Waymo and FCA are also exploring ways to license Waymo’s self-driving car technology in order to deploy the tech in cars for consumers.
“FCA is committed to bringing self-driving technology to our customers in a manner that is safe, efficient and realistic,” FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne said in a statement. “Strategic partnerships, such as the one we have with Waymo, will help to drive innovative technology to the forefront.”
This expanded partnership comes a couple of months after Waymo partnered with Jaguar to introduce a premium self-driving car. Earlier this year, Waymo began testing its Chrysler self-driving car fleet in San Francisco. As of May 18, Waymo had 51 cars registered with the state of California for self-driving testing with a safety driver. Waymo has also applied for driverless testing in California.
Waymo’s plan is to launch a full-fledged self-driving transportation service later this year. The idea is for anyone to be able to pop open the Waymo app to request a driverless vehicle. Since 2009, Waymo has logged six million miles driven on public roads, five billion miles in simulated environments and run tests covering more than 20,000 types of driving scenarios.
“Waymo’s goal from day one has been to build the world’s most experienced driver and give people access to self-driving technology that will make our roads safer,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik said in a statement. “We’re excited to deepen our relationship with FCA that will support the launch of our driverless service, and explore future products that support Waymo’s mission.”
Following the new trend among streaming TV services to combine digital-first channels with traditional TV content, Philo today announced it’s expanding its live TV service with the addition of Cheddar Big News, People TV, and Tastemade. The Tastemade channel goes live today, with the other two shortly after.
Philo is a relative newcomer to the streaming TV market, having launched its service in November following its early endeavors as an on-campus TV provider. Its $16-per-month option is designed for cord cutters who care more about entertainment than they do sports.
By ditching sports programming, Philo undercut its competitors to become one of the cheapest ways to watch traditional cable TV channels, like A&E, AMC, BBC America, Comedy Central, Discovery Channel, Food Network, HGTV, Investigation Discovery (ID), Lifetime, MTV, TLC, Travel Channel, VH1, Viceland and others.
It also later added an expansion pack for $4 more per month that adds nine more channels, while still providing a 30-day cloud DVR and the ability to stream in HD on up to 3 devices at once.
Despite its affordable pricing, Philo is still something of an unknown in a market where even big brands like YouTube TV and Hulu are having to spend large marketing budgets just to create awareness around their live TV offerings. YouTube TV, for example, became a sponsor for the NBA Finals and the World Series to spread the word.
A new angle these services are trying now is to add on digital channels to bring in the internet audience. In April, YouTube TV added its first digital-only networks with the launch of two channels from Cheddar, followed in May by the additions of Tastemade and The Young Turks. Hulu, too, recently added Cheddar. Meanwhile, Sling TV already offers Cheddar, as does Pluto.
These additions also serve as a cheap way to offer viewers more programming, without having to increase prices. The same hold true for Philo, which is keeping the same rates as before, following the expansion.
“We built Philo for everyone who feels like TV was no longer serving them, and this is one more way we can stand apart,” said Philo CEO Andrew McCollum, in a statement.
As for gaining exposure, that’s a harder nut to crack. Philo’s newest attempt here is a just launched referral program, offering a $5 credit for each referral, and $5 for the person referred.
Scout.fm wants to change the way people listen to podcasts. Instead of scouring through the over 500,000 available shows available in your current podcast app, this startup’s new curated podcast service will just ask you a few questions to find out what you like, then create a podcast station customized to you. The experience is primarily designed for use on smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, but is also available as iOS and Android applications.
The company was founded just over a year ago by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously of Google, Twitter, Indiegogo, and Medium; along with Saul Carlin (President and COO), previously Head of Publisher Development at Medium, and before that, Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium.
At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.
But unlike on Medium, which helps to guide readers to topics they like, people today have to seek out new podcasts for themselves. Scout.fm wants to offer a better system, and hopefully bring more listeners to podcasts as a result.
“We want to take podcastlisteningmainstream,” she says. “Wethinkthekeytothatismakingpodcastsaseasytolistentoastheradio –andwethinkthat’sevenmorecriticallyimportant, asweenterthesmartspeakerera.”
The Scout.fm service began as a series of experiments on Alexa.
The company launched over 30 Alexa skills, including a “Game of Thones”-themed podcast radio that was popular while the show was airing on HBO. The goal was to test what worked, what topics and formats drew listeners, and gain feedback through calls-to-action to participate in user surveys.
The result is Scout.fm, a curated podcast service that’s personalized to your listening preferences – and one that improves over time.
Here’s how it works on the Alexa platform. You first launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Scout.fm.” The app will respond (using a human voice actor’s voice, not Alexa’s) by explaining briefly what Scout.fm does then asks you to choose one of three types of talk radio stations: “Daily news, brain food, or true stories.”
The first is a news station, similar to Alexa’s “Flash Briefing;” the second, “brain food,” focuses on other interesting and informative content, that’s not day-to-day news; and the last is a true crime podcast station.
The voice app will then ask you a few more questions as part of this setup process to find out what other subjects appeal to you by having you respond, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a history buff you are, or how much you’re interested in culture, like art, film and literature, for example.
On subsequent launches, the app will simply ask if you want to return to your “Brain Food” (or other selected) station. If you say no, you can try one of the other options.
However, once the setup process is over, the experience becomes very much like listening to talk radio.
A podcast will begin playing – Scout.fm favors those without ads at the very beginning – allowing you to listen as long as you’d like, or say “next” to move to the next one. Each new podcast episodes has a brief, spoken introduction that Scout.fm handwrites, so you know what’s coming up. Your listening can go on for hours, offering you a hands-free means of switching podcasts and discovering new favorites.
The app will also adjust to your preferences over time, removing those you tend to skip – much like how the thumbs down works on Pandora.
Scout.fm doesn’t include every podcast that’s out there. Instead, it’s a curated selection of a few hundred with high production values, narrative storytelling and tight editing.
“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”
For example, some of the podcasts Scout.fm includes come from The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, ESPN, and podcast networks like Gimlet, Wondery, Parcast and others.
The same curated selection of podcasts is also available in Scout.fm’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, which work with the voice assistant on the phone. (For example, you can tap your AirPods to wake Siri then say “Next” to move between podcasts.)
“If you’re jogging, our apps are an excellent companion because you don’t have to go back to your phone and try to find a new thing to listen to,” notes Meverden.
Since Scout.fm’s launch, it has accrued 1.5 million minutes listened across its network of experimental apps ahead of today’s public debut. The Alexa user base listened for twice as long as mobile users.
Currently, the service is not generating revenue, but, in the future, the team envisions call-to-action ads that could work with the Alexa app to share more information about the products, as well as ways it could utilize the newer in-app purchase mechanisms for Alexa skills.
The company is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.
“The Scout team’s unique insight is that podcasts, no matter how good, won’t go mainstream until it is much simpler for consumers to find and listen to the content that’s right for them,” said Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, in a statement about the investment. “The fast adoption of smart speakers changes this. We can open up podcasts to an entirely new audience,” he said.
The App Store has seen over 170 billion downloads over the past decade, totaling over $130 billion in consumer spend. This data was shared this morning by app intelligence firm App Annie, which is marking the App Store’s 10th Anniversary with a look back on the store’s growth and the larger trends it’s seen. These figures aren’t the full picture, however – the App Store launched on July 10, 2008 with just 500 applications, but App Annie arrived in 2010. The historical data for this report, therefore, goes from July 2010 through December 2017.
That means the true numbers are even higher that what App Annie can confirm.
The report paints a picture of the continued growth of the App Store over the years, noting that iOS App Store revenue growth outpaces downloads, and that nearly doubled between 2015 to 2017.
iOS devices owners apparently love to spend on apps, too.
The iOS App Store only has a 30 percent share of worldwide downloads, but accounts for 66 percent of consumer spend, the report says.
But this isn’t a complete picture of the iOS vs. Android battle, as Google Play isn’t available in China. App Annie’s data is incomplete on this front as it’s not accounting for the third-party Android app stores in China.
China today plays an outsized role, as App Annie has repeatedly reported, in terms of App Store revenue, even without Google Play. In fact, the APAC region accounts for nearly 60 percent of consumer spend – a trend that began in earnest with the October 2014 release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in China.
But when you look back at the App Store trends to date (or, as of July 2010 – which is as far back as App Annie’s data goes), it’s the U.S. that leads by a slim margin. China has quickly caught up but the U.S. is still the top country for all-time downloads, with 40.1 billion to China’s 39.9 billion; and it has generated $36 billion in consumer spend to China’s $27.7 billion.
iPhone users are heavy app users, too, the report notes.
In several markets, users have 100 or more apps installed, including Australia, India, China, Germany, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and France. The U.S., U.K., and Mexico come close, with 96, 90, and 89 average monthly apps installed in 2017, respectively.
Of course the numbers of apps used monthly are much smaller, but still range in the high 30’s to low 40’s, App Annie claims.
The report additionally examines the impact of games, which accounted for only 31 percent of downloads in 2017, but generated 75 percent of the revenue. The APAC regions plays a large role here as well, with 3.4 billion game downloads last year, and $19.3 billion in consumer spend.
Subscriptions, meanwhile, are a newer trend, but one that’s already boosting App Store revenues considerably, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend in 2017. This is driven mainly by media streaming apps like Netflix, Pandora, and Tencent Video, for example, but Tinder makes a notable showing as one of the top five worldwide apps by revenue.
Thanks to subscriptions and other trends, App Annie predicts the worldwide iOS App Store revenue will grow 80 percent from 2017 to $75.7 billion by 2022.
And while the App Store today has over 2 million apps, it has seen over 4.5 million apps released on its store to date. Many of these have been removed by Apple or the developers in the months and years, which is why the number of live apps is so much lower.
Mark this date on your calendar. It’s the end of yet another tech era. Though, granted, this one’s been been death rattling for nearly a decade now. Canon this week announced with no fanfare that it’s sold its last film camera. The news was spotted by PetaPixel on the camera giant’s Japanese support forum.
The model in question is the EOS-1V, which, incidentally, the company actually stopped making a full eight years ago. Since it has simply been selling out the rest of its stock, which, it seems, has finally depleted. It’s less of a bang than a prolonged whimper, but it’s the end of an era, nonetheless, marking the first time Canon hasn’t offered a film camera since the 30s, when its parent company started offering a device called the “Kwanon.”
Those who are feeling suddenly nostalgic, you can likely pick one up used fairly easily (though this news might bump up their premium a bit), and I’m sure the inevitable Kickstarter project to revive the technology can’t be too far off, because that’s how these things go now.
And, of course, some other brands are still supporting film in one form or other, including, notably, Nikon. As for Canon, the company has promised to continue to offer repair on the EOS-1V until October 31st 2025, though that could end as early as 2020 for some, if parts and inventory run out sooner.
Steve Schlafman has been an East Coast investor for roughly a decade — scouring deals for the Kraft Group ahead of joining Lerer Hippeau as an early employee, then spending more than four years as a principal with RRE Ventures before announcing on Twitter, to the surprise of some, that he was leaving the New York firm.
Many guessed that Schalfman, like a growing number of people right now, was setting off to create his own venture outfit. Today, Schlafman say it was a consideration and that he did a bit of research toward this end, but that as an identical twin, he’s not really programmed to work entirely on his own. Enter Primary Venture Partners, a seed-stage firm in New York that was previously known as High Peaks Venture Partners and has backed numerous high-profile startups — Jet.com and Coupang, among them — even while flying low itself.
Schlafman had been friends for years with cofounders Ben Sun and Brad Svrluga, coinvesting with them in the civic app startup PublicStuff (acquired in 2015 by a better-funded peer), and turning to them for advice as he was figuring out his next moves. When they suggested that he join them as a venture partner, he thought the move made perfect sense. “It feels like buy a stock that’s on the rise in some ways,” he tells us.
More from our conversation yesterday, edited for length:
TC: Why did you leave RRE when you did?
SS: It was an incredibly hard decision, but after soul searching about what I wanted to do long term, I just felt that seed investing is where my heart is. RRE tends to be Series A investor, and while I enjoy Series A, my super power is really spotting founders early and helping them along that journey.
TC: Were you thinking about launching your own fund?
SS: I was under the assumption at the time that I’d go start a fund as a solo GP, but after doing work [on the idea] for four or five months, I decided I didn’t want to work alone. I’m a collaborative person by nature and the idea of working on my own for the next 18 to 36 months as a solo GP just wan’t attractive. I was in touch with Brad and Ben and they said, ‘What would think of joining forces with us?’ They’d been helping me think through different models, and it evolved that I could bring a lot to Primary.
TC: You’ve led deals in some companies that seemed out there at the time. I still remember chatting with you years ago about Breather, the on-demand network of meeting rooms, and thinking it was pretty far out there.
SS: I tend to like the weird things. I think part of the reason Primary works so well is that Ben has worked with transactional marketplaces, and Brad [knows] business-to business applications and I’ve traversed both worlds. I’ve also done things like [crime reporting app] Citizen, [indoor farming startup] Bowery Farming, and Groups [an opiate treatment center and community]. That’s just my style, so I think they’re excited to get my brain to the table and bring a new perspective.
TC: Venture partner means different things at different firms. Is this a part-time role?
SS: We did spend a lot of time talking about this, and there are a few roles that I’m gong to play for them. Certainly, I”ll be being active on the investment team. I’ll also be helping with the broader firm strategy given the perspective I’ve gained by working in three investment firms previously.
But over the last six months, I’ve also been going through training to become an executive performance coach, which is something I really believe in. Not only only have I personally gotten the benefit of coaching, but founders who’ve worked with coaches will tell you the experience transforms the way they lead. I plan to bring that to Primary, too.
TC: That’s interesting. Whose coaching program is it, and how involved is it?
It’s 250 hour of classroom [learning] and coaching at Leadership that Works, an accredited coach training program that [renowned VC-turned-coach] Jerry Colonna and other coaches at Reboot [a coaching firm Colonna cofounded nearly four years ago]. I chose the one that they went to.
For me, I’m married to a founder, and she’s been a big inspiration for me as in investor and taught me a lot about the daily grind of running a company. [I’ve learned much more about] not telling a founder how to run their company, but asking questions that ultimately help them make the tough decisions themselves. At the end of the day, I’m showing up for them and meeting them where they are in their process and hopefully helping them get to answers themselves versus being a traditional investor and trying to have all the answers.
TC: Are you on any boards right now?
SS: I’m not. I’ll rolled off all my RRE boards when I left the firm.
TC: A year from now, will you be a general partner with Primary? I’m hearing the firm is raising another fund after closing its last fund with $60 million in 2016.
SS: Part of the appeal of working with Brad and Ben, and much of why I believe in Primary’s current trajectory — is that it’s building out the only true fund that’s focused on New York as a seed platform. Right now, I plan to spend half my time with them, and there will be a certain portion of my time spent evaluating alternative paths, in terms of maybe starting a company, or coaching could certainly be one of those paths I decide to take.
I’ll be working from Primary’s office every day like a team member, but I will have a bit of flexibility to explore a variety of avenues. It’s a fluid role, though I imagine I’ll get entrenched pretty quickly.
“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”
