Kozmo.com, the startup that attempted on-demand delivery of anything way back in 1998 but burned through $280 million in capital and failed to make itself profitable, is back.
Instead of delivering anything from videos to games to books and more, the new Kozmo is focused on bulk delivery of groceries. Kozmo will offer next-day delivery, with the goal of delivering on-demand within two hours, for groceries. Kozmo will initially charge a $5.99 delivery fee for orders costing a minimum of $35. With Kozmo, the company says customers can expect to save between 20-50 percent off retail prices.
It’s important to note that this Kozmo is under new leadership. None of the original Kozmo founders or employees are involved in this new venture. Instead, grocery ordering platform Yummy bought the domain and trademark for Kozmo. Kozmo’s products will come from Yummy.com and local retailers.
“Kozmo.com is an iconic brand that millions of people remember,” Kozmo and Yummy CEO Barnaby Montgomery told TechCrunch in an email. “In addition, it’s synonymous with convenience so we felt that keeping the name with our updated offering was the perfect fit.”
Kozmo seems to be going after Costco, Jet and Boxed.com, the site for buying food and household items in bulk that similarly does not charge membership fees.
“When viewed as a combined offer, Kozmo and Yummy.com offer customers the holy grail of online solutions; the opportunity to buy online for less than a trip to the store at Kozmo, and the option to have your groceries delivered in only 30 minutes at Yummy.com, which is faster and more convenient than a trip to the store,” Montgomery said. “The unified view of our 2 solutions is important because we’re able to leverage our owned facilities, inventory, labor and delivery infrastructure to profitably help customers solve more problems, and help them save more money.”
Kozmo is currently only available in Los Angeles, but the company has plans to expand into additional markets this year.
Source: TechCrunch
Wildlife officials at Ol Pejeta Conservancy euthanize the rare rhinoceros due to severe pain from health issues affecting his muscles and bones.
Source: CNET
Are you a developer, marketer, or designer living in Europe? Do you have an idea for an app or a hardware product that’s been tickling your brain trying to escape into the real world? Then you need to get yourself and your ideas down to the Expo Porte de Versailles in Paris on May 25-26. Why? To compete in the TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech, mais bien sûr! Get your free ticket to hack today!
There you’ll connect with hundreds of other like-minded developers, hackers, tech builders and makers to form ad-hoc teams and use BeMyApp, the official Hackathon platform, to produce something amazing.
Here’s the best part: you’ll do all this in less than 24 candy-, caffeine-, and energy-drink-fueled hours. And right when you think you can’t possibly stay awake another second, it’s time to step on stage and deliver your creation in a 60-second, rapid-fire presentation to the Hackathon judges.
It’s grueling, it’s exhausting, it’s fun. Not only do you get a chance to display your own Ninja-like hacker chops, you’ll be surrounded by other devs at the top of their game. The opportunity to share ideas, learn new skills and network is invaluable. C’est magnifique!
So, other than bragging rights and a desire for a three-day nap, what do you get for all your hard work? The overall Hackathon winner takes home €5,000. And each team that scores a three or higher from the judges will receive five tickets to VivaTech 2019 and two Innovator tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in November.
And of course, it’s just not a Hackathon without top-quality swag, cash prizes and other nifty goodies from our sponsors. We’ll have more details on the contests and prizes coming soon.
The only qualification for participating in TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech is that you must be a resident of one of these European countries. And — get this — tickets are absolutely free. There’s a limited supply, however, and once they’re gone that’s it. Quelle horreur!
So, don’t miss out. Come to TechCrunch Hackathon at VivaTech and strut your stuff. We can’t wait to see you bring your ideas to life in Paris. Get your free tickets right here.
Source: TechCrunch
Blockchain technology and the decentralizing effects of distributed ledgers have enormous amounts of potential and may mean the Internet will never be the same again. The fact that one could eventually run vast applications without any servers is equally transformational. But it’s still very much a wild west out there in terms of ascertaining who is working on ‘the real deal’.
The blockchain world is currently weighed down with the expectations of dubious crypto-currency speculators and sky-high ICOs and hacks that are interfering with a frank conversation about the future.
Which is why TechCrunch has decided to throw its hat into the ring and try to bring together the leading players in the space for a frank discussion and inquiry into this next phase in Zug, Switzerland, this July.
At TC Sessions: Blockchain 2018, TechCrunch’s editors will bring together top figures in the blockchain technology world to discuss how and where blockchain technology is going to disrupt the status quo.
We’re delighted to announce that Jun Hasegawa, CEO / Founder of Omise, a multinational payments company currently present in Thailand (HQ), Japan, Singapore and Indonesia that has raised over $50M in funding.
In 2015, his desire to push the boundaries led Omise to become the very first financial services company to join the Ethereum community. In 2017, after over a year of research and development, this culminated in the launch of OmiseGO, the crowd-funded blockchain division tasked with creating the OMG network. This is an Ethereum-based public blockchain with the ambitious vision of enabling financial service equity by radically decentralizing value transfer and exchange.
Prior to founding payments Omise, Jun was involved in founding a series of tech companies in Japan mainly in the fields of e-commerce, lifelog and mobile payments and is currently based in Bangkok.
We’ll also be joined by one of the leading proponents of blockchain tech to track the provenance of real-world objects.
Leanne Kemp, is Founder & CEO of Everledger – a digital, global ledger that tracks and protects items of value.
Using her knowledge of emerging technologies, business, jewelry and insurance, Everledger is aiming at a new kind of global transparency for luxury, constructing a digital verification system that assists in the reduction of fraud, black markets, and trafficking.
Everledger was recently named Best Blockchain Company at the Financial Tech Awards 2016, Best Newcomer at the Asia Insurance Technology Awards 2016, Innovator of the Year at the Penrose Awards, and Best B2B Start-up at the Digital Top 50 Awards.
TC Sessions: Blockchain 2018 is being built on the hugely successful Disrupt San Francisco 2017 event, which included discussions on blockchain startups, cryptocurrency and ICOs with guests such as Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin .
But why is it in Zug, Switzerland?
Well, Zug has become known as “Crypto Valley” because of the numerous blockchain companies that have moved there to capitalize on the canton’s forward-thinking approach to regulation and favorable tax approach for cutting-edge projects.
As well as the above speakers we’ll also be joined by Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of the Hyperledger project, an open source, collaborative effort advancing blockchain technologies in areas like marketplaces, data-sharing networks, micro-currencies and decentralized digital communities.
At the event we’ll be covering how decentralization will impact the internet and web services today; how big businesses and enterprises are moving forward to tap the potential of the blockchain; what the future of financing through crypto and ICOs might look like; and the important technological breakthroughs and challenges facing blockchain.
More speakers are due to be announced in the coming weeks and months, but you can already buy a ticket here.
If you’re interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at this event, contact us here.
Source: TechCrunch
Brian Acton, who co-founded WhatsApp and sold it to Facebook for $19 billion, sent out a short tweet in which he said, “It is time.”
Source: CNET
You’ll be seeing a lot less Pepe at Overwatch events, and from Overwatch pro players.
Source: CNET
Among his greatest contributions, Haro discovered the existence of flare stars — red and blue stars that experience dramatic increases in brightness.
Source: CNET
The electromechanical industry may not be the kind of sexy tech that you’ll regularly read about in TechCrunch, but we like solutions to problems, and that is why I am about to write about a company in the aforementioned industry. Add in that the startup is based in Asia — Thailand, to be precise — and we have the recipe for a young company to keep an eye on.
Kyklo is the company and it is aimed at bringing the electromechanical space, which is worth over $1 trillion per year across 100,000s of distributors and retailers worldwide, into the digital era. The company operates a service that brings sales channels, inventory and networks online to replace the existing system, which is largely offline.
As of now, for example, if an OEM is selling air conditioning units for a new building development — the industry touches 5-20 percent of every new building via electrical equipment — the process will typically be handled by a reseller who presents a paper-based inventory to the buyer. Kyklo is proposing to take things online by allowing OEMs to lay out their inventory in a web-based shop — like Shopify — which can then be used by the reseller to solicit sales.
The idea may seem elementary, but the benefits go beyond ease of use — a website obviously has plenty of benefits over a physical sales catalog — including increased visibility to the OEM, who previously relied on the reseller for sales data. Resellers themselves also have a more dynamic catalog of products to share with prospective sales leads, which is also designed to feature highly in search engine rankings to help bring in inbound sales leads.
Kyklo began as a Shopify-like solution when it was founded in 2015 by two former employees of Schneider Electric, the $50-billion electric and energy company that is listed in Paris, France. Over the past year, however, the startup refocused into a sales lead and management tool for both OEMs and resellers.
CEO Remi Ducrocq — who started Kyklo with fellow co-founder and CTO Fabien Legouic — told TechCrunch that there was an expectation that simply by launching a store sales leads would land. While Kyklo does optimize search ranking, it works best as an aid for teams by helping coordinate sales leads, giving greater transparency on data — for future sales predictions — making it easy to add new products quickly, and automating much of the process for repeat customers.
Kyklo CEO Remi Ducrocq and CTO Fabien Legouic (left and right) both formerly worked for Schneider Electric
Rather than spending time requests from existing customers with phone calls and emails, resellers can simply provide a link to the catalog and enable customers to handle the re-purchasing process by themselves. That frees up resources to chase new sales and more.
“When we pitch distributors on why they should digitize their sales operations, it is first about how you get your existing customers online. So you shift your business from offline to online and by doing so you’ll get better satisfaction and you’ll be able to saturate your customer base,” Ducrocq said, pointing out that the service has helped some customers add 20 percent more sales from existing customers.
“Considering a distributor has 10 sales guys covering 1,000 customers, the truth is they only spend time with 50 guys who do 80 percent of the orders,” Ducrocq added. “On existing customers, a lot of the work is really admin [so] that’s something you can take off by making it digital.”
Kyklo’s customer base includes Schneider Electric and Thailand-based Interlink, the latter of which told TechCrunch in a statement that it grew revenue from its online business five-fold “in a matter of months” after coming on the Kyklo platform.
The benefit for OEMs is obvious, but initially some resellers were initially unsure of allowing a third-party into the relationship with their supplier (OEM). Kyklo CEO Ducrocq said his company has no interest in entering the reseller space. In fact, it has field agents who accompany resellers to meetings with their major buyers to help them come aboard while it jointly works on data and statistics to help reseller teams target new sales opportunities.
While it is sticking firmly to its position in the sales cycle, the startup does, however, have designs on international expansion. Right now, has customers in seven markets in Asia — Ducrocq is half-French, half-Thai hence the initial location in Bangkok — but already it is casting eyes on the European and North American markets.
U.S.-based Handshake, a B2B sales platform that has raised over $20 million from investors, is perhaps one of the most notable competitors it would come up against, but Kyklo believes its focus on the electromechanical space can help it conquer its niche. The startup is also looking to expand its relationship with existing global customers who it services in Asia to cover new markets that will give it a rolling start to its expansions.
“Right now we’re looking at which two countries we will do in Europe, and where we will go in the U.S.,” Ducrocq said.
In order to aid that expansion, Kyklo has raised funding from investors that include Singapore-based duo SeedPlus and Wavemaker Partners. Ducrocq declined to provide financial details of the round, while he also declined to give financial details on Kyklo’s business.
The company currently has 40 staff in its Bangkok HQ, with a number of remote business development and sales executives. While it plans to increase the number of staff it has outside of Thailand, there is no plan to relocate its main office from Bangkok.
The Kyklo office in Bangkok
Source: TechCrunch
CryptoKitties, the virtual collectible kitten game that turned into a viral sensation has raised $12M in funding and will be spun out from Axiom Zen, the Vancouver and San Francisco-based design studio that originally built the game.
The round is being led by Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures, both of which have quickly developed a reputation for backing fast-growing cryptocurrency startups like Coinbase. A bunch of notable angels also participated, including Naval Ravikant (CEO and founder of AngelList), Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga) and Fred Ehrsam (founder of Coinbase) among others.
So what are CryptoKitties? They’re essentially digital collectibles built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Each one is unique and has certain attributes that make them rare and desirable, almost like a digital beanie baby. And users are spending tons of real money on them, with some of the rarest kitties fetching over $100,000 when the game first launched.
While the startup is being pretty mum on what the future looks like and what they’re planning on using this funding for, it’s almost certain that the long term goal is to expand beyond CryptoKitties and use the same Ethereum ERC-721 collectible standard to create other game experiences, especially ones that can be played by regular people who are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency.
To this note, Fred Wilson of USV quickly outlined the firm’s thesis behind investing in CryptoKitties, saying “we think digital collectibles is one of many amazing things that blockchains enable that literally could not be done before this technology emerged. We also think digital collectibles and all of the games they enable will be one of the first, if not the first, big consumer use cases for blockchain technologies.”
If you want to find out more about how CryptoKitties works check out our original story here.
Source: TechCrunch
Last week, Google showed off a new app to display immersive photography in virtual reality, and a multi-camera technique for capturing it, and now it looks like there may be plans to enhance that with some bolted-on technology created by a third party.
Multiple sources tell us that Google is acquiring Lytro, the imaging startup that began as a ground-breaking camera company for consumers before pivoting to use its depth-data, light-field technology in VR.
One source described the deal as an “asset sale” with Lytro going for no more than $40 million. Another source tells us that not all employees are coming over with the company’s technology: some have already received severance and parted ways with the company, and others have simply left. Assets would presumably also include Lytro’s 59 patents related to light-field and other digital imaging technology.
The sale would be far from a big win for Lytro and its backers. The startup has raised just over $200 million in funding and was valued at around $360 million after its last round in 2017, according to data from PitchBook. Its long list of investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Foxconn, GV, Greylock, NEA, Qualcomm Ventures and many more.
The stage of the deal also is not clear. Emails to several investors have received either no response, or no comment. Multiple emails to Google and Lytro also have had no response.
A pricetag of $40 million is not quite the exit that was envisioned for the company when it first launched its camera concept, and in the words of investor Ben Horowitz, “blew my brains to bits.”
The company’s trajectory since being founded in 2006 (originally as Refocus Imaging) by Ren Ng underscores a few of the ongoing challenges in the startup world: hardware remains hard; VR has not grown as fast as some had thought that it would; and more generally, large platforms will loom as persuasive consolidators especially when conditions for the the first two of those issues become tight.
In the case of Lytro, that translated to captivating but expensive cameras; a weaker business funnel for its pivot to VR; and, it appears, a persuasive offer from a company that has plenty of cash and time to wait out the right market conditions for new platforms, and in the meantime to consider the multiple uses of the tech in a variety of different scenarios, be it in its automotive or mapping businesses, or gaming or something else entirely.
(Coincidentally, it seems that Lytro only recently made an acquisition of its own, of Limitless, to expand its work in VR for games.)
What Google would intend to do with Lytro is not very clear right now. But more generally, an exit to the company would give Lytro the potential to integrate and apply its technology at one of the world’s biggest tech companies, which controls development of the world’s most widely used smartphone operating system.
It has also been doubling down on a full spectrum (geddit) of technologies and products related to how we see digital images today and in the future. That has included a plethora of work and acquisitions around computer vision technologies; how images are stored, manipulated and displayed; and how they are captured.
Lytro falls into the third of these categories, with technology that provides a way to capture the so-called light field of an image — that is, a full, all-angles shot of a scene, which produces a depth of data and perspectives, made so that someone can view that scene in an immersive way.
This is tech that is especially useful for VR, where flatter images can cause motion sickness because they do not move as well with the viewer. But such imaging tech also has the long term potential to be applied in a variety of other places.
“We believe we have the opportunity to be the company that defines the production pipeline, technologies and quality standards for an entire next generation of content,” Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal wrote in a blog post at the time of its last funding, just over a year ago. Now, it appears that it might be Google’s turn to see how that ambition will play out.
Source: TechCrunch