Sramana Mitra: What do you see? Is it B2B or B2C? Where is the sweet spot of your entrepreneurs? Cem Sertoglu: We have two very distinct strategies that we focus on. The first is what we call local...
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To benefit entrepreneurs who are seeking funding, I’ve asked many investors to pinpoint what they want to invest in and exactly what they are looking for in startups. Industry trends, segments,...
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Those waiting for Airbnb to go public will need to wait some more. Earlier this year, the Billion Dollar Unicorn player announced that it had no plans of listing this year. It is focused on improving...
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Sramana Mitra: This company is selling to enterprises? Ashmeet Sidana: Menlo Security is focused primarily on large enterprises. If you’re a bank or financial services enterprise, that is our target...
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Cindy Padnos: We structure our seed investment with, at most, three other co-investors, but typically have one co-investor. We think it’s really important to be investing with like-minded investors....
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Cem Sertoglu, Earlybird Venture Capital was...
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Recent reports suggest image-based searching and sharing site Pinterest saw a 58% jump in its annual revenue. However, it has missed its earlier estimates. Pinterest’s Financials Founded in 2009,...
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Ashmeet Sidana: There’s great wisdom in what you’re saying. It is not just something that entrepreneurs should think about doing. You are required to say no to money on the path to success. Every...
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Flock, a London-based startup that has created a data-driven insurance product for drones, has picked up £2.25 million in seed funding. Leading the round is fintech and insurtech VC fund Anthemis, with participation from Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play, Seed and Speed, and previous backer Downing Ventures. A number of unnamed angel investors also took part.
Describing itself as “pioneering the use of real-time data in insurance,” Flock’s drone insurance has its roots in the academic studies of founder Antton Pena. He wrote his thesis on the use of real-time data to quantify drone flight risks, and began building the first version of the Flock platform at the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London with help from a post-doctoral researcher in artificial intelligence.
Likewise, while studying at Cambridge University, Flock CEO Ed Leon Klinger focused on the future of the autonomous world, writing and publishing papers on driverless vehicles, AI safety, and autonomous drones. This included a paper on the future of the drone industry in which he identified the same solution that Antton had already begun building: the idea that real-time data could be leveraged to identify and quantify the risks of drone flights.
To that end, Flock’s first product, dubbed “Flock Cover”, is a ‘pay-as-you-fly’ insurance app that allows drone pilots to insure flights for a minimum of one hour. It aggregates real-time data, including hyperlocal weather conditions, population density, proximity to high-risk areas (such as airports), and more. Flock’s algorithms then analyse this data, coupled with other data points, such as the weight of the drone, to quantify the risk of any given drone flight. The insurance itself is offered through a partnership with Allianz.
“The problem we’re solving in the drone industry is that drone flight risks are unpredictable, complex, and not particularly well understood by insurers,” explains Klinger. “The result of this is overpriced, cumbersome, but often compulsory insurance policies that are not fit for purpose (in the U.K. drone insurance is a legal requirement for commercial pilots)”.
In contrast, Flock’s use of real-time (and static) data enables the startup to offer pricing that is “risk-dependant,” says Klinger, “so the safer you fly, the less you pay. Our safest pilots now pay less for their insurance than their morning coffee!”.
The company says that 1,000 commercial drone pilots now use Flock Cover, which launched earlier this year in the U.K., representing a departure from flat-rate annual premiums in favour of Flock’s on-demand model.
With that said, the Flock CEO concedes that there are a number of other on-demand drone insurance products already on the market, even if traditional insurers remain the startup’s main competition. “These insurers have been going for longer than us, and they certainly have bigger budgets. What they don’t have is real-time data on their side. They cannot differentiate between high-risk and low-risk customers or flights, so they simply charge everyone roughly the same amount for an annual policy,” he says.
Meanwhile, it would appear that drone insurance is just the beginning, as Klinger and Pena eye up other areas of cover where Big Data can be utilised to offer more flexible and better value insurance.
“As the world becomes increasingly autonomous, from the cars on our streets to the robots in our homes, we can expect to see a whole new set of risks emerge,” adds Klinger. “Here at Flock we’re using cutting edge data science to identify, quantify and insure these risks for drones, but we’re just getting started. Our wider vision is ultimately to bridge the gap between today’s insurers and tomorrow’s technologies, pioneering the use of Big Data in insurance for an autonomous future”.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The South Pacific nation of Papua New Guinea (PNG), Australia's closest neighbor, directly to its north, will temporarily ban Facebook as the region grapples with potentially troubling side effects of the platform.
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The month-long ban will allow the government to research how the social media platform is being used and, in particular, will target fake news and fake accounts.
"The time will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accounts, users that upload pornographic images, users that post false and misleading information on Facebook to be filtered and removed," Communications Minister Sam Basil said, according to the local Post-Courier.
"This will allow genuine people with real identities to use the social network responsibly," he said, adding that a specific date for implementation hasn't been set.
"We cannot allow the abuse of Facebook to continue in the country," Basil said.
Rohingya refugees after leaving Myanmar for Bangladesh last year.. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
Fake accounts and potential political interference on Facebook aren't just in Russia's playbook.
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In 2016, weeks before Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines, Rappler found 26 fake accounts were able to influence at least 3 million accounts.
Earlier this year, Sri Lanka temporarily banned Facebook, as well as WhatsApp and Instagram, after posts inciting violence towards the country's Muslim population were discovered amid a state of emergency.
But concern reached new levels when it emerged that Facebook has contributed to the suspected genocide in Myanmar. One UN official said in March that Facebook "substantively contributed to the level of acrimony and dissension and conflict, if you will, within the public. Hate speech is certainly of course a part of that."
A UN investigator also said that "everything is done through Facebook in Myanmar" and "that Facebook has now turned into a beast."
Problems have also arisen in Cambodia, where the Prime Minister's Facebook page has 10 million likes despite the country having less than 16 million constituents. A Cambodian opposition leader has since taken Facebook to court in California in hope of being granted information on where those likes came from.
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Last year, Cambodia was one of the countries where Facebook tested a newsfeed change by putting publishers' content in a separate page, a move that came amid a government crackdown on independent media.
"It's astonishing that Facebook is using a group of less-developed countries as guinea pigs for their experiment, especially since the evidence shows that this separation of newsfeeds is likely to have broad and harmful effects on local public discourse and the local media market," said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, said at the time.
Reuters/Dylan Martinez
Part of the reasoning for PNG's proposed shutdown is to have time to enforce the country's Cyber Crime Act so "perpetrators can be identified and charged accordingly."
The law, enacted in 2017, received praise for its focus on data and network security. But human rights groups are concerned it could also allow the government to crackdown on criticism, and ease the path to censorship.
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Defamatory content, offensive publications, and inciting unrest can all be punished by up to 25 years in jail.
Last year, PNG's electoral commissioner, Patilias Gamato, obtained a court order to stop one blogger tweeting or sharing statements that labeled him "tomato".
In Thailand, arrest warrants are regularly issued for a range of content posted on Facebook and YouTube. One man was sentenced to 30 years for insulting the monarchy on Facebook in 2015, while another was sentenced to 10 years for comments made in a private Facebook Messenger chat.
Police also monitor Facebook posts in Cambodia. Among numerous incidents in recent years, one man was arrested on his wedding day in February for calling the government "authoritarian" in a Facebook video.
Earlier this year Malaysia introduced a fake news law and last month convicted a Danish citizen over a YouTube video that included inaccurate criticism of police. The country's new government hopes to repeal the law in June.
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Cambodia's president is reportedly mulling a similar law.
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In PNG, Basil seemed unconcerned about a future without Facebook, suggesting that the country may also look at creating a new social network site for local citizens.
"If there need be then we can gather our local applications developers to create a site that is more conducive for Papua New Guineans to communicate within the country and abroad as well," he said.
Facebook confirmed to Business Insider it has reached out to the PNG government.
About eight hours south of Silicon Valley sits the Monterey Peninsula, where you'll find a fledgling community that's being designed as a respite for the region's tech elite.
Walden Monterey was founded in 2016 by developer Nick Jekogian, who set out to turn the 609 acre-land into a coastal "agrihood" community, a growing trend amongst millennials in which they shun the idea of belonging to golf communities, like the previous generation, and instead embrace agricultural neighborhoods that focus on nature, farms, and outdoor living.
The property plans to build 22 homes in total, with the lots they sit costing about $5 million each (three lots have been sold, as of November 2017). After the sales are made, buyers can work with a team of more than 20 architects assembled by Jekogian (or they can hire an outsider) to then shell out additional millions in home construction.
A key step in the buying process involves prospective buyers actually visiting the land. Jekogian invites people to stay in "roving rooms," or small moveable glass houses, which allow them to experience what living on the land would actually be like.
But now, Walden Monterey will soon provide a new way to try out the land. The design studio DFA, founded by Laith Sayigh, was approached by Walden Monterey to design a house for potential buyers to stay in while they mull over purchase decisions.
The 3D-printed self-sustaining houses, dubbed Galini Sleeping Pods, are 300 square feet in size, can be moved anywhere, are powered by solar panels, wind turbines, and Tesla batteries, and will cost about $250,000 each. Sayigh told Business Insider that they're not just a future staple for the Walden Monterey community, but that they represent "the next generation of construction technology."
Take a look:
The author enjoying a cocktail at the United Airlines Polaris Lounge at San Francisco International Airport. Melia Robinson/Business Insider
Flying can be a real pain. But for United Airlines' international travelers with money to spare, a high-end experience awaits them at San Francisco International Airport.
The airline raised the curtain on its new Polaris lounge â only the second of its kind â at SFO's international terminal on April 30. The business-class clubhouse features a full restaurant and bar, a library, shower suites, and nap pods for weary travelers.
Business Insider got a peak inside United's Polaris lounge. Here's what you're missing.
Sramana Mitra: I have a specific question that relates to our community. We have a global base of entrepreneurs. Very often, entrepreneurs have their development teams elsewhere, whether it’s India,...
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2017 was the third hottest year on record and as temperatures continue to rise some of America's cities are looking for ways to cool down. In Los Angeles, pavement company GuardTop is coating streets white to help combat climate change. Following is a transcript of the video.
Narrator: 2017 was the third hottest year on record. And based on recent trends, it's not getting cooler any time soon. Some researchers are asking, how can we stay cool? Especially in our cities. They're typically hotter than rural areas. But why?
You can thank the urban heat island effect. On hot summer days, roofs, buildings and other urban surfaces can heat up to 90 degrees hotter than the air. This creates islands of heat. One of the biggest contributors to those islands, dark surfaces. Dark surfaces absorb all wavelengths of light and converts them to heat. So the surface gets warm. It's why your mom told you not to wear black during a heatwave. Surface temperatures can reach up to 150 degrees. And since asphalt is an insulator, it traps that heat over the course of the day. Then at night when the air is cooler, the heat radiates away. Lighter surfaces, on the other hand, absorb fewer wavelengths and reflect the rest. That way, all that energy isn't absorbed. And surface temperatures won't rise as much.
So, would coating our streets white help cool down our cities? Enter Jeff Luzar, he's the Vice President of Sales for GuardTop, a pavement company looking to cool off LA. Their solution? Coat the streets white.
Jeff Luzar: We're seeing temperature difference right now of about, anywhere from about nine to 10 degrees, but again, the temperatures are pretty cool outside right now.
Narrator: When it's hotter though, Jeff says the pavement could be up to 30 degrees cooler with the white coat.
Luzar: Some of the pilot programs that we've done last year with the Bureau of Streets and Services LA City, I know they are, as well as we are, taking a look at the surfaces, making sure they're holding up, making sure they're still doing what we said they were gonna do. And they are. And some of the neighbors are saying they do feel a little difference and this and that. If we can lower the temperatures by the ambient temperature outside by degree or two, it means a lot.
Narrator: That may not seem like a lot but a report by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests that a one and half degree change could make a huge difference. Los Angeles could save over $100 million per year in energy savings and smog reductions. But what is the coating made of? Most other pavements use coal tar. Some studies have been done and that where it's showing that it could have some carcinogenic effects. But GuardTop says that its coating is made from recycled materials that don't have carcinogenic additives.
Of course, LA isn't the only warm city in the world. Other US cities are also considering coating their streets like Las Vegas. But officials there worry that it won't stick due to an oily road mix it uses to combat dry climate. And in New York City, volunteers have painted seven million square feet of rooftops white, but that's only 1% of the potential roof area. It's clear that there's still a lot of work to be done.
Luzar: I was never a big climate guy until we started getting into this product but when you see what differences one degree can make in climate change, it makes quite a bit of difference.
Amy and I took a much needed 10 days off in Aspen.
The first five months of the year was intense for both of us. Lots of travel, work, and stuff. Not a lot of self-care, time alone, or reading. And very little running since my calf was injured.
The last 10 days were lots of together time, running, reading, and sleeping. I gobbled up a bunch of books, all of them worth reading.
Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech Youâll Never Hear: I started with a short book by Carl Hiaasen. Iâm a fan of his fiction, so this caught my eye in Explore Booksellers (the local Aspen bookstore where we always load up whenever we come here.) It was cynically wonderful, and great advice.
Adjustment Day: Ever since Fight Club, Iâve been a Chuck Palahniuk fan. His fiction is cloudy, complex, challenging, contemporary, and cynical. Heâs basically the C-Man of fiction (go Chuck, go â¦) Adjustment Day was the perfect fictional setup for the next book I read, which was â¦
Fascism: A Warning: Amy and I have been fortunate enough to get to know Madeleine Albright through our collective relationships at Wellesley. Amy knows her better, but I had an amazing dinner sitting next to her one night where I walked away thinking âI wish she had been born here so she could run for president.â The word âfascismâ is once again being used so often as to mean nothing, so Albright spends 250 or so pages walking the reader through real fascism, how fascists behave, what they do to their countries (and societies), and what â as a citizen in a democratic country â to pay attention to. She covers the famous ones, but also some not so famous ones, especially those who came to power in the context of a theoretically democratic society.
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup: Every entrepreneur and VC should read this book. John Carreyrou has done something important here. Maybe this book will finally put a nail in the phrase âfake it till you make itâ, but I doubt it. The amount of lying, disingenuousness, blatant and unjustified self-promotion, and downright deceit that exists in entrepreneurship right now is at a local maximum. This always happens when entrepreneurship gets trendy. Carreyrou just wrote a long warning for entrepreneurs and VCs.
Imagine Wanting Only This: I love graphic novels. I donât read enough because â well â I donât know. Amy bought me this one because she loved the cover. Kristen Radtke wrote a beautiful, provocative, at times extremely sad, but also uplifting story that is auto-biographical. I wish I could write this well. And, when I read a book like this, I really wish I could draw.
The Painted Word: The world lost a great writer recently when Tom Wolfe died. So I bought the Five Essential Tom Wolfe Books You Should Read. I hadnât read The Painted Word so I started with it. Itâs a deliciously scathing criticism of modern art, circa 1975. I loved it.
Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto: If you read one book from this list, read this one, especially if you live in Boulder. Alan Stern, the PI on the New Horizons mission to Pluto, wrote â with David Grinspoon â a riveting story that spans around 30 years. Both Alan and David are at CU Boulder, which plays a key role in the exploration of the last planet in our solar system (there â I said it â Pluto is a planet, the IAU be damned.) This book is a page tuner and will cause you to fall in love with Pluto. And, in late breaking news, Pluto may actually be a giant comet (ah â clickbait headlines â¦)
Damn Right!: Behind the Scenes with Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger: Iâm a huge Charlie Munger fan. For some reason, Iâd missed this biography of him. I learned a few things I didnât know and got to travel back in time to a book written in the context of Charlie Munger about 20 years ago.
It was a great vacation. Iâll be back in Boulder tomorrow â¦
Also published on Medium.
"American Animals" is the first release by MoviePass. It will be partnering with distributor The Orchard in the release. The Orchard/MoviePass
At this year's Sundance Film Festival, MoviePass announced the launch of a distribution arm of the company, called MoviePass Ventures. The plan was for the monthly movie-ticket subscription service to start teaming with film distributors to buy titles for theatrical release.
Days later at the festival, MoviePass announced it was working with The Orchard ("Cartel Land") to buy North American rights to one of the festival's acclaimed selections this year, "American Animals," a narrative/documentary hybrid that follows a group of friends who attempt to pull off an elaborate heist.
At the festival, Ted Farnsworth, CEO of MovePass' parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics, told a room full of distributors and industry players, "We aren't here at Sundance to compete with distributors, but rather to put skin in the game alongside them and to bring great films to the big screen across the country for our subscribers."
But a lot has happened since Farnsworth made those remarks.
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In April, his company filed its 10-K to the SEC and reported a loss of $150.8 million in 2017. That was followed by a new filing revealing that the company has been losing $20 million a month on average since September. Due to all of this, the company's stock is down more than 98% since its high in October, but Farnsworth and MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe are adamant that everything is fine, stating that MoviePass can tap $300 million that will keep it going for over a year (though the company's access to that money is far from certain).
Now "American Animals," which will be the first release by MoviePass Ventures, is coming to theaters on June 1. And despite all these new developments, the movie's director, Bart Layton, told Business Insider he had no regrets about taking the deal with MoviePass back at Sundance.
"I don't have insight or understanding of their financial strategy, that's for people more clever than I am, but they came in, they seemed very dynamic, they seemed to have a lot of enthusiasm," Layton said on Wednesday. "As a filmmaker, your whole intention is for people to experience your movie in the theater, that was the thing that was very appealing to me. They are all about the theatrical experience."
"American Animals" director Bart Layton says the movie will be released regardless if MoviePass is in business. Nicholas Hunt/Getty
Layton also said that if MoviePass were to shut down before or during the release of "American Animals," it would not affect the movie's theatrical release.
"The cinemas are booked, the movie will go out," he said. "How it will affect us? I guess if it happened we would have a few less of their subscribers going to the movie. But hopefully at this stage those people are still engaged enough in the film that they want to see it badly enough that they would pay full price to see it."
And it makes sense for distributors, especially the ones in the indie market, to be interested in teaming with MoviePass. With over 3 million subscribers, it's not just a good tool for the movie's promotion â it plans to plaster "American Animals" all over its app, and where it has partnerships â but the distributor its working with will have direct data from MoviePass on how the movie performed with its subscribers through the movie's theatrical run (what day and time they went to see the movie, where they saw it, the ratio of males to females who saw the movie, and so on).
But how much skin does MoviePass really have in the game?
It turns out the answer is "a lot." For "American Animals," specifically, according to a source familiar with the deal, the company is an equal partner with The Orchard in all costs related to the release, including prints and advertising (the physical delivery of the movie to the theaters and the advertising to promote it). In turn, it will split box office revenue with The Orchard down the middle.
If the company were to fold before or during the movie's release, The Orchard would then have to cover the costs MoviePass was responsible for.
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MoviePass has confirmed to Business Insider that it's jointly invested in the release of "American Animals" and the monetization of the movie with The Orchard.
MoviePass Ventures has also signed on to release "Gotti," starring John Travolta, which is coming out June 15. It will team with distributor Vertical Entertainment on the release.
Have a tip about MoviePass or anything else? Email
U.S. President Barack Obama arrives on November 16, 2016 in Berlin, Germany Sean Gallup/Getty Images
We all know the cliche of the lazy government worker. It goes like this: with no quarterly profits to protect, a stable 9-to-5 workday (plus lunch) and a constant string of federal holidays, government employees are people with no ambition and no reason to push hard.
But President Barack Obama says that this is nothing but a myth.
"People in my White House had to work at a much harder level of sustained effort than anyone in the private sector had to work," Obama said to a crowd of 4,000 IT professionals on Wednesday, speaking on stage with Okta CEO Todd McKinnon at at Okta's annual conference in Las Vegas.
"I think there's a misperception that government doesn't work and people don't work hard," he said and then he joked, "I think people's image of government is based on going to get their driver's licence renewed."
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When the crowd laughed, Obama quipped that dealing with the DMV, "is truly annoying."
That said, Departments of Motor Vehicles are run by state governments, not the federal government. He said he once joked to a friend a few years ago, "If I could nationalize DMVs around the country, it would be transformative, because people's ideas of government would drastically improve."
More seriously, he said that "the truth is the public sector does really hard things really well that the private sector can't or won't do." This includes everything from national security to scientific research.
He also suggested that people's frustrations â and misconceptions â come from government's poor use of technology. Government is far when it comes to using tech, he said. It's not just the DMV, at the federal level, he offered the IRS as a big example.
"The fact is, we under-invest in the IRS" in part because "nobody likes the IRS," he said. "As a consequence, we discovered basic IT systems in place [at the IRS] are held together by string and bubble gum."
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While some might argue that it's the convoluted tax code that makes the IRS so miserable to work with, Obama dismissed that. Even if the tax code is never simplified, by upgrading the IRS's technology, "you could make interacting with IRS - I won't say pleasurable - but more efficient, more user friendly. But that requires investment that often times we don't like to do."
Lack of investment in tech increases the frustrations people experience when working with a government agency. And that contributes to their perception of the a bureaucratic or lazy government worker, he said.
For the record, Americans across all job titles work on average just over 34 hours a week, according to US Department of Labor. That's a little less than federal employees, who are expected to work 40 hours a week, typically 8:30 to 5:00, Monday through Friday.
More from President Obama's talk on Wednesday.
Seventy two years after launching the iconic Vespa scooter, Italian motor vehicle company Piaggio has unveiled its newest creation: A robot designed to help you get around without a car at all.
Piaggio Fast Forward, Piaggio's American sibling established in 2015, has been testing the Gita, a two-foot-high, two-wheeled mobile carrying robot, out of its Boston offices for a while now. The company has not yet disclosed a price, but it could start popping up in businesses and construction sites as soon as early 2019.
The company's hope with them is to encourage walking, by eliminating the need for people to need their cars to lug stuff around. The company's motto is "autonomy for humans" â in other words, creating autonomous products in the service of humans, not replacing them.
In that sense, the robot is more like "Star Wars'" heroic, helpful BB-8 droid than a superintelligent robot butler.
Take a look at how it works, below.
We're really bad at choosing passwords.
According to a new study by a researcher at Virginia Tech and Dashlane, a popular password manager service, most users make the same mistakes when making passwords, such as making their password the name of a popular brand or sports team.
And while these things make passwords easy to remember, they aren't all that secure, and make passwords easily guessable by hackers.
The study evaluated 6.1 million anonymized passwords gathered by Gang Wang, a computer science researcher at Virginia Tech, and analyzed by Dashlane. Those passwords come from the massive troves of user personal data that have been leaked in data breaches over the years.
Here are the most common patterns and mistakes people make, and what you should avoid:
Sramana Mitra: Especially for companies coming out of India who sell using inside sales either into the large enterprises or SMB, the SMB market has a lot of headroom in terms of the next 5 to 15...
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