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Snap is reportedly about to launch its own gaming platform

Published June 27, 2018

Snap is seeking to explore new ground as it tries to outrun Instagram’s efforts to copy its features. Its newest effort may be building out a bona fide hub for gaming inside Snapchat, according to a new report from The Information. The platform will launch later this year, the report says, and Snap is already signing on game publishers to participate in its efforts.

We reached out to Snap for comment.

The news makes a lot of sense, given the efforts Snap has increasingly been pouring into its own Lens Studio software for developers to create its specialized AR filters. Snap reportedly bought a web-based 3D game engine last year, called PlayCanvas, which would serve as a good backbone for even more robust developer tools.

It’s not clear from the report whether these gaming titles would be focused largely on AR gaming, though one might expect it given all of the attention Snap has paid to the emerging mobile platform.

In April, the company launched “Snappables,” which were basically short selfie AR games that integrate easily into Snapchat’s Lens selection UI.

Augmented reality applications really benefit from sidling up closely to a camera platform, where you can snap a photo or record some video of an encounter with an AR T-Rex. This thinking benefits Snap. Snap is probably not competing with Google’s ARCore or Apple’s ARKit anymore; with these technologies, Snap simply seems to be striving to be the app that’s home to several of these experiences. This is an advantage Snapchat still seems to hold over Facebook and Instagram’s in-app cameras, which anecdotally don’t seem to be used very heavily by users, though the companies have not released usage numbers.

Snap won’t exactly be blazing the trail with messaging-based gaming experiences. Facebook Messenger has already experimented with short, shareable mini-games. As noted by The Information report, CEO Evan Spiegel has expressed admiration for Tencent’s business model, which sees nearly 40 percent of its revenues come from in-game purchases in the WeChat app. If the gaming platform did have a skew toward augmented reality, that would certainly be a unique proposition — though many of AR’s promises have still been unrealized as developers grapple with what makes an engaging experience.

Samsung will probably unveil the Note 9 on August 9

Published June 27, 2018

Those Galaxy Note 9 rumors have been coming fast and furious in recent weeks, and now we know why. Samsung just sent out invites for its next big event in New York City, and its beloved phablet seems all but guaranteed to show up. The timeframe certainly lines up.

The pen-enabled device was first announced at IFA back in 2011, and while the company has moved away from the trade show toward its own stage in recent years, announcements have more or less stayed within that August/September timeframe. And holding the event on August 9, well, that’s likely more than just a numerological coincidence. As if all that weren’t confirmation enough, the handset appears to have also recently passed through the FCC (alongside the Tab S3 tablet), a surefire sign that it’s just over the horizon.

The phone was the subject of a big leak earlier this week, which hinted at an update to the line’s iconic S Pen stylus. Exact details are pretty thin at the moment, though one leaker called it “the biggest update” in the peripheral’s history, for what that’s worth. And the close up shot on this morning’s invites do appear to confirm a focus on the stylus. Samsung has refined the S Pen’s writing system in the seven years since the first device was announced, but it’s largely taken a back seat to things like screen design and camera specs.

Otherwise, however, Note 9 reports paint a picture of fairly minor upgrades over the Note 8, with plenty of features cribbed from the S9 announced back in February at Mobile World Congress.

Cordial raises $15M for smarter emails and messaging

Published June 27, 2018

Cordial, a San Diego startup building what CEO Jeremy Swift described as a “truly next-generation platform” for email marketing, has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

Swift and his co-founders come from email marketing company BlueHornet/Mapp Digital, which he said gave them the background to see “the market was really screaming: There needs to be a better way.”

We’ve written about plenty of other email marketing products. For example, last week I covered Stensul, which focuses on the email creation process. But Swift argued that most startups are building “point solutions” that sit on top of existing email platforms, whereas Cordial is “unequivocally” taking on the big marketing clouds offered by Oracle, Adobe, IBM and Salesforce.

“Cordial has gone to market to say you don’t need a legacy solution, plus a whole host of other point solutions, to try and do real-time messaging in a better way,” he said.

When Swift and Sales Engineering Manager Justin Soni gave me a quick demo of the Cordial platform, one of the big distinctions they pointed to was the way it uses customer data. Rather than targeting and customizing emails based on broad customer segments, they showed me how a Cordial email can incorporate dynamic elements that are updated with real-time, personal data — as Soni clicked around on different products on the merchant website, the email he was creating changed based on that behavior.

In addition, Cordial applies machine learning technology to optimize the emails — not just testing out variations on one element, but every part of the email, from the subject line to the call-to-action button.

And while Cordial started out with email, Swift said it’s expanded to include other messaging channels like push notifications and SMS. All of that can be coordinated from within a tool called Podium, where a marketer uses a visual interface to build different communication flows based on customer actions.

Cordial previously raised $6 million in Series A funding. Companies using the platform include Freshly, La Quinta and 1-800-Contacts.

The new funding was led by PeakSpan, with participation from Upfront Ventures and High Alpha. Swift said this will allow Cordial to continue adding new marketing channels (the goal is one per quarter) and to continue investing in the technology.

Intermix.io looks to help data engineers find their worst bottlenecks

Published June 27, 2018

For any company built on top of machine learning operations, the more data it has, the better it is off — as long as it can keep it all under control. But as more and more information pours in from disparate sources, gets logged in obscure databases and is generally hard (or slow) to query, the process of getting that all into one neat place where a data scientist can actually start running the statistics is quickly running into one of machine learning’s biggest bottlenecks.

That’s a problem Intermix.io and its founders, Paul Lappas and Lars Kamp, hope to solve. Engineers get a granular look at all of the different nuances behind what’s happening with some specific function, from the query all the way through all of the paths it’s taking to get to its end result. The end product is one that helps data engineers monitor the flow of information going through their systems, regardless of the source, to isolate bottlenecks early and see where processes are breaking down. The company also said it has raised seed funding from Uncork Capital, S28 Capital, PAUA Ventures along with Bastian Lehman, CEO of Postmates and Hasso Plattner, founder of SAP.

“Companies realize being data driven is a key to success,” Kamp said. “The cloud makes it cheap and easy to store your data forever, machine learning libraries are making things easy to digest. But a company that wants to be data driven wants to hire a data scientist. This is the wrong first hire. To do that they need access to all the relevant data, and have it be complete and clean. That falls to data engineers who need to build data assembly lines where they are creating meaningful types to get data usable to the data scientist. That’s who we serve.”

Intermix.io works in a couple of ways: First, it tags all of that data, giving the service a meta-layer of understanding what does what, and where it goes; second, it taps every input in order to gather metrics on performance and help identify those potential bottlenecks; and lastly, it’s able to track that performance all the way from the query to the thing that ends up on a dashboard somewhere. The idea here is that if, say, some server is about to run out of space somewhere or is showing some performance degradation, that’s going to start showing up in the performance of the actual operations pretty quickly — and needs to be addressed.

All of this is an efficiency play that might not seem to make sense at a smaller scale. The waterfall of new devices that come online every day, as well as more and more ways of understanding how people use tools online, even the smallest companies can quickly start building massive data sets. And if that company’s business depends on some machine learning happening in the background, that means it’s dependent on all that training and tracking happening as quickly and smoothly as possible, with any hiccups leading to real-term repercussions for its own business.

Intermix.io isn’t the first company to try to create some application performance management software. There are others like Data Dog and New Relic, though Lappas says that the primary competition from them comes in the form of traditional APM software with some additional scripts tacked on. However, data flows are a different layer altogether, which means they require a more unique and custom approach to addressing that problem.

Peloton acquires music startup Neurotic Media

Published June 27, 2018

Peloton, the unicorn spin (and now treadmill) business that lets users work out via live-streamed classes, has today announced its first acquisition. The company acquired Neurotic Media, a B2B music aggregation and streaming service.

Atlanta-based Neurotic Media was founded in 2001 by Shachar “Shac” Oren, who will become a VP at Peloton serving under Peloton’s Head of Music Paul DeGooyer. The entire Neurotic Media team and offices will remain in Atlanta, continuing operations as a standalone subsidiary serving third-party clients.

Neurotic Media is a white-label distribution and marketing platform, helping brands influence and engage customers via popular music. Essentially, the company connects a brand with a certain popular song or songs that align with their brand mission.

The idea here is that music is integral to working out. Given Peloton’s focus on bringing a high-quality workout to the comfort of a user’s home (or one of their studios), music plays a big role. But one doesn’t often dabble in the music industry without either 1) experience or 2) loads of money. While Peloton has plenty of cash to go around, Neurotic brings nearly two decades of experience to the Peloton portfolio.

Here’s what DeGooyer had to say in a prepared statement:

Our Members have embraced music as central to the Peloton experience and consistently rank it as one of the top aspects of the brand. The addition of Shac and his amazing team to the Peloton family will help us rapidly deploy new music features we know our Members want, along with some unique innovations we think they’ll love.

Peloton has been making moves as of late. The company launched an expanded iOS app called Peloton Digital, and has announced plans to expand into the U.K. and Canada starting in the Fall. Plus, Peloton opened a new Tread studio in NYC, with plans to open a massive multi-studio space on the West Side of Manhattan next year.

Peloton was founded in 2012 and has raised a total of $444.7 million. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Puppet raises $42M led by Cisco as its DevOps automation platform passes 40,000 businesses

Published June 27, 2018

DevOps — the branch of enterprise IT that involves both products and best-practices for developers to build, test and run apps and other software — is on track to be worth nearly $13 billion by 2025. Now, a startup that is building DevOps tools is announcing a significant funding round to capitalize on that opportunity. Portland, Oregon-based Puppet (formerly Puppet Labs) has raised $42 million in funding in a venture round with a number of strategic and key financial investors.

The funding was led by Cisco, with Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures, Singapore’s EDBI and VMware also participating.

The company isn’t readily disclosing its valuation — although we are trying to find out — but according to PitchBook, its last disclosed valuation was in 2014, when it raised $40 million and was valued at $652 million post-money.

But Puppet has grown more than two-fold in the last four years: back then, it had 18,000 customers, including the likes of Google, Twitter, Salesforce and AT&T. Now, it says it has more than 40,000 companies as customers, “including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100” using both its open source and commercial products — and it’s expanded internationally and has made a couple of acquisitions (including the startup Reflect earlier this month).

All this would imply that Puppet, which now has raised $150 million to date, is likely valued at significantly more than $700 million, and may well be approaching the $1 billion-mark.

“Our rapid growth and international expansion is a testament to the rising demand for DevOps transformation, software automation and the pressing need for enterprises to navigate the new world of software delivery. That’s why we’ve been so focused on expanding our product portfolio—to empower customers to discover, deliver and operate software across their cloud and containerized environments,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, CEO, Puppet, in a statement. “I’m thrilled by the momentum we’re experiencing. It helps us better support our customers’ journey to pervasive automation.”

The growth of cloud services, and the ubiquity of digitization, have led to a wide slate of functions in a business falling under the category of developer-led operations.

This has, in turn, driven a bigger demand for better processes to run these operations and the infrastructure that they touch. Puppet is not the only company in this area: in addition to large players like Cisco and CA Technologies and EMC, there are startups like Docker, Chef and more.

Puppet’s solutions cover applications, cloud services, containerized services and networking devices, and that mix is part of what is attractive about the company, as many businesses today are not all-in on modern architectures, but are grappling with hybrids of old and new, cloud and on-premises, and so on. (Indeed, the “Puppet” name is a reference to how it works: developers can control the actions of the their applications over the network as puppeteers control puppets, without being seen).

“ServiceChannel has an aggressive technology roadmap. One that not only takes advantage of cloud native capabilities and containerized applications, but also requires modernization of existing, critical systems. Automation is necessary to help us deliver on that roadmap within the constraints of business—safely and at scale,” said Mark Trumpbour, VP of DevOps at ServiceChannel, in a statement.

Investors Cisco and VMware are themselves already key players in the area of DevOps (and Cisco and VMWare, both previous investors, already work with Puppet), while another backer, EDBI, holds investments in a number of companies that are potential customers for the startup.

“Businesses put increasingly massive pressure on enterprise IT—so, it’s important that those IT organizations partner with technology providers with compelling innovation, world-class support and a global community of experts. Puppet has a track record of empowering its customers with all of these critical elements,” said Rob Salvagno, VP of Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, in a statement. “We look forward to working even more with Puppet as the global demand for automation technology and innovation continues to accelerate.”

“In today’s digital age, companies face increasing complex IT challenges dealing with their dynamic and diverse IT infrastructure. Puppet’s automation and management platform transforms how companies manage and improve the efficiency of their IT assets and can help companies in Singapore realize productivity gains while ensuring compliance,” said Swee-Yeok CHU, CEO and president EDBI, in an additional statement. “Leveraging our network, we look forward to helping Puppet scale up its local talent pool to address the region’s opportunities through its APAC Regional HQ in Singapore and to augment Singapore’s digital transformation strategy.”

Codefresh raises $8M Series B round for its container-centric CI/CD platform

Published June 27, 2018

Codefresh, a continuous integration and delivery platform built for the Kubernetes container ecosystem, today announced that it has raised an $8 million Series B round led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund. Viola Ventures, Hillsven and CEIF also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15.1 million.

In a market where there are seemingly more CI/CD platforms every day, Codefresh sets itself apart thanks to its focus on Kubernetes, which is now essentially the de facto standard for container orchestration services and which is seeing a rapid growth in adoption. The service promises it can help developers automate their application deployments to Kubernetes and that teams will see “up to 24X faster development times.” That number seems a bit optimistic, but the whole point of adopting Kubernetes and CI/CD is obviously to speed up the development and deployment process.

“The meteoric rise of Kubernetes is happening so fast that most toolchains haven’t kept up, and M12 knows it,” said Raziel Tabib, Codefresh co-founder and CEO. “With this latest round of funding we’re going to aggressively accelerate our roadmap and expand our customer base.”

The Codefresh platform hit general availability in 2017 and the company currently claims about 20,000 users, including the likes Giphy.

Facebook tests 30-day keyword snoozing to fight spoilers, triggers

Published June 27, 2018

Don’t want to know the ending to a World Cup game or Avengers movie until you’ve watched it, or just need to quiet an exhausting political topic like “Trump”? Facebook is now testing the option to “snooze” specific keywords so you won’t see them for 30 days in News Feed or Groups. The feature is rolling out to a small percentage of users today. It could make people both more comfortable browsing the social network when they’re trying to avoid something, and not feel guilty posting about sensitive topics.

The feature was first spotted in the Facebook app’s code by Chris Messina on Sunday, who told TechCrunch he found a string for “snooze keywords for 30 days.” We reached out to Facebook on Monday, which didn’t initially respond, but last night provided details we could publish at 5am this morning ahead of an official announcement later today. The test follows the rollout of snoozing people, Pages and Groups from last December.

To snooze a keyword, you first have to find a post that includes it. That kind of defeats the whole purpose, as you might run into the spoiler you didn’t want to see. But when asked about that problem, a Facebook spokesperson told me the company is looking into adding a preemptive snooze option in the next few weeks, potentially in News Feed Preferences. It’s also considering a recurring snooze list so you could easily re-enable hiding your favorite sports team before any game you’ll have to watch on delay.

For now, though, when you see the word, you can hit the drop-down arrow on the post, which will reveal an option to “snooze keywords in this post.” Tapping that reveals a list of nouns from the post you might want to nix, without common words like “the” in the way. So if you used the feature on a post that said “England won its World Cup game against Tunisia! Yes!” the feature would pull out “World Cup,” “England,” and “Tunisia.” Select all that you want to snooze, and posts containing them will be hidden for a month. Currently, the feature only works on text, not images, and won’t suggest synonyms you might want to snooze as well.

The spokesperson says the feature “was something that kept coming up” in Facebook interviews with users. The option applies to any organic content, but you can’t block ads with it, so if you snoozed “Deadpool” you wouldn’t see posts from friends about the movie but still might see ads to buy tickets. Facebook’s excuse for this is that ads belong to “a separate team, separate algorithm,” but surely it just doesn’t want to open itself up to users mass-blocking its revenue driver. The spokesperson also said that snoozing isn’t currently being used for other content and ad targeting purposes.

We asked why users can’t permanently mute keywords like Twitter launched in November 2016, or the way Instagram launched keyword blocking for your posts’ comments in September 2016. Facebook says, “If we’re hearing from people that they want more or less time,” that might get added as the feature rolls out beyond a test. There is some sense to defaulting to only temporary muting, as users might simply forget they blocked their favorite sports team before a big game, and then wouldn’t see it mentioned forever after.

But when it comes to abuse, permanent muting is something Facebook really should offer. Instead, it’s relied on users flagging abuse like racial slurs, and it recently revealed its content moderation guidelines. Some topics that are fine for others could be tough for certain people to see, though, and helping users prevent trauma probably deserves to be prioritized above stopping reality TV spoilers.

IQ Capital is raising £125M to invest in deep tech startups in the UK

Published June 27, 2018

The rapid pace of technology innovation and applications in recent decades — you could argue that just about every kind of business is a “tech” business these days — has spawned a sea of tech startups and larger businesses that are focused on serving that market, and equally demanding consumers, on a daily basis. Today, a venture capital firm in the UK is announcing a fund aimed at helping to grow the technologies that will underpin a lot of those daily applications.

Cambridge-based IQ Capital is raising £125 million ($165 million) that it will use specifically to back UK startups that are building “deep tech” — the layer of research and development, and potentially commercialised technology, that is considered foundational to how a lot of technology will work in the years and decades to come. So far, some £92 million has been secured, and partner Kerry Baldwin said that the rest is coming “without question” — pointing to strong demand.

There was a time when it was more challenging to raise money for very early stage companies working at the cusp of new technologies, even more so in smaller tech ecosystems like the UK’s. As Ed Stacey, another partner in the firm acknowledges, there is often a very high risk of failure at even more stages of the process, with the tech in some cases not even fully developed, let alone rolled out to see what kind of commercial interest there might be in the product.

However, there has been a clear shift in the last several years.

There a lot more money floating around in tech these days — so much so that it’s created a stronger demand for projects to invest in. (Another consequence of that is that when you do get a promising startup, funds are potentially giving them hundreds of millions and causing other disruptions in how they grow and exit, which is another story…)

And while there are definitely a lot of startups out there in the world today, a lot of them are what you might describe as “me too”, or at least making something that is easily replicated by another startup, making the returns and the wins harder to find among them.

A new focus that we are seeing on “deep tech” is a consequence of both of those trends.

“The low-hanging fruit has been discovered… Shallow tech is a solved problem,” Stacey said, in reference to areas like the basics of e-commerce services and mobile apps. “These are easy to build with open source components, for example. It’s shallow when it can be copied very quickly.”

In contrast, deep tech is “by definition is something that can’t easily be copied,” he continued. “The underlying algorithm is deep, with computational complexity.”

But the challenges run deep in deep tech: not only might a product or technology never come together, or find a customer, but it might face problems scaling if it does take off. IQ Capital’s focus on deep tech is coupled with the company trying to determine which ideas will scale, not just work or find a customer. As we see more deep tech companies emerging and growing, I’m guessing scalability will become an ever more prominent factor in deciding whether a startup gets backing.

IQ Capital’s investments to date span areas like security (Privitar), marketing tech (Grapeshot, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year), AI (such as speech recognition API developer Speechmatics) and biotechnology (Fluidic Analytics, which measures protein concentrations), all areas that will be the focus of this fund, along with IoT and other emerging technologies and gaps in the current market.

IQ Capital is not the only fund starting to focus on deep tech, nor is its portfolio the only range of startups focusing on this (Allegro.AI and deep-learning chipmaker Hailo are others, to name just two).

LPs in this latest fund include family offices, wealth managers, tech entrepreneurs and CEOs from IQ’s previous investments, as well as British Business Investments, the commercial arm of the British Business Bank, the firm said.

Watch Rocket Lab’s first commercial launch, ‘It’s Business Time’

Published June 27, 2018

Rocket Lab, the New Zealand-based rocket company that is looking to further amplify the commercial space frenzy, is launching its first fully paid payload atop an Electron rocket tonight — technically tomorrow morning at the launch site. If successful, it will mark a significant new development in the highly competitive world of commercial launches.

Liftoff is planned for 2:10 in the morning local time in New Zealand, or 7:10 Pacific time in the U.S.; the live stream will start about 20 minutes before that.

The Electron rocket is a far smaller one than the Falcon 9s we see so frequently these days, with a nominal payload of 150 kilograms, just a fraction of the many tons that we see sent up by SpaceX. But that’s the whole point, Rocket Lab’s founder, CEO and chief engineer Peter Beck told me recently.

“You can go buy a spot on a big launch vehicle, but they’re not very frequent. With a small rocket you can choose your orbit and choose your schedule,” he said. “That’s what we’re driving at here: regular and reliable access to space.”

An Electron rocket launching during a previous test.

Just like not every car on the road has to be a big rig, not every rocket needs to be a Saturn V. 150 kilos is more than enough to fill with paying customers and cover the cost of launch. And Beck told me there is no shortage whatsoever of paying customers.

“The most important part of the mission is the timing in which we manifested it,” he explained (manifesting meaning having a payload added to the manifest). “We went from nothing manifested to a full payload in about 12 weeks.”

For comparison, some missions or payloads will wait literally years before there’s an opportunity to get to the orbit they need. Loading up just a few weeks ahead of time is unusual, to say the least.

Today’s launch will carry satellites from Spire, Tyvak/GeoOptics, students at UC Irvine, and High Performance Space Structure Systems; you can see the specifics of these on the manifest (PDF). It’s not the first time an Electron has taken a paid payload to orbit, but it is the first fully commercialized launch.

Rocket Lab has no ambitions for interplanetary travel, sending people to space, or anything like that. It just wants to take 150 kilograms to orbit as often as it can, as inexpensively as it can.

“We’re not interested in building a bigger rocket, we’re interested in building more of this one,” Beck said. “The vehicle is fully dialed in; we started from day one with this vehicle designed from a production approach. We’re fully vertically integrated, we don’t have any contractors, we do everything in house. We’ve been scaling up the factories enormously.”

“We’re looking for a one-a-month cadence this year, then next year one every two weeks,” he continued. “Frequency is the key — it’s the choke point in space right now.”

Ultimately the plan is to get a rocket lifting off every few days. And if you think that will be enough to meet demand, just wait a couple years.