Month: May 2018

Real Vision is entering the crowded business and financial new space with a bang. The company, which recently raised a $10 million Series B after a $5 million A, is working on a number of new initiatives including distribution on Apple TV, a content distribution partnership with Thomson Reuters and an upcoming documentary on PBS.

The documentary, “A World on the Brink,” will focus on threats to the global economy. The team is aiming at viewers ages 36-45 instead of the older Boomers who prefer cable financial news far.

“Unlike most video-based media businesses where short-form video is deemed to have the highest user engagement, Real Vision have found that almost 70% of their customers who start a half, or an hour-long, video will watch all of it. This engagement in long-form content is breaking boundaries within the industry,” said co-founder and CEO Raoul Pal. “Sensationalism and clickbait is at an all-time high. Traditional financial news has continued to degenerate into attention-seeking sound bites that are at best of little value and at worst, downright dangerous.”

Pal worked at Goldman Sachs before moving into media.

“I lamented on the state of financial media – how it had let the ordinary person down repeatedly in 2000 and 2008 and was busy treating finance as entertainment and not taking into account that this was peoples live savings they were dealing with. I also noted how far financial programming had become versus the fast-changing world of on line video. Viewing habits and content types were changing but the financial TV incumbents hadn’t changed,” he said “I decided that it was time for someone to disrupt the way in which television worked – particularly with regard to financial and business information.”

The team will use the cash to create programming aimed at “those who want to create new business opportunities and startups, manage new enterprises and leverage new technology.” The videos can run as long as 90 minutes but usually hit the five to thirty-minute mark. They are also distributing their content to Thomson Reuters . It uses a subscription-based model and costs $180 annually.

The team met at a bar in Jesus Pobre, Spain. Pal and his co-founder Damian Horner found each other during their travels and had drinks at a place called Rosita’s where Horner, a former ad exec, learned of Pal’s experience in finance and they both mapped out a new type of online news channel with some real energy. Thus was born a model that mixes on-demand with high-impact news, something that few cable stations can manage.

“Almost all traditional media outlets rely on an ever-dwindling advertising revenue model. Real Vision is subscription-based and built that way from the ground up,” said Pal. “Most media business are still trying to figure out a subscription model to diversify away from advertising. In a highly competitive digital world, the pressure ‘to get clicks’ has a massive impact on the tone, direction and quality of the editorial content itself. Real Vision’s subscriber model means there is no need to sensationalize, no dumbing down of ideas, no incessant ‘breaking news’ headlines, no clickbait soundbites and no cutting things short for commercial breaks.”

from TechCrunch

While knowledge workers are handling increasingly difficult tasks — ones that may be much easier to handle with just a Python script — Alex Yaseen thinks that in the future not everyone will actually need to learn how to code.

Instead, he hopes that tools like the one he’s building, called Parabola, will bridge that gap between the complex technical problems and otherwise nontechnical employees. Instead of running through massive excel spreadsheets, Parabola is designed to make it easier for employees that might not be highly technical to piece together the kinds of processes that will help automate mundane tasks that run through each action. The company said it has raised a new $2.2 million financing round led by Matrix Partners.

“The logical version of the future doesn’t look like everyone coding by running Python or whatever language,” Yaseen said. “It’s a very valid opinion, but we talked a lot with various investors about that perspective of the future where all knowledge workers have to increasingly be more productive to compete. We thought about how we could bridge that gap by giving nontechnical people these tools to work like an engineering without being an engineer.”

At its core, Parabola is a more visually-oriented way of designing a workflow where users can piece together a complex work problem in a kind of flowchart, piece by piece. These are all functions that you might find built into Excel or other spreadsheet tools, like Google Sheets, but Parabola is a tool that is designed to make it easier to automate all those updates into new fields, as well as make the model pretty flexible and easy to manipulate.

Parabola is designed to take those account executives or salespeople that run through hundred-plus step processes in order to do their jobs through dozens of excel tabs. Users can figure out how to describe those steps in Parabola and then begin executing them without having to constantly tweak formulas and ensure that everything is operating properly. At the same time, Parabola is designed to ensure that the whole experience feels like a spreadsheet, where making small changes causes the whole data set to update — something that nontechnical users actually gravitate toward, Yaseen said.

“The reason people love using spreadsheets even though they’re not the right tool for most of these experiences, is that they can make a change and see things immediately,” Yaseen said. “Nontechnical people don’t adapt to [an engineering] mindset, they value the process of making a change and everything updating. That’s one of our hypotheses, and other tools don’t give you those options, and therefore are not really geared to a true nontechnical user.”

Still, the whole idea of trying to simplify programming down to something that’s more palatable for a nontechnical user is both a significant challenge and a very crowded market. There are many approaches to the problem, though Yaseen says they target different niches or use cases, like Airtable or Zapier — many of which have raised large sums of money. But some companies have different demands and users may gravitate toward different options, so those aren’t the direct competition. Instead, the competition is larger firms hiring engineers to handle all these processes in the back-end, as well as users just sitting in Excel all day.

from TechCrunch

Quit Genius, the YC-backed app that helps users quit smoking, has today announced the close of an additional $1.1 million, bringing their seed round to a cool $2 million. Village Global VC, Pioneer Fund, Arab Angel VC, Max Mullen of Instacart, Olivia Teich of Dropbox, Paul Rosania of Slack, Ariel Polar of Strava, Eric Reis, David Langley of Zesty, Juha Paananen of NonStop Games, and Junaid Bajwa of Merck & Co participated in the round, among others.

Quit Genius was built by doctors — Yusuf Sherwani (cofounder and CEO), Maroof Ahmed (cofounder and COO), and Sarim Siddiqui (cofounder and Head of Product) — who met on the first day of medical school. They saw the terrible effects of smoking on patients’ health but didn’t see doctors giving those patients a clear path to quit smoking.

So the team started building out Quit Genius, which uses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to change a user’s behavior.

“CBT breaks down situations into three areas: your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors,” Ahmed told TechCrunch in February. “What you think and feel can affect how you behave. CBT focuses on replacing any negative thoughts and feelings you may have that trigger you to smoke, with healthier and more positive thoughts that will help you to quit smoking.”

Quit Genius uses CBT to take smokers through stages of quitting, using a number of different types of content, from audio sessions to animated videos to interactive exercises to help people think differently about destructive addictions.

Since launch, the company has introduced new ‘packs’ for other addictive behaviors such as drinking alcohol. Packs aren’t quite as comprehensive as the Quit Genius program around quitting smoking, but they do offer troves of additional content around other addictions.

The company already has packs for alcohol, stress, motivation, and health, giving users extra content around the issue they’re dealing with most. Alcohol felt natural, according to Ahmed, because alcohol is such a trigger for many smokers, and one of the issues they dealt with most in their quest to quit.

Soon, Quit Genius has plans to launch packs around pregnancy (for women who are smoking when they become pregnant and want to quit), weight management, social pressure to smoke, and self esteem.

Since launch Quit Genius has grown to 300,000 registered users, with over 20,000 people officially smoke-free in the app (which Quit Genius defines as having not smoked for over 28 days). The company’s internal goal is to get to 100,000 smoke-free users by the end of the year, and will track their progress publicly on the website.

While consumers are the primary focus of the company, there is also a growing opportunity for Quit Genius to start working with big-name employers around well-being and health. Healthy employees save the company money and are more productive, and Quit Genius thinks it can not only help employees get healthier but give employers a way to track that progress. In fact, Quit Genius has already signed on a tech giant as a customer, but wouldn’t disclose which one.

Given that the company was founded by doctors, it comes as no surprise that the Quit Genius team is participating in scientific research papers around their process. One paper, published by JMIR mHealth, found that Quit Genius outperformed the NHS Smoke-free app. An upcoming paper, which will be published in the next few weeks, found that Quit Genius yielded a 36 percent quit rate among participants, with a 59.6 percent reduction in cigarettes among participants. 

from TechCrunch

Amuse, the Swedish startup that offers a free distribution service for artists wanting to get their music on Spotify, Apple Music et al., coupled with what it’s calling a “next generation” record label, has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lakestar, and Raine Ventures, and will be used to expand the company operations globally, including building out a bigger presence in the U.S.

Founded in Stockholm in 2015 by a team of music industry experts including Diego Farias, Christian Wilsson, Jimmy Brodd, Andreas Ahlenius, and Guy Parry — and later joined by music artist and entrepreneur will.i.am — Amuse is aiming to create a new way for musicians to distribute their music globally and, crucially, to be discovered.

As co-founder and CEO Farias explained in a call, it does this via a free music distribution service that makes it easy and cost-free for new and unsigned artists to get their music into all of the major music services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer etc., and in a way that means they keep 100 percent of the royalties. Similar services typically either charge an annual fee or take a cut of any revenue generated or both.

Amuse also provides a dashboard displaying and helping to make sense of data relating to how well your tracks are performing on the streaming apps and download stores you have chosen to distribute on. And its this data — or, rather, the value of it — that underpins the startups unique business model: come for the free distribution, stay for the record deal.

Namely, Amuse uses the data that it has access to via users of its music distribution service to analyze music consumption and listening habits to identify “rising talent”. The company then offers to sign the most promising artists to its own re-imagined record label through a licensing deal whereby they still own their work, rather than a traditional recoding contract. This consists of a 50/50 split of streaming and download revenue and means artists have access to what Amuse claims is large-scale promotion.

Throughout our conversation Farias was very keen to stress that he sees this as a partnership of equals, where the interests of scaling up the success and reach of an artist signed by Amuse are equally aligned. The type of value-add that the Amuse team will bring will vary depending on artist and what they need most, but will include things like public relations, marketing, branding, and having a more direct line to the online distributors it partners with. Farias didn’t rule out more traditional A&R services either, such as help with recording or preparing an artist for follow-up releases.

Meanwhile, I’m told Amuse’s board of directors includes Edgar Berger, former Chairman and CEO of Sony Music International, and Jörg Mohaupt, former Warner Music Group board member. Gordon Rubenstein, Managing Partner, Raine Ventures, is also joining as a board observer.

Dharmash Mistry, General Partner at Lakestar, says that the Amuse team have “reimagined every step of the A&R process from inverting the commercial model to be artist-friendly and discovering new musicians to changing how individual songs are marketed”. He is also talking up Amuse’s early success in Sweden — I understand the startup has already signed licensing deals with 40 or more artists — and says the investment will help the company roll out the model across the U.S. and Europe. To that end, Farias tells me Amuse is opening an office in L.A.

from TechCrunch

If you’ve ever worked in an office building, chances are somebody issued you a keycard or NFC-enabled badge to open the doors to the building. Those cards and badges do their job, but they can be both cumbersome and prone to problems. OpenPath wants to do away with all of these issues and add a new level of convenience to this whole process by replacing these access cards with the phone you already have.

Until today, OpenPath, which currently has about 20 employees, remained in stealth mode since it was founded by Edgecast co-founders Alex Kazerani (CEO)and James Segil (President), together with a number of other former Edgecast execs. The founders are putting their own money into this startup and are leading a $7 million seed round. A number of institutional investors also participated in this round, though, including Upfront Ventures, Sorenson Ventures, Bonfire Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital and Fika Ventures.

Over the course of the last few years, the team developed — and patented — both the hardware and software for allowing employees to securely open doors and for security teams to manage their access. Instead of NFC, the company’s so-called SurePath Mobile technology uses Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and LTE to authenticate the user. The system integrates directly with G Suite and Office 365 so that users and IT teams don’t have to create multiple user accounts to give employees access to their spaces.

Segil argues that employees have come to expect a certain level of convenience in the workplace and while our homes are getting smarter, most offices aren’t. During our conversation ahead of today’s announcement, Kazerani also stressed that the company’s platform had to be enterprise-grade and ready to be used thousands of times a day.

The OpenPath team developed its own reader hardware, which businesses have to install at their doors. The hardware uses the same wiring as existing services, though, making it easy to replace a legacy system with this new solution.

from TechCrunch