Month: April 2018

It’s April, that means tax returns for people in the U.S. very soon. Given the breakout year that crypto had in 2017 — despite prices cooling down in recent months — and well-intended individuals might be thinking about whether to file taxes based on gains they enjoyed from bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

It’s good timing, then, for CoinTracker — a San Francisco-based startup currently tracking $200 million in crypto assets — to pop its head above the parapet and announce that it has raised a $1.5 million seed round.

We wrote about the company earlier this year when it was part of Y Combinator’s winter cohort, and now it has spread its wings with a round led by Initialized Capital — a seed investor in billion-dollar crypto exchange Coinbase — with Y Combinator and a host of angel investors joining in for the ride. Some of those include Protocol Labs CEO Juan Benet and Paul Buchheit, the engineer who created Gmail.

CoinTracker is (as the name suggests) a product that lets you track your crypto portfolio.

Sure, there are a tonne of such services and apps on the market but, having bought and used most of them, there’s none that really fits snuggly. That’s because a lot of the data input is manual. That’s important if you truly want to track the success of your investing, you need to know obvious information like what the price of bitcoin was when you bought. When you factor in crypto-to-crypto trading — e.g. trading bitcoin for ethereum — and the price changes that happen, suddenly your manual attempt to track performance is lacking.

That’s just speaking as a hobbyist. More serious investors are even more underserved, and that is where CoinTracker is aiming to make its mark.

The service tracks your crypto across wallet addresses — using public information, nothing private — while it throws in API keys from the top 14 crypto exchanges. That helps fill in more gaps and give you a fuller read on how your crypto investment has performed. A transfer matching algorithm is in place to help figure out trades on decentralized exchanges, which are more complicated to track.

By pulling that information, CoinTracker is also in a position to help those well-intended individuals I mentioned earlier give the taxman an accurate read on they crypto gains to remain IRS compliant.

Going forward, the plan is to tap into that holistic picture of crypto portfolios to offer more services, CoinTracker co-founder Chandan Lodha told TechCrunch in an interview.

Lodha, formerly a product manager with Google X, started the service alongside co-founder and former TextNow CTO Jon Lerner because both were looking for something to track their crypto investment hobby. When they realized a whole lot more people — both on the more serious and casual end of the spectrum — were too, they made it their main focus.

Lodha said the service aims to set itself apart with a focus on ease of use and simplicity, and he expects that to continue and be reflected in future services that could include trading via exchanges inside the app.

“The key reason we’ve had some success to date is due to focusing on the UX,” Lodha said. “There are tonnes of other tools but one thing that really resonates with our users is that we’ve made it easy to use for mainstream people, not just expert cryptography folks.”

Indeed, gathering and acting on user feedback is a common theme with Lodha, who said the money will go towards adding to CoinTracker’s developer team to work on the “large number” of user requests received. 

Now to price: the basic tracking service is free, but users pay from $49 up to $999 per year for more advanced features centered around optimizing tax filings by computing capital gains reports using FIFO, LIFO or HIFO accounting.

Disclosure: Writer owns a small amount of cryptocurrency.

from TechCrunch

Cambridge, U.K.-based startup Spectral Edge has closed a $5.3M Series A funding round from existing investors Parkwalk Advisors and IQ Capital.

The team, which in 2014 spun the business out of academic research at the University of East Anglia, has developed a mathematical technique for improving photographic imagery in real-time, also using machine learning technology. 

As we’ve reported previously, their technology — which can be embedded in software or in silicon — is designed to enhance pictures and videos on mass-market devices. Mooted use cases include for enhancing low light smartphone images, improving security camera footage or even for drone cameras. 

This month Spectral Edge announced its first customer, IT services provider NTT data, which said it would be incorporating the technology into its broadcast infrastructure offering — to offer its customers an “HDR-like experience”, via improved image quality, without the need for them to upgrade their hardware.

“We are in advanced trials with a number of global tech companies — household names — and hope to be able to announce more deals later this year,” CEO Rhodri Thomas tells us, adding that he expects 2-3 more deals in the broadcast space to follow “soon”, and enhance viewing experiences “in a variety of ways”.

On the smartphone front, Thomas says the company is waiting for consumer hardware to catch up — noting that RGB-IR sensors “haven’t yet begun to deploy on smartphones on a great scale”.

Once the smartphone hardware is there he reckons its technology will be able to help with various issues such as white balancing and bokeh processing.

“Right now there is no real solution for white balancing across the whole image [on smartphones] — so you’ll get areas of the image with excessive blues or yellows, perhaps, because the balance is out — but our tech allows this to be solved elegantly and with great results,” he suggests. “We also can support bokeh processing by eliminating artifacts that are common in these images.”

The new funding is going towards ramping up Spectral Edge’s efforts to commercialize its tech, including by growing the R&D team to 12 — with hires planned for specialists in image processing, machine learning and embedded software development.

The startup will also focus on developing real-world apps for smartphones, webcams and security applications alongside its existing products for the TV & display industries.

“The company is already very IP strong, with 10 patent families in the world (some granted, some filed and a couple about to be filed),” says Thomas. “The focus now is productizing and commercializing.”

“In a year, I expect our technology to be launched or launching on major flagship [smartphone] devices,” he adds. “We also believe that by then our CVD (color vision deficiency) product, Eyeteq, is helping millions of people suffering from color blindness to enjoy significantly better video experiences.”

from TechCrunch

Over the course of the last few years, the Holberton School of Witchcraft and Wizardry Engineering has made a name for itself as one of the more comprehensive coding schools. The two-year program trains full-stack engineers with a focus on the basics of engineering and sees itself as an alternative to a traditional college experience. Today, the San Francisco-based school announced that it has raised an $8.2 million Series A round that will help it expand its programs.

The funding round was led by current investors daphni and Trinity Ventures. The Omidyar Network joined as a new investor. With this, the school has now raised a total of $13 million.

Holberton is currently teaching about 200 students (who have to pass a pretty rigorous entry exam) and the plan is to scale the program to 1,000 students per year. That’s a larger cohort than the computer science programs at even the biggest schools currently teach. Past students have found jobs at companies like Apple, IBM, Tesla, Docker and Dropbox. Instead of charging tuition, the school takes a 17 percent cut of its graduates’ salary for the first three years after they get their jobs.

To enable its expansion to 1,000 students, the team recently moved into a far larger space in San Francisco that can handle about 500 students. As the team has repeatedly told me, part of its mission is to bring in a diverse group of students — and one that isn’t held back by the prospect of student loans. In its recent classes, about 40 percent of the students were women, for example, and a slight majority of students were minorities. That’s sadly still quite unusual in Silicon Valley.

“Everyone deserves a first-rate education. Students at Holberton come from all walks of life, from cashiers to musicians to poker players (as well as right out of high school) without the money, background and education needed to be ‘Ivy League material,’” said Julien Barbier, co-founder and CEO of Holberton. “With Holberton, they now have the same opportunity as the more fortunate and they leave with skills to learn for a lifetime. Our students compete (sometimes after only 9-12 months) with Ivy League graduates and get the jobs.”

from TechCrunch