Mar
12

Deep North raises $25.7M for AI that uses CCTV to build retail analytics

Getting paid for providing content online isn’t simple, and as the ad-based economy continues to collapse, pretty much everyone is looking for alternatives. One problem: While the web is great at moving images and audio and files around, it has a real problem with money. Coil, Mozilla and Creative Commons hope to change that with a native web payments standard and $100 million to get it off the ground.

“Web monetization” is the name of the game here, not just generally but also the specific new web protocol being proposed. It’s meant to be an open, interoperable standard that will let anyone send money to anyone else on the web.

That doesn’t mean it sprang fully formed out of nowhere, though. It’s based on a protocol called Interledger pursued by former Ripple CTO Stefan Thomas in his new company Coil.

“We were basically applying the concept of internet protocol to payments — routing little packets of money,” Thomas told TechCrunch, though he was quick to add that it’s not blockchain-powered. Those systems, he said, are useful in their place, but end up bogged down in upkeep and administration. And services like Flattr are great, he said, but limited by the fact that they’re essentially run by a single company.

Interledger, he explained, is a protocol for securely and universally connecting existing payment systems in a totally agnostic way. “It supports any underlying payment structure, bitcoin or a bank ledger or whatever, and any connection you use, satellite or Wi-Fi, it doesn’t care. We were working on it for a long time, since like 2015, and last year were like, well, how do we get this out into the real world?”

The answer was a new company, for one thing, but also partnering with open web advocates at Mozilla and Creative Commons on Grant for the Web, a $100 million fund to disburse with their input. Both have a seat at the table in selecting grant recipients, and the latter is a recipient itself.

“This is an opportunity for CC to experiment with optional micropayments in CC Search,” said Creative Commons interim CEO Cable Green. “If users want to provide micropayments to authors of openly licensed images, to show gratitude, we’re interested in exploring these options with our global community.”

“An open-source micropayment protocol and ecosystem could be good for creators and users,” he continued. “Building a web that doesn’t rely on data acquisition and advertising is a good thing.”

The $100 million fund is all Coil money, which makes sense, as Coil was founded to promote and develop the Interledger and Web Monetization protocols. Huge funding pushes don’t seem like the ordinary way to establish new web standards, but Thomas explained that payments are a unique case.

“The underlying business model for the web is kind of broken,” he said. And that’s partly by design: Enormous companies with vested interests in existing payment and monetization structures are always working to maintain the status quo or shift it in a favorable direction — companies like Google that rely on advertising, or Visa and others that power traditional payment methods.

“From our perspective, what the standard is ultimately competing with is proprietary platforms with billions in funding,” Thomas said.

The $100 million fund will be spread out over five years or so, and will be awarded both to companies and people that use or plan to use the Web Monetization standard in an interesting way, and to content creators who are poorly served by existing monetization methods.

Long-tail content that’s nevertheless important, like investigative journalism or documentaries from and by marginalized communities, is one of the targets for the fund. Grants could come in the form of direct funding, or matching subscribers’ contributions. There’s no quid pro quo, Thomas said, except for a hard minimum of half the content being released under an open license like Creative Commons — which that organization is likely excited about.

Right now a subscription-based browser extension that allows easy payments to sites that have implemented the standard is the only way to get in the door. Admittedly that’s not a very sexy onboarding experience. But part of the fund is intended to juice the development and adoption of the standard much more widely.

It’s a way — though an expensive one, sure — to show that an alternative model exists to the traditional ad-based or subscription-based methods of supporting content.

You can sign up now to be notified when they start accepting grant applications at grantfortheweb.org.

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Mar
11

Alma is a Klarna-like payment startup that lets you buy now and pay later

Even before the 2016 election, political polarization was increasing, with Americans so entrenched in the news sources they rely on that the Pew Research Center said “liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds.” Now SmartNews, the news aggregation app that recently hit unicorn funding status, wants to give users a way to step out of their bubbles with a feature called News From All Sides.

News From All Sides is an option located under the politics tab in SmartNews’ app. A slider at the bottom allows users to see articles about a specific news event sorted into five groups, ranging from most liberal to most conservative. Now available for new users in the United States, the feature will gradually roll out as the company fine-tunes it.

News From All Sides was created for readers who want to see other points of view, but might be overwhelmed by an online search, says Jeannie Yang, SmartNews’ senior vice president of product. It also aims to provide more transparency about news algorithms, which have been blamed for exacerbating political polarization.

Before developing the feature, the SmartNews team conducted research and focus groups in places including Minneapolis and cities in North Carolina to understand how people across the country consume political news online.

“We found that across the board, the last [presidential] election was not just a wake-up call about what news reporting is, but users also expressed that they are much, much more aware of algorithms running underneath what they see. They might not know how it works, but they know there is something else going on,” Yang says.

[gallery columns="4" ids="1881750,1881751,1881752,1881753"]

The political leanings of publications that appear in News From All Sides were categorized by SmartNews’ content team, which includes journalists who previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Fox News and other major news outlets. An AI-based algorithm decides which headlines appear in each category. As the feature goes through new iterations, Yang says SmartNews will make changes based on reader feedback. For example, future versions might look at the positions taken in specific articles and include more than five categories on the slider.

News From All Sides is an eye-opener along the lines of “Blue Feed, Red Feed,” an interactive feature (now archived) by The Wall Street Journal that demonstrated how much someone’s political leanings can influence what Facebook’s algorithms display on their News Feed.

Of course, there are many people who are content to be ensconced in their own news bubbles and may not be interested in News From All Sides, even with the upcoming presidential election. Features like it won’t fix political polarization, but for people who are curious about different points of view, even ones they strongly disagree with, News From All Sides gives them a simple way to explore more coverage.

“We definitely discussed that,” says Yang. “The feature is not initially targeted to everyone. It targets people who are more political news junkies, who are checking their phones for news multiple times a day and will actively seek out other sources, so they might go on Google News and go down a rabbit hole.”

“As more readers consider how they are going to vote, it will also help them with perspectives,” Yang adds. “It’s not something that will appeal to everyone broadly, but we hope that we will adjust a pain point for this core group and then iterate it to something more universal.”

SmartNews was founded in Japan, but the slider is currently only on its app for the U.S. because political polarization is a major issue there. Yang says the feature is one part of SmartNews’ goal to improve discovery in all news topics.

“Our mission is to break people out of filter bubbles and personalize discovery with the idea that recommendation algorithms can expand interests, instead of narrowing your interests,” she says. “We’re thinking of how to create more transparency and also expose readers to something they might not usually see, but present it in a fun way, like a serendipitous discovery.”

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Sep
16

Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Gautam Sivakumar, CEO of Medisas (Part 1) - Sramana Mitra

Hospital workflows are inefficient. Gautam discusses the evolution and the promise to address the issues. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Medisas....

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Original author: Sramana Mitra

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Nov
08

Alpaca nabs $6M for stocks API so anyone can build a Robinhood

Automated check-out systems in supermarkets, where cashiers are replaced by barcode-readers and touchscreen interfaces for taking payments, have become a commonplace fixture in many parts of the world. But today, a startup that’s building what many believe will be the next generation of such systems — computer-vision-powered platforms that monitor what you take from the shelves and automatically tally it up as you are on the move so that you can leave without checking out — has raised funding to continue developing its product and help it connect with grocery retailers that have seen the advances of Amazon Go and also want to get in on the AI action without getting involved with Amazon itself.

Trigo, a computer vision startup out of Tel Aviv that is building check-out-free grocery purchasing systems specifically targeted at large supermarkets, has picked up a Series A round of $22 million. The funding is being led by Red Dot Capital, with previous Vertex Ventures Israel and Hetz Ventures also participating. This round brings the total raised by Trigo to $29 million.

The company is not disclosing its valuation, but says that it has a number of deals in place already with grocery chains, including an unspecified European chain and Shufersal, the largest grocer in Israel.

Shufersal already has plans to implement Trigo’s solution in 280 stores in the next five years, which speaks to the company’s ambitions and traction to date, even at this early stage in its development: The company says that it’s already piloting its camera and sensor technology in stores that are 5,000 square feet, or twice the size of a typical Amazon Go store. It’s, however, still fairly small compared to the size of a large supermarket (35,000-45,000 square feet) or even smaller challenger markets like a Trader Joe’s or a Lidl (20,000 square feet).

As with Amazon Go, Trigo works by implementing a series of cameras throughout a store to monitor shoppers and record what they are placing into their baskets. This is not just about being able to identify items: it’s also a triangulation system to ensure that people are not charged twice for items, and that items are removed from the total if they are discarded before a person leaves the store.

And it’s not just to speed things up, either. It’s to make shopping great again.

“I don’t actually think people really want grocery e-commerce,” Ran Peled, VP of marketing, said. “They do that because the supermarket experience has become worse with the years. We are very much committed to helping brick and mortar stores return to the time of a few decades ago, when it was fun to go to the supermarket. What would happen if a store could have an entirely new OS that is based on computer vision?”

Unlike Amazon Go, Trigo is not tied to any specific company that might potentially compete with the retailers that it is targeting, and the product can be implemented to work with loyalty cards, or without them.

However, given that Amazon has built one of the world’s most valuable companies by being both a simultaneous competitor and partner to businesses, I’m not sure that its competitor status will be a gating factor to the growth of Amazon Go, if it decides to productise it and sell the technology to other retailers… and neither does Trigo.

“The technology behind Amazon Go existed in the industry for about a decade before Amazon Go,” Peled said (Trigo was founded in 2018 by brothers Michael and Daniel Gabay). “But after it launched, it was a moment of realising, ‘Ah, this is really happening!’ ” Meaning, he knew now would be a fruitful period because other grocery retailers would want to get on board, and even if Amazon did roll Go out as its own service, and a service used by other retailers, there will be others who will never work with it, presenting a market opportunity to his startup.

If the endgame is bringing the time spent in the check-out phase down to zero, there are other startups working on alternative ways to reach that. Just last week, Caper raised a round of funding for a system that is based on “smart” trolleys, with sensors attached to grocery carts to take note of items and add them to your shopping bill. While the shopping cart might have the advantage of being able to more closely monitor an individual’s own shopping cart, store-wide systems like Trigo’s will potentially cost less to operate and the software might even be something that can be used on existing in-store cameras.

Interestingly, at a time when patents form one of the key ways that a company defends its intellectual property, Trigo is taking another approach. “We don’t file patents because we don’t want our technology to be public,” said Peled. “We have things that we don’t want anyone to see.” It’s an ironic, if perhaps telling, stance for a computer vision company.

In the rush to build tech solutions to all the world’s problems (and if not problems, at least all the world’s processes), there are bound to be others building further technology to bring grocery stores into the twenty-first century. Trigo presents one route to getting there, making it as much a coveted company for grocery businesses as it is for the companies that provide other services to them.

“We believe that Trigo’s world-leading computer-vision team will be the first to scale this technology globally and unlock the full potential of a true grocery-wide revolution,” said Barak Salomon, managing partner of Red Dot Capital. “The process of manually scanning barcodes for each separate item at check out is outdated and time-consuming. Trigo’s technology is going to save brick and mortar, revitalizing the in-store experience while keeping the best part of shopping alive.”

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Sep
16

FOSSA scores $8.5 million Series A to help enterprise manage open-source licenses

As more enterprise developers make use of open source, it becomes increasingly important for companies to make sure that they are complying with licensing requirements. They also need to ensure the open-source bits are being updated over time for security purposes. That’s where FOSSA comes in, and today the company announced an $8.5 million Series A.

The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with help from Costanoa Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners. Today’s round brings the total raised to $11 million, according to the company.

Company founder and CEO Kevin Wang says that over the last 18 months, the startup has concentrated on building tools to help enterprises comply with their growing use of open source in a safe and legal way. He says that overall this increasing use of open source is great news for developers, and for these bigger companies in general. While it enables them to take advantage of all the innovation going on in the open-source community, they need to make sure they are in compliance.

“The enterprise is really early on this journey, and that’s where we come in. We provide a platform to help the enterprise manage open-source usage at scale,” Wang explained. That involves three main pieces. First it tracks all of the open-source and third-party code being used inside a company. Next, it enforces licensing and security policy, and, finally, it has a reporting component. “We automate the mass reporting and compliance for all of the housekeeping that comes from using open source at scale,” he said.

The enterprise focus is relatively new for the company. It originally launched in 2017 as a tool for developers to track individual use of open source inside their programs. Wang saw a huge opportunity inside the enterprise to apply this same kind of capability inside larger organizations, which were hungry for tools to help them comply with the myriad open-source licenses out there.

“We found that there was no tooling out there that can manage the scale and breadth across all the different enterprise use cases and all the really complex mission-critical code bases,” he said. What’s more, he found that where there were existing tools, they were vastly underutilized or didn’t provide broad enough coverage.

The company announced a $2.2 million seed round in 2017, and since then has grown from 10 to 40 employees. With today’s funding, that should increase as the company is expanding quickly. Wang reports that the startup has been tripling its revenue numbers and customer accounts year over year. The new money should help accelerate that growth and expand the product and markets it can sell into.

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Mar
11

Assembled raises $3.1M led by Stripe to build ‘the operating system for support teams’

According to a Grand View Research report published earlier this year, the global cyber security market is estimated to grow 10% annually to reach $300.32 billion by 2025 from $139.67 billion in...

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Original author: Sramana_Mitra

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Sep
13

Cloudflare co-founder Michelle Zatlyn on the company’s IPO today, its unique dual class structure, and what’s next

When Plaid announced its $250 million Series C investment last year, it left out a couple of key investors. Today it revealed that Mastercard and Visa quietly participated in the round.

For a company like Plaid, which builds APIs to enable customers to access their bank accounts inside applications in a seamless way, having the blessing of two of the major credit companies in the world is a big deal. It could signal that the startup intends to move more broadly into payments, although it didn’t make any specific assertion it was doing that in the announcement.

CEO and co-founder Zach Perret, writing in a blog post this morning, addressed the broad implications of having these companies on board. “We’re particularly excited about what this means for our customers and consumers. As an industry when we come together with a shared vision for an ecosystem that is open, secure and encouraging of innovation the possibilities are limitless,” he wrote.

Plaid tools

Plaid helps developers connect to financial services in a similar way that Stripe helps them connect to payments or Trello to communications tools. By having access to a set of tools from Plaid, developers can build into their applications access to bank information and other financial data without having to have knowledge about how to connect to thousands of different banking systems.

Former CTO and co-founder William Hockey explained to TechCrunch what this meant in an announcement earlier this year:

“Everybody in the U.S. can actually use this product now. And some of those [connections] are super quick and instant, and some of those maybe take a day to verify, but what we’re doing is we’re wrapping all of that in the product. And so you as a developer, you don’t have to worry about all of the different authentication methods at some of these banks,” Hockey explained.

Plaid has raised more than $310 million since it launched, and that Series C investment last year carried with it a fat $2.65 billion valuation. Strategic investments of this sort show that the industry as a whole is behind a startup, and having Mastercard and Visa involved gives the company additional credibility in the marketplace.

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Sep
05

This already cheap laptop from Lenovo is on sale for under $200 at Best Buy right now — over $100 off its original price

Beekeeper, the Switzerland and U.S.-based startup that provides a mobile-first communications platform for employers that need to communicate with blue-collar and service-oriented workers, has raised $45 million in Series B funding.

The round was co-led by Thayer Ventures and Swisscanto Invest by Zürcher Kantonalbank, with participation from previous backers including Atomico, Alpana Ventures, Edenred Capital Partners, Fyrfly, Hammer Team, investiere, HighSage Ventures, Keen Venture Partners, Samsung NEXT, Swiss Post and Swisscom.

Targeting non-desk employees, including those working in hospitality, manufacturing and retail, Beekeeper’s mobile-first platform is designed to replace more arcane communication methods, such as pen and paper and consumer messaging apps like WhatsApp.

The potential market is said to be big, too, with more than 80% of the world’s workers thought not to be at a desk and therefore arguably in need of a “Slack for non-desk employees,” which is how Beekeeper pitches itself. The company reckons 1.7 billion non-desk workers globally are either unconnected or poorly connected by a “patchwork” of consumer and enterprise applications.

Beekeeper’s clients include Hyatt Hotels, Dollar General, Domino’s Pizza, Heathrow Airport and SeaBoard Foods.

Meanwhile, with today’s Series B, Beekeeper says it plans to bridge the gap between knowledge workers and their non-desk counterparts, and further expand its offering with new features and integrations. On the product roadmap, for example, is a way for companies to be able to customise the Beekeeper experience via a “marketplace” of additional apps and integrations with systems such as Workday.

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Sep
16

Bootstrapping First from Colorado, Then Scaling with VC Funds: Faction CEO Luke Norris (Part 1) - Sramana Mitra

Luke has executed a tremendously effective Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later strategy with Faction. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were...

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Original author: Sramana Mitra

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Mar
11

Visual One smartens up home security cameras with object and action recognition

Former advertising exec Jason Kelly wants to change how airlines manage bookings and operations.

Along with cofounders Martin Kaduc and Michael Peters, Kelly is launching the startup Kambr today and announcing $4 million in seed funding. VC firms Founder Collective, Global Founders Capital, Studio VC, Silicon Badia, C2 Ventures Capital Partners, and TXV Partners participated in the round.

Kambr wants to sell software to big airlines that helps them compete with online travel agents. Specifically, Kambr wants to help with a practice in the airline industry called revenue management that airlines use to monitor when and how people book flights.

Airlines typically hire analysts specifically tasked with looking at data to see at which sites and how far out consumers book a trip. Using the data, an analyst may decided to charge $100 for a seat one week and $500 for the same seat a month later.

But revenue management is a big problem for legacy airlines that don't have the same kind of sophisticated technology that online travel agents have. Research from Expedia found that consumers visit travel websites 38 times before they book.

According to Kelly, software that airlines use today, like Pros and Sabre, was built before the online travel industry took off. As airlines look to catch up with online travel agents like Google Flights, Hopper, and Expedia, Kambr plans to build and pitch software to big airline companies. He said the software will use some artificial intelligence technology but will also be built for analysts to use.

Kelly did not name clients but said that Kambr's business will be based on a software as a service model that charges airlines a monthly fee. According to research from Forrester Research, the online travel industry will be a $1 trillion market by 2023.

"Tools that analysts have at airlines haven't been built for a modern-day environment," Kelly said. "You can't just jump to fully autonomous, artificial intelligence capabilities to manage all of [an airline's] inventory — there is a human and computer interaction that needs to evolve."

Kambr has 22 employees and plans to double headcount in the next year, Kelly said.

Before Kambr, Kelly held top leadership positions at advertising and media companies including Time Inc., Millennial Media, LiveIntent, and Laundry Service. He also served as chief revenue officer of AdMeld before Google acquired it.

While Kelly has ridden the wave of online advertising throughout his career, he worked at airlines like Frontier Airlines and Virgin America in the 90s and 2000s and said he had always wanted to work in aviation and that there are parallels between the airline and advertising industries.

"This is something that I've truly been working on my whole professional life," Kelly said.

Similar to how airlines struggle to get consumers to convert, advertisers also struggle with serving consumers relevant ads.

Kelly said that Kambr plans to eventually roll out an ad-tech product that helps airlines target consumers with ads, similar to existing demand-side platform technology that advertisers use to buy ads programmatically.

"That's absolutely on our roadmap — I've run both demand and supply-side platforms so that technology is very known to me," Kelly said. "It's not going to launch in 2019 or 2020 but that's what clients are asking for."

Original author: Lauren Johnson

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Sep
16

A former Google engineer warned that robot weapons could cause accidental mass killings

A former Google engineer who worked on the company's infamous military drone project has sounded a warning against the building of killer robots.

Laura Nolan had been working at Google four years when she was recruited to its collaboration with the US Department of Defense, known as Project Maven, in 2017, according to the Guardian. Project Maven was focused on using AI to enhance military drones, building AI systems which would be able to single out enemy targets and distinguish between people and objects.

Google canned Project Maven after employee outrage, with thousands of employees signing a petition against the project and about a dozen quitting in protest. Google allowed the contract to lapse in March this year. Nolan herself resigned after she became "increasingly ethically concerned" about the project, she said.

Read more: "Things have changed at Google": An engineer who quit to protest Project Maven explains why the company's changing values forced him out

Nolan described her role as a site reliability engineer, and this is why she was recruited to Maven. "Although I was not directly involved in speeding up the video footage recognition I realised that I was still part of the kill chain; that this would ultimately lead to more people being targeted and killed by the US military in places like Afghanistan," she said, according to The Guardian.

Nolan fears that the next step beyond AI-enabled weapons like drones could be fully autonomous AI weapons. "What you are looking at are possible atrocities and unlawful killings even under laws of warfare, especially if hundreds or thousands of these machines are deployed," she said.

She said that any number of unpredictable factors could mess with the weapon's systems in unforeseen ways such as unexpected radar signals, unusual weather, or they could come across people carrying weapons for reasons other than warfare, such as hunting. "The machine doesn't have the discernment or common sense that the human touch has," she said.

She added that testing will have to take place out on the battlefield. "The other scary thing about these autonomous war systems is that you can only really test them by deploying them in a real combat zone. Maybe that's happening with the Russians at present in Syria, who knows? What we do know is that at the UN Russia has opposed any treaty let alone ban on these weapons by the way."

The autonomous ship "Sea Hunter", developed by DARPA, docked in Portland, Oregon before its christening ceremony. The US military christened an experimental self-driving warship designed to hunt for enemy submarines,. REUTERS/Steve Dipaola

Although no country has yet come forward to say it's working on fully autonomous robot weapons, many are building more and more sophisticated AI to integrate into their militaries. The US navy has a self-piloting warship, capable of spending months at sea with no crew, and Israel boasts of having drones capable of identifying and attacking targets autonomously— although at the moment they require a human middle-man to give the go-ahead.

Nolan is urging countries to declare an outright ban on autonomous killing robot, similar to conventions around the use of chemical weapons.

"Very few people are talking about this but if we are not careful one or more of these weapons, these killer robots, could accidentally start a flash war, destroy a nuclear power station and cause mass atrocities," she said.

Business Insider has contacted Nolan for comment.

Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton

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Sep
16

Mitto, the payment card and app for ‘Gen Z’ teens, raises €2M seed round

Mitto, a debit card and app designed for “Generation Z” teens, has raised €2 million in seed funding.

Backing the round is Spanish bank Banco Sabadell via its innovation and venture arm InnoCells, along with Athos Capital and Spanish social media influencers “AuronPlay” and “Wismichu,” among others.

Claiming to plug a gap in existing payment solutions for Generation Z (from 14 years old), Mitto offers a digital wallet and/or physical card for spending online or offline. Parents can send instant money to their children by topping up the wallet, and get an overview of their “purchasing” profile.

In turn, the idea is that children gain a degree of financial independence by using Mitto, as well as a better understanding of their spending habits. More broadly, Mitto says it want to help develop financial literacy amongst Gen Z kids.

“Despite being born digital, Gen Z today don’t have easy access to a tool to use digital money,” says Mitto co-founder Marcos Cuevas. “Mitto is born to fix this by allowing them to own a digital wallet and virtual and physical cards. At the same time, we allow parents to educate and support financially their children in their first steps using a digital financial product.”

Cuevas says that the longer-term mission of Mitto is to deliver the best payment solution experience for Generation Z and to help them understand the impact their spending has on the planet — as lofty as that sounds.

“We are committed to helping this new generation to change their mind about finance, to succeed by giving them the tools to understand their purchasing habits and — in the future — the impact of their decisions in the world, and how they can help to make it more sustainable,” he adds.

To that end, Mitto says the funding will allow it to further invest in its product and partnerships to become “the financial platform of choice” for Generation Z.

The Spanish fintech wants to launch its proposition in other European and LatAm countries where it says demand exists. It claims a waiting list of more than 80,000 users in several countries, and says it currently has 150,000 registered users.

Meanwhile, directly comparable competitors include GoHenry and Osper in the U.K., and Current, Step and Greenlight in the U.S., to name a few.

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Sep
16

Leeto helps works councils manage perks

French startup Leeto provides a service for French works councils, better known as comités d’entreprise. The fintech startup lets you hand out perks to employees using a simple web service combined with a payment card.

Leeto recently raised a $2.2 million funding round (€2 million) from Founders Future and various business angels, such as Thomas Rebaud (Meero), Benjamin Netter (October) and Vincent Luciani (Artefact).

If you’re not familiar with French works councils, every French company with more than 50 employees has to elect representatives to defend the interests of employees — starting in 2020, companies with more than 11 employees will have a works council. They act as the interface between members of the board and employees, and they vote on strategic moves.

In addition to that role, companies have to hand out a small budget to the works council every year. Works councils can then reimburse cultural or sports activities, hand out gift cards for Christmas, give movie tickets, etc.

And Leeto wants to manage that budget in particular. Many companies currently have a cumbersome process. You have to send receipts of your yoga lessons, find a store that accepts your gift cards… it’s even worse for representatives as they have to order paper gift cards and make sure everyone picks up their gift cards at their desk.

Leeto is a software-as-a-service the lets you manage all that from a web browser. You can add employees and then grant them perks.

Later this year, every employee will get a prepaid Mastercard that the works council can top up and manage. For instance, representatives can hand out €500 a year for vacation and cultural activities. Employees can then use this card to pay for a Netflix subscription, train tickets, museum tickets and more. It works a bit like Lunchr, but for works councils.

If employees go on vacation and forget their card, they can also upload eligible expenses to get reimbursed even if they paid with a personal card.

On the works council’s side, Leeto wants to make it easier to manage accounting and send notifications to employees. Leeto currently costs €3 per employee per month, but that’s directly taken from the budget of the works council, so employees don’t pay that.

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Mar
15

This $1,000 kitchen in a box can turn an SUV into an RV-like cooking station

Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese fashion billionaire, poses with a Starship model and SpaceX spacesuit helmet before a news conference in Tokyo on October 9, 2018. Maezawa plans to ride Starship around the moon in 2023.Koji Sasahara/AP Photo

Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.

WeWork has reduced CEO Adam Neumann's control over the company in response to pre-IPO worries about its profitability and corporate governance. WeWork slashed Neumann's voting rights, and said no member of his family could sit on its board as it plans to plough ahead with its public offering. SoftBank reportedly plans to buy $750 million in WeWork shares in the real-estate company's planned public offering. According to The Wall Street Journal, that would represent around a quarter of all the shares the coworking company plans to sell in the offering, in which it is expected to raise at least $3 billion. MoviePass, the embattled movie-ticket-subscription service, is shutting down on Saturday, its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, announced on Friday. Helios and Matheson said it would explore a sale of MoviePass, along with its other assets Moviefone and MoviePass Films. Disney chief executive Bob Iger has stepped down from his position on Apple's board of directors. Iger's decision comes as Apple confirmed this week that the release of its subscription streaming service, Apple TV Plus, is slated for November 1. Cloudflare, a web security and content delivery company, raised $525 million on Thursday after pricing its shares higher than expected. Shares of Cloudflare surged more than 25% when they began trading on Thursday, valuing the company at north of $5 billion. Representatives from Facebook's digital currency Libra will meet banking officials on Monday, with one official warning that the bar for regulatory approval would be extremely high. The Financial Times reported that this will be the first meeting between Libra's representatives and policymakers. An Ohio gamer upset about a $1.50 bet while playing Call of Duty: WWII online was sentenced Friday to 15 months in prison for recruiting a prankster to make a bogus emergency call that resulted in the fatal shooting of a Kansas man by police. Casey Viner, 19, of North College Hill, Ohio, also is restricted from gaming activity for two years while he is on supervised release after serving his prison term, U.S. District Judge Eric Melgren said in announcing the sentence. Uber is close to signing a lease for office space at 3 World Trade Center in New York City, according to a report from Crain's New York. The company will reportedly move in sometime next year if the lease is signed. The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether Apple's restrictive policies around allowing third-party repairs to its devices, and its algorithms for search rankings in the App Store, constitute a violation of antitrust law. Congress has asked Apple for a trove of documents regarding its restrictions on third-party repairs, and how it promotes its own apps in the App Store, among other issues. Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, a key investor in SpaceX's next-generation rocket system Starship, plans to sell a 30% stake in his online fashion-retail company, Zozo, to Yahoo Japan. During a press conference, Maezawa reportedly said one of his main reasons for departing Zozo was to make time to train for a 2023 voyage around the moon with Starship: a new rocket system planned by SpaceX.

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Original author: Shona Ghosh

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Sep
16

Catching Up On Readings: VC Outcomes - Sramana Mitra

This feature from Medium analyzes the exits of venture funded companies over the past decade and concludes that only 4% of them gave a return of over 10X. For this week’s posts, click on the...

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Original author: jyotsna popuri

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Sep
15

How to get people to open your emails

Julian Shapiro Contributor
Julian Shapiro is the founder of BellCurve.com, a growth marketing agency that trains you to become a marketing professional. He also writes at Julian.com.

We’ve aggregated the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month, we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this Growth Report.

This is how you’re going stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice you can’t get elsewhere.

Our community consists of 600 startup founders paired with VP’s of growth from later-stage companies. We have 300 YC founders plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo, and Ritual .

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group, or marketing training program. See past growth reports here and here.

Without further ado, onto the advice.

How can you send email campaigns that get opened by 100% of your mailing list?

Based on insights from Nick Selman, Fletcher Richman of Halp, and Wes Wagner.

First, a few obvious pieces of advice for avoiding low open rates:Avoid spam filters by avoiding keywords commonly used in spam emails.Consider using email subjects (1) that are clearly descriptive and (2) look like they were written by a friend. Then A/B your top choices.Include the recipient’s name in your email body. This signals to spam filters that you do in fact know the recipient.Now, for the real advice: Let’s say 60% of your audience opens your mailing, how can you get the remaining 40% to open and read it too?First, wait 2 weeks to give everyone a chance to open the initial email.Next, export a list of those who haven’t opened. Mailchimp lets you do this.Important note: The reason many recipients don’t open your email is because it was sent to Spam, it was buried in Promotions, or it was insta-deleted because it looked like spam (but wasn’t). The goal here is to resuscitate these people. You have two options for doing so:(1) Duplicate the initial email then selectively re-send it to non-openers. This time, use a new subject (try a new hook) and downgrade the email to plain text: remove images and link tracking. De-enriching the email in this way can help bypass spam filters and the Promotions tab.(2) Alternatively, export your list of non-openers to a third-party email tool like Mailshake (or Mixmax).First, connect Mailshake to a new Gmail account on your company domain.Next, configure Mailshake to automatically dole out small batches of emails on a daily schedule. Let it churn through non-openers slowly so that Gmail doesn’t flag your account as a spammer.Emails sent through Mailshake are more likely to get opened than emails sent through Mailchimp. Why? Mailshake sends emails through your Gmail account, and Gmail-to-Gmail emails have a greater chance of bypassing Spam and Promotions folders, particularly if the sender doesn’t have a history of its emails being marked as spam.

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Jul
03

SoftBank Vision Fund partner David Thevenon is coming to Disrupt Berlin

Every founder knows you gotta find market fit. Almost no one gets it right on the first try, which means iterating quickly and decisively is the difference between greatness and the void.

On the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we have a jam-packed panel filled with leading product builders to discuss just how founders should think about launching and iterating their products.

First, we have Ravi Mehta, chief product officer at dating app Tinder . Before Tinder, he was a product director at Facebook and a vice president of product at TripAdvisor, in addition to a host of other product-related roles. Mehta brings years of consumer products experience to the panel, and will talk about the specific needs of social and network-based products.

Second, we have Manik Gupta, chief product officer at transportation and delivery company Uber . Before becoming product chief, he led Uber’s Marketplace and Maps products, and spent years at Google as a leading PM for Google Maps. He brings a deep background on building popular consumer apps, and also instrumenting those apps with location and consumer data.

Third, we have Diya Jolly, chief product officer of identity management platform Okta . Before Okta, she led product for Google’s home products like Nest, as well as YouTube’s monetization efforts, and also held product roles at Microsoft and Motorola. She brings a hybrid background in enterprise and consumer product design, and will be able to speak about the varying challenges different types of users bring to bear on a product.

Finally, we have Robby Stein, a director of product management at Instagram, where he leads the consumer team in charge of Stories, Feed, Messaging, Camera and Profile. Before Facebook/Instagram, he held a senior product role at Yahoo, which acquired his startup Stamped, and was also a PM at Google. He brings a cross-over product perspective between startups and larger tech companies that will enrich our conversation.

We’re amped for this conversation, and we can’t wait to see you there! Buy tickets to Disrupt SF here at an early-bird rate!

Did you know Extra Crunch annual members get 20% off all TechCrunch event tickets? Head over here to get your annual pass, and then email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to get your 20% discount. Please note that it can take up to 24 hours to issue the discount code.

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Sep
15

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures (Part 4) - Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to talk about a couple of companies that you’ve invested in that you are particularly excited about? What are they doing? What value proposition are they providing? What...

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Original author: Sramana Mitra

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Jul
05

The 5 best features coming to Apple Maps in iOS 13 (AAPL)

General Motors' 49,000 employees represented by the United Auto Workers will strike Sunday night, the first major labor action in over a decade against a US carmaker and the largest walkout since 1982.

The current GM contract with the UAW, under negotiation all summer long, lapsed with no extension at midnight on Saturday; pro forma extensions were agreed to with Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, both of whom were awaiting the outcome of the GM deal, which would form a template for a new four-year agreement between the union and the Detroit Big Three.

"We stood up for General Motors when they needed us most. Now we are standing together in unity and solidarity for our Members, their families and the communities where we work and live," UAW Vice-President Terry Dittes said in a statement, alluding to the UAW's role in GM 2009 bailout and bankruptcy during the financial crisis.

GM countered with its own statement, taking the unusual step of disclosing the details of its position. "We presented a strong offer that improves wages, benefits and grows US jobs in substantive ways and it is disappointing that the UAW leadership has chosen to strike at midnight tonight," the company said. "We have negotiated in good faith and with a sense of urgency. Our goal remains to build a strong future for our employees and our business."

Read more: 5 reasons why Elon Musk should rescue a GM factory in Ohio

Health care costs, temporary workers, and closed factories

GM CEO Mary Barra and Trump at the White House. Getty Images

The situation was intense, as UAW negotiators meet with GM representatives in Detroit Sunday morning to hammer out a bargain. But a strike has been in the air since 2018, after GM "unallocated" its Lordstown factory in Ohio, where the carmaker had been building its slow-selling Chevy Cruze sedan on a single shift. GM also announced plans to unallocate three other plants, citing concerns about the cost of under-utilized manufacturing capacity.

The UAW was enraged — and President Donal Trump, who captured the Ohio district where Lordstown is located in the 2016 election, jumped in, pressuring GM and CEO Mary Barra to keep the plant open, possibly by committing a new vehicle to the facility (GM provided relocation and reemployment opportunities to Lordstown's approximately 1,500 workers).

Combined with other legacy issues — mainly health-care costs and policies around hiring temporary workers at a lower wage than UAW members — the Lordstown decision set the stage for a lot of serious saber-rattling by the union. The UAW has been signaling that it's ready for a walkoff since before the contract negotiations began.

A focused GM versus a UAW rocked by scandal — and a booming US auto market

United Auto Workers (UAW) union Vice-President Terry Dittes addresses delegates during the 'Special Convention on Collective Bargaining' in Detroit. Reuters

A new contract would actually be straightforward to achieve. GM's UAW membership pays just 3% of its healthcare cost; they don't have the Cadillac of insurance plans — they have a Rolls-Royce, as even GM's white-collar workforce pays for a third of its coverage. From its statement, GM looks to be supporting the existing plan; its statement stressed that the company offered "nationally leading" health care. So ongoing negotiations could center on the UAW accepting a higher level of temporary hiring to better align GM's cost with the so-called foreign transplant automakers such as Toyota and BMW, who operate plants in the non-union US South.

GM indicated that it would sweeten the pot by improving its profit-sharing formula, improving a system that put almost $11,000 in workers' pockets this year, after GM posted another hefty annual surplus in 2018. The company also said it had proposed to invest $7 billion and add 5,400 jobs in the US, including "solutions" for idled plants in Ohio and Michigan. Part of that would entail the "opportunity to become the first union-represented battery cell manufacturing site in the US," GM said.

The automaker perhaps missed a golden opportunity to deflect the UAW's ire over Lordstown when it decided to fire-up production of its new Chevy Blazer at a factory in Mexico, where hourly labor costs are a fraction of what they are in the US. But GM likely expects Mexico to be an important market going forward, and the hangover of the carmaker's 2009 bailout and bankruptcy have shaped its strategies; Barra is determined to make sure GM doesn't face another crisis and has been making a series of tough calls, such as selling its faltering European division while simultaneously ramping up investment in autonomous mobility and electric vehicles.

The strike is no shock

The strike could be longer than 2007's. Thomson Reuters

In this context, a strike isn't surprising. After nearly a decade of expansion, the US auto industry is riding high despite concerns about a downturn, so if the UAW doesn't flex its muscle now, it might not get a chance in four years.

The union, however, is in a weak position, with its leadership rocked by scandals. Most recently, UAW President Gary Jones' home was reportedly raided by the FBI in connection with an investigation into embezzlement by union officials. The Detroit News reported that Jones last week dodged efforts to remove him from his role.

The big question now is whether the UAW is putting all its cards on the table against a determined GM, in the hope that a full strike convinces the company that it needs to give more ground than it's been willing to. A short action, similar to 2007, isn't likely to alter GM's position, and that could be why the union has been preparing its membership for a more extended strike for much of 2019.

The UAW might also be counting on President Trump to leap into the fray, taking up the membership's cause and bucking traditional Republican anti-unionism so that he can fire up his Midwestern base.

Unless a strike drags on, consumers outside the Midwest aren't likely to notice, given that it's late in the year. But GM, like all automakers, likes to finish a year with strong sales and doesn't want to see its long run of annual profits snapped, so an extended strike could cause the largest US carmaker to endure some pain, testing Barra's now-legendary discipline.

This story has been updated.

Original author: Matthew DeBord

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Sep
15

'Hustlers' gave Jennifer Lopez the biggest live-action box office opening of her career with $33.2 million

Jennifer Lopez is having a remarkable career resurgence, and the box office performance by "Hustlers" is the proof.

STXfilms' gritty true-life gangster movie about a group of former strippers who ripped off Wall Street businessmen by drugging them and then maxing out their credit cards had a big opening at the domestic box office this weekend with an estimated $33.2 million. (Warner Bros.' "It: Chapter 2" came in first place for a second-consecutive week with a $40.7 million weekend.)

The opening set multiple records, including:

But "Hustlers" didn't just have the support of J. Lo's fan base. The cast also included Constance Wu, Cardi B, Lizzo, and Lili Reinhart, who made it a can't-miss movie for their majority female fans as 67% of the opening weekend audience was female.

Read more: Jennifer Lopez is getting major Oscar buzz for her performance in "Hustlers" and it's fully deserved

The movie as a whole also earned its fair share of buzz. The movie has an 88% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes (71% audience score), and the Oscar buzz for Lopez' performance as the ring leader of the group has grown since it had its world premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last weekend.

For the five-year-old STXfilms it's a huge win. Since releasing the surprise box office hit "The Upside" in January, starring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston, the studio had forgettable releases like "Poms" and "Uglydolls." The studio nabbed "Hustlers" when the movie's original distributor, Annapurna Pictures, dropped the title in 2018.

Read more: The director of "Hustlers" describes the 3-year struggle to make her gritty gangster movie, and not let it turn into "'Ocean's 8' with strippers"

However, things weren't all cheery at the multiplex this weekend. Warner Bros./Amazon Studios' adaptation of Donna Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Goldfinch" starring Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman was a complete dud its opening weekend. The $45 million-budgeted movie only brought in $870,000 on Friday and has an estimated $2.6 million for the weekend (it played on 2,542 screens).

That's one of the worst openings by a film from a major studio this year.

Original author: Jason Guerrasio

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