Panda has built the next silly social feature Snapchat and Instagram will want to steal. Today the startup launches its video messaging app that fills the screen with augmented reality effects based on the words you speak. Say “Want to get pizza?” and a 3D pizza slice hovers by your mouth. Say “I wear my sunglasses at night” and suddenly you’re wearing AR shades with a moon hung above your head. Instead of being distracted by having to pick effects out of a menu, they appear in real-time as you chat.

Panda is surprising and delightful. It’s also a bit janky, created by a five person team with under $1 million in funding. Building a video chat app user base from scratch amidst all the competition will be a struggle. But even if Panda isn’t the app to popularize the idea, it’s invented a smart way to enhance visual communication that blends into our natural behavior.

It all started with a trippy vision. Panda’s 18-year-old founder Daniel Singer had built a few failed apps and was working as a product manager at peer-to-peer therapy startup Sensay in LA. When Alaska Airlines bought Virgin, Singer scored a free flight and came to see his buddy Arjun Sethi, an investor at Social Capital in SF. That’s when suddenly “I’m hallucinating that as I’m talking the things I’m saying should appear” he tells me. Sethi dug the idea and agreed to fund a project to build it.

Meanwhile, Singer had spent the last 6 years FaceTiming almost every day. He loved telling stories with his closest friends, yet Apple’s video chat protocol had fallen behind Snapchat and Instagram when it came to creative tools. So a year ago he raised $850,000 from Social Capital and Shrug Capital plus angels like Cyan (Banister) and Secret’s David Byttow. Singer set out to build Panda to combine FaceTime’s live chat with Snapchat’s visual flare triggered by voice.

But it turns out, “video chat is hard” he admits. So his small team settled for letting users send 10-second-max asynchronous video messages. Panda’s iOS app launched today with about 200 different voice activated stickers from footballs to sleepy Zzzzzs to a “&’%!#” censorship bar that covers your mouth when you swear. Tap them and they disappear, and soon you’ll be able to reposition them. As you trigger the effects for the first time, they go into a trophy case that gamifies voice experimentation.

Panda is fun to play around with yourself even if you aren’t actively messaging friends, which is reminiscent of how teens play with Snapchat face filters without always posting the results. The speech recognition effects will make a lot more sense if Panda can eventually succeed at solving the live video chat tech challenge. One day Singer imagines Panda making money by selling cosmetic effects that make you more attractive or fashionable, or offering sponsored effects so when you say “gym”, the headband that appears on you is Nike branded.

Unfortunately, the app can be a bit buggy and effects don’t always trigger, fooling you that you aren’t saying the right words. And it could be tough convincing buddies to download another messaging app, let alone turn it into a regular habit. Apple is also adding a slew of Memoji personalized avatars and other effects to FaceTime in its upcoming iOS 12.

Panda does advance one of technology’s fundamental pursuits: taking the fuzzy ideas in your head and translating them into meaning for others in clearer ways than just words can offer. It’s the next wave of visual communication that doesn’t require you to break from the conversation.

When I ask why other apps couldn’t just copy the speech stickers, Singer insisted “This has to be voice native.” I firmly disagree, and can easily imagine his whole app becoming just a single filter in Snapchat and Instagram Stories. He eventually acquiesced that “It’s a new reality that bits and pieces of consumer technology get traded around. I wouldn’t be surprised if others think it’s a good idea.”

It’s an uphill battle trying to disrupt today’s social giants, who are quick to seize on any idea that gives them an edge. Facebook rationalizes stealing other apps’ features by prioritizing whatever will engage its billions of users over the pride of its designers. Startups like Panda are effectively becoming outsourced R&D departments.

Still, Panda pledges to forge on (though it might be wise to take a buyout offer). Singer gets that his app won’t cure cancer or “make the world a better place” as HBO’s Silicon Valley has lampooned. “We’re going to make really fun stuff and make them laugh and smile and experience human emotion” he concludes. “At the end of the day, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with building entertainment and delight.”

Jeff provides a window into the remote access world through this interview, a world that is vastly more complex today than it used to be. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to...

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Devices like smartphones ought to help people feel safer, but if you’re in real danger the last thing you want to do is pull out your phone, go to your recent contacts and type out a message asking a friend for help. The Women’s Safety XPRIZE just awarded its $1 million prize to one of dozens of companies attempting to make a safety wearable that’s simple and affordable.

The official challenge was to create a device costing less than $40 that can “autonomously and inconspicuously trigger an emergency alert while transmitting information to a network of community responders, all within 90 seconds.”

Anu and Naveen Jain, the entrepreneurs who funded the competition, emphasized the international and very present danger of sexual assault in particular.

“Women’s safety is not just a third world problem; we face it every day in our own country and on our college campuses,” said Naveen Jain in the press release announcing the winner. “It’s not a red state problem or a blue state problem but a national problem.”

“Safety is a fundamental human right and shouldn’t be considered a luxury for women. It is the foundation in achieving gender equality,” added Anu Jain.

Out of dozens of teams that entered, five finalists were chosen in April: Artemis, Leaf Wearables, Nimb & SafeTrek, Saffron and Soterra. All had some variation on a device that either detected or was manually activated during an attack or stressful situation, alerting friends to one’s location.

The winner was Leaf, which had the advantage of having already shipped a product along these lines, the Safer pendant. Like any other Bluetooth accessory, it keeps in touch with your smartphone wirelessly and when you press the button twice your emergency contacts are alerted to your location and need for help. It also records audio, possibly providing evidence later or a deterrent to harassers who might fear being identified.

It’s not that it’s an original idea — we’ve had various versions of this for some time, and even covered one of the other finalists last year. But they haven’t been quantitatively evaluated or given a platform like this.

“These devices were tested in many conditions by the judges to ensure that they will work in real-life cases where women face dangers today. They were tested in no-connectivity areas, on public transit, in basements of buildings, among other environments,” explained Anu Jain to TechCrunch. “Having the capability to record audio after sending the alert was one of the main differentiators for Leaf Wearables. Their chip design and software was also easy to be integrated into other accessories.”

Hopefully the million dollars and the visibility from winning the prize will help Leaf get its product out to people who need it. The runners-up don’t seem likely to give up on the problem, either. And it seems like the devices will only get better and cheaper — not that this will change the world on its own.

“Prices will come down as the sensor prices drop. In many countries it will require community support to be built,” continued Jain. “These technologies can act as a deterrent but in the long term culture of violence again women must change.”

You can now buy game and concert tickets from teams and musicians within Snapchat, thanks to an integration with SeatGeek .

While Snapchat has started testing e-commerce features in the past few months, SeatGeek says this is the first ticket-buying experience built into the Snapchat app.

The Los Angeles Football Club was the first team to sell tickets through this integration, by posting a Snapchat Story (and a Snapcode on the team website) that allowed users to swipe up to buy tickets to the May 26 game. The full purchase experience takes place without leaving the app.

“We’re always looking to reach our fans in innovative ways, and selling tickets directly to our followers on Snapchat gives us an incredible opportunity to connect with our most dedicated supporters,” said Los Angeles Football Club President and co-owner Tom Penn in the announcement.

SeatGeek co-founder Russ D’Souza said that as “the pipe gets solidified,” you’ll start seeing more Snapchat/SeatGeek ticket sales. He added that this is the kind of integration he was hoping for when the company launched the SeatGeek Open platform a couple of years ago, allowing teams, musicians and other rightsholders to sell tickets directly through SeatGeek. (The platform also supports ticket sales through Facebook.)

“For too long, the legacy ticketing approach has been to make it difficult for teams to sell tickets in lots of places,” D’Souza said. “Teams should want to sell their tickets in as many places as possible.”

And it sounds there are additional deals in the works: “What we’re excited about over the next few months is beating the drumbeat of openness with new partnerships … We want to drive the whole industry forward and create more tangible results that cause the industry to open up.”

Sramana Mitra: There were a few things you said I want to highlight for our audience. They’re very much in tune with the philosophy that we practice in our program, which is Bootstrap first, and then...

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Today’s 401st FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, June 7, 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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Imagine trying to build a business in a country where 90 percent of the water is undrinkable, electricity only works four hours a day and your travel is restricted to an area four times the size of Manhattan, and where in-person meetings are impossible because your partners can’t enter your country to meet you.

And imagine not having access to capital because of your ethnicity (as many POC entrepreneurs across the globe already do).

That’s the situation for Arab-Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs trying to create businesses and access the enormous engine of wealth creation that has transformed Israel into “startup nation.”

The billions of capital and transformational opportunity that building startups affords to economies has largely been denied entrepreneurs in Israel’s Arab community and in Palestine.

However, two organizations in the country and in the violence-stricken Gaza strip are working to provide access. One is Hybrid, an Israeli government-backed initiative out of Nazareth that is trying to bring the benefits of the tech economy to Israel’s Arab population. The other is Gaza Sky Geeks, an Alphabet-backed initiative based in Gaza that provides pre-seed investments, training and technology resources to Palestine’s Gazan population.

For Arab entrepreneurs living in Israel, Hybrid is a resource to help overcome the broad cultural challenges that they need to combat. Things like a perception that backing their startups is inherently riskier than investing in a company founded by a Jewish Israeli citizen. Or the cultural stigma of failure that’s more prevalent in the Arab community.

These are the things that Fadi Swidan and his Nazareth-based organization are working to combat. “There was the most important miracle that has influenced billions of people and it was the annunciation,” Swidan said onstage at TechCrunch Tel Aviv. “The next miracle for the world and for the high-tech industry will also come from Nazareth.”

The Hybrid invests in early-stage Arab-Israeli entrepreneurs and encourages Israel’s technology companies to reach out to the nation’s Arab population and bring them into startups to gain experience, skills and know-how that the nation has cultivated among its Jewish population for decades.

Meanwhile, Gaza Sky Geeks has set itself out with the no less daunting task of training entrepreneurs that are mostly confined to 140 square miles on how to build successful businesses. It’s there that potable drinking water is scarce; that electricity is intermittent; and that entrepreneurs with the dream of building big businesses are struggling every day to build thriving international businesses.

“The fact that people can’t travel is definitely the biggest obstacle,” says Ryan Sturgill, director of Gaza Sky Geeks. “You can’t meet your investor or partner… or even go out and travel professionally… Most of the entrepreneurs that we’re working with haven’t been more than 20 feet from their home.”

Even with the challenges that entrepreneurs face, both Sturgill and Swidan have successes that can promote. For example, entrepreneurs out of Gaza Sky Geeks are looking to take advantage of the wave of e-commerce growth in the Gulf countries. Zumrod, which sells high-end makeup online; Izaari; Threadless for the Middle East; and MomyHelper.com, which is a social network for mothers, are all making progress. Meanwhile, MindoLife, an industrial IoT startup, and Optima Design Innovation, focused on bringing safety to autonomous vehicles, are also showing early signs of success.

But the issue still stands. Challenges, ranging from the biases of the establishment to literally locked down borders and isolation, stand between these entrepreneurs and their dreams.

For Hybrid, and Arab-Israeli founders, one clear example was the Al-Bawader fund. The state-sponsored fund, working in collaboration with Pitango, was created to invest solely in Arab startups, looking to integrate the Arab startup scene into the much larger and more mature Israeli tech scene. But the fund didn’t adapt to the more nascent Arab tech ecosystem, attempting to write larger checks and take more equity than was seemingly appropriate, and not making as many deals as was expected.

For these emerging entrepreneurs it may not be the capital that’s the most important (although the capital is definitely important), rather it’s just an acknowledgement by the entrepreneurs — who are able to enjoy all of the fruit that the technology ecosystem offers — of the obstacles that their fellow startup founders face.

Which is why Sturgill left the audience with this:

There’s a tendency from the tech community, emanating from the Valley, that tech will bring people together… That can be a ways off…. It’s important… tech is important in that it can build empathy..

There are entrepreneurs in Gaza that are trying to build the exact same thing that businesses here are trying to build.

Try to understand that… if you’re here in this room… there are people there who are just like you… they’re facing the same challenges, but also a set of challenges that are really unique and totally outside of their control… I would encourage people here to have conversations around yourselves… The tech community is fairly influential… People can have conversations about whether it’s the right thing to have a place like that that has been closed off for a decade.

Logtrust is now known as Devo in one of the cooler name changes I’ve seen in a long time. Whether they intended to pay homage to the late 70s band is not clear, but investors probably didn’t care, as they gave the data operations startup a bushel of money today.

The company now known as Devo announced a $25 million Series C round led by Insight Venture Partners with participation from Kibo Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $71 million.

The company changed its name because it was about much more than logs, according to CEO Walter Scott. It offers a cloud service that allows customers to stream massive amounts of data — think terabytes or even petabytes — relieving the need to worry about all of the scaling and hardware requirements processing this amount of data would require. That could be from logs from web servers, security data from firewalls or transactions taking place on backend systems, as some examples.

The data can live on prem if required, but the processing always gets done in the cloud to provide for the scaling needs. Scott says this is about giving companies this ability to process and understand massive amounts of data that previously was only in reach of web scale companies like Google, Facebook or Amazon.

But it involves more than simply collecting the data. “It’s the combination of us being able to collect all of that data together with running analytics on top of it all in a unified platform, then allowing a very broad spectrum of the business [to make use of it],” Scott explained.

Devo sees Sumo Logic, Elastic and Splunk as its primary competitors in this space, but like many startups they often battle companies trying to build their own systems as well, a difficult approach for any company to take when you are dealing with this amount of data.

The company, which was founded in Spain is now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has close to 100 employees. Scott says he has the budget to double that by the end of the year, although he’s not sure they will be able to hire that many people that rapidly

The robots are here and one company, Starship Technologies, has raised $25 million to bring even more to the mainstream. This latest round of funding includes a follow-on investment from Matrix Partners and Morpheus Ventures. New investors include Airbnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn and others.

These autonomous robots can carry items, like groceries or packages, within a two-mile radius. The plan with the funding is to deploy Starship robots in neighborhoods, corporate and university campuses in both the U.S. and Europe.

Starship has also brought on former Airbnb business development lead Lex Bayer as chief executive officer.

“We are at the point where we are ready to start deploying our network of robots at scale,” Starship co-founder Janus Friis said in a statement. “This additional funding, and Lex’s appointment, will allow us to bring our services to market. Lex joins us with a proven track record of growing businesses that change the way we live for the better.”

But Starship is by no means the only company operating in this space. There’s Boxbot, a startup that recently received a permit to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver, and Nuro.

Starship has previously partnered with on-demand food delivery companies like DoorDash and Postmates to test out its robot delivery service. Last January, Starship partnered with the aforementioned companies for a pilot program in Redwood City, Calif. and Washington, D.C. To date, Starship robots have traveled more than 100,000 miles in 20 countries, across 100 cities.

Prior to this round, Starship raised $17.2 million in a seed round led by Mercedes-Benz Vans with participation from Shasta Ventures, Matrix Partners, ZX Venturers, Morpheus Ventures and others.

According to a report published earlier this year, the global cloud storage market is estimated to grow from $30.70 billion in 2017 to $88.91 billion by 2022, translating to an annual growth rate of...

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Zebra Medical Vision, an Israeli medical imaging startup that uses machine and deep learning to build tools for radiologists, has raised a $30 million Series C led by health technology fund aMoon Ventures, with participation from Aurum, Johnson & Johnson Innovation—JJDC Inc. (the conglomerate’s venture capital arm), Intermountain Health and artificial intelligence experts Fei-Fei Li and Richard Socher. Existing investors Khosla Ventures, Nvidia, Marc Benioff, OurCrowd and Dolby Ventures also returned for the round.

Zebra also announced its Textray research today, which it claims is the “most comprehensive AI research conducted on chest X-rays to date.” Textray is being used to develop a new product that has already been trained using almost two million images to identify 40 clinical findings. Scheduled to launch next year, it will help automate the analysis of chest X-rays for radiologists.

Founder and CEO Elad Benjamin, who launched Zebra with Eyal Toledano and Eyal Gura in 2014, told TechCrunch in an email that its Series C capital will be spent on new hires to speed up the development of its analytics engine and its go-to-market strategy.

Chest X-rays are one of the most common radiographs ordered, but also among the most difficult for radiologists to interpret. There are several groups of researchers focused on using artificial intelligence algorithms to make the process more accurate and efficient, including teams from Google, Stanford and the Dubai Health Authority.

Benjamin said Zebra, which has now raised a total of $50 million, differentiates its approach by looking at its algorithms from a “holistic product perspective. Developing an algorithm is just one piece,” he added. “Integrating it into the workflow, adapting it to the needs of multiple countries and healthcare environments, supporting and updating it, and regulating it properly globally takes a tremendous focus – and that’s what delivers value, over and above an algorithm.”

He added that “it will take a few more years” before AI becomes mainstream in medical imaging and diagnosis, but he believes that it will eventually be a critical component of radiology. Zebra Medical Vision already markets a bundle of algorithms for lung, breast, liver, cardiovascular and bone disease diagnoses called AI1 that costs hospitals $1 per scan.

In a press statement, aMoon managing partner Dr. Yair Schindel said “We are excited to partner with the Zebra team, which is harnessing the power of data and machine learning to provide physicians and healthcare systems with tools to dramatically increase capacity, while improving patient care. This investment aligns with our vision of backing scalable and sustainable innovations that will have a valuable impact on fundamental facets of global healthcare.”

Laka, a London-based insurtech startup that offers what it calls “crowd insurance” to rival traditional premiums and is initially targeting high-end bicycle owners, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The round is led by publicly-listed Tune Protect Group, with participation from Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups — money that will be used to enter new insurance categories and for international expansion, including South East Asia.

Founded in 2017, Laka has developed what it claims is a unique insurance model that sees customers only pay for the true cost of cover. At the end of each month, the cost of any claims is split fairly between customers, with the individual’s maximum premium capped at the “market rate”. If there is no claim, the premium that month is zero. To date, the startup says it has saved customers more than 80 percent compared to market prices.

What’s interesting about this model is that it is potentially much-better aligned with customers, meaning that fewer claims mean lower costs for the entire Laka customer base. Laka itself only makes money when a claim is made — it adds 25 percent on top of each claim to cover costs and create some margin. As long as it stays on top of fraudulent claims, customers stand to benefit with a more cost-effective and fairer insurance product.

“Customers join without paying any upfront premiums. When there is a claim, we settle it with working capital we borrow from our insurance partner in exchange for a fee,” explains Laka co-founder Jens Hartwig. “At the end of the month, we total up all claims we have settled, add our fee on top, and split the bill on a pro-rata basis. Thus, we pay out first and then ask customers to pay us back the expenses incurred”.

In contrast, the more a traditional insurer pays out in claims, the less profit it makes. “It’s a great business model from the insurer’s point of view as they happily take customer’s money and maybe settle a claim down the line. In the meantime they can reinvest the available capital. This proposition is clearly not as attractive from the customer’s’ point of view,” says Hartwig.

To change this, Laka’s model moves away from “underwriting risk” to credit risk — that is, ensuring customers can pay the required, albeit capped premium when the startup does have to pay out, which Hartwig reckons is an easily manageable risk with credit cards and modern payment providers such as Stripe.

The cap — where the monthly premium has a maximum so that Laka’s customers never face bill shock — is being provided by Zurich U.K. in the form of a stop-loss agreement for which Laka pays a small fixed fee per policy, per month. Any exposure above the cap is absorbed by Zurich, acting like a reinsurer.

Hartwig says that in months with a lot of claims, this is where the stop-loss kicks in, capping each customer’s exposure at a clearly communicated level. The promise is that you will never be charged more than competitors, but — crucially — if everyone takes better care, you will pay much less.

“We effectively offer a profit share to our customers, encouraging improved behaviour as they benefit from taking better care. By changing the way we earn money in the business model, we fixed the conflict of interest between customer and insurer,” adds the Laka co-founder.

Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate of the timeframe for all this to come into society? Paul Daugherty: It’s a 10 plus year transition. We’re at the very early stages of applying AI. It’s going to...

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CloudNC, the U.K. startup and Entrepreneur First alumni that is developing AI software to automate part of the manufacturing process, has quietly raised £9 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources — and since confirmed by the company — Atomico, the European VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has led the round. A number of existing investors, including Episode 1 and Entrepreneur First, also participated. We first heard a term sheet had been put on the table as far back as March, and last week the investment finally closed.

With the broader aim of using AI to dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with manufacturing, CloudNC is developing software and a cloud computing service that hopes to automate the programming of CNC milling machines.

These machines work by carving blocks of solid metal into useful shapes, where a useful shape could be anything from a Macbook body, to bits of a car, to jet engine turbine blades. Unlike 3D printing, this happens in a ‘subtractive’ way; metal is cut out until what is left is the resulting component.

The problem is that to instruct a CNC machine to turn a 3D design into a finished part requires it to be fed pre-programmed sequences of machine control commands, which currently is a highly skilled and manual process. You have to instruct the machine not just precisely where and how to cut, but also which of its hundreds of tools to use. Programming a CNC machine can also be time-consuming, taking up to 100 hours for more complicated parts.

Related to this manual labour, there’s a second problem CloudNC thinks it can solve, which is the speed of manufacturing itself. That’s because, the startup claims, a human can’t possibly calculate the most efficient way to cut out a block of metal for each bespoke part being manufactured, even though it is currently extremely well-educated guess-work. However, in theory, AI combined with ‘super computing’ in the cloud, can. The result: halving the time needed to manufacture parts and therefore halving the costs (minus the raw material costs, of course).

“We’re applying breakthrough AI methods to control these machines automatically, which will revolutionise how the things around us are made,” CloudNC co-founder and CEO told me after I called him yesterday to confirm the startup’s Series A. “Our mission is to make milling machines one click devices that can produce a part easily, efficiently and with minimal human intervention”.

Meanwhile, a person familiar with Atomico’s investment tells me it plays into the VC firm’s strategy around “industry 4.0,” and that we can expect further investments in the space.

Specifically related to CloudNC, the thinking is that we are heading towards a future where there will be less emphasis on mass production and a move towards just-in-time manufacturing, where certain kinds of products are produced closer to where they are sold and can benefit from near zero inventory. Consumer trends such as product personalization and an appetite for innovative design-led products, enabled by new technology, business models and startups, are helping to drive this.

If CloudNC can deliver on its promise of halving the cost of CNC machine-based manufacturing, it stands to make a major contribution to — and benefit from — that future.

Marshmallow, a new ‘insurtech’ startup in the U.K. building a product for immigrants/expats who are poorly served by the car insurance market, has picked up $1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the company, which is set to launch later this year, is Passion Capital, and Investec Bank.

Founded in March 2017 by identical twins Oliver and Alexander Kent-Braham, and David Goate — all three of whom previously worked at digital identity company Yoti — Marshmallow is developing insurance products that aim to use better data and technology to provide more fairly priced insurance cover to non-U.K. nationals. To that end, the startup is starting out with car insurance for foreign-born drivers.

“Car insurance typically requires an insurer to understand a person’s driving ability, driving history and current lifestyle before they can offer them an accurate price,” explains Marshmallow’s Oliver Kent-Braham.

“Unfortunately, a lot of insurers don’t attempt to understand foreign drivers living in the U.K., instead they just overcharge them. U.K.-based, foreign drivers can expect to be quoted prices that are 51 percent higher than the market average”.

To fix that, the Marshmallow team — which also includes Tim Holliday, who was previously the Chief Underwriting Officer and MD of Personal Lines at Zurich — has built an underwriting system that aggregates global data rather than U.K.-only data.

“We combine this with a proprietary algorithm that eliminates underwriting bias before computing a more accurate price for foreign drivers living in the U.K.,” says Kent-Braham.

The Marshmallow founder says typical customers are people who have moved to the U.K. to build a life here. The company’s research suggests that after one or two years of living in the U.K., people are ready to settle down and that this often means buying a car and inevitably getting insurance.

“Our customers are ambitious, entrepreneurial, educated people who are striving to build a better life in the U.K. Unfortunately, with the current political climate these individuals don’t always feel welcome in the U.K. and we don’t want financial services to further discourage them to settle here,” he says.

Meanwhile, competitors are cited as large incumbent insurers who still use legacy systems and struggle to use U.K. data, let alone global data. In other words — similar to other fintech narratives — this is being pitched as a battle against antiquated companies and old technology.

“We’ve built everything from the ground up which enables us to access global data, have accurate pricing and a user experience that is transparent and convenient,’ adds Kent-Braham.

A new bit of research from David Shear at security firm Flashpoint found that there are hundreds if not thousands of open Trello boards containing passwords, login credentials, and other potentially sensitive stuff including employee on-boarding documents. He and Brian Krebs reported the boards to Trello although some folks have already been notified by well-meaning hackers who wrote “Change your password” on some of these public boards.

“One particularly jarring misstep came from someone working for Seceon, a Westford, Mass. cybersecurity firm that touts the ability to detect and stop data breaches in real time,” wrote Krebs. “But until a few weeks ago the Trello page for Seceon featured multiple usernames and passwords, including credentials to log in to the company’s WordPress blog and iPage domain hosting.”

Another Trello board made at Red Hat in 2017 offered passwords to a pair of online test servers.

Trello worked with the pair to take down the public boards they found and is working with Google to remove the cached sites.

“We have put many safeguards in place to make sure that public boards are being created intentionally and have clear language around each privacy setting, as well as persistent visibility settings at the top of each board,” said a Trello spokesperson.

Missteps like these are sadly common. Another rich trove of user data, Github, has been used to find private passwords for years. Anecdotally, a project I was working on suffered a breach when the CTO put a Bitcoin private key into some public Github code. Yeah. Exactly.

So, again, keep your Trello boards private, don’t paste passwords willy-nilly, and maintain at least a basic level of operational security by not pasting passwords into any site that could make it public. It’s hard but definitely worth the effort.

The images that appear on social media – happy people eating, cultural happenings, and smiling dogs – can actually predict the likelihood that a neighborhood is “healthy” as well as its level of gentrification.

From the report:

So says a groundbreaking study published in Frontiers in Physics, in which researchers used social media images of cultural events in London and New York City to create a model that can predict neighborhoods where residents enjoy a high level of wellbeing — and even anticipate gentrification by 5 years. With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, the model could help policymakers ensure human wellbeing in dense urban settings.

The idea is based on the concept of “cultural capital” – the more there is, the better the neighborhood becomes. For example, if there are many pictures of fun events in a certain spot you can expect a higher level of well-being in that area’s denizens. The research also suggests that investing in arts and culture will actively improve a neighborhood.

“Culture has many benefits to an individual: it opens our minds to new emotional experiences and enriches our lives,” said Dr. Daniele Quercia. “We’ve known for decades that this ‘cultural capital’ plays a huge role in a person’s success. Our new model shows the same correlation for neighborhoods and cities, with those neighborhoods experiencing the greatest growth having high cultural capital. So, for every city or school district debating whether to invest in arts programs or technology centers, the answer should be a resounding ‘Yes!'”

The Cambridge-based team looked at “millions of Flickr images” taken at cultural events in New York and London and overlaid them on maps of these cities. The findings, as we can imagine, were obvious.

“We were able to see that the presence of culture is directly tied to the growth of certain neighborhoods, rising home values and median income. Our model can even predict gentrification within five years,” said Quercia. “This could help city planners and councils think through interventions to prevent people from being displaced as a result of gentrification.”

The team expects to be able to assess the health of citizens using the same method, overlaying pictures of food on maps in order to find food deserts and spots where cafes and croissants are on the rise. Just imagine: all those Instagrammed photos of your favorite sandwiches will some day help researchers build happier cities.

Y Combinator alum Meesho, one of several “social selling” startups gaining speed in India, will add more features to its e-commerce platform after closing a $11.5 million Series B led by Sequoia India. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Y Combinator and Venture Highway also returned for the round, which brings the Bangalore-based startup’s total funding so far to $15 million. Its last round of funding, a $3.4 million Series A, was announced last October.

Like social selling competitors including GlowRoad and Zepo, Meesho’s model combines dropshipping from its wholesale partners with a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools and services. This reduces overhead while making it easy for sellers, who Meesho says includes many housewives, students and retirees, to set up an online business through WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media.

Meesho’s tools include an online platform that allows sellers to manage purchases and process payments, as well as a network of wholesale suppliers (its main categories are currently fashion and lifestyle items) and logistics providers. In other words, it offers almost everything its vendors need to start selling online. This leaves vendors responsible for customer acquisition, picking what items they want to include in their online shops and marketing them.

This reselling model appeals to small stores, as well as individuals, who want to make more money but don’t want the expense of setting up an e-commerce business from scratch and carrying inventory. Meesho’s rivals include e-commerce startups like GlowRoad, Shopmatic and Zepo, which have also recently raised large funding rounds. All of these companies attract sellers by offering a significant amount of help with order management, payment processing, fulfillment and logistics.

In order to differentiate, chief executive officer Vidit Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho in 2015 with Sanjeev Barnwal, its chief technology officer, tells TechCrunch it focuses on product quality, pricing and personalization to help resellers improve their sales and customer service. Meesho claims that more than 800,000 resellers have used its platform and that a “typical” reseller earns between 20,000 to 25,000 rupees per month (about $298 to $373).

In a press statement about the funding, Sequoia India managing director Mohit Bhatnagar said “Social commerce is the future of e-commerce in India. People buy from people they trust, and that’s what Meesho enables.  Entrepreneurs, many of them women, use the Meesho platform to recommend, customize and sell to their family and friends. Social selling is a huge trend and Sequoia India is excited to partner with Meesho, which is the early leader in this space.”

Aatrey says Meesho’s Series B capital will be used to hire more people for its tech and product teams in order to build a suite of new customer acquisition and selling tools. The startup also plans to add more personalization options for its resellers and product categories.

Fintech startup Revolut likes to announce new things all the time. Even though nothing is going live today, it’s interesting to see where the startup is heading. The company is working on a trading platform for traditional shares without any commission.

You’ll find stock from public companies from the U.K. and the U.S., as well as various ETFs and options. In other words, Revolut is going to become the Robinhood of Europe.

While American customers have been using Robinhood for years, the rest of the world has been lagging behind when it comes to stock trading.

You still have to open an account on a painfully slow website and pay a few euros for every transaction. Some companies even ask you to send a letter to create an account. And if you want to buy stock through your existing bank account, it usually costs even more.

Revolut promises that you won’t pay any commission when you buy or sell shares. The company plans to make money on margin trading, securities lending and interest on cash. Unfortunately, Revolut didn’t say when the feature would launch.

Premium subscribers will be able to test the feature first. Eventually, you’ll also get additional perks if you’re a premium subscriber. Trading will be available to all Revolut users in Europe and future markets. The company plans to launch in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months.

Revolut’s premium subscription is becoming a sort of Amazon Prime for financial products. You pay £6.99/€7.99 per month and you get unlimited foreign exchange transactions, travel insurance, access to new features and more.

It’s clear that Revolut plans on making predictable revenue on this premium subscription. And maybe the trading platform will make more people subscribe to Revolut Premium.

Additionally, Revolut now officially has 2 million users. It’s funny to see that Revolut is announcing this new milestone just days after N26 announced a million users. Interestingly, Revolut has 900,000 users in the U.K., where N26 has yet to launch.