Browsing Tag: Startups

“Smart” cameras are to be found in millions of homes, but the truth is they’re not all that smart. Facial recognition and motion detection are their main tricks… but what if you want to know if the dog jumped on the couch, or if your toddler is playing with the stove? Visual One equips cameras with the intellect to understand a bit more of the world and give you more granular — and important — information.

Founder Mohammad Rafiee said that the idea came to him after he got a puppy (Zula) and was dissatisfied with the options he had for monitoring her activities while he was away. Here she is doing what dogs do best:

There are no bad dogs, but chairs are for people

“There were specific things I wanted to know were happening, like I wanted to check if the dog got picked up by the dog walker. The cameras’ motion detection is useless — she’s always moving,” he lamented. “In fact, with a lot of these cameras, just a change in the lighting or wind or rain can trigger the motion alert, so it’s completely impractical.”

“My background is in machine learning. I was thinking about it, and realized we’re at a stage where this problem is starting to become solvable,” he continued.

Some tasks in computer vision, indeed, are as good as solved — detecting faces and common objects such as cars and bikes can be done quickly and efficiently. But that’s not always useful — what’s the point of knowing someone rode their bike past your house? In order for this to have value, the objects need to be understood as part of a greater context, and that’s what Rafiee and Visual One are undertaking.

Unfortunately, it’s far from easy — or else everyone would be doing it already. Identifying a cat is simple, and identifying a table is simple, but identifying a cat on a table is surprisingly hard.

“It’s a very difficult problem. So we’re breaking it down to things we can solve right now, then building on that,” Rafiee explained. “With deep learning techniques we can identify different objects, and we build models on top of those to specify different interactions, or specific objects being in specific locations. Like a car in the wrong spot, or a dog getting on a couch. We can recognize that with high accuracy right now — we have a list of supported objects and models that we’re expanding.”

In case you’re not convinced that the capabilities are that much advanced from the usual “activity in the living room” or “Kendra is at the front door” notifications, here are a few situations that Visual One is set up to detect:

• Kid playing with the stove
• Toddler climbing furniture
• Kid holding a knife
• Baby left alone for too long
• Raccoon getting into garbage
• Elderly person taking her medications
• Elderly person in bed for too long
• Car parked in the wrong spot
• Garage door left open
• Dog chewing on a shoe
• Cat scratching the furniture

The process for creating these triggers is pretty straightforward

If one of those doesn’t make you think “actually… that would be really good to know,” then perhaps a basic security camera is enough for your purposes after all. Not everyone has a knife-curious toddler. But those of you who do are probably scrolling furiously past this paragraph looking for where to buy one of these things.

Unfortunately Visual One isn’t something you can just install on any old existing system — with the prominent exception of Nest, into which it can plug. Camera workflows are generally too locked down for security and privacy purposes to allow for third-party apps and services to be slipped in. But the company isn’t trying to bankrupt everyone with an ultra-luxury offering. It’s using off-the-shelf cameras from Wyze and loading them with its own software stack.

Rafiee said he pictures Visual One as a mid-tier option for people who want to have more than a basic camera setup but aren’t convinced by the more expensive plays. That way the company avoids going head-on with commodity hardware’s race to the bottom or the brand warfare taking place between Google and Amazon’s Nest and Ring. Cameras cost $30-$40, and the service is $7 per month currently.

Ultimately the low-end companies may want to license from Visual One, while the high-end companies will be developing their own full stack at great cost, making it difficult for them to go downmarket. “Hardware is hard, and AI is specialized — unless you’re a giant company it’s hard to do both. I think we can fill the gap in the market for mid-market companies without those resources,” he said.

Of course privacy is paramount as well, and Rafiee said that because of the way their system works, although the AI lives in the cloud and therefore requires the cameras to be online (like most others), no important user data needs to be or will be stored on Visual One servers. “We do inference in the cloud so we can be hardware agnostic, but we don’t need to store any data. So we don’t add any risk,” he said.

Visual One is launching today (after a stint in YC’s latest cohort) with an initial set of objects and interactions, and will continue developing more as it observes which use cases prove popular and effective.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Visual One smartens up home security cameras with object and action recognition

CRM software accounts for one-quarter of all enterprise IT spend. But ironically, while a lot of money is spent on platforms like Salesforce or SAP to manage incoming calls and outgoing marketing and sales activity, not a lot of attention is given to the issue of how to help the teams using all that software work better.

What are the peak times for calls? What are the most common questions? Which staff are best skilled at what kinds of questions? And who is actually working at any given time? These are just some of the issues, but in many cases, there isn’t much in the way of tools used to help with these at all — organisations often just hack a spreadsheet platform like Google Sheets or a calendar app to get by, or do nothing at all.

Today, a startup called Assembled is coming out of stealth mode to address that gap in the market, with a platform that’s built specifically to address the kinds of questions and issues that customer support teams encounter and — answered well — can help them work much better.

Out of the gate, Assembled is announcing $3.1 million in seed funding led by Stripe — where the founding team previously worked — with participation also from Basis Set Ventures, Signalfire and several angel investors (who are also mostly former Stripe employees).

Assembled’s longer-term ambition is to build tools for what co-founder Ryan Wang describes as “the logistics of customer support.”

“We want to become the operating system for support teams,” he said. Most immediately, the company’s focus will be on agent performance. “Teams want to learn about their top performers and how they spend their time, and offer data to empower their decision-making.”

Stripe — the payments and related services provider that is now valued at $35 billion — has developed a sizable operation funding startups adjacent to its own interests in cultivating relationships with startups and other smaller businesses. You could consider it a strategic investor in Assembled: alongside Grammarly, Gofundme, Hopper and Harry’s, Stripe is one of Assembled’s marquee customers.

Wang, an ex-Stripe engineer who co-founded Assembled with his brother John and Assembled’s CEO Brian Sze (both also ex-Stripe), said in an interview that the idea for the startup came directly out of the pair’s experiences as early employees at Stripe.

The approach at the startup in its early days was very grass-roots: employees would get together outside the office to go through support tickets as a way of identifying trends and to talk through them to figure out what might need fixing, how to handle issues in the future and so on.

It was probably a great way for the team to really stay in touch with what customers needed and wanted. But eventually this approach presented a problem: How do you scale this kind of process? To a tech person, the solution would be obvious: build a platform that can help you do this.

“Within the landscape of CRM, we could see that tech hadn’t really been applied to the business of supporting customer support,” Wang said. “That is why we left. We’d understood that it was a broad problem.”

A tool to help improve workforce management for customer support teams is a no-brainer for a company already trying to address these issues through its own home-baked solutions. Wang noted that one of its current customers had built out such an extensive map of data on Google Sheets trying to address customer support workforce management that “they broke Google Sheets. It was just too big.”

Indeed, Bob van Winden, Stripe’s head of operations, noted: “Millions of businesses rely on Stripe every day. To support them, we obsess over every detail of delivering fast, reliable customer service, including free 24×7 phone and chat support. This led us to Assembled, which our global support teams are using to stay coordinated and focused on helping Stripe’s users thrive.”

Less obvious is the use case when a company has never identified these issues, or sees them but haven’t made efforts to try to solve them because it seems too difficult. (The classic issues here are that Assembled is “too clever by half,” or “too ahead of its time.”) That presents both an open market for Assembled, but also a greenfield challenge.

One route to customers has been to integrate with more established CRM packages. Currently Assembled integrates with Salesforce, Kustomer and Zendesk, so that it can source data from these to provide more insights to users.

Another is to provide a set of tools that speak to the wider trend for analytics and data-based insights that can be used to improve how a company works. Indeed, just as Kustomer has disrupted the idea of a CRM being focused on a narrow funnel of inbound requests, Assembled also is rethinking how to parse data to figure out what a customer support person should be doing and when. 

The startup provides a way to forecast inbound support query volumes, and to map that into staffing plans that cover multiple channels like chat, email, phone and social media. The staffing plan, in turn, also acts as a scheduling tool to set up group and single calendars for individuals.

A team’s activity, meanwhile, is tracked through a set of metrics the whole team can see and use to calibrate their work better.

Going forward, you can imagine Assembled expanding in a couple of different directions. One might be to offer workforce management to more teams beyond customer support, but that also have to work out how to manage inbound requests and turn them into more efficient work plans. Another might be to continue expanding the kinds of tools it might provide to customer support teams to continue complementing basic CRMs, in particular as customer support comes to mean different things, depending on who the “customer” actually is.

“We see the term ‘customer support’ evolving,” Wang said. “The big struggle is what the encompassing term should be instead. Generally, our view is that we want to transform and elevate what customer support means. It’s not just about call centers, but any drivers of customer experience related to your products.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Assembled raises .1M led by Stripe to build ‘the operating system for support teams’

PandaDoc, a sales-focused document automation startup, announced a new web-based document production editor today that allows sales teams to quickly generate proposals and contracts from design templates.

The templates give a consistent and professional look to these documents, which might otherwise be produced in a word processor like Word or Google Docs. While customers are free to customize these any way they like, the templated approach means these businesses don’t require a designer to create quality-looking documents.

Company co-founder and CTO Serge Barysiuk says the startup has had a vision for some time that sales documents would be more interactive than a static PDF or Word document, and they have invested a lot of resources into building a more interactive document editor, while enabling the sales team to see usage statistics like document opens, time on pages and so forth.

“We have added a new document builder editor to our platform, which helps you create documents that you can personalize and merge data, and that are also interactive,” Barysiuk told TechCrunch.

PandaDoc document templates selection screen. Screenshot: PandaDoc (cropped)

He says this means their documents contain business logic and data, but also has a professional look and feel, whether being viewed online or on a mobile device.

Barysiuk says the company recognizes that some customers will be using Word and other tools to produce boilerplate content, and users can import existing documents into the PandaDoc editor where appropriate.

In addition to the document editing capabilities, the company provides a general workflow to support sales teams from proposal to contract to digital signing — and even collecting funds.

PandaDoc launched in 2011 and has raised just over $21 million on a post valuation of $70 million, according to PitchBook data. The company reports it has 250 employees with over 17,000 customers, the majority of whom are SMBs, who have closed more than $20 billion in deals on the platform.

The company’s last raise was $15 million in 2017, led by Rembrandt Venture Partners.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | PandaDoc introduces new template-driven editor to ease sales doc production

Ad2iction’s team

TNL Media Group, the Taipei-based media and journalism company, announced it has acquired mobile ad technology startup Ad2iction. In addition to digital advertising and data analytics, Ad2iction also operates verticals like Agent Movie, a film site, and its brands will remain independently run after joining TNL Media Group.

Ad2iction currently serves about 500 brands with a cloud-based platform, called Ad2 CMP (creative management platform) that helps them analyze behavior and create digital content for displays and mobile devices.

Launched in 2013 with The News Lens, a news site, TNL Media Group expanded through a series of partnerships and acquisitions and now includes a portfolio of content brands dedicated to lifestyle, sports, technology and video content. For example, in 2018 it acquired Taiwanese tech news site INSIDE and sports site Sportsvision. The company focuses on creating Chinese-language content for users in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, and English-language articles for international readers, too.

TNL Media Group also recently founded a market research unit called TNLR (with the “R” standing for research) to provide reports that use data analytics from its user base for clients like Dell, Uber and Ford.

Inn a press statement, TNL Media Group founder Joey Chung said “Both companies believe this is the perfect moment for a strategic partnership as we set up to build one of the top content platforms and diversify our product offerings with each bringing in more scale. We look forward to helping Ad2iction’s superior mobile adtech products expand to new clients and international markets while building one of the international Chinese market’s top content and technology service platforms.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Taipei-based TNL Media Group acquires adtech startup Ad2iction

Fitness, wallpaper, and lost item-finding startups could have a big new competitor baked into everyone’s iPhones. Leaks of the code from iOS 14 that Apple is expected to reveal in June signal several new features and devices are on the way. Startups could be at risk due to Apple’s ability to integrate these additions at the iOS level, instantly gain an enormous install base and offer them for free or cheap, as long as they boost sales of its main money maker, the iPhone.

It’s unclear if all of these fresh finds will actually get official unveiling in June versus further down the line. But here’s a breakdown of what the iOS 14 code obtained by 9To5Mac’s Chance Miller shows and which startups could be impacted by Apple barging into their businesses:

Fitness – Codename: Seymour

Apple appears to be preparing a workout guide app for iOS, WatchOS and Apple TV that would let users download instructional video clips for doing different exercises. The app could potentially be called Fit or Fitness, according to MacRumors‘ Juli Clover, and offer help with stretching, core training, strength training, running, cycling, rowing, outdoor walking, dance and yoga. The Apple Watch appears to help track your progress through the workout routines.

Icons for Apple’s fitness feature from the iOS 14 code

The iOS Health app is already a popular way to track steps and other fitness goals. By using Health to personalize or promote a new Fitness feature, Apple has an easy path to a huge user base. Many people are afraid of weight and strength training because there’s a lot to learn about having proper form to avoid injury or embarrassment. Visual guides with videos shot from multiple angles could make sure you’re doing those pushups or bicep curls correctly.

Apple’s entrance into fitness could endanger startups like Future, which offer customized workout routines with video clips demonstrating how to do each exercise. The $11.5 million-funded Future actually sends you an Apple Watch with its $150 per month service to track your progress while using visuals, sounds and vibrations to tell you when to switch exercises without having to look at your phone. By removing Future’s human personal trainers that text to nag you if you don’t work out, Apple could offer a simplified version of this startup’s app for free.

Apple Fitness could be even more trouble for less premium apps like Sweat and Sworkit that provide basic visual guidance for workouts, or Aaptiv that’s restricted to just audio cues. Hardware startups like Peloton, which offers off-bike Beyond the Ride workouts with live or on-demand class, and Tempo’s giant 3D-sensing in-home screen for weight lifting, could also find casual customers picked off by a free or cheap alternative from Apple.

There’s no code indicating a payment mechanism, so Apple Fitness could be free. But it’s also easy to imagine Apple layering on a premium feature like remote personal training assistance from human experts or a wider array of exercises for a fee, tying into its increasing focus on services revenue.

Wallpapers – access for third-parties

The iPhone’s current wallpaper selector

In iOS 14, it appears that Apple will offer new categorizations for wallpapers beyond the existing Dynamic (slowly shifting), Still and Live (move when touched) options. Apple’s always only offered a few native wallpapers plus the option to pull one from your camera roll. But the iOS 14 code suggests Apple may open this up to third-party providers.

A wallpaper “store” could be both a blessing and a curse for entrepreneurs in the space. It could endanger sites and apps like Vellum, Unsplash, Clarity, WLPPR and Walli that aggregate wallpapers for browsing, purchase or download. Instead, Apple could make itself the ultimate aggregator by being built directly into the wallpaper settings. But for creators of beautiful wallpaper images, iOS 14 could potentially offer a new distribution method where their collections could be available straight from where users install their phone backgrounds.

The big question will be whether Apple merely works with a few providers to add wallpaper packs for free, does financially backed deals to bring in providers or creates a full-blown marketplace for wallpapers where creators can sell their imagery like developers do apps. By turning this formerly free feature into a marketplace, Apple could also start earning a cut of sales to add to its services revenue.

AirTags – find your stuff

Apple appears to be getting closer to launching its long-awaited AirTags, based on iOS 14 code snippets. These small tracking tags could be attached to your wallet, keys, gadgets or other important or easily lost items, and then located using the iOS Find My app. AirTags may be powered by removable coin-shaped batteries, according to MacRumors.

Native integration with iOS could make AirTags super-easy to set up. They also could benefit from the ubiquity of Apple devices, as the company could let the crowd help find your stuff by allowing AirTags to piggyback on the connectivity of any of its phones, tablets or laptops to send you the missing item’s coordinates.

Most obviously, AirTags could become a powerful competitor to the vertical’s long-standing frontrunner, Tile. The $104 million-funded startup sells $20 to $35 tracking tags that locate devices from 150 to 400 feet away. It also sells a $30 per year subscription for free battery replacements and 30-day location history. Other players in the space include Chipolo, Orbit and MYNT.

But as we saw with the launch of AirPods, Apple’s design expertise and native iOS integrations can allow its products to leapfrog what’s in the market. If AirTags get proprietary access to the iPhone’s Bluetooth and other connectivity hardware, and if they’re quicker to set up, Apple fans might jump from startups to these new devices. Apple also could develop a similar premium subscription for battery or full AirTag replacements, as well as bonus tracking features.

Augmented reality scanning – Codename: Gobi

iOS 14 includes code for a new augmented reality feature that lets users scan places or potentially items in the real world to pull up helpful information. The code indicates Apple is testing the feature, codenamed Gobi, at Apple Stores and Starbucks to let users see product, pricing and comparison info, according to 9To5Mac’s Benjamin Mayo. Gobi can recognize QR-style codes for specific locations like a certain shop, triggering a companion augmented reality experience.

It appears that an SDK would allow partners to build their own AR offerings and generate the QR codes that initiate them. Eventually, these capabilities could be extended from Apple’s mobile devices to the AR headset it’s working on so you’d instantly get a heads-up display of information when you entered the right place.

Apple moving to power lighter-weight AR experiences rather than just offering the AR Kit infrastructure for developers to build full-fledged apps could create competition for a range of startups and other tech giants. The whole point of augmented reality is that it’s convenient to explore hidden experiences in the real world, which is defeated if users have to know to download and then wait to install a different app for every place or product. Creating a central AR app for simpler experiences that load instantly could speed up adoption.

Snapchat’s Scan AR platform

Startups like Blippar have been working on AR scanning for years in hopes of making consumer packaged goods or retail locations come alive. But again, the need to download a separate app and remember to use it has kept these experiences out of the mainstream. Snapchat’s Scan platform can similarly trigger AR effects based on specific items from a more popular app. And teasers of Facebook and Google’s eventual augmented reality hardware and software hinge on adding utility to every day life.

If Apple can build this technology into everyone’s iPhone cameras, it could surmount one of AR’s biggest distribution challenges. That might help it build out a developer ecosystem and train customers to seek out AR so they’re all ready when its AR glasses finally arrive.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | All the startups threatened by iOS 14’s new features

Startups have welcomed proposals from the European Commission aimed at cutting red tape and shrinking cross-border barriers for small businesses as part of a new EU industrial strategy plan with a twin focus on digital and green transitions unveiled today.

Among the package of measures being proposed by the European Union’s executive body are for Member States to sign up to a “Startup Nations Standard” — which would aim to promote best practices to support startups and scale-ups, such as one-stop shops, favourable employee stock-options arrangements and visa processing to reduce cross-border friction for entrepreneurs starting and growing businesses in the bloc.

In recent years, European startups have organized to campaign for reforms to rules around stock options –with 30 CEOs from homegrown startups, including TransferWise, GetYourGuide, Revolut, Delivery Hero, TypeForm and Supercell (to name a few) signing an open letter to policymakers two years ago calling for legislators to fix what they dubbed “the patchy, inconsistent and often punitive rules that govern employee ownership.”

The effort appears to have made a dent in the EU policymaking universe. Both regulatory and practical barriers are now in the Commission’s sights, with it proposing a joint task force to work on sanding down business bumps.

It also today reiterated a perennial warning against Member States “goldplating” pan-EU rules by adding their own conditions on top. 

“The Single Market is our proudest achievement — yet 70% of businesses report that they do not find it is sufficiently integrated,” said EVP Margrethe Vestager, laying out an industrial strategy package with a big focus on smaller companies, including those with big ambitions to scale. “Across Europe barriers are still preventing startups from growing into European businesses and our report is identifying those barriers and we also then address them in the Single Market enforcement action plan.”

In a letter responding to the Commission’s plan for an EU Startup Nations Standard, 14 European startup founders (listed below) and a number of European startup associations welcomed the proposal — urging EU Member States to get behind it.

“By making it easier to start a business, expand across borders and attract top talent, this new Standard will help to level the playing field with powerful global tech hubs in the US and China,” the tech CEOs and startup advocacy organizations wrote. “We applaud the EU’s ambition of seeking a pan-European solution to address the needs of startups. We are also encouraged that the Commission has specifically called out the treatment of stock options as one of the key issues.

“As highlighted by more than 500 leading European entrepreneurs who joined the Not Optional campaign, the inability of startups to use stock options effectively to attract and retain talent is a major bottleneck to the growth of startups in Europe.”

“The Commission’s proposals will be a major step towards unleashing the full entrepreneurial firepower of Europe – but only if they are adopted and implemented by all Member States,” they added. “That’s why we are today calling on all Member States to sign up to the EU Startup Nations Standard, including a commitment to increase the attractiveness of employee ownership schemes.”

Here’s the list of startup CEOs signing the letter:

• Christian Reber, CEO & Founder, Pitch
• Felix Van de Maele, CEO & Founder, Collibra
• Jean-Charles Samuelian, CEO & Founder, Alan
• Johannes Reck, CEO & Co-Founder of GetYourGuide
• Johannes Schildt, CEO & Founder, KRY / LIVI
• John Collison, Co-Founder and President, Stripe
• Juan de Antonio, CEO & Co-Founder, Cabify
• Markus Villig, CEO & Founder, Bolt
• Miki Kuusi, CEO & Co-Founder, Wolt
• Nicolas Brusson, CEO & Co-Founder, BlaBlaCar
• Peter Mühlmann, CEO & Founder, Trustpilot
• Sebastian Siemiatkowski, CEO & Founder, Klarna
• Taavet Hinrikus, Founder & Chairman, TransferWise
• Tamaz Georgadze, CEO & Founder, Raisin

Also welcoming the stock option proposals, Martin Mignot, a partner at Index Ventures — another backer of the Not Optional campaign — said: “The biggest challenge facing startups today is recruiting and retaining top talent. That’s why we are pleased that the EU Startup Nations Standard addresses stock options, making it easier for startups to allow employees to share in their success.”

“We are pleased to see the European Commission recognise the contribution that startups make to Europe and its citizens, and pursue a pan-European policy initiative to support this growing sector,” he added in a statement. “For too long, the focus in Europe has been on taming US tech giants. Today’s announcement confirms Europe’s ambition to create its own champions.”

EU startup advocacy member association, Allied for Startups, is another signatory to the letter. And in an additional response, it broadly welcomed the Commission’s SME strategy — while pressing for a strong focus on startups as independent actors in the implementation of the strategy, rather than as a sub-category of SMEs.

“The talent-focus of the proposed Startup Nation Standard has significant potential for startup ecosystems, since access to talent is still a bottleneck for startups in Europe,” said Benedikt Blomeyer, the lobby group’s director of EU policy, in a statement.

“Through the SME strategy, we are pleased to see concrete measures such as better startup visas and improved employee stock options on the table. Allied for Startups has repeatedly called for both measures over the past years.”

“Unlike SMEs, startups can only succeed at scale,” he added. “They are global from day one and aim to grow big and fast. Specific measures that work for SMES, for instance a regulatory exemption, might not work for startups. On the contrary, it could incentivise a startup to stay small. To account for these differences, the European Commission should consider a startup strategy that focuses on scalability, complementing the SME strategy.”

Allied for Startups also welcomed the Commission’s general goal of reducing the administrative and regulatory burden for startups within the Single Market — saying the consideration of regulatory sandboxes as part of the support toolkit is “potentially valuable for startups, who build innovative products and services.”

The Commission is also looking to support SMEs to go public in Europe — announcing an SME Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) Fund under the InvestEU SME window, which will aim to make IPOs more accessible to local small businesses.

Another push aims to reduce late payments for SMEs, with the Commission noting today that one in four regional small businesses go bankrupt as a result of not being paid on time.

It also said it wants to stimulate investment in women-led companies and funds to “empower female entrepreneurship.” (Notably all the signatories on the aforementioned letter are male.)

Industrial to digital transformation

More broadly, the Commission’s new industrial strategy intends to underpin core EU policy priorities for the next five years — which include a focus on driving the digitization of legacy industries and simultaneous retooling to transition to a carbon neutral economy under the pan-EU Green Deal.

“Europe has the strongest industry in the world. Our companies — big and small — provide us with jobs, prosperity and strategic autonomy. Managing the green and digital transitions and avoiding external dependencies in a new geopolitical context requires radical change — and it needs to start now,” said Thierry Breton, commissioner for internal market, in a statement today.

During a press briefing, Vestager emphasized the Commission’s view that new and more inclusive working methods are needed to deliver on the planned transformation.

“The twin digital and green transitions are posing both opportunities and challenges for the industry in general and for small and medium sized businesses in particular. Business models are changing. All across Europe companies are confronted with consumers’ decreasing trust and increasing demand for transparency,” she said. “The world around us is also changing… Today global competition, trade disputes, the return of protectionism — I think that creates a shared feeling of uncertainty.

“This is challenging Europe’s industry as it sets out to meet the twin transitions. Fortunately, the European industry is coming to this reality from a strong position. Our new strategy is building on Europe’s strength and on our values.”

On the proposals to shift to “inclusive” working methods, Vestager said the aim is “to work much closer with small and large companies, Member States, researchers, academia, social partners and other EU institutions.”

To that end, the Commission is proposing a new industrial forum to enable closer working with such stakeholders that it aims to have set up by September.

It also wants to work on identifying a number of industrial ecosystems — which Vestager said “may require a bespoke approach,” in terms of policy support.

At the press briefing, Breton suggested there could be between 15 and 20 such industrial ecosystems.

“We don’t want to leave anybody out,” he said. “This is an industrial strategy but we all know that underpinning this there are large corporations but many, many, many small ones too and we have to bring these on board. If we don’t have the big and the small we won’t have a dynamic, innovative, living sector.

“A lot of companies do this among themselves already, locally in fact, but we do hope it is going to be done in an even more horizontal manner across the EU and within the internal market,” he added.

Skills is another focus for the SME strategy — with the Commission saying it will expand Digital Innovation Hubs to every region in Europe to help small businesses plug in cutting edge tech, with expanded options for volunteering and training on digital technologies.

Helping SMEs find the skills they need to shift to sustainable ways of working is another stated aim.

The Commission has published a Q&A on the industrial strategy here.

Last month the executive body also set out proposals aimed at encouraging industrial data sharing and reuse, along with proposals for regulating high-risk uses of artificial intelligence.

A further major piece of EU digital policy due later this year is the forthcoming Digital Services Act — which is slated to address platform liabilities and responsibilities, including toward smaller businesses that rely on them as a marketplace.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | European startups applaud Commission plan to rethink stock options

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology.

At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has filed a complaint in California federal court claiming that Eko has engaged in “a campaign of threats and harassment.”

At the heart of the dispute is Quibi’s Turnstyle technology, which allows viewers to seamlessly switch between landscape and portrait-mode viewing.

Both companies seem to agree that Eko CEO Yoni Bloch met with Jeffrey Katzenberg in March 2017 (before Katzenberg had even founded Quibi) about a possible investment in Eko, and that there was at least one follow-up meeting between Quibi and Eko employees in 2019.

Eko claims that it provided Quibi employees — both while they were working at Quibi and before then, when they were previously at Snap — with details and code behind its technology. Then, after Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman showed off Turnstyle at CES this year, Eko sent a letter to Quibi claiming that the feature infringed on its intellectual property. (According to the Journal’s story, Eko’s lawyers have sent a letter to Quibi but have not filed a lawsuit.)

“Our Turnstyle technology was developed internally at Quibi by our talented engineers and we have, in fact, received a patent for it,” Quibi said in a statement. “These claims have absolutely no merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them in court.”

Meanwhile, in a statement, Eko described Quibi’s technology as “a near-identical copy of its own,” and said the company’s legal motion is “nothing more than a PR stunt”:

It is telling that Quibi filed the motion only after learning the Wall Street Journal was going to publish an article exposing allegations of Quibi’s theft of Eko’s technology … Eko will take the legal actions necessary to defend its intellectual property and looks forward to demonstrating its patent rights to the court.

You can read Quibi’s full complaint below.

Quibi complaint by TechCrunch on Scribd

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Quibi and Eko are in a legal battle over video tech

Monograph, a startup working on cloud-based software that makes project and cost management easier for architects, announced today that it has raised $1.9 million in seed funding. The round was led by Homebrew Ventures and Parade Ventures, with participation from Designer Fund, Hustle Fund VC and angel investors.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded last year by Robert Yuen, Alex Dixon and Moe Amaya. Each has experience in architecture, design and software development, making them well-positioned to create a management platform tailored for architects.

Monograph was designed to be easy to use, with an emphasis on the onboarding process so firms are encouraged to switch from traditional project management methods, like spreadsheets, to the software. The startup says hundreds of architects, ranging from solo practitioners to firms with more than 60 people, have already signed up. Monograph has been used to help manage more than $125 million in projects, ranging in size from bathroom and kitchen remodeling to building large hotels.

Before Monograph, the three were partners in an agency called Dixon and Moe, working as UI/UX consultants for tech startups and architecture firms.

“Monograph really grew out of the agency as a product we saw solving problems that we saw in our day to day lives as architectural designers, and also in our everyday lives with our friends,” Yuen told TechCrunch. “That’s the loss in the transparency of information between how much time you are spending on work, how projects are going, who is working on it. There is really no accurate way to manage a project and they are growing in complexity each year.”

Like other tech companies in the architecture space, including PlanGrid, Procore and UpCodes, Monograph is designed to streamline aspects of the design and building process, while making it easier for teams to collaborate.

Monograph is currently designed for use by architects and consultants, and includes tools to assign milestones, manage project timelines and for timesheets, billing and invoicing. Data is then used for cost and progress analytics, like MoneyGantt, a feature for budget forecasting.

Yuen says that no matter a project’s size, each team includes architects, designers and engineers. By the end of the year, the company plans to start releasing new versions of Monograph that can be used by structural, electrical and mechanical engineers, as well as other licensed professionals.

The company’s funding will be used to hire for its software engineering and customer support teams.

In a press statement, Homebrew partner Satya Patel said “Monograph offers transformative organization and project management software that is changing the way architects and designers work so that they can deliver better client service, manage costs and earn more profit. We look forward to seeing the company’s continued growth and innovation in a market that has been waiting for modern solutions.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Monograph, developer of project and cost management software for architects, raises .9 million

Augmented reality technology did not, it turns out, light the touch paper on a booming new industry. What we got instead were a few cute applications on smartphones and devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens, which has seen pretty limited success.

Where AR has proved that it may have a future is in industry, allowing workers to look at plans whilst they assemble something, for instance.

A new U.K. startup hopes to nudge that future on further with a radical new technology which, although it resembles the HoloLens, is in fact a highly accurate helmet-mounted screen that enables construction workers to place beams or bricks in exactly the right locations, thus introducing significant savings in time normally lost due to mistakes.

To further boost its efforts, XYZ Reality has closed a £5 million Series A funding round, led by Amadeus Capital Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Adara Ventures and J Coffey Construction. The company will build out its AR cloud and software platform and build its team to serve the EU market and expand to the U.S. and Asia.

The idea behind it is highly innovative. A dedicated helmet with an attached visor projects a highly accurate hologram — based on laser positioning — in front of the wearer’s face, allowing them to place objects precisely according to plans projected in front of their eyes.

The company claims its HoloSite headset is the “world’s first engineering-grade Augmented Reality device,” that allows construction workers to view Building Information Models on-site to a five-millimeter accuracy.

The problem it’s solving is an age-old one. In today’s construction industry, buildings are designed in 3D and then converted into 2D drawings. But tradespeople are asked to interpret those 2D drawings and turn them into 3D buildings within construction “tolerances.” This process creates inefficiencies that mean up to 80% of the construction being “out-of-tolerance.” It’s estimated that 7-11% of project costs are wasted this way and, of course, in mega-projects like huge bridges, this amounts to an average of more than $100 million.

Founder, CEO and builder David Mitchell, who has spent his career in the construction industry, says: “Works are currently validated after the fact through laser scanning. But 80% of the time the construction fails to meet acceptable tolerances. With HoloSite, we can prevent errors happening in the first place.”

Mitchell came up with the idea of eliminating 2D designs after the 2008 recession devastated the industry.

I tried out the headset for myself and found that I could, with a reasonable degree of accuracy, from scratch complete a basic assembly of bricks according to the plans projected in front of my eyes.

XYZ says it is possible to build a bathroom in two hours using the headset, versus a day without it, using the technology.

The hope is that as this technology improves, any tradesperson would be able to work on a construction site with less need for training in 2D plans, but still with a high degree of accuracy.

The project is not without risk. Daqri, which built enterprise-grade AR headsets for construction, shuttered its HQ last year. Earlier, Osterhout Design Group unloaded its AR glasses patents after acquisition talks with Magic Leap, Facebook and others stalled. Meta, an AR headset startup that raised $73 million from VCs, including Tencent, also sold its assets earlier this year after the company ran out of cash.

But Amadeus is bullish. Nick Kingsbury, partner, Amadeus Capital Partners said: “Construction is a sector that’s ripe for radical innovation. This technology has the potential to revolutionize how the construction industry sets out and validates its work, reducing costs and the chance of project slippage from mistakes.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | XYZ Reality secures £5M to bring a hologram headset to the construction industry

The insurance industry depends on data to support a number of functions the average person in the street is usually completely unaware of, such as “informed risk selection,” underwriting and claims management. Like many industries, it would like to automate much of this, but it’s just not that simple.

Synthesized is a U.K. startup that tries to reduce friction on preparing all the data that’s needed, to enable insurers to share data safely, complying with regulations. The more that happens, the more innovation can happen, such as insuring for a low-carbon economy, something that will become increasingly important.

It has now raised $2.8 million in a new round of funding co-led by Cambridge-based IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, with participation from Seedcamp, Pretiosum Ventures and a number of finance and technology executives in the U.K. Financing from the round will be used to double the number of its employees in London, and build out its sales and product teams.

Co-founder Nicolai Baldin said: “Synthesized substantially reduces the time to develop and comprehensively test data-driven projects and as a result empowers engineers to build better products and services for end-users. With the new funding from IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures, Synthesized is well-positioned to facilitate its business operations to turbocharge development processes across many sectors, such as finance, insurance and healthcare.”

Ed Stacey, managing partner at IQ Capital said: “Responsible organizations are waking up to the need to ensure that their deployed machine learning systems are fair and unbiased, as well as being robust and accurate. Synthesized’s ability to create multiple, balanced data sets in a flexible way gives organizations and their customers the confidence they need in deployed production systems, while also greatly speeding up the development process. Javier Santiso, CEO and founder of Alma Mundi Ventures, said that “The prospects for Synthesized are bright and we see the impact of synthetic data permeating almost every industry.”

Synthesized competes in various ways with products from Gretel AI, Snorkel, Tonic AI, Hazy and Mostly AI.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Insurance AI startup Synthesized raises .8M from IQ Capital and Mundi Ventures