SuperAwesome, the “kidtech” startup valued now at over $100 million, is today launching its own alternative to YouTube’s embedded video player. The technology is aimed at kids publishers – not consumers directly – and is part of the company’s larger platform of kid-safe technology. This includes tools for social engagement, parental controls, advertising, authentication, and more, all specifically designed for companies catering to kids.

The launch comes at a key time in the industry, as YouTube is now the subject of a class-action lawsuit over children’s privacy, and recently had an FTC complaint filed against it by 23 advocacy groups. The complaint says YouTube has been collecting data on children’s viewing patterns for years, in violation of federal law – meaning COPPA, aka the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

The new player provided by SuperAwesome gives kids brands another choice amid all these questions over YouTube and its respect for children’s privacy.

Explains the company, the player does not capture data on children, nor does it breach regulations like COPPA (U.S.) or GDPR-K (E.U.).

The opportunity for SuperAwesome is fairly sizable here. Already, the company counts among its customer base over 190 kids’ brands like Crayola, Topps, Spin Master, Warner Bros., Hasbro, Disney, Roald Dahl, Mattel, Dreamworks, Penguin, and others. These companies use SuperAwesome’s platform and its tools for socially engaging, advertising and connecting with their under-13 audience.

“The demand for [the video player] has come directly from our customers and the player has been in beta testing for a while,” SuperAwesome CEO Dylan Collins tells TechCrunch.

As with its other tools, the kids’ publishers will be able to embed the new player within their own websites and apps, and then manage all their social content – including video – from SuperAwesome’s “PopJam” dashboard.

“To give you a sense of scale, the PopJam Connect platform is enabling tens of millions of kid-safe social engagements every month,” Collins adds.

The platform itself offers a set of basic tools for free, but larger companies pay for premium upgrades on a SaaS (software-as-a-service) basis. Because it’s working with so many big brands, SuperAwesome is now turning a profit. It’s expecting to grow 100 percent this year to reach a revenue run rate of $50 million, it recently said.

And it also just added Tim Weller, chairman of Trustpilot and Taptica, as its Chairman a few months ago, and announced former Upworthy CRO, Ben Zagorski as its North American Chief Revenue Officer.

SuperAwesome’s platform today is addressing an underserved audience: kids brands that need to abide by federal and international regulations around children’s privacy, but have had limited options in terms of technology that helps them do so.

That was the case with video in particular – there hasn’t really been a viable alternative to YouTube’s player that suits kids publishers’ needs.

“There are over 170,000 children going online for the first time every day and the kidtech ecosystem is growing equally quickly to make the broader internet compatible with this new audience,” noted SuperAwesome CTO Joshua Wohle in a statement about the player’s launch. “Many people misinterpreted children’s appearance on the internet as a temporary blip, whereas in reality it is a structural shift that is changing the landscape,” he said.

Sramana Mitra: I’ll tell you where I am a little bit uncomfortable with what you’re saying. I don’t feel a token angle of it. Your point is well-taken that somebody with a proven business model is a...

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Today’s 408th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, July 26, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!

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Today’s 408th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, July 26, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Recently Linux provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) reported its first quarter results. While the quarter’s performance outpaced market expectations, its outlook was disappointing, sending its stock...

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Spotify is racing to sign up users before Apple Music can, even at the expense of its finances. Spotify’s second quarter as a public company saw mixed performance compared to estimates as it reached 83 million paid subscribers, up 40 percent year-over-year and up 8 million from its 75 million count last quarter. Spotify now has 180 million total users, coming in at the high end of its guidance with a 5.9 percent quarter-over-quarter growth rate, though it added fewer users than last quarter.

But Spotify saw trouble with its finances. The company had €1.27 billion ($1.49 billion) in revenue, up 26 percent year-over-year and in line with estimates, but it missed big on EPS, where it saw a loss of -€2.20 compared to estimates of -€0.68. Spotify saw a net loss of €394 million and operating loss of €91 million this quarter, showing it’s still a ways off from becoming profitable under the heavy strain of its high royalty payments to record labels and artists. Spotify shares were down about 0.8 percent in pre-trading hours.

For comparison, Apple Music has 40 million subscribers, though is rumored to now possibly have more in the U.S. than Spotify. Spotify now says it has 31 percent of its subscribers, or 25 million, in North America as a whole.

Forecasts for Q3 see the company expecting 188 to 193 million users and 85 to 88 million paid subscribers, with €1.2 billion to €1.4 billion in revenue. During the earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek explained that it’s not a record label, “nor do we have any interest in becoming a label,” dispelling myths that it was becoming one because it licensed music directly from artists who own their own rights. Ek said these deals were not exclusive.

Instead, Ek said that Spotify’s strategy to grow its margin beyond what’s allowed by its royalty rates is to grow the number of creators on its platform, the number of creators that use its audience management and promotion tools and the number of creators that pay for those tools. Essentially, Spotify has to use its massive audience across paid and ad-supported tiers to lure artists to pay it for help reaching them instead of the other way around.

As for podcasts, where Spotify may not have to pay as much to creators, Ek said “it’s growing really, really fast” but that it was unclear exactly how big the opportunity is long-term.

Spotify’s average revenue per user also dropped 12 percent this quarter, because it used promotions like a $13 bundled subscription with Hulu to attract more subscribers. Still, that could be a smart bet for Spotify long-term. Music isn’t going anywhere, so whichever streaming service can lock in subscribers now by gathering personalization data and getting them to build playlists could earn monthly fees from them long into the future.

Snap40, a Scottish startup that has developed an AI-enabled wearable device to help health professionals monitor patients either on the hospital ward or at home, has raised $8 million in seed funding. The round is led by ADV, with participation from MMC Ventures, and brings total funding to $10 million.

Originally launched as a clinical pilot in August 2016, the Snap40 hardware and software platform initially set out to enable hospitals to monitor patients whose health is at risk of rapidly deteriorating while on ward, but has since expanded to increasingly focus on what happens after a patient is discharged, in addition to monitoring clinical trials.

Claiming to have the same accuracy as ICU monitoring, the wearable device captures oxygen saturation, respiration rate, pulse rate, temperature, movement and posture. In addition to onboard sensors, the Snap40 platform offers integrations with other devices e.g. a BP cuff, weighing scales, a glucose monitor. It then feeds this real-time data to the cloud where it is analysed by the company’s proprietary algorithms to identify if a patient’s health is at risk and alert a physician proactively.

In a call with Snap40 co-founder and CEO Christopher McCann he explained that where a patient has left hospital after an acute illness or has a long-term health condition, this can ultimately help to reduce hospital re-admission. In more extreme cases, it can also directly save lives.

Let’s take cardiac arrest, for example. McCann cites a report published by the U.K. National Confidential Enquiry into Patient Outcome and Death (NCEPOD) in 2012 that found physiological instability (e.g. elevation of respiration rate or a decrease in blood pressure) was present six hours prior to arrest in 62 percent of patients and twelve hours prior to arrest in 47 percent. Conversely, that instability had not been picked up on in 36 percent of cases where earlier recognition could have improved outcomes.

As another example, Sepsis, which McCann says is the number one cause of hospital readmission in the U.S., can be detected via an elevation in temperature, respiration rate or pulse rate and a drop in blood pressure or oxygen saturation. But in about 95 percent of patients in hospital, those measurements are only collected every 4 or 8 hours. And once the patient goes home, they are never collected.

“We give the physician access to both real-time and historical, trending data for the patient all on their mobile phone,” McCann says. “We wanted to create an experience where they could pull their phone out of their pocket and instantly pull up everything on a patient and allow them to see both acute changes e.g. now and long-term chronic changes over time”.

One interesting aspect of the Snap40 device is that it captures the rawest data possible (ie the actual waveforms), leaving the conversion of this data into tangible vital signs, such as respiration or pulse rate, to the company’s own software and machine learning models running in the cloud. This means that vital sign generation is easily upgradable as it is further refined and new correlations are derived from the large amount of historical data the company is amassing.

“We use non-invasive sensors to monitor the patient, transmitting the raw signal waveforms to our cloud platform, all of which we store for analysis,” says McCann. “We then use vital-sign specific machine learning models to generate each vital sign. Because we have the raw signal waveforms, this also means we can build and train new models and release new vital signs as software updates — this is quite like the Tesla model where they ship new software updates to their car that lets the car go faster”.

While Snap40’s use of machine learning/AI is currently limited to automating existing, repeatable well-defined tasks (e.g. the robust collection and generation of vital signs), moving forward the company wants to use AI to do things that aren’t humanly possible. For example, it is using historical data to build models that can predict patient deterioration based on what’s happened before across many thousands of patients.

McCann says the company is excited by the idea of being able to predict the likelihood of someone with lung disease developing an acute exacerbation of their condition. “If we can do this, with high sensitivity/specificity, then we can wrap this into a digital therapeutic, otherwise known as software as a drug… This is a whole new challenge, from a regulatory, technological and societal perspective”.

(A “digital therapeutic” is defined as software that is scientifically proven to provide some kind of positive change in someone’s health condition, either by seeking to modify the patient’s behaviour e.g. more exercise or more rest etc., or direct some other call to action, such as using a conventional device or drug in a specific way to elicit a measurable change.)

Meanwhile, Snap40 plans to use the new funding to more than double its headcount by the end of 2018, hiring in all areas of the business. The company has an office in New York and its headquarters are in Edinburgh, Scotland. Its target customer is mainly healthcare providers in the U.S., although the startup also works with NHS Trusts in England.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I understood that. How do you work with board members? Is it a Board that has a dashboard about that company’s risk that you’re providing? Tom Turner: What we often see...

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“Augmented reality for enterprise” is the sort of phrase that surely hits all of the right neurological pleasure centers for VCs. No surprise, then, that Scandit just raised a $30 million Series B, in a round led by GV (née Google Ventures) and NGP Capital. That joins a previous $13 million raise for the Zurich-based startup.

We highlighted the company back in early 2017. At the time, its mission was focused on focused on weaning enterprises off of pricey proprietary scanning hardware — instead, its technology leveraged standard smartphones with custom software on top. AR has also always been a key part of the Scandit picture.

The company has focused on the Microsoft Hololens and other wearable displays as ways to help streamline warehouses. “A number of data capture use cases for HoloLens come to mind,” the company wrote in a 2016 blog post. “For example, a warehouse associate with a HoloLens headset could be directed with virtual markers to the correct items. They could then use the built-in HoloLens camera for hands-free scanning. HoloLens could also indicate where an item should be placed once it is scanned, or deliver additional information about scanned objects.”

This latest round will go toward growing the company globally and introducing its technology across various mobile platforms or “any camera-equipped device,” as it puts it in a press release tied to the news.

“This new funding will enable us to keep up our rapid growth, but also, looking at the bigger picture,” says CEO Samuel Mueller, “it’s going to increase the overall adoption of mobile computer vision and augmented reality in the enterprise, which will help to streamline operations and lead to cost savings.”

The pre-social media phenomenon that was early 2000s American Idol might be a weird place to spend a lot of focus when it comes to thinking about the future. But it’s also worth noting how little these types of shows adapted to build themselves into the fabric of live social commentary. Twitter has offered a nice second screen for thirsty users, but what would reality TV look like if it was built for the smartphone?

The team behind FameGame is aiming to answer these very fascinating/worrying questions with their new app which envisions the rebirth of live reality TV on your smartphone. The company’s first offering seems to be a mix of American Idol, Musical.ly and HQ Trivia with young users vying to flex their talents and social media prowess to win cash and glory.

The startup sees live gamified engagement as a social outlet that existing apps and platforms aren’t making much of a dent in. FameGame CEO Alexandra Botez grew interested in the concept after getting into live-streaming herself playing chess on Twitch and seeing the potential of bringing users closer to less gaming-focused verticals.

“We thought that the interactivity of live gaming could also be applied to make conventional TV more entertaining,” Botez tells TechCrunch. “We think Musical.ly and Instagram are pretty big so it’s hard for them to change their infrastructure in such a way that they make the type of immersive experience that we’ve created with FameGame.”

FameGame plays the game of fame by getting users to submit self-shot smartphone videos of their talents. The challenges differ by week but one contest may be focused on dance skills while another may be focused on lip-syncing. After an initial submission period, users can check out what’s been uploaded and vote for their favorites which will be included in a live show that’s hosted at 5:00 PM PT every day.

Cash prizes are at stake, but the real emphasis seems to be on social validation. Winners will also get a shoutout from a Musical.ly “celebrity” user and a big emphasis is put on the host shouting out users and their handles to drive attention their way. The whole design seems to take some pretty clear, erm, inspiration from HQ Trivia but the live voting component adds a more impactful community vibe to it though once users see they aren’t included amongst the finalists, it might be hard to hold onto viewers.

The startup’s efforts are going to start with a focus on the crowd that has helped catapult apps like Instagram and Musical.ly to rabid success. “We decided to go with young teenage girls because they are really obsessed with becoming famous on social media and they spend a lot of time on Musical.ly posting videos and not necessarily getting the gratification that they might want,” CTO Ruben Mayer-Hirshfeld tells me.

There are certainly some unique challenges with catering to such a young user base, especially from a safety standpoint. The company is going to curate the few videos that go into the live show, but there isn’t any screening happening in between user submission and user voting aside from a reporting button so the burden is ultimately put on a young user base to decide what crosses the line.

FameGame is just the start for the company’s ambitions. Botez tells me that there are a number of different TV show formats that seem ripe for the live social mobile elements, but that the main focus is getting excited teens on FameGame right now and seeing whether the format can catch steam and move beyond what’s out there already.

Y Combinator backed Zbiotics has spend two years developing what they’re billing as the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic. The startup’s initial product isn’t exactly world-changing but it might just save your day — given they’ve invented an elixir of ‘next day’ life: Aka a hangover cure.

Although you actually have to take it before — or, well, during — drinking rather than waiting until the moment of regretful misery when you wake up.

How have they done this? For their first product they’ve bioengineered probiotic bacteria to produce more of the enzyme that the body naturally uses to break down a toxic chemical byproduct of alcohol which is in turn responsible for people feeling awful after too many alcoholic drinks. So you could say they’re hoping to put probiotics on steroids. (NB: No actual steroids are involved, obviously.)

While probiotics themselves aren’t at all new, having been in the human diet for thousands of years — with wide acceptance that certain strains of these live ‘friendly’ bacteria/microorganisms can be beneficial for things like human gut health — the team’s approach of using gene editing techniques (specifically fiddling with the bacteria’s DNA) to enhance what a probiotic can deliver to the person who’s ingested it is the novel thing here.

So new they haven’t yet conducted the placebo controlled, peer-reviewed clinical trials that will ultimately be necessary to back up the efficacy claims they’re making for their biotech enhanced hangover cure.

Nor are they therefore in a position to defend their forthcoming hangover elixir from accusations of supplementary ‘snake oil’ — and, well, the supplement industry as a whole often has that charge leveled at it. And yet people keep buying and popping its pills. (Therein lies the temple rub, vitamin potion and wellness capsule. And, well, also the investor appetite for carving a fresh chunk out of a very large pie.)

Zbiotics co-founders Zack Abbott and Stephen Lamb freely admit it’s going to be a challenge to stand out — and be considered credible amid all this, er, goop noise.

“This consumer space is rife with pseudo science,” agrees Abbott, who has a PhD in microbiology and immunology from the University of Michigan. “Everybody is banging the drum of real science. And so we have a huge challenge to differentiate ourselves. And really convince the consumer that we’ve built something specific.

“And it really is a first effort to invent a product to specifically address their problem, as opposed to grabbing vitamins off a shelf, putting them in a bottle and labelling it.”

“There are some companies… [that] address dehydration [for hangovers]; that’s not enough. There are other companies they just put [vitamins] into a bottle, that’s not enough. There’s so much noise out there. How do we break through that? It could take some time,” admits Lamb. “And it could take a lot of work.”

Tested in vitro — and on birthday beers

At this pre-launch stage, the founders say they’ve tested their beefed up probiotic on themselves — and will go so far as to say they’ve seen “promising results”.

“I had the fortune of having the final prototype built just a week or two before my birthday and so I ended up trying it out for my birthday and it was great,” adds Abbott.

They are also keen to say they don’t want to encourage irresponsible drinking. So don’t expect their future marketing to talk about ‘a biotech license for your next bender’. Product pricing is tbc but they say they’re aiming for widely affordable, rather than lux or overly premium.

With hangover results that could speak for themselves, their hope is that people will feel confident enough to have a pop and see whether the idea of a biotech enhanced probiotic that’s pumping out extra alcohol-metabolizing enzymes stands up to several pints of lager and a few chasers (or not).

Though — when asked — they do say they also want to carry out clinical trials to glean data on the efficacy of their hangover cure.

“We are a very science-first company and so we don’t want to be making any claims about anything that we don’t have data to back up,” says Abbott.

“At this point… we’ve done significant testing in a test tube, in vitro, and shown that the bacteria we’ve built do perform the function that they’re supposed to perform. Which is to break down acetaldehyde. But we can’t make further health claims until we do clinical trials. And we in the process of drafting up a protocol for a human clinical study with one of our scientific advisors — Dr Joris Verster — a world expert in academic hangover research. But in the meantime we can’t make those claims until we have that.”

They are also planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign later this year — in order to start making some of their own noise and trying to drum up interest and, well, willing guinea pigs.

Though they are also adamant the product is entirely safe. It’s just the efficacy vs hangover misery that’s yet to be stood up in human clinical trials.

While a hangover cure might seem a trivial problem to focus high tech bioengineering effort on, they say the unmissable fact of a hangover — or indeed the lack of one — was one of the reasons why they selected such an “everyday problem” for the first application of their technique vs going for a more fuzzy (and, well forgiving on the efficacy front) generic goal like ‘wellness’. Or indeed targeting an issue where a ‘cure’ is pretty subjective and hard to quantify (like anti-aging).

Absolutely no one is going to mistake a hangover for feeling great. Though of course the power of the placebo effect working its psychological magic cannot be ruled out — not until they’ve clinically tested their stuff against it in robust trials.

On the other hand, even if it ends up that a placebo effect is what’s making people feel better, given that the target problem is (just) a hangover there aren’t likely to be too many consumer complaints and cries for money back.

“One of the reasons why we chose this use-case was that it would allow people to try it and feel the advocacy for themselves. That was very important,” says Abbott. “It’s something you can feel the results of. So that was really important. Having a visceral read-out of efficacy. People can experience the product working for themselves.”

The other reason for choosing a hangover cure was more practical: They needed a problem that could be solved with an enzyme and therefore which could be helped by genetically engineering bacteria to produce more of the sought for substance.

“The whole point here is that we’ve engineered a bacteria to express an enzyme specifically that can solve a problem,” he explains. “Enzymes are these really powerful complex molecules that are not easy to deliver to people. So it has to be a problem that you can solve with an enzyme.

“There has to be a nice fit with the technology. So we look for things where parts of the body where bacteria has access to you; you have a lot of bacteria in your gut, in your skin, in your mouth, in your nose… places were we can deliver bacteria and they can express these enzymes to solve problems of everyday health.”

“We start with probiotics that have an extremely good safety profile, have been used in regular food by humans for centuries. And we identify those because we know that they’re going to be safe, and we know that they’re going to be able to interact with your body in the way that we want them to. And then we engineer those bacteria as oppose to choosing something that your body may never have seen before,” adds Lamb, who brings prior experience helping food companies enter new markets to the startup.

He says they’ve been safety testing their prototype probiotic for the past year and change at this point — “making sure that this is ready for market before we actually launch anything”.

“We are not going to launch any kind of product until it’s completely safety tested according to every regulatory framework here in the U.S. — and we’re totally comfortable with that,” he adds emphatically.

They do also intend to move beyond hangover cures, with the plan being to develop additional probiotics that target other use-cases. And say they’ve been building a gene editing platform that’s flexible for that purpose. Though they’re not disclosing exactly what else they’re working on or eyeing up — wanting to keep that powder dry for now.

“I spent over a year building the first product, and the lion’s share of that time was spent making sort of a genetic platform… that was adaptable to multiple use-cases,” says Abbott. “At first I just engineered the bacteria to be able to make a lot of enzyme generally. Whatever enzyme I put into the platform. And so the first enzyme I put in was to break down acetaldehydes. That being said it could be easily switched out for an enzyme to break down… a different toxin that your body has to deal with. So the platform is very adaptable and it was designed to be that way.”

“That being said there are certain use-cases we’re really excited about that may require additional optimization techniques in order to make them work specifically for that use-case. So, generally speaking, some may require more work than others but the platform we started with gives us a good launch pad,” he adds.

As well as YC’s standard startup deal, the team has raised an additional $2.8M in seed funding this year for R&D and the initial product roadmap. They’re hoping the forthcoming crowdfunding campaign will give them the additional lift to ship the consumer product into the US market.

Investors in the seed round aren’t being disclosed at this stage. Abbott also notes that he previously got a small amount of pre-seed funding, early on, to fund building the prototype.

It’s fair to say that biotech as an investment space isn’t a bet for every investor — given product development risks, timeframes and perhaps also some of the deflated hype of past years. Which perhaps explains why Zbiotics investors aren’t ready to shout all about it just yet. Even if they’re feeling great about not having a hangover.

“We’ve found different levels of success with different investors,” agrees Lamb. “Where we’ve found the most success is in investors who see the vision for the technology and understand it as something that is and can be truly innovative relative to what’s on the market today. So probiotics themselves — traditional probiotics —  are a $40BN industry, and the fact is that most of those probiotics don’t do anything or are inconsistent at best. So we found investors who have a mindset where they can see how a novel probiotic, something that actually is engineered to work and is based in a high level of biotech is something that can really disrupt that area. And that may or may not be traditional biotech investors. Oftentimes it’s investors who are really looking to push the envelope.

“We definitely had to find the right investor and the traditional biotech investor often is looking for different things than we had to offer,” adds Abbott. “And different pathways — more traditional pathways. We’re going not conventionally I think with bringing this hard biotech to market quickly. So it definitely is threading the needle and finding the right investors.”

Nirav Tolia, CEO of Nextdoor, is stepping down from his role, Recode reports. For those unfamiliar with the company, Nextdoor is like a social network for your neighborhood. Though, over the years, there has been controversy around Nextdoor’s role in promoting racial profiling. Nextdoor later rolled out a new tool to address some of the issues around racial profiling.

In an email sent to the team today, Tolia said he’s starting to look for his replacement and once that happens, he will move into an active chairman role on the board, according to Recode.

Here’s a nugget from the email, obtained by Recode:

Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed.

Nextdoor raised $75 million at a $1.5 billion valuation last December, followed by an expansion into France in January.

Update: The company has since posted on its blog the full email:

Just over eight years ago, I was blessed to be part of a group of seven friends who conceived of the idea behind Nextdoor. We were a tight-knit, ambitious group of co-founders who believed deeply in the power of community and dedicated ourselves to helping neighbors everywhere create stronger, safer, happier places to call home.

It is amazing to see how this simple but powerful mission has inspired the company that Nextdoor is today. That first year, we worked tirelessly to convince 176 neighborhoods to adopt our platform. Since then, we have grown more than 1000X – we now serve over 200,000 neighborhoods across five countries – including nearly 90% of all neighborhoods in the U.S.

All of this has been made possible by the passion and hard work of each of our employees. Their dedication and commitment energizes me every single day. I’ve never been more excited about our team, including our recent additions of Chief Financial Officer and Chief Legal Counsel. It has been the honor of a lifetime to lead this company as CEO.

Yet as Nextdoor evolves, the role of the CEO needs to evolve as well. The size of our footprint is growing larger and our organization is growing more complex. The time is right to find the next CEO for Nextdoor. With our board of directors, I will be leading the search to recruit a proven operator who can take our company to the next level. We will take our time to find the right person, so this process will likely take several months. During that period, I will continue to lead as CEO. When the next CEO is selected, I will become Chair of the Board where I will continue doing whatever I can to help us succeed.

The future is exceptionally bright for Nextdoor. We’ve never been more well-positioned to achieve our potential, both as a business and force for good in the world. Thank you for the last eight years, this has been one of the best experiences of my life. I will always be inspired by the amazing opportunity – and worthy mission – that makes our company truly special.

With gratitude,

Nirav

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy for this company? Greg Borchardt: There are two sides of the business. They started off in the medical device space. They created a consumer product...

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Outvote, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, wants to make grassroots-style campaigning easier and more personal, with the launch of an app that allows people to text their friends with reminders to vote. The idea is to take advantage of people’s willingness to use social sharing to communicate about political issues, while also leveraging the simplicity that comes with tweeting or posting to Facebook and turning that into an actionable reminder that can actually drive people to the polls during critical times.

The startup was founded by Naseem Makiya, a Harvard-educated software engineer with a background in startups, including San Francisco-based Moovweb and Cambridge area’s DataCamp; along with Nadeem Mazen, an MIT grad and interactive designer who once worked with OK GO on one of its viral music videos, and who now owns the Cambridge-based creative agency Nimblebot.

Mazen, who has since moved into an advisory role with Outvote, also has more direct political experience, having run for public office himself. In fact, he learned first-hand how every vote counts, having won his Cambridge City Council position in 2013 by just six votes.

He also attributed his second election win to organizing low propensity, minority and younger voters — plus “really doing a lot of texting and a lot of outreach through my friend networks,” says Mazen.

When Mazen’s time in politics ended, he then helped others get elected using similar means. Later, he and Makiya brought together a group of Harvard and MIT folks to formalize a company around the technology they were using. This became Outvote.

While today there are a lot of tools for voter outreach, many of those operated by well-known organizations, like MoveOn, for example, involve people opting in to receive texts from the group in question. Outvote is different because it’s a tool that helps individual voters reach out to their own personal acquaintances, family and friends.

“The way campaigns are run right now is most of the budget is spent on ads that are really low ROI — they have some effect on persuasion, but less effect on actual voter turnout,” explains Makiya. “With this effort, we’re trying to bring politics back to more of word-of-mouth and conversations between friends,” he says.

The team began working on the technology for Outvote last summer, and officially founded the company early this year.

While individuals are the app’s end users, they’re brought into the app by a campaign.

Users give the app permission to upload their phone’s contacts, which Outvote matches up with registered voter databases. That way, you’ll only be texting those who can actually go vote in your district. When the matching completes, the app has scripts that allow users to just click to text your friends a message from your own phone number.

In other words, it’s no longer a political campaign or organization bugging people to go vote via text — it’s a friend. If your friends have a problem with the unsolicited text, they’ll have to tell you.

The app also uses some sort of basic modeling to figure out who best to text, based on things like past voter history, whether that person tends to vote in the primaries, if they’re a registered Democrat and so on.

Oh, yes, that’s right — this app is built for Democratic campaigns only.

Outvote makes no apologies about the fact that it is a tool designed to help Democrats win back seats across the U.S., both on local and national levels.

“We think it’s really critical that Democrats begin to invest in and promote technology. The right is doing a much better job of investing in some of the niche technology,” says Mazen. “And, obviously, groups like Cambridge Analytica and folks have been, I would say, underhanded, in their use of technology,” he adds. “We have to work twice as hard to be twice as resolute, as a result.”

The company says it has turned down right-leaning independents and Republican campaigns that wanted to use its technology, and is instead piloting with around 50 Democratic campaigns at present. Campaigns will be charged a low monthly fee for using Outvote that will vary depending on their size. However, many of the pilot customers are using Outvote for free at this time.

The goal is to make Outvote far more affordable than the existing mass-texting services that charge as much as 30 cents per person per month, which can cost campaigns hundreds of thousands of dollars at scale. Outvote aims to be around 2 to 5 cents per text, it says.

For now, its focus is on raising awareness about the candidate and their issues, and getting people to the polls. It’s not offering the sort of “call your congressman”-style outreach efforts you’ll find in some other political apps.

Outvote is also partnered with The Movement Cooperative, Represent.Us, Flippable, the DNC, Vote.org and Swing Left, according to its website.

The startup is already reporting some early successes. When used last November, it found millennials contacted through Outvote were twice as likely to vote, while non-millennials were 50 percent more likely to vote. The company doesn’t have the data yet from how it’s been doing in the primaries, but says it’s been getting good feedback from the participating campaigns.

In addition to the Y Combinator backing, Outvote has raised $300,000 in seed funding from 2enable Partners ahead of Demo Day.

Outvote’s app is available on both iOS and Android.

It’s still quite hard to buy physical goods using bitcoins or ethers. Coinbase plans to (partially) solve that issue with a new partnership with WeGift. Coinbase customers in Europe and Australia can now convert their tokens on their Coinbase account into digital gift cards for popular stores.

For instance, you’ll be able to buy gift cards for Uber, Tesco, Google Play, Marks and Spencer and more. The feature is now live in the U.K., Spain, France, Italy, Netherlands and Australia.

While WeGift promises gift cards for dozens of merchants, most of them are restricted to customers based in the U.K. If you live in another country, you’ll only get a handful of options. For instance, in France you can only buy gift cards for Décathlon, Bloom & Wild, Global Hotel Card and Ticketmaster. Coinbase says that it will adding be more retailers in the coming months.

In some cases, WeGift offers you the fiat equivalent of your cryptocurrencies as well as a tiny bonus. For instance, you get £102 in Uber gift cards if you spend the equivalent of £100 in bitcoins.

In the U.S., Coinbase also partnered with Shift for a traditional Visa card. But many European cryptocurrency companies who provided Visa cards had to go back to the drawing board because Visa stopped working Wave Crest Holding — Wave Crest Holding was the card issuer for all European cryptocurrency cards.

Gift cards aren’t as convenient as receiving money on your bank account or a debit card. But they’re a great way to avoid telling your bank that you made money by speculating on cryptocurrencies. Many banks directly report data on their users to local tax authorities. But don’t forget that Coinbase can track all your withdrawal events and notify tax authorities too.

Disclosure: I own small amounts of various cryptocurrencies.

Quantum computing may be a long ways off, but early applications of it aren’t as far off as you might think, according to longtime researcher and ColdQuanta founder Dana Anderson.

The startup creates a device that’s designed to make it easier to start operating quantum computing-like operations on near-term problems like signal processing or time measurement, which is the kind of low-hanging fruit that current technology might enable. Researchers using that approach — a set of atoms where there’s practically no motion — require some mechanism of keeping them from moving, for which some cases involve refrigeration. ColdQuanta’s main product is a set of lasers that’s able to stabilize a set of atoms and allow them to operate with those properties. It’s certainly nowhere close to a server — or even a standard computer — but using this kind of a tool, it might be easier to handle tasks like real-time signal processing. ColdQuanta said today that it has raised $6.75 million in a round led by Maverick Ventures and including Global Frontier Investments.

“If you were to look out the window, and you turned off GPS because it’s a conflict or sunspots, you can ask, ‘can I fly to New York from San Francisco with my eyes closed,'” Anderson said. “The answer is no. These types of applications — real-world applications based on fundamental advances of physics — keeps me thinking, and up at night. Clocks sound pretty boring, and you might ask why do I need something like that. But there’s enormous demand for improvements in time-keeping, whether for high-frequency trading, navigation, guidance, or autonomous vehicles. We see those as early applications.”

The primary aim of ColdQuanta’s hardware is, Andersen says, to create a “neutral” set of atoms that all have identical properties of the ones next to them. It does that by using a set of lasers to bring them to a near standstill — within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero — and then control their properties using lasers. That way, a researcher or team could scale that up to a larger system where they can start finding applications right away. That includes time-keeping, secure communications and others, now that a lot of the primary limitations of the technology have gotten a little more relaxed over time. ColdQuanta’s aim is to be able to do this in a normal, room-temperature situation throughout the environment everywhere else, as well. The lasers are tuned in such a way that a stream of photons hitting each atom slows it down until it’s largely stable (also being held up by another set of lasers to account for gravity).

“Laser technology was unreliable in the early days, that was mostly a time when things weren’t working, and most often it was the laser,” Anderson said. “What ColdQuanta is focused on, now for 11 years, is technology that could be manufactured in large quantities, making reliable, small, and robust equipment. If you looked at the initial quantum gas machine it took a couple of square meters of area on a table plus tons of electrics. Now we’ve made it small enough that there’s one sitting on the ISS. It’s a fairly small package, mostly because integration techniques, improvements in lasers and developing key electronics components have helped us achieve this task.”

There may be an analogy between what’s happened with the emergence of the widespread use of deep learning for a variety of tasks and the early stages of products like ColdQuanta. Deep learning, Andersen said, was the key innovation on the change in a lot of machine learning models, but there were plenty of smaller use cases where it was interesting and useful — even back in the 1990s. Andersen said there will probably be a similar situation going forward as limited quantum computing will find some near-term applications and then exist on a similar timetable as other technological shifts as it waits for the biggest, cheapest, and most powerful use case that demands widespread adoption.

“I see the path we’re going on is very familiar,” Andersen said. “I don’t think the technological challenges we face are improbable. We’ve been through other difficult technology roadmaps before and overcome them. The landscape is very familiar. The timescale of inserting them into real-world problems gets kind of fuzzy when you have to predict so far off, but I think quantum computers will get there. I’m quite convinced there will be modest applications of quantum computers that will show up very soon. Quantum simulation, I have almost no doubt, will find pure science uses and begin to apply to at least in restricted spaces relative to national security and defense.”

In a letter to backers today, Bay Area-based Mayfield Robotics said it was “crushed” to announce that it has ceased manufacturing of its home robot, Kuri. The note finds the Bosch-backed business grappling with an uncertain future, as it pauses all operations and re-evaluates its future.

Launched in 2015, as part of Bosch’s Startup Platform, the company debuted its home robot at CES the following year. It took close to two years, but the company finally began shipping the adorable little robot to backers in late 2017. Kuri also appeared on stage at our robotics event, back in May.

According to the letter, however, Bosch struggled to find good fit for the company in its broader portfolio.

“From the beginning, we have been constantly looking for the best paths to achieve scale and continue to advance our innovative technology,” the company writes. “Typically, startups in the Bosch Startup Platform are integrated into existing Bosch business units, but after extensive review, there was not a business fit within Bosch to support and scale our business.”

Home robotics have, of course, had a famously difficult time finding mainstream success, through a combination of prohibitive pricing (Kuri carried a $700 price tag) and limited functionality. Only the hyper-focused Roomba has managed to effectively buck that trend.

Existing within the larger confines of Bosch likely sheltered the company from some of those harsher realities, but ultimately, corporations have little time for products that don’t play into their larger strategies. Without a support structure, the future remains one giant question mark for the company.

“Creating a robot like Kuri is a massive undertaking,” Mayfield writes. “We don’t know what the coming months will bring. Regardless, we stand firm in our belief that the home robot Renaissance is just beginning, and it’s going to be amazing.”

Riding on a wave of an explosion in the use of machine learning to power, well, just about everything is the emergence of GPUs as one of the go-to methods to handle all the processing for those operations.

But getting access to those GPUs — whether using the cards themselves or possibly through something like AWS — might still be too difficult or too expensive for some companies or research teams. So Davit Buniatyan and his co-founders decided to start Snark AI, which helps companies rent GPUs that aren’t in use across a distributed network of companies that just have them sitting there, rather than through a service like Amazon. While the larger cloud providers offer similar access to GPUs, Buniatyan’s hope is that it’ll be attractive enough to companies and developers to tap a different network if they can lower that barrier to entry. The company is launching out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2018 class.

“We bet on that there will always be a gap between mining and AWS or Google Cloud prices,” Buniatyan said. “If the mining will be [more profitable than the cost of running a GPU], anyone can get into AWS and do mining and be profitable. We’re building a distributed cloud computing platform for clients that can easily access the resources there but are not used.”

The startup works with companies with a lot of spare GPUs that aren’t in use, such as gaming cloud companies or crypto mining companies. Teams that need GPUs for training their machine learning models get access to the raw hardware, while teams that just need those GPUs to handle inference get access to them through a set of APIs. There’s a distinction between the two because they are two sides to machine learning — the former building the model that the latter uses to execute some task, like image or speech recognition. When the GPUs are idle, they run mining to pay the hardware providers, and Snark AI also offers the capability to both mine and run deep learning inference on a piece of hardware simultaneously, Buniatyan said.

Snark AI matches the proper amount of GPU power to whatever a team needs, and then deploys it across a network of distributed idle cards that companies have in various data centers. It’s one way to potentially reduce the cost of that GPU over time, which may be a substantial investment initially but get a return over time while it isn’t in use. If that’s the case, it may also encourage more companies to sign up with a network like this — Snark AI or otherwise — and deploy similar cards.

There’s also an emerging trend of specialized chips that focus on machine learning or inference, which look to reduce the cost, power consumption or space requirements of machine learning tasks. That ecosystem of startups, like Cerebras Systems, Mythic, Graphcore or any of the other well-funded startups, all potentially have a shot at unseating GPUs for machine learning tasks. There’s also the emergence of ASICs, customized chips that are better suited to tasks like crypto mining, which could fracture an ecosystem like this — especially if the larger cloud providers decide to build or deploy something similar (such as Google’s TPU). But this also means that there’s room to potentially create some new interface layer that can snap up all the leftovers for tasks that companies might need, but don’t necessarily need bleeding-edge technology like that from those startups.

There’s always going to be the same argument that was made for Dropbox prior to its significant focus on enterprises and collaboration: the price falls dramatically as it becomes more commoditized. That might be especially true for companies like Amazon and Google, which have already run that playbook, and could leverage their dominance in cloud computing to put a significant amount of pressure on a third-party network like Snark AI. Google also has the ability to build proprietary hardware like the TPU for specialized operations. But Buniatyan said the company’s focus on being able to juggle inference and mining, in addition to keeping that cost low for idle GPUs of companies that are just looking to deploy, should keep it viable, even amid a changing ecosystem that’s focusing on machine learning.