crunch

Podcasts are exploding in popularity and Y Combinator, the startup accelerator known for its long list of unicorn graduates, is throwing its support behind a business tackling the podcast monetization problem. Among its latest and largest-ever cohort is Brew, a subscription-based app complete with original content.

Though Brew’s founders, Jijo Sunny, Madhavan Ramakrishnan, Aleesha John and Joseph Sunny, call Brew the “Netflix for podcasts,” the app differs from Luminary, which made headlines with the same tagline and a $100 million round earlier this month. Luminary, which hasn’t yet launched, will similarly operate under a subscription model, charging $8 a month for access to its podcasts. Instead of opening its platform to creators of any stature, the business is striking deals with established voices in the podcast industry, like Guy Raz of “How I Built This,” Adam Davidson of “Planet Money” and celebrities Trevor Noah and Lena Dunham.

Brew, on the other hand, charges listeners $5 per month for access to a different demographic: upstart podcasters and rising stars alike. In other words, if you and your mom wanted to start a podcast — and get paid — you can sign up on Brew and instantly start raking in cash. That is, if you’re garnering an audience of listeners; Brew pays its creators based on their number of unique listens.

“Podcasts, by nature, have a low barrier to entry and that’s the best thing about podcasts, right?,” Brew chief executive officer Jijo Sunny tells TechCrunch. “Anyone anywhere can set up a podcast. To be a Netflix for audio, it has to be for all creators, not celebrities like Trevor Noah.”

The app officially launched in the app store last week with several original ad-free shows, including original content from YouTubers Boogie2988 and Jack Vale, who boast a 4.5 million and 1.5 million following on YouTube, respectively. Next month, Brew will make its platform available for all podcasters to upload shows.

“Our vision is to help millions of creators earn a living doing what they love,” Ramakrishnan tells TechCrunch.

The startup’s long-term vision includes incorporating a tipping feature, much like Himalaya, another podcasting business that recently secured a $100 million check. Himalaya allows listeners to send micro-payments to creators to help subsidize their ad-based income.

Later, Brew plans to allow podcasters to operate online stores within the app, so they can earn additional money through merchandise sales. Live podcasts, publishing and production tools are also on the roadmap.

Podcast startups are taking off thanks to support from venture capitalists, but the people behind the content still struggle to earn a solid paycheck. Justine and Olivia Moore of CRV, an early-stage venture capital firm, say podcasts monetize at only a penny per listener hour, on average. Podcasting, in other words, makes 10x less money per hours consumed than radio, TV, magazines or any other major content medium. Meanwhile, 73 million people are enjoying podcasts every month, per Edison Research, and some 15 billion episodes are downloaded each year.

It’s clear there is an untapped opportunity to help content creators get rich. The Brew team’s experience — they previously built Buymeacoffee.com, a tipping platform for artists that has funded 40,000 people to date — coupled with VCs excitement for the growing medium puts Brew on a solid path for growth.

Brew’s team is originally from Kerala, India but plans to permanently set up shop in San Francisco. They’ve raised a total of $400,000, including Y Combinator’s $150,000 check. CrunchRoll founder Kun Gao and Teachable CEO Ankur Nagpal are amongst its early backers.

Brew, alongside some 200 other startups, will pitch to investors at YC Demo Days later today and tomorrow.

Source: Tech Crunch

Branch, the scheduling and pay management app for hourly workers, has added a new pay-on-demand service called Pay, which is now available to anyone who downloads the Branch app.

It’s an attempt to provide a fee-based alternative to payday lending, where borrowers charge exorbitant rates to lenders on short-term loans or cash advances. Borrowers can often wind up paying anywhere from 200 percent to more than 3,000 percent on short-term payday loans.

The Pay service, which was previously only available to select users from a waitlist at companies like Dunkin’, Taco Bell and Target (which are Branch customers), is now available to anyone in the United States and gives anyone the opportunity to get paid for the hours they have worked in a given pay period.

Branch, which began its corporate life as Branch Messenger, started as a scheduling and shift management tool for large retailers, restaurants and other businesses with hourly workers. When the company added a wage-tracking service, it began to get a deeper insight into the financially precarious lives of its users, according to chief executive, Atif Siddiqi.

“We thought, if we can give them a portion of their paycheck in advance it would be a big advantage with their productivity,” Siddiqi says. 

The company is working with Plaid, the fintech unicorn that debuted five years ago at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York Hackathon, and Cross River Bank, the stealthy financial services provider backstopping almost every major fintech player in America.

“Opening Pay and instant access to earnings to all Branch users continues our mission of creating tools that empower the hourly employee and allow their work lives to meet the demands of their personal lives,” said Siddiqi, in a statement. “Our initial users have embraced this feature, and we look forward to offering Pay to all of our organic users to better engage employees and scale staffing more efficiently.”

Beta users of the Pay service have already averaged roughly 5.5 transactions per month and more than 20 percent higher shift coverage rates compared to non-users, according to the company. Pay isn’t a lending service, technically. It offers a free pay-within-two-days option for users to receive earned but uncollected wages before a scheduled payday.

For users, there’s no integration with a back-end payroll system. Anyone who wants to use Pay just needs to download the Branch app and enter their employer, debit card or payroll card, and bank account (if a user has one). Through its integration with Plaid, Branch has access to almost all U.S. banks and credit unions.

“A lot of these employees at some of these enterprises are unbanked so they get paid on a payroll card,” Siddiqi said. “It’s been a big differentiation for us in the market allowing us to give unbanked users access to the wages that they earn.”

Users on the app can instantly get a $150 cash advance and up to $500 per pay period, according to the company. The Pay service also comes with a wage tracker so employees can forecast their earnings based on their schedule and current wages, a shift-scheduling tool to pick up additional shifts and an overdraft security feature to hold off on repayment withdrawals if it would cause users to overdraw their accounts.

Branch doesn’t charge anything for users who are willing to wait two days to receive their cash, and charges $1.99 for instant deposits.

Siddiqi views the service as a loss leader to get users onto the Branch app and ultimately more enterprise customers onto its scheduling and payment management SaaS platform.

“The way we generate revenue is through our other modules. It’s very sticky… and our other modules complement this concept of Pay,” Siddiqi says. “By combining scheduling and pay we’re providing high rates of shift coverage… now people want to pick up undesirable shifts because they can get paid instantly for those shifts.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Benjamin Fernandes, the Tanzanian co-founder chief executive of Nala, spent hundreds of hours talking to local Tanzanians about their frustrations with mobile money payment services before he launched his new payment platform.

While at least a hundred million Africans hold mobile money accounts, the process of transacting over the services is difficult, so Tala made an application that acts as an interface on top of the unstructured supplementary service data layer to make money transfers and payments much easier.

Mobile payment services have swept across the African continent in the 12 years since the wireless carrier Safaricom launched M-Pesa in 2007. As of 2017, roughly half of the 282 mobile money services operating worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a McKinsey report. Nala’s founder estimates that there around 420 million Africans holding mobile money accounts, making the continent the leader in mobile money adoption by a wide margin. 

In Tanzania, making one send money payment requires a user to enter somewhere between 39-46 digits, a hard enough task for anyone, let alone someone who may be newly adjusting to mobile phone service.

Using Nala, users can make payments to anyone on any device, and it only requires a one-time download to start transacting, according to the company.

Think of Nala has taken all of the short codes from all of the transaction providers and created a router system that users can operate without having to memorize the different underlying coding. Currently live in Tanzania, with over 100,000 users, Fernandes says that his company has plans to expand to at least two other African countries over the course of 2019.

It’s been a long road for Fernandes, a former national television host of youth talk shows and sports shows in Tanzania, to financial services entrepreneur.

Fernandes moved to the U.S. for university, doing his undergrad degree at the evangelical Christian University of Northwestern in St. Paul. At the university, Fernandes developed an interest in economics and excelled. Encouraged by his business professor to apply to Harvard and Stanford for business school, Fernandes briefly returned home and did just that.

He received a full ride to Stanford through the school’s Africa MBA Fellowship in 2014 and moved back to America.

“I took the two years at Stanford to learn everything i can about fintech,” Fernandes recalled. “In the summer i started working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and that’s where i met Sam Castle. He was a PhD student at Washington doing research in mobile payments in MENA and Sub Saharan Africa.

Castle and Fernandes stayed in touch while the Tanzanian wrapped up his studies at Stanford, and when Fernandes graduated and received the Frances and Arjay Miller Prize for Social Entrepreneurship along with its attendant $20,000 bounty, he returned home and started working on Nala.

“It was such a hard decision to make to go home,” Fernandes recalls. “Most Africans don’t go home. We stay in the States. But I was 24 at the time and thought ‘We’ll figure this out.’”

As he began working on different prototypes and as the work progressed, he was able to convince Castle to come on board.

Now the company is generating some revenue from airtime sales and bill payments, although down the road Fernandes sees value in the data that the company collects across the multiple accounts that Nala services.

Eventually there’s a possibility for the company to get into other financial services like lending and savings.

What’s clear is the massive opportunity that exists in simplifying a transaction mechanism that’s wildly popular across the continent but also massively tricky for consumers to use.

Mobile payments have already revolutionized financial transactions in Africa, by building a simpler interface, Nala could take that revolution one step further.

Source: Tech Crunch