Disrupt

Hidden Door wants to turn fiction into immersive roleplaying experiences • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Gaming, hidden door, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

The first season of “House of Dragon” just ended, and I find myself wishing for more. I’ve seen each episode twice already, read through the lore, and even re-watched some “Game of Thrones” episodes. If I had the option to immerse myself in that world and role-play as a dragon-riding Targaryen queen, you bet your ass I would do it. That’s eventually the vision of Hidden Door, a game studio that specializes in narrative AI and competed at ZebethMedia Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield 200 last week. Hidden Door wants to be able to turn any work of fiction into an immersive collaborative roleplaying experience, where players can jump into their favorite story worlds turned into dynamic graphic novels, with text and images being generated based on their choices. Hidden Door is currently testing out an adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz” because the story addresses various age groups and the original text is “so banana pants, which is perfect because it’s supposed to be silly and fun,” Matt Brandwein, Hidden Door’s co-founder, told ZebethMedia. What the platform looks like is a combination of Dungeons & Dragons and Roblox, where you have the vibe of a tabletop roleplaying game that allows you and your friends to “conjure” a story together — only with Hidden Door it doesn’t take four hours to get into character. An in-game AI dungeon master serves as the narrator and builds out a world based on the choices you make as you play. (The above YouTube demo is an early development preview, not the final experience, says Hidden Door.) To set up the game, the players can decide what characters, items, locations, tropes and vibes they want to encounter and “it all comes together like the dynamic back of a book, which doesn’t tell you everything that will happen, but it gives you the sorts of things you will encounter,” said Brandwein. When players choose a character type, the AI dynamically arts that character into a simplistic but cute 2D cartoon avatar. So, for example, a character called “Mischief Maker” might look something like Dennis the Menace in the Land of Oz. Once the character is chosen, the story begins and you’re given a challenge to complete, which you can do in any myriad of different ways based on how you choose to move through the game. The AI creates a host of responsively generated non-player characters, items and locations, which can then be collected, traded and shared with friends to make into new worlds and stories, according to Brandwein. “It’s a trope machine,” said Brandwein about his company’s narrative AI. “It’s trained on 2 million stories in addition to being fine tuned on the author’s work. It knows what sorts of things could plausibly happen, but also what’s implausible. And a lot of the work we’re doing right now is to fine tune it to have the right level of surprise, the right level of subterfuge.” Game studio Latitude last month came out with a similar type of game, AI Dungeon, which writes dialogue and scene descriptions using text-generating AI models. But the company has faced headwinds in both content and image generation. Hidden Door says its AI has the content generation part solved at least, and not only because the model was trained on millions of stories. The more the game is played, the bigger the world gets. Artifacts are created out of that play, which you can share with other players who can mix them into their own stories. Hilary Mason, Hidden Door’s CEO, said the creativity of the players coupled with the machine’s ability to riff off those ideas is a breakthrough on the impossible problem of generative storytelling. The company’s next move is to work with a dozen “fairly well known” sci-fi and fantasy authors who are interested in world building and want to loosely define a world for their fans to inhabit in order to “make this more of a community collaborative entertainment experience,” said Brandwein. “Beyond that, the vision we have for this is that someday, you know, if you’re on Amazon, or something like it, you can read the book, you can listen to the book, and then you might just play the book or whatever it is,” Brandwein continued. “Or if you look at Netflix’s game strategy, it’s some very trivial free-to-play game. But why can’t you put yourself into ‘Bridgerton’ and seduce the dude?” Netflix attempted an immersive TV experience a few years back with “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” which gave players an option to choose their own adventure. But that was pre-scripted, only giving you an A or a B at every moment, said Brandwein. Hidden Door recently raised a $7 million seed round led by Makers Fund with participation from Northzone and Betaworks. The startup is testing its current product with a cohort of nine to 12 year olds, and is actively looking for authors to collaborate with for future stories, as well as other potential tech partners with an interest in generative AI.

Skidattl’s augmented reality beacons are ‘like a Bat-Signal for fun’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 27, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Commerce, Disrupt, skidattl, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Skidattl wants to use augmented reality to get people to engage with the real world. It’s a story we’ve heard before from AR companies, particularly as they pit themselves against the potentially isolating effects of virtual reality. But rather than chasing metaversal Pokémon creatures on the street, Skidattl aims to use AR “beacons” to show people what’s going on around them. Randy Marsden, Skidattl co-founder, said they will be like “a Bat-Signal for fun” once the app launches. Anyone can make a beacon and anyone can see them. Businesses might set up beacons, which have a one-hour life span, to advertise two-for-one coffee sales, movie times or open bowling lanes. People might shoot up a beacon at a music festival to help their friends find them in the crowd. All a user would have to do is scan the horizon with their phone, or eventually with AR glasses, to see an array of beacons at up to 100 yards of distance, said Marsden. When Skidattl exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at TC Disrupt last week, the company had an AR beacon over its booth to demonstrate what it might look like. “Of course, you can look at a map and say, ‘What’s near me?’ but this pulls you back into the real world,” Marsden told ZebethMedia, noting that he is an Apple alum and a two-time ZebethMedia Battlefield finalist for previous companies — Swype (technically TC50) and Dryft (Disrupt SF 2013). Skidattl’s AR beacons will be anchored by GPS coordinates in the real world. To locate where a user is in relation to that beacon, Skidattl uses Google’s ARCore Geospatial API, which relies on Street View data. “When you launch the app, it’ll tell you to scan the buildings across the street, and within a few seconds, it will know where you are,” said Marsden. “And then those beacons are anchored; they don’t move around.” When people want to set up beacons indoors, Skidattl will also use Wi-Fi signals to help position users against the location of those beacons. Skidattl is still in its angel funding stage and alpha tech stage, but the startup hopes to go to market with a freemium business model — meaning it will be free to use but Skidattl can monetize through premium subscriptions, in-app purchases and affiliate commissions. Like any new social media app, Skidattl will have to battle the chicken-and-egg problem — no one will want to use it if there’s not plenty of beacons already lit up, but there can’t be any lit-up beacons without people on the app. “I think we can kickstart the business side pretty easily by giving them a free beacon,” said Marsden. “On the customer side, getting YouTube and TikTok influencers to talk about it, place ads with ZebethMedia and that sort of thing. And then once we have someone in the app, we can give them incentives for sharing with their contacts.” (It goes without saying, but ZebethMedia ad sales are totally separate from editorial.) Skidattl is currently trying to raise $500,000 to finish the minimum viable product and get the money it needs to officially launch its app at South by Southwest in March, Marsden said.

Pantheon Design alleviates supply chain uncertainty with factory-grade 3D printing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 22, 2022Posted in 3d printing, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Hardware, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

In the midst of the pandemic, Pantheon Design, a maker of industrial 3D printers from Vancouver, BC, suddenly found itself getting orders from factories in the Midwest, the center of heavy industries. The reason? These manufacturers were having a hard time getting parts out of China as COVID-19 restrictions in the country squeezed global supply chains. One of Pantheon Design’s e-mobility customers waited 18 months before its injection molds, which are used for producing parts, arrived from China. If your electric vehicle or home appliance order is taking longer to arrive, chances are port closures and lockdowns in the factory of the world are messing up your supplier’s production timeline. For a long time, 3D printers were too expensive, slow, and short-lived to be economically viable for manufacturers, observes Bob Cao, co-founder and CEO of Pantheon Design, as he speaks to ZebethMedia as one of the Disrupt Startup Battlefield 200 companies. Many of the 3D printing startups that secure big VC checks are run by smart people who have never been in a real factory, which is hot and smelly, says the entrepreneur. “So their machines break down all the time.” “They make the product for prototyping, but they try to sell the idea for manufacturing,” he adds. Cao’s founder story follows a familiar pattern seen among engineers: five years ago, he and his co-founders bought a bunch of 3D printers to build products for industrial customers, but the third-party devices weren’t meeting their expectations, so they set out to build their own. Parts created by Pantheon’s 3d printer. The result is the HS3 3D printer, which is a sleek-looking cube measuring 300mm on each side and weighing 46.7 kilograms, featuring black anodized aluminum, which has been treated to achieve a durable finish. The device is able to print carbon fiber parts that are as sturdy as metal and 5-10 times faster than other options on the market thanks to the startup’s patented methods, according to Cao. Moreover, it’s able to do it at a competitive cost even in comparison to Chinese suppliers. The startup has sold 40 HS3 units — all assembled in-house in Vancouver with parts manufactured in Canada — since starting shipping the machine nine months ago. Each printer costs $15,000, but the bigger chunk of the company’s revenues comes from selling filaments. Also called the “ink” for 3D printers, filaments range from $50-150 a kilo, which brings a nice 90% profit margin, and most of the company’s customers spend about $500-800 a month on them. Pantheon Design has raised $800,000 in funding from a mix of investors in Canada and the U.S., including the Boston-based accelerator Techstars. The company is also buoyed by revenues it generated from its previous business of printing products and prototypes for clients, and two of its proudest moments include printing entire concept motorcycles for Honda and all the sci-fi props in the Netflix film The Adam Project.

Maro’s new app looks to help schools screen kids for depression and anxiety • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 22, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Maro, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Maro has developed a platform that helps families and schools navigate tough conversations about mental health. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, launched its first product, Maro Parents, in 2020. Now, the company is gearing up to launch Maro for Schools next week to help schools screen students for anxiety and depression, with parental consent. Based in Tennessee, the startup was founded by Kenzie Butera Davis, who had originally planned to get Maro into schools to start helping children dealing with mental health issues. However, these plans were halted due to the start of the pandemic in 2020 as schools had to pivot online. Maro then decided to bring its platform into homes through the Maro for Parents app. Among other things, the app includes digital modules and an AI-powered bot to help parents discuss difficult topics with their children. Although Maro for Schools is officially launching next week, the company says 350 schools have already signed up to screen 100,000 students across 40 states for anxiety and depression. The program will be accessible via an annual subscription fee, but the company did not disclose the price. With the upcoming launch of Maro for Schools, the platform aims to provide teachers with accessible lesson plans around mental health. Maro for School also gives teachers access to resources regarding sex education, drug abuse and more. The platform also allows for streamlined communication between teachers and counselors, as teachers may be the first ones to detect if a child could benefit from help. If a counselor believes that a child requires additional care, Maro will connect them with referral partners who are doing virtual care. Maro for School doesn’t conduct virtual care, instead its purpose is to identify at-risk children early and then connect them with virtual care teams. “We’ve created a platform to screen children and then refer them to clinical teams that will facilitate and provide the care for the child,” Maro chief medical officer Tariq Chaudry told ZebethMedia. “We’re basically acting as a marketplace for pediatric development and mental health. We don’t want to be directly in therapy because we don’t want to dilute our company.” The launch of Maro for School comes the same month that the U.S. Preventive Series Task Force had recommended screening for anxiety in children between the ages of 8-18. Maro is in the midst of raising a $1.5 million pre-seed round and plans to use the investment to expand its current 11-person team and build out its product further. Maro anticipates closing the round within the next quarter.

Jasper’s robots assemble fresh meals for nearby apartment dwellers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Jasper, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

After attempting to sell its tech to large food service companies, cooking automation startup Jasper has shifted to direct-to-consumer. In a recent conversation, CEO Gunnar Froh told ZebethMedia about the pivot and gave a general update on the company, a member of this year’s Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2022. When Gunnar founded Jasper several years ago (as YPC Technologies) with human-robot interaction expert Camilo Perez Quintero, their motivation was primarily to save time on cooking. After developing robotics technologies to automate cooking processes, they opted for a business-to-business go-to-market approach, hoping to sell their platform to food suppliers and service vendors. But the company never gained the corporate traction Gunnar and Quintero hoped it would. The company pivoted a few months ago, rebranding to Jasper and adopting what Gunnar calls a “cooking as a service” model. Jasper now runs robotic kitchens in or next to residential high rises, charging residents a subscription fee plus the cost of ingredients for meals. “Having good meals at home is expensive or time consuming. Food delivery is highly inefficient — restaurants or ghost kitchens prepare meals worth a few dollars and then pay someone to ship them across town. While most customers aren’t aware of this, about half of their dollars are spent on platform fees and delivery costs,” Gunnar told ZebethMedia. “By running robotic kitchens in or next to residential high rises, Jasper eliminates labor and delivery inefficiencies to offer residents freshly prepared gourmet meals at the cost of home cooking. Jasper meals are plated on porcelain which allows its clients to cut up to a third of their household waste.” Jasper’s robotics tech platform, which assembles food according to a set menu. Food automation startups are having a moment, as recently evidenced by Chipotle’s investment in Miso Robotics’ tortilla chip-making robot. It’s no surprise — labor shortages and increasingly costly ingredients make food-prepping robots an attractive proposition. In 2020, Karakuri landed $8.4 million for its automated canteen to make meals. Last May, Chef Robotics raised $7.7 million with the goal of helping automate certain aspects of food preparation. A few months later, salad chain Sweetgreen bought kitchen robotics startup Spyce, and this past summer Makeline secured $24 million for its robot that automatically assembles bowl lunches. Jasper competes more directly with Los Angeles-based Nommi, who supplies autonomous food kiosks to real estate and college campus partners. But Gunnar asserts that Jasper’s platform is able to prepare a wider range of menu items (ranging in cost from $1.20 to $16.90), including cod with steamed potatoes, paprika cream chicken and desserts like sticky toffee pudding. “We use machine learning for task scheduling and the dispensing of ingredients. We intend to also add it to enable the experience of a personal chef,” Gunnar sad. “The same way that Spotify can predict what music you like, Jasper will predict what meals our customers would like to eat … No other food robotics company we are aware of can currently serve customers at home the way Jasper does as no other system can prepare a menu as versatile as ours.” Jasper says it ran multiple trials in a residential midrise over the past year and over the past month launched Jasper in six apartment buildings. To date, only about 231 customers have ordered food from Jasper via the company’s ordering platform. But in a sign investors are pleased with current progress, Jasper has raised $3.5 million from backers including Toyota Ventures. Image Credits: Jasper In a statement via email, Toyota Ventures’ founding managing director Jim Adler said: “Toyota Ventures made an early investment in Jasper because we got excited by the team’s vision of bringing fresh cooking, exciting menus, and high food quality close to consumers. They’ve been focused on how best to serve customers daily meals at home. They have impressive early traction that’s been driven by recent labor shortage in the restaurant industry and growing consumer demand for affordable food options. It’s a bit of a perfect storm for Jasper which is creating a huge opportunity for the company to improve the way we eat every day.” Gunnar says the goal is to reach $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) as it prepares to raise $7 million in additional capital. Jasper, which employs 13 people (a number Gunnar anticipates increasing to 15 by the end of the year), has a current ARR of “less than” $100,000. “We just launched Jasper in multiple buildings over the past few weeks and will ramp up revenue,” Gunnar said. “This funding will further increase automation in our processes to get to a revenue per man-hour of $167.”

How Zette plans to let people access paywalled news with a single monthly subscription • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Media & Entertainment, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, ZetteNo Comments

A new startup wants to help online media outlets make money by making it easier for consumers to access paywalled content without being locked in to multiple subscriptions. Demoing as part of the Battlefield 200 cohort at TC Disrupt this week, Zette is trying to achieve something that others before have tried. Since the dawn of time (well, at least since the advent of the web), digital media businesses have sought new ways to make money. While traditional newspapers and magazines’ path to monetization was relatively straightforward, insofar as they charged money for a physical product (usually filled with paid advertising), the online sphere has had to flirt with a multitude of models, from advertising and events, to — increasingly, it seems — paywalls. But while paywalls promise clear and predictable income, it’s a difficult model to scale outside of the major outlets such as the New York Times. People don’t want (or can’t afford) dozens of subscriptions, but that doesn’t mean that they’re unwilling to pay something to access individual articles if they’re given the option to do so. There are already subscription-based services such as Apple News+, which bundles stories from hundreds of publications, and pay-per-article alternatives such as Blendle, which allow publications to charge microtransactions to read one-off articles. Zette sits somewhere in the middle, charging a monthly $9.99 subscription for access to 30 articles from its partner publications, though it is also dabbling with different pricing plans for those who want to purchase more credits. However, if the user doesn’t consume their credits in a given month, this doesn’t roll over to the next month — everything resets. The story so far Zette was founded out of San Francisco in 2020 by former Forbes reporter Yehong Zhu, and after raising some $1.7 million in seed funding last year, the company is officially arriving in private beta this week for waitlist members, ahead of an anticipated public launch early next year. For now, Zette has inked deals with New Scientist, Forbes, McClatchy, Boone Newspapers, and Haaretz, with plans to bolster this by “hundreds” more in the coming year. So, how does it all work? Well, the user downloads and installs a browser extension, signs up for a Zette account and subscription, and when Zette detects a paywall on a partner website, it invites the user to unlock the article by paying a single credit. Zette in action Image Credits: Zette The company said that it’s also considering allowing users to roll over some of their credits, though with a time limit on when they need to be used by. Perhaps the crucial point worth noting here is that in contrast to something like Apple News+, rather than serving as an aggregator, Zette’s pitch to publishers is that it enables them to retain relationships with their readers, given that their content remains on their own website. “Publishers control the display and messaging of their content, unlike within Apple News’ ecosystem,” Zhu said. “Readers can open an article from anywhere — Twitter, Facebook, Google, iMessage, Slack, the news websites themselves — and still use Zette to unlock the article.” Zette will be focusing on the U.S. market exclusively at first, but it has aspirations to launch in international markets too. “We’re an American company focusing first on U.S. readers,” Zhu said. “We’re investing heavily in marketing and growth, especially as it pertains to getting younger readers — Gen-Zs and millennials — on board.” Business model There are, perhaps, some flaws with this type of model. The benefit of subscribing to a publication directly is that while you might not enjoy everything in it, you will probably find some articles that you like. With a subscription-based, pay-per-article model, you don’t know whether you’re going to like it before committing credits to the cause. On top of that, you might not stumble upon 30 paywalled articles in a given month that you want to read. So for a $10 monthly payment, it’s possible that some subscribers simply won’t get value from it. There are some elements of Blendle’s model which make more sense. There is less pressure on the reader to consume a set number of monthly articles, as it’s built around single microtransactions — put money in your account, and use it whenever you want. But while that may be a more consumer-friendly model, it doesn’t necessary benefit the publication or the company behind the technology. According to Zhu, this type of business model merely encourages “sporadic use rather than sustained readership,” ultimately leading to higher churn and poor monetization. “We also believe that consumers tend to not enjoy the experience of having to put a dollar and cents value on each article they want to read,” Zhu continued. “This causes them to feel ‘nickel and dime-d’. For this reason, Zette took inspiration from video games, where you buy bundles of ‘virtual coins’ up front for in-app purchases: we replace money with credits to distance the customer from the feeling of making a purchase. This makes each transaction low-friction, and also makes it easier to top up on credits every month. We believe that a microtransactions-like experience on the frontend, recurring revenue on the backend, is the best of both worlds.” Moreover, while there are benefits to a traditional news subscription, vis-à-vis readers can consume everything from sports and politics in a single publication, not everyone wants to read a newspaper cover to cover. “Traditional news subscriptions serve one audience very well: heavy readers,” Zhu said. “These are readers who hit paywalls often enough and frequently enough that they decide to become paying patrons of a single outlet. The majority of online readers are light readers: they browse around for news, they only want to read one article at a time so they can’t justify the cost and inconvenience of signing up for a subscription, they’re relatively brand agnostic, they’re price sensitive, and they are largely looking for a diversity of content, rather than just getting all their news

View select ZebethMedia Disrupt content online today • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Disrupt, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

If you couldn’t make it to San Francisco to attend ZebethMedia Disrupt in person, the next is the next best thing. With it, you can access all the sessions that went down on the Disrupt stage, the ZebethMedia+ stage along with select presentations from both the Discovery stage and breakout sessions — today, October 21 only! You’ll find all that content available as video on demand in the event app, which you can watch on your mobile or in-browser. Plus, you’ll even find speed networking sessions in the app so you can connect with folks both near and far who align with your business goals. Note: If you did attend Disrupt, your pass gives you access to the online content, too. We’re guessing you might not have seen every session on your must-see list. Now’s your chance. Here’s a look at just some of the headliners you can access online — and what they discussed. Marc’s Lore: Billionaire Marc Lore sold his startup to an everything store, twice. After inking deals with Amazon and Walmart, the Quidsi and Jet.com co-founder has launched Wonder to tackle a common problem, food delivery, in an unconventional way. The Art of Inclusivity with Kevin Hart: Financial inclusion is multifaceted: you’re fighting up against homogeneous networks, deceptive warm intros and the basic need for more fluency across different demographics. There’s an art to it. Comedian and actor Kevin Hart, Mike Elanjian of Capital Connect by JPMorgan, and Robert Roman of HartBeat Ventures are joining us to talk about these very complexities. HartBeat Ventures will also chat about their work investing in the likes of Beyond Meat, Fabletics and Therabody, while JPMorgan will give us a look at how institutions are breaking down barriers. Michael Elanjian, head of digital investment banking and digital private markets, JPMorgan; Kevin Hart, founder, HartBeat Ventures; and Robert Roman, president and co-founder, HartBeat Ventures. Acing Venture: Serena Williams is the greatest to ever play the game of tennis, and she’s already made a name for herself as a VC in the tech world. At Disrupt, Williams and her Serena Ventures partner Alison Rapaport will join us to discuss the next chapter of Serena’s career, swapping out the racket for several (hundred) inbound pitch decks. We’ll talk about their investment thesis, her plans to bring more diversity into tech, and what she brings to the table as a VC. Serena Williams, founding and managing partner at Serena Ventures and Alison Rapaport Stillman, founding and managing partner at Serena Ventures. From Court to Cast: Basketball stars are no strangers to diversifying their portfolios. For four-time NBA champion and Golden State Warriors power forward Draymond Green, that’s meant going from the front court to behind the mic. He joins us to discuss his successes on and off the court, including The Draymond Green Show podcast and the Prime Video special, “The Sessions: Draymond Green.” Draymond Green, NBA 4x champion and host of The Draymond Green Show. Seriously, this is just a taste — take a look at the event agenda to see all the content on the Disrupt and ZebethMedia+ stages — you don’t want to miss it. Buy your online pass and start watching!

Meta’s $10B metaverse investment is ‘not enough’ according to Animoca Brands’ Yat Siu • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Animoca Brands, Crypto, Disrupt, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, web3, Yat SiuNo Comments

Yat Siu, the co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, has a lot of thoughts about the metaverse. That’s because his company owns The Sandbox and has investments in many different web3 companies, such as OpenSea, Dapper Labs and Axie Infinity. At ZebethMedia Disrupt, he shared his thoughts about Meta’s take on the metaverse. They said they’re going to spend $10 billion a year to make the metaverse work. Well, here’s the thing — we think $10 billion is not enough for Facebook to succeed. Billions of dollars are transacted in the open metaverse space — actually much more when you consider fungible tokens. Most of the value goes to the end user, so why would I transact on something like Meta — regardless of its visuals — when I have to give half of it to the platform? Whereas if I use Sandbox, I get 95% of it. It just doesn’t make any sense for me to do that, economically speaking. And because billions of dollars of value are already generated in an open way, why would I surrender that value? So Facebook would have to spend a lot more to incentivize people to go into its platform. But that doesn’t mean that Zuckerberg is the wrong person to head up this project. “I would say that certainly Zuckerberg did get it right in terms of construction. Remember, he tried to put out Libra, right?… So he understands blockchain,” Yat Siu said. But what is the metaverse exactly? A lot of people are still arguing about that. Some people think it’s online universes, while others think it involves virtual reality. According to Yat Siu, the key thing that makes a metaverse a true metaverse is property rights. “Just how George Washington said that you can’t have basically, freedom without property rights, we think the same is true with digital. You can’t have digital freedom without digital property rights. So our perspective on the open metaverse is that it has to start with a foundation of ownership. And that’s where The Sandbox stands out,” he said. Animoca Brands is much bigger than The Sandbox. There are 380 companies in the group and portfolio. Thirty of them are subsidiaries. Animoca Brands is technically an Australian company with a headquarters in Hong Kong and nearly a thousand employees. It’s quite easy to sum up Animoca Brands’ strategy. The company is investing in the web3 ecosystem because there are some strong network effects. It is betting on a web3 rising tide that could lift all boats. “The economy activity around the ownership of cars is much bigger than the sales of cars,” Yat Siu said. He mentioned Uber, Lyft and car washes as examples of businesses that work without selling cars. “For instance, when we made our first check in OpenSea, which had a very small valuation back in 2018–2019, it wasn’t because we hoped that OpenSea would be a decacorn,” he said. “We did it because OpenSea had lots of NFT work and relatively good NFT volume. We would help push that and we would have our own NFT sales and every company we invest in could sell on OpenSea.” In other words, if web3 becomes a huge thing, it’s clear that Animoca Brands is well positioned to become a key player in the space.

How Talkbase plans to power user-led growth for any company • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Community-led growth, Disrupt, Social, Startups, Talkbase, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

A new startup is setting out to help companies build and harness communities around their products, enabling them to side-step multiple disparate tools and manage everything in a single platform. Founded out of the Czech Republic in 2021, Talkbase launched out of stealth just a couple of weeks back, backed by $2 million in pre-seed funding from a mixture of Czech and U.S. funds, including J&T Ventures, Credo Ventures, Mxv Capital, and Plug & Play Tech Center. The Prague-based company represents one of the Battlefield 200 startup exhibitors at TC Disrupt this week, and ZebethMedia caught up with the cofounders to get the lowdown on what Talkbase is all about, and the problem that it’s looking to solve. Community meets product Much has been written about the various strategies companies pursue for growth, from traditional approaches such as marketing-led and sales-led, through to what is arguably one of the biggest buzzwords of today — product-led growth (PLG), where the product itself does the selling and onboarding. However, community-led growth is also an increasingly popular approach to driving new and repeat business organically — this is where a product’s users serve as advocates and a support network for other would-be customers. Community-led growth is actually closely aligned with product-led growth, insofar as a user has to first be made aware that a product exists, and then convinced that it’s worth checking out and remaining an active user. The “community” that performs this task can be anything from social media influencers and review sites, to dedicated forums such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, Slack, or Facebook Groups. If companies can harness these types of channels through active engagement, and get millions of people banging the drum about their product, they can sit back (more or less) and focus on building rather than selling. As ZebethMedia wrote last year, in many ways, the chief community officer is the new chief marketing officer. “I think in some ways, they [community-led growth and product-led growth] go hand-in-hand, because in order to be product-led, and in order to build an amazing product, you really need to work close with your users,” cofounder and CEO Klara Losert said. “And if you want to work with them well, you build a community around your product.” Talkbase cofounders Klara Losert and Roman Nguyen Image Credits: ZebethMedia There are many examples of startups that have risen to billion-dollar behemoths off the back of community-led growth, from commercial open source companies like MongoDB (which actually isn’t open source any more) to popular creator-focused companies such as Figma (currently in the process of being acquired by Adobe for a cool $20 billion) and $40 billion unicorn Canva, which happens to be one of Talkbase’s early customers. “Community-led growth is one of the most popular growth channels in tech, but there is no platform to support it,” Losert said. “Community managers are responsible for growth, hiring, or retention programs — yet they spend most of their time in Google Sheets, Airtable, forms, and other platforms to launch one single program.” A “program” could mean a one-off event, a series of content (e.g. video demos), or an ambassador program that coaches brand advocates on how best to spread the word. Community managers might use any number of platforms to manage their community, such as Slack, Discord, or Hubspot, and this essentially is where Talkbase enters the fray — it bridges various community management tools, bringing everything under one roof. For example, Talkbase packs task-management and collaboration tools similar to Trello or Asana, allowing managers to assign tasks, and teams to work together on programs to meet deadlines. Talkbase: Task management Image Credits: Talkbase Elsewhere, Talkbase includes features for creating, managing, and scheduling events, such as supporting attendee registrations and managing moderators or speakers. On top of that, Talkbase has purpose-built advocacy management tools for customizing and tracking their goals, and collating feedback for potential new projects. This can also be used to identify existing members of the community (e.g. on Twitter or LinkedIn) who are already vocal supporters of a particular product, making it easier for companies to reach out and engage with directly. Talkbase: Ambassador program It’s worth noting that there are a number of other platforms out there that have raised significant VC money to power community-led growth at companies of all sizes. Commsor recently raised a $50 million Series B, while Common Room secured $52 million. Threado, meanwhile, raised a slightly more modest $3.1 million seed round. It’s difficult to ignore the parallels between Talkbase and these other companies, in terms of how they pull together the different strands that constitute a “community.” But Talkbase says that it’s moving beyond the incumbents by pulling together all the various elements that constitute a community manager’s toolset. While it’s focused mostly on managing events and company ambassadors for now, it’s adding more features to the mix, enabled in part by its recent seed round of funding. Talkbase is tooling up to replace survey tools such as Typeform; CRMs or spreadsheet tools such as Google Sheets or Airtable; event publishing tools such as Eventbrite; and even outbound communication tools such as Mailchimp — Losert said that they are currently in the process of developing their own newsletter tool. In terms of pricing, the company officially unveiled its various plans this week, starting from “free” for a basic tier with restrictions, through $68 per month for the basic plan and a soon-to-launch Pro plan that opens everything up for $680 per month.

Uils wants to lend LatAm’s rideshare drivers cash based on their driving record • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Fintech, LATAM, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Transportation, UilsNo Comments

When Uils launched in 2021, it was a car rental service for rideshare drivers. But after the founders realized that many rideshare drivers don’t have access to credit, particularly in Latin America, the Buenos Aires-based company pivoted to fintech, offering financial services to drivers through a behavioral scoring engine based entirely on a person’s driving history. Rideshare vehicle lending is a crowded market. Both Uber and Lyft host marketplaces where approved vehicle rental companies can show their wares; Uber has piloted a short-term credit program offering up to $500 to drivers. One of the largest ridesharing companies in China, Didi, started offering loans to drivers in 2019. Meanwhile, lenders like Giggle Finance have long extended credit lines for ridesharing vehicle purchases, maintenance and upkeep. But Costanzo argues Uils (pronounced “wheels”), which is one of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, stands apart in its ability to give a “360-degree” view of drivers in the mobility gig economy. “Being integrated with all the mobility applications available in Latin America, we have a total vision of the driver’s work activities, being able to determine a credit offer that is more adjusted to reality,” he told ZebethMedia in an interview. To use Uils, drivers download an app, fill out an application, and connect the app to the ridesharing platforms for which they drive via an API (e.g., Uber). Uils analyzes their history using a machine learning model to determine whether they qualify for a “micro” or consumer loan, considering various factors. The interest rates range from 0% for the micro loans (for a weekly subscription of $1 to $2) to 145% for the consumer loans. That’s quite a wide range — and sounds sky-high — but Costanzo says it’s reflective of the equally high inflation rate in Argentina, the country where Uils first launched. “The app has an embedded banking account where drivers collect their earnings from mobility apps,” Costanzo explained. “In that same account, they receive loan funds and pay their installments every week. We have a collection process that runs every 15 seconds so as soon as the mobility app sends the money, we will collect the pending installments before the driver notices … The rent-to-own loans are a leasing, so technically we can get the car back as soon as the driver goes into delinquency, therefore there is a tendency to 0% default.” It’s a relatively new idea in the lending domain, although services that track driver behavior to offer discounts and benefits have been around for some time. For example, Zendrive collects data about driving habits and awards drivers for making safe decisions. Root Insurance calculates car insurance premiums based on driving patterns, and Avinew rewards customers for using autonomous safety features. But there are obvious surveillance — and bias — implications. It’s unlikely every driver would be comfortable with the idea of sharing driving histories with Uils, particularly given that the company uses that data to create a risk profile of them. And where algorithms are involved, there’s always the possibility that flaws in the model could lead some drivers to be treated unfairly or poorly. Consider traffic in a driver’s area that forces them to make frequent, sudden stops that under normal circumstances might be considered reckless. There’s another risk to consider: the challenge of paying back loans in a downtrending economy, especially as interest rates climb and inflation impacts the price of fuel. An April poll from The Rideshare Guy, a ridesharing blog and forum, found that nearly half of rideshare workers quit or starting driving less that month because of spikes in gas prices. Image Credits: Uils For its part, Uils says that it requires customers to reauthorize the connections between the app and ridesharing platforms every month, so that tracking doesn’t continue indefinitely. (The company does require customers verify their identity to receive loans, however.) Uils is keeping the details of its algorithm close to the chest, save for revealing 70% of users who’ve applied for loans through the platform have received them. The company also isn’t saying exactly how many of those users have failed to make payments, if any. “The scoring engine has more than 200 data points for each driver. We have variables like their work schedule, how many trips per day, how many apps do they use, how many cars they have used, among others,” Costanzo said. “After processing the driving history, we will get a score from one to 1,000. Based on our current lending policies, that score will let us know what is the maximum that a driver can receive as a loan.” After that, Uils has the second layer that’s based on earnings. Depending on how much money the driver makes, they’re able to allocate up to 30% to loan repayment. But opaqueness aside, Uils’ terms and approach might be less onerous than, for example, those around rentals from Lyft or Uber — which some drivers say make achieving a profit nearly impossible. A 2019 investigative piece found that Lyft paid drivers participating in its Express Drive rental program less per mile than drivers who used cars leased through dealerships. The program imposed restrictions on drivers as well, prohibiting them from making money using their vehicles to work for other services. Costanzo stresses, again, that these are drivers without access to traditional credit — making their financial situations particularly precarious. “The biggest competitive advantage is that we apply a matching fund strategy around the installments amount,” Costanzo said. “Drivers will pay the same amount that he pays to rent the car in the informal market, offering a frictionless solution. On top of that, we are the only fintech in Latin America that offers major consumer loans and rent-to-own loans without consulting credit bureaus or asking for a credit card or any other guarantees.” Image Credits: Uils Uils is currently raising its second round funding round — totaling $1 million — through a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE), which grants the investors the right to purchase