Monthly Archives: January 2021

News: Vantage makes managing AWS easier

• January 12, 2021
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Vantage, a new service that makes managing AWS resources and their associated spend easier, is coming out of stealth today. The service offers its users an alternative to the complex AWS console with support for most of the standard AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, ECS and Fargate and Route 53 hosted zones.

Vantage, a new service that makes managing AWS resources and their associated spend easier, is coming out of stealth today. The service offers its users an alternative to the complex AWS console with support for most of the standard AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, VPCs, ECS and Fargate and Route 53 hosted zones.

The company’s founder, Ben Schaechter, previously worked at AWS and Digital Ocean (and before that, he worked on Crunchbase, too). Yet while DigitalOcean showed him how to build a developer experience for individuals and small businesses, he argues that the underlying services and hardware simply weren’t as robust as those of the hyperclouds. AWS, on the other hand, offers everything a developer could want (and likely more), but the user experience leaves a lot to be desired.

Image Credits: Vantage

“The idea was really born out of ‘what if we could take the user experience of DigitalOcean and apply it to the three public cloud providers, AWS, GCP and Azure,” Schaechter told me. “We decided to start just with AWS because the experience there is the roughest and it’s the largest player in the market. And I really think that we can provide a lot of value there before we do GCP and Azure.”

The focus for Vantage is on the developer experience and cost transparency. Schaechter noted that some of its users describe it as being akin to a “Mint for AWS.” To get started, you give Vantage a set of read permissions to your AWS services and the tool will automatically profile everything in your account. The service refreshes this list once per hour, but users can also refresh their lists manually.

Given that it’s often hard enough to know which AWS services you are actually using, that alone is a useful feature. “That’s the number one use case,” he said. “What are we paying for and what do we have?”

At the core of Vantage is what the team calls “views,” which allows you to see which resources you are using. What is interesting here is that this is quite a flexible system and allows you to build custom views to see which resources you are using for a given application across regions, for example. Those may include Lambda, storage buckets, your subnet, code pipeline and more.

On the cost-tracking side, Vantage currently only offers point-in-time costs, but Schaechter tells me that the team plans to add historical trends as well to give users a better view of their cloud spend.

Schaechter and his co-founder bootstrapped the company and he noted that before he wants to raise any money for the service, he wants to see people paying for it. Currently, Vantage offers a free plan, as well as paid “pro” and “business” plans with additional functionality.

Image Credits: Vantage 

News: Eden office management platform rebrands to Eden Workplace

• January 12, 2021
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Eden, the office management platform that has raised nearly $70 million since inception, is today making a tweak to its nomenclature to reflect its push into SaaS tools. Henceforth, the startup will be called Eden Workplace. “We had a lot of clients in different categories like retail, some industrial and some classic real estate and

Eden, the office management platform that has raised nearly $70 million since inception, is today making a tweak to its nomenclature to reflect its push into SaaS tools. Henceforth, the startup will be called Eden Workplace.

“We had a lot of clients in different categories like retail, some industrial and some classic real estate and we wanted to reaffirm that we’re really building software and a service marketplace for the modern office,” said cofounder and CEO Joe Du Bey. “We also felt that the company is fundamentally different because of all the SaaS tools that we’re building, so it acknowledges that there’s a change in our business.”

Eden also acquired the rights to edenworkplace.com, which Du Bey believes will lend more credibility to the brand who is looking to sell into corporations and organizations and IT departments.

Image Credits: Eden

This isn’t the first evolution for the office management startup.

Eden started out as a service to help folks troubleshoot tech issues using on-demand specialists. Over time, the company moved into office management services, such as cleanings, repairs, re-stocking, IT help and more. The vertically integrated startup turned into a marketplace, working with multiple vendors to provide services to clients.

In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Eden has had to shift yet again, introducing SaaS products to help people return to and work in their office spaces. That includes the ability to offer COVID-safety questionnaires, track the people coming in and out of the office, alongside tools for visitor management and room booking.

Eden is also introducing a desk reservation system for workers to ensure they can maintain social distancing. This feature was teased at the time of the SaaS launch but is available now to new and existing customers.

Thus far, Eden’s SaaS tools have been growing revenue by more than 100 percent month over month, and Du Bey believes the SaaS side of the business will grow 5x by the end of 2021.

News: Capchase nabs $60M in credit to help founders avoid dilution

• January 12, 2021
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No one likes dilution, and that’s why every founder is looking for alternatives to traditional equity investing by venture capitalists. Financial entrepreneurs have launched a number of products, from SaaS securitization to debt-based financing, to help founders avoid that dilution, particularly when they have recurring revenues clocked on the books. SaaS securitization will disrupt VC’s

No one likes dilution, and that’s why every founder is looking for alternatives to traditional equity investing by venture capitalists. Financial entrepreneurs have launched a number of products, from SaaS securitization to debt-based financing, to help founders avoid that dilution, particularly when they have recurring revenues clocked on the books.

Capchase is one of this new crop of startup-focused fintech companies. It allows startups to receive their future recurring revenue today in the form of debt, allowing founders to spend future money earlier and potentially avoid at least some of those expensive, dilutive rounds of venture capital, particularly when they are just getting started. I profiled the Boston-based company a few months ago, when they had raised a $4.6 million seed led by Caffeinated Capital.

Now, the company is swimming in new funds, and it’s ready to start lending out to even more startups. This morning, the company announced that it has raised $60 million in an “asset-backed credit facility” from i80 Group. That should allow Capchase to expand the number of startups it works with, as well as the amount of revenue prepayment it could potentially extend to each startup as well.

i80 itself has built an investment firm based around credit underwriting just these sorts of projects for startups. In addition to this facility for Capchase and similar fintech underwriting, the group also backs real estate underwriting projects like for Properly, where it co-led a $100 million facility with Silicon Valley Bank.

Capchase, which was founded in early 2020, claims that its initial customers have delayed fundraises by an average of 8 months and saved about 16% in overall dilution. Of course, those number will vary widely depending on the startup, its growth, its recurring revenues and other variables.

Capchase’s goal isn’t just to extend revenue prepayment to startups, but to do it fast, sometimes in just days or even hours depending on the complexity of the recurring revenues of its clients. With $60 million more, it’s hungry to lend even faster.

News: Lenovo introduces a wireless charging mat for its e-ink sporting laptop

• January 12, 2021
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Lenovo keeps rolling out unique takes on familiar categories this year at CES. Last week it was the screen-swiveling all-in-one and some AR glasses, and today (the first official day of the show), the company’s got an interesting update to last year’s dual-display ThinkBook Plus. Like the original, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i sports

Lenovo keeps rolling out unique takes on familiar categories this year at CES. Last week it was the screen-swiveling all-in-one and some AR glasses, and today (the first official day of the show), the company’s got an interesting update to last year’s dual-display ThinkBook Plus.

Like the original, the ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i sports an e-ink display on the lid. Lenovo’s been experimenting with the technology for a number of form factors, and this one makes more sense than previous shots — essentially offering up a quick-glance notification center. I suppose you could also use it as an e-reader if you’re so inclined.

Ultimately, like a lot of what Lenovo does, it’s perhaps more interesting than honestly useful. Though, as ever, points for trying something new. This time out the screen is significantly larger, at about the same size as the primary screen. It now measures 12 inches and sports a 2560 x 1600 resolution (also matching the main screen). The refresh rate has been enhanced, and now it’s possible to run some of the apps on the lid without opening it.

The laptop also sports a built-in stylus for use with the touchscreen. Also interesting is the arrival of the new ThinkBook Charging Mat, which uses Energysquare’s Power by Contact to power the battery. The battery itself gets 15 hours on a charge, or 24 if just using the e-ink screen. I suspect charging it up using just the pad is a fairly time-consuming process.

Dell notably introduced its own take on the category back at CES 2017. The technology, of course, hasn’t gained much traction in the intervening years.

ThinkBook Plus Gen 2 i arrives this quarter, starting at $1,549. No word on the pricing for the mat accessory.

News: Grafana Labs adds a free tier to its managed observability platform

• January 12, 2021
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Grafana Labs, the company behind the increasingly popular open-source monitoring and observability platform, today announced both an updated version of its cloud service and the launch of a free tier for it. The free plan for Grafana Cloud has some limitations, but it includes access to virtually all of Grafana Labs’ tools for monitoring modern

Grafana Labs, the company behind the increasingly popular open-source monitoring and observability platform, today announced both an updated version of its cloud service and the launch of a free tier for it.

The free plan for Grafana Cloud has some limitations, but it includes access to virtually all of Grafana Labs’ tools for monitoring modern applications. In addition, Grafana’s paid Pro plan for its hosted service is also getting an update and will now include access to five times more metrics per month.

With the free plan, users get a 14-day retention period for metrics and logs, access for up to three team members, 50 GB of log storage and up to 10,000 series for Prometheus and Graphite metrics. For Pro plans, those numbers increase to 15,000 series, 13 months of retention for metrics (up from 3,000 previously) and 100 GB of logs with a one-month retention period.

Image Credits: Grafana

Offering a hosted service is par for the course for open-source companies. For most of them, after all, this is the most obvious way to monetize their tools.

“The origin story of Grafana Cloud is one of open source,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Just like the development of our features, Grafana Cloud was first born from the pains and needs of our open source community. We were looking to give users a quick way to get Grafana up and running. It was a product created out of necessity, and it made sense at the time because it’s what our customers wanted back then.”

Given its open-source origins, the team decided that it made sense to also offer a free plan. In addition, though, adding a free plan will also make it easier for new users to get started  — and maybe become paying users over time.

Image Credits: Grafana

News: Slim.ai announces $6.6M seed to build container DevOps platform

• January 12, 2021
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We are more than seven years into the notion of modern containerization, and it still requires a complex set of tools and a high level of knowledge on how containers work. The DockerSlim open source project developed several years ago from a desire to remove some of that complexity for developers. Slim.ai, a new startup

We are more than seven years into the notion of modern containerization, and it still requires a complex set of tools and a high level of knowledge on how containers work. The DockerSlim open source project developed several years ago from a desire to remove some of that complexity for developers.

Slim.ai, a new startup that wants to build a commercial product on top of the open source project, announced a $6.6 million seed round today from Boldstart Ventures, Decibel Partners, FXP Ventures and TechAviv Founder Partners.

Company co-founder and CEO John Amaral says he and fellow co-founder and CTO Kyle Quest have worked together for years, but it was Quest who started and nurtured DockerSlim. “We started coming together around a project that Kyle built called DockerSlim. He’s the primary author, inventor and up until we started doing this company, the sole proprietor of that of that community,” Amaral explained.

At the time Quest built DockerSlim in 2015, he was working with Docker containers and he wanted a way to automate some of the lower level tasks involved in dealing with them. “I wanted to solve my own pain points and problems that I had to deal with, and my team had to deal with dealing with containers. Containers were an exciting new technology, but there was a lot of domain knowledge you needed to build production-grade applications and not everybody had that kind of domain expertise on the team, which is pretty common in almost every team,” he said.

He originally built the tool to optimize container images, but he began looking at other aspects of the DevOps lifecycle including the author, build, deploy and run phases. He found as he looked at that, he saw the possibility of building a commercial company on top of the open source project.

Quinn says that while the open source project is a starting point, he and Amaral see a lot of areas to expand. “You need to integrate it into your developer workflow and then you have different systems you deal with, different container registries, different cloud environments and all of that. […] You need a solution that can address those needs and doing that through an open source tool is challenging, and that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity to provide premium value and have a commercial product offering,” Quinn explained.

Ed Sim, founder and general partner at Boldstart Ventures, one of the seed investors sees a company bringing innovation to an area of technology where it has been lacking, while putting some more control in the hands of developers. “Slim can shift that all left and give developers the power through the Slim tools to answer all those questions, and then, boom, they can develop containers, push them into production and then DevOps can do their thing,” he said.

They are just 15 people right now including the founders, but Amaral says building a diverse and inclusive company is important to him, and that’s why one of his early hires was head of culture. “One of the first two or three people we brought into the company was our head of culture. We actually have that role in our company now, and she is a rock star and a highly competent and focused person on building a great culture. Culture and diversity to me are two sides of the same coin,” he said.

The company is still in the very early stages of developing that product. In the meantime, they continue to nurture the open source project and to build a community around that. They hope to use that as a springboard to build interest in the commercial product, which should be available some time later this year.

News: Study finds around one-third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook

• January 12, 2021
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Around a third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook, according to the latest study from Pew Research Center, whose surveys aim to better understand the current media landscape in the U.S. In the updated report, Pew Research found that around half of U.S. adults, or 53%, said they “often” or “sometimes” use social

Around a third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook, according to the latest study from Pew Research Center, whose surveys aim to better understand the current media landscape in the U.S. In the updated report, Pew Research found that around half of U.S. adults, or 53%, said they “often” or “sometimes” use social media to get their news. This is spread out across a number of sites, but Facebook is at the top of the list.

The study found that 36% of U.S. adults said they “regularly” access Facebook to get news. This is a significantly larger percentage than almost any other social media platform, with the exception of YouTube, which is used regularly for news by 23% of U.S. adults.

Beyond that, the percentages are much smaller. Even Trump’s preferred platform for communication (well, until recently), Twitter, is only used regularly for news by 15% of U.S. adults, Pew found.

Only around one-in-ten Americans or fewer said they regularly got their news from other social media platforms, including Instagram (11%), Reddit (6%), Snapchat (4%), LinkedIn (4%), TikTok (3%), WhatsApp (3%), Tumblr (1%) and Twitch (1%).

Pew notes that the lower percentages for using these sites as a source of news also has to do with the fact that fewer Americans report using these sites at all.

But even if their audiences are smaller, the site’s users may be heavily engaged with the news. Twitter, for instance, is used only by 25% of U.S. adults, but over half the users (59%) say they get news on the platform, compared with 54% of Facebook users. Meanwhile, 42% of Reddit users get news regularly on its site, even though it has a significantly smaller user base than Facebook.

In other words, the list of “top news platforms” looks a bit different when you count how many of a social media site’s own users gets the news regularly from the platform, instead of just how many U.S. adults altogether get their news from the site.

When measured this way, Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit lead, followed by YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, then Twitch.

Pew additionally examined the demographic makeup of those who use social media for news, and found that White adults make up the majority of the regular news users for sites like Facebook and Reddit. Both Black and Hispanic adults, meanwhile, made up around a quarter of Instagram’s regular users (22% and 27%, respectively.) Facebook was found to also skew towards women (63% vs 35%) when it came to regularly using it getting the news, while Reddit skews towards men (67% vs. 29%).

What’s also interesting about the report’s findings is that, despite Americans’ widespread usage of social media for getting the news, a majority (59%) said they believed it to be “largely inaccurate.” This figure has stayed fairly consistent over the past couple of years, as well. It’s up from 57% in 2018 and the same as on 2019.

Nearly half of social media users also said reading the news on social media has not made much of a difference in helping them to understand current events.

This finding seems to contradict reports and studies that say social media sites — and their algorithms that personalize news to the interests and beliefs of their users — have helped radicalize people online. Last week, the results of that was on full display as a mob of people who have consumed misinformation and conspiracy theories, often for years, stormed the U.S. Capitol in a failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

However, keep in mind that Pew’s study is based on self-reported data. So while respondents may have claimed social media posts didn’t really help them “understand” the news, they may be underestimating those posts’ power and influence over time.

The Pew Research Center regularly runs studies like this. For example, last year it reported how social media news consumers tend to be less engaged and less knowledgeable about the facts on key news topics, like the U.S. election or COVID-19. The same study also found that the social media news consumers were more frequently exposed to fringe conspiracies.

The platforms themselves have done little to help prevent the spread of misinformation, beyond adding basic fact-checks. Facebook waited years to ban QAnon groups, but many still remained after the sweep, as did “Stop the Steal” conspiracy groups, after a similar crackdown on the hashtags and other incitements of violence.

The latest report is here.

News: The Cadillac personal drone is the cadillac of personal drones

• January 12, 2021
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GM revealed Tuesday a Cadillac -branded electric vertical takeoff and landing drone concept that is designed — if it’s ever built — to let owners cruise the skies in isolated luxury. The single seat eVTOL, which was showcased alongside an autonomous vehicle during GM’s keynote presentation at the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show, is

GM revealed Tuesday a Cadillac -branded electric vertical takeoff and landing drone concept that is designed — if it’s ever built — to let owners cruise the skies in isolated luxury.

The single seat eVTOL, which was showcased alongside an autonomous vehicle during GM’s keynote presentation at the virtual 2021 CES tech trade show, is the automaker’s first foray into aerial mobility. This is a mere concept, which means it’s unlikely to become a real product. However, these concepts can signal where a company is headed on the design or product front. And when it comes to electric and autonomous vehicles, GM has proven its willingness to invest in the technologies.

“We are preparing for a world where advances in electric and autonomous technology make personal air travel possible,” Michael Simcoe, GM’s global design chief, said during the presentation. “It is a concept designed for the moment when time is of essence and convenience is everything.”

Image Credits: GM

The eVTOL concept is equipped with 90-kilowatt hour electric motor to power four rotors that can whisk the passenger off of a rooftop to their destination. It also comes with air-to-air and air-to-ground communications capabilities.

Simcoe said the company has more concepts planned, including a “luxurious two-seater designed for you and someone very special to decompress, relax and enjoy a multi sensory experience choreographed for more intimate journeys.”

The entire exercise, as Simcoe explained, is to show the world what autonomy and Cadillac luxury might look like in the “not too distant future.” 

Of course, these concepts are also designed to convey just how serious GM is about the future of transportation, which in its view centers around electrification, automated vehicle technology and connected car services.

News: Rollables are the new foldables

• January 12, 2021
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Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries. Samsung is the only

Smartphone sales are bad — and have been for a couple of years now. Certainly this ongoing pandemic hasn’t helped. All the talk about how 5G and new form factors were going to cause a kind of bounce-back all fell by the wayside, as people put a pause on unnecessary luxuries.

Samsung is the only company that’s seen some success with the foldable form factor, and that whole thing got off to a…rough start. There were plenty of technical issues at first, leading to a less than auspicious first impression. These days, price continues to be a major hurdle — especially during a time when paying $1,000 and up on a phone is a major red flag for many.

In the world of phone form factors, two is, at the very least, the start of a trend. And on day one of CES both LG and TCL have offered their take on yet another form factor designed to offer more screen real estate in pocketable devices.

Image Credits: TCL

LG’s product is — for the moment — the more notable of the two, largely because the company plans to actually release the thing. In an interview published this morning, spokesperson Ken Hong told Nikkei, “As it is released at CES 2021, I can tell that it will be launched this year.”

And, indeed, LG’s a company not afraid to take chances with a wacky form factor. There are a number of examples of the phenomenon in recent years, most notably the swiveling screen on the LG Wing.

Still, the product didn’t amount to much more than a brief tease during a press conference (an excuse to transition between scenes, really), so you’d be forgiven for assuming that the tech still has a long way to go.

TCL, meanwhile, noted up front that the product is still firmly in the concept phase, but managed to give us a better look. I suppose it’s easier to parade concept than an unfinished real-world product. Details are still slim, but the company says the device is capable of expanding from 6.7 to 7.8 inches.

One imagines — or, at least, hopes — that the industry has learned from the issues stemming from the first batch of foldables. Sometimes the race to bring technology to market results in delivering something half-baked, an issue that came back to bite companies like Samsung and Motorola. Lab testing is one thing — the real world is a different thing entirely.

News: Facebook revamps ‘Access Your Information’ tool to better break down, explain data usage

• January 12, 2021
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Facebook today is rolling out an update to its Access Your Information tool with the goal of making the tool easier to both use and navigate, as well as better explain how and why that data is used. The new version of the tool has been visually redesigned, and now further breaks down the viewable

Facebook today is rolling out an update to its Access Your Information tool with the goal of making the tool easier to both use and navigate, as well as better explain how and why that data is used. The new version of the tool has been visually redesigned, and now further breaks down the viewable information across eight different categories instead of just two.

The tool had first launched in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users had been hijacked. Following that event, Facebook made a number of changes to how its platform apps worked and rolled out new features to make it easier for users to find and utilize Facebook’s privacy settings.

One of the new additions was this Access Your Information tool, which offers users a secure way to manage their Facebook posts, reactions, comments and other things they’ve searched for. The idea is that you could use the tool to pull up your information, then “delete anything from your timeline or profile that you no longer want on Facebook.”

Before, this tool offered just two broad categories of data: Your Information and Information About You. The updated version, on the other hand, has broken this out to eight categories:

• Your Activity Across Facebook
• Friends and Followers
• Preferences
• Personal Information
• Logged Information
• Ads Information
• Apps and Websites Off Of Facebook
• Security and Login Information

Within each of these eight categories, the information is then further broken down into subcategories. This makes it easier to more narrowly drill down to just the sort of data you want to view and, possibly, remove.

Image Credits: Facebook

In addition, the tool is introducing Search functionality with the update. You can find data categories by searching them — like by typing in “location” to pull up information about your location history.

The tool will also now better explain how this data Facebook has can be used to personalize your experience on its platform. For example, you might see your primary location is one of the signals that was used to target you with an ad for a food delivery app. (Facebook already explains this in its Why Am I Seeing This tool for ads, but now it’s in this tool, too.)

Facebook says the changes were developed based on how people had been using the tool — especially in terms of what categories of data they were clicking on.

That said, the timing of the tool’s revamp is notable. There’s a large effort at Apple underway to better highlight to App Store users which apps collect personal data which is then used to track them. Apple is now requiring apps to add App Store privacy labels and will soon require apps to get user consent on tracking.

Facebook, in response to this push, launched a website and ran full-page ads in newspapers to gain support for its personalized advertising business, noting the harms it says will come to small businesses as a result of Apple’s changes.

This revamped tool will help make Facebook’s case to users, as well, by explaining the why the data and the ads could be useful. (After all, isn’t it better to see a food delivery ad for a company that actually serves your local area?, Facebook would want you to think.)

Then there is the not-so-small-matter of people who may be trying to rapidly delete their incriminating Facebook history — like photos and videos of themselves inside the Capitol during last week’s riot, perhaps. Now that the FBI is filing federal charges and dozens more are being charged in Superior Court, people may be rethinking their decision to share their participation in the event so publicly. The tool could help there, too.

Facebook, when asked, said the enhancements are just a usability update, however.