by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
Amazon said today that it has launched a new unlimited grocery delivery subscription for Prime members and customers with an EBT card (Electronic Benefit Transfer) in the U.S. if you’re living in one of the 3,500 eligible cities and towns.
The company started testing grocery delivery in three locations last year : Denver, Colorado; Sacramento, California; and Columbus, Ohio. The subscription costs $9.99 per month for Amazon Prime users and $4.99 per month for registered EBT card holders.
Subscribers get free deliveries for grocery orders over $35 across Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market and other local grocery and specialty retailers — such as Cardenas Markets, Save Mart, Bartell Drugs, Rite Aid, Pet Food Express and Mission Wine & Spirit — on the Amazon site. Users will get a 30-day free trial before paying up.
The subscription offers one-hour delivery windows without any extra fee, unlimited 30-minute pickup for orders of any size and priority access to recurring reservations for a weekly grocery delivery, as well.
The company noted that the subscription “pays for itself” when you order even once per month from Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods Market with a total order value of under $50.
Amazon’s new grocery delivery plan is rivaled by Walmart Plus , which costs $12.95 per month or $98 per year. Target also has a free grocery delivery plan that costs $99 a year . Both of these plans have the same minimum order limit as Amazon’s grocery subscription plan.
Earlier this month, Amazon removed its “Just Walk Out” technology from its own store — this feature allowed users to walk out without a formal checkout process . Instead, it is switching to its Dash Cart , which can scan products when customers put items in the physical cart.
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
James Jones’ father was an engineer. He was also a musician and a preacher, performing at churches along the East Coast.
Jones, an entertainment lawyer, noticed his father often worried about keeping track of the money he collected while performing at church, and artists and influencers were often complaining about the same things.
“I also often had creators complain about the lack of ownership over their creative assets and how painful it was to get loans, mortgages, or generally create generational wealth opportunities for themselves and their families,” Jones told TechCrunch.
Jones said the pandemic brought forth a new set of challenges for creators: So many of them were at home trying to figure out how they would earn money and what to do next.
His solution was Bump , a platform that helps creators manage and grow their businesses. He launched it in 2020 with Anton Kovalyov, who now serves as CTO. On Tuesday Bump announced a $3 million seed round, with investments from ImpactX, Capitalize and Serac Ventures.
Bump seeks to help creators manage their finances. Image Credits: Snap Inc. / Courtesy of James Jones
Bump seeks to help creators manage their finances. Image Credits: Snap Inc. / Courtesy of James Jones
Bump allows creators to track income and market value, which can help them negotiate better deals and see how much money they are owed from partners. In 2022, Bump launched the Bump Creator credit card in partnership with Mastercard, which provides no monthly or hidden fees and can be acquired without a credit check. Bump also works with a banking institution and has direct deposit accounts that let creators earn interest on cash placed in its money market account.
Jones said fundraising for his company was brutal. Bump was up against numerous factors it simply couldn’t control, like a bear market and the lack of investor appetite for creator economy companies. “We took no after no from investors on the chin and lived to keep fighting,” he said. “We weren’t afraid to ask for investment, and we weren’t afraid of being ghosted, being judged or being told no.”
Bump closed its seed round in about six months, with other investors, including Heirloom Ventures, H/L Ventures and Mana Ventures. It has raised $3.5 million to date, with existing investors, including Snap Inc. and Sixty8 Capital.
“The creator economy is one of the most important trends in the future of work,” Oliver Libby, a managing partner at H/L Ventures, told TechCrunch. “There is virtually no financial infrastructure, no financial training, products, or help for this growing population — many of them underrepresented and underbanked.”
Bump will use the latest fundraise to help it expand and refine its infrastructure.
Creating a company like Bump has always been Jones’ passion, even though he didn’t always want to be a founder. “I always had a burning desire to solve the world’s problems,” he said. He liked talking to people, listening to what they were saying, and analyzing details that could help make them “healthier, wealthier, or happier.”
“I can’t say that I always wanted to be a founder, but I do think my natural tendencies and characteristics have pushed me toward being a founder,” he said. “And despite the highs and lows, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing business, wants to become the go-to place companies host and fine-tune their custom generative AI models.
Today, AWS announced the launch of Custom Model Import (in preview), a new feature in Bedrock, AWS’ enterprise-focused suite of generative AI services. The feature lets organizations import and access their in-house generative AI models as fully managed APIs.
Companies’ proprietary models, once imported, benefit from the same infrastructure as other generative AI models in Bedrock’s library (e.g., Meta’s Llama 3 or Anthropic’s Claude 3). They’ll also get tools to expand their knowledge, fine-tune them and implement safeguards to mitigate their biases .
“There have been AWS customers that have been fine-tuning or building their own models outside of Bedrock using other tools,” Vasi Philomin, VP of generative AI at AWS, told TechCrunch in an interview. “This Custom Model Import capability allows them to bring their own proprietary models to Bedrock and see them right next to all of the other models that are already on Bedrock — and use them with all of the workflows that are also already on Bedrock, as well.”
According to a recent poll by Cnvrg, Intel’s AI-focused subsidiary, the majority of enterprises are approaching generative AI by building their own models and refining them to their applications. The enterprises say that they see infrastructure, including cloud compute infrastructure, as their greatest barrier to deployment, per the poll.
With Custom Model Import, AWS aims to fill that need while maintaining pace with cloud rivals. (Amazon CEO Andy Jassy foreshadowed as much in his recent annual letter to shareholders.)
For some time, Vertex AI, Google’s analog to Bedrock, has allowed customers to upload generative AI models, tailor them and serve them through APIs. Databricks, too, has long provided toolsets to host and tweak custom models, including its own recently released DBRX .
Asked what sets Custom Model Import apart, Philomin asserted that it — and by extension Bedrock — offers a wider breadth and depth of model customization options than the competition, adding that “tens of thousands” of customers today are using Bedrock.
“Number one, Bedrock provides several ways for customers to deal with serving models,” Philomin said. “Number two, we have a whole bunch of workflows around these models — and now customers’ can stand right next to all of the other models that we have already available. A key thing that most people like about this is the ability to be able to experiment across multiple different models using the same workflows, and then actually take them to production from the same place.”
So what are the alluded-to model customization options?
Philomin points to Guardrails, which lets Bedrock users configure thresholds to filter — or at least attempt to filter — models’ outputs for things like hate speech, violence and private personal or corporate information. (Generative AI models are notorious for going off the rails in problematic ways , including leaking sensitive info; AWS’ models have been no exception .) He also highlighted Model Evaluation, a Bedrock tool customers can use to test how well a model — or several — performs across a given set of criteria.
Both Guardrails and Model Evaluation are now generally available following a several-months-long preview.
I feel compelled to note here that Custom Model Import only supports three model architectures at the moment: Hugging Face’s Flan-T5, Meta’s Llama and Mistral’s models. Also, Vertex AI and other Bedrock-rivaling services, including Microsoft’s AI development tools on Azure, offer more or less comparable safety and evaluation features (see Azure AI Content Safety , model evaluation in Vertex , etc.).
What is unique to Bedrock, though, is AWS’ Titan family of generative AI models. And, coinciding with the release of Custom Model Import, there have been several noteworthy developments on that front.
Titan Image Generator , AWS’ text-to-image model, is now generally available after launching in preview last November. As before, Titan Image Generator can create new images from a text description or customize existing images — for example, swapping out an image’s background while retaining the subjects in the image.
Compared to the preview version, Titan Image Generator in GA can generate images with more “creativity,” said Philomin without going into detail. (Your guess as to what that means is as good as mine.)
I asked Philomin if he had any more details to share about how Titan Image Generator was trained.
At the model’s debut last November, AWS was vague about which data, exactly, it used in training Titan Image Generator. Few vendors readily reveal such information; they see training data as a competitive advantage and thus keep it and info relating to it close to the chest.
Training data details are also a potential source of IP-related lawsuits, another disincentive to reveal much. Several cases making their way through the courts reject vendors’ fair use defenses, arguing that text-to-image tools replicate artists’ styles without the artists’ explicit permission, and allow users to generate new works resembling artists’ originals for which artists receive no payment.
Philomin would only tell me that AWS uses a combination of first-party and licensed data.
“We have a combination of proprietary data sources, but also we license a lot of data,” he said. “ We actually pay copyright owners licensing fees in order to be able to use their data, and we do have contracts with several of them.”
It’s more detail than we got in November. But I have a feeling that Philomin’s answer won’t satisfy everyone, particularly the content creators and AI ethicists arguing for greater transparency around generative AI model training.
In lieu of transparency, AWS says it’ll continue to offer an indemnification policy that covers customers in the event a Titan model like Titan Image Generator regurgitates (i.e., spits out a mirror copy of) a potentially copyrighted training example. (Several rivals, including Microsoft and Google, offer similar policies covering their image generation models.)
To address another pressing ethical threat — deepfakes — AWS says that images created with Titan Image Generator will, as during the preview, come with a “tamper-resistant” invisible watermark. Philomin says that the watermark has been made more resistant in the GA release to compression and other image edits and manipulations.
Segueing into less controversial territory, I asked Philomin whether AWS, like Google, OpenAI and others, is exploring video generation given the excitement around (and investment in) the tech. Philomin didn’t say that AWS wasn’t … but he wouldn’t hint at any more than that.
“Obviously, we’re constantly looking to see what new capabilities customers want to have, and video generation definitely comes up in conversations with customers,” Philomin said. “I’d ask you to stay tuned.”
In one last piece of Titan-related news, AWS released the second generation of its Titan Embeddings model, Titan Text Embeddings V2. This model converts text to numerical representations, called embeddings, to power search and personalization applications. The first-generation Embeddings model did that, too, but AWS claims that Titan Text Embeddings V2 is overall more efficient, cost-effective and accurate.
“What the Embeddings V2 model does is reduce the overall storage [necessary to use the model] by up to four times while retaining 97% of the accuracy,” Philomin claimed, “outperforming other models that are comparable.”
We’ll see if real-world testing bears that out.
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
After losing their husbands in devastating and unexpected ways, Karine Nissim and Eloise Bune discovered there were no suitable places where people could go to face all the challenges that surface during the grieving process, including daunting tasks such as organizing a funeral ceremony and donating belongings, as well as scouring the internet for support groups.
Being seasoned entrepreneurs themselves — Nissim sold her startup DogVacay to Rover in 2017 and Bune co-founded Tentrr and Handwriting.io — the two widow founders decided to take matters into their own hands and build what they call a “360 healing” platform that provides a range of services and resources to help with grief and other hardships like divorce, illness, and trauma.
Now available on the App Store , Google Play Store , and the web , DayNew is a new grief support platform, social community, educational hub, and task manager app wrapped up into one, user-friendly package. At its core, DayNew aims to be a safe space for users to connect with others, share their stories, and receive support from the community.
“From hospice centers to bereavement groups to online therapy, regular therapists and psychiatrists, to funeral homes to all of the other services, there was not one place that we could go that could hold the whole journey for us,” Nissim told TechCrunch. “So, we set out to create a customized roadmap that is really highly tailored to each person based on their trauma type. … When you come to DayNew, we are ready to meet you with organizational, emotional, and social support.”
Image Credits: DayNew
Image Credits: DayNew
Some people find it hard to ask for help because they don’t want to feel like a burden to their family and friends. DayNew’s Community feed acts as a dedicated space for users to be direct about what they want from supporters, whether it be money to buy groceries, a place to sell and donate belongings, or a job listing for a babysitter.
“[Eloise and I] got lots of flowers and casseroles. While that’s beautiful, generous and thoughtful, we also got a lot of comments like ‘Whatever you need,’ and we were always ill-equipped on how to answer that or didn’t feel comfortable. … The community page takes the ickiness of the ask out. It also takes the ickiness out of the supporters’ side because now they actually know what you need, and they don’t feel like they’re bothering you,” Nissim said.
There’s also a “Find a Buddy” feature for users to get one-on-one support from people who are going through similar tragedies. Users can search for others with the same hashtags in their profiles, including #partnerloss, #parentloss, #cancerloss, #covidloss, and so on.
Similar to other grief support platforms (e.g., Grief Refuge, Untangle, and Grief Works), DayNew has a Journal feature where users can vocalize how they feel by either answering prompts or freehanding an entry that speaks from the heart. The company compares the prompts to homework from a therapist, asking tough and thought-provoking questions such as “What’s something about grief you never knew before?” and “What’s something you wish you could tell your younger self?” Depending on comfort level, the journal entry can be kept private or shared publicly on the Community feed.
Additionally, there’s a daily mood tracker component for users to check in with themselves and log their moods on a scale of 1 to 10.
Image Credits: DayNew
Image Credits: DayNew
DayNew offers various other features to assist users throughout their journey, including personalized lists for users to check off overwhelming tasks (sell assets, get life insurance, apply for widow social security benefits, etc.) at their own pace, a ChatGPT-powered AI tool that provides emotional advice, and a “Learn & Grow” page with educational and motivational content.
Nissim explained that the platform is also launching virtual workshops and in-person events to bring people together and teach them the benefits of “grounding and meditation” in order to promote healing. The online classes cost around $36 and feature special guests like experts, scientists, and psychologists. The first session is on May 21 and will be hosted by the founders themselves. In mid-July, there will be an in-person retreat in Mexico for about $1,800.
In the next iteration of the platform, DayNew plans to introduce a gifting feature where friends and family members can purchase classes to give to a loved one.
DayNew is free to join but it also offers a $5 per month subscription for users who want to access premium features, including the “Find a Buddy” service, direct messages, and being able to comment on public community posts.
In the digital age, users are embracing grief-related products and services to cope with death. What once was considered a taboo topic, grievers can now openly discuss loss and be reassured that they’re not alone. However, it’s important to realize that these services shouldn’t replace proper therapy and counseling but should act as an additional outlet to express their feelings.
Empathy closes $47M for AI to help with the practical and emotional bereavement process
Lalo launches an app to memorialize loved ones
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
Easel is a new startup that sits at the intersection of the generative AI and social trends, founded by two former employees at Snap. The company has been working on an app that lets you create images of yourself and your friends doing cool things directly from your favorite iMessage conversations.
There’s a reason why I mentioned that the co-founders previously worked at Snap before founding Easel. While Snap may never reach the scale of Instagram or TikTok, it has arguably been the most innovative social company since social apps started taking over smartphone home screens.
Before Apple made augmented reality and virtual reality cool again, Snap blazed the AR trail with lenses. Even if you never really used Snapchat, chances are you’ve played around with goofy lenses on your phone or using someone else’s phone. The feature has had a massive cultural impact.
Similarly, before Meta tried to make virtual avatars cool again with massive investments in Horizon Worlds and the company’s Reality Labs division, Snap made a curious move when it acquired Bitmoji back in 2016 . At the time, people thought the ability to create a virtual avatar and use it to communicate with your friends was just a fad. Now, with Memojis in iMessage and FaceTime, and Meta avatars also popping up in Meta’s apps, virtual avatars have become a fun, innovative way to express yourself.
“I was at Snap for five years. Before that, I was at Stanford. I moved down to LA to join Snap in Bobby Murphy’s research team, where we kind of worked on a range of futuristic things,” Easel co-founder and CEO Rajan Vaish told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. He co-founded Easel with Sven Kratz , who was a senior research engineer at Snap.
But this team was dissolved in 2022 as part of Snap’s various rounds of layoffs. The duo used the opportunity to bounce back and keep innovating — but outside of Snap.
Easel is using generative AI to let users create Bitmoji-style stickers of themselves drinking coffee, chilling at the beach, riding a bicycle — anything you want as long as it can be described and generated by an AI model.
When you first start using Easel, you capture a few seconds of your face so that the company can create a personal AI model and use it to generate stickers. Easel is currently using Stable Diffusion ‘s technology to create images. The fact that you can generate images with your own face in them is both a bit uncanny but also much more engaging than an average AI-generated image.
“Once you give your photos, we start training on our servers. And then we create an AI avatar model for you. We now know what your face looks like, how your hair looks like, etc.,” Vaish said.
But Easel isn’t just an image generation product. It’s a multiplayer experience that lives in your conversations. The startup has opted to integrate Easel into the native iOS Messages app so that you don’t have to move to a new platform, and create a new social graph, just to swap funny personal stickers.
Instead, sending an Easel sticker works just like sending an image via iMessage. On the receiving end, when you tap on the image, it opens up Easel on top of your conversation. This way, your friends can also install Easel and remix your stickers. This is one of the key features behind Bitmoji, too, as you can create scenes with both you and your friend in the stickers, amping up the virality.
Image Credits: Easel
Image Credits: Easel
Easel allows users to create more highly customized personal stickers than Bitmoji. Say, for example, you want a sticker that shows you’ll soon be drinking cocktails with your buddies in Paris. You could use a generic cocktail-drinking Bitmoji — but it won’t look like Paris. (And you’ve already seen this Bitmoji many times before.) Whereas, with Easel — and thanks to generative AI — you get to design the background scenes, locations and scenarios where your personal avatar appears.
Finally, Easel users can also share stickers to the app’s public feed to inspire others. This can create a sort of seasonality within the app as you might see a lot of firework stickers around July 4, for instance. It’s also a laid-back use case for Easel, as you can scroll until you find a sticker you like, tap “remix” and send a similar sticker (but with your own face) to your friends.
Easel has already secured $2.65 million in funding from Unusual Ventures, f7 Ventures and Corazon Capital, as well as various angel investors, including a few professors from Stanford University.
Now let’s see how well Easel blends into people’s conversations. “We have learned two very unique use cases. One is that there’s a big demographic that is not very comfortable sharing their faces,” said Vaish. “I’m not a selfie person and a lot of people are not. This is allowing them to share what they’re up to in a more visual format.”
“The second one is that Easel allows people to stay in the moment,” he added, pointing out that sometimes you just don’t want to take out your phone and capture the moment. But Easel still enables a form of visual communication after the fact.
by tyler | Apr 23, 2024 | Tech
Platform is a word that gets tossed around a lot in technology circles, so much so that it’s often misused. But here’s the basic business school definition: A platform is a company or business model that creates more value for participants than it captures for itself.
Consider that some of the most successful companies in tech have helped other businesses make more money in aggregate than they make for themselves. A couple decades ago, Microsoft made lots of money facilitating the PC revolution. More recently, Apple said that developers that used its App Store generated $1.1 trillion in sales in 2022, nearly triple what the company made itself that year.
Serial startup veteran Sanjiv Sanghavi, who has logged experience as the co-founder of ClassPass and chief product officer at Arcadia, thinks it’s high time the energy transition birthed its equivalent. In fact, he spent years as a venture partner at Day One Ventures looking in vain to invest in such a company. “So I decided to go and build it,” he told TechCrunch.
Sanghavi’s newest company, Texture , seeks to become a common data collection and sharing platform for renewable power sources like wind, solar, and batteries. “We’ve done a really exceptional job of distributing hardware over the energy grid in the last decade. Making solar affordable, making batteries affordable, getting EVs out there,” he said. Each solar array or battery installation doesn’t have the power to bring clean, affordable power to the grid on its own. In aggregate, though, they have a much better chance at displacing fossil fuels.
But many of those systems come from different manufacturers, making basic communication between them challenging, let alone anything that looks like interoperability. “If there’s a lack of standards, there’s a lot of walled gardens being built,” Sanghavi said. “Our view is that Texture can provide the technology stack that should accelerate everybody on top of it.”
The company is incorporating data directly from the equipment itself. When manufacturers have APIs available, it connects with those directly, similar to how Plaid connects with banks. For those that don’t, it will work to build the necessary software to make the connections possible. Battery manufacturers, for example, may not prefer to maintain an API themselves since it’s not one of their core competencies.
In other cases, where a solution already exists, it works with a third party. “One of the tenets of Texture really is not to rebuild everything. There are companies out there that are tracking electricity usage, grid status, and their meter data, tariff data,” Sanghavi said. “Why don’t we work together?”
On the other end of the equation, target customers for Texture’s product include installers, who might sell monitoring and maintenance plans, and virtual power plant operators, who would benefit from being able to include batteries from a range of manufacturers. By having more data, each of these would be able to sell more of their product. Texture charges customers by how many megawatts they have under management.
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The company recently raised a $7.5 million seed round from Abstract Ventures, Day One Ventures, Equal Ventures, Lerer Hippeau, and a handful of angels, including Kiran Bhatraju, CEO of Arcadia. It plans to use this money to further develop and test the product with the first set of customers.
Not every supplier has opened their products to Texture yet, but Sanghavi is obviously hoping they will. Sure, they could charge for API access now, he said, but he thinks Texture’s pitch to them will resonate: “If you play as part of the ecosystem, you expand the market an exponential amount of times. Even if your market share remains the same, your business becomes five times bigger.” If Texture succeeds in delivering on that promise to customers, then it will truly be a platform for the energy transition.
