It’s a new era for fertility tech

Women’s health has long been devoid of technological innovation, but when it comes to fertility options, that’s starting to change. Startups in the space are securing hundreds of millions in venture capital investment, a significant increase to the dearth of funding collected in previous years.

Fertility entrepreneurs are focused on a growing market: couples are choosing to reproduce later in life, an increasing number of female breadwinners are able to make their own decisions about when and how to reproduce, and overall, around 10% of women in the US today have trouble conceiving, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Startups, as a result, are working to improve various pain points in a women’s fertility journey, whether that be with new-age brick-and-mortar clinics, information platforms, mobile applications, wearables, direct-to-consumer medical tests or otherwise.

Although the investment numbers are still relatively small (compared to, say, scooters), the trend is up — here’s the latest from founders and investors in the space.

VCs want to help you get pregnant

Clue, a period and ovulation-tracking app, co-founder and CEO Ida Tin talks at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2017 (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

This fall, TechCrunch received a tip that SoftBank, a prolific venture capital firm known for its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund, was investing in Glow, a period-tracking app meant to help women get pregnant. Max Levchin, Glow’s co-founder and a well-known member of the PayPal mafia, succinctly responded to a TechCrunch inquiry regarding the deal via e-mail: “Fairly sure you got this particular story wrong,” he wrote. Glow co-founder and chief executive officer Mike Huang did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the time.

Needless to say, some semblance of a SoftBank fertility deal got this reporter interested in a space that seldom populates tech blogs.

Femtech, a term coined by Ida Tin, the founder of another period and ovulation-tracking app Clue, is defined as any software, diagnostics, products and services that leverage technology to improve women’s health. Femtech, and more specifically the businesses in the fertility and contraception lanes, hasn’t made headlines as often as AI or blockchain technology has, for example. Probably because companies in the sector haven’t closed as many notable venture deals. That’s changing.

The global fertility services market is expected to exceed $21 billion by 2020, according to Technavio. Meanwhile, private investment in the femtech space surpassed $400 million in 2018 after reaching a high of $354 million the previous year, per data collected from PitchBook and Crunchbase. This year already several companies have inked venture deals, including men’s fertility business Dadi and Extend Fertility, which helps women freeze their eggs.

“In the last three to six months, it feels like investor interest has gone through the roof,” Jake Anderson-Bialis, co-founder of FertilityIQ and a former investor at Sequoia Capital, told TechCrunch. “It’s three to four emails a day; people are coming out of the woodwork. It feels like somebody shook the snow globe here and it just hasn’t stopped for months now.”

Dadi, Extend Fertility and FertilityIQ are among a growing list of startups in the fertility space to crop up in recent years. FertilityIQ, for its part, provides a digital platform for fertility patients to research and review doctors and clinics. The company also collects data and issues reports, like this one, which ranked businesses by fertility benefits. Anderson-Bialis launched the platform with his wife, co-founder Deborah Anderson-Bialis, in 2016 after the pair overcame their own set of infertility issues.

Anderson-Bialis said he has recently fielded requests from seed, Series A and growth-stage investors interested in exploring the growing fertility market. His company, however, has yet to raise any outside capital. Why? He doesn’t see FertilityIQ as a venture-scale business, but rather a passion project, and he’s skeptical of the true market opportunity for other businesses in the space.

Sequoia-backed Medallia files to raise $70M at a $1.7B valuation, documents show

Customer experience management platform Medallia has filed to raise up to $70 million in Series F funding, according to regulatory documents obtained by the Prime Unicorn Index. The new shares were priced at $15 apiece, valuing the nearly two-decades-old business at $1.7 billion.

We’ve reached out to Medallia for comment.

Medallia is expected to finally transition to the public markets in 2019, a year chock-full of high-profile unicorn IPOs. The downsized round, which if raised at full is less than half of its Series E funding, will likely be Medallia’s final infusion of private investment.

San Mateo-headquartered Medallia, led by newly-appointed chief executive officer Leslie Stretch, operates a platform meant to help businesses better provide for their customers. Its core product, the Medallia Experience Cloud, provides employees real-time data on customers collected from online review sites and social media. The service leverages that data to provide insights and tools to improve customer experiences.

Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia (PRNewsfoto/Medallia).

According to PitchBook, Medallia boasts a particularly clean cap table, especially for a roughly 18-year-old business. It’s backed by four venture capital firms: Sequoia Capital, Saints Capital, TriplePoint Venture Growth and Grotmol Solutions, the latter which invested a small amount of capital in 2010. Medallia has raised a total of $268 million in equity funding, including a $150 million round in 2015 that valued the company at $1.25 billion.

Prior to hiring Stretch to lead the company to IPO, Medallia co-founder Borge Hald ran the company as CEO since its 2001 launch. Hald is now executive chairman and chief strategy officer.

5 unicorns that will probably go public in 2019 (besides Uber and Lyft)

SoftBank’s Vision Fund invests $1.5B in Chinese second-hand car startup Chehaoduo

Applications are open for Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019

Founders. This is your shot. TechCrunch is officially in the hunt for the most disruptive startups for this year’s Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019. Startups can apply here to compete on our world-famous stage for a $100,000 equity-free prize and the coveted Disrupt Cup. With more than 10,000 attendees, hundreds of press outlets and top investors from around the world, your company will launch to the most influential players in tech.

The application. Simple. Fill out your app here. There is no cost to apply or participate. TechCrunch does not take any fees or equity. Early-stage startups from any country and any vertical are eligible. TechCrunch’s editors will review the applications and select the most promising startups to pitch the world’s top VCs on the main stage at Disrupt SF (October 2-4) — set to be the biggest event in TechCrunch’s history.

The training. The Startup Battlefield team will work intensively over many weeks with the Startup Battlefield contestants to hone pitches, sharpen business models and perfect demos.

The conference. At TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Startup Battlefield contestants are welcome at VIP events, backstage and more. The Battlefield startups receive complimentary exhibition space on the show floor for all three days, as well as access to CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s investor-founder matching system. Battlefield startups also receive complimentary tickets to all future TechCrunch events, access to alumni events and free subscriptions to Extra Crunch.

The competition. The Startup Battlefield contestants, approximately 20 in number, pitch for six minutes each, including a live demo, followed by a six-minute Q&A with our elite judges — investors like Roelof Botha, Jeff Clavier, Cyan Banister, Kirsten Green and Aileen Lee. After the initial round, 4-6 companies will be selected to pitch again on the final day of the conference in front of a new panel of judges. They will choose the winner, who will receive the Disrupt Cup, a check for $100,000 and a post in TechCrunch, as well as the attention of media and investors around the world. All Startup Battlefield sessions are streamed live on TechCrunch to a global audience in the millions.

The Startup Battlefield Alumni Community. Join the ranks of alumni like Vurb, Dropbox, Get Around, Cloudflare, Mint.com and more. Don’t just take our word for it! Our Startup Battlefield Alumni metrics speak for themselves — 857 contestants have raised about $8.8 billion and produced 108 successful exits (IPOs or acquisitions). 

So what are you waiting for? Apply now.

Two Chairs nabs $7M for its client-therapist matching app and brick-and-mortar clinics

The future of healthcare isn’t entirely digital. For encounters as intimate as the client-therapist dynamic, a face-to-face relationship is still key.

For those able to afford tech-enabled therapy services, Two Chairs, a San Francisco-headquartered mental healthcare business, may be of interest. The startup believes in the power of in-person therapy, as opposed to the new variety of affordable digital tools meant to replace or coexist with therapy services. Today, the company is announcing a $7 million Maveron-led Series A financing to open additional brick-and-mortar clinics and build out its client-therapist matching app, which leverages technology to pair its customers with a therapist best-tailored to their needs.

The company currently operates four clinics in the Bay Area, where patients can access individual or group therapy. Each of those clinics was built with modern, young professionals in mind using “thoughtful design” to create “non-judgmental spaces.”

A Two Chairs clinic, which emphasizes “non-judgmental” design

The mobile app and clinic interior design are the key differences between Two Chairs and a neighborhood private practice, it says. As far as pricing, at $180 an hour, a session doesn’t differ terribly from a typical session at a Bay Area private practice (the company does accept insurance). The startup currently employs 30 therapists, who also are available over video chat should a client be sick or traveling, with a customer base of 2,000.

Two Chairs was founded in 2017 by former Palantir employee Alex Katz (pictured). In a conversation with TechCrunch, Katz admitted procuring real estate for Two Chairs’ brick-and-mortar clinics has been an expensive and difficult endeavor. It’s no wonder venture capitalists tend to favor IT startups devoid of the overhead costs associated with firms in the real estate business. Katz is hoping the latest investment, which brings Two Chairs’ total raised to $8 million, will help the business quickly sign additional leases outside of the most expensive city in the U.S.

The cash will also be used to advance Two Chairs’ matching app. The app surveys potential clients on their history, preferences and goals, then uses a library of data to match the client with the most suitable therapist in its roster and to create a customized treatment plan. Katz says they’ve provided clients with an accurate match 95 percent of the time.

“We know that the client-therapist relationship is the best predictor of an outcome with care and while it sounds intuitive, matching is not a concept that has existed in the mental health field historically,” Katz told TechCrunch.

Two Chairs is one of several mental health startups to capture the attention of venture capitalists lately. Basis, which helps people cope with anxiety and depression through guided conversations via chat and video, emerged from stealth in 2018 with a $3.75 million investment led by Bedrock. Wisdo, a community-focused app that connects people seeking help with those who can offer help, brought in an $11 million investment in December and emotional well-being app Aura raised $2.7 million from Cowboy Ventures in October.

Those three businesses have one thing in common: they are digital-first endeavors looking to innovate on top of a broken mental healthcare model. Two Chairs’ plan to build additional therapy clinics, however, doesn’t feel particularly inventive. Opening a chain of therapy offices, rather, sounds like a hard-to-scale, expensive business idea.

As for the uptick in capital for mental health tech, Katz is satisfied Silicon Valley has finally acknowledged the problem: “I think Silicon Valley venture has had a preference for models that don’t involve brick-and-mortar and minimize the use of people; they prefer software businesses,” he said. “The reason we are taking this approach is we know from the research that really well-matched in-person therapy is really effective. Still, at a high level, it’s exciting. There are a lot of people thinking in innovative ways of how we can provide improved mental healthcare.”

Goldcrest Capital also participated in Two Chairs’ Series A.

SoFi founder Mike Cagney’s new company, Figure, just raised another $65 million

Figure, a 13-month-old, San Francisco-based company that says it uses blockchain technology to provide home equity loans online in as little as five days, has raised a whole lot of money in not a lot of time: $120 million to date, including $65 million in fresh funding from RPM Ventures and partners at DST Global, with participation from DCG, Nimble Ventures, Morgan Creek and earlier investors Ribbit Capital and DCM.

The money isn’t entirely surprising, given who founded the company — Mike Cagney, who founded SoFi and built it into a major player in student loan refinancing in the U.S. before leaving amid allegations of sexual harassment and an anything-goes corporate culture that saw at least two former employees sue the company.

Today, SoFi has moved on under the leadership of CEO Anthony Noto, a former Twitter executive who is working to reshape SoFi from a lending company into more of a full-fledged financial services company, with savings and checking accounts, as well as exchange-traded funds, all with the aim of making its platform stickier than in the past.

It may be a bigger endeavor than Noto had realized. Though Cagney once predicted the company would IPO in 2018 or 2019, SoFi isn’t even considering a public offering this year, Noto told reporters earlier this week.

Cagney has meanwhile moved on, too, though he still seems set on taking on traditional banks. Indeed, while Figure is providing home loans today — it says it has provided more than 1,500 home equity lines to date — it’s also moving to diversify into new areas, including wealth management, unsecured consumer loans and checking accounts offered (for now) in partnership with an existing bank.

Interestingly, Figure, which employs 100 people, is targeting a very different demographic than did SoFi, as Cagney told American Banker recently. Whereas SoFi marketed to young people earning high salaries, Figure is going after older customers who may not be seeing much in the way of income but have much of their wealth tied up in their homes instead.

Given that older Americans are projected to outnumber children for the first time in history by 2030, according to U.S. census data, Cagney clearly sees the writing on the wall.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not the only one. Other startups trying to make it easier for Americans to borrow against their homes include Point, a roughly four-year-old startup that lends capital to people and receives partial ownership in their homes in return.

Cagney co-founded Figure with his wife, June Ou, who is the company’s chief operating officer. She was previously chief technology officer at SoFi.

As for its culture and lingering questions that customers and potential partners may have about what happened at SoFi, Cagney — who has said he had consensual sexual relationships with female subordinates at SoFi — insists that Figure is benefiting from lessons learned.

At SoFi, he told American Banker, “[W]e grew so fast and we never really understood what we were going to grow into, and culture never took a front seat.” Figure meanwhile has a “very clear adherence to a no-asshole policy.”

Ceros raises $14M for its interactive content platform

Ceros allows marketers to create animated, interactive content — but don’t call it a content marketing company.

“We think content is just a dry, bland, over-leveraged, oversaturated space,” said founder and CEO Simon Berg. “The goal is not to hack the system, the goal is to make a great experience for your customers.”

That’s why he describes Ceros as a platform for creating experiences. The company is focused on powering beautiful, well-designed graphics and web pages, instead of blog posts or white papers that mostly exist to snare search traffic.

Ceros is announcing today that it’s raised $14 million in Series C funding.

Ceros previously raised $19.5 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The new round was led by Greenspring Associates, with participation from Grotech Ventures, CNF Investments, Sigma Prime Ventures, StarVest Partners, Greycroft and Silicon Valley Bank.

“Ceros is well known for empowering marketers to think creatively, but we have also come to know Ceros as a highly capital efficient business, which is a refreshing change in the burn-rate happy world of digital,” said Greenspring’s John Avirett, General Partner in a statement. “We’re confident that this investment will catalyze Ceros’ continued growth while enabling their team to opportunistically pursue acquisitions that enhance the core product and further penetration of key markets.”

For examples of the different between Ceros “experiences” and run-of-the-mill content marketing, check out Ceros/Inspire, where some of the most viewed projects include a comic book-style blockchain explainer from Ozy and a “friend versus pro” created to promote H&R Block.

“What we’ve continued to work on over the last seven years is to comply with laws of physics that are laws of internet, whilst giving as much creative freedom as possible,” Berg said. “We want to put the creative and the design piece first.”

The company says it’s now working with more than 400 customers, including well-known brands like United Airlines and Red Bull, as well as publishers including Condé Nast and Vice, plus sports teams like the Baltimore Ravens and Detroit Lions.

“Both in terms of the revenues that we’ve reached and the clients that we’ve worked with … you never really ‘arrive,’ but I feel like we’ve reached a critical milestone,” Berg said.

Interactive Content Can Save Content Marketing From The Dark Side

Collaboration Software Meemim Shuts Down But Users Can Keep Accounts Until 2020

In an emailed notice, Meemim said their platform will be retired at the end of February 2019. This will give existing clients a grace period of about a month to find an alternative knowledge management solution as well as migrate their data.

Meemim said customers will have to move the data between the systems manually because of the cost involved in providing data extracts. This is an important point to remember because the back-end infrastructure will be shut down at the end of the month. It means no data will be stored or made available beyond that point.

If you have been using Meemim to share and store information by your organization, make sure you download it as soon as possible. Delaying the download to the last minute may cause problems if there is increased traffic or any other technical glitch, so plan accordingly.

The decommissioning of Meemim applies to free users. The company said paying customers will be able to use the system until 2020 or longer.

Meemim

Built in 2015, Meemim was designed as a way for teams and people in an organization to share knowledge.

The company said the closure comes even though it experienced some growth, but not enough to achieve the scale needed to make it a viable enterprise. The support of Microsoft is what kept it up and running, which has now ended.

Looking for an Alternative Provider?

With collaboration now an essential part of today’s workforce, knowledge management tools are a reliable way of bringing information together under one platform and make it accessible.

Even though Meemim will no longer be available, there are many companies in the marketplace which provide similar services.

Here are some of the other options: Atlassian Confluence, ProProfs Knowledge Base, Bloomfire, and Freshdesk Freshworks.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "Collaboration Software Meemim Shuts Down But Users Can Keep Accounts Until 2020" was first published on Small Business Trends

What is a Business Continuity Plan and How Can it Benefit your Business?

A big part of planning for small business success is a business continuity plan. This is the fallback position your business has when a natural disaster, power outage, or any one of a number of mishaps threatens your company’s ability to function.

Part of the initial planning for one of these important documents starts with understanding how vulnerable your small business might be if an emergency happened.

How to Get Started with a Business Continuity Plan

One of the first things that you will need to do is understand the natural disasters like floods and wildfires that can happen in your area. This is a good starting point so that you can tailor make a business continuity plan that reacts to any potential issues of this kind. Here’s a good starting point to better understand some of the risks.

Take Proactive Measure

Having one of these plans in place is a proactive measure. It is also motivational even if the disaster doesn’t strike because it shows your customers and shareholders as well as your employees that you are prepared.

Here’s some of the steps that you should work through with your small business to come up with a plan that will put everyone at ease.

Put an Emergency Team Together

Being ready for an emergency that can otherwise disrupt your business means having an emergency preparedness team in place. These are people that will be the foundation for how your business reacts and how operations will be able to continue.

Having this team in place means selecting some individuals or maybe a few managers who will be up to the task. They should have a thorough understanding of how your business works and these individuals all need to be reliable when it comes to decision-making.

If the whole idea was the brainchild of a committee in the first place, it’s a good idea to let them take charge although one person should lead the entire planning process.

Look at the Risks

Finding out where your company is vulnerable by looking at the risks and doing an assessment is the next step. One of the ways to approach this type of assessment is to take proactive steps for each disaster possibility.

In other words, it’s a good idea to be able to see any potential disruptions before they happen. There’s a National Weather Service that you can monitor and local services too. If you’re in a location where potential IT outages are an issue, assigning someone to monitor your network is a good idea.

If your business is near a body of water, making some flood preparations is a positive step.

Determine Essential Services

You’ll also need to be able to determine the essential services for your small business. Some of the things that your company does might need to satisfy regulatory requirements so they should be top priority. You might be in a business that makes goods or services that can impact the health and safety of your customers.

Your business may experience a disruption because of interruptions in power lines or communication. These are considered essential services because you need to keep them running so you will need to consider alternate sources like generators.

Indentify Major Customers

Even if your products and services don’t fit in those other categories, you’ll want to be able to earmark major customers that keep you afloat financially. Ticking off check marks next to your major clients so they are in the essential services category is a good idea.

Prepare an Action Plan

This is one of the foundations of your entire business continuity plan. It should start by describing the essential parts of your business that you identified in the previous step. The individuals that have been put in charge should be mentioned clearly here.

It’s a good idea to have backups as well. This is the meat and potatoes of all planning that you’ve done. Everything needs to be covered here. This includes how you’re going to reallocate staff to keep things moving and what plans you have for using other sectors to keep the essential parts of your business up and running.

Any changes that you need to make with delivery models and business reporting needs to be detailed here. An important part of any action plan lists contact information should you need to contract services including staffing and equipment.

Keep in mind you have a variety of software solutions that can help you by providing access to the cloud for disaster recovery.

Test and Train

Once you have a plan in place, you will need to test it and train the continuity team. By running through a few mock exercises, you will be able to see where the plan needs to be tweaked.  It’s a good idea that you continue to test even when you get the plan to where you think it needs to be. Reviewing your plan quarterly is a good idea to stay on top of any changes that need to be implemented.

Find a Business Continuity Plan Template

Putting together a business continuity plan is easy if you can find a template and just fill in the blank spaces to tailor make it to suit your business. There are a series of excellent resources to help you with a small business plan including The National Fire Protection Association’s Standard on Continuity, Emergency and Crisis Management. Here’s another version you can download and customize for your small business.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "What is a Business Continuity Plan and How Can it Benefit your Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends

Zūm, a ridesharing service for kids, raises $40 million

Ride-sharing isn’t just for transporting teenagers and adults anymore. Zūm, a ridesharing startup for kids, just raised a $40 million Series C round led by BMW i Ventures with participation from Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $70 million.

Zūm is a mobile app that enables parents to schedule rides for their kids from fully-vetted drivers. It also partners with school districts to support their transportation needs. To date, the company has partnered with 150 school districts across the country and transported more than 500,000 students.

“Zūm has proven itself as a force to be reckoned with in a market that has a lot of untapped opportunity,” BMW i Ventures Managing Partner Ulrich Quay said in a statement. “Its leadership is strong not only because of their drive to help working families, but because they themselves have families and understand the need for better child transportation, today. We’re proud to be supporting Zūm and look forward to seeing its momentum as it continues driving funds back into schools.”

The plan with the funding is to support the increase of partnerships with schools throughout the nation. Additionally, Zūm plans to use the funding to further develop its one-stop platform technology for schools. This platform features route optimization, vehicle and quality tracking and real-time vehicle dashboards for schools.

“I’m honored to gain the support of our incredible investors who believe in what Zūm does, and our mission to build the world’s largest and safest transportation service for students,” Zūm founder and CEO Ritu Narayan (pictured above) said in a press release. “It is beyond exciting to have investors who have supported transportation, tech and marketplace startups across the globe, and to know they see in Zūm what I’ve seen since the beginning—ineffective, inefficient school transportation is a massive issue and we need to build a better future for our children.”

Zūm, however, is not the only startup tackling transportation for kids. HopSkipDrive, a rideshare service that picks up your kids, similarly partners with school districts for school bus alternatives. In 2017, HopSkipDrive raised a $7.4 million round to bring its total funding to $21.5 million. There’s also Kango, a more Uber-like service for kids. However, you may recall Shuddle’s shutdown of its Uber-like service for kids in 2016. Shuddle had raised $12.2 million prior to shutting down. Perhaps partnering with schools and school districts is the way to go in this kid ridehailing business.

Apply These Secret Techniques to Become More Authentic in your Small Business Marketing

Marketing for small businesses is becoming increasingly difficult. Customers are growing tired of traditional paid and owned advertising. We’re living in the age of the customer experience, and the same principles apply when it comes to marketing. Consumers want a brand they can trust and build a relationship with. They want to connect with brands and that means that businesses need to consider spicing up their marketing strategy this year. Customers today want authenticity.

The ideas of authenticity and marketing may seem like polar opposites. But, in the digital age, consumers are so connected that authenticity is essential to successful marketing. Customers have the advantage. They have access to all of the information they could ever want to know about your product or service. They also have unprecedented access to a global network of reviews, both positive and negative, on which to base their opinions of not only your products and services but your brand as a whole. News spreads fast on social media, and your brand could turn from being on top of the world to a sinking ship in no time

Be Customer Conscious

Authenticity in marketing means being honest and transparent with your customers.

Make it personal- while the concept of personalization in marketing is nothing new, taking the time to let your customers know you care can really go a long way.

Own your mistakes and shortcomings- customers will be more likely to extend you some grace if you’re humble and willing to engage them if you fail to meet their expectations

Respond, don’t react- if you receive a negative comment on social media, address it quickly and with honesty. Avoid knee-jerk, emotional reactions that will perpetuate a negative image.

Face the Feedback

One way to promote authenticity this year is to ask for feedback from your customers. Traditional marketing is a one-sided conversation. It involves a business sending a message to a customer and waiting for the sales to start pouring in. However, being authentic requires participation from both sides. Call your customers on the phone, or better yet, meet with them in-person. Ask them what their perception is of your brand and company. Let them know that their opinions and stories are valued. While you might be surprised at how your brand is received in the real world, you have a tremendous opportunity to really connect with your customers in an authentic, honest way. Then, use that feedback to improve your marketing effort.

Credibility is Key to Authenticity

Get familiar with earned media. Earned media is a relatively overlooked marketing tool. According to business.com, earned media is when “a business or business leader is written about, quoted in or contributes to a publication or website.” So, basically, the more credibility you have across your industry, the more likely your customers are to trust you and your brand.

Raising the Bar

It’s no longer enough to market and sell a product or service well.

Customers want to know what you’re doing with their hard-earned cash when they hand it over to you. They want to know your brand’s purpose and place in the bigger picture.

Are you giving back to the greater good? Are you trying to find eco-conscious sourcing or manufacturing? They want to be proud that what they are purchasing and they want to know that you’re committed to making the world a better place.

Hold onto Your Values

Stay true to your brand. This may seem obvious if you’re aiming for authenticity, but don’t feel like you have to reinvent your brand to remain relevant. Brands that try to reinvent themselves end up straying from their original core values. Customers can practically sniff out when you’re trying to be something you’re not. You created your company with a vision and values in mind, be yourself and stick to them.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "Apply These Secret Techniques to Become More Authentic in your Small Business Marketing" was first published on Small Business Trends

Mirakl raises $70 million to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce website

French startup Mirakl raised a $70 million funding round. Bain Capital is leading the round with existing investors 83North, Felix Capital and Elaia Partners also participating.

If you’ve bought a few products from a third-party seller on an e-commerce website that isn’t Amazon or Alibaba, chances are you’ve used Mirakl in the past. The company has built a solution to manage the marketplace of your e-commerce platform.

While Mirakl doesn’t have a ton of customers, each customer is very valuable. The company has worked with some of the biggest names in e-commerce so that they could add a new revenue stream with a marketplace. Examples include Best Buy in Canada, Walmart in Mexico, Office Deport and Darty.

The startup also lets you create B2B marketplaces for bulk selling and other complicated transactions. Sellers can set minimum and maximum quantities and customize their listings.

In 2018, the startup managed to add 60 customers and launch 37 marketplaces — it doubled the gross merchandise volume compared to 2017. And it’s true that marketplaces are attractive. You can greatly increase your sales without any physical infrastructure investment as third-party sellers handle logistics.

Behind the scene, Mirakl has developed connectors that work with multiple e-commerce platforms. After setting up Mirakl, your third-party sellers will also get their own on-boarding back end. And Mirakl continuously helps you when it comes to maintaining a certain level of quality and handling orders.

More recently, Mirakl has developed a catalog manager so that you can more easily manage product listings. It lets you get product information, merge product listings and moderate your platform in general. Any e-commerce website can use it, not just websites that operate a Mirakl marketplace.

The company has also launched a services marketplace so that you can upsell your customers before they check out with extended warranties and insurance products from third-party companies.

Mirakl works with global B2B platforms as well as retail websites that usually operate in a country or a handful of countries. 30 percent of retail clients are French, 30 percent are American and 40 percent are from the rest of the world. The startup charges an upfront fee as well as a monthly subscription that varies according to the success of your marketplace.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to do more of the same, at a bigger scale. Mirakl will expand the team, expand to new countries and improve its product offering.

12 Business Card Design Tips That Will Get You More Customers

Even in this digital age business cards hold a great significance to attract attention of prospective customers and business contacts.

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This Is How Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 Will Soon Significantly Change Your Business

(This post originally appeared on Inc)

The headset is leveraging the cloud to help you do things you couldn’t do before.

Do you remember that scene from The Matrix where Neo and Trinity are being chased and they stumble upon a helicopter? Neo asks “Can you fly that thing?” Trinity says “Not yet.” Trinity then makes a call to Tank back on the ship and “requests” the instructions which are then “downloaded” to her and well…as she puts it: “Let’s go!” Trinity now knows everything she needs to know to fly a helicopter. Problem solved.

 

Crazy, right? Not so much.The Matrix, made back in 1999, was only foreshadowing some of the technology that is now, in 2019, becoming reality.  Augmented reality.

Microsoft HoloLens 2, the company’s new augmented reality headset, essentially plugs into that Matrix. Except today we call it the cloud. And its potential uses will change the way many of us do business in the very near future.

 

Augmented reality is not the same as virtual reality. In a virtual reality environment, you’re sitting in a room somewhere with a headset that’s creating a fake world.  In an augmented reality environment, you’re in the real world, except your headset is enhancing it with more information to help you navigate the world better.

 

HoloLens 2 is that headset. There are competitors, of course. But Microsoft’s hardware, which was demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress earlier this week, is leading the pack.  When it’s released later this year I predict it will be snapped up by many companies and developers eager to build applications for it. At $3,500 the price is almost reasonable. And because it’s been re-designed for better weight distribution and comfort (some say it fits like a baseball cap) it’ll be more easily adopted by companies who will take advantage of its many potential uses.  What kind of uses?

Troubleshooting, inspecting, maintaining and fixing machinery on the floor using interactive guides, pointers and diagrams that’s taking the real life object into consideration and specifically walking an employee through a procedure.  Treating people or animals onsite during an emergency where the medical technician is given immediate visual instructions or is acting as the eyes and ears for a more experienced doctor who’s located potentially thousands of miles away. Inspections of infrastructure and facilities where heat maps point out potential problem areas along with steps to repair.

Want more?

 

How about the enabling of teams located around the world to collaborate on plans, designs, structures and situations as they happen? Or the walk through of homes and properties with a prospective buyer who can’t travel to that location? Or a hologram of a colleague or customer that’s participating in a meeting? And of course, there’s the teaching or guidance of a novice on how to operate complicated equipment, drive a vehicle or yes, even fly a helicopter.

 

Microsoft’s HoloLens can do all of this because the headset is capturing a lot of real-life, physical information from the person who wears it and then using artificial intelligence to process that information. Eye movements are being tracked. The field of view has been expanded. Hand gestures like pointing and pinching and waving are comprehended. Will this thing one day be able to interpret feelings, emotions and the user’s personality? I wouldn’t count that out either.

 

Don’t dismiss this. Already drones, sensors and even autonomous vehicles are being used by hundreds of companies for mapping, analytics, preventative maintenance, deliveries and construction. These technologies were once considered science fiction. But now they’re quickly becoming reality.

HoloLens was once considered just a potential gaming tool. But this is no game. This hardware is all business. So regardless of whether you decide on the red pill or the blue pill, your company is still going to receive a serious does of augmented reality in the not-so-distant future.

Presto raises $30M to bring its AI platform and tabletop ordering hardware to restaurant chains

The “restaurant of the future” may elicit thoughts of a chrome diner with robot servers and an otherwise hefty amount of Tokyo futurist kitsch, but the fact is that the forthcoming sit-down dining experience may just end up looking a lot like ordering from a takeout app.

Presto is working with restaurants to update the 21st century dine-in experience, letting customers order and pay from their table with a tablet device while also providing hardware like wearables for servers so they can be alerted when they are needed by customers.

The company announced today that they’ve raised $30 million in growth funding from Recruit Holdings and Romulus Capital. I2BF Global Ventures, EG Capital and Brainchild Holdings also participated in the raise. 

Considering how much online shopping has shaped commerce and apps like Instacart and Uber Eats are changing how we get food delivered to our houses, it’s a bit peculiar that physical restaurants with hundreds of locations have been so slow to shift the customer experience toward a greater reliance on tech.

Presto has launched partnerships with a number of restaurant chains like Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Denny’s and Outback Steakhouse. These aren’t exactly mom-and pop locations, but Presto CEO Raj Suri says these large restaurant groups are always looking to shift their weight to improve efficiencies across the board with new tech in a way that most small businesses just aren’t.

“I would say most restaurant groups are looking at how they can become more of a tech company… and adopt technology that could help them become more efficient,” Suri tells TechCrunch. “The industry is moving in this direction in a pretty significant way and it won’t be long before you see our technology in every restaurant.”

Beyond the ordering hardware, Presto’s new AI platform is aiming to give restaurants a more robust look at the state of each individual business and insights that help managers make decisions about staffing or deciding which food items to stock. The platform leverages a variety of data inputs so that things like nearby sporting events or weather patterns can be integrated into suggestions about how many servers should be staffed on a given Tuesday.

Presto is looking to supercharge their platform with the funding and rapidly expand their footprint. The 11-year-old company is now supporting 5,000 restaurant locations, but Suri says that Presto will double that number in 2019.

Coterie, a young New York startup, promises to deliver charming party kits to your doorstep

Party planning can be fun if you have the time for it and happen to know what you’re doing. For the rest of us, it can be a daunting, time-consuming endeavor, one that requires visits to numerous websites, in-store visits when those products invariably don’t arrive in time, then return visits to pick up those last items that you could have sworn you’d thrown in your shopping cart but did not.

Enter Coterie, a nine-month-old, New York-based startup that was incubated with the help of the investment firm Female Founders Fund and that is assembling party kits that it’s delivering to customers’ doorsteps, for everything from birthday parties to baby showers to friendversary get-togethers.

Just tell the site how many people you expect, whether it’s 10 or 50, then pick a kit. For example, the “lux” version of its “shine on” package — which could pretty much suit any occasion — comes with glittery plates, metallic flatware, votives, string lights, gold paper straws, dressed-up paper cups and napkins and confetti. Oh, also, gold paper fans as either wall or table decoration.

In the near future, customers of the site will also be able to handpick their products.

It’s less expensive to assemble your own party items, particularly if they are made of paper. That “lux” kit for 50 guests costs $329, with free shipping. These are also mostly items that can’t be reused.

Still, many of Coterie’s products can be recycled and, more to the point for Coterie, the sum of their parts can make a party sparkle in photos. Indeed, ease aside, a big motivator for Coterie customers seemingly will be how their parties look on social media, though venture capitalist Laura Chau disagrees with this assessment.

In fact, Chau, an investor at Canaan Partners who wrote a check to Coterie on behalf of her firm — Coterie has raised $2.75 million altogether, including from Female Founders Fund — says the company more or less pokes fun at social media. As she explains it, Coterie is building a modern brand that gives consumers a “frictionless, elevated and more beautiful experience. But the goal is not to feed on the fake perfection of Instagram but to blow up the idea that such perfection is real.”

Either way, party kits done the right way looks like a big business opportunity to Chau, who says she sees dozens of direct-to-consumer brands every month that might be interesting but don’t fit the venture model because the market is too small or too crowded. With Coterie, she says, it’s a “massive category with only one legacy player — Party City. And no one likes Party City.”

This last part is true, though there are also other, legacy players that no one really likes, including Oriental Trading Company.

Canaan and Female Founders Fund also appear to be betting that the tailwinds from Instagram and Pinterest will drive consumer demand for this kind of product. Just look up “festive planning” on Pinterest to see what we mean.

Coterie was founded by Sarah Raffa and Linden Ellis, two early employees of another e-commerce brand, Daily Harvest. According to an interview with CNN earlier this week, the friends were determined to start their own company, bouncing ideas off the partners at Female Founders Fund until collectively striking on Coterie.

The service launched on Monday.

Compass acquires Contactually, a CRM provider to the real estate industry

Compass, the real estate tech platform that is now worth $4.4 billion, has made an acquisition to give its agents a boost when it comes to looking for good leads on properties to sell. It is acquiring Contactually, an AI-based CRM platform designed specifically for the industry, which includes features like linking up a list of homes sold by a brokerage with records of sales in the area and other property indexes to determine which properties might be good targets to tap for future listings.

Contactually had already been powering Compass’s own CRM service that it launched last year so there is already a degree of integration between the two.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Crunchbase notes that Contactually had raised around $18 million from VCs that included Rally Ventures, Grotech and Point Nine Capital, and it was last valued at around $30 million in 2016, according to PitchBook. From what I understand, the startup had strong penetration in the market so it’s likely that the price was a bit higher than this previous valuation.

The plan is to bring over all of Contactually’s team of 32 employees, led by Zvi Band, the co-founder and CEO, to integrate the company’s product into Compass’s platform completely. They will report to CTO Joseph Sirosh and head of product Eytan Seidman. It will also mean a bigger operation for Compass in Washington, DC, which is where Contactually had been based.

“The Contactually team has worked for the past 8 years to build a best-in-class CRM that aggregates relationships and automatically documents every touchpoint,” said Band in a statement “We are proud that our investment into machine learning has resulted in new features like Best Time to Email and other data-driven, follow-up recommendations which help agents be more effective in their day-to-day. After working extensively with the Compass team, it was apparent that joining forces would accelerate our missions of building the future of the industry.”

For the time being, customers who are already using the product — and a large number of real estate brokers and agents in the US already were, at prices that ranged from $59/month to $399/month depending on the level of service — will continue their contracts as before, for the time being.

I suspect that the longer-term plan, however, will be a little different: you have to wonder if agents who compete against Compass would be happy to use a service where their data is being processed by it, and for Compass itself, I would suspect that having this tech for itself would give it an edge over the others.

Compass, I understand from sources, is on track to make $2 billion in revenues in 2019 (its 2018 targets were $1 billion on $34 billion in property sales, and it had previously said it would be doubling that this year). Now in 100 cities, it’s come a long way from its founding in 2012 Ori Allon and Robert Reffkin.

The bigger picture beyond real estate is that, as with many other analog industries, those who are tackling them with tech-first approaches are sweeping up not only existing business, but in many cases helping the whole market to expand. Contactually, as a tool that can help source potential properties for sale that owners hadn’t previously considered putting on the market, could end up serving that very end for Compass.

The focus on using tech to storm into a legacy industry is also coming at an interesting time. As we’ve pointed out before, the housing market is predicted to cool this year, and that will put the squeeze on agents who do not have strong networks of clients and the tools to maximise whatever opportunities there are out there to list and sell properties.

The likes of Opendoor — which appears to be raising money and inching closer to Compass in terms of valuation — is also trying out a different model, which essentially involves becoming a middle part in the chain, buying properties from sellers and selling them on to buyers, to speed up the process and cut out some of the expenses for the end users. That approach underscores the fact that, while the infusion of technology is an inevitable trend, there will be multiple ways of applying that.

This appears to be Compass’s first full acquisition of a tech startup, although it has made partial acquihires in the past.

On the strength of its Mixer partnership, streaming toolkit developer Lightstream raises $8 million

Lightstream, a Chicago-based company that develops tools to augment live streams, has raised $8 million in new funding as it looks to add monitoring, management and monetization services to its suite of editing technologies.

Last year, the company inked a partnership with Microsoft‘s live-streaming Twitch competitor, Mixer, to let streamers on the platform add professional flourishes like images, overlays, transitions and text to streams or to edit streams, without a lot of professional editing tools or expertise.

“We got started when Twitch was the only game in town,” says Stu Grubbs, Lightstream’s co-founder and chief executive. “Twitch was the only big name back in 2014 when we started and to be a live streamer you needed to understand bit rates and codex. We set out to make that easier.”

The company works with Twitch, YouTube and Mixer, but it was when the partnership with Mixer came along that the company’s user base began to explode.

Key to the adoption was Microsoft’s adoption of Beam, which lowered the latency on Mixer’s video streams and made that product more compelling to users. Coupled with Microsoft’s reach as one of the most popular platforms for PC and console gamers, Lightstream’s toolkit gained a powerful, and large, user base.

For the past few years, the company has had between 1,000 and 2,000 streamers signing up every week to use its tools. There are now roughly 10,000 streamers on the platform, according to a rough estimate.

Now, with the new money, the company will look to double the size of the team and add some features that have been requested by Lightstream’s growing community of users, Grubbs said.

As a result of the new round, which included a $6 million equity commitment from investors including Drive Capital, MK Capital and Pritzker Group, and a $2 million debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank, Drive Capital general partner Andy Jenks will take a seat on the company’s board of directors.

“Lightstream is an incredible company that has seen tremendous growth because of smart and efficient practices. Stu and his team stand at the convergence of multiple massive and rapidly growing industries,” said Jenks, in a statement. “Stu has immense passion and a keen vision for what they can do for creators and the impact Lightstream can have in live streaming, gaming, and beyond. They have assembled an incredible team, made smart strategic moves, created massive partnerships and are building towards something so big that we had to be a part of it.”

This is the Stanford thesis presentation that launched Juul

Against a backdrop of public backlash and looming federal regulations, the world’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturer has released video of the original thesis presentation that launched Juul, with the hopes of making the case that its purpose is to do no harm — or at least less harm.

The founders of Juul have told their story before — the two met and became friends over smoke breaks at Stanford University, and eventually decided to design an alternative product to cigarettes. Juul today released a video of that thesis, presented by James Monsees (MFA in Product Design) and Adam Bowen (MSME in Product Design).

Bowen and Monsees say they started with the principle of harm reduction, aiming to keep the “good” and eliminate the “bad” from cigarettes. The people they spoke to said they were attracted to the ritual of smoking, and the satisfaction of basic human cravings like an oral fixation. However, smokers were tired of smelling like a cigarette and complained that, even if they weren’t being judged, they felt judged. Of course, hanging over all of this like a storm cloud is the fact that smoking is inherently bad for your health.

Monsees says in his presentation:

“Is it even possible to make a safe cigarette? What if smoking were safe? And even better, what if smoking wasn’t offensive to others?”

Back in 2004, when the presentation was given, Monsees and Bowen identified one of the strongest pillars of Juul’s value proposition as a cigarette replacement.

“It’s not the nicotine that’s really hurting you,” said Monsees. “It’s burning tobacco, the combustion and burning plant material.”

Professor at NYU’s College of Global Public Health David Abrams, who has advised Juul but not been compensated by them, told the New Yorker that the stigma of cigarettes has followed e-cigarettes.

“Cigarettes were a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said. “Now, with vaping, we have a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and we cannot get the wolf out of our minds.”

Part of the reason we can’t get the wolf out of our minds is the fact that minors have taken up e-cigarettes, and Juul in particular, in staggering numbers. For young people, nicotine and nicotine addiction have a far more egregious affect on health than they would for an adult former smoker. To teenagers, nicotine is indeed a wolf.

And it’s this issue that poses the greatest existential threat to Juul Labs. The FDA has asked for Juul and other e-cig companies to create and enforce new policies that will stymie use of these products by minors, but thus far Commissioner Gottlieb doesn’t seem too impressed.

In the presentation from 2004, Bowen presents a slide that shows the future company’s predicted demographic. On a scale from social smokers to pack-a-day smokers, Monsees and Bowen estimated that it would pick up users across the spectrum, with the majority of adoption coming from social/light smokers.

Ten years later, however, when the thesis project had evolved into the Ploom which then evolved into the Juul we know today, the company made a marketing decision that surely still haunts them. The early marketing campaign for the device showed young, hip models using the device. To this day, the campaign is cited by critics of the company for starting the youth craze over the device, which the FDA calls an epidemic.

Juul Labs has taken action to reverse this trend, including a $30 million investment in youth prevention, removal of non-tobacco-flavored nicotine pods from retail stores, deleting its social media, enforcing stricter age verification for online sales, an offensive legal push against counterfeiters and copycats, and a new $10 million ad campaign focused on attracting smokers to ‘make the switch’ to Juul.

“It [underage use] is an issue we desperately want to resolve,” Chief Product Officer and co-founder James Monsees said in August. “It doesn’t do us any favors. Any underage consumers using this product are absolutely a negative for our business. We don’t want them. We will never market to them. We never have. And they are stealing life years from adult cigarette consumers at this moment, and that’s a shame.”

Whether Juul’s efforts will be enough to prevent further regulation remains to be seen.

But from an entrepreneurial perspective, it’s interesting to see the earliest seed of a company that has now become a behemoth in its respective industry. In fact, Juul has grown to the point where Altria, makers of Marlboro cigarettes, have invested $12.8 billion in the company.

Alongside the thesis video, Juul also released a video of present-day Monsees and Bowen recalling the product design process for Juul.

“We started this project with the firm belief that innovation could address all the problems associated with smoking,” said Bowen in the video. “I would tell people, anyone who would listen, ’50 years from now no one will smoke cigarettes, they’re going to look back and think ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe people used to do that.” And now I think that’s actually going to happen much faster. In large part because of the progress that we’ve made.”

What is a Haul Video and How Can You Use it to Promote Your Retail Business?

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube in recent years, you’re probably familiar with haul videos. This type of content can provide potential benefits to both influencers and small retail businesses.

Though they may not be quite as prevalent as they once were, it’s still important to be aware of the potential impact of these videos. They still may be able to help you spread the word about your brand or create useful content for your target audience. To learn the ins and outs of haul videos, here’s a quick guide.

What Is a Haul Video?

Essentially, a haul video is a recording of someone going over a collection of purchases. They may go into detail about what each product is, their initial impressions, and the shopping experience as a whole. A haul usually includes products from a single retailer, a particular collection of shops, or at least a specific category where the products all relate to one another.

Haul videos originally gained relevance around 2006/2007 through the beauty vlogging community on YouTube. But then the concept has since spread through plenty of other niches. And though they’re still most common on YouTube, they’ve also spread to other platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Haul videos may not be quite as prevalent as they once were. But influencers are still creating and sharing these videos daily. And since the market for them isn’t quite as saturated, it could be an interesting time for businesses to jump in.

Haul videos really only offer initial impressions of products. They’re not as thorough as full product reviews. But they do usually contain products that the influencer has chosen, so they can quickly explain why they liked each item. In certain categories like clothing or makeup, the person may even try on the items to offer a full and honest first impression. So it could be a bit more impactful than an unboxing video, which often features products from a subscription box or items gifted from a PR company.

Who Can Use a Haul Video?

Haul videos have been posted in nearly every business niche and target audience. However, they tend to be especially popular in areas like makeup, fashion, toys, and any area where it’s possible/common to buy a lot of products at once. It’s not a concept that’s especially relevant for service businesses or retailers that sell really expensive products.

As a small retail business, haul videos can help you connect to relevant consumers through influencers. Basically, viewers watch and subscribe to YouTube videos of people they trust or who share similar tastes in products. So when that influencer shares a collection of products, a viewer might see an item that strikes their fancy and decide to purchase one as well.

On the influencer side, haul videos can offer a way to share valuable content with your audience. If you have a YouTube channel, Facebook page, Instagram account or blog, offering insights on the products you love can help your audience shape their own buying decisions. And the video format allows people to get a feel for your personality and connect with you. It also creates a natural way for you to infuse some brand related content into your strategy. This can lead to profitable connections for your business going forward.

How Can You Use Haul Videos for Your Small Business?

If you’re interested in utilizing haul videos as an influencer, you simply need to find a product category or shop that is relevant to your audience and then go on a shopping spree. When you film your video, simply go over each purchase and then promote your content. Over time, you may even be able to work with brands that want to connect with your audience. This can help you cover the costs of your videos and bring in a profit in exchange for spreading the word.

If you’re a retailer, taking advantage of haul videos requires finding relevant influencers to work with or promoting organic content related to your brand. Haul videos can be especially helpful in spreading the word about new products. So if you’re preparing for a launch or have recently unveiled a new line, you may want to contact some relevant YouTube creators or social media personalities in your niche to arrange sponsored content.

The exact logistics are up to you. But you may be able to pay them or arrange a free shopping spree for them. However, it is usually beneficial to have them pick out their own products. If you send them items without their input, they may be less relevant or less likely to share the positive attributes that drew them to each item. In these cases, they’ll also need to disclose that the content is sponsored.

Of course, organically created content can also be incredibly valuable for your business. This is a less proactive step. But you can still keep an eye out for haul videos that mention your business or include your products. Then you can promote them to your own audience. This may also be a helpful way for you to find influencers for future sponsored content opportunities, since they’re already genuinely interested in your offerings.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "What is a Haul Video and How Can You Use it to Promote Your Retail Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends

The Shadow Ghost turns cloud gaming into a seamless experience

French startup Blade, the company behind Shadow, is launching a new set-top box to access its cloud gaming service — the Shadow Ghost. I’ve been playing with the device for a couple of weeks and here’s my review.

The Shadow Ghost is a tiny little box that doesn’t do much. The true magic happens in a data center near your home. When you sign up to Shadow, you don’t even have to get a box. You can simply subscribe to the service without any hardware device and use the company’s apps instead.

Shadow is a cloud computing service for gamers. For $35 per month, you can access a gaming PC in a data center and interact with this computer. Right now, Shadow gives you 8 threads on an Intel Xeon 2620 processor, an Nvidia Quadro P5000 GPU that performs more or less as well as an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. You can optionally get more storage with an extra subscription. It’s a full Windows 10 instance and you can do whatever you want with it.

Most subscribers now access Shadow using one of the company’s apps on Windows, macOS or Linux. You can also connect to your virtual machine from your iOS or Android phone or tablet. And now, you can also buy the Shadow Ghost if you want to use the service on a TV or without a computer.

I first used Shadow during the early days of the service back in early 2017. My first experience of the service felt like magic. Thanks to my high-speed fiber connection, I could play demanding games on a laptop. The best part was that the laptop fan would remain silent.

But it wasn’t perfect. Nvidia driver updates failed sometimes. Or your virtual machine would become completely unaccessible without some help from the customer support team.

In other words, the concept was great but the service wasn’t there yet.

Things have changed quite drastically after years of iteration on the apps, the streaming engine, the infrastructure and even the GPUs in the data centers. Blade co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me that the service has been working fine for just a few months.

It’s no surprise that those technical improvements have led to less churn, more referrals and more subscriptions. In July 2018, the startup had 20,000 subscribers. Now, there are 65,000 subscribers. There’s even more demand, but the company has had a hard time keeping up with new machines in data centers.

Shadow is currently available in France, the U.K., Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and parts of the U.S. The company simply can’t accept customers from anywhere in the world because they need to live near a data center with Shadow servers.

Playing with the Shadow Ghost

The original Shadow box was a bit clunky. You could hear the fan, you had to rely on dongles if you wanted to pair a Bluetooth device or connect to a Wi-Fi network and there was no HDMI port — only DisplayPort. Internally, Blade has been debating whether the company needs another box.

In 2017, it was too hard to explain the product without some sort of physical device — you can replace a PC tower with a tiny box. But now that gamers understand the benefits of cloud gaming, there’s no reason to force you to buy a box.

And yet, the Shadow Ghost can be a useful little device in some cases. For instance, while the company has released an Android TV app and is testing a new app for the Apple TV, your current TV setup might not be compatible with Shadow. Or maybe you primarily use a laptop and you want to create a desktop PC setup with a display, a keyboard, a mouse and a Shadow Ghost.

Everything has been improved. It is now a fanless device that consumes less than 5W when it’s on. It has an Ethernet port, two USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, an audio jack and a single HDMI port. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi have finally been integrated in the device.

When you boot up the device, you get a menu to connect to a Wi-Fi network or control your Bluetooth devices. You can also change some streaming settings, like in the app launcher.

Once you press the start button, the video stream starts and it feels like you’re using a Windows computer. With Steam’s Big Picture mode, you get a convenient setup for couch gaming. I had no issue playing demanding games, such as Hitman 2. It works perfectly fine with a Wi-Fi connection and a Bluetooth controller.

Using the Shadow Ghost feels just like using the Shadow app on a computer. So it’s hard to say whether you need the Shadow Ghost or not. It depends on your setup at home and how you plan on using the service.

Last summer, Blade planned to manufacture 5,000 units. But now that the user base has grown significantly, that first batch could disappear in no time. It is available starting today for $140.

A gold rush

Cloud gaming is a hot space right now. While some companies have been experimenting with this concept for a while (Nvidia, Sony), it feels like everyone is working on a new service of some sort. Maybe the next Xbox is going to be about streaming a game from a data center. Maybe Amazon will offer a game library in the cloud as part of your Amazon Prime subscription.

Emmanuel Freund believes that it could be an opportunity for Shadow. Everybody is going to talk about cloud gaming if Apple and Google announce new services. But the startup has years of experiences in the space and has tried hard to compensate when it comes to latency and internet speeds.

It’s going to be harder to compete on content though. Game publishers and console manufacturers could start releasing exclusive titles on their cloud gaming services. That’s why Blade is thinking about new gaming experiences and exclusive content that would make Shadow more than a technical service.

(Controller for scale)