Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: Apple’s new iMac finally gets an actually good webcam

• April 20, 2021
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Apple introduced new iMacs at its event on Tuesday, outfitted with its M1 processor and redesigned inside and out from the ground up. The hardware is impressive, but one of the biggest improvements for everyone’s Zoom-heavy life might be the webcam. Apple said it’s the “best camera ever in a Mac,” which honestly wouldn’t take

Apple introduced new iMacs at its event on Tuesday, outfitted with its M1 processor and redesigned inside and out from the ground up. The hardware is impressive, but one of the biggest improvements for everyone’s Zoom-heavy life might be the webcam. Apple said it’s the “best camera ever in a Mac,” which honestly wouldn’t take much, but its specs suggest it actually is a big upgrade.

The camera finally achieves 1080p video capabilities, and Apple has also equipped it with a larger sensor that should provide greatly-improved low light performance. The M1 chip has better image signal processing capabilities, and uses computational video powers to correct and improve the image on the fly, which has brought benefits to the image quality even on existing MacBook Air and MacBook Pro hardware with the same old, bad webcam equipment.

That should mean this iMac actually has really good image quality — or at least not image quality you need to be embarrassed about. The on-board machine learning processor in the M1, which Apple calls the Neural Engine, will be working in real-time to optimize lighting and do noise reduction, too.

On top of the camera, Apple touts new beam forming mics in a three-mic array that will optimize audio, focusing on your voice and eliminating background noise. All told, this should finally be a Mac that provides a videoconferencing experience that doesn’t feel like it’s stuck in the early 2000s.

News: Deep Science: Introspective, detail-oriented and disaster-chasing AIs

• April 20, 2021
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Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That’s especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects practically every industry and company.

Research papers come out far too frequently for anyone to read them all. That’s especially true in the field of machine learning, which now affects (and produces papers in) practically every industry and company. This column aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers — particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence — and explain why they matter.

It takes an emotionally mature AI to admit its own mistakes, and that’s exactly what this project from the Technical University of Munich aims to create. Maybe not the emotion, exactly, but recognizing and learning from mistakes, specifically in self-driving cars. The researchers propose a system in which the car would look at all the times in the past when it has had to relinquish control to a human driver and thereby learn its own limitations — what they call “introspective failure prediction.”

For instance, if there are a lot of cars ahead, the autonomous vehicle’s brain could use its sensors and logic to make a decision de novo about whether an approach would work or whether none will. But the TUM team says that by simply comparing new situations to old ones, it can reach a decision much faster on whether it will need to disengage. Saving six or seven seconds here could make all the difference for a safe handover.

It’s important for robots and autonomous vehicles of all types to be able to make decisions without phoning home, especially in combat, where decisive and concise movements are necessary. The Army Research Lab is looking into ways in which ground and air vehicles can interact autonomously, allowing, for instance, a mobile landing pad that drones can land on without needing to coordinate, ask permission or rely on precise GPS signals.

Their solution, at least for the purposes of testing, is actually rather low tech. The ground vehicle has a landing area on top painted with an enormous QR code, which the drone can see from a fairly long way off. The drone can track the exact location of the pad totally independently. In the future, the QR code could be done away with and the drone could identify the shape of the vehicle instead, presumably using some best-guess logic to determine whether it’s the one it wants.

Image Credits: Nagoya City University

In the medical world, AI is being put to work not on tasks that are not much difficult but are rather tedious for people to do. A good example of this is tracking the activity of individual cells in microscopy images. It’s not a superhuman task to look at a few hundred frames spanning several depths of a petri dish and track the movements of cells, but that doesn’t mean grad students like doing it.

This software from researchers at Nagoya City University in Japan does it automatically using image analysis and the capability (much improved in recent years) of understanding objects over a period of time rather than just in individual frames. Read the paper here, and check out the extremely cute illustration showing off the tech at right … more research organizations should hire professional artists.

This process is similar to that of tracking moles and other skin features on people at risk for melanoma. While they might see a dermatologist every year or so to find out whether a given spot seems sketchy, the rest of the time they must track their own moles and freckles in other ways. That’s hard when they’re in places like one’s back.

News: Apple announces Apple Card Family for spouses to build credit together, and over-13s to use it too

• April 20, 2021
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Apple has been slowly building a position for itself as a financial services giant, banked around its digital wallet for storing a user’s payment cards and the launch of its own Apple Card in 2019. Today during Apple’s spring event, the company announced the newest chapter in that functionality: the launch of Apple Card Family,

Apple has been slowly building a position for itself as a financial services giant, banked around its digital wallet for storing a user’s payment cards and the launch of its own Apple Card in 2019. Today during Apple’s spring event, the company announced the newest chapter in that functionality: the launch of Apple Card Family, which will let partners/spouses build joint credit, and give family members aged over 13 access to using Apple Card, too.

Apple Card Family will launch first in the US in May after users update to the latest version of iOS.

“One of the things that became apparent to us in the beginning [of launching Apple Card] was a lack of fairness in the way the industry calculated credit scores when there were two holders of a credit card,” said CEO Tim Cook today. “One of you got the benefit of building a good credit history, and the other did not. We want to reinvent the way this works.”

Some of this is not coming as a surprise: developer previews of iOS 14.5 revealed that Apple was building in multi-user support for Apple Cards, laying the groundwork for joint accounts for adults and wider family usage.

As Cook described it, spouses and partners will be allowed to share and merge their credit lines have equal rights on their account, in order to “build credit equally.”

“This solution helps deliver financial equity, and it’s a game changer,” he said. Indeed, in cases where either one partner has outstanding debts, or has defaulted on some of that debt, or doesn’t have the same earning power, this move is way to confer the stronger spending power of one partner on another, in cases where partners are actually combining their finances anyway. It makes sense and frankly is long overdue.

The ability to give Apple Card access to over-13s will come with spending limits if you want to put them in, along with other controls in terms of how it can be used.

This is also smart, an extension of how Apple has built a role for itself as the “responsible” technology company with privacy controls for all users, and parental controls for devices, and now it’s adding on a new angle to this provide, becoming an educative tool. Many parents are turning to technology and apps to build more financial nous among their children, and so it makes sense for Apple to position itself as a partner in this effort.

While letting families run their finances in a more equitable way, there is of course another, more business-minded strategy here: it’s clearly giving Apple a much, much bigger pool of potential consumers using its Apple Card, using services like Daily Cash (which gives up to 3 percent of every purchase as cash on users’ Apple Cash card each day) and access to using the secure titanium Apple Card that comes without a visible card number, CVV security code, expiration date, or signature.

On that subject, we don’t quite know how many people are using that Apple Card today. Cook simply called Apple Card, which was estimated to be used by over 3.1 million people as of March 2020, “the most successful credit card launch ever.”

News: Apple introduces a colorful new iMac

• April 20, 2021
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After years of waiting, Apple has finally given the world a dramatic new iMac redesign, aimed at the company’s long-standing goal of “making the computer disappear.” That, of course, only applies to the the thin new design, because these things are eye-popping. Naturally, the latest version of the 24-inch all-in-one desktop is built around the

After years of waiting, Apple has finally given the world a dramatic new iMac redesign, aimed at the company’s long-standing goal of “making the computer disappear.” That, of course, only applies to the the thin new design, because these things are eye-popping. Naturally, the latest version of the 24-inch all-in-one desktop is built around the company’s new proprietary M1 chips.

The screen sports a 4.5K Retina Display, coupled with a 1080p camera — a first for the Mac line, and a sign the company is taking both audio and video more seriously as these products are serving as a kind of life line for the work from home crowd. True Tone is, naturally, on board for better color balance, and sound have been improved with six-speaker setup.

The new devices are significantly thinner — with overall volume reduced by half, according to the company. The rear is also flat, instead of curved. In addition to allowing for a much thinner design, the new chip allows for far faster performance than previous models — a huge performance bump we’ve seen in our own testing of the most recent generation of Macs. All told, the company says it’s up to 85% faster than the last model, coupled with a GPU that’s up to twice as fast and 3x the machine learning.

Around back are two Thunderbolt ports and a new magnetic power adapter that also delivers Ethernet.

The system comes in seven colors. It starts at $1,299 (with four colors — you unlock all seven at $1,499). It goes up for pre-order April 30 and starts shipping in the second half of May.

Developing…

News: Tom Brady and Salesforce Ventures pour millions into Class, a Zoom-friendly edtech startup

• April 20, 2021
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Class, an edtech startup that integrates exclusively with Zoom to make remote teaching more elegant, has raised $12.25 million in new financing. The round brings Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures and Super Bowl champion Tom Brady onto its capital table. CEO and founder Michael Chasen said that Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, approached the company

Class, an edtech startup that integrates exclusively with Zoom to make remote teaching more elegant, has raised $12.25 million in new financing. The round brings Salesforce Ventures, Sound Ventures and Super Bowl champion Tom Brady onto its capital table.

CEO and founder Michael Chasen said that Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, approached the company about investing in Class. Salesforce Ventures launched a $100 million Impact Fund in October 2020, a month after Class launched, to back edtech companies and cloud enterprises businesses with an impact lens.

As for Tom Brady entering the edtech world, Chasen said that the famous football player has made tech investments in the past and, “as the father of three is passionate about helping people through education.”

“Tom Brady and I are both fathers to three kids and like all parents, we get the need to add teaching and learning tools to Zoom,” Chasen added.

Class has now raised $58 million in less than a year, with a $30 million Series A in February 2021 and a $16 million seed round in September 2020. Today’s raise is less than its Series A round, which signals it was likely more done strategically to bring on investors than out of necessity.

The money will be used to help roll out Class to K-12 and higher-ed institutions across the world. The startup’s software publicly launched on the Mac a few months ago, and will exit beta for Windows, iPhone, Android and Chromebook in the next few weeks, Chasen said. The larger public launch will help scale the some 7,500 schools that have shown interest in adopting Class.

The big hurdle for Class, and any startup selling e-learning solutions to institutions, is post-pandemic utility. While institutions have traditionally been slow to adopt software due to red tape, Chasen says that both of Class’ customers, higher ed and K-12, are actively allocating budget for these tools. The price for Class ranges between $10,000 to $65,000 annually, depending on the number of students in the classes.

“We have not run into a budgeting problem in a single school,” Chasen said in February. “Higher ed has already been taking this step towards online learning, and they’re now taking the next step, whereas K-12, this is the first step they’re taking.” So far, Class has more than 125 paying clients with even-split between K-12 and higher ed, and 10% of customers using it for corporate teams.

It’s not the only startup that is trying to reinvent Zoom University. A number of companies are trying to serve the same market of students and teachers who are fatigued by current video conferencing solutions which — at best — often look like a gallery view with a chat bar. Three companies that are gaining traction include Engageli, Top Hat and InSpace.

While each startup has its own unique strategy and product, the founders behind them all need to answer the same question: Can they make digital learning a preferred mode of pedagogy and comprehension — and not merely a backup — after the pandemic is over?

As that question continues to get explored, today’s news shows that Class isn’t having any trouble recruiting people to believe the answer is yes. In just nine months, the company has gone from two to more than 150 employees and contractors.

News: Apple adds a new purple color option to its iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 mini lineup

• April 20, 2021
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Apple has added a new color option to the iPhone 12 lineup — a rare mid-cycle facelift for the company’s flagship product. The new color is purple, and looks like a lavender-ish pastel hue, which is in keeping with the tones on the rest of the color options on the 12 lineup, which include a

Apple has added a new color option to the iPhone 12 lineup — a rare mid-cycle facelift for the company’s flagship product. The new color is purple, and looks like a lavender-ish pastel hue, which is in keeping with the tones on the rest of the color options on the 12 lineup, which include a mint green and a red that leans towards the pink end of the spectrum.

The purple iPhone 12 is going on sale starting this Friday, April 23, and will begin shipping out to customers on April 30. It’s available for iPhone 12 and 12 mini, but the iPhone 12 Pro isn’t getting any new color options to match.

It’s a small thing, but not a bad way for Apple to jazz up their hardware mid-cycle in a bid to excite general consumers. Also, it suggests Apple is leaning in even more to a multicolor aesthetic for its hardware, which is a refreshing change after a mostly monochrome approach in recent years.

Image Credits: Apple

News: Announcing our TC Sessions: SaaS virtual event happening October 27

• April 20, 2021
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Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the default business model for most B2B and B2C software startups. And while it’s been around for a while now, its momentum keeps accelerating and the ecosystem continues to expand as technologists and marketers are getting more sophisticated about how to build and sell SaaS products. For all of them, we’re

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is now the default business model for most B2B and B2C software startups. And while it’s been around for a while now, its momentum keeps accelerating and the ecosystem continues to expand as technologists and marketers are getting more sophisticated about how to build and sell SaaS products. For all of them, we’re pleased to announced TechCrunch Sessions: SaaS 2021, a one-day virtual event that will examine the state of SaaS to help startup founders, developers and investors understand the state of play and what’s next.

The single-day event will take place 100% virtually on October 27 and will feature actionable advice, Q&A with some of SaaS’s biggest names, and plenty of networking opportunities. $75 Early Bird Passes are now on sale. Book your passes today to save $100 before prices go up.

We’re not quite ready to disclose our agenda yet, but you can expect a mix of superstars from across the industry, ranging from some of the largest tech companies to up-and-coming startups that are pushing the limits of SaaS.

The plan is to look at a broad spectrum of what’s happening in with B2B startups and give you actionable insights into how to build and/or improve your own product. If you’re just getting started, we want you to come away with new ideas for how to start your company and if you’re already on your way, then our sessions on scaling both your technology and marketing organization will help you to get to that $100 million annual run rate faster.

In addition to other founders, you’ll also hear from enterprise leaders who decide what to buy — and the mistakes they see startups make when they try to sell to them.

But SaaS isn’t only about managing growth — though ideally, that’s a problem founders will face sooner or later. Some of the other specific topics we will look at are how to keep your services safe in an ever-growing threat environment, how to use open source to your advantage and how to smartly raise funding for your company.

We will also highlight how B2B and B2C companies can handle the glut of data they now produce and use it to build machine learning models in the process. We’ll talk about how SaaS startups can both do so themselves and help others in the process. There’s nary a startup that doesn’t want to use some form of AI these days, after all.

And because this is 2021, chances are we’ll also talk about building remote companies and the lessons SaaS startups can learn from the last year of working through the pandemic.

Don’t miss out. Book your $75 Early Bird pass today and save $100.

News: Catch&Release raises $14M to help marketers find and license content from across the web

• April 20, 2021
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Catch&Release founder and CEO Analisa Goodin told me that she wants to help brands break free from the limitations of stock photography — and that her startup has raised $14 million in Series A funding to achieve that goal. Goodin explained that the company started out as an image research firm before becoming a product-focused,

Catch&Release founder and CEO Analisa Goodin told me that she wants to help brands break free from the limitations of stock photography — and that her startup has raised $14 million in Series A funding to achieve that goal.

Goodin explained that the company started out as an image research firm before becoming a product-focused, venture-backed startup in 2015. The Series A was led by Accel (with participation from Cervin Ventures and other existing investors), and it brings Catch&Release’s total funding to $26 million.

Stock media and video services are moving in this direction themselves, for example by introducing their own libraries of user-generated content. Goodin applauded this, and she said Catch&Release isn’t opposed to the use of stock photos — it integrates with these stock marketplaces. At the same time, she suggested that she has a much bigger vision.

“This isn’t just about UGC, this is about tapping into the creative potential of the internet,” she said.

After all, you can now find pretty much any kind of content you can imagine somewhere online, but “a lot of advertising agencies and brands have been trained that if a piece of content comes form internet, avoid it,” because it’s just “too hard” to figure out how to license it.

Image Credits: Catch&Release

Catch&Release aims to make that process as simple as possible, first with a browser extension that allows marketers to save any media that they find on the web, anytime they think they might want to use in their own campaigns (this is the “catch” part of the process). It even presents a “licensability score,” which is a rating based on factors like the person who posted the content, the description and the comments, indicating how likely it is that a marketer will actually be able to license this content.

Then, when someone from a brand or advertising agency decides that they want to use a piece of content, they can send a licensing request with a push of a button (this is the “release”). Catch&Releases also analyzes the content for anything else that needs to be cleared or obscured, such as a company logo.

While we’ve written about other tools for licensing online content, Goodwin emphasized that Catch&Release isn’t just about finding photos for a social media campaign. Part of the goal, she said, is to erase the “stigma” around UGC, which now “represents the entire spectrum of culturally relevant content.”

For example, she showed me a Red Lobster commercial that looks like a normal TV ad, but was in fact assembled entirely from footage found online — something that’s been even more useful in the past year, with pandemic-related safety concerns around large shoots. (Catch&Release has also been used to license content for ads promoting TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon.)

Goodwin added that the new funding will allow Catch&Release to continue investing in product, engineering and marketing.

“No one has defined the commercial licensing layer for the web,” she said. “What’s got me really excited to build this product is being that layer for the internet, not just for photos and videos, but for writing, art, graphics, and building the commercial licensing engine of the web.”

News: IBM breaks latest revenue losing streak as cloud revenue shows modest growth

• April 20, 2021
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For IBM, much of the last 8 years simply posting positive revenue growth was a challenge. In fact, the company had a period between 2013 and 2018 when it experienced an astonishing 22 straight quarters of negative revenue growth. So when Big Blue reported yesterday that revenue was up slightly, I’m sure the company took

For IBM, much of the last 8 years simply posting positive revenue growth was a challenge. In fact, the company had a period between 2013 and 2018 when it experienced an astonishing 22 straight quarters of negative revenue growth. So when Big Blue reported yesterday that revenue was up slightly, I’m sure the company took that as a win. Investors appear to be happy with the results with the stock up 4.73% this morning as of publication.

Consider that over the last 8 quarters encompassing FY2019 and FY2020, the company had only one positive revenue quarter when it was up 0.1% in Q42019. It had had five losing quarters prior to that one. When you look at yesterday’s report in that light, and combine it with growth in the Cloud and Cognitive Services group, it adds up to a decent quarter for IBM, one it badly needed after another negative report in the prior quarter.

Looking back at the January report, the company reported Cloud and Cognitive Services revenues down 4.5% at $6.8 billion, which was a big blow considering the company has been betting much of its future on those very areas, fueled in large part by the $34 billion Red Hat acquisition in 2018.

Its most recent quarterly report proved much better with the company reporting Cloud and Cognitive Services revenues of $5.4 billion, up 3.8% YoY. Interestingly quarter-on-quarter revenue for the segment was down, but rose on a year-over-year basis. Perhaps a year-end enterprise revenue push could account for the difference between Q4 2020 and Q1 2021.

At any rate, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna saw today’s report as a positive sign that his attempts to push the company toward a future focused on hybrid computing and AI were starting to take root. He also saw enough in the report to predict some growth this year.

“In our last call, we shared our financial expectations for the year, revenue growth and $11 billion to $12 billion of adjusted free cash flow. While it’s still early in the year and a lot remains to be done, we are confident enough to say that we are on track,” Krishna said in the earnings call with analysts yesterday.

The company has made a number of smaller acquisitions over the last year including a couple of consulting companies, which should help as they try to work with customers around the transition to hybrid computing and artificial intelligence, both of which tend to require a lot of hand-holding to get done.

At the same time of course, the company is continuing apace with its spin out of the legacy infrastructure services division, which it announced last year. The plan at this point is to rename the company Kyndryl (an unfortunate choice) and complete the spin out by year’s end.

CFO Jim Kavanaugh also sees the modestly positive quarter as something the company can build on. “…in fact we are even more confident in the position we put in place with regards to our two most important measures, one, revenue growth, and second, adjusted free cash flow, which is going to provide the fuel for the investments needed for us to capture that hybrid cloud $1 trillion TAM,” Kavanaugh said in the earnings call with analysts.

All of this is being pushed by Red Hat, which grew revenue 15% in the most recent quarter, something the company is banking will continue to advance it deeper into positive territory throughout the rest of 2021.

Krishna is not looking for booming growth by any means. He just wants growth, and even sustained single digit top line expansion will make him happy. “Our systems if I take a two-year to three-year view kind of flattish, but in any given year it might increase or decrease but not by a whole lot. It doesn’t impact the topline a lot and that’s how sort of we get to the mid-single-digit sustainably,” Krishna said in the call.

The CEO simply wants to bring some long-term stability back to the company it has been sadly lacking in recent years. Of course, it’s hard to know if this quarter was a temporary upward blip on IBM’s earnings chart, one of those fluctuations up or down he spoke of, or if it is the corner the company has been looking to turn for years. Only time will tell whether IBM can sustain the modest revenue goals Krishna has set for the organization, or if it will fall back into the revenue doldrums that have plagued the company for the last eight years.

News: Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money

• April 20, 2021
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The investment landscape for insurtech startups is off to a hot start in Q2 2021.

The investment landscape for insurtech startups is off to a hot start in Q2 2021. Since the end of the first quarter, we’ve seen several players in the broad startup category announce new capital, including Clearcover, Alan, Next Insurance and The Zebra.

But, as anyone who’s familiar with startups that offer insurance-related products and services knows, the sector is enough of a mixed bag that one needs to segment down to get clarity on how constituent companies are performing. So while Clearcover’s $200 million round from last week, Next Insurance’s $250 million round from the first of the month and Alan’s $220 million round from yesterday are interesting, this morning we’re going to focus a bit more on The Zebra’s side of the insurtech house. 

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The Exchange divides insurtech startups into three categories: neo-insurance providers, insurtech marketplaces and insurtech enablers. (You can see why we need to segment the insurtech genre!)

Briefly, neo-insurance providers are companies like Root, Metromile and Next Insurance, which use technology to underwrite and sell insurance in an updated manner; these companies also often have optimized mobile experiences.

Marketplaces like The Zebra, Gabi, Insurify and others provide a way for consumers to better identify their insurance options. And, finally, there are companies like AgentSync, which fit neatly into our third category of firms that help other companies in the insurance business digitize their operations or otherwise modernize. 

Insurtech marketplaces came back into our view when The Zebra put together a $150 million Series D earlier this month and released a host of metrics regarding its growth, and Insurify dropped the news that it is partnering with Toyota.

This morning, let’s discuss insurtech’s 2020 as a whole, peek at some preliminary 2021 venture data and then dive deep into what we’ve collected regarding growth among insurtech marketplace players. The Exchange has data and other details from The Zebra, Insurify, Wefox and more. 

Covering longitudinal progress of specific startup categories is one of our favorite things to do. So, please, walk with us!

2020 to today

PitchBook data regarding the insurtech category in 2020 underscores how large the startup niche has grown. Per the data company, $18.3 billion was spent last year on insurtech startups across venture capital, private equity and M&A activity. That was a billion dollars under its 2019 result, but given the pandemic’s onset, 2020’s final result is somewhat impressive — who expected insurance investing to hold up during an unprecedented global catastrophe?

This year is proving lucrative for the insurtech market, at least from a venture capital perspective. Normally I’d make a joke about how unprofitable some neo-insurance providers are at this juncture, but because our focus is elsewhere, bringing up the fact that, say, Lemonade’s adjusted losses in the final quarter of 2020 were around 150% of its revenue is kind of irrelevant. So we won’t!