When weighing up the likely success of challenger banks in the U.K., two predominant schools of thought emerge.

Those who are bullish say that incumbent banks provide a lousy user experience, rip off customers, and innovate incredibly slowly — and therefore are ripe for the taking. Challenger banks just need to focus on what they do best and word of mouth-led switching will follow.

And then there are people who are less convinced who say that most consumers are happy enough with their current bank account and see no reason to switch. Besides, anything innovative a challenger does will be copied by incumbents eventually anyway.

But what if switching was only one means to customer acquisition? One argument I’ve sometimes made is that grabbing customers from a competing bank isn’t the only way to grow a challenger bank. Another customer segment is people who don’t have an existing current account, such as recent immigrants or young people who need to open their very first bank account.

In fact, incumbent banks have long targeted students, for example, with attractive student overdrafts or by setting up shop on university campuses. That’s how Barclays first won my business and why I still lazily bank with them today.

Enter challenger bank Monzo, which early on in its existence experimented with a Monzo ambassador program at a number of universities, with only limited success. Today the fintech is moving the funnel forward slightly by making its digital current account offering available to 16-18 year olds, opening up the bank to more than 1.5 million new young people.

Monzo says that 16- and 17-year-old customers can sign up for a Monzo bank account today by downloading the app. They’ll then receive a contactless debit card in the post the next working day. Certain banking features, such as overdrafts and spending on gambling, will be blocked until customers turn 18.

With more than 860,000 registered account holders and set to cross 1 million accounts in the next few months, Monzo has employed a number strategies to grow customers, with a heavy emphasis on viral features and a fresh, young brand.

These have included making friend-to-friend payments easy, either to people who already bank with the startup, or via the Monzo.me service, which gives users a payment link to share with friends.

The idea, as Monzo co-founder Tom Blomfield (picture above) often explains, is that unlike traditional incumbent banks that basically have zero network effects (perhaps beyond joint accounts), the challenger bank is designed to become more useful the more people who join it.

More recently, the challenger bank launched ‘Nearby Friends’, geolocation functionality that uses Bluetooth to let you see anyone else that uses Monzo who is nearby so that you can initiate a payment without needing their phone number to be in your contact book first.

Sramana Mitra: How did your VCs react on the topic of a virtual company? Fred Plais: This divides people a lot. The world is changing. People are starting to buy the story more and more. We need the...

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This feature from The Washington Post by Margaret Sullivan examines how the dwindling employment numbers in regional newspaper newsrooms is affecting local coverage and a set of common facts to argue...

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Sramana Mitra: Your first financing was US financing? Fred Plais: It was financed by French and Finnish VCs. It’s difficult when you’re pivoting. You get a business that’s not going that fast anymore...

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Boston has regained its longstanding place as the second-largest U.S. startup funding hub.

After years of trailing New York City in total annual venture investment, Massachusetts is taking the lead in 2018. Venture investment in the Boston metro area hit $5.2 billion so far this year, on track to be the highest annual total in years.

The Massachusetts numbers year-to-date are about 15 percent higher than the New York City total. That puts Boston’s biotech-heavy venture haul apparently second only to Silicon Valley among domestic locales thus far this year. And for New England VCs, the latest numbers also confirm already well-ingrained opinions about the superior talents of local entrepreneurs.

“Boston often gets dismissed as a has-been startup city. But the successes are often overlooked and don’t get the same attention as less successful, but more hypey companies in San Francisco,” Blake Bartlett, a partner at Boston-based venture firm OpenView, told Crunchbase News. He points to local success stories like online prescription service PillPack, which Amazon just snapped up for $1 billion, and online auto marketplace CarGurus, which went public in October and is now valued around $4.7 billion.

Meanwhile, fresh capital is piling up in the coffers of local startups with all the intensity of a New England snowstorm. In the chart below, we look at funding totals since 2012, along with reported round counts.

In the interest of rivalry, we are also showing how the Massachusetts startup ecosystem compares to New York over the past five years.

Who’s getting funded?

So what’s the reason for Boston’s 2018 successes? It’s impossible to pinpoint a single cause. The New England city’s startup scene is broad and has deep pockets of expertise in biotech, enterprise software, AI, consumer apps and other areas.

Still, we’d be remiss not to give biotech the lion’s share of the credit. So far this year, biotech and healthcare have led the New England dealmaking surge, accounting for the majority of invested capital. Once again, local investors are not surprised.

“Boston has been the center of the biotech universe forever,” said Dylan Morris, a partner at Boston and Silicon Valley-based VC firm CRV. That makes the city well-poised to be a leading hub in the sector’s latest funding and exit boom, which is capitalizing on a long-term shift toward more computational approaches to diagnosing and curing disease.

Moreover, it goes without saying that the home city of MIT has a particularly strong reputation for so-called deep tech — using really complicated technology to solve really hard problems. That’s reflected in the big funding rounds.

For instance, the largest Boston-based funding recipient of 2018, Moderna Therapeutics, is a developer of mRNA-based drugs that raised $625 million across two late-stage rounds. Besides Moderna, other big rounds for companies with a deep tech bent went to TCR2, which is focused on engineering T cells for cancer therapy, and Starry (based in both Boston and New York), which is deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology for consumer broadband.

Other sectors saw some jumbo-sized rounds too, including enterprise software, 3D printing and even apparel.

Boston also benefits from the rise of supergiant funding rounds. A plethora of rounds raised at $100 million or more fueled the city’s rise in the venture funding rankings. So far this year, at least 15 Massachusetts companies have raised rounds of that magnitude or more, compared to 12 in all of 2017.

Exits are happening, too

Boston companies are going public and getting acquired at a brisk pace too this year, and often for big sums.

At least seven metro-area startups have sold for $100 million or more in disclosed-price acquisitions this year, according to Crunchbase data. In the lead is online prescription drug service PillPack . The second-biggest deal was Kensho, a provider of analytics for big financial institutions that sold to S&P Global for $550 million.

IPOs are huge, too. A total of 17 Boston-area venture-backed companies have gone public so far this year, of which 15 are life science startups. The largest offering was for Rubius Therapeutics, a developer of red cell therapeutics, followed by cybersecurity provider Carbon Black.

Meanwhile, many local companies that went public in the past few years have since seen their values skyrocket. Bartlett points to examples including online retailer Wayfair (market cap of $10 billion), marketing platform HubSpot (market cap $4.8 billion) and enterprise software provider Demandware (sold to Salesforce for $2.8 billion).

New England heats up

Recollections of a frigid April sojourn in Massachusetts are too fresh for me to comfortably utter the phrase “Boston is hot.” However, speaking purely about startup funding, and putting weather aside, the Boston scene does appear to be seeing some real escalation in temperature.

Of course, it’s not just Boston. Supergiant venture funds are surging all over the place this year. Morris is even bullish on the arch-rival a few hours south: “New York and Boston love to hate each other. But New York’s doing some amazing things too,” he said, pointing to efforts to invigorate the biotech startup ecosystem.

Still, so far, it seems safe to say 2018 is shaping up as Boston’s year for startups.

Jeremy Almond: We have another product where most of the time when a payment that needs to be authorized goes beyond a certain amount, there are controls in place. Maybe your accounts payable clerk...

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Sramana Mitra: What was the pricing model for this product? Fred Plais: It’s a yearly subscription which includes the old product. You’re getting your hosting part of the subscription but you also...

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A company called Rentlogic has raised $2.4 million to take the guesswork out of determining whether that cheap, beautiful New York apartment is actually a deathtrap wrapped in a brownstone’s clothing.

Renting in New York is murder already, but using Rentlogic, apartment hunters can figure out if their new housing situation could actually kill them (or put them at significant risk of bodily or property harm… or even minor inconveniences).

Investors in the company’s seed round include the Urban-X accelerator (which is a partnership between Urban.US and Mini); Urban.Us, an investor in urban technologies; the millennial-entrepreneur-focused investment firm, Kairos; and Seagram beverage company scion Edgar Bronfman, Jr.

Rentlogic already provides a grade for every building in New York — more than 1 million properties — but has added an inspection feature that it charges landlords for so that they can display a rating outside of their building. It’s like the city’s scoring grades for restaurants in neighborhoods.

“We grade every single property in New York,” says Yale Fox, the company’s founder and chief executive. “We have inspected 103 properties. Everybody is really happy with it and everybody is going to re-sign and we’re going to start scaling this out to every property in New York.”

Rentlogic scores buildings on a combination of around 150 different variables, including the ability to provide continuous heat and hot water, and whether or not a building has evidence of bed bugs or rodents.

The looks of the building doesn’t matter, Fox says. It’s more about the conditions of the building.

“It’s the same way a building would get LEED-certified,” says Fox. “It’s a good way for one landlord to differentiate their property as higher quality than a competitor’s in the same neighborhood.”

Launched initially in 2013, Rentlogic was born out of Fox’s own tragic experience as a new renter in New York. The Canadian transplant (and the son of a family of real estate professionals and small scale landlords) had come to the city for a new job and was looking at an apartment in the West Village.

After shelling out a $12,000 deposit for first month’s rent, last month’s rent and a security deposit, Fox settled into his abode in the tree-lined luxury of one of Manhattan’s most sought-after neighborhoods. The love affair with the building didn’t last long.

Unexpectedly, Fox started to become sick. Several visits to the doctor couldn’t identify a cause for his illness, until, finally, his physician suggested a mold-related illness.

“I asked the landlord to fix it and I wound up having to take the landlord to court,” says Fox.

By the time the court date arrived, Fox had paid to fix the mold problem himself and had little in the way of solid evidence to show a judge. So he built an app that would track the public complaints filed against the landlord and the public assessments that had been done on the building.

“I went to court and I showed the judge this model that I had put together and he said, ‘Welcome to New York and I’m sorry this happened to you… and you should definitely build an app, because New York City needs this.'”

Fox, already enrolled in the TED Fellows program, built the app, initially called “RentCheck” and began marketing it to landlords and renters. “It was just a hobby because I was so angry about how things had happened to me,” says Fox. “We didn’t want to charge renters fees to the site. We thought having equal access to information could prevent this from happening in the future.”

Things continued as a nonprofit for a while until last year Fox hit on a business model. He designed a ratings card for the building based on the data his company had collected and showed it to his current landlord. “She said, ‘How much would you charge for it?'” Fox recalled.

Thus RentCheck became Rentlogic and a business was born. Fox charges landlords for assessments and to display a ratings placard that indicates the building’s grade.

Renters are willing to pay up to an additional $45 per month, according to a white paper, to sign a lease in a building that’s been independently certified. “People are willing to pay a little bit more just to not deal with the constant headaches that happen in certain kinds of buildings,” he said.

Fox appears to have launched Rentlogic at the right time. The market for housing in New York has softened as luxury apartments flood the market and demand softens, meaning that rents are coming down across the board.

But beyond being more competitive there’s a defensive aspect to getting rated in a market filled with demanding, complaint-prone consumers that have no qualms savaging any business, from landlords to local restaurants (although oftentimes the landlords and restaurants deserve it).

“A lot of times landlords are purchasing this because there’s no way to prove they’re not a one-star landlord,” Fox says. “This is accessible for big landlords and small landlords. In a zero-transparency and low-accountability marketplace, there’s no incentive for bad actors to improve their behavior, but with Rentlogic there is.”

The company is already making institutional moves. Fox has inked a deal with Blackstone about providing ratings for their $5.5 billion Stuyvesant Town acquisition on the Lower East Side, according to Fox. In addition, the company has partnered with a number of real estate brokers and roommate-hunting services like Nooklyn and Roomi to use its ratings.

While Rentlogic is scrupulous about using data to train its algorithm, it’s also transparent about how the algorithm works, according to Fox.

“Algorithms control so much what’s going on in the world and people just don’t understand them,” he says. So in the interest of full transparency, the company is putting together a building simulator where users can add problems and see how it affects a building’s rating on the Rentlogic site. The company also has an algorithmic review committee that reviews the results coming from the building assessments.

And while Rentlogic is starting in New York, the company has plans to use its machine learning system to hoover up publicly available data and provide grades for real estate across the United States.

Ultimately, Fox just wants to help improve the tenant-landlord relationship, he says. “I was in a terrible situation with a landlord who went to jail… I launched this site so no one would have to go through what I went through.”

Digital media company Kin has announced a slate of new video series from singer/actress Jordin Sparks, Bachelorette JoJo Fletcher and Jordan Rodgers (who successfully proposed to Fletcher over on the series).

The company also revealed more details about its programming with Vanessa Lachey (who had already signed on with her husband Nick). She’ll be hosting a competition series called Beauty School Knockout, where contestants compete to create specific looks using unconventional products.

This is all part of what the company calls its “neighborhood” strategy, where it launches a set of interconnected channels, usually featuring stars who became famous on traditional media. The new announcements bring Kin up to five channels, with the goal of creating three more by the end of the year.

“[Ultimately,] We want to create 20 of these channels … a neighborhood of channels for women in what we call the ‘builder’ phase of their lives,” Kin CEO Michael Wayne told me. “And they all have sort of the same like-minded, inspirational, accessible feeling to them, in women lifestyle verticals.”

The company’s first big success with this model was Tia Mowry’s Quick Fix, a series of lifestyle and how-to videos from the Sister, Sister star.

According to research by Nielsen, Quick Fix reached 8.8 million total viewers in the week of June 25, including 3.7 million women between the ages of 18 to 34 — an audience that’s comparable to cable reality hits like Chopped, Property Brothers and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. So Kin said it’s extending its partnership with Mowry to develop more lifestyle content in addition to Quick Fix.

In Wayne’s view, it makes more sense for Kin to work with a “mainstream star” like Mowry rather than someone who recently became famous on social media, especially since the first wave of social media influencers is being “completely disrupted by the next wave.”

He said that Mowry, on the other hand, has been in the public consciousness for decades: “No one searches for Tia because she did a smokey eye video.”

Wayne added that he remains focused on a cross-platform strategy, where individual platforms might get early access to the videos (Beauty School Knockout will premiere on Facebook Watch), but the videos ultimately get posted to YouTube, Facebook, Instagram TV and Amazon. He also said it’s crucial that the “unit economics” of advertising on each series makes sense, so Kin isn’t relying on the platforms or on custom, branded video deals to subsidize production.

“With Tia, I know exactly how much money I’m spending making on Facebook, I know how Amazon will monetize, I can chart this investment and know it’s going to pay off and become profitable within 9 to 12 months,” he said.

Update, August 4: Updated to correct Wayne’s final quote.

Sometimes smart contracts can be pretty dumb.

All of the benefits of a cryptographically secured, publicly verified, anonymized transaction system can be erased by errant code, malicious actors or poorly defined parameters of an executable agreement.

Hoping to beat back the tide of bad contracts, bad code and bad actors, Sagewise, a new Los Angeles-based startup, has raised $1.25 million to bring to market a service that basically hits pause on the execution of a contract so it can be arbitrated in the event that something goes wrong.

Co-founded by a longtime lawyer, Amy Wan, whose experience runs the gamut from the U.S. Department of Commerce to serving as counsel for a peer-to-peer real estate investment platform in Los Angeles, and Dan Rice, a longtime entrepreneur working with blockchain, Sagewise works with both Ethereum and the Hedera Hashgraph (a newer distributed ledger technology, which purports to solve some of the issues around transaction processing speed and security which have bedeviled platforms like Ethereum and Bitcoin).

The company’s technology works as a middleware, including an SDK and a contract notification and monitoring service. “The SDK is analogous to an arbitration clause in code form — when the smart contract executes a function, that execution is delayed for a pre-set amount of time (i.e. 24 hours) and users receive a text/email notification regarding the execution,” Wan wrote to me in an email. “If the execution is not the intent of the parties, they can freeze execution of the smart contract, giving them the luxury of time to fix whatever is wrong.”

Sagewise approaches the contract resolution process as a marketplace where priority is given to larger deals. “Once frozen, parties can fix coding bugs, patch up security vulnerabilities, or amend/terminate the smart contract, or self-resolve a dispute. If a dispute cannot be self-resolved, parties then graduate to a dispute resolution marketplace of third party vendors,” Wan writes. “After all, a $5 bar bet would be resolved differently from a $5M enterprise dispute. Thus, we are dispute process agnostic.”

Wavemaker Genesis led the round, which also included strategic investments from affiliates of Ari Paul (Blocktower Capital), Miko Matsumura (Gumi Cryptos), Youbi Capital, Maja Vujinovic (Cipher Principles), Jordan Clifford (Scalar Capital), Terrence Yang (Yang Ventures) and James Sowers.

“Smart contracts are coded by developers and audited by security auditing firms, but the quality of smart contract coding and auditing varies drastically among service providers,” said Wan, the chief executive of Sagewise, in a statement. “Inevitably, this discrepancy becomes the basis for smart contract disputes, which is where Sagewise steps in to provide the infrastructure that allows the blockchain and smart contract industry to achieve transactional confidence.”

In an email, Wan elaborated on the thesis to me, writing that, “smart contracts may have coding errors, security vulnerabilities, or parties may need to amend or terminate their smart contracts due to changing situations.”

Contracts could also be disputed if their execution was triggered accidentally or due to the actions of attackers trying to hack a platform.

“Sagewise seeks to bring transactional confidence into the blockchain industry by building a smart contract safety net where smart contracts do not fulfill the original transactional intent,” Wan wrote.

Crypto skeptics rejoice! A new way to short the cryptocurrency market is coming from dYdX, a decentralized financial derivatives startup. In two months it will launch its protocol for creating short and leverage positions for Ethereum and other ERC20 tokens that allow investors to amp up their bets for or against these currencies.

To get the startup there, dYdX recently closed a $2 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain, and joined by Kindred and Abstract plus angels, including Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and co-founder Fred Ehrsam, and serial investor Elad Gil.

“The main use for cryptocurrency so far has been trading and speculation — buying and holding. That’s not how sophisticated financial institutions trade,” says dYdX founder Antonio Juliano. “The derivatives market is usually an order of magnitude bigger than the spot trading or buy/sell market. The cryptocurrency market is probably on the order of $5 billion to $10 billion in volume, so you’d expect the derivatives market would be 10X bigger. I think there’s a really big opportunity there.”

How dYdX works

The idea is that you buy the short Ethereum token with ETH or a stable coin from an exchange or dYdX. The short Ethereum’s token price is inversely pegged to ETH, so it goes up in value when ETH goes down and vice versa. You can then sell the short Ethereum token for a profit if you correctly predicted an ETH price drop.

On the backend, lenders earn an interest rate by providing ETH as collateral locked into smart contracts that back up the short Ethereum tokens. Only a small number of actors have to work with the smart contract to mint or close the short Tokens. Meanwhile, dYdX also offers leveraged Ethereum tokens that let investors borrow to boost their profits if ETH’s price goes up.

The plan is to offer short and leveraged tokens for any ERC20 currency in the future. dYdX is building its own user-facing application for buying the tokens, but is also partnering with exchanges to offer the margin tokens “where people are already trading,” says Juliano.

“We think of it as more than just shorting your favorite shitcoin. We think of them as mature financial products.”

Infrastructure to lure big funds into crypto

Coinbase has proven to be an incredible incubator for blockchain startup founders. Juliano was employed there as a software engineer after briefly working at Uber and graduating in computer science from Princeton in 2015. “The first thing I started was a search engine for decentralized apps. I worked for months on it full-time, but nobody was building decentralized apps so no one was searching for them. It was too early,” Juliano explains.

But along the way he noticed the lack of financial instruments for decentralized derivatives despite exploding consumer interest in buying and selling cryptocurrencies. He figured the big hedge funds would eventually come knocking if someone built them a bridge into the blockchain world.

Juliano built dYdX to create a protocol to first begin offering margin tokens. It’s open source, so technically anyone can fork it to issue tokens themselves. But dYdX plans to be the standard-bearer, with its version offering the maximum liquidity to investors trying to buy or sell the margin tokens. His five-person team in San Francisco with experience from Google, Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, NerdWallet and ConsenSys is working to find as many investors as possible to collateralize the tokens and exchanges to trade them. “It’s a race to build liquidity faster than anyone else,” says Juliano.

So how will dYdX make money? As is common in crypto, Juliano isn’t exactly sure, and just wants to build up usage first. “We plan to capture value at the protocol level in the future likely through a value adding token,” the founder says. “It would’ve been easy for us to rush into adding a questionable token as we’ve seen many other protocols do; however, we believe it’s worth thinking deeply about the best way to integrate a token in our ecosystem in a way that creates rather than destroys value for end users.”

“Antonio and his team are among the top engineers in the crypto ecosystem building a novel software system for peer-to-peer financial contracts. We believe this will be immensely valuable and used by millions of people,” says Polychain partner Olaf Carlson-Wee. “I am not concerned with short-term revenue models but rather the opportunity to permanently improve global financial markets.”

Timing the decentralized revolution

With the launch less than two months away, Juliano is also racing to safeguard the protocol from attacks. “You have to take smart contract security extremely seriously. We’re almost done with the second independent security audit,” he tells me.

The security provided by decentralization is one of dYdX’s selling points versus centralized competitors like Poloniex that offer margin trading opportunities. There, investors have to lock up ETH as collateral for extended periods of time, putting it at risk if the exchange gets hacked, and they don’t benefit from shared liquidity like dYdX will.

It also could compete for crypto haters with the CBOE that now offers Bitcoin futures and margin trading, though it doesn’t handle Ethereum yet. Juliano hopes that since dYdX’s protocol can mint short tokens for other ERC20 tokens, you could bet for or against a certain cryptocurrency relative to the whole crypto market by mixing and matching. dYdX will have to nail the user experience and proper partnerships if it’s going to beat the convenience of centralized exchanges and the institutional futures market.

If all goes well, dYdX wants to move into offering options or swaps. “Those derivatives are more often traded by sophisticated traders. We don’t think there are too many traders like that in the market right now,” Juliano explains. “The other types of derivatives that we’ll move to in the future will be really big once the market matures.” That “once the market matures” refrain is one sung by plenty of blockchain projects. The question is who’ll survive long enough to see that future, if it ever arrives.

[Featured Image via Nuzu and Bryce Durbin]

Lemonade, the New York-based insurance platform, looks set to drop the lawsuit it filed against German company ONE Insurance, its parent company Wefox, and Wefox founder Julian Teicke.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court Southern District of NY, alleged that Wefox reverse engineered Lemonade to create ONE, infringed Lemonade’s intellectual property, violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and breached the contract in Lemonade’s terms of service.

At the time of the filing, a statement issued on behalf for Wefox said the allegations had no merit and “ultimately appear to be an attempt to disrupt our business rather than a serious dispute,” dubbing Lemonade’s concerns as meritless. “We intend to defend ourselves vigorously. This lawsuit appears to be an attempt to bait the media into covering a non-issue,” concluded the statement.

However, in a slightly bizarre turn of events, Wefox founder Teicke has taken to his personal LinkedIn profile to post what appears to be a mea culpa of sorts — also revealing that he and Lemonade founder Daniel Schreiber recently met in person to discuss Lemonade’s lawsuit against ONE Insurance (as adults are supposed to do).

Posted to LinkedIn on the 2nd of August, Teicke writes: “Here’s the bottom line: Lemonade created something truly revolutionary, and their innovation inspired many in our industry – including myself. There’s a fine line between inspiration and imitation, and we acknowledge that Lemonade’s perspective is that we crossed it in some parts”.

Continues Teicke:

“While ONE has many unique features, I’m committed to addressing this concern of Lemonade. To that end, ONE will immediately undertake a redesign of elements in the app, website and marketing material that are similar to Lemonade. I am looking forward to putting this conflict aside and to exploring possibilities for cooperation in the future”.

In response, Schreiber shared Teicke’s post on his own LinkedIn profile, and thanked him for a “very amicable and constructive meeting” and for committing to remedy the issues raised in the complaint. He also said he is “committed to dropping the lawsuit once all these changes are implemented”.

I have reached out Teicke, who said he was unable to comment, and to Schreiber, who declined to comment on record. If and when the lawsuit is dropped, which I understand could be within a matter of a couple of weeks, we’ll endeavour to update our reporting. As always, watch this space.

As employers duke it out over hiring the best possible candidates, especially ones coming out of school, they are starting to get a little bit more creative with their incentive packages — and that includes offering an option for paying down student debt.

Goodly is a new startup that’s looking to help those employers offer that as a benefit. Smaller companies without the resources to create complicated incentive packages especially need tools that help shortcut the process of offering those benefits. It’s following a similar playbook of companies looking to make it easier to get the tools they need in place and focus more on the set of products that are going to make it an actually differentiated company. Goodly is launching out of Y Combinator’s summer class this year.

“We found it to be a really great tool for recruiting and retaining,” co-founder Gregory Poulin said. “When people hear student loan benefits, they instantly think it’s very expensive. You can offer student loan benefits starting $25 to $50 per employee per month, up to $200. Our system is completely flexible. You can offer any company size for any budget. You can offer meaningful benefit for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day. For the average borrower, when they have an employer contributing an extra $100 per months, it could help your average employee get out of debt almost a decade faster.”

There are more common benefits like stock packages, 401(k) matches, insurance, better time off policies, or others along those lines. But as student debt increasingly becomes a factor in a candidate’s decision on where they work, it’s another way that companies — ones without larger compensation packages or very aggressive recruiting operations like, say, Google or Facebook — can still get the attention and interest of good candidates coming out of school. Like other companies (like Human Interest for 401(k)s, for example), the goal is to make it easy to get started and maintain the whole process.

Employees connect their student loans to Goodly, which takes a few minutes to verify them before setting up the contribution plan. Goodly integrates with payroll operations and gives companies and employees a pretty flexible way to set their spending schedule. Then, it goes from there, without the employees having to manage it on a per-period basis. While it might have the robust tax incentives in place like a retirement plan, it’s still a way to help companies offer some way of showing employees that they’re invested in their employees’ future success, which is another way that those companies might be able to retain that talent. Goodly then brings back detailed reports on the company’s implementation to help it better understand whether the policies are working for their employees.

It’s certainly an area that’s attracted interest — and funding — from a number of startups like Tuition.io which look to help employers get a little more creative about their benefits. Much like contributions to retirement plans, it’s another way to offer employees a way to invest in their future by reducing the financial stress they have through some of their biggest financial decisions like where to go for college. Poulin also said it’s a way to help discover a more diverse talent pool as it surfaces up underrepresented parts of the population that are acutely dealing with student debt as a factor in their decision-making.

Sramana Mitra: My question also is, what is the value proposition versus direct deposit? Jeremy Almond: In the US, you have effectively three ways to get paid if you’re a business. All three of these...

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Portal founder Jonathan Swerdlin is just the latest media pundit to point to advertising as the root cause of the industry’s problems. But he’s not content to diagnose the illness — he thinks he’s created a cure.

“Digital media has become toxic, in part, because of advertising,” Swerdlin said. “The unmet and unarticulated need is a peer-to-peer economy where you’re rewarded for creating value, rather than a quantity model” where a publisher or creator’s main economic incentive is to attract as many eyeballs as possible.

Naturally, that’s what Swerdlin is trying to offer in Portal. When you open the app, you follow creators and topics that interest you, then get presented with a feed of videos. During or after the video, you can tip the creator in Portal coins — the current price is 1 cent per coin, and individual payments can be anything from 10 to 10,000 coins.

This changes the equation for creators. If you’re monetizing a video with ads, 1,000 views would represent a negligible amount of ad revenue — but if 1,000 people like the video and are willing to pay a dollar, then then you’re starting to talk about real money.

Conversely, there’s no financial incentive to post a video on Portal that gets a million views if everyone’s going to think it’s a complete waste of their time.

Swerdlin said removing advertising changes the incentives for Portal too, because the startup doesn’t benefit from promoting content just because it’ll get clicks.

In fact, he said Portal will pretty allow users to post anything, as long as it doesn’t violate community standards around things like pornography and hate speech. And it presents a purely reverse chronological feed of content based on what you follow — the question of surfacing interesting content in the feed will probably get more complicated as more users join the platform, but Swerdlin argued, “We don’t need algorithms to solve feed problems.”

“We’re not going to bury things that are not advertiser-friendly,” he added. “It’s a very different game. Portal is very much about people having a place to freely express themselves and not worry about being buried by an algorithm.”

Swerdlin acknowledged that these aren’t entirely new ideas or strategies — micropayments have been touted as a solution to media monetization for years, and he pointed to services like Netflix and Medium as offering models that help creators “break free of advertising.”

At the same time, Swerdlin said Portal’s approach to payments is truly offers “no friction” — it’s uses your App Store payment info, so you don’t even need to enter your credit information. He also said that by creating an app for content (rather than just a micropayment platform that plugs into existing websites), Portal can truly solving the problem by offering a media environment that’s “safe, it’s a healthy media diet, as opposed ot the juunk food.”

Currently, Portal’s content is limited to videos, but those videos cover a range of topics and genres like advice (personal- and business-related), comedy, music and personal vlogging. Over time, Swerdlin wants to expand to other content formats.

You also need an invite code to access the app, but if you want to try it out, feel free to use mine: “anthonyha”. (Don’t blame me; I didn’t choose it.)

Go to Google Maps and zoom out. Halfway out, the map’s perspective changes from a traditional flat map view to an interactive globe. Zoom all the way out and the Earth is presented as a globe with landmasses of the appropriate size. Greenland is no longer the size of Africa and all is right with the world.

On flat maps, it’s impossible to represent land mass size on a relative scale. Objects in the north and south become distorted as the flat map compensates for the flattening of the globe. This is most evident in the commonly used Mercator projections that properly represents the size of land around the equator but super-sizes land in the Arctic and Antarctic.

Now, when Google Maps is used on Desktop, users will see the appropriate size of land masses. The update is great but I have yet to find the giant ice wall that’s preventing all of life from sliding off the side of the flat earth and onto the back of the giant turtle we’re riding through the vast emptiness of space.

Epic Games continues to spread the love… to consumers, at least.

Following the launches of Fortnite Battle Royale on iOS earlier this year and Fortnite for the Nintendo Switch earlier this summer, Epic Games is now confirming that the Android version of the game will be available exclusively through the Fortnite website.

Users can visit Fortnite.com and download the Fortnite Launcher, which will then allow them to load Fortnite Battle Royale onto their devices.

When asked why Epic would choose to distribute the game via their own website instead the more official channel of the Google Play Store, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney told TechCrunch in an email:

On open platforms like PC, Mac, and Android, Epic’s goal is to bring its games directly to customers. We believe gamers will benefit from competition among software sources on Android. Competition among services gives consumers lots of great choices and enables the best to succeed based on merit.

Of course, Sweeney didn’t mention the 30 percent fee that goes to Google each time a user makes an in-app purchase, but it’s hard to imagine that’s not a factor in the decision.

In-game purchases are a huge source of revenue for Epic. After all, Fortnite Battle Royale is still a free download across all platforms. That said, Epic Games has already made more than $1 billion on the game through in-game purchases alone. For context on that 30 percent fee, Epic Games is making approximately $2 million per day as of July, according to Sensor Tower.

Using a virtual currency called V-Bucks, players can buy skins, pick axes, gliders and emotes, none of which offer a competitive advantage. Epic declined to clarify if mobile users have the same purchasing behavior as PC and console players. But if they do on Android, Epic will make 100 percent of the revenue.

Epic Games also declined to give an exact date for the launch, still simply saying that the game will launch this “summer.”

That said, you can expect to see the same game, and the same cross-play compatibility, on the Android version of Fortnite Battle Royale when it launches.

One potential drawback to the launch will be security. As Android Police points out, loads of people will enable unknown sources in settings, forgetting to turn it off after, which could end up being a problem down the line.

We’ll be sure to let you know more specific information around the launch date and supported devices as soon as we hear more from Epic Games.

Stack Overflow and other various sites and tools have made it easy to Google search for solutions — or code snippets — to the easier parts of putting together an app or program for developers, but Aidan Cunniffe wants to take that one automated step further.

That’s the premise behind Optic, which gives developers a way to grab very common coding use cases that they can drop right into their code. It works by finding the sort of routine additions developers might need, like how to create a form that will add a user to a database, as well as all the ancillary parts that come with that like tests. Optic works within a developer’s IDE, so they don’t have to look externally for the code they need, which is compiled together from online sources. Right now it works for JavaScript, with Python next on the docket. Optic is coming out of Y Combinator’s summer 2018 class.

“The biggest problems are when people have a bunch of systems that have to talk together,” Cunniffe siad. “Optic’s really good at syncing that code. If you change something on the backend, it’ll update the front end. That’s a big problem that anyone who develops anything complex. We generate a lot of unit tests for people, speed up the development of new features, and larger companies are using us as an advanced linter to ensure developers write code that conforms to their standards.”

Optic works as a little Clippy-like object within an IDE, where developers can search for things to add to a slice of code. The processing is all done locally, and the project itself is open source with a free version (in addition to a paid version for larger teams). While there are a number of other code-generating tools, Cunniffe says Optic competes primarily with those kinds of Google searches for Stack Overflow results, and one of the primary reasons it’s better is that any changes on any part of the code will propagate through existing code throughout a system.

“Code generators had been around for a long time,” Cunniffe said. “There’s a ton of tradeoffs to tools that existed, people wanted stuff that was useful but didn’t change their workflow. They could also only be used once, so there’s not as much utility, and there wasn’t work to maintain the code. [Code search engines] are really useful, but the biggest drawback they have is it’s not your code. What sets us apart is it’ll help you generate those snippets but it’ll do that in a smart way. All the args and parameters are variables in your own code.”

Analysts expect the global e-commerce payment market to reach $135 billion by 2022. A huge beneficiary of this trend is Billion Dollar Unicorn Stripe, which facilitates payments over the Internet....

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