Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated.

The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services that leverage AI and machine learning, and, while website monitoring may not seem like an obvious area where machine learning can add a lot of value, if you’ve ever used one of these services, you know that they can often unleash a plethora of false alerts. For the most part, after all, these tools simply look for something in a website’s underlying code to change and then trigger an alert based on that (and maybe some other parameters you’ve set).

Image Credits: Visualping

Earlier this week, Visualping launched its first machine learning-based tools to avoid just that. The company argues that it can eliminate up to 80% of false alerts by combining feedback from its more than 1.5 million users with its new ML algorithms. Thanks to this, Visualping can now learn the best configuration for how to monitor a site when users set up a new alert.

“Visualping has the hearts of over a million people across the world, as well as the vast majority of the Fortune 500. To be a part of their journey and to lead this round of financing is a dream,” FUSE’s Brendan Wales said.

Visualping founder and CEO Serge Salager tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to focus on building out its product but also to build a commercial team. So far, he said, the company’s growth has been primarily product led.

As a part of these efforts, the company also plans to launch Visualping Business, with support for these new ML tools and additional collaboration features, and Visualping Personal for individual users who want to monitor things like ticket availability for concerts or to track news, price drops or job postings, for example. For now, the personal plan will not include support for ML. “False alerts are not a huge problem for personal use as people are checking two-three websites but a huge problem for enterprise where teams need to process hundreds of alerts per day,” Salager told me.

The current idea is to launch these new plans in November, together with mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company will also relaunch its extensions around this time, too.

It’s also worth noting that while Visualping monetizes its web-based service, you can still use the extension in the browser for free.


Source: Tech Crunch

Xiaomi global shipments push past Apple for No. 2 spot

A banner quarter for Xiaomi helped the Chinese mobile company snag the No. 2 spot in global smartphone shipments, according to newly posted Q2 numbers from research firm Canalys. It’s pretty stunning growth for the company, up 83% year-over-year for the quarter and capturing 17% of the global market.

The surge puts Xiaomi at No. 2, globally, behind only Samsung’s 19% by a relatively small margin. Apple is at third with 14% (after its own solid growth has slowed), while fellow Chinese manufacturers Oppo and Vivo round out the top five at 10% a piece.

Huawei, of course, is nowhere to be seen among the top companies. It’s a pretty massive drop, due in no small part to blacklisting that has both barred the company from certain markets (namely, the U.S.) and cut off access to U.S. mobile products, including Google’s Android and various apps.

Image Credits: Canalys

Canalys cites aggressive pricing as a big factor in Xiaomi’s success — particularly contrasted with premium priced offerings from Samsung and Apple.

“It is now transforming its business model from challenger to incumbent, with initiatives such as channel partner consolidation and more careful management of older stock in the open market,” the analyst firm’s Research Manager Ben Stanton said in a release. “It is still largely skewed toward the mass market, however, and compared with Samsung and Apple, its average selling price is around 40% and 75% cheaper respectively. So a major priority for Xiaomi this year is to grow sales of its high-end devices, such as the Mi 11 Ultra.”

The company certainly isn’t a household name in the States (the company has dealt with its own issues here), but of late it has found particular success in Latin America, Africa and Western Europe. It seems that there are still plenty of markets available to continue its expansion as it looks to take on Samsung, even as Oppo and Vivo hope to continue their own respective rapid global growth.


Source: Tech Crunch

Announcing the agenda for the Disrupt Stage this September

Disrupt 2021 stands to be the best Disrupt yet. We have an incredible lineup of speakers both on the Disrupt Stage and the Extra Crunch Stage. And, of course, we can’t forget the Startup Battlefield, which has been a launch pad for some of the biggest tech companies in the world today, including Dropbox, Mint and Cloudflare.

Today, we’re excited to give you a closer look at the Disrupt Stage, where the biggest names in tech talk about their companies, their plans, and what’s next for the greater tech ecosystem.

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to the three jam-packed days we’re planning for you at Disrupt. Along with these heavy hitters on the Disrupt Stage, you can get your founder how-to knowledge at sessions on the Extra Crunch Stage, breakout sessions and intimate roundtable discussions. You’ll be able to find and engage with people from all around the world through world-class networking on CrunchMatch and our virtual platform — all for under $100 for a limited time with even deeper discounts for nonprofit/government agencies, students and up-and-coming founders!

So without any further ado, check out the current agenda for the Disrupt Stage:

HEALTH/BIOTECH

Saving the World with Ugur Sahin (BioNTech) and Ursheet Parikh (Mayfield Fund)

COVID-19 changed everything. It not only threatened our individual health and well-being, but shook industries and economies across the globe. But the same could be said about the COVID-19 vaccines. Hear from BioNTech co-founder and CEO Ugur Sahin on the process of rapidly developing the world’s most sought-after vaccine, alongside Pfizer, and the long-term potential of mRNA-based therapies. Sahin will be joined by Ursheet Parikh of Mayfield Fund to discuss what’s next for startups in this rapidly evolving industry.

Democratizing Healthcare with Toyin Ajayi (Cityblock Health), Adrian Aoun (Forward),and Eren Bali (Carbon Health)

It’s no secret that the current healthcare system in America is broken. Technology stands to make a huge difference, especially in the backdrop of eased regulations due to COVID-19. Hear how startup founders from Forward, Carbon Health and Cityblock Health decided to tackle the behemoth, backward industry of healthcare, as well as talk through their plans to democratize access and digitize the industry.

Pot, Pottery and Beyond with Seth Rogen (Houseplant), Haneen Davies (Houseplant), and Michael Mohr (Houseplant)

Somehow we live in world where alcohol is sold in grocery stores and weed is considered a gateway drug. But that is rapidly changing. The legalized cannabis industry is estimated to be worth more than $13 billion in 2021, and major players from big food, pharma, etc. all want a slice of the pie. Hear from actor and comedian Seth Rogen on his well-known passion for pot, and how it led him to start Houseplant. Rogen will also be joined by Houseplant Chief Commercial Officer Haneen Davies and co-founder and CEO Michael Mohr.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition — Session 1

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.

IMPACT

From ABC’s to IPO with Luis von Ahn (Duolingo)

Language-learning company Duolingo was founded in 2011 and has raised more than $167 million in private capital, and recently filed to go public. Despite avoiding monetization for years, the startup saw revenue growth of 120%+ in 2020, with no signs of slowing. CEO and co-founder Luis von Ahn will join us on the Disrupt stage to talk about gamifying education, prepping for a public offering, and how he and the team built the anti-Rosetta Stone with an owl as a mascot.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition — Session 2

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.

FINTECH

Collecting Crypto Opportunities with Roham Gharegozlou (Dapper Labs)

Dapper Labs launched the digital collectible craze into the mainstream earlier this year with its smash hit NBA Top Shot, but even amid sinking NFT sales, CEO Roham Gharagozlou has big ambitions for the space. His startup most recently hit a $7.5 billion valuation and has aims to own the NFT ecosystem with their Flow blockchain product.

Breaking the Bank with Brian Armstrong (Coinbase)

Coinbase’s massive direct listing earlier this year couldn’t have come at a better time as peaking crypto enthusiasm reached market exuberance, but now amid a major market correction, CEO Brian Armstrong is once again tasked with building for the future and navigating volatility while fending off global competitors knocking at their door.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

ENTERPRISE/SAAS & SECURITY

Staying a Step Ahead with Rinki Sethi (Twitter)

In 2020, in the midst of an already frantic year, Twitter was breached in a very public way. Behind the scenes, Twitter spends a tremendous amount of time, money and energy on user protection and platform integrity. A big part of that is through information security. CISO Rinki Sethi will join us at Disrupt to talk through how Twitter tries to stay ahead of malicious actors, and how tech companies large and small can do the same.

From Bootstrapped to Billions with Tope Awotona (Calendly)

Dozens have tried to reinvent the calendar, and dozens have failed. Tope Awotona built Calendly not as a way to reinvent the wheel, but to add a layer of simplicity to the chaos of human communication and time management. And boy did it work! The once bootstrapped company is now worth more than $3 billion, serving individuals and enterprises alike. Hear from the founder and CEO on how he got Calendly off the ground, why he decided to finally take institutional investment, and how the company has changed as it grows.

Startup Battlefield Competition — Session 3

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.

An Unstoppable Force and an Immovable Object with Stewart Butterfield (Slack) and Bret Taylor (Salesforce)

Slack and Salesforce are two of the biggest names in all of tech. The communication tool (born from one of the odder pivots in tech history) is commonplace across organizations from almost every industry. It’s an unstoppable force. The sales CRM behemoth is used all over the world by sales teams small and large. An immovable object. In December of 2020, the pair announced a $27.7 billion merger. Hear from Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield and Salesforce President and COO Bret Taylor about the future of the combined entity, why the deal made sense, and what it’s like to write down that many 0s.

Dogmatic Design with Melanie Perkins (Canva)

The rapid evolution of the design industry can’t be understated. From better collaboration among designers and other departments, to collaboration among designers themselves, to the democratization of design across an organization, the landscape is changing. Canva has led the charge in this evolution, building one of the simplest (and yet full-featured) tools on the market. Hear co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins talk about scaling the business to now be worth upward of $15 billion, and expanding the business from B2C to B2B, all while continuing to iterate the product.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition — Session 4

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.

HARDWARE

Reflecting on Success with Brynn Putnam (Mirror)

Mirror co-founder and CEO Brynn Putnam first hit the Disrupt Stage years ago to launch her idea for a better, more beautiful, fitness product. This year, she’s returning to our stage to talk through the ups and downs of building a hardware product, how she manages the variety of moving pieces of this business (from the instructor network, to the content and subscription business, to sales and marketing, etc.) and walk us through the company’s $500 million acquisition by Lululemon.

A Fictional Future Built with Real AI with Kai-Fu Lee (Sinovation Ventures) and Chen Qiufan (World Chinese Science Fiction Association)

A leading mind in AI research and investment and a bold new voice in science fiction collaborate in “AI 2041,” a remarkable new collection of stories imagining a future shaped by technology being built today. Hear Sinovation Ventures Chairman and CEO Kai-Fu Lee and author Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan) discuss the tech that inspired their book and the changes they expect over the next two decades.

Drones, Self-driving Cars, and Everything in Between with Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg (U.S. Department of Transportation)

Pete Buttigieg first came on the scene as a small-town mayor in Indiana. He launched onto the national stage as a presidential candidate for the Democratic party in 2020. He now serves as U.S. secretary of transportation under the Biden administration, and oversees everything from public transport to autonomous vehicle regulation. Hear Secretary Buttigieg’s take on micromobility, the future of cities, drone delivery, autonomous vehicles and more in this fireside chat.

Crafting a Lunar Trajectory in Newspace with Peter Beck (Rocket Lab)

Rocket Lab has upgraded its ambitions from building a global launch empire to designing its own spacecraft and visiting the moon and beyond. Founder and CEO Peter Beck will speak to the challenges and opportunities lying ahead for his fast-growing space and tech outfit.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

VENTURE CAPITAL

Bankrolling Web 3.0 with Katie Haun (Andreessen Horowitz)

At $2.2 billion, Andreessen Horowitz’s third crypto-centric fund is their largest vertical-specific bet ever and a signal of just how crucial blockchain tech and decentralized finance is to the firm’s future. General Partner Katie Haun co-leads the crypto team tasked with tracking down the firm’s next Coinbase, which returned billions for the firm.

Checking In with Chris Sacca (Lowercarbon Capital)

Chris Sacca has been a judge on “Shark Tank” and appeared on the show “Billions.” But he’s best known for sharing his opinions on Twitter, a company in which he invested early and often, and for placing a wide range of other hugely successful bets, including Uber, Instagram and Twilio. Now, at his newest firm, Lowercarbon Capital, Sacca is focusing his attention and dollars on finding and funding solutions to the climate crisis, and we’re excited to talk with him about where he’s seeing the most opportunity bubbling up in this fireside chat.

Speaking SPAC with Chamath Palihapitiya (Social Capital)

Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and CEO of Social Capital, is one of the world’s most well-regarded and respected investors and has been at the forefront of the recent SPAC craze. Hear Palihapitiya’s thoughts on the future of SPACs, what tech sectors are primed for a boom, and what excites him most in terms of future investments.

The Disrupt Desk

Industry experts and TechCrunch editors break down the panels you missed with analysis, insight and likely a laugh or two.

Startup Battlefield Competition — Final Round

TechCrunch’s iconic startup competition is back, as entrepreneurs from around the world pitch expert judges and vie for the Startup Battlefield Cup and $100,000.

MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

Esports Everywhere with Nicole LaPointe Jameson (Evil Geniuses)

The pandemic not only spurred the growth of gaming as a hobby, but gave an extra boost to the world of esports. Hear Evil Geniuses’ CEO Nicole LaPointe Jameson outline where esports is headed, how data and technology are driving the players, teams, leagues and beyond, and what opportunities lie in this ever-growing industry.

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Source: Tech Crunch

Valve launches Steam Deck, a $400 PC gaming portable

A new challenger has emerged in the gaming hardware category. Game distribution giant Valve today announced the launch of Steam Deck, a $399 gaming portable designed to take PC games on the go.

The handheld (which has echoes of several portable gaming rigs of years past) features a seven-inch screen and runs on a quad-core Zen 2 CPU, coupled with AMD RDNA 2 graphics and 16GB of RAM. Storage runs 64GB to 512GB, the latter of which bumps the price up to $649. The built-in storage can be augmented via microSD.

Image Credits: Valve

Naturally, the thing is custom built for Valve’s wildly popular Steam platform (it’s right there in the name, after all). Users log into their Steam account and their library — and friends list — are right there, ready to go. There’s even a dedicated Steam button.

The system has been rumored for some time now, but it enters the world during a rapidly evolving era for gaming. Essentially the company is hoping to outperform the admitted graphical limitations of Nintendo’s Switch (OLED or no), while filling in the gap as cloud-based gaming from companies like Microsoft are still working on a foothold as they deal with latency and other technical limitations. There’s also the Nvidia Shield Portable — though we’ve not heard much from that project, of late.

Image Credits: Valve

Flanking the 1280 x 800 touchscreen are a pair of trackpads and thumb sticks. A built-in gyroscope also uses movement to control the gaming experience. There’s a single USB-C port for charging, peripherals and connecting to a big screen, while a 40Wh battery promises between 7-8 hours of gameplay, by Valve’s numbers.

 

Image Credits: Valve

The system is up for preorder now and starts shipping this December, in time for the holidays.


Source: Tech Crunch

Researchers match DeepMind’s AlphaFold2 protein folding power with faster, freely available model

DeepMind stunned the biology world late last year when its AlphaFold2 AI model predicted the structure of proteins (a common and very difficult problem) so accurately that many declared the decades-old problem “solved.” Now researchers claim to have leapfrogged DeepMind the way DeepMind leapfrogged the rest of the world, with RoseTTAFold, a system that does nearly the same thing at a fraction of the computational cost. (Oh, and it’s free to use.)

AlphaFold2 has been the talk of the industry since November, when it blew away the competition at CASP14, a virtual competition between algorithms built to predict the physical structure of a protein given the sequence of amino acids that make it up. The model from DeepMind was so far ahead of the others, so highly and reliably accurate, that many in the field have talked (half-seriously and in good humor) about moving on to a new field.

But one aspect that seemed to satisfy no one was DeepMind’s plans for the system. It was not exhaustively and openly described, and some worried that the company (which is owned by Alphabet/Google) was planning on more or less keeping the secret sauce to themselves — which would be their prerogative but also somewhat against the ethos of mutual aid in the scientific world.

Update: In something of a surprise, DeepMind published more detailed methods in the journal Nature today. The code is available on GitHub. This does considerably lessen the aforementioned concern, but the advance described below is still highly relevant. I’ve also added a comment from that team at the bottom of the article.

That concern seems to have been at least partly mooted by work from University of Washington researchers led by David Baker and Minkyung Baek, published in the latest issue of the journal Science. Baker, you may remember, recently won a Breakthrough Prize for his team’s work combating COVID-19 with engineered proteins.

The team’s new model, RoseTTAFold, makes predictions at similar accuracy levels using methods that Baker, responding to questions via email, candidly admitted were inspired by those used by AlphaFold2.

“The AlphaFold2 group presented several new high-level concepts at the CASP14 meeting. Starting from these ideas, and with a lot of collective brainstorming with colleagues in the group, Minkyung has been able to make amazing progress in very little time,” he said. (“She is amazing!” he added.)

Examples of predicted protein structures and their ground truths. A score above 90 is considered extremely good. Image Credits: UW/Baek et al

Baker’s group more or less placed second at CASP14, no mean feat, but hearing DeepMind’s methods described even generally set them on a collision course. They developed a “three-track” neural network that simultaneously considered the amino acid sequence (one dimension), distances between residues (two dimensions) and coordinates in space (three dimensions). The implementation is beyond complex and far outside the scope of this article, but the result is a model that achieves almost the same accuracy levels — levels, it bears repeating, that were completely unprecedented less than a year ago.

What’s more, RoseTTAFold accomplishes this level of accuracy far more quickly — that is, using less computation power. As the paper puts it:

DeepMind reported using several GPUs for days to make individual predictions, whereas our predictions are made in a single pass through the network in the same manner that would be used for a server…the end-to-end version of RoseTTAFold requires ~10 min on an RTX2080 GPU to generate backbone coordinates for proteins with less than 400 residues.

Hear that? It’s the sound of thousands of microbiologists sighing in relief and discarding drafts of emails asking for supercomputer time. It may not be easy to lay one’s hands on a 2080 these days, but the point is any high-end desktop GPU can perform this task in minutes, instead of requiring a high-end cluster running for days.

The modest requirements make RoseTTAFold suitable for public hosting and distribution as well, something that might never have been in the cards for AlphaFold2.

“We have a public server that anyone can submit protein sequences to and have the structures predicted,” Baker said. “There have been over 4,500 submissions since we put the server up a few weeks ago. We have also made the source code freely available.”

This may seem very niche, and it is, but protein folding has historically been one of the toughest problems in biology and one toward which countless hours of high-performance computing have been dedicated. You may recall Folding@Home, the popular distributed computing app that let people donate their computing cycles to attempting to predict protein structures. The kind of problem that might have taken a thousand computers days or weeks to do — essentially by brute-forcing solutions and checking for fit — now can be done in minutes on a single desktop.

The physical structure of proteins is of utmost importance in biology, as it is proteins that do the vast majority of tasks in our bodies, and proteins that must be modified, suppressed, enhanced and so on for therapeutic reasons; first, however, they need to be understood, and until November that understanding could not be reliably achieved computationally. At CASP14 it was proven to be possible, and now it has been made widely available.

It is not, by a long shot, a “solution” to the problem of protein folding, though the sentiment has been expressed. Most proteins at rest in neutral conditions can now have their structure predicted, and that has huge repercussions in multiple domains, but proteins are seldom found “at rest in neutral conditions.” They twist and contort to grab or release other molecules, to block or slip through gates and other proteins, and generally to do everything they do. These interactions are far more numerous, complex and difficult to predict, and neither AlphaFold2 nor RoseTTAFold can do so.

“There are many exciting chapters ahead… the story is just beginning,” said Baker.

Regarding the DeepMind paper, Baker offered the following comment in the spirit of collegiate camaraderie:

I’ve read through, and think this is a beautiful paper describing fantastic work.

The DeepMind paper is actually very complementary to our paper, and I think it is appropriate that it is not coming out after ours, as our work is really based on their advances.

I think that readers will enjoy reading both papers — they are very far from being duplicative. As we point out in our paper, their method is more accurate than ours, and now it will be very interesting to see what features of their approach are responsible for the remaining differences. We are already using RoseTTAFold for protein design and more systematic protein-protein complex structure prediction, and we are excited about rapidly improving these, along with traditional single chain modeling, by incorporating ideas from the DeepMind paper.

If you’re curious about the science and the potential repercussions, consider reading this much more detailed and technical account of the methods and possible next steps written in the wake of AlphaFold2’s CASP14 performance.


Source: Tech Crunch

The latest distraction-free Freewrite features an Ernest Hemingway monogrammed attaché case

In our review last year, we called the Freewrite Traveler “outstanding, but expensive.” The latest version of Astrohaus’ distraction-free word processing hardware tool does little to address the latter concern. In fact, the Ernest Hemingway Freewrite Signature Edition comes in at a full $300 more than its predecessor.

But the latest edition of the hardware strives to be something more than just a utilitarian writing tool. In fact, Astrohaus secured the blessing from the Ernest Hemingway estate for the new version of a product that began life as the “Hemingwrite” for its 2014 Kickstarter campaign.

The product strives to live up to some of the ethos and/or aesthetics of “The Sun Also Rises” author. “Even though we changed the name to Freewrite in 2015, the original Hemingwrite concept is what captured the world’s attention,” co-founder and CEO Adam Leeb said in a release tied to the news. This time out, however, the company secured the family’s blessing.

The new version trades portability for aesthetic, with the inclusion of an attaché case that brings to mind both writers’ tools of yore and, more recently, retro turntables from companies like Crosley. There were, of course, travel typewriters that came with their own carrying case, but the Freewrite’s significantly slimmer profile makes the setup far more compact.

Here’s Astrohaus’ write-up of the hardware [best read in a Ron Burgundy voice]:

The Hemingwrite features an exclusive design with green keycaps and a hand-polished aluminum chassis that is uncoated and will develop a unique patina over time. Each unit is finished by hand – no two are exactly alike. Every Hemingwrite comes with a Hemingway monogramed cleaning cloth and an exclusive attaché case to safely store the device and elegantly transport it anywhere inspiration is found. The hard-sided Hemingwrite Attaché Case is crafted from rich cognac leather and a cream-colored velvet lining. A deep pocket is located inside to store books, pens, notebooks, or other pieces of writing inspiration.

If you’re looking for something to reduce the distractions that come from writing on a laptop, while ramping up the aesthetic homage to days of yore, the Ernest Hemingway Freewrite Signature Edition is available now for $899.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon launches its mobile-first Kindle Vella serialized story platform

As it promised last month, Amazon has launched its serialized fiction Kindle Vella store that lets you unlock episodic, self-published stories via in-app purchases. The new platform is a way for readers to discover new fiction and a new way for authors to generate revenue from the Kindle Direct Publishing service.

While the name might suggest otherwise, Kindle Vella isn’t available on Amazon’s Kindle e-readers. Rather, you’ll only find it on Amazon.com or the Kindle iOS app (no Android for now). To start with, the service will be limited to US-based authors who publish stories in English.

The serialized stories will run from 600 to 5,000 words per episode, with the first three offered for free. To see subsequent episodes, you’ll need to pay for “tokens,” with prices ranging from $2 for 200 tokens up to $15 for 1,700 tokens. The latter will give you about 34 episodes, though prices per episode depend on the word count — the more words, the more you’ll have to spend.

Authors, meanwhile, will receive 50 percent of the revenue along with bonuses based on engagement with the app’s social media-style features. To that end, readers can follow stories to be notified of new episodes, leave a thumbs up for episodes they like, apply a “Fave” for their favorite story of the week (provided they purchase tokens), and share on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. To boost engagement, authors can speak directly to readers at the end of episodes to “share story insights and behind-the-scenes content,” Amazon wrote.

Since Amazon opened Vella to authors three months ago, “thousands of authors” have published “tens of thousands of Kindle Vella episodes across dozens of genres and microgenre,” Amazon said. Authors appear to be interested as well. “I’ve published close to 30 novels, and I’m enjoying the adventure of writing The Marriage Auction in this new format,” said bestselling author Audrey Carlan in a statement. Whether or not the format takes off now depends on readers — to try it out, you can access Vella here.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget


Source: Tech Crunch

Crypto startup Phantom banks funding from Andreessen Horowitz to scale its multichain wallet

While retail investors grew more comfortable buying cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in 2021, the decentralized application world still has a lot of work to do when it comes to onboarding a mainstream user base.

Phantom is part of a new class of crypto startups looking to build infrastructure that streamlines blockchain-based applications and provides a more user-friendly UX for navigating the crypto world, something that can make the entire space more approachable to a non-developer audience. Users can download the Phantom wallet to their browsers to interact with applications, swap tokens and collect NFTs.

The crypto wallet startup has banked a $9 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Variant Fund, Jump Capital, DeFi Alliance, Solana Foundation and Garry Tan also participating. The round, which closed earlier this summer, comes as some venture capital firms embrace a crypto future even as volatility continues to envelop the broader market. Last month, a16z announced a whopping 2.2 billion crypto fund, the firm’s largest vertical-specific investment vehicle ever.

Image via Phantom

The co-founding team of CEO Brandon Millman, CPO Chris Kalani and CEO Francesco Agosti all come aboard from crypto infrastructure startup 0x.

At the moment, Phantom is best-known among the Solana community, where it has become the go-to wallet for applications on that blockchain. The startup’s ambition is to interface with more and more networks, currently building out compatibility with Ethereum and looking to embrace other blockchains, aiming to be a product built for a “multichain world,” Millman tells TechCrunch.

Alongside building out support for other networks, Phantom wants to build more sophisticated DeFi mechanisms right into their wallet, allowing users to stake cryptocurrencies and swap more tokens inside the wallet.

The startup says they have some 40,000 users of their existing wallet product.

Building out a presence on the popular Ethereum blockchain, which already has a handful of popular wallet providers, will be a challenge, but Phantom’s broadest challenge is helping a new breed of crypto-curious users interface with a network of apps that still have a long way to go when it comes to being mainstream-friendly.

“The entire space is kind of stuck in this ‘built by developers for other developers mode,’ ” Millman says. “This bar has been kind of stuck there, and no one is really stepping up to push the bar up higher.”


Source: Tech Crunch

WhatsApp is testing multidevice support that works without the phone

WhatsApp is finally pushing an improvement to a key feature that even the Facebook-owned instant messaging service acknowledges has been a top request from users for years.

On Wednesday, WhatsApp said it is rolling out a limited public beta test for its improved multidevice capability.

The update enables WhatsApp users for the first time to use the service on up to four nonphone devices without having the registered phone switched on or otherwise connected to the internet. A WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch that this chain of multiple devices can’t have another phone in it.

“Each companion device will connect to your WhatsApp independently,” said the messaging app in a post.

To be clear, WhatsApp, which is used by more than 2 billion users globally, already provides support for multiple-device use. A user can simultaneously access the service, for instance, from a web browser or a desktop app on their computer. But the multidevice support flow currently requires the phone to be connected to the internet.

In WhatsApp’s own words:

By requiring the phone to perform all operations, companion devices are slower and frequently get disconnected — especially when the phone has a poor connection, its battery is running low, or the application process gets killed by the phone’s OS. It also allows for only a single companion device to be operative at a time, meaning people can’t be on a call in Portal while checking their messages on their PC, for example.

The new WhatsApp multi-device architecture removes these hurdles, no longer requiring a smartphone to be the source of truth while still keeping user data seamlessly and securely synchronized and private.

In a whitepaper published today (PDF), WhatsApp has outlined how this feature works, which gives an insight into why it took so long to ship.

The firm says it has developed new technologies that ensure that even on multiple devices, messages sync while maintaining end-to-end encryption, a feat that is currently rare in the market.

Image: WhatsApp

“To achieve this, we had to rethink WhatsApp’s architecture and design new systems to enable a standalone multi-device experience while preserving privacy and end-to-end encryption,” the company wrote. “Each message is individually encrypted using the established pairwise encryption session with each device. Messages are not stored on the server after they are delivered.”

The feature also doesn’t change how WhatsApp uses cloud backups for users, a spokesperson said. “The mechanism we use to synchronize messages and other app data across a user’s devices is independent from our cloud backups,” the spokesperson added, pointing to the whitepaper that describes the protocol in more detail.

WhatsApp doesn’t have a specific date for when it plans to roll out this feature to all users. Instead, the firm told us that it is initially rolling out this feature to its existing beta users. Over the coming months, it plans to start adding it as an opt-in beta feature for a small number of users on stable versions of the app, as well.

The aforementioned feature is one of many that WhatsApp is currently developing. WhatsApp is working on a dedicated app for the iPad, as well as expanding on the last year’s disappearing mode feature. The app, which currently allows users to set a seven-day timer on messages, plans to expand this feature to let users share pictures and videos that can only be viewed once.


Source: Tech Crunch

SF’s Off the Grid food truck festival refocuses on emergency response and services

Off the Grid is a mainstay of the San Francisco culinary scene. The event company, founded by Matt Cohen in 2010, created neighborhood pop-up festivals centered around entrepreneurial food trucks. It was part of the vanguard in the food truck movement, designed to open a path to restaurants for a new generation of ambitious and diverse chefs with inventive ideas around food and the people who enjoy it.

Off the Grid’s food festival in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Over the years, the festivals grew to extreme popularity (I remember more than once trying to go and realizing that others have way more patience to wait in line than I do), and Off the Grid itself increasingly expanded into catering for events. “[I] built my career on the idea that food is a source of comfort at all different times,” Cohen said.

Well, we do live in different times, don’t we?

The first inklings of a change for the company started back in 2017, when wildfires like those in Sonoma and Napa swept across California. Frontline firefighters, operating at times in remote areas of the state, were often forced to eat what the military dubs MREs or Meals Ready-to-Eat.

Cohen and his team saw an opportunity. “For a long time in emergency response, people thought about food as calories, not necessarily about allowing local food businesses to sustain themselves,” he said. He noted that MREs are almost universally bland, and that the meals are typically ordered in bulk from outside the state. Could Off the Grid connect the dots by having local restauranteurs cook meals while Off the Grid supplied the logistics to get them to the frontlines?

Those 2017 fires were the first time the company forayed into helping first responders and victims, and Off the Grid along with its restauranteurs supplied an estimated 20,000 people with meals that year. “[We] got an understanding of the market landscape in emergency response,” he said.

Those first trials were accelerated dramatically in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across California and the rest of the world. Suddenly, delivered meals were the only means for restaurants to connect to their communities, and the frontlines were no longer in the foothills where the fires were, but everywhere all the time.

Off the Grid worked with its restaurant partners to scale up food delivery to frontline workers and victims during the pandemic and wildfire season last year. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Off the Grid doubled down on its pivot, seeing an opportunity to provide solace to people at a time of terrible tragedy. “People don’t think of food being delivered during emergencies as delicious, [since] the reality is that people are happy to just have anything to eat,” Cohen said. “But then, delicious food can be a real comfort when the rest of their lives are disrupted.” Over the course of the pandemic, Off the Grid facilitated the delivery of 1.3 million meals with a “rotating list of options, so people can constantly be delighted,” targeting customers ranging from temporary shelters to immunocompromised consumers residing at home.

In addition to giving customers delectable options, the model also helped sustain the local food scene that Off the Grid had spent years growing through its programs. Cohen said the company sees these links as a key tool for building resilient communities, particularly as climate change continues to ravage California and much of the rest of the world.

Last year’s punctuated growth forced the startup to scale up quickly. Food safety and health regulations vary from county to county, which meant that as it delivered meals throughout the greater Bay Area and the rest of California, Off the Grid had to develop scalable processes to handle the paperwork and logistics. That technology is now forming the basis for the next phase of its business as Off the Grid enters its second decade in operation.

“[There are a lot of] unique aspects of food service in particular, licensing, and permitting, and insurance, and the less sexy things that allows us to operate,” Cohen said. With those logistics increasingly systematized, 2021 is going to be an even more ambitious year for the company.

Off the Grid CEO and founder Matt Cohen. Image Credits: Off the Grid

“We actually have been working with the state and the Red Cross to identify 39 counties in the state of California that are at relatively high risk for fire danger, and on-board 200 restaurants … so that in the event there is a fire, we can access them and activate them,” he said. Today, roughly half the company is focused on its emergency response programs.

That doesn’t mean its food festivals will go away. It has reopened its smaller venues in places like Levi’s Plaza near SF’s Coit Tower in North Beach, and it intends to restart its larger festivals as safety guidelines allow. But emergency response is a new, enduring mission for this mission-oriented company. “We’re definitely going to continue to do this as long as there is a need,” Cohen said.


Source: Tech Crunch