Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Retailers join party as baby fashion grows out of infancy
ETtech Top 5: Spike in e-commerce festive sales, Infy acquires Irish firm & more
Redmi 8 to Launch in India Today: What You Need to Know
Smart fitness company Mirror, maker of a reflective LCD device with two-way audio and video, launches in-home 1:1 personal training at $40 per 30-minute session (Amanda Capritto/CNET)
Smart fitness company Mirror, maker of a reflective LCD device with two-way audio and video, launches in-home 1:1 personal training at $40 per 30-minute session — Mirror, the fitness equipment that's part full-length mirror and part LCD screen, took the home-workout world by storm in early 2019 …
Motorola One Macro India Launch Expected Today: Everything You Need to Know
Austin-based SparkCognition, which uses AI to monitor and predict when industrial systems may fail or be hacked, raises $100M Series C at a valuation of $725M (Lori Hawkins/Austin American-Statesman)
Austin-based SparkCognition, which uses AI to monitor and predict when industrial systems may fail or be hacked, raises $100M Series C at a valuation of $725M — In one of the biggest Austin funding deals of the year, fast-growing SparkCognition has raised $100 million to accelerate its artificial intelligence platform.
Looking for a job selling weed? EpicHint pitches training for cannabis dispensary ‘budtenders’
Adriana Herrera first came up with the idea for EpicHint, a training and staffing service for cannabis dispensaries, while she was surfing off the coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.
Decompressing after the dissolution of her last startup venture — her second attempt at running her own business — Herrera realized quickly that surfing and #vanlife wasn’t her ultimate calling.
The serial entrepreneur had previously founded FashioningChange, a recommendation engine for sustainable shopping, back in 2011. The company was gaining traction and had some initial support, but it ran into the buzzsaw of Amazon’s product development group, which Herrera claims copied their platform to build a competing product.
Undeterred, Herrera took some of the tools that FashioningChange had developed and morphed them into a business focused on online marketing to shoppers at the point of sale — helping sites like Cooking.com pitch products to people based on what their browsing history revealed about their intent.
By 2017, that business had also run into problems, and Herrera had to shut down the company. She sold her stuff and had headed down to Oaxaca, but kept thinking about the emergent cannabis industry that was taking off back in the U.S.
Herrera had a friend who’d been diagnosed with colon cancer and was taking medicinal marijuana to address side effects from the operation that removed his colon.
“When recovering from the removal of his colon, he’d run out of his homegrown medicine and go to dispensaries where he . got the worst service,” Herrera wrote in an email. “He would ask for something pain, nausea, and sleep, and was always recommended the most expensive product or a product that was being promoted. He never got what he needed and had to self advocate for the right product while barely being able to stand.”
Herrera buckled down and did research throughout the course of 2018. She hit up pharmacies first as a customer, asking different “budtenders” for information about the product they were selling. Their answers were… underwhelming, according to Herrera. The next step was to talk to dispensary managers and research the weed industry.
By her own calculations, cannabis companies (including dispensaries and growers) will add roughly 300,000 jobs — most of them starting out at near-minimum-wage salaries of $16 per-hour. Meanwhile current training programs cost between $250 and $7,000.
That disconnect led Herrera to hit on her current business model — selling an annual subscription software for brands and dispensaries that would offer a training program for would-be job applicants. The training would give dispensaries a leg up for experienced hires, increasing sales and ideally reducing turnover that costs the industry as much as $438 million.
“The data is showing an average of a 30% turnover rate in 21 months,” says Herrera. “Looking at turnover and a lot of that comes down to bad hiring.”
The company is on its first eight customers, but counts one undisclosed, large, multi-state dispensary along with a few mom and pop shops.
Herrera also says that the service can reduce bias in hiring. Because dispensaries only hire candidates after they’ve completed the program, any unconscious bias won’t creep into the hiring process, she says.
Applicants interested in a dispensary can enroll in the dispensary “university” and once they complete the curriculum go through a standardized form to apply for the job.
“Our recommendation to run and get the best results is to pre-train, pre-screen and have the graduates unlock the ability to apply.”
What the hell is up with this Essential device?
Essential CEO Andy Rubin has been pretty silent over the past year for, well, lots of reasons — both business and otherwise. The company has struggled to sell devices, reportedly shipping only 88,000 handsets in its first year. On a far more serious note, Rubin has been plagued by reports of inappropriate behavior during his time at Google. A bombshell report from The New York Times highlighted sexual misconduct accusations prior to his receiving a $90 million exit package from the company.
The former Google executive last used Twitter to state that the story “contains numerous inaccuracies about my employment at Google.” Now, a year later, he’s back on the platform touting a new device. It could be the next Essential handset, or it could be something else entirely.
It’s not the shiny “GEM Colorshift material” on the back that’s caught viewers’ eyes, as much as the “new UI for radically different formfactor.” The closet thing I can thing to compare the long, skinny handset to is the new Galaxy Fold when closed. Of course, this has the decided advantage of a full length screen.
The UI appears to be a collection of different widgets, each sporting different apps: weather, maps, calendar and Uber on one, with a full length map on the other. It’s certainly different and even more of a departure from the original Essential handset, which had very little of the industry revolutionizing impact the company was initially hoping for.
A spokesperson for the company confirmed that the new device is in “early testing” in the real world, which is probably why Rubin opted to get out in front of leaks by showing the half-phone on his own terms, rather than grainy leaks. Here’s the official statement from Essential:
We’ve been working on a new device that’s now in early testing with our team outside the lab. We look forward to sharing more in the near future.
There are, of course, way more questions than answers right now, like whether the company is abandoning the first gen’s modular attachment system. Also, is the lack of cellular information at top a sign? Is this why the company acquired CloudMagic? Can one say this is truly “essential”?
At the very least, the existence of such a device does seem to contradict earlier rumors about Rubin canceling the device and attempting to sell the company. Maybe. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say Essential is courting a similar secondary handset market as Palm — though that, too, didn’t exactly set the smartphone world ablaze.
More soon, I suppose.
Twitter used phone numbers provided for 2FA to match users to advertisers
If ever there was a surefire way to sour users against a two-factor authentication system that was already highly flawed, Twitter has found it. On Tuesday, the social media site said that it used phone numbers and email addresses provided for 2FA protection to tailor ads to users.
Twitter requires users to provide a valid phone number to be eligible for 2FA protection. A working cell phone number is mandatory even when users' 2FA protection is based solely on security keys or authenticator apps, which don't rely on phone numbers to work. Deleting a phone number from a user's Twitter settings immediately withdraws account from Twitter 2FA, as I confirmed just prior to publishing this post.
Security and privacy advocates have long grumbled about this requirement, which isn't a condition of using 2FA protection from Google, Github, and other top-ranked sites. On Tuesday, Twitter gave critics a new reason to complain. The site said it may have inadvertently used email addresses and phone numbers provided for 2FA and other security purposes to match users to marketing lists provided by advertisers. Twitter didn't say if the number of users affected by the blunder affected was in the hundreds or the millions or how long the improper targeting lasted.
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Monday, October 7, 2019
OnePlus CEO Pete Lau Confirms New McLaren Edition Phone is Coming
Goodbye, iTunes: Once-Revolutionary App Gone in Mac Update
Analysis: UK's Financial Conduct Authority now has 87 open inquiries into crypto companies, compared with 50 this time last year (Caroline Binham/Financial Times)
Analysis: UK's Financial Conduct Authority now has 87 open inquiries into crypto companies, compared with 50 this time last year — The number of cryptocurrency businesses in the crosshairs of the UK's financial watchdog leapt by 74 per cent in the past year, as the Financial Conduct Authority estimates …
Profile of Katie Haun, who targeted Bitcoin as a US DOJ prosecutor and is the first female general partner at a16z, now co-heading its $350M cryptocurrency fund (Kate Rooney/CNBC)
Profile of Katie Haun, who targeted Bitcoin as a US DOJ prosecutor and is the first female general partner at a16z, now co-heading its $350M cryptocurrency fund — - Katie Haun is the first female general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and co-heads its $350 million cryptocurrency fund.
Samsung Fixed Its Folding Phone but It's Still Not Ready for Most
This startup just raised $8 million to help busy doctors assess the cognitive health of 50 million seniors
All over the globe, the population of people who are aged 65 and older is growing faster than every other age group. According to United Nations data, by 2050, one in six people in the world will be over age 65, up from one in 11 right now. Meanwhile, in Europe and North America, by 2050, one in four people could be 65 or over.
Unsurprisingly, startups increasingly recognize opportunities to cater to this aging population. Some are developing products to sell to individuals and their family members directly; others are coming up with ways to empower those who work directly with older Americans.
BrainCheck, a 20-person, Houston-based startup whose cognitive healthcare product aims to help physicians assess and track the mental health of their patients, is among the latter. Investors like what it has put together, too. Today, the startup is announcing $8 million in Series A funding round co-led by S3 Ventures and Tensility Venture Partners.
We talked earlier today with BrainCheck cofounder and CEO Yael Katz to better understand what her company has created and why it might be of interest to doctors who don’t know about it. Our chat has been edited for length and clarity.
TC: You’re a neuroscientist. You started BrianCheck with David Eagleman, another neuroscientist and the CEO of NeoSensory, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. Why? What’s the opportunity here?
YK: We looked across the landscape, and we realized that most cognitive assessment is [handled by] a subspecialty of clinical psychology called neuropsychology, where patients are given a series a tests and each is designed to probe a different type of brain function — memory, visual attention, reasoning, executive function. They measure speed and accuracy, and based on that, determine whether there’s a deficit in that domain. But the tests were classically done on paper and it was a lengthy process. We digitized them and gamified them and made them accessible to everyone who is upstream of neuropsychology, including neurologists and primary care doctors.
We created a tech solution that provides clinical decision support to physicians so they can manage patients’ cognitive health. There are 250,000 primary care physicians in the U.S. and 12,000 neurologists and [they’re confronting] what’s been called a silver tsunami. With so many becoming elderly, it’s not possible for them to address the need of the aging population without tech to help them.
TC: How does your product work, and how is it administered?
YK: An assessment is all done on an iPad and takes about 10 minutes. They’re typically administered in a doctor’s office by medical technicians, though they can be administered remotely through telemedicine, too.
TC: These are online quizzes?
YK: Not quizzes and not subjective questions like, ‘How do you think you’re doing?’ but rather objective tasks, like connect the dots, and which way is the center arrow pointing — all while measuring speed and accuracy.
TC: How much does it cost these doctors’ offices, and how are you getting word out?
YZ: We sell a monthly subscription to doctors and it’s a tiered pricing model as measured by volume. We meet doctors at conferences and we publish blog posts and white papers and through that process, we meet them and sell products to them, beginning with a free trial for 30 days, during which time we also give them a web demo.
[What we’re selling] is reimbursable by insurance because it helps them report on and optimize metrics like patient satisfaction. Medicare created a new code to compensate doctors for cognitive care planning though it was rarely used because the requirements and knowledge involved was so complicated. When we came along, we said, let us help you do what you’re trying to do, and it’s been very rewarding.
TC: Say one of these assessments enables a non specialist to determine that someone is losing memory or can’t think as sharply. What then?
YZ: There’s phrase: “Diagnose and adios.” Unfortunately, a lot of doctors used to see their jobs as being done once an assessment was made. It wasn’t appreciated that impairment and dementia are things you can address. But about one third of dementia is preventable, and once you have the disease, it can be slowed. It’s hard because it requires a lot of one-on-one work, so we created a tech solution that uses the output of tests to provide clinical support to physicians so they can manage patients’ cognitive health. We provide personalized recommendations in a way that’s scalable.
TC: Meaning you suggest an action plan for the doctors to pass along to their patients based on these assessments?
YZ: There are nine modifiable risk factors found to account for a third of [dementia cases], including certain medications that can exacerbate cognitive impairment, including poorly controlled cardiovascular health, hearing impairment, and depression. People can have issues for many reasons — multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, Parkinson’s — but health conditions like major depression and physical conditions like cancer and treatments like chemotherapy can cause brain fog. We suggest a care plan that goes to the doctor who then uses that information and modifies it. A lot of it has to do with medication management.
A lot of the time, a doctor — and family members — don’t know how impaired a patient is. You can have a whole conversation with someone during a doctor’s visit who is regaling you with great conversation, then you realize they have massive cognitive deficits. These assessments kind of put everyone on the same page.
TC: You’ve raised capital, how will you use it to move your product forward?
YK: We’ll be combining our assessments with digital biomarkers like changing voice patterns and a test of eye movements, and we have developed an eye-tracking technology and voice algorithms, but those are still in clinical development; we’re trying to get FDA approval for them now.
TC: Interesting that changing voice patterns can help you diagnose cognitive decline.
YK: We aren’t diagnosing disease. Think of us as a thermometer that [can highlight] how much impairment is there and in what areas and how it’s progressive over time.
TC: What can you tell readers who might worry about their privacy as it relates to your product?
YK: Our software is HIPAA compliant. We make sure our engineers are trained and up to date. The FDA requires that we we put a lot of standards in place and we ensure that our database is built in accordance with best practices. I think we’re doing as good a job as anyone can.
Privacy is a concern in general. Unfortunately, companies big and small have to be ever vigilant about a data breach.
A new English-language Polish film about Vladimir Putin, in which AI is used to superimpose his real face onto an actor, sparks a debate about use of AI (Alicja Ptak/Notes From Poland)
Alicja Ptak / Notes From Poland : A new English-language Polish film about Vladimir Putin, in which AI is used to superimpose his real fa...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
