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ZenBusiness raises $15M to help founders launch and grow ‘worry-free’

Published September 25, 2019

There are two sides to starting a new business. On one side, entrepreneurs need creativity, imagination — a dream, essentially — to find, build, and market a new product to users and consumers. But on the other side, they have to deal with the regulatory state and all the minutia that comes with running any business in the 21st century.

That includes such delightful topics as choosing a particular model for incorporation, ensuring that a business has the right licenses to operate, and tracking all the legal changes happening in 50 state legislatures every year. It can be inordinately complicated (and expensive!) to ensure that your business is ready and legal.

That’s where ZenBusiness comes in. The Austin-based startup wants to empower entrepreneurs to build businesses large and small by dramatically simplifying the processes required to launch a business and then grow it.

When I last chatted with the company 18 months ago, they had just raised a $4.5 million seed round and had launched its platform. Today, it’s announcing that it has raised a new $15 million series A round led by return backer Greycroft, along with returning investors Lerer Hippeau and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest fund, alongside new investors Rosecliff Venture Partners, Interlock Partners and Recruit Strategic Partners.

ZenBusiness raises $4.5m to help launch one million small businesses by 2023

The company launched with a product that was essentially an automated registered agent for new entrepreneurs. Under state incorporation laws, companies must designate a so-called “registered agent” to receive official notices from regulatory agencies, and so ZenBusiness chose this strategic point for entry into the market.

When I last chatted with CEO Russ Buhrdorf, he described rolling up this market as one of the key initial targets for the company:

ZenBusiness is the brainchild of Ross Buhrdorf, who joined vacation rental marketplace HomeAway five months after its inception as founding CTO, and stayed for a decade until its acquisition by Expedia in 2015 for $3.9 billion. Buhrdorf intended to take a year off, but “didn’t quite make it a year” he told me.

He explained to me that HomeAway in many ways followed a rollup playbook, “raising $400 million and acquired 26 companies.” Bringing that rollup lens while exploring new spaces, he ran into the corporate legal services market, which offers help to companies to keep them in compliance with the law. Buhrdorf liked what he saw. “It’s different in all 50 states, highly-regulated, which is great for technology, it is overpriced, and they underserve their customers.” He says the space is “completely ripe for disruption.”

Since that time, the company has expanded its product to help entrepreneurs get beyond merely incorporating to actually building out their business by recommending services like banking, lending, tax preparation, website building, and more. The hope is to provide a “worry-free” guarantee to entrepreneurs so that they can get those early critical logistics out of the way and back to actually operating and growing their business.

“Small businesses come through this funnel, they don’t necessarily know exactly what to do. So we curate that solution, and then we provide them with the basics for them to get up and running and to be successful,” Buhrdorf said.

He explained that the company has built out some tools itself such as a simple webpage creator, but in the long run, he hopes to partner with other providers who integrate into the ZenBusiness platform. For instance, ZenBusiness has partnered with Xero as the company’s main accounting provider, while also backstopping that offering with accountants working at ZenBusiness. The idea is that the automated tooling plus a little human touch can help most owners handle the day-to-day challenges of running a business.

The ZenBusiness team in 2018. Photo via ZenBusiness.

Buhrdorf is particularly focused on keeping the product very self-service and automated to allow it to focus on these smaller customers. “Many of the companies that you cover that are in the enterprise space, who provide solutions for medium-sized businesses, they have to charge, they have to have sales forces, it’s very competitive there,” Buhrdorf said. “What we’re after is the segment that’s underserved, it’s the long tail of the small business segment.”

ZenBusiness has expanded its services, and it is hoping to use the fresh infusion of capital to invest in building out community features that will allow small business owners to swap tips with each other and help one another grow their businesses (presumably with some guidance from ZenBusiness community managers and experts).

The company is now 40 employees predominantly in Austin with a small office in Peru. Since we last checked in, the company has transitioned to become a public benefit corporation, which Buhrdorf said was an attempt to better align the company’s charter with its mission orientation to help small business entrepreneurs.

Update: The funding total was changed from $10m to $15m. Sorry about that.

Nintendo’s ‘Mario Kart Tour’ is out now for iPhone, iPad and Android

Published September 25, 2019

Mario Kart Tour, Nintendo’s latest mobile game, is now available on iOS for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, as well as on Android devices. The game, like Nintendo’s other mobile releases, is free to play, with in-app purchases (in-game currency called “rubies”) that you use for upgrades and unlocks.

Players immediately unlock one rider and get a tutorial to start, which introduces them to the Mario Kart Tour driving mechanics, which are slightly different than the ones you’re probably used to if you’ve played Mario Kart games for Nintendo’s various consoles. Specifically, your kart will always be moving forward, so there’s no acceleration to press; instead, you slide your finger side to side on the screen to steer left and right, with a tap firing off any items or weapons you might pick up.

High scores earn you points that can be redeemed for in-game unlocks, and the game also features other new mechanics, like “frenzy mode,” which gives you a timed period of unlimited item use whenever you pick up three of the same. Special challenges are also new in this mobile iteration, which introduce new ways to win instead of just placing first in a race with other kart drivers. Mario Kart Tour also features online ranking with other mobile players worldwide.

The “Tour” component of the game is also a new twist: Nintendo is mixing courses inspired by real-world cities in with levels that are taken from classic Mario Kart games, and these will be cycling every two weeks for a fresh global tour on a regular basis. In-game characters will also get costume variants that are inspired by these globe-trotting destinations.

Based on Nintendo’s track record, Mario Kart Tour should be perfectly playable without any in-game purchases, but players may feel that they hit a progression wall pretty quickly without picking up some currency. It’ll be interesting to see how this one fares, given that Apple has just introduced its own Arcade subscription service focused on games that eschew in-app purchase mechanics — including cart racer Sonic Racing, which looks very much like it was once intended to offer similar in-app mechanics before Arcade came along.

Alibaba unveils Hanguang 800, an AI inference chip it says significantly increases the speed of machine learning tasks

Published September 25, 2019

Alibaba Group introduced its first AI inference chip today, a neural processing unit called Hanguang 800 that it says makes performing machine learning tasks dramatically faster and more energy efficient. The chip, announced today during Alibaba Cloud’s annual Apsara Computing Conference in Hangzhou, is already being used to power features on Alibaba’s e-commerce sites, including product search and personalized recommendations. It will be made available to Alibaba Cloud customers later.

As an example of what the chip can do, Alibaba said it usually takes Taobao an hour to categorize the one billion product images that are uploaded to the e-commerce platform each day by merchants and prepare them for search and personalized recommendations. Using Hanguang 800, Taobao was able to complete the task in only five minutes.

Alibaba is already using Hanguang 800 in many of its business operations that need machine processing. In addition to product search and recommendations, this includes automatic translation on its e-commerce sites, advertising and intelligence customer services.

Though Alibaba hasn’t revealed when the chip will be available to its cloud customers, the chip may help Chinese companies reduce their dependence on U.S. technology as the trade war makes business partnerships between Chinese and American tech companies more difficult. It also can help Alibaba Cloud grow in markets outside of China. Within China, it is the market leader, but in the Asia-Pacific region, Alibaba Cloud still ranks behind Amazon, Microsoft and Google, according to the Synergy Research Group.

Hanguang 800 was created by T-Head, the unit that leads the development of chips for cloud and edge computing within Alibaba DAMO Academy, the global research and development initiative in which Alibaba is investing more than $15 billion. T-Head developed the chip’s hardware and algorithms designed for business apps, including Alibaba’s retail and logistics apps.

In a statement, Alibaba Group CTO and president of Alibaba Cloud Intelligence Jeff Zhang (pictured above) said, “The launch of Hanguang 800 is an important step in our pursuit of next-generation technologies, boosting computing capabilities that will drive both our current and emerging businesses while improving energy-efficiency.”

He added, “In the near future, we plan to empower our clients by providing access through our cloud business to the advanced computing that is made possible by the chip, anytime and anywhere.”

T-Head’s other launches included the XuanTie 910 earlier this year, an IoT processor based on RISC-V, the open-source hardware instruction set that began as a project at UC Berkeley. XuanTie 910 was created for heavy-duty IoT applications, including edge servers, networking, gateway and autonomous vehicles.

Alibaba DAMO Academy collaborates with universities around the world, including UC Berkeley and Tel Aviv University. Researchers in the program focus on machine learning, network security, visual computing and natural language processing, with the goal of serving two billion customers and creating 100 million jobs by 2035.

India’s ALTBalaji partners with Microsoft to bring online video streaming to offline users

Published September 25, 2019

ALTBalaji, a leading video streaming service in India, has partnered with Microsoft and fintech firm Eko as it moves to expand its subscriber base in the country that is already larger than any of its local rivals.

ALTBalaji, which has more than 27 million paying subscribers, said it will use Microsoft’s BlendNet technology to help its users download and access more titles without consuming large amounts of cellular data.

Microsoft is providing ALTBalaji with BlendNet technology that enables videos to be disseminated through a combination of cloud-enabled metadata systems. “The file is transferred onto the recipient’s mobile using peer-to-peer local Wi-Fi. While the creation of this cloud plane might need a data network, the transfer of data will happen over local Wi-Fi,” Microsoft said.

The idea is to move much of the downloading without relying on cellular data connectivity, which remains costly for the masses in India. ALTBalaji subscribers will be able to download files from their nearby Eko retail stores, as well as from other users who have the same files. When neither options are viable, the downloading is paused.

Nachiket Pantvaidya, CEO of ALTBalaji and Group COO of Balaji Telefilms, said he hopes the new feature would help the video streaming service attract new users who don’t have access to cheap and reliable data. He said the firm also expects the feature to boost engagement for other subscribers on the platform who’re watching two to three episodes on the app each day.

“At ALTBalaji it has always been our endeavor to reach out to the masses and enhance our users’ experience through such services, while being affordable. And through this pilot feature, we aim to attract more viewers to our platform from areas with not so good internet connectivity,” said Pantvaidya.

In a statement, Meetul Patel, COO of Microsoft India, said, “Microsoft’s BlendNet is a great example of advanced technologies being used to make information and content accessible to all. It leverages the power of the cloud and intelligent edge networks to address gaps in connectivity and reduces the costs of content distribution.”

ALTBalaji, a wholly owned subsidiary of Balaji Telefilms, has more paying subscribers in India than any other video streaming service in the nation, Pantvaidya told TechCrunch in a recent interview. The service is available for Rs 100 ($1.40) for three months, or comes bundled with offerings from telecom providers.

Unlike most other streaming services, ALTBalaji only serves originally produced locally relevant content on its platform. It has made 45 original TV shows to date. Each year, the firm invests about 1,500 million Indian rupees ($21 million) in production of original shows, Pantvaidya said.

The firm, which employs about 100 people, today fights with more than three dozen companies, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney-owned Hotstar. Even as Hotstar claimed to have more than 300 million users earlier this year, it has fewer than 10 million paying subscribers, people familiar with the matter have told TechCrunch.

Netflix has fewer than 3 million subscribers in India, according to industry estimates. It recently launched an aggressively priced mobile-only plan in the country. A person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that the new price tier has attracted a significant number of new subscribers to Netflix.

Target Global is firming up its bet on Barcelona’s entrepreneurs

Published September 24, 2019

VC firm Target Global has just announced it’s expanding its European network by adding a local office in Barcelona, Spain — building on its existing presence in Berlin and London, plus Tel Aviv and Moscow.

The firm has €700 million under management and a broad investment range that covers SaaS, marketplaces, fintech and insurtech, as well as a big focus on mobility.

TechCrunch sat down with general partner Shmuel Chafets and investor director Lina Chong, who will be heading the firm’s push into Spain, to talk about its decision to set up shop in Barcelona — discussing how they see the local and national ecosystem, as well as picking their brains on wider investments trends and regulation in Europe.

Want to know what it takes to get a meeting with Target Global and factors they weigh when they’re deciding whether to cut a check or not? Read on…

The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

TechCrunch: Why choose Barcelona and why now? Why not Spain’s capital, Madrid — or even a city like Paris?

Shmuel Chafets: First of all have you been outside!?

I started coming to Barcelona four or five years ago just to see things and we had some angel investments here and it feels to me today — or when Lina and I started getting more serious about Barcelona it seemed to us that Barcelona has the attributes of Berlin eight or nine years ago. When I at least started coming to Berlin and Lina moved to Berlin, it has the same attributes. It looks like it’s just about to happen

I think it has a few factors. The first one is that it’s a great place to live and you can’t ignore that. In Europe, if you’re a team and you’re an international team there are very few places that you can live in. So London is the original ex-pat city of Europe and it still is amazing but very, very expensive. Berlin is the second one. And I think a lot of Berlin’s early success was fuelled by people who were not necessary German and definitely not Berliners coming and starting a company there.

It’s a good place to live, it’s also a cheap place to live, and it’s a cheap place to do business. Salaries here are quite low but the quality of living is quite high and that makes it very good for startups. Particularly when you need young people, developers, creative people to move. It’s an easy place to convince people to move to.

It doesn’t have a dominant industry. And that is very similar to Berlin — Berlin is not where Germany economically is, and that means that the smartest people around want to go in for startups. That’s the best employment option. There is no banking industry sucking people in with high salaries. And also driving costs up. It is in its culture a very creative city, a very open, very creative city and that I think is also very important.

And lastly, there are these early success stories that fuel the idea of entrepreneurship and also fuel financial entrepreneurship. So one of the interesting things about entrepreneurship is that people who start need to know where it ends or where it’s going to. And the early success stories — first of all they make the smartest kid graduating — who has a McKinsey job offer and a Goldman Sachs job offer and a startup idea — he needs to know that the startup idea has a future. That there’s a future in being an entrepreneur and he needs to look up to people around him. It’s not enough to know that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out — that’s fine but that’s very far and very large.

Image via Getty Images / Pol Albarrán

But to look at Carlos [Pierre, founder and CEO] from Badi and say okay there’s a guy, he’s a few years older than me, he started a company, he’s doing very well — this is the path that I want to take.

Also, there are more and more mentors. People who’ve done it before. And they can help you figure things out. You have to be able to call someone up and say hey let’s have breakfast and explain how they do it.

And there’s more money — for seed. Because you look at a lot of people starting funds, and we were just talking on the way about the Ticketbis guys. They’re starting a fund. And that’s a great example of one of these early success stories and now they’re putting it back into the ecosystem and helping it grow.

Rocket Internet did a lot of that in Germany. They had early exits and then they went and plowed it all back into the ecosystem in their own particular way. People like [serial entrepreneur] Lukasz Gadowski — who we work with a lot. He built Spreadshirts… [then later] he founded Delivery Hero. So through Team Europe. So people who were early, early entrepreneurs — and then in the second wave helped build an ecosystem. So I think there are more and more people like that that we see here.

That usually fuels the ecosystem. Also as companies here start to scale and as more of these European startups start to build hubs here there’s more experience. You can find people who’ve been through a couple of rounds.

And the last thing which is not about Barcelona it’s about Spain in general. There’s a decent local domestic market and there is a natural second market in South America. And actually in the US too — because Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in America so when you start a company here you have that second market built-in. Which is very important — you can scale it.

Latin America is a fascinating market right now, a fascinating time. So in a way, it’s a way for us to make a side bet on Latin America in a way without going out of Europe and insetting far. My first boss told me never to do business in a place where there’s no direct flight from where I live and I adhere to that. If things go belly up you don’t want to be stuck in transfer in some airport sitting there waiting for a transfer.

TechCrunch: So in a way being in a second city — this isn’t Madrid, Spain’s capital — is a more interesting proposition for startups because there’s less competition for talent?

Chong: It’s a bit of an underdog here. There are not these big dominant industries. It’s not cosmopolitan like how Madrid is perceived. There’s a lot of creativity, a lot of people who are more entrepreneurial in spirit.

BlaBlaCar to acquire online bus ticketing platform Busfor

Published September 24, 2019

BlaBlaCar, the marketplace that matches people for long-distance ridesharing between cities, has announced plans to acquire Busfor, the leading bus ticketing platform in Russia and Ukraine.

“This is the biggest acquisition in BlaBlaCar’s history and Busfor is the region’s leading bus distribution company, with over 150 employees. Connecting our significant online demand with Busfor’s supply will help travelers and bus operators alike, so we’re incredibly excited to be joining forces,” BlaBlaCar co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson told me.

BlaBlaCar isn’t disclosing terms of the deal.

This is yet another move in buses for BlaBlaCar. But this is a different move when you compare it to the acquisition of Ouibus in France. BlaBlaBus, BlaBlaCar’s bus service, currently operates in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

This time, the company is buying a ticketing platform that partners with 7,000 bus carriers and generates $4 billion in ticket sales per year. It doesn’t plan to operate as a bus carrier in Russia, Ukraine and Poland directly. Blablacar says that it has 25 million members in the region out of 80 million registered users in total.

“Busfor will retain its own brand, product offering and consumer app, but we will be integrating its supply of bus journeys into the BlaBlaCar platform to help bus carriers and stations grow their customer bases while also creating the best user experience for travelers,” Brusson said.

But buses are still an offline industry in those countries. BlaBlaCar says that online booking currently represents 10% of all tickets. There’s still a lot of room for growth.

Eventually, BlaBlaCar wants to become a carpooling and bus company, with buses for trips from one main city to another main city, and carpooling rides for trips between smaller cities.

Pan-European VC fund Target Global is opening an office in Barcelona

Published September 24, 2019

Hola Barcelona. Target Global, a pan-European VC firm with €700 million under management and a broad investment canvas spanning SaaS, marketplaces, fintech, insurtech and mobility, is opening an office in the Catalan capital.

Investor director, Lina Chong, will lead the expansion into Spain, having relocated to Barcelona from the fund’s Berlin headquarters. They’re setting up in a co-working space on Avenue Diagonal in the center of the city.

Target Global backs early and growth stages startups, as well as doing some seed investing. The firms tells us it’s expecting to do between one and three deals per year out of the Barcelona office, envisaging the same mix of investments in terms of early and growth stage.

“We’ve been seeing decent deals in both stages. Definitely. Across Spain,” says Chong. “There is just more — by numbers — way more early stage seed than A. I think that’s just the maturity of the ecosystem here.”

Dialling up a local presence across Europe means Target Global can pitch founders on being able to connect talent and expertise across key regional startup hubs, while also plugging into a wider international network. (It also has offices in London, Tel Aviv and Moscow.)

From a VC perspective opening local offices is of course about deal flow. Being on the ground to take more meetings widens the pipe, increasing the chance of an early shot at the next high growth business.

That’s important because Europe’s startups have many more options for early stage funding than in years past, and founders are getting smarter about choosing their investors. Boots on the ground means more time for all important relationship building.

Target Global describes itself as something of a startup — it was founded in 2012 — which means it’s competing for deals with VCs that have more established brands and networks. Becoming a familiar face in the room looks like a solid strategy to growth hack its own network.

“We are a global or a pan-European fund but for an entrepreneur here we want them to feel that we’re local; we understand the ecosystem; that we have deep rooted connections; that we’re committed; that we show up,” general partner Shmuel Chafets tells TechCrunch.

“It’s all a function of time and effort. Just being here and having breakfast with people, lunch with people and helping out even the people we don’t invest. You get more connected and then you start to see more deal flow.”

This is the second local office it’s opened in Europe this year, after adding a London base in April — making it a flattering pick for Barcelona. Plenty of other European hubs are being passed over in the city’s favor this time, be it Madrid, Lisbon, Paris or Stockholm.

Chafets says the firm looked at five or six other cities but settled on Barcelona for now, though he won’t rule out opening more offices in future. “Never say never,” he quips.

Having been a regular visitor to Barcelona for a number of years he talks enthusiastically about the creative energy motivating entrepreneurs — saying the city’s ecosystem reminds him of how Berlin felt a few years ago. “It looks like it’s just about to happen,” he reckons.

“From what I’ve seen Barcelona is sort of strong in creative. It’s a very creative city. It’s always pretty strong in mobile, historically. It had more mobile successes… SaaS, particular smb SaaS, is pretty good here. I think it would be harder to find enterprise sales companies and companies building these very deep tech stuff right now. But definitely in the marketplace, smb SaaS space, mobile space you see great stuff here.

“That ties into the creativity, because it’s a product driven environment — not a tech driven environment. I think Berlin is a very operationally driven environment, Tel Aviv is a very tech driven environment, this is a very product driven environment — which actually complements well our other hubs.”

“There’s some pent-up energy here,” agrees Chong, who says they’ve already come across a “surprising” amount of deal flow. “Again it’s very similar to Berlin where there’s a lot of willingness and there’s a lot of dreaming but there’s not a lot going on. So I think the younger people here they’re creating that.”

Target Global has been testing the water prior to formalizing its commitment to Barcelona, and has four local portfolio companies which it’s ploughed around €20M into over the past 12 months.

Its biggest regional investment to date is in business trip booking SaaS, TravelPerk. It’s also backed flatmate matching platform Badi; online doctor booking platform, Doc Planner (which relocated from Warsaw, Poland after merging with local startup Doctoralia); and medical chat app MediQuo.

From a wider perspective, Barcelona’s tech ecosystem has been gathering momentum for years, helped by the annual presence of the world’s biggest mobile tradeshow (MWC) — as well as more specific pull factors for startups such as a relatively low cost of living and an attractive Mediterranean location.

“It’s a great place to live and you can’t ignore that,” says Chafets. “In Europe if you’re a team and you’re an international team there are very few places you can live.”

This combination means Barcelona is now home to a growing number of high growth startups, including Target Global’s portfolio firm TravelPerk — as well as the likes of on-demand delivery platform Glovo; and RedPoints, which sells a SaaS to brands for detecting and acting against the sale of fake goods online, to name two other notable examples.

Other local startups grabbing attention and investment in recent years include 21Buttons, Holded, Housfy, Typeform and Verse. While hyper local mobile marketplace startup Wallapop — which was on a growth tear in an earlier wave of ecoystem growth — remains the go-to classified app on every local’s phone (though it merged with a US rival back in 2015).

The city even has its own youthful scooter startup (Reby) which has refused to be put off by some tough regulations controlling rentals — and has recently been applying AI to try to make like a good citizen by automatically detect poor parking.

Mobility is a major area of focus for Target Global — which last year announced a dedicated fund (with an initial raise of $100M) for startups working to disrupt transportation. Although, when it comes to stand-up e-scooters the firm is already invested in Berlin-based Circ so will presumably be looking to spend elsewhere on that front.

“Barcelona is the perfect city for scooters,” says Chafets. “Scooters can really change the way the city works. It’s also small and has relatively good public transportation from outwards in — but they need to be regulated. You need to really make sure that [they aren’t a misused nuisance].”

He notes that European regulators have been relatively quick to spot the risks of shared mobility, and close off the antisocial expansionist playbook that played out in some US cities during the first wave of scooter startups — when people trolled Bird by hanging scooters in trees (or, well, worse) — but he sees that as good news for building a sustainable future for alternative mobility.

“It’s a great challenge and it will be a huge money maker — that’s where we want to be right, multiple trillion dollar businesses!”

Away from disruptive developments on the ground in Barcelona and the other local tech hubs that Target Global is intending to explore from its new base in Catalonia, it also views Spain as a low risk gateway to opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic.

“There’s a decent local domestic market and there is a natural second market in South America,” says Chafets. “Actually in the US too — because Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language in America so when you start a company here you have that second market built in. Which is very important — you can scale it.”

“Latin America is a fascinating market right now, it’s a fascinating time,” he adds. “So in a way it’s a way for us to make a side bet on Latin America without going out of Europe and investing far.”

We’ll share a full interview with Chafets and Chong on Extra Crunch.

Target Global is firming up its bet on Barcelona’s entrepreneurs

Amazon launches Amazon Care, a virtual and in-person healthcare offering for employees

Published September 24, 2019

Amazon has gone live with Amazon Care, a new pilot healthcare service offering that is initially available to its employees in and around the Seattle area. The Amazon Care offering includes both virtual and in-person care, with telemedicine via app, chat and remote video, as well as follow-up visits and prescription drug delivery in person directly at an employee’s home or office.

First reported by CNBC, Amazon Care grew out of an initiative announced in 2018 with J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway to make a big change in how they all collectively handle their employee healthcare needs. The companies announced at the time that they were eager to put together a solution that was “free from profit-making incentives and constraints,” which are of course at the heart of private insurance companies that serve corporate clients currently.

Other large companies, like Apple, offer their own on-premise and remotely accessible healthcare services as part of their employee compensation and benefits packages, so Amazon is hardly unique in seeking to scratch this itch. The difference, however, is that Amazon Care is much more external-facing than those offered by its peers in Silicon Valley, with a brand identity and presentation that strongly suggests the company is thinking about more than its own workforce when it comes to a future potential addressable market for Care.

The Amazon Care logo.

Care’s website also provides a look at the app that Amazon developed for the telemedicine component, which shows the flow for choosing between text chat and video, as well as a summary of care provided through the service, with invoices, diagnosis and treatment plans all available for patient review.

Amazon lists Care as an option for a “first stop,” with the ability to handle things like colds, infections, minor injuries, preventative consultations, lab work, vaccinations, contraceptives and STI testing and general questions. Basically, it sounds like they cover a lot of what you’d handle at your general practitioner, before being recommended on for any more specialist or advanced medical treatment or expertise.

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Rendered screenshots of the Amazon Care app for Amazon employees.

Current eligibility is limited to Amazon’s employees who are enrolled in the company’s health insurance plan and who are located in the pilot service geographical area. The service is currently available between 8 AM and 9 PM local time, Monday through Friday, and between 8 AM and 6 PM Saturday and Sunday.

Amazon acquired PillPack last year, an online pharmacy startup, for around $753 million, and that appears to be part of their core value proposition with Amazon Care, too, which features couriered prescribed medications and remotely communicated treatment plans.

Amazon may be limiting this pilot to employees at launch, but the highly publicized nature of their approach, and the amount of product development that clearly went into developing the initial app, user experience and brand all indicate that it has the broader U.S. market in mind as a potential expansion opportunity down the line. Recent reports also suggest that it’s going to make a play in consumer health with new wearable fitness tracking devices, which could very nicely complement insurance and healthcare services offered at the enterprise and individual level. Perhaps not coincidentally, Walgreens, CVS and McKesson stock were all trading down today.

Facebook promises not to stop politicians’ lies & hate

Published September 24, 2019

Facebook confirms it won’t fact check politicians’ speech or block their content if it’s newsworthy even if it violates the site’s hate-speech rules or other policies. This cementing of its policy comes from Facebook’s head of global policy and communication Nick Clegg, who gave a speech today about Facebook’s plans to prevent interference in the 2020 presidential election.

But by seeking neutrality, Facebook may become complicit in the misinformation and malevolence some politicians will use it to spread. It leaves users to fend for themselves as they try to discern fact from fiction and opinion from reality. Clegg claims the idea is for users to “judge what politicians say themselves.”

Isn’t that disgorgement of responsibility already what Facebook was doing by merely routing false news links to fact checkers and affixing their verdicts to shares of the content while still leaving it up on the site? To now say politicians can’t be fact-checked directly at all sets a critical and questionable precedent.

Facebook’s head of global policy and communications, Nick Clegg

“We don’t believe, however, that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates and prevent a politician’s speech from reaching its audience and being subject to public debate and scrutiny,” writes Clegg, the former deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. “That’s why Facebook exempts politicians from our third-party fact-checking program . . .This means that we will not send organic content or ads from politicians to our third-party fact-checking partners for review.”

Yes, it prevents direct censorship of politicians and leaves critique to the media. Yet it also ignores how Facebook turns any voice into a publication, amplified by engagement-seeking algorithms distributed to billions of people. Users often treat Facebook as the internet and what they see on the internet as true.

Facebook doesn’t want false news distorting voters’ decisions ahead of the 2020 elections. However, the year-old “no fact-checks” rule and three-year-old “protected newsworthy speech” rule effectively elevate whatever comes out of a politicians mouth as above consequence.

If they share a debunked link, that can be labeled as wrong and demoted, but what they say is free to proliferate and confuse people. Not even a politician’s ads are subject to fact check, so you can spread whatever lies you want on Facebook as long as you’re rich enough and running for office. Facebook only draws the line at allowing content from politicians that would cause real-world harm, or running politicians’ ads that violate its policies.

This is certainly easier operationally for Facebook. It doesn’t have to be responsible for paying in-house staff or outside fact checkers to assess politicians’ diatribes. And it won’t as often end up in the cross-hairs of elected officials claiming Facebook is biased against them.

Some could see the benefit of these rules being that Facebook could never directly censor a politician unless they directly threatened people. If speaking for themselves from their own accounts, they get what’s close to free speech.

But it ignores how politics has evolved in the post-truth era. Rather than win with facts, it’s easier just to shout lies or insults loud and frequently enough that they’re accepted at face value, rebroadcast and culturally ingrained. Sensationalism spreads further than what’s level-headed. The fact check never gets as many shares as the incendiary claim. And those with a bully pulpit can keep an iron grip on their megaphone.

Facebook may not want to be the arbiter of truth, or even be considered “media,” but it transmits falsity without question; it’s not a platform, it’s a pawn.

CrunchMatch is open: Ready, set, vet and network at Disrupt SF 2019

Published September 24, 2019

Attention all current and future pass holders to Disrupt SF 2019! Our CrunchMatch platform is up, operational and ready for you to create your profile and get down to the business of connecting with the people who can move your business to new heights.

Hold up a sec’. If you don’t already have one, stop what you’re doing and buy your pass to Disrupt SF right now.

Okay, back to networking. More than 10,000 people will attend Disrupt SF and CruntchMatch is the most efficient way for you to zero in on the connections you want to make. Whether you’re a founder looking for developers, an investor looking to fatten your portfolio, technology service providers trolling for new customers or founders looking for marketing help, CrunchMatch will make connecting so much easier.

Now’s the time to create a CrunchMatch profile listing your specific criteria, goals and interests. For example, you’ll identify your role (developer, service provider, founder, etc.) and the type of people you want to connect with at Disrupt.

CrunchMatch kicks into high, algorithmic gear to find and suggest suitable matches and, subject to your approval, proposes meeting times and sends meeting requests. You can even use it to reserve meeting spaces. How well does it work? Here’s what Michael Kocan, managing partner at Trend Discovery, said about CrunchMatch.

“I scheduled more than 35 meetings with startups that I pre-vetted using CrunchMatch, and we made a significant investment in one, who came to our attention through Startup Battlefield. It’s an extremely efficient way to vet deals.”

Last year alone, the program facilitated more than 3,000 meetings. And Yoolox — makers of a portable wireless charger — says the connections it made through CrunchMatch helped Yoolox increase its distribution.

Make the most of your limited time at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. CrunchMatch relieves you of the hassle and the guesswork associated with traditional conference networking. Buy your pass, go create your profile and get ready to meet the right movers and shakers for your business.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.