Author : zebethcontrol

Watch Google’s ping pong robot pull off a 340-hit rally • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Google, Ping Pong, Robotics & AINo Comments

As if it weren’t enough to have AI tanning humanity’s hide (figuratively for now) at every board game in existence, Google AI has got one working to destroy us all at ping pong as well. For now they emphasize it’s “cooperative” but at the rate these things improve, it will be taking on pros in no time. The project, called i-Sim2Real, isn’t just about ping pong but rather about building a robotic system that can work with and around fast-paced and relatively unpredictable human behavior. Ping pong, AKA table tennis, has the advantage of being pretty tightly constrained (as opposed to playing basketball or cricket) and balance of complexity and simplicity. “Sim2Real” is a way of describing an AI creation process in which a machine learning model is taught what to do in a virtual environment or simulation, then applies that knowledge in the real world. It’s necessary when it could take years of trial and error to arrive at a working model — doing it in a sim allows years of real-time training to happen in a few minutes or hours. But it’s not always possible to do something in a sim; for instance what if a robot needs to interact with a human? That’s not so easy to simulate, so you need real world data to start with. You end up with a chicken and egg problem: you don’t have the human data, because you’d need it to make the robot the human would interact with and generate that data in the first place. The Google researchers escaped this pitfall by starting simple and making a feedback loop: [i-Sim2Real] uses a simple model of human behavior as an approximate starting point and alternates between training in simulation and deploying in the real world. In each iteration, both the human behavior model and the policy are refined. It’s OK to start with a bad approximation of human behavior, because the robot is also only just beginning to learn. More real human data gets collected with every game, improving the accuracy and letting the AI learn more. The approach was successful enough that the team’s table tennis robot was able to carry out a 340-strong rally. Check it out: It’s also able to return the ball to different regions, granted not with mathematical precision exactly, but good enough it could begin to execute a strategy. The team also tried a different approach for a more goal-oriented behavior, like returning the ball to a very specific spot from a variety of positions. Again, this isn’t about creating the ultimate ping pong machine (though that is a likely consequence nevertheless) but finding ways to efficiently train with and for human interactions without making people repeat the same action thousands of times. You can learn more about the techniques the Google team employed in the summary video below:

Staax thinks peer-to-peer payments can onboard a new generation of stock investors • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Disrupt, Fintech, investing, Staax, StartupsNo Comments

For better or for worse, Robinhood helped inspire a new generation of investors to enter the stock market. Now that investing is cool again, upstarts like Staax, which pitched today at ZebethMedia Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, are finding new ways to cash in on its cachet, particularly among young people. Nikki Varanasi, Staax’s founder and CEO, was managing an $800 million fund-of-funds at McKinsey when she began to take notice of the lack of resources available to aspiring investors who wanted to get comfortable with the process. “When I looked at my friend group, who was still shy to invest or didn’t know where to start, I saw this huge gap when it came to institutional investing versus everyday people. There were resources on the market, like Robinhood, or whatever it is, but I think at the end of the day, there are still a lot of barrier points for the everyday, beginner investor to get in,” Varanasi told ZebethMedia. Her initial idea was to gift her friends shares of stock — a thoughtful gesture, she hoped, that could help them kickstart their investing journeys. Oftentimes, the barriers to investing are logistical, she explained. Once someone gets paid, there are a number of different, cumbersome steps they have to go to through in order to invest that money. “Because of the disposable income left in apps [like Venmo], it takes over a week to transfer to your bank and then to your brokerage. So for a lot of people, they just leave their money in there and they don’t invest it and that takes a hit with inflation,” Varanasi said. When Varanasi realized there wasn’t an existing platform that could help her send stocks directly to her friends, thus helping them bypass the onerous aforementioned process, she decided to build it herself. Staax is the result of her efforts, alongside her two co-founders, COO Lucy Yang and CTO Victoria Yang. Staax operates like a full-service brokerage in that its users who sign up open an investment account on its platform. They can buy and sell shares much like they could on Robinhood or Fidelity, Varanasi explained. What sets Staax apart, though, is that it allows for peer-to-peer payments in stock. Nikki Varanasi, CEO and founder at Staax pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “We want to turn assets into payments, because we believe that payments haven’t had a lot of evolution in the last 10 years,” Varanasi said. New users who sign up for Staax link the new brokerage account to their bank account and make a list of their top five preferred stocks to receive. Senders can’t gift shares of stock that aren’t on their recipients’ top five lists, which helps prevent unwanted transactions, alongside a feature that lets a recipient choose if and when to accept a stock gift. I asked Varanasi how the platform handles stock price movements that occur between when the shares are sent and when the recipient accepts them. She explained that the sender could gift someone a share priced at $10 each, for example, which would come out of the sender’s bank account in the form of cash. Then, if that share went up in price to $12, let’s say, the recipient could either accept the gift and would be on the hook for the extra $2, which would come out of their own bank account, or they could choose to accept the $10 in cash rather than in stock. For the sender, this system helps them avoid having to purchase the stock and sell it before sending it to the recipient in the form of cash. “What happens on Staax is we avoid taxes for the sender, because we use a ledger system based on cash on the back end, so you don’t need to own the stock to send it,” Varanasi said. According to Varanasi, the main use cases for Staax outside of gifting tend to be social, such as a friend paying back another friend for buying them coffee, but doing so in stock instead of cash. Staax’s co-founders, Nikki Varanasi, Lucy Yang and Victoria Yang. Image Credits: Staax “It’s not large amounts of money you need to stress about and it’s in the market, but it accumulates over time. And so [as an investor] you’re really in it for the long term strategy,” Varanasi said. It’s still early days for the company, which has raised $2 million in pre-seed funding since its founding in 2020. Its investors include Techstars and Western Union, which invested through an accelerator program for fintechs that Staax took part in, as well as VC firms Lightspeed, Harlem Capital and Hustle Fund as well as angel investor Litquidity (of finance meme account fame). Staax is still figuring out its path to monetization, though taking payment for order flow (PFOF) from market makers who execute trades on behalf of other companies’ users is a likely candidate, Varanasi said. It’s the same process Robinhood uses to make money while keeping its product free for users, but has attracted scrutiny from both customers and regulators. Varanasi said she isn’t worried PFOF will be banned in the U.S., because regulators have been talking about doing so for years but haven’t cracked down. Still, she drew a distinction between her plan to monetize Staax and Robinhood’s implementation of the same system. “We are exploring ways to make revenue on the back end through the trades, but in the most ethical way, because we know that PFOF can be controversial, especially when given to the wrong third party,” Varanasi said. In addition to PFOF, Staax is also exploring charging some users a fee for premium content from influencers and creators who partner with the startup as well as potential B2B partnerships down the line. Ultimately, Staax’s growth depends on its ability to build community because the social component is integral to getting users

Bird exits Germany, Sweden, Norway and “several dozen” US, EMEA markets • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in bird, micromobility, TransportationNo Comments

Shared micromobility company Bird is exiting several markets across the world as it struggles to build an economically viable business, according to a regulatory filing. Bird said it will “fully exit Germany, Sweden and Norway, as well as wind down operations in “several dozen additional, primarily small to mid-sized markets” across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Africa, according to the company. Bird would not respond to requests for more information from ZebethMedia, so it’s not clear which cities Bird will exit. However, the only Middle Eastern market Bird is in is Israel, and Bird doesn’t appear to be in any African countries. The downsizing of the business comes a few months after Bird laid off 23% of its staff in an attempt to become more financially self-sustainable and achieve profitability. More importantly, Bird really needs to raise its share price before it gets delisted by the New York Stock Exchange. In June, Bird got a warning from the NYSE for trading too low. The company was given six months to get back to compliance, which means holding an average share price of at least $1 across 30 consecutive trading days and having a share value above $1 on the final trading day of that month. At the time, Bird was trading at $0.56. Today, Bird is trading at $0.37 after hours, which, to be fair, is up 1.01%. In a blog post, Bird blamed a lot of the bumps on the road to profitability to cities that lack a “robust regulatory framework.” The company said it reviewed its portfolio of cities to weed out the ones without such a framework — the cities that have too much competition, an oversupply of vehicles and overcrowded streets. “In the short-term the current macroeconomic conditions have created an environment that requires us to increase our level of financial discipline and make a clear distinction between markets where we see a near-term path to fully self-sustainable operations, and those which appear to be longer-term, riskier investments,” Bird wrote. It’s not clear what this will mean for Bird’s army of fleet managers who will be affected by the change, and Bird did not respond in time to ZebethMedia’s request for comment. Bird’s fleet managers are essentially contractors that pay up-front fees to manage fleets of scooters for Bird. They essentially pay to rent the scooters from Bird so they can deploy them and earn an income, but they are responsible for maintenance, storage, and maintaining adequate insurance coverage. The program has been criticized for potentially luring inexperienced contract workers into debt for scooters they’ll never own.

Cityblock Health CEO Toyin Ajayi on how to scale human-centered care models • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Biotech & Health, Cityblock Health, Disrupt, healthcare, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Toyin AjayiNo Comments

Cityblock Health is focused on providing affordable, human-centered healthcare in lower-income and marginalized communities, while also building sustainable business models. Founder and CEO Toyin Ajayi talked at Disrupt today about the challenges of tackling the healthcare system’s inequalities, while serving patients with personalized medical care, behavioral health care and social services. “Do I believe that healthcare is a right, that should be available to all people, irrespective of their ability to pay and then it should be distributed equitably? Yes. 100%. And there are a lot of ways of achieving that,” Ajayi said. “It’s unacceptable in 2022, that we’re looking at exactly the same data that we were looking at 15 years ago about health care disparities, health care outcomes, all exacerbated by COVID,” she added about the current health care system. “Everyone’s like, oh my god, black and brown people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, poor people are dying more from COVID. Oh my god, essential workers who don’t have health insurance. We knew this stuff. Give me a break. So, yes, I would have designed it differently and I’m also not content to bitch and moan about it. We’ve got to do something.” Based in Brooklyn, New York and now live in seven markets, including Indiana and Ohio, Cityblock works with many people who lack access to basics like food, safe places to sleep and social support, which creates more risk factors for worsening chronic conditions. As a result, many rely on emergency rooms for crises, like running out of insulin or acute psychiatric care, because they didn’t received the kind of care that would have kept them at home. “I come to this work as a physician, I’m deeply passionate about caring for underserved communities. I come to this work from a place of real heart. This is my life’s work and my mission,” Ajayi said. “I’m also a deep pragmatist and I recognize that there are real economic forces that drive most of the decisions that people make in our healthcare system, certainly in the for profit space, but even as we learn and read more about it, even in the not-for-profit space.” Addressing systemic issues like health disparities is important on a moral level, but for payers there is also an opportunity to figure out how to create a more viable business by caring for people differently. When launching in a new market, like Indiana or Ohio, Cityblock looks for places where there are socioeconomic disparities and then looks for partners, payers and health insurers who they launch into markets with. “Pre-launch we spend the time figuring out where exactly in the neighborhood should we be,” Ajayi said. “Can we be near public transportation, near grocery stores, making sure that we’re really mapping the ecosystem and showing up in places that are accessible to our members and also positioning ourselves so we can go to the home and see people from there.” Part of this means working with community-based organizations, include shelters, housing agencies and food pantries. “We think of ourselves as part of the glue within an ecosystem that knits together existing providers, the specialty providers, the hospitals, the communities, organizations and creates a seamless experience for the people we serve,” Ajayi said. She noted that many of these organizations run on tenuous and vulnerable business models. For example, during the pandemic, many community-based organizations couldn’t get enough workers to continue coming in. Many run on tiny margins and are grant-funded. This means Cityblock has to be prepared to support community organizations in its ecosystem, including tasks like packaging and bring over groceries. Tech and data science can also support more individualized care. For example, data science can help Cityblock figure out who it needs to engage with first in patient populations that are often very diverse in terms of age and needs. “I have to engage all of them. Who do I go after first. Who do I call first? Who’s going to go to the emergency room tomorrow unless they get a phone call from us? Who’s not home today because they’re likely not working, or who’s likely to be engageable on the weekend,” Ajayi said. “Those are types of things we can use our data and our data products to help us better refine.” Better data science means people also have to repeat their story less as they seek care. “When we interview our members about what they dislike about the traditional health care system, it’s ‘I gotta tell my whole story over and over again.’ And then you add on layers of discrimination and stigma that many people face. More than half of our members are people of color, because that’s the best representation of Medicaid and dually-eligible populations.” “Telling your story over and over again seems benign, but the healthcare system makes people tell their story over and over again, it subjects them to friction, abrasion and sometimes even trauma, that is entirely counterproductive to a therapeutic relationship that’s going to result in better health outcomes. Even alleviating that is such a meaningful lever for us.”

DigestAI’s 19-year-old founder wants to make education addictive • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, digestai, Disrupt, edtech, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

When Quddus Pativada was 14, he wished that he had an app that could summarize his textbooks for him. Just five years later, Pativada has been there and done that — earlier this year, he launched the AI-based app Kado, which turns photos, documents or PDFs into flash cards. Now, as the 19-year-old founder takes the stage for Startup Battlefield, he’s looking to take his company, DigestAI, beyond flashcards to create an AI dialogue assistant that we can all carry around on our phones. “If we make learning truly easy and accessible, it’s something you could do as soon as you open your phone,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “We want to put a teacher in every single person’s phone for every topic in the world.” Quddus Pativada, founder at DigestAI pitches as part of ZebethMedia Startup Battlefield at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia The company’s AI is trained on data from the internet, but the algorithm is fine-tuned to recall specific use cases to make sure that its responses are accurate and not too thrown off by online chaos. “We train it on everything, but the actual use cases are called within silos. We’re calling it ‘federated learning,’ where it’s sort of siloed in and language models are operating on a use case basis,” Pativada said. “This is good because it avoids malicious use.” Pativada said that this kind of product would be different from smart assistants like Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa because the information it provides would be more personalized and detailed. So, for certain use cases, like asking for sources to use in an essay, the AI will pull from academic journals to make sure that the information is accurate and appropriate for a classroom. Despite running an educational AI startup, Pativada isn’t currently in school. He took a gap year before going to college to work on his startup, but as DigestAI took off, he decided to keep building instead of going back to school. Growing up, he taught himself to code because he loved video games, so he wanted to make his own — by age 10, he published a “Flappy Bird” clone on the App Store. Naturally, his technological ambitions matured a bit over time. Before founding DigestAI, Pativada built a COVID-19 contact tracing platform. At first, he just made the app as a tool for his classmates — but his work ended up being honored by the United Arab Emirates’ government. Image Credits: DigestAI So far, the outlook is good for the Dubai-based company. Pativada — who says he feels skittish about the CEO label, and prefers to think of himself as just a founder — has raised $600,000 so far from angel investors like Mark Cuban and Shaan Patel, who struck a deal on Shark Tank for his SAT prep company, Prep Expert. How does a 19-year-old in Dubai capture the attention of one of thee most well-known startup investors? A cold email. Mark, we apologize if this admission makes your inbox even more nightmarish. “I was watching a GQ video of Mark Cuban’s daily routine,” Pativada said. “He said he reads his emails every morning at 9 AM, and I looked at the time in Dallas, and it was about 9 AM. So I was like, maybe I should just shoot him an email and see what happens.” While he was at it, he reached out to Patel, whose educational startup has done over $20 million in sales. Patel hopped on a video call with the teenage founder, and by the next week, he and Cuban both offered to invest in DigestAI. “We raised our entire round through cold emails and Zoom,” Pativada told ZebethMedia. “It sort of helped because no one can see how young I look in person.” Before he decided to eschew college altogether, Pativada applied to Stanford and interviewed with an alumnus, as is standard in the admissions process. He didn’t end up getting into the competitive Palo Alto university, but his interviewer, who works at Stanford, did end up investing in his company. Go figure. “Our goal is to work with universities like Stanford,” Pativada said. The company is also targeting enterprise clients. Currently, DigestAI works with some U.S.-based universities, Bocconi University in Italy, a European law firm and other clients. At the law firm, DigestAI is testing a tool that allows associates to text a WhatsApp number to quickly brush up on legal terms. In the long term, DigestAI wants to create an SMS system where people can text the AI asking for help learning something — he wants information to be so accessible that it’s “addictive.” “That is what AI is — it’s almost the best version of a human being,” Pativada said.

Mother Honestly’s new commerce offering aims to give employees more freedom when it comes to caregiv • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Battlefield, battlefield 2022, Commerce, Disrupt, Fintech, Mother Honestly, StartupsNo Comments

Being a working parent is challenging. Being a working mother, according to many studies, is extra challenging. Many mothers have had the unfortunate experience of having to choose between their careers and children as the balancing act of both can be overwhelming. Factor in aging parents and the number of women who are caregivers for multiple people is greater than ever. To address this, Blessing Adesiyan launched Mother Honestly. Today, the company reaches more than 1 million working parents, caregivers, employers and business leaders. It has generated about $1 million in revenue since inception. And while its initial focus was on working parents, it has broadened its scope to help caregivers of all kinds — regardless of gender. Now, to further extend its reach, Mother Honestly is presenting a new commerce offering at ZebethMedia’s Startup Battlefield. Adesiyan had her first child while she was in college and remembers taking her daughter with her to an internship she had at one multinational corporation. Upon graduating, she started immediately working with Fortune 100 companies such as PepsiCo, DuPont, BASF and Cargill. Once she got into the workforce, she poured herself into her work while managing her caregiving responsibilities, and concluded early on it was “not designed” for her — “a single mother, a black woman that was a chemical engineer who really wanted to remain ambitious.” She knew she wasn’t the only working mother who felt that way, so she created multiple Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) within those companies around parents and caregiving. A bit scarred from her first foray into the corporate world, Adesiyan admits she was actually “terrified of having more kids” without her career being “solid.” Eventually, she had her second child nine years after giving birth to her first. All of the feelings she had when starting her career began coming back — the recognition of a lack of a reliable and affordable care infrastructure, a lack of support from her supervisors and having to spend a small fortune flying her parents back and forth from Nigeria to take care of her children when she had to travel for work. “I eventually ran out of money, and couldn’t keep flying them back and forth,” Adesiyan recalls. The straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, was when she was consulting for a large chemical company and was asked to travel to Morocco. She called her then-boss, asking if the company could provide a stipend toward meeting some of her caregiving obligations. Her boss’s response, Adesiyan told ZebethMedia, shocked her. “He told me it was important that I keep my professional and personal life separate, and that a male colleague had been doing this for 10 years and had never asked for that kind of support,” she recounts. “So I said, ‘No offense, my colleague is a white man with a stay-at-home wife who subsidizes the cost of care.’” Two weeks later, Adesiyan had landed another job, but she was still angry at the thought that she was “making millions of dollars” for a company which “thought it was too much to support” her caregiving needs. She added: “I was out of the country two weeks at a time, and I was a single mom, an immigrant with no real network to support me.” In frustration, Adesiyan turned to Instagram to ask others how they were effectively managing work and family. “People started sending DMs and videos, and she had amassed about 10,000 followers in three months,” Adesiyan recalls. That turned into a conference in Detroit that had hundreds of attendees from all over the country. And by 2018, Mother Honestly — a startup that Adesiyan says was “somewhat of an external ERG” — was born. The website was initially built to offer content and community to caregivers who needed support. “I wanted to support mothers holistically in balancing their careers and personal lives, and I wanted them to do it honestly without comparing themselves to others,” she recalls. “It became clear that only a parent could actually solve this problem holistically, so I like to think of our product as ‘built by mothers, for everyone.’” By 2020, Adesiyan left her job in engineering to focus full time on her venture. Current customers include Indeed, Care.com, Splendid Spoon, Bobbie, Nanit and more. Past customers include Lincoln, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Bright Horizons, Pacira and others. Bootstrapped since inception, Mother Honestly has thus far made money primarily from brand partnerships with the likes of Indeed, Care.com and Splendid Spoon, doing things like co-creating content for employee caregivers together. The natural evolution of Mother Honestly has led to the creation of something Adesiyan believes has been missing, but is crucially needed, in the workforce: a Work-Life Wallet. Mother Honestly will make money by charging a fee to provide the wallet that would give employees the freedom to spend on things such as caregiving or medical travel. Mother Honestly would serve as a middleman, either denying or approving the expenses based on predetermined categories so that employees would have privacy and not have do disclose personal details to their employers. For Adesiyan, widespread adoption would be a dream come true. “Employers, instead of wasting millions of dollars away at EAP (Employee Assistance Programs) that employees don’t use, can redirect their cash into the hands of their employees via our Work-Life Wallet, which they can customize who gets how much and over what time period,” she said.

Netflix to expand into cloud gaming, opens new studio in Southern California • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Netflix, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

At ZebethMedia Disrupt, Netflix VP of Gaming Mike Verdu dropped two bits of news about the streaming giant’s foray into games. Verdu said that Netflix is “seriously exploring a cloud gaming offering.” The company will also open a new gaming studio in Southern California. “It’s a value add. We’re not asking you to subscribe as a console replacement,” Verdu said on stage. “It’s a completely different business model. The hope is over time that it just becomes this very natural way to play games where wherever you are.” Google’s Stadia and Amazon’s Luna have made the same play, attempting to peddle video games that people can play even if they don’t have an expensive gaming computer or coveted console. But these services have struggled to attain mainstream user adoption. Google recently said that it will shut down Stadia in January. “While Stadia’s approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn’t gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service,” Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post. Verdu thinks these products struggled due to their business models, not the technology itself. Mike Verdu, VP of Games at Netflix speaks about “whether game streaming can go mainstream” at ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco on October 18, 2022. Image Credit: Haje Kamps / ZebethMedia “Stadia was a technical success. It was fun to play games on Stadia,” Verdu said. “It had some issues with the business model, sure.” Both Stadia and Luna have dedicated controllers — but Verdu was reticent to say whether or not we can expect a Netflix gaming controller in the future. He did reveal, though, that Netflix is stepping up its game development by opening an internal studio in Southern California. This is the company’s fifth studio — just last month, Netflix set up shop in Helsinki, Finland, with a former Zynga GM at the helm. Others include Boss Fight Entertainment, Night School Studio and Finland’s Next Games, which are each designed to develop games catering to different tastes. The new California studio will be led by Chako Sonny, the former executive producer on “Overwatch.” At Blizzard Entertainment, “Overwatch” was a massive success, netting billions of dollars. Sonny announced his departure from Blizzard last year in the wake of an SEC probe regarding sexual harassment and discrimination at the dominant gaming company. “He could have done anything, but he chose to come here,” said Verdu. “You don’t get people like that coming to your organization to build the next big thing in gaming unless there’s a sense that we’re really in it for the long haul and in it for the right reasons.” Since it announced its foray into gaming, Netflix has developed 14 games in its own studios and has 35 games on the service now. In total, Verdu said it has 55 games “in flight” at present. These games include experiences based on original IP like “Stranger Things,” as well as licensed IP like “Spongebob Squarepants.” Netflix is also developing original games. “We hope over time that the balance is like, 50% Netflix IP,” Verdu said. The company still considers itself in the very early stages of its gaming initiative but hasn’t ruled out expansions beyond mobile — though we understand it won’t be heading to the console or VR at this point. The news of the gaming studio launch and cloud gaming plans arrives as Netflix is announcing its Q3 earnings, which sees the streamer beating expectations with the addition of 2.41 million subscribers, bringing the total to 223.09 million. Netflix had forecast a net gain of only 1 million subs in the third quarter. The company also reported earning $7.93 in revenue in Q3 2022, whereas analysts predicted $7.85 billion.

Alaffia Health taps AI to detect errors in hospital bills • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Alaffia Health, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, Disrupt, Robotics & AI, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The multi-decade rise in healthcare costs isn’t expected to reverse course any time soon. In search of a fix, Adun Akanni and TJ Ademiluyi co-founded Alaffia Health in 2020, one of the startups participating in the ZebethMedia Disrupt Battlefield 200. The healthtech company uses machine learning to try to identify fraud, waste and abuse in healthcare claims. “We leveraged key insights from our family’s medical billing company in founding Alaffia,” Ademiluyi told ZebethMedia in an interview. “We determined that the majority of the waste in the system results from natural human error, lack of transparency in claims processing, and misaligned incentives between healthcare providers and payers. We founded Alaffia to tackle these issues using nascent machine learning and AI, built on top of deep healthcare domain expertise.” Alaffia sells services primarily to health insurance payers and enterprises that provide their employees health coverage. Using AI to extract and standardize data from hospital bills, including various medical billing procedure codes and dates of service, the platform aims to reduce payers’ spending by finding errors and overcharges within the bills sent by healthcare providers. The causes of medical billing errors are myriad, but often arise from double billing, missing the payer submission deadline and a failure to capture patient information. Non-specific diagnostic codes are another common issue, leading to instances of upcoding and undercoding. Upcoding is when a coder reports a higher-level service than patients received or never had performed, while undercoding is when billing codes don’t capture the full scope of work performed by a physician. Medical expenses are expected to grow by an average of 5.1% from 2021 to 2030, reaching $6.8 trillion, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — and a significant portion of those expenditures are derived from errors in health insurance claims. It’s estimated that about 80% of claims in the U.S. contain at least one medical billing error, and that as much as $300 billion is lost to provider fraud, waste and abuse each year. Image Credits: Alaffia Health “This is a quite challenging technical problem due to the lack of data standardization in the healthcare system, so we’ve rigorously trained machine learning models using training data generated by our in-house annotation team,” Ademiluyi said. Alaffia reviews facility bills for errors such as “unbundling” — i.e., using multiple codes for individual parts of a procedure — while checking the accuracy of more complex claims like implants and surgeries. The company says it taps registered nurses, certified coders and certified billers to cross-reference the AI’s findings, as well as a clinical review team that examines each claim and corresponding medical record. When asked about competitors, Ademiluyi says he sees “legacy industry participants” who manually process and review claims as Alaffia’s principal rivals. But Alaffia isn’t the only startup attempting to tackle the medical billing error problem with AI. Anomaly, which works with insurance companies and providers, offers an AI-driven platform designed to detect irregularities in medical bills. There’s also Nym, whose technology converts medical charts and electronic medical records from physician consultations into auditable billing codes automatically. Alaffia has managed to gain traction in the space, however — and funding. Ademiluyi claims the company’s services currently cover over 300,000 health plan members in aggregate. And to date, Alaffia has raised $6.6 million in venture capital from backers including Anthemis, 1984 Ventures, Aperture Venture Capital, Tau Ventures, Twine Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures and ERA’s Remarkable Ventures Fund. Ademiluyi says that 2022 revenue is on pace to more than double year-over-year. The near-term plan is to expand Alaffia’s commercial footprint and product offerings, he added, starting with hospital bill review services direct to patients. The company currently employs “just over” 20 people and expects to hire five more by the end of the year. “Fortunately, we operate in an industry resistant to recession. Regardless of pandemics, macro trends, or the outlook for interest rates, people will still visit the doctor to receive care,” Ademiluyi said. “When patients receive care, it leads to further healthcare spending, which benefits our business as we review generated hospital bills for errors. As we move into a slowdown in the market, large enterprises — both health insurance institutions and employers whom we support are actually looking at ways to lower their expenses, which we directly support by reducing healthcare spending. As such, we believe the pandemic and current slowdown in the economy to be a net positive for the business.”

Netflix adds 2.41 million subscribers, soaring past expectations • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Media & Entertainment, Netflix, streaming serviceNo Comments

Things are looking up for Netflix this quarter. The streamer added 2.41 million subscribers, bringing the total to 223.09 million. Netflix expected a net gain of 1 million subs in the third quarter. The streaming giant also slightly beat analysts’ expectations, earning $7.93 in revenue. Analysts predicted $7.85 billion. Netflix experienced two very grim quarters in recent months, losing a total of 1.2 million global subscribers. A significant number of layoffs have also occurred, including the more recent downsizing of its animation department. However, with the addition of its new ad-supported tier coming to the platform in November, the company has potentially opened itself up to new customers looking for a cheaper way to stream. The streaming giant revealed last week that the Basic with Ads plan would cost $6.99 per month and include four to five minutes of advertisements an hour for TV shows and movies. The launch will occur one month before rival Disney+’s ad-supported tier, which will cost $7.99 per month. Netflix has partnered with Microsoft, Nielsen, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science to help with its ad plan. The company also signed up with BARB to measure Netflix’s streaming numbers in the U.K. More to come…

Vitag launches NFC-powered ‘sticky notes’ for visual instructions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 18, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Hardware, NFC, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VitagNo Comments

While QR codes emerged as something of a technology poster-child during the pandemic, garnering a new lease of life in everything from restaurant menus to contactless payments, there remains a certain inelegance to the matrix barcode system. Usability remains a sticking point, both in terms of the effort it takes to create content and align it with a QR code, and also from the end-user’s standpoint who has to open their camera app to scan the QR code — something that might not even work in low-light situations. Throw into the mix aesthetics (who’s ever seen an attractive QR code?), and there’s a strong case to be made for an alternative that brings the QR code spirt to a more user friendly format. This is a problem that Vitag is setting out to address, with an NFC product designed for video instructions. Or, “video sticky notes,” as the company calls them. Founded in Dallas in March this year, Vitag is officially announcing its private beta today at TC Disrupt, where the company was selected as one of ZebethMedia’s Battlefield 200 startup cohorts. We caught up with cofounders Sean Jackson (CEO) and CTO Daniel Reiling to get a sneak peek into what exactly it’s looking to achieve. Vitag cofounders: Daniel Reiling (CTO) and Sean Jackson (CEO) Image Credits: ZebethMedia Videos on tap Vitag’s product consists of two core “things”: a mobile app for people to record instructional videos or upload existing material from their device, and a physical NFC-enabled tag that they can program the video to. All the end-user then has to do is tap their phone on the tag, and the video pops up on their screen, demonstrating to an AirBnb guest how to use the A/C system or where the recycling goes. Vitag in action Image Credits: Vitag Of course, it’s easy enough to achieve all this through QR codes — there are many online services for generating QR codes which someone can then tether to a YouTube video that they created. What Vitag does, though, is provide the tools for creating the video, managing tags, and hosting the actual video itself — it has built its own hosting service on top of Google Cloud, with the content viewable only to those with access to a unique URL, which is activated when users tap their phone to a tag. “We created our own service where you can capture a video on your phone, it goes to our servers, and it’s hosted there,” Reiling said. It may seem more intuitive to have just used an existing white-label video hosting service from a company like Vimeo, but the founders explained its reasoning for building its own hosting service: it’s about scalability, controllability, and customizability. While Vimeo might be great for a company to host its own videos, when it comes to potentially hundreds or thousands of Vitag’s own customers who need their own individual accounts for creating and storing hundreds or thousands of videos, this requires full control of the experience from creation through to hosting. The entire back-end and front-end packaged in a single platform. “Our goal is to remove complexity from the process of sharing instructions,” Jackson said. “We believe people are tired of cobbling together different technologies to complete a task — from QR code generators, to different hosting platforms, to desktop publishing tools, to printers, to adhesives — and everything else required.” However, it’s not purely about video. A customer can configure their tag so that it links to a static text page, a photo, URL, or whatever they want. The company offers $2 pre-printed tags specific to a certain type of business, for example restaurants or retail, while creators can also order personalized tags with their own individual text and a choice of different backgrounds. It’s also worth noting that companies can elect to have QR codes printed on the NFC tags for those who prefer to use QR codes, Vitag: Customization interface Image Credits: ZebethMedia Furthermore, Vitag also supports NFC tags from third-party providers, with an in-app function for users to format the tags to work with Vitag. The company said that it’s also planning additional tools in the future, including a desktop app with additional features for small businesses and enterprise customers. NFC surge NFC, or near-field communication as it’s more formally known, is hardly a new technology, but it has taken its time to properly hit the mainstream consciousness, where it still pretty much resides in the payments domain. But its recent growth has been aided somewhat by recent adoption from big tech companies such as Apple, which started to fully embrace NFC with iOS 13 back in 2019 — instead of only allowing iPhone apps to read NFC tags, Apple started to allow apps to write directly to blank tags, and interact through native protocols. The company also recently launched a new “tap to pay” feature that allows iPhones to accept contactless payments over NFC. Elsewhere, NFC is also being used as a replacement for business cards, allowing people to exchange information just by tapping phones. So while QR codes have seen a major resurgence in recent years and are unlikely to being going away any time soon, NFC is on something of an upwards trajectory too, which is where Vitag wants to make its mark. “We believe that consumers are becoming more comfortable with ‘tap to’ events, with payments being the most used today,” Jackson said. “And as more people become exposed to digital business cards the market adoption of ‘tap to’ will only increase.” For now, Vitag is looking to serve the short-term rental property market in the U.S., which Jackson identified as a particularly powerful use-case for video instructions. But plans are afoot to target all manner of verticals, from restaurants and retail stores to gyms. “As we shared our vision of what this technology could do, we found use-case after use-case from almost everyone we encountered,” Jackson explained. “People that stayed in rentals wanted to use them