Ideaforge

Tachyon, the accelerator of the blockchain powerhouse ConsenSys which launched earlier this year, has announced the first cohort for its 10 week accelerator program which is aimed at taking early stage blockchain projects from idea to a viable product. Sixteen companies were selected from around the world and will be brought together in San Francisco to participate in programming and accelerate their businesses. The projects are placed into one of three tracks:  Blockchain for-profit projects, open source and social impact. The program will culminate with a demo day for investors on November 17th.

Kavita Gupta (Managing Partner, ConsenSys Ventures) said: “We launched Tachyon with the intention of finding extremely promising early-stage companies and providing them with hands on support from the get-go. Among this inaugural group, I feel confident that we’ve found the next crop of game-changing projects that will drive innovation across the blockchain ecosystem.” 

Joe Lubin (Founder, ConsenSys) commented: “One thing that excites me about this first Tachyon cohort is that it demonstrates the degree to which our Ethereum community remains decentralized, even as it continues to grow. In this first batch, I see companies coming from Israel, China, India, Europe, the South Atlantic and Pacific Northwest all coming together to drive innovation beyond their geographical boundaries.”

Here’s a run-down of each company selected, in their own words:

BULVRD:  BULVRD is Washington DC based map and navigation app that tokenizes and gamifies the community aspect of navigation apps like Waze, rewarding users to report route information in the app making maps more real-time and community driven. 

Decompany: Decompany is a Korea based decentralized and incentivized knowledge trading system coming from Polaris Office (Infraware is publicly traded parent company). Decompany will be using the blockchain to build a global and monetizable version of Slideshare, utilizing network effects and a lone currency for transactions.

Elkrem: Elkrem is a Cairo based company creating hardware that will make it easy for IOT devices to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Using proprietary software, Elkrem’s boards can force devices to interact with the Ethereum stack in an efficient and scalable way.  

Eth Status Codes (Open Source Grant):  A Candian company, ETH Status Codes, also known as the ERC-1066 proposal, outlines a common set of Ethereum status codes in the same vein as HTTP statuses or BEAM tagged tuples. These shared set of signals allow smart contracts to react to situations autonomously and expose localized error messages to users. 

Expercoin:  Out of the Harvard innovation lab, Expercoin is a decentralized AI powered marketplace protocol empowering non-technical individuals to create specialized learning economies with the ability to instantly monetize them. 

FastX:  China based high throughput decentralized exchange protocol built on Plasma. At scale, FastX will combine the security of a DEX with the UX and low fees of a centralized offering, offering a low-latency decentralized platform to serve Web 3.0’s largest use-case to date: the exchange of digital assets.

GlobalXplorer (Non-profit grant, Social impact track): A TED prize recipient,  GlobalXplorer is a crowdsourced archaeology initiative that allows for locals to participate in archaeology and legitimize findings in their region. The GXº Blockchain is a global registry for antiquities and an Ethereum-based marketplace for the sustainable distribution of an antiquity’s cultural heritage data which can be curated and collected. 

Groundhog (Open Source): Out of the Nova Scotia based Blockcrushr labs, The Groundhog Wallet is a multi-blockchain crypto wallet, browser, and hub for decentralized access to Web 3.0 that includes Groundhog Pay, a payment platform that lets merchants world accept all types of crypto currencies including subscription payments over Ethereum. 

MWC Vision: MWC Vision is a Berlin based studio spinning up decentralized, on-chain video games, the first of which is Chainmonsters. ChainMonsters is an Ethereum-based game in which users can catch, collect, and battle with monsters known as ChainMonsters (much like the handheld Pokemon games). Utilizing non-fungible Ethereum tokens, users can fully control and own an in-game avatar and explore  a digital world, catching and training ‘monsters’ represented by tokens which can be sold and used elsewhere.

Net Ninjas:  Net Ninjas is an Israel based protocol for all things decentralized compute and storage, starting with an offering that will use the blockchain to create a decentralized VPN that can be used by enterprises. 

Nuo: Nuo is an India based project facilitating decentralized crypto lending on-chain. Borrowers on the platform can stake tokens as collateral and get ETH as a result. The protocol has already processed $15,000 worth of loans and provides an entirely on-chain lending solution for digital assets.

Pulse: The Pulse protocol allows users to tokenize their ‘intent’ to procure a service that potential sellers can bid on, aiming to become the defacto protocol for service customer acquisition and a simpler way for users to connect directly with service providers. In this decentralized network, relayers and market makers help organize ‘intent’ and any dApp or current publisher can plug directly into the Pulse infrastructure to participate, contribute, and earn tokens. 

Quidli: Quidli is a France based protocol building the technological infrastructure that makes equity based employee compensation possible – with a particular focus on the startup space . Currently a centralized protocol, integrating an Ethereum-based solution will allow for the tokenization of equity – making equity based compensation programs programmable and tradeable.

Stealth Project: A member of our cohort still in stealth mode is a project re-imagining databases by building a P2P network with an open participation model aiming to be a decentralized version of an SQL database, providing a fundamental data storage building block enterprises and future dApps.

TapTrust (Open source): SF based, TapTrust is building a a self sovereign wallet that utilizes a standard username and password login and allows users easy set-up without ever needing to back up a seed phrase. In addition to their wallet offering, TapTrust is incorporating a commercial feature called TrustFund that provides loss protection for smart contract security exploits. The loss protection offered with TrustFund along with the ease of setup for the TapTrust wallet should make it easy for people to get started with using dApps without the major risk factor of losing their crypto.

WalletConnect (Open Source Grant): WalletConnect is a simple solution that bridges communication between browser-based dApps and mobile wallets using a QR code scan to establish the initial connection. It is an open protocol and does not require a dApp user to install a browser extension. The protocol is agnostic to specific mobile wallets a user may want to use and will enable dApp developers to integrate with multiple wallets and reach users through a single implementation.

Source: Tech Crunch

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Jina Choi, the longtime head of the SEC’s San Francisco unit, declined to confirm that her agency is investigating Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his now infamous tweet about securing funding for a take-private maneuver.

Choi did pull back the curtain substantially with regard to how the agency — which has never worked harder as it relates to private company investigations — operates.

The uptick in activity is no surprise. As companies linger as private entities for longer periods of time — often raising hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars along the way — the SEC has found itself spending more time understanding who the players are, as well as watching them more closely. In fact, while Cho’s 130-person unit covers much more than the Bay Area — its reach extends to Portland, Seattle, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska  — it could easily pour all of its resources into Silicon Valley and San Francisco because it’s so “incredibly busy.”

One of its most famous cases to date has centered on Theranos, the blood-testing company that is right now dissolving but was charged with massive civil fraud by the SEC back in March. It was a case that the SEC spent nearly two years building, and when we talked with Choi about what took so long, she explained how resource intensive the process really is.

She also talked about how much of the agency’s tips come through media accounts (the WSJ famously blew the covers off what had gone so wrong at Theranos) versus other means, including the SEC’s whistleblower program.

And we talked about how the SEC determines settlements in those frequent cases where it settles with a party it has charged with fraud. Recently, for example, the SEC settled with Bay Area investor Mike Rothenberg, who it accused of misappropriating millions of dollars of investor capital. Rothenberg didn’t admit to wrongdoing, but he did agree to be banned from the investment advisory and brokerage business for five years — a move that some industry observers thought didn’t go far enough, while others viewed as onerous.

As it happens, barring people from the industries in which operate is about as extreme a punishment as the SEC can deliver, she explained. “We’re a civil law enforcement agency, so that means that we’re we don’t have the power to take away people’s liberties . . . We can’t put people in jail . . . but one of our most impactful remedies is to bar people from [their] profession” when such a penalty is deemed appropriate.

In fact, she continued, “a lot of times [the target of the SEC’s investigations will say] ‘I can pay a bigger penalty,’ ‘I’ll pay you more money; just don’t ban me from this industry.’ And I think that that’s where we have a tough negotiation, because I think that’s where we can have our greatest impact.”

If you’re interested in how the SEC operates, as well as its evolving stance on ICOs and main street investors accessing private companies, you can learn a lot more by watching here.

Source: Tech Crunch

A decade from now, ride-hailing will be less than 50% of Uber’s business, in terms of transactions, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Thursday at Disrupt SF.

The on-stage prediction is in line with recent moves by Uber and its CEO to be part of, and make money from, all the different ways people might move within an urban environment. Since Khosrowshahi’s one year as CEO, Uber has made a multimillion-dollar acquisition of JUMP bikes, launched UberRENT, announced plans to launch a dockless electric scooter service and launched a new modalities organization created to figure out out what this multi-modal future might look like for Uber.

Ride-hailing, the company’s first and primary revenue driver, and its delivery app UberEATS will both be enormous in the future, Khosrowshahi said. But the long-term vision, and one that is already in motion, is to move away from travel that relies on passenger cars.

“We want to be the Amazon of transportation,” Khosrowshahi said. “And hopefully, 10 years from now no one in the audience is going to own a car.”

Dockless scooters and bikes—and someday even flying taxis—are central to that plan.

“I’m actually very, very bullish on personal individual electric vehicles,”Khosrowshahi said. “We’ve got to deconstruct that car and that’s a big part of the mission going forward.”

Source: Tech Crunch

In an ecosystem enthralled with private capital and delayed public debuts, Bill Gurley has been something of a maverick. The former dot-com equity analyst and long-time partner at Benchmark has pushed hard for companies to go public and “grow up,” including at his portfolio company Uber, where he was formerly a board member.

Earlier this year, he noted that “it’s cool to go public again,” and now we are starting to see the fruits of Benchmark’s labors. Over the past 24 hours, two companies – Elastic and Upwork – have submitted their S-1 registration statements to the SEC, and Benchmark is the largest shareholder in both. That follows last year’s IPO for Stitch Fix, where Gurley was the lead investor.

The story of these two public aspirants are certainly divergent. Upwork is the rebranded merger of two companies, Elance and oDesk, which merged in 2013. Benchmark got involved through oDesk, leading a Series B round of investment in the company in 2006, with founding partner Kevin Harvey joining the board. Considering oDesk was founded in 2003, and Elance in 1999, it has certainly been a circuitous route to the public markets for the company.

Elastic, on the other hand, is a relatively rare case of a company going public quite early in its evolution. The startup was founded just a few years ago in 2012 according to Crunchbase, and Benchmark’s Peter Fenton led a $10m series A into the company that same year. Only six years later, the company is heading to the public markets, with a projected unicorn valuation.

While Upwork has certainly been a journey, it’s Elastic that best exemplifies the startup trajectory that I think Gurley has been advocating for the past few years. Given its rapid revenue growth and key ownership of the search engine market, it is doubtful the company would have struggled to raise additional capital from the private markets. Indeed, six years from founding to IPO is more reminiscent of the 1990s, when the IPO was a key early milestone in the development of a startup since private investment was just not available.

The other interesting dynamic here is around capital efficiency. Elastic raised just $162 million in venture capital according to Crunchbase, a surprisingly low number considering its revenues, growth, and valuation. Enterprise startups have been raising more capital over time as sales and marketing costs have soared and the standards required to publicly debut have become more exacting. That capital efficiency is mirrored on the consumer side by Stitch Fix, which had raised just $42 million in venture capital before its IPO.

These are early data points, but it is clear that Gurley’s and Benchmark’s words around capital efficiency and public markets are influencing their advice to their startup boards and leading to very different actions from these founders. It’s a contrast to companies like Palantir and SpaceX, which have seemed to have committed to staying private for as long as possible.

Tiger Global and other crossover hedge funds are also pushing IPOs

Benchmark is not the only company that has had some good S-1 news this week. The lead investor in the other two prominent tech IPOs so far this season — Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey — is Tiger Global, the quiet but prolific crossover hedge fund. The fund owns 21.3% of Eventbrite and 29.3% of SurveyMonkey.

The rise of these crossover funds is driving renewed interest in early public liquidity. Unlike traditional venture firms, which typically have a decade investment horizon (plus frequent multi-year extensions), these hedge funds face greater pressure to get returns on a compressed timeline.

That’s indicative here with Tiger Global. It’s investments in Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey took place in 2013, so it is just roughly five years from investment to IPO. Certainly, the hedge fund targets growth-stage opportunities which have shorter liquidity times in general, yet, the speed of liquidity is still notable even for growth investors.

For an ecosystem that has in many ways avoided the public markets, these changing norms will not just increase the pressure to go public, but may also present challenges for boards where discordant voices may be simultaneously pushing the exec team to stay private or go public. It’s a dynamic that founders are going to have to increasingly think through as they select investors through each of their venture rounds, in order to ensure that every investor is on the same page regarding the timeline for the public markets.

Source: Tech Crunch

As a speaker I often find myself mumbling into a microphone with little thought about the sound system powering it. While most PAs are massive affairs requiring a soundboard operator and lots of wiring, I’ve also had to hoot into portable PAs, a practice I rarely relish. But who was I to judge the quality of a portable PA system? When JBL asked me to review their new $1,299 JBL Eon One Pro I decided to send it to a real professional, my childhood friend Rick Barr, who helped me tag-team on the review.

The most important reason that Rick liked the Eon One Pro was the built-in battery. Everything else, he said, was icing on the cake.

Rick is a professional musician, performing shows every weekend, and some weeknights, in a wide variety of venues. His go-to PA is the Bose L1 Model II with the B2 bass unit. It’s a beast in terms of sound quality and immersion, doesn’t take up much floor space, and really soars when used in outdoor environments.

We immediately recognized that a smaller, more portable unit could be extremely useful. He had just recently performed at a new outdoor event that wasn’t well-equipped with power and he had to come up with a makeshift solution. It worked, but the idea of being able to “cut the cord” to avoid all that was certainly appealing.

JBL says you can get up to six hours of battery life from the extended-life lithium-ion. In our tests, he was able to make it through three-hour shows without a problem. Charging it is as simple as plugging in the AC cord to the back. So, in short, we were pleased with the battery performance. Still, going cordless is all well and good, but it’s really the sound that matters. So, let’s take a look at what this unit can do.

The Eon One Pro weighs 37.5 pounds, and it’s all very compact. The 8” subwoofer is right up front, and you fit the 118 dB speaker array directly on top. This, and the two optional spacers, fit nicely in the back of the unit. The overall design of the Eon Pro really is nice. The spacers essentially increase the range of the speaker, so their usefulness is really dependent on your environment.

The 7-channel mixer features 2 Hi-Z inputs, 4 combo ¼” / XLR inputs, a 3.5mm jack, and an RCA input. Each of the 4 combo inputs has controls for volume, treble, bass, and reverb. This allows for very basic mixing, but if you prefer to have more options, it is easy enough to plug in an external mixer and run through that. In our tests, we used the on-board controls.

You can also stream from a mobile device via Bluetooth, or connect directly via USB. Rick connected via his cell phone using Bluetooth and found the overall sound to be extremely good. There is also phantom power for condenser mics and an XLR Pass Thru to other systems, as well as RCA output jacks for a monitor.

So, on to the show. The first venue Rick played in was your typical bar, with a medium-sized square room, wood floors, and a decent crowd. He was able to get set up in just 10 minutes, compared to 20 for my Bose. It took some extra time to adjust levels and once he started playing, just a little more tinkering got him where he needed to be. He did notice that he had to turn the volume up for his Sennheiser 935 mic quite a bit in order to match the guitar level, which leads to an interesting omission: lack of level meters. There are none, so you need to rely solely on your ears to get the right mix.

The speaker did a fine job of filling the room, while the subwoofer provided some nice depth to the overall sound. Rick had some friends out who sat just six feet in front of the speaker who said they weren’t overwhelmed by the volume and others will able to hear the music very clearly outside of the room.

The speaker covers 100 x 50 degrees, and while testing this at his shows, Rick stood slightly behind and to the side. This worked well enough, though in a noisy environment, having a monitor speaker might be helpful. He could hear the music pretty well, but it seems you’d want to be at least 90 degrees on either side, if not a little forward.

The second show we took the Eon One out to was another small bar, fairly narrow but long. It was completely different from the other bar in terms of dimensions, and a really good test of how far the speaker could project. Again, folks sitting up front were just fine with the volume, while people in the back, some 50-60 feet away, could hear it as well (and reported that it sounded very nice).

“I’d played at this venue before but this time, the electrical outlet wasn’t working. The girl at the bar didn’t know how to turn it on. This is something that rarely happens, but if I’d had my Bose or any other kind of amp, I would have been hosed. I hadn’t planned on testing the battery again but in this instance, it saved me,” Rick said.

Given that most offices purchase something like this at some point for broadcasting at meetings or meetups it makes sense to get something that works well for a gigging musician. Rick’s requirements – that this thing be reliable and sound great – is in line with the average desk jockey’s and the built in battery can save the day when it comes to situations where power is unavailable.

Source: Tech Crunch

Uber has no plans to sell its self-driving car research unit “at this time,” according to the company’s chief executive.

Dara Khosrowshahi said that the ride-hailing giant will “absolutely” keep the research unit, known as the Advanced Technologies Group, including when the company files its initial public offering, which Khosrowshahi said is on track for 2019.

“Ultimately, it is a big asset that we are building and we can monetize that in whatever way we want to,” he told Reuters, speaking at an event in New York.

He added that the company is also open to partnering with other companies building self-driving car technology, including Toyota, which said last month that it would invest $500 million in developing self-driving technologies with the company.

Earlier Wednesday, Uber announced new safety and security features, including “Ride Check,” which activates if the rider’s phone senses a crash.

Khosrowshahi will be speaking at Disrupt SF on Thursday.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ashton Kutcher’s VC firm, Sound Ventures, believes there’s opportunity for investment outside of Silicon Valley. Specifically, the firm pegs Denver, Austin and Miami as the most promising U.S. markets for tech startups and investing, outside of the large markets like Silicon Valley and New York, of course.

According to Sound Ventures partner Effie Epstein, speaking on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 this morning, Boston is another great market for startups.

She also noted that the firm has a couple of companies coming out of Miami now, and credited Seattle as being a possible player.

“Seattle has always been in the background. I’m kind of surprised that we haven’t seen more out of Seattle,” said Epstein.

However, when asked about the most promising upcoming markets, Seattle wasn’t on the list.

“I would say Denver, Austin, and, shockingly Miami, have been climbing up the ranks,” she said.

The appeal of these markets is that they’re places where people don’t just want to work, they also want to live.

“One of the one of the biggest things relative to those companies being in different markets was they could attract talent at similar to lower prices because the cost of living was lower,” Epstein said, during the Disrupt interview. “So, suddenly people could have better lives working at companies – working on hard problems to solve to make the world a better place – but actually have a life while they were doing that.”

The partners also touched on the possibilities in L.A.

More recently, L.A. startups have been able to actually retain their talent, they said.

Source: Tech Crunch

Elastic, the provider of subscription-based data search software used by Dell, Netflix, The New York Times and others, has unveiled its IPO filing after confidentially submitting paperwork to the SEC in June. The company will be the latest in a line of enterprise SaaS businesses to hit the public markets in 2018.

Headquartered in Mountain View, Elastic plans to raise $100 million in its NYSE listing, though that’s likely a placeholder amount. The timing of the filing suggests the company will transition to the public markets this fall; we’ve reached out to the company for more details. 

Elastic will trade under the symbol ESTC.

The business is known for its core product, an open-source search tool called ElasticSearch. It also offers a range of analytics and visualization tools meant to help businesses organize large data sets, competing directly with companies like Splunk and even Amazon — a name it mentions 14 times in the filing.

“Amazon offers some of our open source features as part of its Amazon Web Services offering. As such, Amazon competes with us for potential customers, and while Amazon cannot provide our proprietary software, the pricing of Amazon’s offerings may limit our ability to adjust,” the company wrote in the filing, which also lists Endeca, FAST, Autonomy and several others as key competitors.

This is our first look at Elastic’s financials. The company brought in $159.9 million in revenue in the 12 months ended July 30, 2018, up roughly 100 percent from $88.1 million the year prior. Losses are growing at about the same rate. Elastic reported a net loss of $18.5 million in the second quarter of 2018. That’s an increase from $9.9 million in the same period in 2017.

Founded in 2012, the company has raised about $100 million in venture capital funding, garnering $700 million the last time it raised VC, which was all the way back in 2014. Its investors include Benchmark, NEA and Future Fund, which each retain a 17.8 percent, 10.2 percent and 8.2 percent pre-IPO stake, respectively.

A flurry of business software companies have opted to go public this year. Domo, a business analytics company based in Utah, went public in June raising $193 million in the process. On top of that, subscription biller Zuora had a positive debut in April in what was a “clear sign post on the road to SaaS maturation,” according to TechCrunch’s Ron Miller. DocuSign and Smartsheet are also recent examples of both high-profile and successful SaaS IPOs.

Source: Tech Crunch

Rugged smartphones, the kind of devices that business can give to their employees who work in harsh environments, are a bit of a specialty market. Few consumers, after all, choose their smartphones based on how well they survive six-foot drops. But there is definitely a market there, and IDC currently expects that the market for Android -based rugged devices will grow at 23 percent annually over the next five years.

It’s maybe no surprise that Google is now expanding its Android Enterprise Recommended program to include rugged devices, too. Chances are you’ve never heard of many of the manufacturers in this first batch (or thought of them as smartphone manufacturers): Zebra, Honeywell, Sonim, Point Mobile, Datalogic. Panasonic, which has a long history of building rugged devices, will also soon become part of this program.

The minimum requirements for these devices are pretty straightforward: they have to support Android 7+, offer security updates within 90 days of release from Google and, because they are rugged devices, after all, be certified for ingress protection and rated for drop testing. They’ll also have to support at least one more major OS release.

“Today’s launch continues our commitment to improving the enterprise experience for customers,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “We hope these devices will serve existing use cases and also enable companies to pursue new mobility use cases to help them realize their goals.“

Source: Tech Crunch