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Author : zebethcontrol

Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in CCTV, Enterprise, spot aiNo Comments on Spot AI raises $40M to build smarter CCTV security camera tech • ZebethMedia

CCTV and other kinds of security cameras have a strong big brother vibe, but for many of us that may be because we don’t really understand or know how the footage they pick up ever gets used. Today, a startup called Spot AI that’s built a system to help answer that question at least in part — it provides a cloud-based analytics system that “reads” that footage to get insights about not just security, but also safety and operational activity — is announcing $40 million in funding to grow. Scale Venture Partners is leading the round, with past backers Redpoint Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, and new investors StepStone Group and Modern Venture Partners also investing. This brings the total raised by Spot AI to $63 million. Spot AI, appropriately for a security camera company, existed in stealth for years before it came out into the public in 2021: at that point it had already raised $22 million. As with that round, Spot AI is not disclosing its valuation, but Tanuj Thapliyal, Spot AI’s CEO, noted that it is a “significant up-round” based on the fact that in the last 12 months, the startup’s revenues have grown fivefold, and that customers — it has “thousands” in the U.S., both small businesses and large enterprises across some 17 industries, which aren’t really those that include “knowledge workers” per se but businesses in areas like manufacturing and retail that have critical physical components and a lot of activity — have tripled in the same period. Its customers have included SpaceX, transportation company Cheeseman, Mixt and Northland Cold Storage. And it turns out that giving people a better reason for using their video cameras makes them much more interested in using and looking at that video data. “People are using our cameras a lot,” Thapliyal said in an interview. “Forty percent of our month active users log in every day. There is value to be had here.” Fundraising has gotten very challenging recently, but Thapliyal said that the San Francisco startup hasn’t seen that itself in part because of those growth numbers, and also because it’s bringing something different to market. CCTV and other security cameras have become as ubiquitous as electric lighting in many workplaces these days, especially those with high traffic. Spot AI estimates that since 2015 the number has doubled and now stands at 1 billion devices globally. In many cases, cameras are networked and link into bigger systems where footage can be viewed by security teams. But that’s typically where a lot of the usage ends, and so that is where Spot AI is hoping to pick things up. Spot AI provides a few different levels of service: for customers that already have networked cameras, they can integrate these with Spot AI’s platform so that it can start reading and parsing the video data. Those that either don’t use cameras already or that don’t have networked systems, or want the full system as envisioned by Spot AI, can potentially use free hardware built and provided by Spot AI itself. That system is based around technology that uses computer vision and other AI both in the cloud and at the edge (eg, if using Spot’s own cameras) to monitor video across security parameters, but also others around safety and efficiency and movement overall. What is monitored, and where, is set up by customers themselves by way of a drag and drop interface that lets them select specific items or areas in a frame, which the system can then analyze across a specified range of time for changes and other kinds of activity. One scenario Thapliyal described how a car wash was using its system to help resolve damage claims by pinpointing video to identify when and were, and if, damage was done during a carwash to help those claims move along. Another you could imagine could involve helping a store determine where customer assistants are spending time and where, and if they could be better positioned at different times of day. Longer term, there are some interesting opportunities for Spot AI’s platform that it’s not already pursuing, specifically in the consumer segment. Thapliyal said that selling direct to consumers — for example, building on the market created by the likes of Ring for cameras to track who comes to people’s front doors — is not one that it wants to pursue, but that there could well be an opportunity for working with businesses that in turn work with consumers. Thapliyal — who co-founded the company with Rish Gupta and Sud Bhatija — believes that with all of these, the opportunity of actually making that video useful is the route to making the video less creepy and indeed less idle. “If you make the video data [produced by these cameras] more useful and accessible to more people in the workplace, then you transform it from this idea of surveillance to the idea of video intelligence,” Thapliyal said to me in 2021. “It can help you make all sorts of important decisions.” As I said before, its ethos seems to come out of the idea that these cameras are here, so we need to find better ways of using them more effectively and responsibly. That has definitely carried the company up today and is helping shape future strategy. “For a company like ours to have impact we have to be really specific in our purpose,” Thapliyal said to me this week. One interesting scenario where Spot AI could have a place, for example, is in the area of connected cars, where carmakers might want to tap into the trend for dashcams that drivers use to help them potentially make claims in the event of accidents: many cars already have cameras built into their vehicles, but no additional ability to parse or use that video data beyond the immediate purpose of, say, helping people park. “The product usage and engagement Spot AI has seen in its customers over the past year since launch

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Is web3 really the new phase of the internet? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Crypto, FTX, Marc Andreessen, sir tim berners-lee, web3, world wide webNo Comments on Is web3 really the new phase of the internet? • ZebethMedia

We are on the verge of a new phase of the web, or so the story goes. Its proponents have labeled it web3. While last week’s implosion of systemically important crypto exchange FTX showed that the tech industry is far from realizing that vision in terms of execution, the concept of web3 has been a fundamental driver for startups and venture capital over the past few years. If we are truly in the midst of a third wave, it’s important to understand the history of the web, how it evolved and how this new phase — if it is actually one — fits in this chronology. Is the so-called web3 the next logical step for the internet, one that will have a lasting effect on its evolution or something else altogether? We need to place what we call web3 in proper historical context and judge whether its rise truly marked an innovation cycle or is just a simple repackaging of existing tech to make it more palatable to an investor ecosystem hungry for the next big thing. It’s clear that one of the primary motivations for identifying a new phase of the web is the incredible wealth creation that accompanied the first two phases. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and operators in web3 continuously repeat the adage that web3’s current state resembles the early days of the internet. It follows logically, then, that early adopters and builders in the web3 space believe there is likely to be a significant financial reward for being one of the first in, just as there was with the earliest days of the web itself. As we wade through the history of the internet (yes, really!), consider how the web developed and grew, and whether you see a similar dynamic at play in crypto right now. In this tumultuous moment for the web3 vision, it’s worth examining whether the FTX collapse shows this new wave was a house of cards all along or whether the string of bankruptcies among web3 companies this year was simply a setback in the adoption of the inevitable future of the internet.

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Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, funding, language learning, OpenAI Startup Fund, Robotics & AI, SPEAK, startup, StartupsNo Comments on Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform • ZebethMedia

Speak, an English language learning platform with AI-powered features, today announced that it raised $27 million in a Series B funding round led by the OpenAI Startup Fund, with participation from Lachy Groom, Josh Buckley, Justin Mateen, Gokul Rajaram and Founders Fund. Notably, Speak is the third startup in which OpenAI, the AI lab closely aligned with Microsoft, has publicly invested through its fund — the others being Descript and Mem. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “We are very excited to partner with the outstanding team at Speak, who are well-positioned to deliver on this powerful application of generative AI — making language learning effective and accessible,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO and the manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in a statement. “Speak has the potential to revolutionize not just language learning, but education broadly, and this aligns with the OpenAI Startup Fund’s goal of accelerating the impact of powerful AI to improve people’s lives.” Speak was founded in 2016 by Connor Zwick and Andrew Hsu, both of whom had an acute interest in AI from an early age. Hsu has a health background, having completed a neuroscience PhD at Stanford before joining Zwick to co-launch Speak. Zwick came from the edtech industry — he sold his first startup, the flashcard app Flashcards+, to Chegg in 2013 after dropping out of Harvard. Zwick and Hsu met through The Thiel Fellowship originally, Hsu being in the first cohort and Zwick in the second. (Note that Founders Fund, which Thiel co-founded, pledged cash toward Speak’s Series B.) Prior to starting Speak, the two spent a year studying and researching machine learning and developing accent detection algorithms using YouTube videos as training data. “Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.” Image Credits: Speak Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. The premise might sound like Duolingo and some of the other AI-powered language learning apps out there, such as Yanadoo, ELSA and Loora. But Zwick insists that Speak’s AI tech is superior to most. “Under the hood, we combine the latest from OpenAI with in-house models to deliver the best performance across speech recognition, speech generation and conversation generation,” he said. “We’re able to provide feedback on things like pronunciation and more natural vocabulary and syntax using [our] models … We are accumulating a substantial data set of second-language labeled speaking examples, which enables us to uniquely deliver state-of-the-art speech models for foreign accented speakers.” Whether that’s true is up for debate. Speak didn’t provide any empirical data showing its platform outperforms rivals. But what Speak does demonstrably have is early momentum. It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue. Speak offers auto-renewing monthly and annual subscriptions, both of which provide access to courses, electives and review content in addition to the AI-guided practice sessions. For Speak’s next act, the company plans to expand to new languages and markets, including Japan, and invest in features that leverage text-generating models like OpenAI’s GPT-3. “The pandemic accelerated remote work and the expansion of global, distributed teams, meaning there’s even more demand for people around the world to speak the same language. It’s also driven demand for new solutions more oriented around remote or programmatic experiences as opposed to in-person instruction.” Zwick added. “Speak has remained fairly lean and has multiple years of runway enabling it to control its own destiny regardless of the fundraising environment over the next few years.” Currently, Speak has 40 employees across offices in San Francisco (its headquarters), Seoul and Ljubljana, Slovenia. Zwick says that the new funding, which brings Speak’s total raised to “just over” $47 million, will be put toward expanding the company’s engineering, machine learning, product, marketing, content and operations departments.

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OnlyFans partners with Spring to add shopping features • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, onlyfans, Social, SpringNo Comments on OnlyFans partners with Spring to add shopping features • ZebethMedia

Merch is coming to OnlyFans. In a partnership with Spring — the merch company formerly known as TeeSpring that just got acquired by Amaze — OnlyFans creators can sell physical products to their supporters directly on their platform pages. The feature works via an integration. If you go to a creator’s page who has a store enabled, you can see what products are available and be directed to their Spring page to make a purchase. Image Credits: Paige VanZant on OnlyFans “As a creator-first organisation, there are over 3 million creators on OnlyFans, meaning over 3 million small businesses now have access to a new monetisation tool,” said Ami Gan, CEO of OnlyFans, in a press release. OnlyFans isn’t taking a cut from the transaction, but the feature incentivizes creators to integrate their businesses more deeply within the platform. Last year, the company generated $433 million in profit and is on track to earn $2.5 billion in revenue this year — so OnlyFans isn’t exactly hurting for cash. Creators who use this new integration will see the same rates as any other Spring shop. The income a creator makes per item sold varies depending on the cost of production — for example, if it costs $31.95 to print a hoodie, if a creator sells it for $50, they will make $18.05 from the sale. Creators can choose their own price points for their merch, and they can also select what kinds of items they want to sell from over 120 products, including shirts, mugs, pillows, iPhone cases and puzzles (in our opinion, the idea of an adult creator selling a risqué puzzle is extremely funny and someone should definitely do that).

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Corporate comms for the startup soul • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in elon musk twitter, Equity podcast, startup pr, Startups, VentureNo Comments on Corporate comms for the startup soul • ZebethMedia

 Hello and welcome back to Equity, ZebethMedia’s venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Today we have something a bit different for you. In light of the never-ending Musk-Twitter saga, and news that the new social media CEO had cut its corporate communications staff to the bone — and then some. So to get more perspective on the role that a corporate comms team plays in both startups and public companies alike, we wrangled two folks who have just that experience set: Kelly Boynton, senior director of communications at Gusto Keyana Corliss, until recently the head of global communications and PR at Databricks The pair discussed the role that comms plays in companies both internally and externally, and why it deserves a seat at the decision-making table. Given the media furor surrounding Musk himself, you can imagine that we had a lot to talk about. Oh, and Keyana has a podcast that I was a guest on, in case you want to hear more from her! Regular service returns tomorrow! Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday and Wednesday, and at 6 a.m. PT on Fridays, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. ZebethMedia also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together, and more!

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“We were the last straw that broke the camel’s back” • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Binance, Crypto, CZNo Comments on “We were the last straw that broke the camel’s back” • ZebethMedia

Binance co-founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, commented on the collapse of FTX at ZebethMedia Sessions: Crypto 2022. He played down his personal role in the series of events that ultimately led to FTX filing for bankruptcy. “I still don’t think I have that much influence. I think we were the last straw that broke the camel’s back. It’s not a straw that is really strong,” he told ZebethMedia’s Anita Ramaswamy. “There’s a whole bunch of stuff that built up to it. I just may have happened to be the last thing that pushed it.” He repeated some of the concerns that he has already expressed over the past few days. CZ believes the implosion of FTX is a negative event in the short term. But it will have a positive effect over the long term. “Many consumers are really hurt financially, they have money stuck on FTX, etc. That’s going to really shake confidence and credibility in the industry,” CZ said. “We will have a lot more education to do. We do need to increase transparency of our businesses — significantly. That itself is actually probably a good thing.” In many ways, CZ tried to differentiate Binance from FTX, saying that they are very different exchanges by design. But what makes Binance different? “We still run a profitable business today, we’re okay,” CZ said. “I was very surprised by the amount of money that [FTX] lost, and the amount of customer funds they moved, and the state of things there.” But Binance is still very dependent on transaction fees on its main crypto exchange. CZ said Binance generates around 90% of its revenue from that activity. And it changes vastly depending on the price of bitcoin. If the crypto winter lasts longer than expected, Binance could start generating revenue from its other products, such as CoinMarketCap and Trust Wallet. “When we acquired CoinMarketCap, they were making $3 million per month in ad revenue. We removed all ads so there’s no banners, no pop-ups,” CZ said. “It’s a much cleaner experience. But we can turn that back on. That’ll give us $40 million a year. But we don’t need to today. We have many products we provide for free just to increase the speed of adoption. but if we want to monetize those we could.” The second concern with Binance is that Binance also has its own token with BNB. FTX’s demise all started with concerns about the value of FTX’s own token FTT. “Fair concern, but we have proof of reserve and are working with auditors, regulators. We want to be as transparent as possible. We are in a very different situation than FTX,” CZ said. The industry recovery fund During the interview, Changpeng Zhao also talked about his plans to launch an industry recovery fund. It sounds like the fund is still very much a work in progress. “It’s not set in stone. Different numbers have been thrown around. I’ve seen numbers around $2 billion and I’m not sure if that’s enough or too much,” he said. Almost all projects you hear about in the news, they will have talked to us Changpeng Zhao While it sounds like a relief effort, Binance is approaching the fund with a business mindset. “There’s different ways to get compensation. We can get equity or ask for other things,” CZ said. Binance could also help open source projects if they don’t have enough funding. In that case, it would be traditional grants. Yesterday, Genesis halted customer withdrawals for its institutional client base dealing with Genesis Global Trading. According to their website, they have $2.8 billion in total active loans. Could Genesis benefit from some help from Binance’s industry recovery fund. “I can’t comment on specific deals. I would assume that there would be NDAs in place but we are looking at a large number of projects. Almost all projects you hear about in the news, they will have talked to us,” CZ said. Going forward, there is a lot of work to do to rebuild trust. Sure, CZ said Binance has 100% reserve for user assets. But a simple statement like that is no longer enough given FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried recent statements. “Publishing a cold wallet address is a short-term temporary method. It doesn’t mean that you’re 100% guarantee. And as we have seen in certain cases, it actually increases the amount of questions when things don’t really add up,” CZ said. “How secure is the wallet infrastructure? What kind of technologies do you use for your custody solution? How do you handle customer disputes? In which situations do you compensate users or not compensate users?” Of course, he believes Binance is a cutting-edge exchange on all those questions. “And we actually would like to share many of them to make them industry standards — like how we manage wallets. I think we have one of the most secure technologies for managing wallets. We also manage the largest wallets in the world,” he said. Many people believe FTX’s collapse will lead to more decentralization. In that case, FTX was a single point of failure. Many users lost some money because of that centralization. But CZ doesn’t necessarily see that as an existential risk. According to him, there will always be centralized entities and decentralized technologies in the crypto industry. “Today, if you ask everybody in the world who does not have crypto to hold crypto on their own, they are not technically capable of doing that,” he said. “So if we just force people to go from banks directly to DeFi, Most of them will lose their own money because they misplaced it, or they lost their keys, or they don’t know how to encrypt it, etc. That’s not the best way to grow the industry.”

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Roku lays off 200 US employees, citing economic conditions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Layoffs, Media & Entertainment, rokuNo Comments on Roku lays off 200 US employees, citing economic conditions • ZebethMedia

Roku wrote in a new SEC filing that it plans to cut 200 jobs in the U.S. as it braces for economic headwinds. Thanks to the workforce reduction, the company expects to incur a non-recurring charge of between $28 to $31 million, mainly because of severance payments, employee benefits contributions, other related expenses, and notice pay “where applicable,” Roku said. The company added that it expects most of the restructuring charges to come in Q4 2022 and that the job cuts, including cash payments, will be “substantially complete” by the end of the first quarter of 2023. In trading before the bell, shares of Roku dropped nearly 3%. “Due to the current economic conditions in our industry, we have made the difficult decision to reduce Roku’s headcount expenses by a projected 5%, to slow down our [Operating Expenses] growth rate. This will affect approximately 200 employee positions in the U.S. Taking these actions now will allow us to focus our investments on key strategic priorities to drive future growth and enhance our leadership position,” Roku said in an official statement. The unfortunate news comes on the heels of Roku’s third-quarter results when it cautioned investors that it predicts an unsatisfactory fourth quarter as the estimated total net revenue is approximately $800 million or a 7.5% decline year over year. Many tech and media companies have had layoffs recently, including Warner Bros. Discovery, Disney, Paramount Global, Amazon, Snap, Spotify, Twitter and Meta. Amazon was the most recent company to make major cuts yesterday. Last week, Meta laid off 13% of its workforce, affecting 11,000 employees.

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TikTok begins testing an early version of its platform research API • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Apps, Social, TikTokNo Comments on TikTok begins testing an early version of its platform research API • ZebethMedia

Earlier this year, TikTok announced that it’s developing a research API to improve access to public and anonymized data about content and activity on its app. Now, the company says it’s ready to make a beta version of its platform research API available and has asked members of its Content and Safety Advisory Councils to test an early version of the API. “To get started, we’ve asked members of our Content and Safety Advisory Councils with expertise in misinformation, violent extremism, hateful behavior, and emerging technologies to test an early version of our platform research API,” TikTok said in a blog post. “They’ll have access to public data as we gather their feedback on usability and the overall experience. We’re dedicated to hearing and incorporating feedback from testers and creating an API that will meet the needs of the scientific community while respecting the privacy of our community.” At the time of the initial announcement, TikTok said researchers currently don’t have an easy way to assess content or conduct tests on its platform, which is why it saw the need for a research API. In addition to the platform research API, TikTok is developing a content moderation API. The company plans to share more details in the coming months. The moderation system API will give select researchers a way to evaluate TikTok’s content moderation systems and examine existing content on the app. Researchers will also be able to upload their own content to see how different types of content are either permitted, rejected or passed to moderators for further evaluation. TikTok’s update on its research API work comes amid renewed calls from FCC commissioner Brendan Carr to ban the app. This wasn’t the first time Carr voiced this idea. After BuzzFeed News reported data improprieties implied by leaked internal communications, Carr wrote in June to Apple and Google calling the app an “unacceptable national security risk” and asking the companies to remove it from their app stores.

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Binance chief says crypto exchange doesn’t currently see a viable business in India • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on Posted in Binance, CoinDCX, Coinswitch Kuber, Crypto, indiaNo Comments on Binance chief says crypto exchange doesn’t currently see a viable business in India • ZebethMedia

Scores of crypto-focused venture capital firms have raced to India in the past two years, hoping to turn the world’s second largest internet market’s large developer community into a key web3 power house. But what does Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, arguably the most powerful and influential figure in the crypto industry, think about the potential of India? Not much, as of today. “To be honest, I don’t think India is a very crypto-friendly environment,” said Zhao at ZebethMedia Crypto conference Thursday. Zhao is not alone with such grim view about the Indian market. Dozens of investors and startup entrepreneurs I have spoken to have privately shared similar concerns, but Zhao’s comment is remarkable because nobody else with such stature has publicly expressed such view. Zhao blamed the country’s high tax environment for making the market not so viable for global players. “If you are going to tax 1% on each transaction, there is not going to be that many transactions,” he said. To be sure, Binance, by far the world’s largest crypto exchange by volume, is operational for users in India. “A user could trade 50 times a day and they will lose like 70% of their money. There is not going to be any volume for an order book type of exchange. So we don’t see a viable business in India today. We just have to wait. We are in conversation with a number of industry associations and influential people and trying to put some logic there,” he said, adding that charging a high tax on each transaction is resulting in lower tax accumulation broadly. “We are trying to get this message across, but tax policies typically take long time to change,” Zhao cautioned. “Binance goes to countries where regulations are pro-crypto and pro-business. We don’t go to countries where we won’t have a sustainable business — or any business, regardless of whether or not we go.” Zhao dismissed any concerns that the firm is seeing less potential in India because of the troubled deal deliberations with local exchange WazirX. India enforced a law earlier this year for taxing virtual currencies. It is taxing income from the transfer of any virtual assets at 30%. To capture details of all such crypto transactions, New Delhi is taking away a 1% tax deduction at source on payments made related to purchase of virtual assets. The nation’s move, alongside the market downturn, has brutally wiped the transactions local exchanges CoinSwitch Kuber, backed by Sequoia India and Andreessen Horowitz, and CoinDCX, backed by Pantera, observe on their platforms. WazirX was processing volumes of about $500 million a day during the peak crypto bull cycle of last year. The figure had dropped below $5 million as of a month ago, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Other global exchanges have attempted to make a push in India. Coinbase, which has backed both CoinDCX and CoinSwitch Kuber, launched its crypto platform in the country earlier this year but quickly rolled back the service amid regulatory scare. Coinbase co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong said in May that the firm disabled Coinbase’s support for local payments infra UPI “because of some informal pressure from the [central bank] Reserve Bank of India.”

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