Tag Archives: Blog

News: Pokémon Unite is coming to iOS and Android on September 22

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

During today’s Pokémon Presents livestream, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Unite will become available for iOS and Android on September 22. The strategic battle game came out for Nintendo Switch in late July, but its arrival on mobile devices will expand the game’s potential user base. For users already playing on Nintendo Switch, fear

During today’s Pokémon Presents livestream, The Pokémon Company announced that Pokémon Unite will become available for iOS and Android on September 22. The strategic battle game came out for Nintendo Switch in late July, but its arrival on mobile devices will expand the game’s potential user base.

For users already playing on Nintendo Switch, fear not — the game allows cross-platform play, which means you can play on your Switch, then pick up where you left off on mobile. All users can play together regardless of what device they’re using, and it’s not necessary to have a Switch to get the mobile game. Pokémon Unite is free-to-start with microtransactions — you can purchase in-game currency to get certain items or Pokémon.

The presentation also unveiled new gameplay footage and feature news for upcoming Nintendo Switch releases: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl (November 19, 2021), remakes of the Nintendo DS games from 2006, and Pokémon Legends: Arceus (January 28, 2022), the first open world RPG in the Pokémon universe.

Image Credits: Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl

Like previous main series game remakes, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will expand upon the original games’ foundation and introduce features that appeared in later games, like Following Pokémon, Secret Bases, and — very importantly — changing your trainer’s outfit. The game will also include re-designed features from its original release, like designing Poké Ball capsules and competing in Pokémon Contests. But for the first time in a Pokémon Game, Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will introduce a new aspect of gameplay called the Sinnoh Underground. Players can collect statues of Pokémon for their Secret Base, and depending on what statues are on display, different Pokémon will appear in Pokémon Hideaways within the Sinnoh Underground. To commemorate the fifteen-year-old games’ remakes, on November 5, 2021, Nintendo will release a “Dialga and Palkia Edition” of the Nintendo Switch Lite, which features the legendary Pokémon in gold and silver on a grey console.

Then, the Pokémon Company shared more information about Pokémon Legends Arceus, a first-of-its-kind release for the iconic franchise. Fans have compared its open world design to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is the fourth best-selling Nintendo Switch game with 23.2 million copies sold, but others say it’s more similar to Monster Hunter. The new game introduces the Hisui Region (an ancient version of the Sinnoh Region), along with new Pokémon like a grandpa-esque Growlithe, and an evolution of Basculin called Basculegion, which can evolve when “possessed by the souls of other Basculin from their school that could not withstand the harsh journey upstream”… Yes, this is a children’s franchise.

Nightmare-inducing new Pokémon aside, the livestream revealed more information about how exactly this new type of Pokémon game will work.

Like standard Pokémon games, players will set out on a mission to complete a Pokédex, but rather than training to become “the best like no one ever was,” they will be part of an expedition team, conducting survey work to learn more about the nature of Pokémon and the secrets they hold. In between field assignments, players can heal their party, craft items, and buy supplies at outposts (ancient Pokémon Centers?). Pokémon Legends: Arceus will also introduce a new battle style — like Pokémon Unite, it won’t simply repurpose the turn-based gameplay we’ve been accustomed to since the first Pokémon games were released in 1998.

Anyway, these games seem promising, but just try your best not to think about Basculegion.

News: KaiPod Learning thinks ‘learning pods’ are here to stay

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Since launch, ‘learning pods’ have been controversial in the world of edtech. The term, somewhat synonymous with micro-schools, pandemic pods, and small-group learning, describes small clusters of children within the same age range who are paired with a private instructor with the goal of replacing, or supplementing, learning. The concept took off last year as

Since launch, ‘learning pods’ have been controversial in the world of edtech. The term, somewhat synonymous with micro-schools, pandemic pods, and small-group learning, describes small clusters of children within the same age range who are paired with a private instructor with the goal of replacing, or supplementing, learning.

The concept took off last year as working parents looked for a way to supplement their children’s video-based school days with more engaging, personalized material. Some edtech entrepreneurs predicted that the trend would usher in a new wave of homeschooled children, which would disproportionately favor affluent families that could afford pod-learning to begin with. Tyton Partners estimates that 7 million students were enrolled in supplemental learning pods last year, which drove $12 billion in new spend.

Now, nearly a year after the first pods popped up, one startup coming out of Y Combinator has a fresh take on the role that the emerging learning model plays in schooling. KaiPod Learning, founded by the former Chief Product Officer of Pearson Online Learning Amar Kumar, recently launched its learning pod service that aims to connect homeschooled children with in-person, supplemental learning pods.

The Boston-based startup wants to be the go-to platform for online learners and learning pod families to get in-person interactions into their curriculum. The startup is starting by targeting homeschooling families in need of a boost to refresh existing curriculums.

KaiPod begins by helping parents pick the best online school for their child, whether it’s through a virtual microschool like Sora Schools or a homeschooling program set up by locals. This process makes sure that students get access to a replacement from a traditional school that still meets core standards. Then, KaiPod tries to serve as a co-working space of sorts for any child that is going through the online school.

“We know we can’t do socialization as well in the cloud, we can’t do childcare as well in the cloud, and those are some of the things that parents look to schools for,” Kumar said. “And the fact that we got rid of them by moving everything online shows you that our priorities weren’t in the right place.”

Students are invited to come to a KaiPod center near them where they will interact with learning coaches, a role that Kumar defines as part-time teacher, part-tiime camp counselor.

The coaches are there to help through online coursework, while also leading enrichment activities meant to give the social edge back to the school day. Learning coaches are juggling a variety of curriculums within their centers, which could be a quality assurance challenge as KaiPod scales.

In the broadest sense, KaiPod is helping students in virtual school go to physical school, but this time with more flexibility and diversity when it comes to what the day looks like. For example, one kid may be following an entirely different curriculum than another; which means the physical space won’t be used for, say, a lecture, but may be used for a socratic-style seminar that motivates children to share their separate learnings.

A WeWork for education?

Kumar thinks it’s a more inclusive approach to pods because it takes care of child care along with education. The centers are open five days a week from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Kumar pointed to Kumon as an example of how out of school, supplemental models can lead to academic enrichment. Kumon began as one off centers, and eventually took over the franchisee model until it became one of the largest after school tutoring companies in the global market.

A non-insignificant part of KaiPod’s success depends on if homeschooling is here to stay, beyond the pandemic bump of interest. The National Center for Education Statistics shows that the percent of homeschool households in the United States tripled between 2020 to 2021, but the numbers don’t entirely reflect how the return to school will change those metrics.

In the meantime, KaiPod Learning ran an eight-student pilot program in Boston this year. Kumar said that one learning coach identified the early signs of a potential learning disability in a middle-schooler during a game, a sign he thinks illustrates how a small-group format helps instructors ‘engage with students in more ways than just didactic teaching.” KaiPod plans to open up 5 to 7 more centers in the next few months.

“As we generate more awareness, we think entrepreneurs in other states will want to open centers using our playbook (a la franchise model) and we can power them through our technology layer [which is] affectionately code named “KaiPod OS”” Kumar said. The locations of centers could show who KaiPod is selling to, as well as if families come from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“At this point I have no interest in becoming WeWork for education, or anything like that,” he said. “Think of the centers as convenient areas where families can drop off their kids, stop in and see how the pod is doing.”

News: Ransomware recovery can be costly, and not just because of the ransom

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Ransomware is rarely out of the headlines. Just last week, IT consulting giant Accenture was hit by the LockBit ransomware gang, days after Taiwan-based laptop maker Gigabyte also fell victim to an apparent ransomware attack, leading the hackers to leak gigabytes of confidential AMD and Intel data. Unsurprisingly, ransomware — which has rocketed in activity

Ransomware is rarely out of the headlines. Just last week, IT consulting giant Accenture was hit by the LockBit ransomware gang, days after Taiwan-based laptop maker Gigabyte also fell victim to an apparent ransomware attack, leading the hackers to leak gigabytes of confidential AMD and Intel data.

Unsurprisingly, ransomware — which has rocketed in activity during the pandemic — remains among the most costly to businesses, with large U.S companies losing an average of $5.66 million each year to ransomware. But new findings show that is not for the reason you might think.

While we often hear of multimillion-dollar ransom payments made by hackers, research from Proofpoint and the Ponemon Institute found that ransom payments typically account for less than 20% of the total cost of a ransomware attack. Of that $5.66 million figure each year, just $790,000 accounts for ransom payments. Rather, the research shows businesses suffer the majority of their losses through lost productivity and the time-consuming task of containing and cleaning up after a ransomware attack.

Proofpoint says that the remediation process for an average-sized organization takes on average 32,258 hours, which when multiplied by the average $63.50 IT hourly wage totals more than $2 million. Downtime and lost productivity is another costly consequence of ransomware attacks; the research shows that phishing attacks, for example, which were determined as the root cause of almost one-fifth of ransomware attacks last year, have led to employee productivity losses of $3.2 million in 2021, up from $1.8 million in 2015. 

“In the wake of a ransomware attack, communication and interaction between employees and any effected external parties must increase massively, causing many teams to have to drop all existing work as part of their ‘day job’ immediately and focus on this urgent matter, for potentially days, weeks or even months,” Proofpoint’s Andrew Rose told TechCrunch.

“They automatically face more scrutiny from customers, regulators and have to increase reliance on third parties. This may include a significant increase in external audits by customers and regulators, which again increases workload cost. There’s also the potential of regulatory fines, or class action lawsuits from customers,” said Rose.

This isn’t all businesses have to contend with from a financial point of view; organizations hit by ransomware are also likely to face an increase in cyber insurance costs, hefty IT expenditure and likely will have to cough up for PR teams, legal staff, customer services and external specialists. There’s also the brand and reputational fallout from such attacks: recent research from Cybereason shows that more than half of U.S. companies reported their brand was tarnished as a result of a ransomware attack. 

“For public organizations, there is also the potential for the share price to fall,” Rose adds. “Customers can also lose trust in a business once they know their data may have been at risk, which may in turn cause them to jump ship to a competitor, costing revenue.”

News: Webiny nabs $3.5M seed to build serverless development framework on top of serverless CMS

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Webiny, an early-stage startup that launched in 2019 with an open-source, serverless CMS, had also developed a framework to help build the CMS, and found that customers were also interested in that to help build their own serverless apps. Today, Webiny announced a $3.5 million seed round to continue developing both pieces. Microsoft’s venture fund

Webiny, an early-stage startup that launched in 2019 with an open-source, serverless CMS, had also developed a framework to help build the CMS, and found that customers were also interested in that to help build their own serverless apps. Today, Webiny announced a $3.5 million seed round to continue developing both pieces.

Microsoft’s venture fund M12 led the round, with participation from Samsung Next, Episode 1, Cota Capital and other unnamed investors. The company previously raised $348,000 in 2019.

Webiny founder Sven Al Hamad says that when the company launched, he had an inkling that serverless would be the future and started by building an open-source serverless CMS, but then something interesting happened.

“We spoke to more than 300 companies, who had actually approached us and they also believed that the future is going to be built on top of serverless infrastructure. While they were intrigued by the CMS we built, they were more intrigued in terms of how we built it because they had tried serverless and they had a poor experience,” Al Hamad explained.

It turned out that the Webiny team was spending the vast majority of its time building an underlying serverless framework in order to build the CMS on top of that, and he began to realize that maybe they should be marketing and selling both the framework and the CMS.

“There was still a lot of interest for the CMS, but a lot of companies wanted both, being able to use the CMS for some of the content platforms, but also being able to build custom APIs on top, custom business logic, all on top of serverless,” he said.

At that point, Al Hamad realized that his startup had two products and that’s where they stand today as they take on this new capital to help build out the company. While he is still working on building a community and reports that he hosts a Slack community with close to a 1,000 developers, the goal is to use this money to begin building commercial products on top of their open-source offerings.

That will involve some sort of enterprise offering with management features for complex environments, single sign-on, better security and so forth.

Serverless is a way of delivering infrastructure in an automated way, so that the developer can concentrate on building the application without worrying about delivering the correct amount of resources. But it requires a very specific way of programming that involves writing functions and triggers. Webiny’s serverless framework is designed to help developers build these specialized apps and the related bits to make it all work.

The company currently has nine employees, with plans to add about six more over the remainder of 2021. He says that diversity is top of mind, but there are challenges in a tight market for technical talent. “We are thinking openly about diversity, but the overall market in terms of the talent available is making it very hard for us to find that balance,” he said. He says that there needs to be an effort across the entire system to train more diverse talent in STEM roles, but he will continue to try look for a diverse staff in spite of the challenges.

He says that his employees are spread out, but when it’s possible to be back in the office, he intends to make offices available where there are pools of people, while giving them the flexibility to decide when and if to come in.

News: One banks $40M to offer ‘all-in-one’ financial services to the middle class

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding. Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm) led the round, which included participation from Obvious Ventures, Foundation Capital, Core Innovation Capital and others. The financing brings

One, a startup that aims to bring “all-in-one banking” to the middle class, announced today that it has raised $40 million in a Series B round of funding.

Progressive Investment Company (the insurance giant’s investment arm) led the round, which included participation from Obvious Ventures, Foundation Capital, Core Innovation Capital and others. The financing brings One’s total raised since its 2019 inception to $66 million.

Since making its product generally available in September of 2020, Northern California-based One has grown to have “hundreds of thousands” of customers, according to CEO and co-founder Brian Hamilton, who previously co-founded PushPoint (which was acquired by Capital One).

“Stretched middle-income households and working families deal with financial stress on a daily basis and are largely unsupported by current offerings,” Hamilton said. “This can be viewed as a kind of a noisy market, and so this funding has been a good validation of the vision and kind of the products, in that we have been able to stand out in that market.”

Over the past 11 months, the startup has worked to enhance its core product offering, launching overdraft protection, an auto-save feature that rewards automatic savings contributions at 3.00% APY, cash flow-based credit lines and a credit builder product to help its customers build financial health. One claims that it has helped its users automatically save over $2 million collectively since its launch, a number that grows daily, according to Hamilton.

The company is also trying to change up how people share financial goals and responsibilities with individually configurable “Pockets” that it says can be “easily” shared with others and accessed via virtual and physical cards. 

“What we’re doing really is to re-integrate and unify what is otherwise a pretty splintered financial life for middle income households and families that are attempting to manage finances on a daily, weekly and monthly basis,” Hamilton told TechCrunch.

Over the past few years, he said, there have been a number of different fintech and bank products that people use to run their life “and they’re all starting to converge.”

The company was founded on the premise that traditional banking exists “on a system of fractured accounts and billions of dollars in hidden fees that leave customers living paycheck to paycheck despite steady incomes.” One says it is built on a “proprietary” technology core that aims to deliver saving, spending, sharing, budgeting and borrowing in a single account.

“Everybody’s trying to do a piece of everything, but they all started doing one thing,” Hamilton said. “But it’s really hard to back into the others or to bolt them on afterwards if you didn’t begin with the end in mind, kind of on an integrated basis. So that is essentially what we set out to build with One, with the idea to reunify credit and debit and savings and reintegrate the sharing of money with other people so it didn’t have to be done on a one-off transactional basis through Venmo or PayPal or Zelle.”

One’s banking services are provided by Coastal Community Bank, Member FDIC. The startup emphasizes that it’s a financial technology company, and “not a bank.”

It plans to use the new funding toward “fueling” customer growth, hiring and expanding its product offerings.

Charles Moldow, Foundation Capital general partner and One investor, said that challenger banks such as Chime and Aspiration focus on a debit card offering to subprime customers who are looking for lower bank fees and access to paychecks sooner.  

“These customers are generally treated poorly by banks and charged a lot of fees because they don’t generate much revenue for banks outside of interchange fees on debit purchases with little disposable income,” he said.

The real money made by banks, according to Moldow, is against mid-prime customers for both debit and lending.  

“These customers are harder to acquire because banks hate to lose them due to their large lifetime values,” he said. “One differs from the challenger banks in the market in that they have created a superior mobile banking experience for the 80% of the market that is not super prime or subprime. They have both a debit and credit offering and a vastly better user experience.”

The fintech is able to offer a user experience that is “materially” different from standard large bank offerings in that their back end infrastructure is a “modern” core and One is able to handle core checking, lending, money transfer and savings all on the same back end.

This means One can fully integrate those experiences (the aforementioned integrated offering “Pockets”).

“This differs from traditional banks which have each of these systems on top of different tech stacks which prevents them from providing integrated offerings,” he said. 

Also, by not having brick and mortar branches, the company is able to offer lower fees, more points and rewards and higher savings rates, Moldow added.

News: Crypto world shows signs of being rather bullish

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Bitcoin maximalists aren’t going to find much here that underscores their core thesis that every coin not mentioned in Satoshi’s whitepaper is, in fact, a scam. Save your tweets, please.

Welcome back to The Exchange. Today we’re doing something fun with crypto.

Sure, we could write more about how insurtech valuations are under fresh pressure after Hippo’s Q2 earnings report — we spoke to the company’s president yesterday; more to come — or the latest stock market movements in China. There are big rounds worth considering as well. Roblox reported earnings this week. And Monday.com’s earnings pushed its shares sharply higher yesterday. There’s lots of interesting news to chew on.

But instead of all that, we’re digging back into crypto. Why? Because there are some rather bullish trends that indicate the world of blockchain is maturing and creating a raft of winning players

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Writing about crypto is always a little risky. Cybersecurity folks will complain that we’re abusing the phrase crypto, despite the fact that language always evolves. And Bitcoin maximalists aren’t going to find much below that underscores their core thesis that every coin not mentioned in Satoshi’s whitepaper is, in fact, a scam. Save your tweets, please.

But if you care more generally about the larger global cryptoeconomy, it’s time to imbibe some good news. Our goal is to highlight a few recent trends and then talk a little about what we might see coming from startups.

Sound good? Let’s get busy.

Encouraging news from your local distributed ledger

The Exchange finds rising NFT volumes bullish, and we have a new thesis for what the value proposition is for such digital assets. The rising tide of mega-rounds for crypto exchanges belies not only the worldwide demand for access to crypto, but also sets the stage for a global cohort of stable, well-funded and trustworthy on-ramps to the crypto world — and, of course, more exchanges imply lower fees over time.

Non-exchange crypto fees are also bullish. And then there’s a wrinkle to the stablecoin game and what sort of economics things like USDC may command in time. We have notes from an interview with Circle to help us there.

NFTs and the concept of joy

I don’t think anyone actually understands what the metaverse is. But the possibility that, in time, unique assets on particular chains — NFTs — will have a part to play in larger digital worlds seems like a reasonable conjecture. One can easily imagine life, as we all become Increasingly Online, leaning on human desires for scarcity as a method of showing status. NFTs will help meet that demand in certain digital ecosystems. Games, probably, though what we consider a game will also evolve as VR becomes more mainstream.

But that future is not here yet. So, what value are NFTs providing today that makes them potentially worthwhile? Joy.

News: Holoride’s in-car VR gaming system leaves the track for the real world

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Holoride’s VR gaming system for passengers caught our attention a few years back at CES. The company is back, demoing two games and threw off the shackles of the track for the real world.

Holoride’s VR gaming system for passengers caught our attention a few years back at CES when we were given a ride in an Audi on a track and had the game react to the movement of the vehicle while we played. Well, the company is back and this time they demoed two games and threw off the shackles of the track for the real world.

We took a ride in an Audi with the Holoride system and again enjoyed video games while someone else drove. The company is currently courting developers to build games via their recently announced SDK and are partnering with automakers to make sure that the data they need from the car to make their games a reality is available. Watch the video above for the full story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

News: FloodMapp wants to predict where water goes before it washes away your home

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year, and recovering them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in damage

Floods are devastating. They rip asunder communities, wipe out neighborhoods, force the evacuation of thousands of people every year, and recovering them can take years — assuming recovery is possible at all. The U.S. government estimates that floods in recent decades (exclusive of hurricanes and tropical storms) have caused an estimated $160 billion in damage and killed hundreds of people.

One would think that we should have a real-time model for where water is and where it is going around the world, what with all of those sensors on the ground and satellites in orbit. But we mostly don’t, instead relying on antiquated models that fail to take into account the possibilities of big data and big compute.

FloodMapp, a Brisbane, Australia-based startup, is aiming to wash out the old approaches to hydrology and predictive analytics and put in place a much more modern approach to help emergency managers and citizens know when the floods are coming — and what to do.

CEO and co-founder Juliette Murphy has spent a lifetime in the water resources engineering field, and saw first hand the heavy destruction that water can cause. In 2011, she watched as her friend’s home was submerged in the midst of terrible flooding. The “water went right over the peak of her house,” she said. Two years later in Calgary, she saw the same situation again: floods and fear as friends tried to determine whether and how to evacuate.

Those memories and her own professional career led her to think more about how to build better tools for disaster managers. She ultimately synced up with CTO and co-founder Ryan Prosser to build FloodMapp in 2018, raising $1.3 million AUD along with a matching grant.

The company’s premise is simple: we have the tools to build real-time flooding models today, but we just have chosen not to take advantage of them. Water follows gravity, which means that if you know the topology of a place, you can predict where the water will flow to. The challenge has been that calculating second-order differential equations at high resolution remains computationally expensive.

Murphy and Prosser decided to eschew the traditional physics-based approach that has been popular in hydrology for decades for a completely data-based approach that takes advantage of widely available techniques in machine learning to make those calculations much more palatable. “We do top down what used to be bottoms up,” Murphy said. “We have really sort of broken the speed barrier.” That work led to the creation of DASH, the startup’s real-time flood model.

FloodMapp’s modeling of the river flooding in Brisbane. Image Credits: FloodMapp

Unlike typical tech startups though, FloodMapp isn’t looking to be its own independent platform. Instead, it interoperates with existing geographic information systems (GIS) like ESRI’s ArcGIS by offering a data layer that can be combined with other data streams to provide situational awareness to emergency response and recovery personnel. Customers pay a subscription fee for access to FloodMapp’s data layer, and so far, the company is working with the Queensland Fire and Emergency Services in Australia as well as the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach in Virginia.

But it’s not just emergency services the startup is ultimately hoping to attract. Any company with physical assets, from telcos and power companies to banks and retail chains with physical stores could potentially be a customer of the product. In fact, FloodMapp is betting that the SEC will mandate further climate change financial disclosures, which could lead to a … flood of new business (I get one flood pun, okay, I get one).

FloodMapp’s team has expanded from its original two founders to a whole crop of engineering and sales personnel. Image Credits: FloodMapp

Murphy notes that “we are still in our early stages” and that the company is likely to raise further financing early next year as it gets through this year’s flood season and onboards several new customers. She hopes that ultimately, FloodMapp will “not only help people, but help our country change and adapt in the face of a changing climate.”

News: Spotify expands its radio DJ-like format, Music + Talk, to global creators

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Last fall, Spotify introduced a new format that combined spoken word commentary with music, allowing creators to reproduce the  radio-like experience of listening to a DJ or music journalist who shared their perspective on the tracks they would then play. Today, the company is making the format, which it calls “Music + Talk,” available to

Last fall, Spotify introduced a new format that combined spoken word commentary with music, allowing creators to reproduce the  radio-like experience of listening to a DJ or music journalist who shared their perspective on the tracks they would then play. Today, the company is making the format, which it calls “Music + Talk,” available to global creators through its podcasting software Anchor.

Creators who want to offer this sort of blended audio experience can now do so by using the new “Music” tool in Anchor, which provides access to Spotify’s full catalog of 70 million tracks that they can insert into their spoken-word audio programs. Spotify has said this new type of show will continue to compensate the artist when the track is streamed, the same as it would elsewhere on Spotify’s platform. In addition, users can also interact with the music content within the shows as they would otherwise — by liking the song, viewing more information about the track, saving the song, or sharing it, for example.

The shows themselves, meanwhile, will be available to both free and Premium Spotify listeners. Paying subscribers will hear the full tracks when listening to these shows, but free users will only hear a 30-second preview of the songs, due to licensing rights.

The format is somewhat reminiscent of Pandora’s Stories, which was also a combination of music and podcasting, introduced in 2019. However, in Pandora’s case, the focus had been on allowing artists to add their own commentary to music — like talking about the inspiration for a song — while Spotify is making it possible for anyone to annotate their favorite playlists with audio commentary.

Since launching last year, the product has been tweaked somewhat in response to user feedback, Spotify says. The shows now offer clearer visual distinction between the music and talk segments during an episode, and they include music previews on episode pages. To date, creators have produced “tens of thousands” of shows using the format, Spotify told TechCrunch, but the company isn’t providing exact numbers at this time.

The ability to create Music + Talk shows was previously available in select markets ahead of this global rollout, including in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand.

With the expansion, creators in a number of other major markets are now gaining access, including Japan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and Colombia. Alongside the expansion, Spotify’s catalog of Music + Talk original programs will also grow today, as new shows from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, India, Japan, and the Philippines will be added.

Spotify will also begin to more heavily market the feature with the launch of its own Spotify Original called “Music + Talk: Unlocked,” which will offer tips and ideas for creators interested in trying out the format.

News: Blumira raises $10.3M Series A to bring cloud-based SIEM to mid-market companies

• August 18, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Blumira today announced it raised a $10.3 million Series A financing round. The Ann Arbor-based cybersecurity company says the capital will be used to expand its product offering, double its headcount to 80 employees, and grow its partnership program with managed service providers. The company, founded in 2018, seeks to provide enterprise-level security to medium-sized

Blumira today announced it raised a $10.3 million Series A financing round. The Ann Arbor-based cybersecurity company says the capital will be used to expand its product offering, double its headcount to 80 employees, and grow its partnership program with managed service providers.

The company, founded in 2018, seeks to provide enterprise-level security to medium-sized businesses through turn-key, cloud-based solutions. Blumira’s solution upends the traditional security information and event management market with a powerful suite of tools designed specifically for mid-market companies that’s relatively more affordable. According to Blumira, its product deploys quickly and gives these companies the security and threat monitoring ability of tools used by giant corporations.

With the new funding, the firm has raised $12.9 million since its founding in 2018. New investor Mercury led Blumira’s Series A with Managing Director Aziz Gilani joining Blumira’s board as a director. The Series A also included participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, enterprise angles, and existing investors of M25, Array Ventures, and Duo
Security co-founder and angel investor Jon Oberheide.

“Having additional capital behind us accelerates our velocity and ability to execute our vision of democratizing the detection and response market,” said Steve Fuller, co-founder and CEO at Blumira. “We’ve built incredible momentum in just a few short years, and we’re thrilled to have the support of world-class investors as we work to make security operations simple, automated, affordable and accessible to organizations of all sizes.”