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The BCT terminal brings crypto to Wall Street
The last revolution in front end trading technology – essentially the tools traders use to interact with the markets – came when Bloomberg released their primitive but surprisingly resilient terminals. Now that new systems are hitting the Street, new tools are necessary to help traders make better decisions. That’s why BCT made their interesting new Terminal.
The tool is essentially a double-screened PC with a great deal of proprietary software installed. It looks at multiple exchanges at once and lets you read news, prices, and market changes in one easy-to-understand package. I sat down with the BCT team to look at their product more closely and despite some early marketing hiccups the team seems to have a cool – if complex – product for those more familiar with the Bourse than Binance.
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Whisk, the smart food platform that makes recipes shoppable, acquires competitor Avocando
Whisk, the U.K. startup that has built a B2B data platform to power various food apps, including making online recipes “shoppable,” has acquired Avocando, a competitor based in Germany.
The exact financial terms of the deal remain undisclosed, although TechCrunch understands it was all-cash and that Whisk is acquiring the tech, customer base, integrations and team. Related to this, Avocando’s founders are joining Whisk.
“The team is joining Whisk to help scale a joint global vision to help leading businesses create integrated and meaningful digital food experiences using cutting-edge technology,” says Whisk in a statement.
To that end, Whisk’s “smart food platform” enables app developers, publishers and online supermarkets/grocery stores to do a number of interesting things.
The first relates to making recipes shoppable, i.e. making it incredibly easy to order the ingredients needed to cook a recipe listed online or in an app. Specifically, Whisk’s platform parses ingredients in a recipe, and matches it to products at local grocery stores based on user preferences (e.g. “50g of butter, cubed” matched to “250g Tesco Salted Butter”). It then interfaces with the store to fill the user’s basket with the needed items.
The second is recipe personalization. Based on user preferences (e.g. disliked ingredients, diet, previous behavior, deals at a favorite store and trending recipes based on location), Whisk is able to create personalized recipe feeds, search results and meal plans.
The third aspect is an Internet-of-Things play. This is seeing Whisk’s data power experiences that connect IoT devices with different parts of a user’s journey. Think: smart fridges connected to recipes.
“As the e-commerce grocery market quickly accelerates across Europe, players are increasingly looking for ways to connect recipe content to grocery retailers and provide consumers with personalized nutrition, planning and purchase options right from the comfort of their kitchen,” says the startup.
Whisk says its platform powers experiences for more than 100,000,000 monthly users through the applications of its clients. They include retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Instacart and Tesco, which use Whisk to enable online grocery shopping via recipes. On the IoT front, Samsung is using Whisk to build smart food applications that take user preferences, what’s in their fridge, what offers are in the supermarket, and recommends recipes. Other customers include publishers, such as the BBC, and food brands like McCormick, Nestle, Unilever and General Mills.
Meanwhile, Whisk says it is currently focused on the U.S., U.K. and Australia, and with today’s acquisition will expand services across Europe. “Together, Germany, France and Spain represent a larger e-commerce grocery market than both the U.S. and U.K. individually, with the largest online recipe usage per capita figures in the world,” adds the company.
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Microsoft acquires conversational AI startup Semantic Machines to help bots sound more lifelike
Microsoft announced today that it has acquired Semantic Machines, a Berkeley-based startup that wants to solve one of the biggest challenges in conversational AI: making chatbots sound more human and less like, well, bots.
In a blog post, Microsoft AI & Research chief technology officer David Ku wrote that “with the acquisition of Semantic Machines, we will establish a conversational AI center of excellence in Berkeley to push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces.”
According to Crunchbase, Semantic Machines was founded in 2014 and raised about $20.9 million in funding from investors, including General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures.
In a 2016 profile, co-founder and chief scientist Dan Klein told TechCrunch that “today’s dialog technology is mostly orthogonal. You want a conversational system to be contextual so when you interpret a sentence things don’t stand in isolation.” By focusing on memory, Semantic Machines claims its AI can produce conversations that not only answer or predict questions more accurately, but also flow naturally, something that Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Microsoft’s own Cortana and other virtual assistants still struggle to accomplish.
Instead of building its own consumer products, Semantic Machines focused on enterprise customers. This means it will fit in well with Microsoft’s conversational AI-based products. These include Microsoft Cognitive Services and Azure Bot Service, which the company says are used by one million and 300,000 developers, respectively, and its virtual assistants Cortana and Xiaolce.
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Bail reform has a complex relationship with tech
On any given day in the United States, more than 450,000 people are behind bars awaiting their constitutionally mandated fair trial. None of them have been convicted of a crime — they’ve been accused of committing a crime, but no formal ruling of guilt or innocence has been made. That means these hundreds of thousands of people are incarcerated simply because they don’t have the financial means to post bail.
Bail was originally designed to incentivize people to show up for their court dates, but it has since evolved into a system that separates the financially well-off from the poor. It requires arrested individuals to pay money in order to get out of jail while they await trial. For those who can’t afford bail, they wind up having to sit in jail, which means they may be at risk of missing rent payments, losing their jobs and failing to meet other responsibilities.
Money bail is all too often a common condition to secure release from jail while a case is in progress. Cash bail systems result in leaving many people incarcerated, even though they haven’t been convicted of a crime.
The cash bail system in the United States is one of the greatest injustices in the criminal justice system, ACLU Deputy National Political Director Udi Ofer tells TechCrunch. Bail reform, Ofer says, is a “key way to achieve” the goals of challenging racial disparities in the criminal justice system and ending mass incarceration.
As we explored in “The other pipeline,” the criminal justice system in the United States is deeply rooted in racism and a history of oppression. Black and Latino people comprise about 1.5 million of the total 2.2 million people incarcerated in the U.S. adult correctional system, or 67 percent of the prison population, while making up just 37 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Sentencing Project.
With a criminal justice system that disproportionately affects people of color, it’s no wonder why the cash bail system does the same. For one, people of color are 25 percent more likely than white people to be denied the option of bail, according to a pre-trial study by Dr. Traci Schlesinger. And for the black people who are given the option to pay bail, the amount is 35 percent higher on average than bail for white men, according to a 2010 study.
The national felony bail median is $10,000. For those who can’t afford it, they have to rely on bail bond agencies, which charge a non-refundable fee to pay the required bail amount on the person’s behalf. The bail bond companies, which are backed by insurance companies, collect between $1.4 billion and $2.4 billion a year, according to the ACLU and Color of Change.
Source: ACLU/Color of Change
And if bail bond companies are out of reach, those who are sitting in jail awaiting trial are more likely to be convicted of the crime they were charged with. The non-felony conviction rate rose from 50 percent to 92 percent for those jailed pre-trial, according to a study by the New York City Criminal Justice Agency. Along the way, leading up to the trial, some prosecutors incentivize people to plead guilty to the charges even if they’re innocent.
“It’s time to end our nation’s system of cash bail that lets the size of your wallet determine whether you are granted freedom or stay locked up in jail,” Ofer says. “Money should never decide a person’s freedom yet that’s exactly what happens every day in the United States.”
Pre-trial detention is also costly to local cities, counties and taxpayers. It costs about $38 million a day to keep these largely nonviolent people behind bars, according to the Pretrial Justice Institute. Annually, that comes out to about $14 billion to jail unconvicted people.
“The only people benefiting from bail is the for-profit bail industry,” Ofer said. “If we’re ever going to end mass incarceration in the United States, then we need to end cash bail.”
Bail reform is coming
Across the nation, bail reform has made its way into a handful of states. New Jersey’s bail reform law took effect last January; since then, its daily jail population has dropped 17.2 percent, and courts have imposed cash bail on just 33 defendants out of 33,400, according to the ACLU.
The ACLU itself is working on bail reform in 38 states, including California, where Ofer says he is optimistic reform will happen this year. Right now, a pre-trial release bill, Senate Bill 10, is up for consideration in the Assembly. The bill argues California should ensure people awaiting trial are not incarcerated simply because they can’t afford to pay bail. The bill also advocates for counties to establish pre-trial services agencies to better determine if people are fit to be released.
The bill, introduced by Senators Bob Hertzberg and others, is backed by the ACLU and Essie Justice Group, an Oakland-based organization that advocates for actual justice in the criminal justice system.
“Today we have a system that allows for people to be released pre-trial if they have enough money to afford their bail,” Essie Justice Group founder Gina Clayton tells TechCrunch. “Everyone else is required to sit inside of a cage without any way out.”
Essie Justice Group works mostly with and for women who have incarcerated loved ones. Often, the only way out for people is help from family or a plea deal, Clayton says.
“When we see people making the bail, we see that women are going into tremendous debt and are also beholden to an industry that has time and time again been cited and known to practice in quite an incredibly despicable way in terms of coercing and harassing their customers,” Clayton says. “When we think about who are the people who know about what’s going on with bail, it’s black and brown women in this country.”
For the past two years, Essie Justice Group held an action around Mother’s Day, with the goal of bailing moms out of jail or immigration detention. Last year’s action led to release of 30 women.
Photo via Essie Justice Group
Can tech help?
The short the answer is maybe. Earlier this month, Google banned ads for bail bonds services, which Clayton says is the largest step any corporation has taken on behalf of people who have loved ones in jail. But while tech can help in some ways, Clayton has some concerns with additional for-profit entities entering the criminal justice system.
“There are definitely tech solutions that I’m very against,” Clayton said, but declined to comment on which ones in particular. “I will say that my energy around this doesn’t come from an imagined place. I’m seeing it happen. One of the things we’re seeing is companies who are interested in bail reform because they see another opportunity to make money off of families. Like, ‘let this person out, but have them, at a cost, check in with people I hire to do this fancy but expensive drug testing three times a week, pay for an ankle shackle or bracelet and GPS monitoring.’ I think the companies that are making money off of those types of things are the ones we need to be wary of.”
There is, however, one for-profit company that immediately jumped to Clayton’s mind as being one doing actual good in the criminal justice space. That company is Uptrust, which provides text message reminders to people regarding court dates.
“I think that is a really great addition to the landscape,” Clayton says. “The reason I’m a proponent of theirs is because I understand their politics and I know what they won’t do, which is take it a step further or get involved with getting incentivized to add on bells and whistles that look less like freedom for people but more revenue for them.”
Uptrust, founded by Jacob Sills and Elijah Gwynm, aims to help people make their court dates. While the movies like to depict flight risks and people skipping town ahead of their court dates, failure to appear in court often comes down to a lack of transportation, work conflicts, not receiving a reminder, childcare or poor time management, Sills tells TechCrunch.
That’s where the idea came to humanize the system a bit more, by enabling public defenders to more easily connect with their clients. Uptrust is two-way in nature and reminds people on behalf of the public defender about court dates. Clients can also communicate any issues they may have about making it to court.
“If the public defender knows the client has an issue, they can usually get court moved,” Sills says. “But if they don’t have the information, they’re not going to lie on behalf of clients.”
Because public defenders don’t make much money, Uptrust doesn’t charge very much, Sills says.
“But they really care about the client and one of the things we saw with this was we needed to change the whole front end of the system to be less adversarial and more human,” Sills says.
In addition to text reminders, Uptrust enables public defenders to assist with other needs clients may have.
“A lot of stuff around bail reform is around risk assessment rather than need assessment,” Sills tells me. “But we saw a lot of these individuals have needs, like helps with rides, child care or reminders.”
Public defenders who are invested in the care of their clients can remind them via Uptrust to do things like ask for time off work or schedule child care.
For the end-user, the client, Uptrust is all text-based. For the public defenders, Uptrust offers a software solution that integrates into their case management systems.
Since launching in the summer of 2016 in California’s Contra Costa County, the court appearance rate improved from 80 percent to 95 percent, Sills says. To date, Uptrust has supported 20,000 people with a five percent FTA rate.
“As we improve product, if we can get [the FTA rate] down to 3 percent, you really can start taking that data and pushing forth major policy change,” Sills says.
Uptrust’s goal is to shift from risk assessment to needs assessment and ensure people are supported throughout their interactions with the criminal justice system.
“Our view is in terms of bail reform, we need to make sure there’s not a proliferation of things like ankle monitors and whatnot,” Sills says. “For us, success is really being a subcontractor to the community as well as working with the government. I think there’s a huge risk in bail reform as it relates to technology because people see it as a big business opportunity, If a company replaces the government, they may not have the community’s best interest in mind. So it’s important to keep in mind they have the community’s best interest in mind.”
Similar to Uptrust, a tech organization called Appolition works by operating within the confines of the system. Appolition, founded by Dr. Kortney Ryan Zieger, enables people to funnel their spare change into the National Bail Out fund. As of April, Appolition has facilitated over $130,000 to go toward bail relief. Ziegler was not available for comment for this story.
Promise, on the other hand, aims to provide an alternative to the cash bail system. In March, Promise raised a $3 million round led by First Round Capital with participation from from Jay-Z’s Roc Nation.
The idea is to offer counties and local governments an alternative approach to holding people behind bars simply because they can’t afford bail. With Promise, case managers can monitor compliance with court orders and better keep tabs on people via the app. GPS monitoring is also an option, albeit a controversial one.
Let’s say you get arrested and end up having a bail hearing. Instead of asking you to pay bail, the public defender could suggest a pre-trial release with Promise. From there, Promise would work with the public defender and your case manager to determine your care plan.
“It’s clear that our values are about keeping people out of jail,” Promise CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins told me on an episode of CTRL+T. “Like, we’re running a company but we fundamentally believe that not just it’s more cost effective but that it’s the right thing to do.”
Instead of a county jail paying $190 per day per person, Ellis-Lamkins said, Promise charges some counties just $17 per person per day. In some cases, Promise charges even less per person.
It’s that for-profit model that worries Clayton.
“Whenever you bring in the for-profit ethos in a criminal justice space, I think we need to be careful,” Clayton says.
She didn’t explicitly call out any companies. In fact, she said she doesn’t feel ready to make a judgment on Promise just yet. But she has a general concern of tech solutions that “dazzle and distract system actors who we really need to hold accountable and see operate in more systemic, holistic ways.”
Solutions, Clayton says, look like social safety nets like hospitals and clinics instead of jails.
“If we want to really move ourselves away from this path we’ve been on,” Clayton says, “which is towards normalizing state control of people then we should be really careful that our system that once looked like slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration doesn’t then become tech surveillance of all people.”
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Does Google’s Duplex violate two-party consent laws?
Google’s Duplex, which calls businesses on your behalf and imitates a real human, ums and ahs included, has sparked a bit of controversy among privacy advocates. Doesn’t Google recording a person’s voice and sending it to a data center for analysis violate two-party consent law, which requires everyone in a conversation to agree to being recorded? The answer isn’t immediately clear, and Google’s silence isn’t helping.
Let’s take California’s law as the example, since that’s the state where Google is based and where it used the system. Penal Code section 632 forbids recording any “confidential communication” (defined more or less as any non-public conversation) without the consent of all parties. (The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press has a good state-by-state guide to these laws.)
Google has provided very little in the way of details about how Duplex actually works, so attempting to answer this question involves a certain amount of informed speculation.
To begin with I’m going to consider all phone calls as “confidential” for the purposes of the law. What constitutes a reasonable expectation of privacy is far from settled, and some will have it that you there isn’t such an expectation when making an appointment with a salon. But what about a doctor’s office, or if you need to give personal details over the phone? Though some edge cases may qualify as public, it’s simpler and safer (for us and for Google) to treat all phone conversations as confidential.
As a second assumption, it seems clear that, like most Google services, Duplex’s work takes place in a data center somewhere, not locally on your device. So fundamentally there is a requirement in the system that the other party’s audio will be recorded and sent in some form to that data center for processing, at which point a response is formulated and spoken.
On its face it sounds bad for Google. There’s no way the system is getting consent from whomever picks up the phone. That would spoil the whole interaction — “This call is being conducted by a Google system using speech recognition and synthesis; your voice will be analyzed at Google data centers. Press 1 or say ‘I consent’ to consent.” I would have hung up after about two words. The whole idea is to mask the fact that it’s an AI system at all, so getting consent that way won’t work.
But there’s wiggle room as far as the consent requirement in how the audio is recorded, transmitted and stored. After all, there are systems out there that may have to temporarily store a recording of a person’s voice without their consent — think of a VoIP call that caches audio for a fraction of a second in case of packet loss. There’s even a specific cutout in the law for hearing aids, which if you think about it do in fact do “record” private conversations. Temporary copies produced as part of a legal, beneficial service aren’t the target of this law.
This is partly because the law is about preventing eavesdropping and wiretapping, not preventing any recorded representation of conversation whatsoever that isn’t explicitly authorized. Legislative intent is important.
“There’s a little legal uncertainty there, in the sense of what degree of permanence is required to constitute eavesdropping,” said Mason Kortz, of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. “The big question is what is being sent to the data center and how is it being retained. If it’s retained in the condition that the original conversation is understandable, that’s a violation.”
For instance, Google could conceivably keep a recording of the call, perhaps for AI training purposes, perhaps for quality assurance, perhaps for users’ own records (in case of time slot dispute at the salon, for example). They do retain other data along these lines.
But it would be foolish. Google has an army of lawyers and consent would have been one of the first things they tackled in the deployment of Duplex. For the onstage demos it would be simple enough to collect proactive consent from the businesses they were going to contact. But for actual use by consumers the system needs to engineered with the law in mind.
What would a functioning but legal Duplex look like? The conversation would likely have to be deconstructed and permanently discarded immediately after intake, the way audio is cached in a device like a hearing aid or a service like digital voice transmission.
A closer example of this is Amazon, which might have found itself in violation of COPPA, a law protecting children’s data, whenever a kid asked an Echo to play a Raffi song or do long division. The FTC decided that as long as Amazon and companies in that position immediately turn the data into text and then delete it afterwards, no harm and, therefore, no violation. That’s not an exact analogue to Google’s system, but it is nonetheless instructive.
“It may be possible with careful design to extract the features you need without keeping the original, in a way where it’s mathematically impossible to recreate the recording,” Kortz said.
If that process is verifiable and there’s no possibility of eavesdropping — no chance any Google employee, law enforcement officer or hacker could get into the system and intercept or collect that data — then potentially Duplex could be deemed benign, transitory recording in the eye of the law.
That assumes a lot, though. Frustratingly, Google could clear this up with a sentence or two. It’s suspicious that the company didn’t address this obvious question with even a single phrase, like Sundar Pichai adding during the presentation that “yes, we are compliant with recording consent laws.” Instead of people wondering if, they’d be wondering how. And of course we’d all still be wondering why.
We’ve reached out to Google multiple times on various aspects of this story, but for a company with such talkative products, they sure clammed up fast.
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Meet Alchemist Accelerator’s latest demo day cohort
An IoT-enabled lab for cannabis farmers, a system for catching drones mid-flight and the Internet of Cows are a few of the 17 startups exhibiting today at Alchemist Accelerator’s 18th demo day. The event, which will be streamed live here, focuses on big data and AI startups with an enterprise bent.
The startups are showing their stuff at Juniper’s Aspiration Dome in Sunnyvale, California at 3pm today, but you can catch the whole event online if you want to see just what computers and cows have in common. Here are the startups pitching onstage.
Tarsier – Tarsier has built AI computer vision to detect drones. The founders discovered the need while getting their MBAs at Stanford, after one had completed a PhD in aeronautics. Drones are proliferating. And getting into places they shouldn’t — prisons, R&D centers, public spaces. Securing these spaces today requires antiquated military gear that’s clunky and expensive. Tarsier is all software. And cheap, allowing them to serve markets the others can’t touch.
Lightbox – Retail 3D is sexy — think virtual try-ons, VR immersion, ARKit stores. But creating these experiences means creating 3D models of thousands of products. Today, artists slog through this process, outputting a few models per day. Lightbox wants to eliminate the humans. This duo of recent UPenn and Stanford Computer Science grads claim their approach to 3D scanning is pixel perfect without needing artists. They have booked $40,000 to date and want to digitize all of the world’s products.
Vorga – Cannabis is big business — more than $7 billion in revenue today and growing fast. The crop’s quality — and a farmer’s income — is highly sensitive to a few chemicals in it. Farmers today test the chemical composition of their crops through outsourced labs. Vorga’s bringing the lab in-house to the cannabis farmer via their IoT platform. The CEO has a PhD in chemical physics, and formerly helped the Department of Defense keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. She’s now helping cannabis farmers get high… revenue.
Neulogic – Neulogic is founded by a duo of Computer Science PhDs that led key parts of Walmart.com product search. They now want to solve two major problems facing the online apparel industry: the need to provide curated inspiration to shoppers and the need to offset rising customer acquisition costs by selling more per order. Their solution combines AI with a fashion knowledge graph to generate outfits on demand.
Intensivate – Life used to be simple. Enterprises would use servers primarily for function-driven applications like billing. Today, servers are all about big data, analytics and insight. Intensivate thinks servers need a new chip upgrade to reflect that change. They are building a new CPU they claim gets 12x the performance for the same cost. Hardware plays like this are hard to pull off, but this might be the team to do it. It includes the former co-founder and CEO of CPU startup QED, which was acquired for $2.3 billion, and a PhD in parallel computation who was on the design team for the Alpha CPU from DEC.
Integry – SaaS companies put a lot of effort into building out integrations. Integry provides app creators their own integrations marketplace with pre-boarded partners so they can have apps working with theirs from the get go. The vision is to enable app creators to mimic their own Slack app directory without spending the years or the millions. Because these integrations sit inside their app, Integry claims setup rates are significantly better and churn is reduced by as much as 40 percent.
Cattle Care – AI video analytics applied to cows! Cattle Care wants to increase dairy farmers’ revenue by more than $1 million per year and make cows healthier at the same time. The product identifies cows in the barn by their unique black and white patterns. Algorithms collect parameters such as walking distance, interactions with other cows, feeding patterns and other variables to detect diseases early. Then the system sends alerts to farm employees when they need to take action, and confirms the problem has been solved afterwards.
VadR – VR/AR is grappling with a lack of engaging content. VadR thinks the cause is a broken feedback loop of analytics to the creators. This trio of IIT-Delhi engineers has built machine learning algorithms that get smarter over time and deliver actionable insights on how to modify content to increase engagement.
Tika – This duo of ex-Googlers wants to help engineering managers manage their teams better. Managers use Tika as an AI-powered assistant over Slack to facilitate personalized conversations with engineering teams. The goal is to quickly uncover and resolve employee engagement issues, and prevent talent churn.
GridRaster – GridRaster wants to bring AR/VR to mobile devices. The problem? AR/VR is compute-intensive. Latency, bandwidth and poor load balancing kill AR/VR on mobile networks. The solution? For this trio of systems engineers from Broadcom, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, it’s about starting with enterprise use cases and building edge clouds to offload the work. They have 12 patents.
AitoeLabs – Despite the buzz around AI video analytics for security, AitoeLabs claims solutions today are plagued with hundreds of thousands of false alarms, requiring lots of human involvement. The engineering trio founding team combines a secret sauce of contextual data with their own deep models to solve this problem. They claim a 6x reduction in human monitoring needs with their tech. They’re at $240,000 ARR with $1 million of LOIs.
Ubiquios – Companies building wireless IoT devices waste more than $1.8 billion because of inadequate embedded software options making products late to market and exposing them to security and interoperability issues. The Ubiquios wireless stack wants to simplify the development of wireless IoT devices. The company claims their stack results in up to 90 percent lower cost and up to 50 percent faster time to market. Qualcomm is a partner.
4me, Inc. – 4me helps companies organize and track their IT outsourcing projects. They have 16 employees, 92 customers and generate several million in revenue annually. Storm Ventures led a $1.65 million investment into the company.
TorchFi – You know the pop-up screen you see when you log into a Wi-Fi hotspot? TorchFi thinks it’s a digital gold mine in the waiting. Their goal is to convert that into a sales channel for hotspot owners. Their first product is a digital menu that transforms the login screen into a food ordering screen for hotels and restaurants. Cisco has selected them as one of 20 apps to be distributed on their Meraki hotspots.
Cogitai – This team of 16 PhDs wants to usher in a more powerful type of AI called continual learning. The founders are the fathers of the field — and include professors in computer science from UT Austin and U Michigan. Unlike what we commonly think of as AI, Cogitai’s AI is built to acquire new skills and knowledge from experience, much like a child does. They have closed $2 million in bookings this year, and have $5 million in funding.
LoadTap – On-demand trucking apps are in vogue. LoadTap explicitly calls out that it is not one. This team, which includes an Apple software architect and founder with a family background in trucking, is an enterprise SaaS-only solution for shippers who prefer to work with their pre-vetted trucking companies in a closed loop. LoadTap automates matching between the shippers and trucking companies using AI and predictive analytics. They’re at $90,000 ARR and growing revenue 50 percent month over month.
Ondaka – Ondaka has built a VR-like 3D platform to render industrial information visually, starting with the oil and gas industry. For these industrial customers, the platform provides a better way to understand real-time IoT data, operational and job site safety issues and how reliable their systems are. The product launched two months ago, they have closed three customers already and are projecting ARR in the six figures. They have raised $350,000 in funding.
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Rackspace acquires Salesforce specialist RelationEdge
Rackspace today announced that it has acquired RelationEdge, a Salesforce implementation partner and digital agency. The companies did not disclose the financial details of the acquisition.
At first, this may sound like an odd acquisition. Rackspace is still best known for its hosting and managed cloud and infrastructure services, after all, and RelationEdge is all about helping businesses manage their Salesforce SaaS implementations. The company clearly wants to expand its portfolio, though, and add managed services for SaaS applications to its lineup. It made the first step in this direction with the acquisition of TriCore last year, another company in the enterprise application management space. Today’s acquisition builds upon this theme.
Gerard Brossard, the executive VP and general manager of Rackspace Application Services, told me that the company is still in the early days of its application management practice, but that it’s seeing good momentum as it’s gaining both new customers thanks to these offerings and as existing customers look to Rackspace for managing more than their infrastructure. “This allows us to jump into that SaaS management practice, starting with the leaders in the market,” he told me.
Why sell RelationEdge, a company that has gained some good traction and now has about 125 employees? “At the end of the day, we’ve accomplished a tremendous amount organically with very little funding,” RelationEdge founder and CEO Matt Stoyka told me. “But there is a huge opportunity in the space that we can take advantage of. But to do that, we needed more than was available to us, but we needed to find the right home for our people and our company.” He also noted that the two companies seem to have a similar culture and mission, which focuses more on the business outcomes than the technology itself.
For the time being, the RelationEdge brand will remain and Rackspace plans to run the business “with considerable independence under its current leadership.” Brossard noted that the reason for this is RelationEdge’s existing brand recognition.
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Call of Duty Black Ops IIII adds battle royale mode while taking the game back to boots on the ground
In recent releases, Activision has taken its Call of Duty franchise into space (with its Infinite Warfare) and back in time (with the World War II release); now it’s looking to its past to bring it back to glory, while adding the massive multi-player Battle Royale mode.
The new Black Ops game is set within a narrative universe between Black Ops II and Black Ops III and stresses multi-player gaming like the battle royale, improved league play and collaborative features for gamers.
Critical to that is the franchise’s introduction of Battle Royale mode, bringing favorite characters, favorite weapons and the most iconic parts of players’ favorite maps along with the ever-popular zombies into a winner-take-all competitive landscape.
It’s a nod to the new ways gamers are playing and a pitch to rejuvenate Call of Duty — one of the world’s most popular game titles, with Black Ops as perhaps the most compelling title in the company’s arsenal. Previous releases have failed to capture the imagination in the same way as its early releases. Black Ops IIII is returning to the complete boots on the ground game play, and stressing the multi-player functionality that made the first games such a hit.
The game will launch in October and will be available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.
Black Ops IIII doesn’t have a traditional campaign, but weaves narrative into each of the game’s modes. “This is a game that’s built to last for years to come,” said Treyarch chairman Mark Lamia.
The game developers stressed more nuanced game play, with improved sound and graphics capabilities like more refined muzzle flashes and better audio for improved orientation. Weapons mods are getting an upgrade; each weapon will get its own set of attachments. There are operator mods and better, more realistic recoil.
For players familiar with the game, Treyarch developers stressed changes to make the game more tactical, including a new healing mechanic and better situational awareness for more measured, strategic play.
“Tactical players can choose when to disengage and look for a better opportunity to survive,” said one of the Treyarch developers presenting onstage in a cavernous hangar at the Jet Center Los Angeles for the Call of Duty IIII community reveal. As part of the tactical emphasis, the company reintroduced characters like FireBreak to deal with aerial threats and two new specialists, a reconnaissance expert and a defensive player who can create tactical positions for teams.
Zombie mode
Black Ops IIII also adds new features and first-time experiences for fans of its Zombie mode. “As with the rest of the Black Ops IIII we’ve gone back to the drawing board on Zombies,” says Jason Blundell. “The zombies community has always been our most loyal…. So 10 years after it all began we’re about to begin a brand new chapter with the Zombie story right here.”
There are three zombie game-play scenarios. Two new scenarios include one set in a past, mythical Romanesque era while the other is set in the luxurious venue of the Titanic as the maiden voyage turns deadly and zombifying.
For both experiences there are going to be customizable tools and social experiences so that the new Zombie world can exist in an evergreen mode. On offer will be customizable zombie modes for ways fans can customize and trade their own zombies. There’s also a Black Ops stamp system to validate the work that’s been done.
Activision and Treyarch also introduced limited-time creative challenges for modding zombies, and promised new ways to play the game and updated seasonal themes based, in part, on player modifications. For Zombies, Black Ops IIII will include bot support to play with an artificial intelligence. Zombie Rush is a new mode designed to introduce players to the zombie universe and adding in-game tutorials. Difficulty settings are also customizable to encourage repeat game play.
PC focus
Black Ops IIII is the first title to be released on the multi-player Battle.net PC platform. The company is focused on PC as “its own unique platform, integrated with all the social features on Battle.net.” Players can talk across Black Ops IIII and Overwatch, and the company is emphasizing the customizable elements for PC gamers.
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Snapchat Spectacles tests non-circular landscape exports
The worst thing about Spectacles is how closely tied they are to Snapchat. The proprietary circular photo and video format looks great inside Snapchat where you can tip your phone around while always staying full screen, but it gets reduced to a small circle with a big white border when you export it to your phone for sharing elsewhere.
Luckily, Snapchat has started beta testing new export formats for Spectacles through the beta version of its app. This lets you choose a black border instead of a white one, but importantly, also a horizontal 16:9 rectangular format that would fit well on YouTube and other traditional video players. The test was first spotted by Erik Johnson, and, when asked, a Snapchat spokesperson told TechCrunch “I can confirm we’re testing it, yes.”
Allowing Spectacles to be more compatible with other services could make the v2 of its $150 photo and video-recording sunglasses much more convenient and popular. I actually ran into the Snapchat Spectacles team this weekend at the FORM Arcosanti music festival in Arizona where they were testing the new Specs and looking for ideas for their next camera. I suggested open sourcing the circular format or partnering so other apps could show it natively with the swivel effect, and Snap declined to comment about that. But now it looks like they’re embracing compatibility by just letting you ditch the proprietary format.
Breaking away from purely vertical or circular formats is also a bit of a coup for Snapchat, which has touted vertical as the media orientation of the future as that’s how we hold our phones. Many other apps, including Facebook’s Snapchat clones, adopted this idea. But with Snapchat’s growth slipping to its lowest rate ever, it may need to think about new ways to gain exposure elsewhere.
Seeing Spectacles content on other apps without ugly borders could draw attention back to Snapchat, or at least help Spectacles sell better than v1, which only sold 220,000 pairs and had to write-off hundreds of thousands more that were gathering dust in warehouses. While it makes sense why Snap might have wanted to keep the best Spectacles content viewing experience on its own app, without user growth, that’s proven a software limitation for what’s supposed to be a camera company.
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Sprinklr hires former fed CIO Vivek Kundra as COO
Sprinklr, the unicorn startup best known for helping customers interpret social signals has been moving into the broader customer experience market in the last year. Today it announced is was hiring a heavy hitter as Chief Operating Officer, bringing in former federal CIO and Salesforce executive Vivek Kundra. He began working at his new position just this week.
Kundra says that he sees a company that is in a good position and poised for growth. It will be part of his job to work with CEO Ragy Thomas to make sure that happens. “When I look at the 1200 customers we have today, I see a massive opportunity to provide technology to change the way [our users] interact with customers,” Kundra told TechCrunch.
He says that, with his background, whether working under President Obama or with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the focus has always been on the customer, however you defined that, whether in the context of delivering government services or selling cloud software.
He said that to achieve that you have to be ruthlessly focused on execution. “Ideas are cheap, but how do you bring them to life in a way that inspires and motivates? I think that’s really important,” he said.
It’s worth noting that Kundra is not the first COO, however. The company hired Tim Page, who was a founder and COO at VCE before joining Sprinklr in 2016. That was apparently not a good fit.
Thomas says that landing Kundra was part of an extensive 9-month executive search where they looked at people who had worked at SaaS companies that had scaled over a billion dollars in revenue, concentrating on Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow. “If you look at people in the driver’s seat at those companies, there is a finite number of people. Salesforce is a great company and a great partner. That experience is relevant and unique,” Thomas said.
Kundra pointed out that as part of his responsibilities at Salesforce he built a business unit from scratch that included driving adoption for the company’s Government Cloud and other verticals. “Now I have ability to draw on those experiences,” he said.
Firming up the COO position, much like the CFO, is crucial ahead of going public. With the company valued at $1.8 billion in 2016, they would seem to be of sufficient size to make that move, but Thomas wasn’t ready to commit to anything definitive (much as you would expect).
Instead, he talked of building a strong foundation as preparation to become a public company at some point. “It’s a question of when, not if [we go public], but for a company of our size and scale, it’s logical for us to go public. We aren’t talking about when and how, and we are trying to pour a strong foundation [before we do]” he said. Bringing in Kundra appears to be part of that.
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