Jeffrey Katzenberg’s upcoming mobile streaming service Quibi has added another notable name to its roster of executive talent. The company announced it has hired Tom Conrad, previously VP of product at Snap (maker of Snapchat), and a co-creator of Pandora, where he served as chief technology officer. At Quibi, Conrad will be chief product officer, which will see him leading product, user research and customer support.

The news of Conrad’s hire was first reported by Variety on Monday, which also noted Conrad had served on Quibi’s board since late 2018 and was officially hired as CPO on March 25. He will report to Quibi CEO Meg Whitman in his new role.

Conrad will play a big part in Quibi’s success (or lack thereof, if it doesn’t fare well!), as a significant aspect to the service is to be the app’s mobile design. Unlike modern streaming services like Netflix, Quibi aims to offer short-form, high-quality video cut into smaller pieces for easy consumption on a smartphone. At this year’s SXSW, Whitman explained the Quibi advantage, noting how the technology it’s using will allow the company to do “full-screen video seamlessly from landscape to portrait.”

At Quibi, Conrad’s understanding of streaming services, thanks to his time at Pandora, and apps favored by young users, thanks to his role at Snap, will surely come into play.

Conrad left Snap in 2018 at a critical time for the popular social app. Its massive redesign had just rolled out, and was destroyed by early user reviews, with the majority giving the update one or two stars when it hit. The design was later rolled back. However, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel was the product decision maker — Conrad was more involved in terms of execution. That experience, however, may have given Conrad insight into what doesn’t work for the young Gen Z crowd, as much as what does.

The executive also spent a decade at Pandora, as CTO and EVP of Product, which saw him leading the teams that designed, developed and maintained the Pandora apps across platforms — including web, mobile and other consumer electronics devices, as well as automotive. While Quibi is focused on being a mobile streaming app, it’s hard to imagine a streaming service that refuses to ever go cross-platform — especially since the majority of viewing of today’s streaming service viewing takes place on a television. (Even when it’s the streaming service from YouTube.)

With its billion-dollar backing from investors, Quibi has been able to snag several big names for its exec ranks, in addition to its CEO Meg Whitman, and now Conrad.

In March, the company said it landed top CAA agent Jim Toth (married to power producer Reese Witherspoon, by the way). Toth’s clients at CAA included Matthew McConaughey, Robert Downey Jr., Scarlett Johansson, Jamie Foxx, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Salma Hayek, Zooey Deschanel and Neil Patrick Harris.

Quibi also hired former DC and Warner Bros. exec Diane Nelson to run operations. Nelson had served as president of DC Entertainment since 2009, and helped spearhead development of the DC Universe movies and shows.

In addition, the streaming service itself has already been signing big-name talent for its content, including Catherine Hardwicke, Antoine Fuqua, Guillermo del Toro, Sam Raimi and Lena Waithe. It’s also working with Steph Curry’s production company and most recently announced — awkward alert? — a show detailing Snapchat’s founding, focused on Evan Spiegel’s rise.

Image credit: Conrad, via Crunchbase

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Streaming service Quibi snags Snap and Pandora vet Tom Conrad as chief product officer

Meet Alcatraz AI, a startup that wants to replace all the badge readers in your office with a Face ID-like camera system. Alcatraz has integrated multiple sensors to identify faces and unlock doors effortlessly.

If you think about it, it’s weird that fingerprint sensors took off on mobile but everybody is still using plastic badges for their offices. Sure, high-security buildings use fingerprint and iris scanners. But it adds too much friction in too many cases.

First, when everybody gets back from their lunch break, it can create a traffic jam if everybody needs to place their finger on a sensor. Second, onboarding new employees would require you to add their biometric information to the system. It can be cumbersome for big companies.

Alcatraz AI promises a faster badging experience with facial authentication. When you join a company, you also get a physical badge. The first few times you use the badge, Alcatraz AI scans your face to create a model for future uses — after a while, you can leave your badge at the office.

The company has built custom hardware with three different sensors that include both traditional RGB sensors and infrared sensors for 3D mapping. Customers pay Alcatraz AI to install those hybrid badge/face readers. After that, companies pay an annual fee in order to use the platform.

Alcatraz AI customers get analytics, real-time notifications and can detect tailgating. This way, if somebody isn’t supposed to go in the secret lab, Alcatraz AI can detect if they’re trying to sneak in by following someone who is authorized to go in there.

The idea is that the ongoing license cost should cover what your company was paying for guards. The startup has raised nearly $6 million from Hardware Club, Ray Stata, JCI Ventures, Ruvento Ventures and Hemi Ventures.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Alcatraz AI is building Face ID for corporate badges

FireHydrant, an NYC startup, wants to help companies recover from IT disasters more quickly, and understand why they happened — with the goal of preventing similar future scenarios from happening again. Today, the fledgling startup announced a $1.5 million seed investment from Work-Bench, a New York City venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise startups.

In addition to the funding, the company announced it was opening registration for its FireHydrant incident management platform. The product has been designed with Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) methodology in mind, but company co-founder and CEO Bobby Ross says the tool is designed to help anyone understand the cause of a disaster, regardless of what happened, and whether they practice SRE or not.

“I had been involved in several fire fighting scenarios — from production databases being dropped to Kubernetes upgrades gone wrong — and every incident had a common theme: ​absolute chaos​,” Ross wrote in a blog post announcing the new product.

The product has two main purposes, according to Ross. It helps you figure out what’s happening as you attempt to recover from an ongoing disaster scenario, and once you’ve put out the fire, it lets you do a post-mortem to figure out exactly what happened with the hope of making sure that particular disaster doesn’t happen again.

As Ross describes it, a tool like PagerDuty can alert you that there’s a problem, but FireHydrant lets you figure out what specifically is going wrong and how to solve it. He says that the tool works by analyzing change logs, as a change is often the primary culprit of IT incidents. When you have an incident, FireHydrant will surface that suspected change, so you can check it first.

“We’ll say, hey, you had something change recently in this vicinity where you have an alert going off. There is a high likelihood that this change was actually causing your incident. And we actually bubble that up and mark it as a suspect,” Ross explained.

Screenshot: FireHydrant

Like so many startups, the company developed from a pain point the founders were feeling. The three founders were responsible for solving major outages at companies like Namely, DigitalOcean, CoreOS and Paperless Post.

But the actual idea for the company came about almost accidentally. In 2017, Ross was working on a series of videos and needed a way to explain what he was teaching. “I began writing every line of code with live commentary, and soon FireHydrant started to take the shape of what I envisioned as an SRE while at Namely, and I started to want it more than the video series. 40 hours of screencasts recorded later, I decided to stop recording and focus on the product…,” Ross wrote in the blog post.

Today it integrates with PagerDuty, GitHub and Slack, but the company is just getting started with the three founders, all engineers, working on the product and a handful of beta customers. It is planning to hire more engineers to keep building out the product. It’s early days, but if this tool works as described, it could go a long way toward solving the fire-fighting issues that every company faces at some point.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | FireHydrant lands .5M seed investment to bring order to IT disaster recovery

Pixeom, a startup that offers a software-defined edge computing platform to enterprises, today announced that it has raised a $15 million funding round from Intel Capital, National Grid Partners and previous investor Samsung Catalyst Fund. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its go-to-market capacity and invest in product development.

If the Pixeom name sounds familiar, that may be because you remember it as a Raspberry Pi-based personal cloud platform. Indeed, that’s the service the company first launched back in 2014. It quickly pivoted to an enterprise model, though. As Pixeom CEO Sam Nagar told me, that pivot came about after a conversation the company had with Samsung about adopting its product for that company’s needs. In addition, it was also hard to find venture funding. The original Pixeom device allowed users to set up their own personal cloud storage and other applications at home. While there is surely a market for these devices, especially among privacy-conscious tech enthusiasts, it’s not massive, especially as users became more comfortable with storing their data in the cloud. “One of the major drivers [for the pivot] was that it was actually very difficult to get VC funding in an industry where the market trends were all skewing towards the cloud,” Nagar told me.

At the time of its launch, Pixeom also based its technology on OpenStack, the massive open-source project that helps enterprises manage their own data centers, which isn’t exactly known as a service that can easily be run on a single machine, let alone a low-powered one. Today, Pixeom uses containers to ship and manage its software on the edge.

What sets Pixeom apart from other edge computing platforms is that it can run on commodity hardware. There’s no need to buy a specific hardware configuration to run the software, unlike Microsoft’s Azure Stack or similar services. That makes it significantly more affordable to get started and allows potential customers to reuse some of their existing hardware investments.

Pixeom brands this capability as “software-defined edge computing” and there is clearly a market for this kind of service. While the company hasn’t made a lot of waves in the press, more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies now use its services. With that, the company now has revenues in the double-digit millions and its software manages more than a million devices worldwide.

As is so often the case in the enterprise software world, these clients don’t want to be named, but Nagar tells me they include one of the world’s largest fast food chains, for example, which uses the Pixeom platform in its stores.

On the software side, Pixeom is relatively cloud agnostic. One nifty feature of the platform is that it is API-compatible with Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Azure and offers an extensive subset of those platforms’ core storage and compute services, including a set of machine learning tools. Pixeom’s implementation may be different, but for an app, the edge endpoint on a Pixeom machine reacts the same way as its equivalent endpoint on AWS, for example.

Until now, Pixeom mostly financed its expansion — and the salary of its more than 90 employees — from its revenue. It only took a small funding round when it first launched the original device (together with a Kickstarter campaign). Technically, this new funding round is part of this, so depending on how you want to look at this, we’re either talking about a very large seed round or a Series A round.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Pixeom raises M for its software-defined edge computing platform

San Diego-based Edgybees today announced the launch of Argus, its API-based developer platform that makes it easy to add augmented reality features to live video feeds.

The service has long used this capability to run its own drone platform for first responders and enterprise customers, which allows its users to tag and track objects and people in emergency situations, for example, to create better situational awareness for first responders.

I first saw a demo of the service a year ago, when the team walked a group of journalists through a simulated emergency, with live drone footage and an overlay of a street map and the location of ambulances and other emergency personnel. It’s clear how these features could be used in other situations as well, given that few companies have the expertise to combine the video footage, GPS data and other information, including geographic information systems, for their own custom projects.

Indeed, that’s what inspired the team to open up its platform. As the Edgybees team told me during an interview at the Ourcrowd Summit last month, it’s impossible for the company to build a new solution for every vertical that could make use of it. So instead of even trying (though it’ll keep refining its existing products), it’s now opening up its platform.

“The potential for augmented reality beyond the entertainment sector is endless, especially as video becomes an essential medium for organizations relying on drone footage or CCTV,” said Adam Kaplan, CEO and co-founder of Edgybees. “As forward-thinking industries look to make sense of all the data at their fingertips, we’re giving developers a way to tailor our offering and set them up for success.”

In the run-up to today’s launch, the company has already worked with organizations like the PGA to use its software to enhance the live coverage of its golf tournaments.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Edgybees’s new developer platform brings situational awareness to live video feeds

I’m in the process of looking for a pup friend to bring home with me, but I quickly found that it’s not an easy process. There are tons of places offering up pups, including breeders, shelters and rescues. But it’s not always clear if these places are legitimate.

This is where Good Dog, a startup that just raised $6.7 million from David Tisch’s BoxGroup, Felicis, Slow Ventures and others, can be helpful. Good Dog, launching today, is a marketplace that pre-vets breeders, shelters and rescues and centralizes the dog-search process.

“I’ve been fortunate to be involved with Josh and Lauren since the inception of Good Dog,” Tisch said in a statement. “As I was embarking on my own dog search, it quickly became clear that this was a totally broken process, opening up a massive opportunity within the $72 billion dollar pet market.”

Good Dog co-founders Lauren McDevitt and Josh Wais, former early Jet employees, came up with the idea while they were looking for a pup to add to their family. What was most troubling in their search, McDevitt told TechCrunch, was that there was a lack of standard and expertise.

“It was hard to determine the good from the bad,” she said. “It was hard to identify who was doing the right thing. Some put dogs in harm’s way and made it hard for well-intentioned people to find the right dog.”

Good Dog focuses on educating people about what it takes to take care of a dog, as well as what kind of dog may be best for them. The startup then enables those looking for dogs to explore profiles from trusted, vetted providers and then facilitates connections.

You can search by location and shelter, or simply by breed.

“Our mission is to help connect good with good to weed out the bad,” Wais said. “The industry is broken and we see an opportunity in connecting prospective dog owners with responsible sources to help weed out the irresponsible sources.”

So far, Good Dog showcases pups from more than 1,000 responsible sources across the U.S. Before adding a source to the platform, Good Dog’s team uses its own proprietary standards to ensure the source cares for its dogs in a way its advisory team has determined is acceptable. That entails making sure the source cares for each dog’s respective health needs, socializes them properly and houses them in safe environments.

Good Dog makes money by charging a fee (around $100) once you’ve decided to go ahead and purchase a dog. Good Dog does not charge breeders, shelters or rescues. It’s worth noting that providers also cannot pay to be featured on Good Dog.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Good Dog raises .7 million to help you find a pup