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Watch Shimon the marimba-playing robot play along to jazz, reggae, and hip hop
Shimon is a marbima-playing robot with some real soul. This crazy little robot, created by Gil Weinberg at the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, can listen to the other players around it and play out little ditties in response to the music. In short, it’s the world’s best jazz and hip hop collaborator because, unlike humans, Shimon can never get drunk and forget the van keys back at that Taco Bell in Fresno.
“Most of what Shimon is playing is generated using a new process where he creates hundreds of melodies off line based on deep learning analysis of large musical data sets,” said Weinberg. “Then us humans (me and my students) choose melodies we like and orchestrate / structure them into songs. It’s a new form of robot-human collaboration, at least for us.”
In this video Shimon and crew jam along to Dash Smith, an Atlanta-based rapper who freestyles. You’ll also notice another Georgia Tech product, a robotic drumming prosthesis that gives the drummer the power of four Neil Perts.
Weinberg, Shimon’s human, is excited by the new developments.
“Still under development is the other new element – we are working letting Shimon analyze in real time the rhythm, melodies and semantic meaning of the free style rapper lyrics and use this analysis to drive Shimon’s improvisation. As you know we have explored mostly improvised music, starting with drum circles moving to Jazz, rock jam-bands, and African marimba bands,” said Weinberg. “We are now ready to move to the next frontier of real time collaborative improvisation – free style rapping, where the hope is that the rapper will be influenced by what Shimon is coming up with and vice versa.”
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Snowflake scoops up another blizzard of cash with $450 million round
When Snowflake, the cloud data warehouse, landed a $263 million investment earlier this year, CEO Bob Muglia speculated that it would be the last money his company would need before an eventual IPO. But just 9 months after that statement, the company announced a second even larger round. This time it’s getting $450 million, as an unexpected level of growth led them to seek additional cash.
Sequoia Capital led the round, joined by new investor Meritech Capital and existing investors Altimeter Capital, Capital One Growth Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, Redpoint Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures Iconiq Capital and Wing Ventures. Today’s round brings the total raised to over $928 million with $713 million coming just this year. That’s a lot of dough.
Oh and the valuation has skyrocketed too from $1.5 billion in January to $3.5 billion with today’s investment. “We are increasing the valuation from the prior round substantially, and it’s driven by the growth numbers of almost quadrupling the revenue, and tripling the customer base,” company CFO Thomas Tuchscherer told TechCrunch.
At the time of the $263 million round, Muglia was convinced the company had enough funds and that the next fundraise would be an IPO. “We have put ourselves on the path to IPO. That’s our mid- to long-term plan. This funding allows us to go directly to IPO and gives us sufficient capital, that if we choose, IPO would be our next funding step,” he said in January.
Tuchscherer said in fact that was the plan at the time of the first batch of funding. He joined the company, partly because of his experience bringing Talend public in 2016, but he said the growth has been so phenomenal, that they felt it was necessary to change course.
“When we raised $263 million earlier in the year, we raised based on a plan that was ambitious in terms of growth and investment. We are exceeding and beating that, and it prompted us to explore how do we accelerate investment to continue driving the company’s growth,” he said.
Running on both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, which they added as a supported platform earlier this year, certainly contributed to the increased sales, and forced them to rethink the amount of money it would take to fuel their growth spurt.
“I think it’s very important as a distinction that we view the funding as being customer driven in the sense that in order to meet the demand that we’re seeing in the market for Snowflake, we have to invest in our infrastructure, as well as in our R&D capacity. So the funding that we’re raising now is meant to finance those two core investments,” he stressed
The number of employees is skyrocketing as the company adds customers. Just eight months ago the company had around 350 employees. Today it has close to 650. Tuchscherer expects that to grow to between 900 and 1000 by the end of January, not that far off.
As for that IPO, surely that is still a goal, but the growth simply got in the way. “We are building the company to be autonomous and to be a large independent company. It’s definitely on the horizon,” he said.
While Tuchscherer wouldn’t definitively say that the company is looking to support at least one more cloud platform in addition to Amazon and Microsoft, he strongly hinted that such a prospect could happen.
The company also plans to plunge a lot of money into the sales team, building out new sales offices in the US and doubling their presence around the world, while also enhancing the engineering and R&D teams to expand their product offerings.
Just this year alone the company has added Netflix, Office Depot, DoorDash, Netgear, Ebates and Yamaha as customers. Other customers include Capital One, Lionsgate and Hubspot.
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Google+ for G Suite lives on and gets new features
You thought Google+ was dead, didn’t you? And it is — if you’re a consumer. But the business version of Google’s social network will live on for the foreseeable future — and it’s getting a bunch of new features today.
Google+ for G Suite isn’t all that different from the Google+ for consumers, but its focus is very much on allowing users inside a company to easily share information. Current users include the likes of Nielsen and French retailer Auchan.
The new features that Google is announcing today give admins more tools for managing and reviewing posts, allow employees to tag content and provide better engagement metrics to posters.
Recently Google introduced the ability for admins to bulk-add groups of users to a Google+ community, for example. And soon, those admins will be able to better review and moderate posts made by their employees. Soon, admins will also be able to define custom streams so that employees could get access to a stream with all of the posts from a company’s leadership team, for example.
But what’s maybe more important in this context is that tags now make it easy for employees to route content to everybody in the company, no matter which group they work in. “Even if you don’t know all employees across an organization, tags makes it easier to route content to the right folks,” the company explains in today’s blog post. “Soon you’ll be able to draft posts and see suggested tags, like #research or #customer-insights when posting customer survey results.”
As far as the new metrics go, there’s nothing all that exciting going on here, but G Suite customers who keep their reporting structure in the service will be able to provide analytics to employees so they can see how their posts are being viewed across the company and which teams engage most with them.
At the end of the day, none of these are revolutionary features. But the timing of today’s announcement surely isn’t a coincidence, given that Google announced the death of the consumer version of Google+ — and the bug that went along with that — only a few days ago. Today’s announcement is clearly meant to be a reminder that Google+ for the enterprise isn’t going away and remains in active development. I don’t think all that many businesses currently use Google+, though, and with Hangouts Chat and other tools, they now have plenty of options for sharing content across groups.
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Google introduces dual-region storage buckets to simplify data redundancy
Google is playing catch-up in the cloud, and as such it wants to provide flexibility to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft. Today, the company announced a couple of new options to help separate it from the cloud storage pack.
Storage may seem stodgy, but it’s a primary building block for many cloud applications. Before you can build an application you need the data that will drive it, and that’s where the storage component comes into play.
One of the issues companies have as they move data to the cloud is making sure it stays close to the application when it’s needed to reduce latency. Customers also require redundancy in the event of a catastrophic failure, but still need access with low latency. The latter has been a hard problem to solve until today when Google introduced a new dual-regional storage option.
As Google described it in the blog post announcing the new feature, “With this new option, you write to a single dual-regional bucket without having to manually copy data between primary and secondary locations. No replication tool is needed to do this and there are no network charges associated with replicating the data, which means less overhead for you storage administrators out there. In the event of a region failure, we transparently handle the failover and ensure continuity for your users and applications accessing data in Cloud Storage.”
This allows companies to have redundancy with low latency, while controlling where it goes without having to manually move it should the need arise.
Knowing what you’re paying
Companies don’t always require instant access to data, and Google (and other cloud vendors) offer a variety of storage options, making it cheaper to store and retrieve archived data. As of today, Google is offering a clear way to determine costs, based on customer storage choice types. While it might not seem revolutionary to let customers know what they are paying, Dominic Preuss, Google’s director of product management says it hasn’t always been a simple matter to calculate these kinds of costs in the cloud. Google decided to simplify it by clearly outlining the costs for medium (Nearline) and long-term (Coldline) storage across multiple regions.
As Google describes it, “With multi-regional Nearline and Coldline storage, you can access your data with millisecond latency, it’s distributed redundantly across a multi-region (U.S., EU or Asia), and you pay archival prices. This is helpful when you have data that won’t be accessed very often, but still needs to be protected with geographically dispersed copies, like media archives or regulated content. It also simplifies management.”
Under the new plan, you can select the type of storage you need, the kind of regional coverage you want and you can see exactly what you are paying.
Google Cloud storage pricing options. Chart: Google
Each of these new storage services has been designed to provide additional options for Google Cloud customers, giving them more transparency around pricing and flexibility and control over storage types, regions and the way they deal with redundancy across data stores.
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Google expands its identity management portfolio for businesses and developers
Over the course of the last year, Google has launched a number of services that bring to other companies the same BeyondCorp model for managing access to a company’s apps and data without a VPN that it uses internally. Google’s flagship product for this is Cloud Identity, which is essentially Google’s BeyondCorp, but packaged for other businesses.
Today, at its Cloud Next event in London, it’s expanding this portfolio of Cloud Identity services with three new products and features that enable developers to adopt this way of thinking about identity and access for their own apps and that make it easier for enterprises to adopt Cloud Identity and make it work with their existing solutions.
The highlight of today’s announcements, though, is Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners, which is now in beta. While Cloud Identity is very much meant for employees at a larger company, this new product allows developers to build into their own applications the same kind of identity and access management services.
“Cloud Identity is how we protect our employees and you protect your workforce,” Karthik Lakshminarayanan, Google’s product management director for Cloud Identity, said in a press briefing ahead of the announcement. “But what we’re increasingly finding is that developers are building applications and are also having to deal with identity and access management. So if you’re building an application, you might be thinking about accepting usernames and passwords, or you might be thinking about accepting social media as an authentication mechanism.”
This new service allows developers to build in multiple ways of authenticating the user, including through email and password, Twitter, Facebook, their phones, SAML, OIDC and others. Google then handles all of that authentication work. Google will offer both client-side (web, iOS and Android) and server-side SDKs (with support for Node.ja, Java, Python and other languages).
“They no longer have to worry about getting hacked and their passwords and their user credentials getting compromised,” added Lakshminarayanan, “They can now leave that to Google and the exact same scale that we have, the security that we have, the reliability that we have — that we are using to protect employees in the cloud — can now be used to protect that developer’s applications.”
In addition to Cloud Identity for Customers and Partners, Google is also launching a new feature for the existing Cloud Identity service, which brings support for traditional LDAP-based applications and IT services like VPNs to Cloud Identity. This feature is, in many ways, an acknowledgment that most enterprises can’t simply turn on a new security paradigm like BeyondCorp/Cloud Identity. With support for secure LDAP, these companies can still make it easy for their employees to connect to these legacy applications while still using Cloud Identity.
“As much as Google loves the cloud, a mantra that Google has is ‘let’s meet customers where they are.’ We know that customers are embracing the cloud, but we also know that they have a massive, massive footprint of traditional applications,” Lakshminarayanan explained. He noted that most enterprises today run two solutions: one that provides access to their on-premise applications and another that provides the same services for their cloud applications. Cloud Identity now natively supports access to many of these legacy applications, including Aruba Networks (HPE), Itopia, JAMF, Jenkins (Cloudbees), OpenVPN, Papercut, pfSense (Netgate), Puppet, Sophos and Splunk. Indeed, as Google notes, virtually any application that supports LDAP over SSL can work with this new service.
Finally, the third new feature Google is launching today is context-aware access for those enterprises that already use its Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (yes, those names are all a mouthful). The idea here is to help enterprises provide access to cloud resources based on the identity of the user and the context of the request — all without using a VPN. That’s pretty much the promise of BeyondCorp in a nutshell, and this implementation, which is now in beta, allows businesses to manage access based on the user’s identity and a device’s location and its security status, for example. Using this new service, IT managers could restrict access to one of their apps to users in a specific country, for example.
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ServiceNow to acquire FriendlyData for its natural language search technology
Enterprise cloud service management company ServiceNow announced today that it will acquire FriendlyData and integrate the startup’s natural language search technology into apps on its Now platform. Founded in 2016, FriendlyData’s natural language query (NLQ) technology enables enterprise customers to build search tools that allow users to ask technical questions even if they don’t know the right jargon.
FriendlyData’s NLQ tech figures out what they are trying to say and then answers with text responses or easy-to-understand data visualizations. ServiceNow said it will integrate FriendlyData’s tech into the Now Platform, which includes apps for IT, human resources, security operations, and customer service management. It will also be available in products for developers and ServiceNow’s partners.
In a statement, Pat Casey, senior vice president of development and operations at ServiceNow, said “ServiceNow is bringing NLQ capabilities to the Now Platform, enabling companies to ask technical questions in plain English and receive direct answers. With this technical enhancement, our goal is to allow anyone to easily make data driven decisions, increasing productivity and driving businesses forward faster.”
The acquisition of FriendlyData is the latest in ServiceNow’s initiative to reduce the friction of support requests within organizations with AI-based tools. For example, it launched a chatbot-building tools called Virtual Agent in May, which enables companies to create custom chatbots for services like Slack or Microsoft Teams to automatically handle routine inquiries such as equipment requests. It also announced the acquisition of Parlo, a chatbot startup, around the same time.
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Origin launches protocol for building cheaper decentralized Ubers & Airbnbs
The sharing economy ends up sharing a ton of labor’s earnings with middlemen like Uber and Airbnb, and $38 million-funded Origin wants the next great two-sided marketplace to be decentralized on the blockchain so drivers and riders or hosts and guests can connect directly and avoid paying steep fees that can range up to 20 percent or higher. So today Origin launches its decentralized marketplace protocol on the ethereum mainnet that replaces a central business that connects users and vendors with a smart contract.
“Marketplaces don’t redistribute the profits they make to members. They accrue to founders and venture capitalists,” said Origin co-founder Matt Liu, who was the third product manager at YouTube. “Building these decentralized marketplaces, we want to make them peer-to-peer, not peer-to-corporate-monopoly-to-peer.” When people transact through Origin, it plans to issue them tokens that will let them participate in the governance of the protocol, and could incentivize them to get on these marketplaces early as well as convince others to use them.
Origin’s in-house marketplace DApp
Today’s mainnet beta sees Origin offering its own basic decentralized app that operates like a Craigslist on the blockchain. Users can create a profile, connect their ethereum wallet through services like MetaMask, browse product and service listings, message each other to arrange transactions through smart contracts with no extra fees, leave reviews and appeal disputes to Origin’s in-house arbitrators.
Eventually, with the Origin protocol, developers will be able to quickly build their own sub-marketplaces for specific services like dog walking, house cleaning, ridesharing and more. These developers can opt to charge fees, though Origin hopes the cost-savings from its blockchain platform will let them undercut non-blockchain services. And vendors can offer a commission to any marketplace that gets their listing matched/sold.
It might be years before the necessary infrastructure like login systems and simple wallets make it easy for developers and mainstream users to build and adopt DApps built on Origin. But it has plenty of runway thanks to $3 million in seed token sale funding from Pantera Capital, $6.6 million raised through a Coinlist token sale, plus $26.4 million in traditional venture funding from Pantera Capital, Foundation Capital, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Gil Penchina, Kamal Ravikant, Steve Jang and Randall Kaplan.
“Marketplaces are at the core of what makes the internet so valuable and useful and the Origin team has one of the most promising blockchain platforms for the new sharing economy — with currency baked in — this could be really disruptive (and one of the best utilizations of the ethereum blockchain),” says Ohanian, the Reddit and Initialized Capital co-founder.
Liu and co-founder Josh Fraser came up with the idea after trying to imagine the downstream effects of ethereum. Liu recalls thinking, “What if we could replace dozens of multi-million and multi-billion-dollar companies with open-source protocols that aren’t owned or controlled by anyone?”
Origin co-founders (from left): Matthew Liu and Josh Fraser
So why would marketplaces want to build on Origin instead of creating their own blockchain or traditional proprietary system? Fraser tells me smart contracts can save money, but that “these individual pieces are incredibly difficult to build,” so he sees Origin as “analogous to Stripe — able to abstract away all the friction of building on the blockchain.” Indeed, 40 marketplaces have already signed letters of intent to build on the protocol.
If Origin reaches critical mass, it could also benefit from the concept of shared network effect. Users only have to sign up once, and can then interact with any marketplace built on Origin. That means new marketplaces that builds on the protocol instantly has a registered user base.
Origin will face some stiff challenges, though. There’ll be a chicken-and-egg problem of getting the first marketplaces signed up before there are users on its self-sovereign identity platform, or getting those users aboard when there’s little for them to do. Liu admits that timing is the startup’s biggest threat. “We believe that decentralized marketplaces are inevitable, but a lot of smart people seem to think we’re too early and that we should be focused on building lower-level infrastructure instead,” the co-founder says. For us, we’d rather be too early than too late.”
There’s also the trouble of leaving actors in a capitalist system to treat each other properly without a centralized authority. If an Uber driver treats you terribly, you can complain and get them kicked off the platform. Even with Origin’s review system, abusers of the system may be able to continue operating. It’s easy to imagine its arbitration service becoming completely overwhelmed with disputes. Luckily, Origin has made some strong hires to tackle these challenges, including Yu Pan, who it says was a PayPal co-founder, former head of Dropbox’s NYC engineering team Cuong Du, and Franck Chastagnol who previously led engineering teams at PayPal, YouTube, Google and Dropbox.
Origin’s success will all come down to usability. Your average Uber driver or Airbnb host is no blockchain expert. They vend through those apps because it’s easy. Those centralized organizations are also highly incentivized to fulfill transactions quickly and smoothly in ways prohibited by eliminating fees. Origin will have to effectively make the blockchain aspects of its service disappear so all users and vendors know is that they’re paying less or earning more.
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Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman announce the name of their stealthy mobile video startup
Onstage at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman unveiled the name of their highly anticipated mobile video company known until now as NewTV.
The name is Quibi, short for “quick bites,” per a note on its new website: “Something cool is coming from Hollywood and Silicon Valley — quick bites of captivating entertainment, created for mobile by the best talent, designed to fit perfectly into any moment of your day.”
The short-form video service, launching next year, will operate on a two-tiered subscription model similar to Hulu, per Deadline. Quibi is cooking up original content with Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua and Spider-Man director Sam Raimi, as well as Get Out producer Jason Blum and Van Toffler, the CEO of digital media production company Gunpowder & Sky, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Hollywood Reporter says the del Toro project “is a modern zombie story,” the Fuqua project is “a modern version of Dog Day Afternoon” and the Blum project, titled Wolves and Villagers, could be compared to Fatal Attraction.
Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and founder of WndrCo, a consumer tech investment and holding company, has raised $1 billion for Quibi from Disney, 21st Century Fox, Entertainment One, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Alibaba Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Madrone Capital and several others. He hired Meg Whitman as Quibi’s CEO in January.
Quibi, given Katzenberg and Whitman’s entertainment and business acumen, is expected to compete with the biggest players in the space, including Instagram, Netflix and Snap, which today announced Snap Originals. The new effort will have the ephemeral messaging service rolling out 12 new scripted shows on its app, from Keeping Up with the Kardashians creator Bunim/Murray, Friday Night Lights writer Carter Harris and more.
Quibi is hiring aggressively, recently bringing on former Instagram product manager Blake Barnes and former Hulu chief technology officer Rob Post.
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Shasta Ventures is doubling down on security startups with 3 new hires
Early-stage venture capital firm Shasta Ventures has brought on three new faces to beef up its enterprise software and security portfolio amid a big push to “go deeper” into cybersecurity, per Shasta’s managing director Doug Pepper.
Balaji Yelamanchili (above left), the former general manager and executive vice president of Symantec’s enterprise security business unit, joins as a venture partner on the firm’s enterprise software team. He was previously a senior vice president at Oracle and Dell EMC. Pepper says Yelamanchili will be sourcing investments and may take board seats in “certain cases.”
The firm has also tapped Salesforce’s former chief information security officer Izak Mutlu (above center) as an executive-in-residence, a role in which he’ll advise Shasta portfolio companies. Mutlu spent 11 years at the cloud computing company managing IT security and compliance.
InterWest board partner Drew Harman, the final new hire, has joined as a board partner and will work closely with the chief executive officers of Shasta’s startups. Harman has worked in enterprise software for 25 years across a number of roles. He is currently on the boards of the cloud-based monetization platform Aria, enterprise content marketing startup NewsCred, customer retention software provider Totango and others.
“There’s no area today that’s more important than cybersecurity,” Pepper told TechCrunch. “The business of venture has gotten increasingly competitive and it demands more focus than ever before. We aren’t looking for generalists, we are looking for domain experts.”
Shasta’s security investments include email authentication service Valimail, which raised a $25 million Series B in May. Airspace Systems, a startup that built “kinetic capture” technologies that can identify offending unmanned aircrafts and take them down, raised a $20 million round with participation from Shasta in March. And four-year-old Stealth Security, a startup that defends companies from automated bot attacks, secured an $8 million investment from Shasta in February.
The Menlo Park-based firm filed to raise $300 million for its fifth flagship VC fund in 2016. A year later, it announced a specialty vehicle geared toward augmented and virtual reality app development. With more than $1 billion under management, the firm also backs consumer, IoT, robotics and space-tech companies across the U.S.
In the last year, Shasta has promoted Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Nitin Chopra and Jacob Mullins from associate to partner, as well as added two new associates, Natalie Sandman and Rachel Star.
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Kahoot, the educational gaming startup, has raised another $15M, now at a $300M valuation
School’s back in session and a startup that’s building games to help students learn has moved to the top of the class. Kahoot — the educational gaming startup out of Norway that has been a quick hit with schools in the US and elsewhere — today announced that it has raised 126.5 million Norwegian krone (around $15.4 million), its second round this year, at a valuation of about 2.55 billion krone ($300 million), tripling its valuation in 7 months.
For some context, the company raised $17 million in March at a $100 million valuation.
Kahoot has been around since 2006 — originally as a gamified education app called Lecture Quiz — although its rise in popularity and usage has been a more recent shift, dovetailing with how teachers are increasingly using more learning aids that are in tune with two of the more popular pastimes among kids these days: playing around on devices with screens, and playing games.
Kahoot is a notable standout at a time when gaming among kids is dominated by Fortnite, a top-grossing app, but a controversial one because of how addictive it is. (Even Prince Harry — yes, Prince Harry — has weighed in on this one.)
Åsmund Furuseth, Kahoot’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview that the money will be used to continue investing in building the platform, and also to make acquisitions — likely to be announced in the next couple of months.
“It’s about strengthening our position in learning and the platform,” he said in an interview. This latest round comes from Nordic investors in the company led by existing investor Datum AS, and Furuseth said that there is likely to be another round in the company that brings in international investors and strategic backers.
“Disney is an investor already and they have an option to become a larger shareholder,” he noted. Others that have already backed Kahoot include Microsoft and Northzone. “This round was specifically around the Nordic region and Nordic investment bankers, who were interested in acquiring shares because of our growth and what we are doing in the learning space.”
As we have written before, Kahoot in January this year passed the 70 million user mark with about a 50 percent penetration among K-12 students in the US, with about 51 million games created on the platform.
Furuseth today said that the company is on track to pass 100 million users by the end of this year, with rises in its other metrics. Alongside its push into the K-12 education sector, it’s also been growing its enterprise line, building “games” for businesses to use in helping onboard employees and other services.
“Our largest amount of users come from the education sector, but when it comes to revenue and growth, it’s the business segment that is larger,” he said. The plan is to continue building products for audiences, he added.
He did not say whether the company is closer to being cash-flow positive. Notably, he took over as CEO earlier this year on a platform of aiming for just that, after a period in which the company appeared to be bulking up quickly with an ambitious plan to ink content partnerships and build out more products.
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