As two of the largest players in online-food ordering and delivery in Europe , one of its biggest rivals has made an acquisition to expand its own tech muscle. , the London-based food delivery startup that is itself valued in the billions, has acquired a small Scottish startup called , a software development and user experience design house that has worked with a number of big names, . Deliveroo — which today has 80,000 restaurants and 60,000 riders on its books across 500 cities in 14 markets in Europe and beyond (Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and the United Kingdom) — is subsequently creating a new fintech hub in Edinburgh, where Cultivate is headquartered. It will be run by Andy Robinson, currently chief commercial officer for Cultivate. “We have a fantastic relationship with Deliveroo, supporting them through an amazing period of growth. We were attracted by the array of interesting problems being tackled by their team, and how they are addressing them using modern and emerging technology,” Robinson said in a statement. “We’re proud to have built such a great team here in Edinburgh, and today’s announcement is a testament to their hard work and expertise in building world-class software. We are excited to continue this work, create highly skilled jobs, and build a centre of tech excellence here in Edinburgh.” The plan will be to expand the team to 50 in the next three years, hiring engineers, product managers, user researchers, and designers and data scientists. (It’s worth pointing out too that Amazon has been a major employer in Edinburgh, where it also has a key R&D operation working in various areas including AI and search.) Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed but it’s likely to be a modest deal. Cultivate itself was a , from the looks of its filings with Companies House. It was also off the radar somewhat as a startup. Originally , Cultivate was initially acquired in 2009 ago by Texas firm EdgeCase, which was then itself in 2017 in a bid to take on Shopify and rebranded to become Neo. Subsequent to that, Cultivate was amicably spun out again. In that time it had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from unnamed investors. Deliveroo, founded in 2013 by William Shu and Greg Orlowski, was most recently valued at over $2 billion, although that was into the company earlier this year. It has raised around $1.5 billion in funding to date. Cultivate — which had worked for many of clients — will now be working for just one, its owner. The two had already built Deliveroo’s payments technology, but as Deliveroo continues to work on ways to differentiate itself from its competitors through tech, it will be investing more in this area. In addition to building new (not yet launched) services, some of the other areas of focus for the new Edinburgh operation will be to create more efficient payment systems for riders (which today use a Cash Out feature to access earnings quickly) and restaurants; to expand Deliveroo’s analytics for restaurants to figure out how to better plan for surges and to figure out what is popular and what is not; and (for both restaurants and riders) to better manage finances. Cultivate had been involved in a number of social enterprise community initiatives to promote technology education alongside its paid work and Deliveroo said these efforts will continue. “Cultivate have always been at the centre of the tech scene in Edinburgh and have supported events and initiatives across the board,” said Stephen Coleman, CEO of CodeBase, the tech campus in Edinburgh where Cultivate was based. “We are really pleased for the Cultivate team and Deliveroo’s plans to grow here in Scotland and are looking forward to having one of Europe’s top tech companies based here at CodeBase.” News of this acquisition comes in the same week that Takeaway.com and Just Eat announced that their respective boards had agreed on the basic terms of a merger to create an expanded footprint across Europe. The deal, if it completes, will not only give the two more economies of scale, and thus a better return on their own tech investment, but the aim will be to help them compete better against the likes of Uber Eats (a major priority for now-public Uber) as well as Deliveroo, which is now continuing its growth now with the might and will of Amazon behind it. In that context, the Cultivate acquisition is demonstration not just of Deliveroo’s own investments into its tech, but specifically into what is a sizeable and important tech hub in the region, where Amazon has also been very active. “Deliveroo is proud to be investing in Edinburgh and creating more high skilled jobs in the UK,” said Dan Winn, Deliveroo VP of engineering, in a statement. “Edinburgh is one of the UK’s fastest growing tech hubs, with access to an excellent talent pool of highly skilled people and university graduates. Deliveroo is committed to offering riders flexible, well-paid work and helping restaurants to grow their businesses. Building on Cultivate’s expertise, we are excited to create new products and services that will help us achieve this.” Notes to Editors Deliveroo is one of the UK’s leading tech unicorns and a British tech success story. Its investment in world-leading proprietary technology yields substantial benefits for customers, restaurants and riders. The Frank algorithm – which finds the optimal way to deliver food from restaurant to customer – has cut the average delivery time by nearly 20%, significantly reducing customer wait times. Frank’s machine-learning capabilities improves the allocation of orders and reduces restaurant waiting times for riders, helping them to earn higher fees without riding longer hours. And Deliveroo’s innovative products and tools give restaurants unique insights into their customer base, allows them to provide in-app offers to customers and improves their efficiency when preparing meals. A photo of Andy Robinson (Chief Commercial Officer, Cultivate), Dan Winn (VP of Engineering, Deliveroo) and Paul Wilson (Managing Director, Cultivate) is available here.

Sitting at our desks for hours on end can be a real pain in the back, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Flash Furniture Mid-Back Mesh Chair can help. You can also check out our and rest comfortably. No one likes back and joint pain from sitting too long. This Flash Furniture Chair has a lot of great features to help your body sit ergonomically, which is more comfortable and more healthy. It can help you avoid serious issues that come from sitting with improper posture. Read my review below to see how this piece of fared in my real-world tests. Is It Mesh or Meh? Sale 2,301 Reviews A comfortable chair for long hours. $88.00 This Mid-Back Mesh chair offers excellent lower back support without costing a fortune. In fact, it is a very affordable mesh swivel task chair. Under $100. It has built-in lumbar support, a comfortable mesh back and just enough adjustments to make you feel great when sitting for hours at a time. Pros: Easy assembly Built-in lumbar support Comfortable mesh back Cons: Needs more adjustability options No headrest This is not for taller or larger folks Build Quality And Design The design is very modern and stylish. It fits into any office space and easily elevates it. It also looks good in your home thanks to that modern style with black leather and mesh. The build construction feels very heavy duty when sitting in this black mesh-backed chair, without being too heavy as well. Adjustability Sadly, the lumbar support on this task chair is not adjustable, but it works and feels great. You can adjust the height and tilt tension with the adjustment lever, but it needs more adjustable features to accommodate bigger people. It has flipup armrests, but that’s it and the seat is not adjustable. There is no seat height adjustment. Big people will not be comfortable in this chair. Performance Despite the lack of adjustable features, I found this executive office chair to be comfortable and it supported my back very nicely. After a few hours of work, when I would normally feel tense and stiff, I felt pretty great. But again, I am a pretty average size at about 5’8. That mesh back feels great and allows some allows air to circulate, which is a nice feature. The chair is very comfortable and takes the weight off of your joints and back. It is great for long work hours at the computer desk or playing video games or playing with your . Bottom Line You probably can’t get a better midback swivel task chair for under $100. Despite lacking adjustments, this chair is a very good value for your money spent. It’s perfect for anyone on a tight budget who wants some help getting rid of an aching back. This is going to be for people of average size and height though since the lack of adjustable features means that big people can’t get a comfy fit. If you are average size and weight, this is your perfect budget ergonomic swivel task chair. It may not have high-end chair features, but it works. Other top rated office ergonomic chairs that you might want to check out are the Duramont ergonomic, Coavas ergonomic office chair, Ergohuman high back swivel chair, Flash Furniture office chairs, and Herman Miller chairs. has all of the info you need to buy the right chair for you. Related Posts: The post appeared first on .

Former British Prime Minister Theresa May once said “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere”. And while that sentiment would be considered risible by just about anybody who works in today’s outward-looking technology industry, if you are a digital worker of the world, you may well be a worker of no insurance. That’s the problem that , a startup out of Norway and a recent graduate of Y Combinator, . “People used to be limited to working locally. Now the internet and recent technologies have made it possible to hire and work for companies globally, allowing people to live wherever in the world they choose to, free from the physical restraints of an office location,” says co-founder and CEO Sondre Rasch. “Unfortunately, social safety nets like health insurance are national and only available in one’s home country. Millions are left to figure this out on their own with the majority going uninsured. To solve this problem, we are building the first global social safety net: a welfare state on the internet”. Launched last year, SafetyWing first product is focussed on medical travel insurance, with the promise to provide medical cover for anybody who works outside of their home country. The cover is flexible, too, sold as a 28 day rolling subscription that can be paused at any time. Cover starts at $37 every 4 weeks. “Our typical customer is a digital nomad,” explains Rasch, “an entrepreneur, freelancer or remote worker in a startup, early 30s, who has moved from the U.S. and spends 3 months at a time in their favorite low cost countries with good infrastructure. Thailand, Indonesia, Colombia, Eastern Europe and Mexico are typical examples”. On direct competitors, Rasch says there isn’t really anyone else currently building a “social safety net” for digital nomads, although WorldNomads also offers similar travel insurance. “The main difference is that we are made for digital nomads and remote workers specifically,” he claims. “Our product is quite simple in that we offer a subscription-like service that you can buy while you live abroad, and keep it forever”. Meanwhile, to support its mission of providing a safety net for digital nomads and to develop further products, the 2017-founded company, whose other co-founders are Sarah Sandnes (CTO) and Hans Kjellby (COO), has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Nordic and Baltic-focussed VC , with participation from Credit Ease Fintech Fund and DG Incubation. SafetyWing’s previous backers include YC and .

, the London-based educational software maker,that thousands of school and university accounts, mostly in the United States, were affected by a data breach. The company added that it has notified affected users already and that the vulnerability has been fixed. The that the data breach happened in November 2018 and Pearson was notified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in March. The perpetrator is still unknown. According to unauthorized access was gained to 13,000 school and university accounts on AIMSweb, the company’s student monitoring and assessment platform. The data exposed included first and last names and, in some cases, date of birth and email addresses. Each account could potentially include information about thousands of students. Pearson added that it has no evidence that any of the exposed information was misused. It will offer free credit monitoring services to affected users as a “precautionary measure.” News of Pearson’s data breach comes the same week that Capital One that exposed sensitive information for about 100 million people in the U.S. and 6 million in Canada.

Got hardware? Well then, listen up, because our search continues for boundary-pushing, early-stage hardware startups to join us in Shenzhen, China for an epic opportunity; launch your startup on a global stage and compete in on November 11-12. . Why? It’s your chance to demo your product to the top investors and technologists in the world. Hardware Battlefield, cousin to , focuses exclusively on innovative hardware because, let’s face it, it’s the backbone of technology. From enterprise solutions to agtech advancements, medical devices to consumer product goods — hardware startups are in the international spotlight. If you make the cut, you’ll compete against 15 of the world’s most innovative hardware makers for bragging rights, plenty of investor love, media exposure and $25,000 in equity-free cash. Just participating in a Battlefield can change the whole trajectory of your business in the best way possible. We chose to bring our fifth Hardware Battlefield to Shenzhen because of its outstanding track record of supporting hardware startups. The city achieves this through a combination of accelerators, rapid prototyping and world-class manufacturing. What’s more, takes place as part of the larger TechCrunch Shenzhen that runs November 9-12. Creativity and innovation no know boundaries, and that’s why we’re opening this competition to any early-stage hardware startup from any country. While we’ve seen amazing hardware in previous Battlefields — like , , tools, for diabetics and , we can’t wait to see the next generation of hardware, so bring it on! Meet the minimum requirements listed below, and we’ll consider your startup: by August 14th You must have a minimally viable product to demo onstage Your product has received little if any, press coverage to date Your product must have a hardware device or component Here’s how Hardware Battlefield works. TechCrunch editors vet every qualified application and pick 15 startups to compete. Those startups receive six rigorous weeks of free coaching. Forget stage fright. You’ll be prepped and ready to step into the spotlight. Teams have six minutes to pitch and demo their products, which is immediately followed by an in-depth Q&A with the judges. If you make it to the final round, you’ll repeat the process in front of a new set of judges. The judges will name one outstanding startup the Hardware Battlefield champion. Hoist the Battlefield Cup, claim those bragging rights and the $25,000. This nerve-wracking thrill-ride takes place in front of a live audience, and we capture the entire event on video and post it to our global audience on TechCrunch. takes place on November 11-12. Don’t hide your hardware or miss your chance to show us — and the entire tech world — your startup magic. , and join us in Shenzhen! Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen? Contact our sponsorship sales team by .

Fintech startup is launching its stock trading feature today. It’s a Robinhood-like feature that lets you buy and sell shares without any commission. For now, the feature is limited to some Revolut customers with a Metal card. While Robinhood has completely changed the stock trading retail market in the U.S., buying shares hasn’t changed much in Europe. Revolut wants to make it easier to invest on the stock market. After topping up your Revolut account, you can buy and hold shares directly from the Revolut app. For now, the feature is limited to 300 U.S.-listed stocks on NASDAQ and NYSE. The company says that it plans to expand to U.K. and European stocks as well as Exchange Traded Funds. There’s no minimum limit on transactions, which means that you can buy fractional shares for $1 for instance. You can see real-time prices in the Revolut app. When it comes to fees, Revolut doesn’t charge any fee indeed, but with some caveats. The feature is currently limited to Revolut Metal customers for now. It currently costs £12.99 per month or €13.99 per month to become a Metal customer. As long as you make less than 100 trades per month, you don’t pay anything other than your monthly subscription. Any trade above that limit costs £1 per trade and an annual custody fee of 0.01%. Eventually, Revolut will roll out stock trading to other subscription tiers. Revolut Premium will get 8 commission-free trades per month and basic Revolut users will get 3 commission-free trades per month. Behind the scene, Revolut has partnered with for this feature. This is a nice addition for existing Revolut users. You don’t have to open a separate account with another company and Metal customers in particular get a lot of free trades.

has acquired Israeli storage tech startup E8 Storage, as first reported by , and and confirmed by TechCrunch. The acquisition will bring the team and technology from E8 in to Amazon’s existing Amazon Web Services center in Tel Aviv, per reports. E8 Storage’s particular focus was on building storage hardware that employs flash-based memory to deliver faster performance than competing offerings, according to its own claims. How exactly AWS intends to use the company’s talent or assets isn’t yet known, but it clearly lines up with their primary business. AWS acquisitions this year include , a Vancouver-based startup that optimizes data center workload operating efficiency, and Israel-based , which provides data recovery services in the event of a disaster.

Encryption in space can be tricky. Even if you do everything right, a cosmic ray might come along and flip a bit, sabotaging the whole secure protocol. So if you can’t radiation-harden the computer, what can you do? European Space Agency researchers are testing solutions right now in an experiment running on board the ISS. Cosmic radiation flipping bits may sound like a rare occurrence, and in a way it is. But satellites and spacecraft are out there for a long time and it it only takes one such incident to potentially scuttle a whole mission. What can you do if you’re locked out of your own satellite? At that point it’s pretty much space junk. Just wait for it to burn up. Larger, more expensive missions like GPS satellites and interplanetary craft use that are carefully proofed against cosmic rays and other things that go bump in the endless night out there. But these bespoke solutions are expensive and often bulky and heavy; if you’re trying to minimize costs and space to launch a constellation or student project, hardening isn’t always an option. “We’re testing two related approaches to the encryption problem for non rad-hardened systems,” . To keep costs down and hardware recognizable, the team is using a Raspberry Pi Zero board, one of the simplest and lowest-cost full-fledged computers you can buy these days. It’s mostly unmodified, just coated to meet ISS safety requirements. It’s the heart of the Cryptography International Commercial Experiments Cube, or Cryptographic ICE Cube, or CryptIC. The first option they’re pursuing is a relatively traditional software one: hard-coded backup keys. If a bit gets flipped and the current encryption key is no longer valid, they can switch to one of those. “This needs to be done in a secure and reliable way, to restore the secure link very quickly,” said Armborst. It relies on “a secondary fall-back base key, which is wired into the hardware so it cannot be compromised. However, this hardware solution can only be done for a limited number of keys, reducing flexibility.” If you’re expecting one failure per year and a five year mission, you could put 20 keys and be done with it. But for longer missions or higher exposures, you might want something more robust. That’s the other option, an “experimental hardware reconfiguration approach.” “A number of microprocessor cores are inside CryptIC as customizable, field-programmable gate arrays, rather than fixed computer chips,” Armborst explained. “These cores are redundant copies of the same functionality. Accordingly, if one core fails then another can step in, while the faulty core reloads its configuration, thereby repairing itself.” In other words, the encryption software would be running in parallel with itself and one part would be ready to take over and serve as a template for repairs should another core fail due to radiation interference. A CERN-developed radiation dosimeter is flying inside the enclosure as well, measuring the exposure the device has over the next year of operation. And a set of flash memory units are sitting inside to see which is the most reliable in orbital conditions. Like many experiments on the ISS, this one has many purposes. The encryption tests are set to begin shortly and we’ll know how the two methods fared next summer.

Get ready to dive into the fiercely competitive waters of enterprise software. Join more than 1,000 attendees for September 5 to navigate this rapidly evolving category with the industry’s brightest minds, biggest names and exciting startups. Our $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play, which saves you $100. But one is the loneliest number, so why not , buy in bulk and bring your whole team? Save an extra 20% when you buy four or more tickets at once. We’ve packed this day-long conference with an outstanding lineup of presentations, interviews, panel discussions, demos, breakout sessions and, of course, networking. , which includes both industry titans and boundary-pushing startups eager to disrupt the status quo. We’ll add more surprises along the way, but these sessions provide a taste of what to expect — and why you’ll need your posse to absorb as much intel as possible. Talking Developer Tools () With tools like Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence, few companies influence how developers work as much as Atlassian. The company’s co-founder and co-CEO Scott Farquhar will join us to talk about growing his company, how it is bringing its tools to enterprises and what the future of software development in and for the enterprise will look like. Keeping the Enterprise Secure(Andreessen Horowitz), (Duo Security), (United Airlines) Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CSO and how to move fast — without breaking things. Keeping an Enterprise Behemoth on Course (SAP) With over $166 billion in market cap, Germany-based is one of the most valuable tech companies in the world today. Bill McDermott took the leadership in 2014, becoming the first American to hold this position. Since then, he has quickly grown the company, in part thanks to a number of $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’ll talk to him about his approach to these acquisitions, his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market and the state of enterprise software in general. The Quantum Enterprise (), () and ()4:20 PM – 4:45 PM While we’re still a few years away from having quantum computers that will fulfill the full promise of this technology, many companies are already starting to experiment with what’s available today. We’ll talk about what startups and enterprises should know about quantum computing today to prepare for tomorrow. takes place on September 5. You can’t be everywhere at once, so bring your team, cover more ground and increase your ROI. .

Hello Friends Top 10 Ringtone for iPhone And Android: https://youtu.be/zAWY61j3Olk Solo Vs Squad | PUBG Mobile Gameplay ...

A few years ago, Silicon Valley couldn’t stop using a trendy buzzword — the sharing economy. The good old top-down economic model with a clear separation between service providers and clients was falling apart. And huge tech companies disrupted entire industries, from to , , and . When you retrospectively look at the sharing economy boom of the early 2010s, many of the principles that defined that generation of startups have slowly disappeared. Instead of a huge societal shift, the sharing economy is slowly fading away. What is the sharing economy? In the past, if you wanted to buy a good or a service, you would ask a company or a professional to provide it. You’d buy something from a company in particular because you knew it would be the exact thing you need. That’s why plenty of companies spent huge amounts of money to build a brand and a reputation. If you just bought a car, chances are you’ll see thousands of ads for cars before you buy your next car. And that’s also why distribution channels have been key, especially in commoditized markets with low brand differentiation. For instance, when you buy a new printer, chances are you just head to an electronics store or type “printer” on your favorite e-commerce website. If HP doesn’t have a distribution deal with those stores, you’ll just buy an Epson printer. If your neighbor wants a new printer in a couple of years, you might recommend the same printer, but you may have forgotten where you bought it. There’s little differentiation between distribution channels in that case. The marketplace model The sharing economy happened because a group of entrepreneurs wanted to invent new distribution channels. Sure, some traditional distribution channels secured exclusive rights to sell specific products. But those startups made a radical change. They wanted to work on a completely new inventory of goods or services.

Low code programming is supposed to make things easier on companies, right? Low code means you can count on trained administrators instead of more expensive software engineers to handle most tasks, but like any issue solved by technology, there are always unintended consequences. While running his former company, Steelbrick, which for $360 million, Max Rudman identified a persistent problem with low-code deployments. He decided to fix it with automation and testing, and the idea for his latest venture, , was born. The company announced a $3.5 million seed round today, but more important than the money is the customer momentum. In spite of being a very early-stage startup, the company already has 100 customers using the product, a testament to the fact that other people were probably experiencing that same pain point Rudman was feeling, and there is a clear market for his idea. As Rudman learned with his former company, going live with the data on a platform like Salesforce is just part of the journey. If you are updating configuration and pricing information on a regular basis, that means updating all the tables associated with that information. Sure, it’s been designed to be point and click, but if you have changes across 48 tables, it becomes a very tedious task, indeed. The idea behind Prodly is to automate much of the configuration, provide a testing environment to be sure all of the information is correct, and finally automate deployment. For now, the company is just concentrating on configuration, but with the funding it plans to expand the product to solve the other problems as well. Rudman is careful to point out that his company’s solution is not built strictly for the Salesforce platform. The startup is taking aim at Salesforce admins for its first go-round, but he sees the same problem with other cloud services that make heavy use of trained administrators to make changes. “The plan is to start with Salesforce, but this problem actually exists on most cloud platforms — ServiceNow, Workday — none of them have the tools we have focused on for admins, and making the admins more productive and building the tooling that they need to efficiently manage a complex application,” Rudman told TechCrunch. Customers include Nutanix, Johnson & Johnson, Splunk, Tableau and Verizon (which owns this publication). The $3.5 million round was led by Shasta Ventures with participation from Norwest Venture Partners.

A group of sex tech startup founders, employees and supporters gathered outside of Facebook’s NY office in Manhattan to protest its advertising policies with respect to what it classifies as sexual content. The protest, and a companion website detailing their position , are the work of ‘Approved, Not Approved,’ a coalition of sex health companies co-founded by Dame Products and Unbound Babes. These policies are applied have fallen out of step with “the average person’s views of what should or shouldn’t be approved of ads,” according to Janet Lieberman, co-founder and CTO of Dame Products. “If you look at the history of the sex toy industry, for example, vibrators were sexual health products, until advertising restrictions were put on them in the 1920s and 1930s – and then they became dirty, and that’s how the industry got shady, and that’s why we have negative thoughts towards them,” she told me in an interview at the protest. “They’re moving back towards wellness in people’s minds, but not in advertising policies. There’s a double standard for what is seen as obscene, talking about men’s sexual health versus women’s sexual health and talking about products that aren’t sexual, and using sex to sell them, versus taking sexual products and having completely non-sexual ads for them.” Credit: TechCrunch It’s a problem that extends beyond just Facebook and Lieberman says. In fact, her company is for its own ad standards after it refused to run ads for women’s sex toys in their out-of-home advertising inventory. But it also has ramifications beyond just advertising, since in many ways what we see in ads helps define what we see as acceptable in terms of our everyday lives and conversations. “Some of this stems from society’s inability to separate sexual products from feeling sexual, and that’s a real problem that we see that hurts women more than men, but hurts both genders, in not knowing how to help our sexual health,” Lieberman said. “We can’t talk about it without being sexual, and that we can’t bring things up, without it seeming like we’re bringing up something that is dirty.” Credit: Unbound / Dame Products “A lot of the people you see here today have Instagrams that have been shut down, or ads that have been not approved on Facebook,” said Bryony Cole, CEO at Future of Sex in an interview. “Myself, I run Future of Sex, which is a sex tech hackathon, and a podcast focused on sex tech, and my Instagram’s been shut down twice with no warning. It’s often for things that Facebook will say they consider phallic imagery, but they’re not […] and yet if you look at images for something like HIMS [an erectile dysfunction medication startup,], you’ll see those phallic practice images. So there’s this gross discrepancy, and it’s very frustrating, especially for these companies where a lot of the revenue in their business is around community that are online which is true for sex toys.” Online ads aren’t just a luxury for many of these startup brands and companies – they’re a necessary ingredient to continued success. and Facebook together account for the majority of digital advertising spend in the U.S., , and it’s hard to grow a business that caters to primarily online customers without fair access to their platforms, Cole argues. “You see a lot of sex tech or sexual wellness brands having to move off Instagram and find other ways to reach their communities,” she said. “But the majority of people, that’s where they are. And if they’re buying these products, they’re still overcoming a stigma about buying the product, so it’s great to be able to purchase these online. A lot of these companies started either crowdfunding, like Dame Products, or just through ecommerce sites. So the majority of their business is online. It’s not in a store.” Credit: Unbound / Dame Products Earlier this year, sex tech company netted a win in getting the Consumer Technology Association to restore its CES award after community outcry. Double standards in advertising is a far more systemic and distributed problem, but these protests will hopefully help open up the conversation and prompt more change.

DeepMind, the Google-owned UK AI research firm, has published a research letter in the journal Nature in which it discusses the performance of a deep learning model for continuously predicting the future likelihood of a patient developing a life-threatening condition called acute kidney injury (AKI). The company says its model is able to accurately predict that a patient will develop AKI “within a clinically actionable window” up to 48 hours in advance. In a blog post trumpeting the research, DeepMind couches it as a breakthrough — saying the paper demonstrates artificial intelligence can predict “one of the leading causes of avoidable patient harm” up to two days before it happens. “This is our team’s biggest healthcare research breakthrough to date,” it adds, “demonstrating the ability to not only spot deterioration more effectively, but actually predict it before it happens.” Even a surface read of the paper raises some major caveats, though. Not least that the data used to train the model skews overwhelmingly male: 93.6%. This is because DeepMind’s AI was trained using patient data provided by the US Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). The research paper states that females comprised just 6.38% of patients in the training dataset. “Model performance was lower for this demographic,” it notes, without saying how much lower. A summary of dataset statistics also included in the paper indicates that 18.9% of patients were black, although there is no breakout for the proportion of black women in the training dataset. (Logic suggests it’s likely to be less than 6.38%.) No other ethnicities are broken out. Asked about the model’s performance capabilities across genders and different ethnicities, a DeepMind spokeswoman told us: “In women, it predicted 44.8% of all AKI early, in men 56%, for those patients where gender was known. The model performance was higher on African American patients — 60.4% of AKIs detected early compared to 54.1% for all other ethnicities in aggregate.” “This research is just the first step,” she confirmed. “For the model to be applicable to a general population, future research is needed, using a more representative sample of the general population in the data that the model is derived from. “The data set is representative of the VA population, and we acknowledge that this sample is not representative of the US population. As with all deep learning models it would need further, representative data from other sources before being used more widely. “Our next step would be to work closely with [the VA] to safely validate the model through retrospective and prospective observational studies, before hopefully exploring how we might conduct a prospective interventional study to understand how the prediction might impact care outcomes in a clinical setting.” “To do this kind of work, we need the right kind of data,” she added. “The VA uses the same EHR [electronic health records] system (widely recognized as one of the most comprehensive EHRs) in all its hospitals and sites, which means the dataset is also very comprehensive, clean, and well-structured.” So what DeepMind’s ‘breakthrough’ research paper neatly underlines is the reflective relationship between AI outputs and training inputs. In a healthcare setting, where instructive outputs could be the difference between life and death, it’s not the technology that’s king; it’s access to representative datasets that’s key — that’s where the real value lies. This suggests there’s huge opportunity for countries with taxpayer-funded public healthcare systems to structure and unlock the value contained in medical data they hold on their populations to develop their own publicly owned healthcare AIs. Indeed, that was one of the recommendations of a 2017 industrial strategy review of the UK’s life sciences sector. Oxford University’s Sir John Bell, who led the review, summed it up in comments to the newspaper, when he said: “Most of the value is the data. The worst thing we could do is give it away for free.” Streams app evaluation DeepMind has also been working with healthcare data in the UK. Reducing the time it takes for clinicians to identify when a patient develops AKI has been the focus of an app development project it’s been involved with since 2015 — co-developing an alert and clinical task management app with doctors working for the country’s National Health Service (NHS). That app, called Streams, which makes use of an NHS algorithm for detecting AKI, has been deployed in several NHS hospitals. And, also today, DeepMind and its app development partner NHS trust are releasing an evaluation of Streams’ performance, led by University College London. The results of the evaluation have been published in two papers, in the Nature Digital Medicine and the Journal of Medical Internet Research. In its blog DeepMind claims the evaluations show the​ ​app​ “​improved​ ​the​ ​quality​ ​of​ ​care​ ​for​ ​ patients​ ​by​ ​speeding​ ​up​ ​detection​ ​and​ ​preventing​ ​missed​ ​cases”, further claiming ​clinicians​ ​”were​ ​able​ ​to​ ​respond​ ​to​ ​urgent​ ​AKI​ ​cases​ ​in​ ​14​ ​minutes​ ​or​ ​less” — and suggesting that ​using​ ​existing​ ​systems​ “​might​ ​otherwise​ ​have​ ​taken​ ​many​ ​hours”.​ ​ It also claims a reduction in the cost of care to the NHS — ​from​ ​£11,772​ ​to​ ​£9,761​ ​for​ ​a hospital​ ​admission​ ​for​ ​a​ ​patient​ ​with​ ​AKI.​ ​ Though it’s worth emphasizing that under its current contracts with NHS trusts DeepMind provides the Streams service for free. So any cost reduction claims also come with some major caveats. Simply put: We don’t know the future costs of data-driven, digitally delivered healthcare services — because the business models haven’t been defined yet. (Although DeepMind has previously suggested .) “A​ccording​ ​to​ ​the​ ​evaluation,​ ​the​ ​app​ ​has​ ​improved​ ​the​ ​experience​ ​of​ ​clinicians​ ​responsible​ ​for​ ​ treating​ ​AKI,​ ​saving​ ​them​ ​time​ ​which​ ​would​ ​previously​ ​have​ ​been​ ​spent​ ​​trawling​ ​through​ ​paper,​ ​ pager​ ​alerts​ ​and​ ​multiple​ ​desktop​ ​systems,” DeepMind also writes now of Streams. However, again, the discussion contained in the evaluation papers contains rather more caveats than DeepMind’s PR does — flagging a large list of counter considerations, such as training costs and the risks of information overload (and over-alerting) making it more difficult to triage and manage care needs, as well as concluding that more studies are needed to determine wider clinical impacts of the app’s use. Here’s the conclusion to one of the papers, entitled A Qualitative Evaluation of User Experiences of a Digitally Enabled Care Pathway in Secondary Care: Digital technologies allow early detection of adverse events and of patients at risk of deterioration, with the potential to improve outcomes. They may also increase the efficiency of health care professionals’ working practices. However, when planning and implementing digital information innovations in health care, the following factors should also be considered: the provision of clinical training to effectively manage early detection, resources to cope with additional workload, support to manage perceived information overload, and the optimization of algorithms to minimize unnecessary alerts. A second paper, looking at Streams’ impact on clinical outcomes and associated healthcare costs, concludes that “digitally enabled clinical intervention to detect and treat AKI in hospitalized patients reduced health care costs and possibly reduced cardiac arrest rates”. “Its impact on other clinical outcomes and identification of the active components of the pathway requires clarification through evaluation across multiple sites,” it adds. To be clear, the current Streams app for managing AKI alerts does not include AI as a predictive tool. The evaluations being published today are of clinicians using the app as a vehicle for task management and push notification-style alerts powered by an NHS algorithm. But the Streams app is a vehicle that DeepMind and its parent company Google want to use to drive AI-powered diagnosis and prediction onto hospital wards. Hence DeepMind also working with US datasets to try to develop a predictive AI model for AKI. (It backed away from an early attempt to use Streams patient data to train AI, after realizing it would need to gain additional clearances from UK regulators.) Every doctor now carries a smartphone. So an app is clearly the path of least resistance for transforming a service that’s been run on paper on pagers for longer than Google’s existed. The wider intent behind DeepMind’s app collaboration with London’s Royal Free NHS Trust was stated early on — to build “powerful general-purpose learning algorithms”, an ambition expressed in a between the pair that has since been cancelled following a major data governance scandal. The background to the scandal — which we covered extensively in and — is that the medical records of around 1.6 million Royal Free NHS Trust patients were quietly passed to DeepMind during the development phase of Streams. Without, as it subsequently turned out, a valid legal basis for the data-sharing. Patients had not been asked for their consent to their sensitive medical data being shared with the Google-owned company. The regulator concluded they would not have had a reasonable expectation of their medical data ending up there. The trust was ordered to — though not the original data-sharing arrangement that had caused the controversy in the first place. It was not ordered to remove DeepMind’s access to the data. Nor were NHS patients whose data passed through Streams during the app evaluation phase asked for their consent to participate in the UCL/DeepMind/Royal Free study; a note on ‘ethical approval’ in the evaluation papers says UCL judged it fell under the remit of a service evaluation (rather than research) — hence “no participant consent was required”. It’s an unfortunate echo of the foundational consent failure attached to Streams, to say the very least. Despite all this, the Royal Free and DeepMind have continue to press on with their data-sharing app collaboration. Indeed, DeepMind is pressing on the accelerator — with its push to go beyond the NHS’ AKI algorithm. Commenting in a statement included in DeepMind’s PR, Dr​ ​Chris​ ​Streather,​ ​Royal​ ​Free​ ​London​’s ​chief​ ​medical​ ​officer​ ​and​ ​deputy​ ​chief​ ​executive,​ ​enthuses: “The​ ​ findings​ ​of​ ​the​ ​Streams​ ​evaluation​ ​are​ ​incredibly​ ​encouraging​ ​and​ ​we​ ​are​ ​delighted​ ​that​ ​our​ ​partnership​ ​with​ ​DeepMind​ ​Health​ ​has​ ​improved​ ​the​ ​outcomes​ ​for​ ​patients.​ ​ “Digital​ ​technology​ ​is​ ​the​ ​way​ ​forward​ ​for​ ​the​ ​NHS.​ ​In​ ​the​ ​same​ ​way​ ​as​ ​we​ ​can​ ​receive​ ​transport​ ​ and​ ​weather​ ​alerts​ ​on​ ​our​ ​mobile​ ​devices,​ ​doctors​ ​and​ ​nurses​ ​should​ ​benefit​ ​from​ ​tools​ ​which​ ​put​ ​ potentially​ ​life-saving​ ​information​ ​directly​ ​into​ ​their​ ​hands.​ “In​ ​the​ ​coming​ ​months,​ ​we​ ​will​ ​be​ ​introducing​ ​the​ ​app​ ​to​ ​clinicians​ ​at​ ​Barnet​ ​Hospital​ ​as​ ​well​ ​as​ ​ exploring​ ​the​ ​potential​ ​to​ ​develop​ ​solutions​ ​for​ ​other​ ​life-threatening​ ​conditions​ ​like​ ​sepsis.”​ Scramble for NHS data The next phase of Google-DeepMind’s plan for Streams may hit more of a blocker, though. Last year DeepMind the app would be handed off to its parent — to form part of Google’s own digital health push. Thereby contradicting DeepMind’s own claims, during the unfolding scandal when it had said Google would not have access to people’s medical records. More like: ‘No access until Google owns all the data and IP’, then… As we said at the time, it was quite the trust shock. Since then the Streams app hand-off from DeepMind to Google appears to have been on pause. Last year the Royal Free Trust said it could not happen without its approval. Asked now whether it will be signing new contracts for Streams with Google a spokesperson told us: “At present, the Royal Free London’s contract with DeepMind remains unchanged. As with all contractual agreements with suppliers, any changes or future contracts will follow information governance and data protection regulations. The trust will continue to be the data controller at all times, which means it is responsible for all patient information.” The trust declined to answer additional questions — including whether it intends to deploy a version of Streams that includes predictive AI model at NHS hospitals; and whether or not patients will be given an opt out for their data being shared with Google. It’s not clear what its plans are. Although DeepMind’s and Google’s is clearly for Streams to be the conduit for predictive AIs to be pushed onto NHS wards. Its blog aggressively pushes the case for adding AI to Streams. To the point of talking down the latter in order to hype the former. The DeepMind Health sales pitch is evolving from ‘you need this app’ to ‘you need this AI’… With the follow on push to ‘give us your data’. “Critically, these early findings from the Royal Free suggest that, in order to improve patient outcomes even further, clinicians need to be able to intervene before AKI can be detected by the current NHS algorithm — which is why our research on AKI is so promising,” it writes. “These results comprise the building blocks for our long-term vision of preventative healthcare, helping doctors to intervene in a proactive, rather than reactive, manner. “Streams doesn’t use artificial intelligence at the moment, but the team now intends to find ways to safely integrate predictive AI models into Streams in order to provide clinicians with intelligent insights into patient deterioration.” In its blog DeepMind also makes a point of reiterating that Streams will be folded into Google — writing: “As we announced in November 2018, the Streams team, and colleagues working on translational research in healthcare, will be joining Google in order to make a positive impact on a global scale.” “The combined experience, infrastructure and expertise of DeepMind Health teams alongside Google’s will help us continue to develop mobile tools that can support more clinicians, address critical patient safety issues and could, we hope, save thousands of lives globally,” it adds, ending with its customary ‘hope’ that its technology will save lives — yet still without any hard data to prove all the big claims it makes for AI-powered predictive healthcare’s potential. As we’ve , for its predictive AI to deliver anything of value Google really needs access to data the NHS holds. Hence the big PR push. And the consent-overriding scramble for NHS data. Responding to DeepMind’s news, Sam Smith, coordinator at health data privacy advocacy group medConfidential told us: “The history of opportunists using doctors to take advantage of patients to further their own interests is as long as it is sordid. Some sagas drag on for years. Google has used their international reach to use data on the US military what they said they’d do in the UK, before it became clear they misled UK regulators and broken UK law.” In a blog post the group added: “In recent weeks, Google & YouTube, Facebook & Instagram, and other tech companies have come under increasing pressure to accept they have a duty of care to their users. Can Google DeepMind say how its project with the Royal Free respects the Duty of Confidence that every NHS body has to its patients? How does the VA patient data they did use correspond to the characteristics of patients the RFH sees? “Google DeepMind received the RFH data -– up to 10 years’ of hospital treatments -– of 1.6 million patients. We expect its press release to confirm how many of those 1.6 million people actually had their data displayed in the app, and whether they were used for testing alongside the US military data.”

Digital, the subsidiary of carmaker Porsche, is , after launching its first in 2017 in Silicon Valley. The second North American office for this software and digital product-focused wing of Porsche will open in Atlanta, which is also the seat of Porsche’s North American cars business. Porsche Digital cited proximity to their auto business headquarters as one reason why they picked Atlanta, but also pointed to Atlanta’s “local tech talent” and “robust and constantly growing startup and tech sector” as key factors in its selection. The need for a second office is specifically about serving the U.S. market, Porsche Digital notes and the company expects to have 45 employees total in the U.S. across both offices within the next year. The subsidiary overall has 120 employees worldwide, with offices in Berlin, Shanghai, and Tel Aviv as well as the U.S. Porsche Digital does focus on creating software and digital products for the automaker’s customers, but it’s actually probably more valuable to its parent company as a sort of distributed tech talent scouting and business development arm of the company. Its offices definitely occupy global hotspots when it comes to startup tech companies, and having a permanent presence in this locations has got to come in handy when looking to attract engineering talent and potential acquisitions of complimentary early-stage companies.

New gear from will equip you with everything you need to become the best first-person drone racer that’s ever graced the Earth – you’ll be the Anakin Skywalker of FPV drone races. The company is launching a new suite of products specifically to make the most of Digital First Person Viewing (FPV) when operating drones, with a wide range of compatibility. The includes a set of FPV goggles, a transmission unit that you attach to your drone of choice, a camera that also attaches to the transmitter unit and the drone body, and an FPV controller. Together, they provide the “first low latency HD video transmission signal” according to DJI, with total end-to-end latency of just 28 milliseconds per the specs, and the ability to transmit 720p footage at 120fps with that low lag transmission. There are a few key ingredients here that are tuned specifically to the needs of drone racers here: low-latency is important because you want the video feed to be as real-time as possible when you’re racing high-speed drones around courses with tight turns and a field of airborne competitors you can potentially run into. And high-quality speed, with a high refresh rate for the video, is important for similar reasons – you need to ‘see’ accurately from the perspective of the drone in order to race it effectively. The system can also transmit at a distance of up to 2.5 miles, and there are eight channels of 5.8GHz wireless frequency supported by the Air Unit so that you can fly as many as eight drones at the same time connected to a single system. Users can even change feeds on the fly when multiple units are in use, letting them take a look at the competition or just watch the race rom an FPV perspective if they don’t actually have a drone in the running. As for the camera, it offers a 150-degree field of view, and while the feed is optimized for action at 720p 120fps as mentioned, you can export video at either 1080p 60 or 720p 120 depending on your editing needs. The live video transmission also optimizes by first pixellating around the edges and keeping the center clear when it needs to increase broadcast efficiency under heavy load and in sub-optimal connection conditions, so that the important part of the action remains in focus for racers. DJI will be selling these in two packages, including a ‘Fly More Combo’ that retails for $929 and an ‘Experience Combo’ that will be $819, with the main difference being that you get the Remote controller in the mix with the ‘Fly More’ version.

Whether you are spending hours working in the office or at home, you need a to keep yourself healthy and safe. The Ergohuman High Back Swivel Chair is a great candidate, with some good ergonomically designed features to keep you out of pain. The Ergohuman High Back is fully adjustable with a mesh backrest, solid construction and it has some modern style to boot. Read the buying guide below to find out my impressions after spending 40+ hours living and working with this ergonomic chair. Does The Ergohuman High Back Swivel Chair Really Help Support Your Back? 251 Reviews This chair will give you proper support. from $699.00 This Ergohuman chair is pretty comparable to the popular Herman Miller Aeron chair, but even better. That’s right, a Herman Miller quality chair that isn’t from Herman Miller. It lets you customize almost every area and this allows you to get the most comfortable experience possible. Pros: Fully adjustable Mesh backrest Solid construction Cons: Assembly may be difficult for some Armrests don’t lock Mesh sticks at times Build Quality And Design This executive office chair boasts very solid construction. It frame feels sturdy when you are using it and all of the parts are also good quality. Unlike most mesh office chairs this one has a nice design that looks very modern and sleek too. They really nailed the build quality and design on this model. Adjustability It is almost completely adjustable. You can customize almost every component ensuring that you are getting the perfect fit for your body. The backrest, headrest, adjusting seat depth, adjustable armrests(somewhat), and height are all adjustable. The armrests swivel but don’t lock in place, so they move too easily. That would be my only adjustability complaint. Performance Thanks to all of that adjustability, this Ergohuman chair is very comfortable after you have been using it for many hours. It is a highly customizable chair. Sometimes the mesh will stick to your pants or shirt as you stand up, but this didn’t really bother me very much. The breathable mesh feels nice when you are in the chair. The tension control adjustment allows you to control the amount of force to recline or sit up straight and that is another great feature. It is adjustable to fit almost anybody. Bottom Line For how comfortable this executive chair is and how sturdily it is constructed, it is priced just right. If you experience back pain or just want to improve your posture, this should be one of your top choices. Sitting for long periods has consequences and so it is good to be preventatively minded by having the right chair. You don’t always see this much adjustability in the price range as well. Some of the competition is just height adjustable and they call it a day. And on top of all that it also has a good looking design. I would call it an office must-have for anyone who likes mesh chairs. It has all of the right ergonomics to keep you safe and healthy while working the day away, or even if you just sit down for a few minutes to answer some emails or play with your . You can also use it as a gaming chair. I would call it an office must-have if you like . Even those who use standing desks throughout the day need a comfortable swivel task chair for the rest of the time. You might also like top pick ergonomic chairs like the Leap chair, the Steelcase leap, Chair ME7erg, Raynor Ergohuman, or the Eurotech Ergohuman. These are all top-notch ergonomic chairs. You can find many of them right here on in our section. Related Posts: The post appeared first on .

Lucian Freud, Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau), 1981-1983. Oil on canvas, 73 x 78 inches. (Paul G. Allen Family Collection) The public will get a chance to view some of the significant pieces in the private art collection of Paul Allen, the late Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist, as part of a year-long exhibition at . “A Cultural Legacy: A Series of Paintings from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” (July 24 – July 20, 2020), is an iterative single-painting exhibition that will feature works by Lucian Freud, Sandro Botticelli and Georgia O’Keeffe. In addition to his cultural pursuits around sports and music, Allen, who died last October at age 65, had a lifelong interest in the visual arts. His collection spans centuries, genres and media, SAM said in a news release on Monday, and he was a frequent lender to the museum. A 2017 exhibition titled “Seeing Nature: Landscape Masterworks from the Paul G. Allen Family Collection,” featured 39 works from his collection and showcased key moments in the development of the landscape genre. SAM said which Allen hoped it would “inspire people to renew their commitment to protecting Earth’s natural beauty for generations to come.” Sandro Botticelli, The Madonna of the Magnificat, c. 1480-1489. Tempera on panel, 24 3/4 inches diameter. (Paul G. Allen Family Collection) “Paul Allen was a tireless champion of art with an incredible commitment to this city. His cultural legacy surrounds us,” SAM director and CEO Kimerly Rorschach said. “We’re honored to have this opportunity to present this series of paintings that reflect his appreciation for extraordinary art, and his belief that art connects us to each other and to the world.” Georgia O’Keeffe, White Rose with Larkspur No. 1, 1927. Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 inches. (Paul G. Allen Family Collection) “Art demands something of us: to slow down, to view the world differently, to see ideas and possibilities previously unknown,” said Greg Bell, chief curator, Art Collections at Vulcan. “We are grateful to be able to share these works with the Seattle Art Museum and our community, so that we may continue to enrich the arts and culture of the region.” The new exhibition, which opens Wednesday, will be on view in the museum’s third floor galleries, adjacent to its collection of modern and contemporary art. The artworks (pictured above) and dates include: Large Interior, W11 (after Watteau) (1981–1983) by Lucian Freud, on view July 24 – Nov. 18. The Madonna of the Magnificat (c. 1480–1489) by Sandro Botticelli, on view Nov. 27 – March 23, 2020), concurrent with SAM’s major fall exhibition, “Flesh and Blood: Italian Masterpieces from the Capodimonte Museum (Oct. 17 – Jan. 26, 2020), featuring works from the High Renaissance and Baroque periods. White Rose with Larkspur No. 1 (1927) by Georgia O’Keeffe, on view April 1 – July 20, 2020, concurrent with “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstract Variations (March 5–June 28, 2020), focusing on O’Keeffe’s early drawings, paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, and photographs of the artist by Alfred Stieglitz.

Africa’s mobile phone industry has in recent times been by Transsion, a Shenzhen-based company that is little known outside the African continent and is gearing up for an . Now, its Chinese peer Vivo is following its shadow to this burgeoning part of the world with low-cost offerings. the world’s , this week that it’s bringing its budget-friendly smartphones into Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt; the line of products is already available in Morocco. It’s obvious that Vivo wants in on an expanding market as its home country China experiences . Despite a global slowdown, Africa posted annual growth in smartphone shipments last year thanks in part to the abundance of entry-level products, according to market research firm IDC. Affordability is the key driver for any smartphone brands that want to grab a slice of the African market. That’s what vaulted Transsion into a top dog on the continent where it sells feature phones for less than $20. Vivo’s Y series smartphones, which are priced as little as $170, are vying for a place with Transsion, Samsung and Huawei that have respective unit shares of 34.3%, 22.6% and 9.9% in Africa last year. The Middle East is also part of Vivo’s latest expansion plan despite the region’s recent . The Y series, which comes in several models sporting features like the 89% screen-to-body ratio or the artificial intelligence-powered triple camera, is currently for sale in the United Arab Emirates and will launch in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain in the coming months. Vivo’s new international push came months after its sister company, also owned by BBK, made into the Middle East and Africa by opening a new regional hub in Dubai. “Since our first entry into international markets in 2014, we have been dedicated to understanding the needs of consumers through in-depth research in an effort to bring innovative products and services to meet changing lifestyle needs,” said Vivo’s senior vice president Spark Ni in a statement. “The Middle East and Africa markets are important to us, and we will tailor our approach with consumers’ needs in mind. The launch of Y series is just the beginning. We look forward to bringing our other widely popular products beyond Y series to consumers in the Middle East and Africa very soon,” the executive added.

Managing your customers has changed a lot in the past decade. Out are the steak dinners and ballgame tickets to get a sense of a contract’s chance at renewal, and in are churn analysis and a whole bunch of data science to learn whether a customer and their users like or love your product. That customer experience revolution has been critical to the success of SaaS products, but it can remain wickedly hard to centralize all the data needed to drive top performance in a customer success organization. That’s where comes in. The company, founded in New York City in 2017 and launched April last year, wants to centralize all of your disparate data sources on your customers into one easy-to-digest tool to learn how to approach each of them individually to optimize for the best experience. The company’s early success has attracted more top investors. It announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series A led by Vas Natarajan of Accel, who previously backed enterprise companies like , Segment, InVision, and Blameless. The company had previously raised $3 million from and $2.4 million from True Ventures. Both firms participated in this new round. Catalyst CEO Edward Chiu told me that Accel was attractive because of the firm’s recent high-profile success in the enterprise space, including IPOs like Slack, PagerDuty, and CrowdStrike. , the firm had just raised its first seed round and was just the company’s co-founders — brothers Edward and Kevin Chiu — and a smattering of employees. Now, the company has 19 employees and is targeting 40 employees by the end of the year. In that time, the product has continued to evolve as it has worked with its customers. One major feature of Catalyst’s product is a “health score” that determines whether a customer is likely to grow or churn in the coming months based on ingested data around usage. CEO Chiu said that “we’ve gotten our health score to be very very accurate” and “we have the ability to take automated action based on that health score.” Today, the company offers “prefect sync” with Salesforce, Mixpanel, Zendesk, among other services, and will continue to make investments in new integrations. One high priority for the company has been increasing the speed of integration when a new customer signs up for Catalyst. Chiu said that new customers can be onboarded in minutes, and they can use the platform’s formula builder to define the exact nuances of their health score for their specific customers. “We mold to your use case,” he said. One lesson the company has learned is that as success teams increasingly become critical to the lifeblood of companies, other parts of the organization and senior executives are working together to improve their customer’s experiences. Chiu told me that the startup often starts with onboarding a customer success team, only to later find that C-suite and other team leads have also joined and are also interacting together on the platform. An interesting dynamic for the company is that it does its own customer success on its customer success platform. “We are our own best customer,” Chiu said. “We login every day to see the health of our customers… our product managers login to Catalyst every day to read product feedback.” Since the last time we checked in, the company has added a slew of senior execs, including Cliff Kim as head of product, Danny Han as head of engineering, and Jessica Marucci as head of people, with whom the two Chius had worked together at cloud infrastructure startup DigitalOcean. Moving forward, Chiu expects to invest further in data analysis and engineering. “One of the most unique things about us is that we are collecting so much unique data: usage patterns, [customer] spend fluctuations, [customer] health scores,” Chiu said. “It would be a hugely missed opportunity not to analyze that data and work on churn.”