For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our weekly and informal group meetups. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in...
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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
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For any company looking to spin up some kind of operation in a new region, one of the first steps may be finding contractors in the area that can actually get the work started — but, especially as companies drift farther from cities, that can increasingly become a nightmare that’s quite familiar to Matt Velker.
That led to he and his co-founder Vignesh Venkataraman starting Emptor, a network to connect companies with local contractors in order to get those local projects off the ground effectively. That can range from actual construction to janitorial work or landscaping. A platform like Emptor seeks to take a lot of the ambiguity or guesswork out of finding a set of local companies to work with in order to get construction projects off the ground. It also adds a robust audit trail — ratings or otherwise — to ensure that the best contractors surface and that everyone knows which ones they should skip. The company is coming out of Y Combinator.
“Every time you’re building [projects in new regions you have to find an entirely new set of suppliers,” Velker said. “Often in rural areas when there isn’t a saturation of contractors like there is in a large metro, that discovery process within a reasonable time frame was the biggest challenge. Especially within the construction industry, there’s a huge deviation in terms of the quality of the companies you work with. We definitely had a lot of pains with unreliable contractors who weren’t getting the job done to spec or on time, or things that came close to fraud. It comes with the territory when you work with that volume of companies in a short period of time.”
Companies first go to Emptor and describe the projects they want and what kinds of pricing structure they are offering. Then, kind of like Thumbtack or other marketplaces, Emptor matches those projects with qualified contractors and then compares those bids in order to select the best offer. It aims to be a replacement for the time spent searching around Yelp or Google, where there may be listings and pages but not a high volume of ratings — or ones that are even accurate to begin. Even after the search, getting the whole process started can take weeks, another period Emptor hopes to shrink by streamlining that process.
Right now Emptor mainly focuses on facilities and maintenance, though should something like this take off it could add other elements of contract work that companies need. The approach also aims to be more granular, giving companies more ways to identify the needs of the project that might not necessarily just be quantitative. After all, better data about a company’s actual needs that flows into some algorithm can produce better matching, and that can also go down to the actual way compensation would work on that project.
“Having just one number for what a project will cost is convenient from the supplier and buyer perspective, but it’s missing out on the ability to build structured data that you can analyze,” Velker said. “The companies are deciding, ‘what do I need to know, how many years have you done in business.’ You want to be explicit about how are we going to make this decision. If price is a factor, how much of a factor is it, so they can spec things out and there’s transparency to the buyers.”
But while it’s an attempt to try to bridge that gap between the company and a service provider, it’s one that many companies have tried to fill before. There are tools like Angie’s List and others for finding contractors, though Velker says those are primarily geared toward consumers — and some end up bending the apps in order to fill the needs they have for contractors without some kind of formal platform to use. Velker acknowledges the theory behind all these tools is pretty similar, though he hopes Emptor will be able to tackle the specific needs companies might have that he’s experienced himself.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 407th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, July 19, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...
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Sramana Mitra: Interesting. How many customers do these MSPs typically cater to? Fred Voccola: It depends. A typical profile of a manager service provider starts with an individual. They work at a...
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Instacart has tapped Postmates to offer better delivery services during peak hours in a San Francisco pilot.
While Instacart will still handle all the shopping for its customers, it will hand off some deliveries to Postmates at times when there is high demand on the Instacart platform.
Postmates, obviously, has offered delivery-as-a-service for merchants and brands since its inception, and some of those brands, such as Walmart, offer their own delivery services. But this marks the first time that Postmates has offered delivery-as-a-service to a business that itself is already a delivery service.
This comes at a time when the grocery space is at an inflection point. Amazon’s nearly $14 billion acquisition of Whole Foods has spurred a race to offer quick and convenient grocery delivery from a number of the bigger players, such as Target and Walmart. On top of that, the grocery industry is highly fragmented, offering a huge opportunity for the catch-all of Instacart’s service.
But quantity means almost nothing without quality, and Instacart’s pilot with Postmates is meant to ensure that delivery times don’t lag in the late morning and early afternoon, when most Instacart orders are set to be delivered.
Instacart’s Northwest General Manager Michelle McRae explained that there is a load balance involved in the partnership with Postmates.
“Like many on-demand services, Instacart sees demand peaks on certain days and at certain times,” said McRae. “The pilot is a way to offer delivery during peak hours and utilize Postmates delivery staff at times where Postmates would be most underutilized. Instacart users overwhelmingly prefer mid-morning and mid-afternoon, where is different from when people want hot, prepared food.”
McRae also stressed that the pilot would not affect current Instacart shoppers or delivery contractors, as Postmates is simply offering delivery capacity during peak demand times.
Perhaps more interesting, Postmates sees a big opportunity to work with on-demand services in offering extra delivery either at or below the cost of hiring more delivery people.
“We definitely see this as a bigger part of Postmates’ future,” said Postmates SVP Dan Mosher. “Most brands are moving toward a world where they want to provide quick convenient delivery but they don’t have the capabilities. As we scale, we have the delivery density to drive economics in a really cost-effective way, not only to restaurants and retailers but to other on-demand services as well.”
He added that enterprise delivery services will never eclipse Postmates’ direct-to-consumer business.
The pilot is currently only going down in San Francisco, but Instacart said that it is considering expanding it to other geographies and other delivery services as the pilot continues. The deal is not exclusive, as Postmates is currently working with Walmart to help deliver their groceries to customers.
According to an IDC report, the worldwide revenues for big data and business analytics will grow at a 12% annual growth rate over the next few years. The market was pegged at $130.1 billion in 2016...
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It’s one thing to have a great business idea, but connecting all of the disparate pieces of information and people needed to build it can be a frustrating growing pain — and one that the internal knowledge sharing company Guru is trying to fix.
Guru launched in 2015 as a Chrome extension to help revenue and customer service teams have easy access to all of their company’s information the moment they needed it by congregating relevant “cards” of information written by different internal teams. Since its launch, Guru has extended its company to include a web app, and Slack bot. Today, Guru unveiled a new AI, and syncing and impact analytics features aimed to improve the overall experience of the platform.
“Customer facing teams want to be responsive to their customers and feel confident in knowing what they want to communicate to them,” Guru CEO and co-founder Rick Nucci told TechCrunch. “They want to respond quickly and they want to respond accurately. These features further reduce the time it takes for them to dig up information and by reducing that time they’re solving issues faster and helping the customer have a better experience with them.”
With the introduction of AI Suggest to its Chrome extension, users will be able to access relevant company information without needing to search for it first. And because the extension can work wherever they work, there’s no time wasted returning to a single site. In its announcement, Guru says that this AI will learn a user’s search patterns overtime and grow to better understand their needs and improve efficiency.
While AI Suggest is specific to Guru’s Chrome extension, its Sync feature is universal across the company’s several implementations. With Sync, users can easily congregate and access not only information created natively on Guru but also information stored in a wiki, intranet or web-based applications.
“Companies have knowledge everywhere, and it’s not necessarily realistic that they’ll be able to move all of that into Guru,” Nucci said. “[But this allows] the team using Guru to still have one place to search.”
To get a better picture of how companies are using their knowledge, Guru has also incorporated impact analytics into its web app to help companies see where knowledge is best being utilized and where any gaps might be.
Nucci told TechCrunch that these new features are part a scaling plan the company is implementing with the help of a $9.3 million Series A funding round last summer with new investor Emergence Capital (as well as previous backers FirstMark Capital and MSD Capital). In addition to the new features announced today, Guru also has plans to expand its product into other areas of company knowledge management including HR and IT.
Updated: 10:43 AM ET / July 13th
Imagine being in a new city with a few hours to kill, but no idea what to do. Headout is a travel app that enables tourists to book outings at very short notice, in most cases on the same day. The startup announced today that it’s raised a $10 million Series A led by returning investors Nexus Venture Partners and Version One Ventures to support its ambitious growth targets.
Over the next 18 months, co-founder and CEO Varun Khona says the startup wants to expand from 20 cities to 100 cities in North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific. The app recently added French, German and Spanish in select markets and aims to have all of its inventory available in 12 languages by the end of next year. Its bookings includes sightseeing tours, museum tickets and shows.
Headout’s Series A brings its total raised to $12 million. Its seed round was announced in 2015, when TechCrunch first profiled the company. The startup claims it has grown eight times over the past 12 months and is profitable.
As it enters new markets, however, Headout will be up against a roster of competitors that also offer experience bookings for tourists. These include Klook, TripAdvisor-owned Viator, Get Your Guide and Airbnb’s Experiences feature.
Khona says Headout’s main edge is tailoring its inventory and technology platform for “spontaneous last-minute mobile use cases.” It’s also a managed marketplace, meaning it standardizes pricing and quality, with the hope of creating a consistent experience across all outings. The startup says this focus on combining quality with unit economics means it’s enabled customers to save an average of 18% on last-minute bookings.
Sramana Mitra: That point that you made about seed capital being abundant and seed funding being abundant, and Series A becoming an issue is huge. The numbers are 50,000 to 70,000 seed financing a...
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Alex Jones from InfoWars.YouTube/screengrab
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
1. Facebook got caught up in a massive, contentious discussion about why it permits conspiracy InfoWars on its site. The company showcased its efforts to fight fake news on Wednesday, and defended its decision to allow a page that peddles 9/11 conspiracy theories.
2. The Department of Justice is appealing a judge's decision to allow a merger between AT&T and Time Warner. The government argued that the merger would hurt competition, limit choices and jack up prices for consumers to stream TV and movies.
3. Celebrities will see a big dip in their Twitter followers, thanks to new rules about 'locked' accounts. Twitter will stop counting locked accounts towards people's follower numbers, affecting 6% of all follows.
4. Facebook hinted that it will contest its first ever fine for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. European policy director Richard Allen said there was a 'debate' about whether the firm should pay a £500,000 fine for breaking UK data laws.
5. Apple launched a new set of Macbook Pros on Thursday. The updated computers have faster processors and most notably, a "quieter" keyboard.
6. Facebook closed a loophole that let third parties access the names of people who were in closed, private groups. CNBC reported that women in a group about breast cancer complained about the potential privacy violation after discovering the loophole.
7. Magic Leap's CEO said critics can't understand the multibillion-dollar startup's technology without trying it. He said 'You could never experience TV on the radio' after people were underwhelmed by Magic Leap's mixed reality technology.
8. Russian Twitter accounts posed as local US news sources during the presidential election, in an attempt to undermine Americans' trust in local media. NPR found 48 accounts run by Russia's Internet Research Agency with names such as @ElPasoTopNews.
9. The fifth season of hit game Fortnite has arrived with big updates. The new updates include several new locations on the island, a new vehicle, and even a new game mechanic.
10. The defunct gossip blog Gawker has a new owner. Bryan Goldberg, who founded Bustle and Bleacher Report, put in the winning $1.35 million bid for Gawker.com in an auction.
Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
One last thing: Business Insider wants your nominations for the coolest people in the British tech industry. Please get in touch if you know someone who should be included in our UK Tech 100.
Hock Tan, chief executive officer of Broadcom, has gained the trust of some analysts with past acquisitions. Martin H. Simon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Broadcom's surprise $18.9 billion acquisition of CA Technologies, announced Wednesday, has caused a chasm on Wall Street as investors and company analysts try to figure out whether or not the deal is a good thing.
Broadcom's share price sunk 14% Thursday following the announcement of the deal, a sign of investors' discomfort with the high pricetag and lack of clarity over what Broadcom, a semiconductor company, plans to do with what some see as an underperforming software company.
But not everyone is sour on the deal. While most analysts were surprised to hear of the acquisition, many think investors are missing the big idea behind Broadcom CEO Hock Tan's seemingly spontaneous purchase.
"While we do not think that anyone would have imagined this potential combination (definitely not us!), the deal does highlight the growing strategic importance of software to 'non-traditional' acquirers," Kirk Materne, an analyst with Evercore ISI, wrote Thursday.
Here's why analysts are keen on the deal, even if investors are not.
Broadcom (AVGO) sunk 13.76% Thursday on news of its CA Technologies acquisition. Google
One explanation for why Broadcom's stock fell so much on Thursday is that investors didn't understand the strategy behind the acquisition. But analysts don't necessarily see the obscurity as a bad thing.
One reason is that Tan, in his 12 years as CEO at Broadcom and its predecessor Avago, has made several acquisitions that turned out well for the company. Basically, many analysts trust Tan's judgement.
"We think the Street is completely misunderstanding the CA Technology deal," Harsh V. Kumar, an analyst with PiperJaffray, said in a note Thursday. "In our opinion, the CA product set is an extension into some of the Broadcom's recent acquisitions (Brocade and LSI), ones that have worked well for the company."
Broadcom acquired Brocade in November 2017 for $5.5 billion. It bought LSI for $6.6 billion in December 2013.
UBS analyst Timothy Arcuri was less enthusiastic about the deal, and wrote that he finds "the strategic rationale here hard to see." But he agreed with Kumar that CA Technologies has similarities to the Brocade acquisition, in that is "ultimately a cash flow play" for Broadcom.
CEO Michael P. Gregoire developed CA Technologies' solid grip on the mainframe software market.catechnologies via YouTubeWhile Broadcom's bread-and-butter semiconductor business has more obvious crossover with a company like Qualcomm, analysts see several areas where CA Technologies could boost Broadcom's profile â most notably in mainframe computers.
"Broadcom expects the acquisition will expand its position as a mission-critical technology provider," Credit Suisse analyst Brad Zelnick. "[Broadcom] can also realize synergies between its established enterprise customer base and CA's Enterprise Solutions business."
Kumar similarly noted that Broadcom's hardware products like switches and boxes are sold into data center and mainframe environments, where CA Technologies has a strong software presence, both areas "with very few alternatives."
While Zelnick describes CA Technologies as an example of "unloved, value-oriented software stocks," that could change post-acquisition.
John DiFucci at Jeffries thinks the company could see a boost to its financials once some of its corporate overhead is gone, and that CA's operating margins could grow by at least 10% once it's eliminated administrative and R&D costs.
Whether or not Broadcom and CA Technologies converge product portfolios, some analysts think the real gold of the deal is that Broadcom now has a substantial foot in software.
Enterprise software companies, like CA Technologies, are extremely fragmented so there are many other small companies looking to be acquired.
Some analysts think Broadcom could take on the role of a private equity firm, and raise the value of smaller software units before selling then off for a profit.
"On the surface, this is a head-scratcher. But software is a fragmented sector w/ more assets than can be consolidated," wrote Arcuri. "When viewed through a Private Equity lens though, we see a possibility that this could be the start of something bigger - perhaps a roll up of infrastructure software companies."
Materne highlighted AT&T's July 10 acquisition of the cybersecurity software company AlienVault as an example of unexpected software grabs from outside buyers.
DiFucci agreed that, if Broadcom did take a private equity approach and sell off CA Technologies down the road, it could see a pretty penny for its troubles.
"While it is difficult to see an exit strategy, the mainframe business can be milked for a very long time â providing a significant dividend to Broadcom â and the best of what is left might be able to be repackaged and sold as a rejuvenated new company via IPO or to another buyer," DiFucci wrote.
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Devdutt Yellurkar, General Partner at CRV, who discussed his investment principles. It was an excellent discussion! Elastic Storage Solutions As for...
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Earlier in July, the #PlaneBae saga went viral on social media, as one Rosey Blair documented on Twitter what she presented as a love connection between strangers â a man and a woman, sitting in front of her on an airplane.
Now, for the first time, the woman involved in the #PlaneBae saga breaks her silence, and says that being an unwitting part of this social media phenomenon has had serious consequences for her in the real world.
"I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance - it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent," she says, in a statement provided to Business Insider by her lawyer on Thursday.
Business Insider has verified that she is the woman from the Twitter posts. We have not published her name out of respect for her desire for privacy. You can read her full statement at the end of this story.
The #PlaneBae himself, former pro soccer player Euan Holden, embraced his newfound celebrity, and even appeared on the Today Show. However, after Blair's Twitter posts went viral, the woman quickly went to ground, deleting her own social media accounts in an attempt to preserve her privacy.
Still, it didn't stop some internet users from finding and circulating her personal information, she says.
"Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information," she writes. "I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world." ("Doxxing" is internet slang for when a person's private information is publicly released against their will.)
The #PlaneBae saga sparked a sizable backlash, as pundits and average users alike wondered if it was reasonable for to assume that you should expect to be filmed, photographed, and otherwise recorded at all times for the purposes of providing someone else with social media content.
Blair, for her part, ultimately decided to delete the original #PlaneBae posts earlier this week, and apologized for what she said she now sees as an invasion of the strangers' privacy.
"The last thing I want to do is remove agency and autonomy from another woman. I wish I could communicate the shame I feel in having done this, but I truly feel that at this point my feelings are irrelevant," Blair wrote in her apology.
Earlier on Thursday, Holden posted his own reflection on the #PlaneBae saga and the backlash, too, calling it an "incredibly humbling experience."
We've reached out to Holden and Blair for additional comment and will update if we hear back.
I am a young professional woman. On July 2, I took a commercial flight from New York to Dallas. Without my knowledge or consent, other passengers photographed me and recorded my conversation with a seatmate. They posted images and recordings to social media, and speculated unfairly about my private conduct.
Since then, my personal information has been widely distributed online. Strangers publicly discussed my private life based on patently false information. I have been doxxed, shamed, insulted and harassed. Voyeurs have come looking for me online and in the real world.
I did not ask for and do not seek attention. #PlaneBae is not a romance - it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.
Please continue to respect my privacy, and my desire to remain anonymous.
Recruiting platform Greenhouse has raised $50 million to expand its recently launched feature that helps companies manage unconscious bias during the hiring process, the company announced on Thursday.
The series D round was led by Riverwood Capital, bringing the company's total funding to $110 million.
Greenhouse is a popular recruitment platform used by buzzed-about startups, such as Airbnb, Warby Parker, Pinterest, and Squarespace. Its new inclusion feature, launched in April, has been in the works for more than a year and was created in partnership with Paradigm, a consulting firm specializing in diversity and inclusion.
"So many companies are waking up to this problem and now they're asking 'now what?'" Greenhouse CEO Daniel Chait told Business Insider. "So that's why we think this is the right time to really be investing in this and taking on these challenges rather than just talking about it."
While there are plenty of other software solutions that aim to reduce bias in hiring, Chait says Greenhouse Inclusion is takes a more holistic approach. The program surfaces "nudges" or small reminders in real time that point out how users can act more fairly when they're writing job postings, making referrals, and conducting interviews. These reminders, the program hopes, will prompt long-term behavior changes.
"We want to solve this problem at the main point where it occurs, the behavior of employees," Chait said.
Greenhouse Inclusion also collects and organizes demographic data, so companies can easily access how many women and underrepresented minorities are employed at the company and where those hire are being recruited from.
The idea of creating features for diverse hiring came from Joelle Emerson, the founder of Paradigm. The consulting firm was brought on to help Greenhouse internally a little more than a year ago, and during the process Paradigm mentioned they already advise companies on how to use Greenhouse for better hiring practices.
Chait then asked Emerson if the company could make product improvements that would help what Paradigm was already doing. When Emerson said yes, the two started working together.
While Greenhouse hasn't released a full demographic report for the entire company â Chait tells Business Insider it will release a full diversity report later this year â the company did say that 40% of its executive team is women and across the entire company, employees from underrepresented minorities has increased 12%.
The team at Octi says it’s building a crucial piece of the augmented reality puzzle — the ability to understand the human body and its movement.
Co-founder and CEO Justin Fuisz told me that most existing AR technologies (including Apple’s ARKit) tend to be “plane-based” — in other words, while they can make something cool appear against a real-world background, it’s usually on a flat surface, like a table or the floor.
Octi, on the other hand, recognizes where people are in-camera, and it can use that understanding to apply a variety of different effects.
For example, Fuisz and his team showed me how they could dance around their office while bright, squiggly lines overlaid their bodies — and then they erased their bodies entirely. They also showed me how effects could be tied to different gestures, like how a “make it rain” motion could result in dollar bills flying out of their hands.
To do this, Octi says it’s built sophisticated machine learning and computer vision technology. For starters, it looks at a human being and detects key points, like eyes, nose, hips and elbows, then uses those points to construct a model of a skeleton.
Fuisz suggested that the technology could be applied to a number of different industries, including fashion, fitness, entertainment and gaming. In fact, the company is announcing a partnership and strategic investment from the OneTeam Collective, the accelerator of the NFL Players Association. As a result, Octi plans to create and distribute avatars of more than 2,000 NFL players.
In addition, Octi is announcing that it has raised $7.5 million in seed funding from Shasta Ventures, I2BF Ventures, Bold Capital Partners, Day One Ventures, Human Ventures Live Nation and AB InBev, plus individuals, including former Pandora and Snap executive Tom Conrad, WeWork Chief Product Officer of Technology Shiva Rajaraman, Adobe Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky, A&D Networks Chairman Abbe Raven and Joshua Kushner.
If you want to try this out for yourself, the startup has its own iOS app — Fuisz described the app as a technology showcase for potential partners, but he added, “The app is available to the public and is totally awesome.”
Apple is reaching into its cash pile to help spread solar energy and wind farms across China.
The iPhone maker has teamed up with 10 of its components suppliers to create a new $300 million fund that will invest in renewable sources of energy in China over the next four years.
The fund, called the China Clean Energy Fund, will be managed by DWS Group, Deutsche Bank's asset management arm.
The idea is that the fund can invest in new power generators so that the companies that make parts for Apple â its suppliers â have better access to renewable energy sources. In China, where many of Apple's suppliers are based, that means a lot of wind wind and solar.
Apple did not specify how much of the $300 million fund will come from its coffers and how much its 10 suppliers will contribute.
Apple is hoping the fund can help develop new renewable energy projects that don't currently exist. Apple said that the projects it invests in will total more than 1 gigawatt of renewable energy.
Part of the reason for the fund is to help smaller companies that do work for Apple find clean energy. While a big supplier may be able to negotiate renewable cost-effective renewable energy deals, a smaller manufacturer may have less leverage.
That's important as Apple said earlier this year that it wants its suppliers to run off of 100% clean energy. It announced in April that its own facilities were fully powered by renewable energy, including its headquarters, Apple Park, which has a 17-megawatt solar installation on its roof.
The Apple suppliers investing in the fund are:
Catcher Technology Compal Electronics Corning Incorporated Golden Arrow Jabil Luxshare-ICT Pegatron Solvay Sunway Communication Wistron
Hewlett-Packard CEO Dion Weisler and the PC industry had something to smile about on Thursday as PC shipments rose for the first time in six years.HP
The PC business isn't dead yet.
But it sure doesn't look very good, and its prospects continue to look bleak.
Those seem to be the takeaways from Gartner's latest report on PC shipments, which it issued on Thursday. The report showed that for the first quarter in more than six years, the number of PCs shipped worldwide actually grew on annual basis.
It's certainly good news for the industry that shipments grew, but the results weren't exactly impressive. Overall shipments were 62.1 million, up just 1.4% from the same period last year. And while the top five PC makers all grew in the quarter, shipments from the rest of the market plunged 13% in the period.
Even with the growth, shipments in the quarter were still down by nearly a third from the third quarter of 2011, when PC shipments hit their peak at 91.8 million.
What's worse, the rebound â such as it was â is likely to be short-lived. Consumers continue to abandon PCs, choosing instead to use their smartphones for more and more tasks, Mikako Kitagawa, an analyst at the research firm, noted in the report.
"In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth," Kitagawa said.
Businesses are still buying PCs, and their purchases boosted overall sales in the quarter. But those purchases are being driven by companies belatedly upgrading to Windows 10, the latest version of Microsoft's PC operating system â and that's a temporary phenomenon, Kitagawa said.
"PC momentum will weaken in two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes," she said.
As might be expected in a maturing, declining industry, the quarterly results demonstrated how the PC business continues to consolidate around a handful of players. Lonovo and Hewlett-Packard alone accounted for nearly 44% of all shipments in the second quarter, up from about 41% a year ago. Together, shipments from the top five PC makers comprised 74% of the total, up from 69% in the same period last year.
The story was much the same in the United States as it was for the world as a whole. US PC shipments grew in the second quarter to 14.5 million, but were up by only 1.7%. The result marked the first positive quarter for the industry in the US in nearly two years â but it was still millions of units below the market's peak.
Meanwhile, in the US, traditional PC shipments are facing another challenge â Chromebooks, which Gartner doesn't include in its shipment numbers. Shipments of computers based on Google's Chrome OS software grew 8% in the quarter.
"Strong Chromebook demand in the education market adversely affected PC growth," Kitagawa said.
So, while the PC industry proved it still has some life left in it, there are plenty of reason to think this is just a pause in its long-term decline.
Business Insider recently profiled 30 health-tech leaders under 40 who are trying to upend the healthcare system, from eliminating the hassle of going to a pharmacy to making healthcare easier to use and more affordable.
But amid discussion about all that's going to change, we asked them to take a step back and think about what's actually going to stay the same over the next decade. It's a question Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has said he likes to ask himself when thinking about the future of the e-commerce giant.
The health-tech leaders we spoke with all agreed that the healthcare system as we know it isn't likely to go away entirely.
"All of us in some aspect of our lives are going to be patients and in some way may need to interact with the healthcare system," Dr. Veena Jones, a pediatric hospitalist at Sutter Health's Palo Alto Medical Foundation and medical director, told Business Insider.
That is, people will always need care and medication. And a fair amount of healthcare, the leaders said, will still involve humans. At the same time, healthcare frustrations such as high costs aren't likely to go anywhere.
While technology is making healthcare cheaper and easier to use â from Alexa-like assistants for doctors to software that can warn doctors which patients are more likely to fallâ health-tech leaders were adamant that the human element will continue to be integral to healthcare.
"Humans in healthcare should stay the same," Capsule co-founder and CEO Eric Kinariwala, said. "Humans are human, and having another human to interact with and explain what's going on and to help you navigate the complexities of the healthcare system when you're at your most vulnerable should stay the same. It's making that part even stronger."
When patients go to the hospital, that means they'll still see doctors and nurses. The difference might just be that those hospital-workers might be more empowered through technology.
"Doctors and nurses are going to continue to be an important part, and technology is only going to enhance," Tanvi Abbhi, co-founder of Veta Health, said.
But the fear of artificial intelligence putting doctors out of work, they said, is overblown.
"I think a lot of people are scared that physicians are going to be replaced by AI and by robots. I don't believe in that," Spring Health cofounder and CEO April Koh said. "I fundamentally believe that in the next 10 years, there will be specialists and clinicians doing their jobs very well. What is going to change dramatically is the amount of data that the clinicians use to make decisions."
Healthcare, the leaders said, is all about relationships between patients and the doctors and nurses who care for them.
"At the core of everything in healthcare is humanity," Dr. Alexi Nazem, the cofounder and CEO of Nomad Health, said. "There is a patient, a real person who is suffering and they need help, and there are other people who want to help them â doctors, nurses, [physician assistants]."
But that relationship' influenced by technology, might change.
"I think it's going to change in the way it's expressed," said Grant Verstandig, the chief digital officer of UnitedHealth. "But the value, the power, and the transformative effect of relationship is a core tenet."
At the same time, many healthcare leaders had their doubts that the cloud that hangs over the US healthcare system â the issue of high spendingâ will dissipate over the next 10 years.
"The cost of care is going to continue to rise," Marta Bralic, vice president of business development at Flatiron Health, said.
Other entrenched aspects of the healthcare system â such as the role of health insurers â won't be changing any time soon either, Michael Rea, founder and CEO of Rx Savings Solutions, said. "I don't think consumers can underwrite the risk associated with a catastrophic event," he said.
So too with frustrations around the way healthcare information is shared.
"I think it's going to be really hard to change some of the back-end bureaucratic systems. I don't see for instance a lot of the processes in the IT infrastructure changing," said Cornell engineering professor Andrea Ippolito, who spent time in her career working with Department of Veteran Affairs electronic medical record system. "What I do see changing is how we use the data changing to redesign to be more patient centric more doctor."
To be sure, the US healthcare system is a $3 trillion behemoth that's historically been slow to change. Concepts that have been much-discussed for a while, such as value-based care in which care is paid for based on patient outcomes, have taken a lot longer to materialize than expected. Even so, Manik Bhat, the CEO and founder of Healthify, said he expects it to stick around.
"I think something that will stay the same is this trend towards value-based care. I think it's much slower than people expected, but I think it's here to stay," he said.
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design/Flickr
Getting the attention of investors isn't easy.
Venture capitalists turn down thousands of offers from prospective entrepreneurs each year and receive multiple funding requests every day.
While having industry connections undoubtedly helps, cold emails, if done right, can be a very effective method of spearheading a company's fundraising efforts.
But how do you get the attention of a busy VC whose inbox is glutted with requests?
Niv Dror, founder of San Francisco-based firm, Shrug Capital, has been on both sides of the equation. Dror singlehandedly raised his own fund with contributions from high profile VCs like Founder Fund's Cyan Banister as well as Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz.
In an effort to raise his own fund, Dror spent a lot of time thinking about what makes the perfect pitch.
Now that he's receiving scores of cold emails from entrepreneurs by the day, Dror is offering his insights to founders seeking funding.
Here are his tips on effectively pitching an investor:
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