Tag: Startups

We can’t wait to dig into the competitive, high-stakes world of enterprise software at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We’re channeling the excitement into creating extra ROI for you. How’s that work? Read on.

It starts with the $100 you’ll save when you buy your early-bird ticket. Here comes the extra part. For every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’ll register you for a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019. Who doesn’t like free?

We expect more than 1,000 attendees — including some of the top minds, makers and investors in enterprise software — for a day-long intensive event focused on the promises and challenges of this massive $500 billion market. You can expect onstage interviews, exhibiting startups, breakout sessions, receptions and more. TechCrunch editors Frederic Lardinois, Ron Miller and Connie Loizos will interview founders from both established and emerging companies about crucial topics, like intelligent marketing automation, AI and the inevitability of the cloud.

Case in point. You can’t talk about enterprise software or its shift to the cloud without talking about the Kubernetes container management system. That’s why we’re thrilled to have the opportunity to sit down with Aparna Sinha, Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes; Tim Hockin, who currently works on Kubernetes and the Google Container Engine; Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie; and Microsoft’s Brendan Burns — the lead engineer for Kubernetes during his time at Google.

These four heavy hitters will discuss the history of Kubernetes, why Google went open source with it and the five-year-old project’s rapid growth. It promises to be a fascinating look at the past, present and future of containers in the enterprise.

That’s just one presentation in a jam-packed day dedicated to all things enterprise. Check out the speakers we have on tap so far. And by all means, if there’s someone you want to hear on the stage, send us your speaker submissions.

TC Sessions Enterprise 2019 takes place September 5. Early-bird tickets cost $249, and student tickets sell for $75. Buy 4+ tickets to get the group rate and save another 20%. And remember, you’ll receive a free Expo-only pass to Disrupt SF 2019 with every TC Sessions: Enterprise ticket.

Get your early-bird tickets now, and we’ll see you in September!

Interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Enterprise? Fill out this form and a member of our sales team will contact you.

Source: Tech Crunch

Refraction, a new autonomous delivery robot company that came out of stealth Wednesday at TC Sessions: Mobility, sees opportunity where most AV startups are avoiding: regions with the worst weather.

The company, founded by University of Michigan professors Matthew Johnson-Roberson and Ram Vasudevan, calls its REV-1 delivery robot the “Goldilocks of autonomous vehicles.”

The pair have a long history with autonomous vehicles. Johnson-Roberson got his start by participating in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and stayed in academia researching and then teaching robotics. Vasudevan’s career had a stint at Ford working on control algorithms for autonomous operations on snow and ice. Both work together at University of Michigan’s Robotics Program.

The REV-1 is lightweight and low cost — there are no expensive lidar sensors on the vehicle — it operates in a bike lane and is designed to travel in rain or snow, Johnson-Roberson, cofounder and CEO of Refraction told TechCrunch.

The robot, which debuted on stage at the California Theater in San Jose during the event, is about the size of an electric bicycle. The REV-1 weighs about 100 pounds and stands about 5 feet tall and is 4.5 feet long. Inside the robot is 16 cubic feet of space, enough room to fit four or five grocery bags.

It’s not particularly fast — top speed is 15 miles per hour. But since it’s designed for a bike lane, it doesn’t need to be. That slower speed and lightweight design allows the vehicle to have a short stopping distance of about five feet.

Refraction has backing from eLab Ventures and Trucks Venture Capital.

Consumers have an appetite and an expectation for on-demand goods that are delivered quickly. But companies are struggling to find consistent, reliable and economical ways to address that need, said Bob Stefanski, managing director of eLab Ventures.

Stefanksi believes Refraction’s sturdy, smaller-sized delivery robots will allow for faster technology development and will be able to cover a larger service area than competitors operating on the sidewalk.

“Their vehicles are also light-weight enough to deploy more safely than a self-driving car or large robot,” Stefanski noted. “The market is huge, especially in densely populated areas.”

The REV-1 uses a system of 12 cameras as its primary sensor system, along with radar and ultrasound sensors for additional safety.

“It doesn’t make sense economically speaking to use a $10,000 lidar to delivery $10 of food,” Johnson-Roberson said. By skipping the more expensive lidar sensor, they’re able to keep the total cost of the vehicle to $5,000.

The company’s first test application is with local restaurant partners. The company hopes to lock in bigger national partnerships in the next six months. But don’t expect those to be in the southwest or California, where so many other autonomous vehicle companies are testing.

“Other companies are not trying to run in the winter here,” Johnson-Roberson said. “It’s a different problem than the one that others are trying to solve, so we hope that gives us some space to breathe and some chance to carve out some opportunity.”

Source: Tech Crunch

After an hour of sweet freedom, the world has been returned to the grasp of Twitter.

At about 2:50 pm ET, the desktop and mobile site were down, displaying a “Something is technically wrong” error. The app was also not working. The site returned at about 3:45 pm ET, but took a few minutes to regain full functionality.

Twitter’s status page said little more than it was an “active incident.” A spokesperson for Twitter confirmed the outage but referred us to the status page.

After the site returned, Twitter said it was because of an “internal configuration change,” which it has since rolled back.

It’s not the first time Twitter’s had a hiccup in the past few weeks. The social media giant was hit by a direct message outage earlier this month. In fact, between June and July, most of the major internet companies had some form of outage, knocking themselves or other sites offline in the process.

Please tweet about how it was down and how it’s hard to tweet about how Twitter’s down when it is itself down, and the irony therein.

We’ll patiently wait to hear from Twitter about the cause of the outage.

Devin Coldewey contributed.

Source: Tech Crunch

In 2017 — for the first time in over a decade — a computer worm ran rampage across the internet, threatening to disrupt businesses, industries, governments and national infrastructure across several continents.

The WannaCry ransomware attack became the biggest threat to the internet since the Mydoom worm in 2004. On May 12, 2017, the worm infected millions of computers, encrypting their files and holding them hostage to a bitcoin payment.

Train stations, government departments, and Fortune 500 companies were hit by the surprise attack. The U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS) was one of the biggest organizations hit, forcing doctors to turn patients away and emergency rooms to close.

Earlier this week we reported a deep-dive story into the 2017 cyberattack that’s never been told before.

British security researchers — Marcus Hutchins and Jamie Hankins — registered a domain name found in WannaCry’s code in order to track the infection. It took them three hours to realize they had inadvertently stopped the attack dead in its tracks. That domain became the now-infamous “kill switch” that instantly stopped the spread of the ransomware.

As long as the kill switch remains online, no computer infected with WannaCry would have its files encrypted.

But the attack was far from over.

In the days following, the researchers were attacked from an angry botnet operator pummeling the domain with junk traffic to try to knock it offline and two of their servers were seized by police in France thinking they were contributing to the spread of the ransomware.

Worse, their exhaustion and lack of sleep threatened to derail the operation. The kill switch was later moved to Cloudflare, which has the technical and infrastructure support to keep it alive.

Hankins described it as the “most stressful thing” he’s ever experienced. “The last thing you need is the idea of the entire NHS on fire,” he told TechCrunch.

Although the kill switch is in good hands, the internet is just one domain failure away from another massive WannaCry outbreak. Just last month two Cloudflare failures threatened to bring the kill switch domain offline. Thankfully, it stayed up without a hitch.

CISOs and CSOs take note: here’s what you need to know.

Source: Tech Crunch

After generally being the butt of the public market’s jokes since its IPO, Snap is having a killer 2019, with its stock price nearly tripling in value. The successes are perhaps giving the company a moment to pause and think more about generating future value.

Part of that equation is certainly the company’s Yellow accelerator that aims to invest in pre-seed startups that bring mobile users to shared experiences.

We covered Yellow’s inaugural batch back in September, now we’ve got the full rundown on Snap’s second class of bets.

Yellow’s latest accelerator class definitely showcases some similarities to their inaugural group, but you’ll notice more online-to-offline startups aiming to bring users into real-world scenarios and communities like a concert subscription service and workout service reviews. This contrasts a bit to the first class which seemed a bit more focused on camera-based startups that centered around selfies, AR and photos.

From an organizational standpoint, things haven’t shifted too much inside Yellow. The broader company has had a standout 2019, building back a healthy chunk of the market cap value it has lost since debuting publicly. One wonders whether this has enabled the company’s accelerator group to push its investment ambitions beyond Snap’s mobile app focus.

Mike Su, Snap’s director of Yellow, tells me that there haven’t been any top-down directives to shift investment strategies for the accelerator and that the prevalence of offline startups in the class is just more representative of the applicants.

“[The class] continues to be an extension of our values and our thesis,” Su tells me. “Snap has always been about people making connections inside and outside the app.”

Here is Yellow’s summer 2019 class of startups.

Active Spaces

ClassPass might toss you in a random workout and say good luck, but Active Spaces is looking to give you more info when searching for your exercising fix. The New York startup is scouring its way through the NYC reviewing gyms and studios one-at-a-time. It’s less about star ratings than it is about giving you a bird’s eye view of what’s there and what’s missing. It’s all really well-done and gives you a ton of info about what you’re in for, and you can book direct from the app.

Cash Live

HQ Trivia might be falling on hard times but Cash Live is looking to take the daily mobile quiz show in a new direction by leaning on the laurels of gaming, some good ole fashioned casino titles. The Vancouver startup is planning to bring a live host to scheduled 15-minute poker, blackjack and bingo tournaments.

Disko

Finding local concerts sucks and it’s a process that hasn’t found its startup solution yet. Disko is building a concert subscription service that helps users discover new events in their city with a flat rate $25 per month subscription service which will let users attend up to four concerts per month. The LA startup is starting off in its hometown but has ambitions to expand elsewhere soon.

Dose of Society

We’re missing a lot of diversity in the voices and perspectives we see in the media we enjoy. Dose of Society is a London media startup looking to share “real stories from real people.” The group’s videos have had more than 18 million views since launching at the end of 2017.

Frame

Snap still has vertical video startups firmly in its purview. Frame is a weekly newsmagazine built for mobile that’s trying to rethink how we get news delivered to us. The NY startup is looking beyond push notifications and is also supporting text updates and calendar updates so that its subscribers can make time to absorb its narrative vertical video  journalism.

Loco Adventures

Pokémon GO brought people into physical spaces with its location-based gaming, but other startups are seeing the potential to even further localize AR experiences. Berlin-based Loco Adventures is building games that guide you through local areas with a chat message narrative style.

Muze

Muze sees the endless wave of comments on the web and wants to make things a bit noisier, the New York team is working on a way to bring audio commentary “to the always-on stream of internet video” and share it across the web.

Quirktastic, Inc.

The startup has the ambitious goal of building a community for “geeks, gamers and nerds” that’s less toxic to minority groups. The Durham, NC company wants to connect these people with each other and the events they want to check out. Quirktastic says they have 15,000 users since they launched in beta in March.

SNKRHUD

The sneaker business is a hefty one, but SNKRHUD is betting that it still isn’t as big as it could be. It’s trying to focus on the dormant sneaker heads who are liking shoes on Instagram and searching through online stores but haven’t delved further into communities. The Brooklyn team wants to be the glue between existing platforms.

Stop, Breathe & Think

There’s a lot in the world to get stressed and anxious about, Stop, Breathe & Think is aiming to build a digital wellness platform to help people feel better. The app lets people check-in with how they’re feeling and then the app is able to recommend short activities like meditation, breathing, yoga, acupressure, guided journaling, and more.

Source: Tech Crunch

The future of car ownership: Cars-as-a-service

It’s Mobility Day at TechCrunch, and we’re hosting our Sessions event today in beautiful San Jose. That’s why we have a couple of related pieces on mobility at Extra Crunch.

First, our automotive editor Matt Burns is back with part two of his market map and analysis of the changing nature of how consumers are buying cars these days. Part one looked at how startups like Carvana, Shift, Vroom, and others are trying to disrupt the car dealership’s monopoly on auto sales in the United States.

Now, Burns takes a look at how startups like Fair and premium automakers like Mercedes are disrupting the very notion of owning a car in the first place. Rather than buying a car or leasing one, users with these new services are asked to subscribe to their cars, giving them the flexibility to get a car when they need it and to get rid of it when they don’t. Fair has raised $1.5 billion in venture capital, so clearly the space has caught the eye of investors.

“In simple terms,” co-founder and then CEO [of Fair] Scott Painter, told TechCrunch following its recent raise, “for every dollar in equity we unlock $10 in debt, and we borrow that cash to buy cars.”

Fair works much like a traditional lease with more options. Users can drive the vehicles as long as they’re paying for them and can switch to a different one whenever. This is different from a traditional lease where the buyer is often locked into the vehicle for two to four years. The model makes Fair an excellent option for Uber and Lyft drivers, and in the last year, Uber sold fair its $400 million leasing business to accelerate this offering.

Meituan, Alibaba, and the new landscape of ride-hailing in China

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, our China tech reporter Rita Liao takes a deeper look at the quickly changing tides of the ride-hailing industry in China. It’s a fight between intermediation, disintermediation, and who ultimately owns the ride-hailing consumer. As transit in China and the rest of the world increasingly becomes multi-modal, who owns the gateway to figuring out the best method and paying for it is increasingly in the driver’s seat:

Source: Tech Crunch

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. AT&T’s new streaming service HBO Max arrives in 2020, will be the exclusive home of ‘Friends’

Hooray, we don’t have to call it the Untitled WarnerMedia streaming service anymore! Instead, it’s going to be named HBO Max, and it will launch next spring with more than 10,000 hours of content available to subscribers.

The service won’t be limited to HBO content — hence the availability of “Friends” — but the naming indicates how important HBO as a TV brand is to consumers and to parent company AT&T.

2. Visa funds $40M for no-password crypto vault Anchorage

Visa and Andreessen Horowitz are betting even bigger on cryptocurrency, funding a big round for fellow Facebook Libra Association member Anchorage’s omnimetric blockchain security system.

3. Nintendo Switch Lite’s trade-off of whimsy for practicality is a good one

Nintendo revealed a new Switch Lite version of its current-generation console today, which attaches the controllers permanently, shrinks the hardware a bit and adds a touch more battery life. It also takes away the “Switch” part of the equation, because you can only use it handheld, instead of attached to a TV or as a unique tabletop gaming experience.

4. Opera founded startup OPay raises $50M for mobile finance in Nigeria

OPay’s raise tracks greater influence in African tech from China.

5. Flaws in hospital anesthesia and respiratory devices allow remote tampering

Security researchers have found a vulnerability in a networking protocol used in popular hospital anesthesia and respiratory machines, which they say if exploited could be used to maliciously tamper with the devices.

6. Snapchat announces new shows from Serena Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others

The shows will begin airing this month. They’re all exclusive to Snapchat, and many of them come from creators who have a substantial following on other platforms

7. Understanding mental health in Silicon Valley, with professional coach and former investor Jerry Colonna

In a conversation with Connie Loizos, Colonna discusses how previously developed standards of success can impact your ability to lead and find fulfillment at work. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Source: Tech Crunch

Early-stage startup founders, you’re searching for opportunities to take your company to greater heights, amirite? Then allow me to direct your attention to Disrupt San Francisco 2019, TechCrunch’s flagship event that takes place October 2-4. More specifically to Startup Alley, the exhibition floor where opportunity thrives.

Grab that opportunity by the scruff and buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. There’s simply no better way to place your early-stage startup in front of influential change agents. Yes, we’re biased, but that doesn’t make us wrong. Here are just three of the many reasons why you should exhibit in Startup Alley.

Media exposure

Along with 10,000+ attendees, Disrupt SF draws more than 400 media outlets. And all those journalists spend time prowling Startup Alley hunting for stories about fascinating founders, emerging tech trends or maybe even a future unicorn. Scoring media coverage can work wonders for your bottom line — as Luke Heron, CEO of TestCard, learned when he exhibited in Startup Alley:

We got a fantastic writeup in Engadget, which was really valuable. Cash at the beginning of the start-up journey is difficult to come by, and an article from a credible organization can help push things in the right direction.

Last year, TestCard closed a $1.7 million funding round.

Investor attention

Journalists aren’t the only influencers perusing the tech and talent on display in Startup Alley. Investors are just as eager to find up-and-coming prospects to add to their portfolios. It’s the perfect place to start conversations and develop relationships. Here’s what David Hall, co-founder of Park & Diamond, had to say about his experience:

Exhibiting in Startup Alley was a game-changer. The chance to have discussions and potentially form relationships with investors was invaluable. It completely changed our trajectory and made it easier to raise funds and jump to the next stage.

Last year, Park & Diamond closed its first round of funding, allowing the company to relocate to New York and make its first key hires.

Wild Card shot at Startup Battlefield

Exhibit in Startup Alley for a chance to win a Wild Card entry to the Startup Battlefield pitch competition. TechCrunch editors will select two standout startups as Wild Card teams. Both teams will compete head-to-head in Startup Battlefield for $100,000 equity-free cash, the Disrupt Cup and even more glorious investor and media attention.

There you have it. Three terrific reasons to buy a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and strut your stuff at Disrupt San Francisco 2019.

Pro Tip: You have until July 19 to apply for our TC Top Picks program. If you make the cut, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package and sweet VIP perks.

Is your company interested in sponsoring at Disrupt SF 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Source: Tech Crunch