More than 30 civil rights groups sign an open letter asking mayors and city councils to cancel 500+ existing local police partnerships with Amazon's Ring — Ring has more than 500 police partnerships across the US, and a coalition of civil rights groups are calling for local governments to cancel them all.
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 …
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.
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.”
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.
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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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 — - Katie Haun is the first female general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and co-heads its $350 million cryptocurrency fund.
New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...
