Haje Jan Kamps

October 19, 2021

Google’s brand new Android 12 operating system launches today

With Android 12, the world’s most-used mobile operating system continues its steady march of carving out its unique selling points and finding differentiators from Apple’s iOS. Available for Pixel 3 and beyond, the new OS beefs up some of the strengths in the operating system, while adding some new features along the way.

When everyone has a phone that looks essentially like every other smartphone ever made, personalization becomes more important. That’s why Google brings the Material You feature to the OS – when you change your wallpaper, the entire Android 12 experience changes to match its colors. The OS includes color extraction algorithms which helps everything looks integrated and slick. Everything is personalizable, including the lockscreen, notifications, settings, widgets and even apps. Material You comes to Pixel first, and will be rolled out to devices from other device makers further down the line.

Fully customizable OS makes your phone look more… you.

Security and privacy are other themes across the OS. For example, Android 12 enables you to keep your precise location private from apps that, strictly, only need an approximate location to work their magic. You can also see when an app is using your mic or camera, with a new status-bar indicator. And if you want to turn off your camera and mic across the entire OS, you can turn them off in the Quick Settings with a pair of new toggles. The OS also adds additional features to lock down apps you’ve forgotten about, by automatically revoking permissions from apps after several months of lack of use.

The OS also finally divorces the connection between location and Bluetooth. As Google puts it: “While your wireless headphones need to connect to your phone, they probably don’t need to know where you are.” Android 12 makes that possible at long last.

Google introduced a ton of new Android features for Google Lens in previous releases of the OS – you can do optical character recognition on any screen shot, for example. Android 12 adds additional extensions to that functionality, such as ‘scrolling screen shots.” Just because you reach the end of your screen doesn’t mean you need to reach the end of your screenshot. New scrolling screenshots will allow you to capture all the content on the page in one image. Clever!

The new features extend beyond functionality; Android 12 also brings power-saving and better accessibility features. The company is also rolling out hot-updates, so you can keep using an app even while an update for the very same app is downloading and installing in the background. God forbid you’d have to put down Pokemon Go for a couple of minutes.

Google’s Android 12 operating system is rolling out to supported phones starting today.

October 19, 2021

Orbacam adds music video-making tools to its palm-size musical sequencer

Not content with setting your feet a-tapping with its intuitive music sequencer aimed at amateur music makers, Artiphon today announced an app that adds video-making prowess to the Orba’s already impressive feature set. Appealing to your inner Video Jockey, the Orbacam demo video makes it look easy, adding video filters and effects to your visual creative pursuits.

The idea of the Orbacam is to create quick and easy videos that Artiphon refers to as “Musical Selfies.” The results of the videos are fun, colorful, highly shareable music videos that sync automatically to whatever else you’re playing on the Orba. The app turns the already social media-magnet of a musical instrument into the perfect companion for Instagram Stories, TikTok or Snap creative pursuits.

Orbicam in action. Image Credits: Artiphon

“We believe that music is always a multisensory experience, and we designed Orbacam as an auditory, visual and tactile experience that anyone can play immediately,” says Artiphon’s CEO and founder Mike Butera. “We’ve seen the power of synchronizing music with social content, but almost all of that is just pasting someone else’s song on your video. Now people can create musical videos that are entirely their own.”

With Orbacam, the company made it easy to make music — what is new, is the ability to weave visual effects into the video export, without needing to do additional music mixing, audio routing or post-production.

The app also enables you to use the microphone connected to your phone — or the one built into your phone — to sing or beat-box your way on top of the music you’re creating. It also gives users the option to import videos and photos from the phone’s camera roll.

For armchair musicians, the Orba takes some of the scary parts out of creating music. Part synthesizer, part looper, part MIDI controller, the palm-sized digital grapefruit already made it easy and intuitive to create music. Most impressively, Orba wasn’t even the company’s first shot at creating weird and wonderful music-making tools. In 2015, the company pre-sold $1.3 million worth of the INSTRUMENT 1 musical instrument.

Ever the sucker for creative hardware products making their way to market, we’ve been keeping an eye on Artiphon. The Orba originally saw the light of day following a $1.4 million Kickstarter campaign, along with a cash injection from, among others, Warner Music. We thought it was fun to play with when it launched last year. We’re delighted to see the company add a companion app with more features, stretching its usefulness beyond the slightly gimmicky, if relatively affordable, offering.

If you already have an Orba, the free app is available from Artiphon today. If you don’t, you can pick up the Orba for $100 from a number of retailers, or direct from Artiphon.

October 19, 2021

Frozen coffee startup Cometeer raises $35M Series B and launches its product in earnest

Gloucester, Massachusetts-based Cometeer has been around for nine years. In that time, the company has built up a mad scientist’s lair worth of coffee scientists, equipment and processes to jolt some fresh life into the industry. Based out of a former frozen seafood facility, the company has created a multimillion-dollar proprietary production line to turn beans into flash-frozen little “pucks”, sealed in capsules to keep their flavor intact. The 10x strength brew is then ready to use.

Pick beans. Roast them. Grind them. Add water. Drink. Coffee really doesn’t have to be complicated, but every year a dozen new startups come jittering along to try to find new and innovative ways to inject some flavor and caffeine into the drab, meaningless existence of a technology journalist. Most of those startups are safely ignored, because the vast majority of them will be gone by the time you think of writing a “where are they now” round-up at the end of the year. Still, when a fistful of investors pump a total of $100 million into an upstart, you’d best believe that even the most under-caffeinated reporter begrudgingly shoves some toothpicks to prop open their eyelids, and pays attention.

The previous round was $50 million, closing in April of 2020. In the current round of financing, the company harvested $35 million from D1 Capital, Elephant, Tao Capital, Addition Ventures, Avenir, Greycroft Partners and TQ Ventures, along with a number of coffee-expert angel investors. The company declined to disclose the valuation of the funding round.

To brew the pods, you “melt” the puck by dropping it in a cup of hot or cold water, wait a bit, and you’ve got a fresh cup of joe on the go. The only thing you need is some water, and a way of heating the water, if it’s hot coffee your little heart desires. The capsules stay fresh for up to three years if you keep them in the freezer, and will survive for about three days in the refrigerator.

The Cometeer capsules are flash-frozen in liquid nitrogen to preserve the flavor. In your freezer, they stay fresh for about three months. Image Credits: Cometeer

As for the coffee itself, the magic starts with the beans:

“Our roasting partners are the backbone of Cometeer. Equally as important as superior tasting roasts, considerations amongst our roasters is their support of coffee farmers, and commitment to direct trade purchasing at equitable prices multiple times the fair trade minimum,” explains Cometeer’s co-founder and CEO Matt Roberts. “We are focused on building out a diverse group of roasting partners with unique backgrounds, sourcing techniques and roasting styles. Alongside these partners, we look to support the de-commoditization of the coffee industry.”

Cometeer has seen extreme growth over the past couple of years, growing from 12 to 120 employees since its previous round of funding. For now, the company is focusing on its direct-to-consumer play.

“While we are focused on direct to consumer right now, we are trialing on-premise with George Howell’s café in Boston and are piloting B2B coffee solutions with focus on corporate gifting,” explains Roberts.

The company shut down its wait-list today, making the coffee available for anyone who has a credit card and a hankering for a new frontier in Java technology. The capsules are two-buck-pucks, with a price tag of around $2.00 each — the base shipment is 32 capsules for $64.

October 18, 2021

Apple brings back the MagSafe connector – MagSafe 3

Apple sure loves taking us on a rollercoaster of connectivity. The new MacBooks Pro computers are power-hungry enough that the USB-C connectors the MacBook line has been relying on for a while isn’t cutting it anymore. You can still charge your computer using the Thunderbolt ports, but if you’re planning to flog the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors to within a micron of their little lives, it’s MagSafe o clock.

The brand new MagSafe 3 connector, along with the new port lineup on the MacBook Pro

The new MagSafe port has the familiar magnetic quick-release that Apple pioneered back in 2006 – preventing your laptop from being sent crashing to the floor if someone clumsily stumbles over your power cord. At the time, Apple heralded it as the solution to all your computer-tumbling woes.

The new MagSafe 3 connectors certainly have a certain magnetism about them.

A decade later, Apple changed its mind and went all-in on USB-C, leading to some head-scratching; was the computers-falling issue not really a thing after all? Seeing the connector return to the company’s laptops is welcome, but further makes me wonder what, exactly, the messaging is here.

I suspect that Apple simply needed more power than USB-C can reliably provide (not to mention, people were plugging woefully under-powered phone chargers into their laptops), and if they were going to design a brand new connector, why not go back to the Greatest Hits of days gone by.

The MagSafe 3 is available on Apple’s brand new line of MacBook Pro computers launched today.

October 18, 2021

Apple launches flagship M1 Max processor

With its new M1 Pro and M1 Max chips, Apple declares all-out war on PCs, with a huge boost in performance, while sending battery consumption to the basement. The M1 Max is clearly gunning for the graphics professionals out there, but may also turn out to bring some more gaming capabilities to the Mac.

The M1 Max builds on the M1 Pro architecture, but adds a lot more oomph to the mix. The architecture features much higher bandwidth – up to 400GB/sec of memory bandwidth, which works out to about six times faster than the already blazingly fast M1 chip – and twice as fast as the just-announced M1 Pro chip.

The new chip features 57 billion transistors, and supports 64GB of unified memory – that’s the shared memory between the GPU and CPU. It shares the same 10-core CPU architecture of the M1 Pro, and bumps the GPU to 32 cores, and a new media engine for hardware-accelerated video processing for H.264 and HEVC. It also features two parallel video encoding engines, which will delight video editors and others doing heavy graphics lifting.

The most impressive claim is that the M1 Max claims to keep the same power consumption curve per watt – in other words, more heavy graphics lifting without burning through your battery in minutes.

“Now let’s compare and one max to the chip running in the fastest PC Laptop we could find,” Apple joked in its event, comparing it to some of its rivals, flexing its power-supping super-powers.

October 18, 2021

Dance Church raises $4.7M to get your bootie back on the (virtual) dance floor

Our DJ, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy dancefloor come, thy steps be done, on earth, as it is at Dance Church. The 11-year-old startup, which started back in 2010 as an in-person experience, has seen tremendous growth, especially as people were forced out of dance studios because of COVID-19. Fueled by a rise in popularity in at-home tush-shaking, the company snagged $4.7 million from a handful of investors led by MaC Ventures.

The company started with four to five people gathering in a dance studio in Seattle, but rapidly grew in popularity and impact, to the point where Dance Church’s founder, Kate Wallich, decided it was time to shift gears, turning the passion project into a full-fledged tech endeavor.

“Dance Church offers joyful and inclusive movement classes that are one part performance, one part fitness and one part dance party,” explains long-time Dance Church community member Clara Siegel, who joined the company as its CEO at the start of the year. “And you can think of Dance Church as a grassroots community movement that turned into a tech company when going online during the pandemic.”

The project started its life under the name “Sunday Movement Practice,” but the dancers showing up to the sessions started referring to it as Dance Church — and the name stuck. The company has no religious undercurrent, but its following certainly grew at biblical speed. Siegel explains that the community grew rapidly during the pandemic, with a very simple tech stack. At launch, 40,000 people started following the dance videos seemingly overnight, and in the last year, almost 150,000 people have tuned in to participate in classes. With traction like that, no wonder VCs started paying attention.

“Joining as the CEO has been absolutely incredible, the honor of my life,” says Siegel. “My role models throughout my career in tech have been incredible, trailblazing women. Kate [Wallich] is this incredible entrepreneur.”

The company’s product grew organically, as well; the community members started playing the instruction videos together and dancing together on Zoom. Of course, that’s a somewhat clunky solution, and Dance Church saw an opportunity: building a tech platform around the behaviors it knew its members were already displaying.

One of the powerful drivers for Dance Church is inclusivity, with a very Seattle “come as you are” approach.

“We reach a really broad audience, which is really exciting. What we do is a wrapper for fitness, but I think fitness has become synonymous with reaching a goal and trying to get your body to look a certain way,” says Siegel, outlining the company’s inclusive-first approach, welcoming people of all ages, backgrounds and physical abilities. “I feel like I can be myself in this space. We are seeing really broad age ranges of people who are taking Dance Church classes, especially with going online. We have people in their 90s take classes, alongside people with disabilities, and there’s a lot of demand for kids’ dance classes, too.”

The investors agreed, shaking the money tree to the tune of $4.7 million led by MaC Ventures.

“MaC is our lead investor, and they’ve been absolutely phenomenal,” Siegel explains. “They have a breadth of experience in a number of things, and for us, it was this intersection between technology and entertainment that was really unique. Dance Church, as a product, straddles a couple of different verticals. And entertainment is one of them. MaC has experience in that field and were able to add value right away. A big part of their mission is around investing in underrepresented founding teams and underserved communities. They’re very aligned with our mission.”

In addition to MaC Ventures, PSL Ventures, Crush Ventures, Kid Venture Capital, Spike Ventures and Graham & Walker participated in the round. The money will be spent on building out the tech platform, producing more content and driving more sign-ups and engagement among its members.

“We were struck by the outpouring of admiration from the Dance Church community,” said Zhenni Liu, the partner at MaC who led the investment and will be joining the Dance Church board. “It is wellness that’s joyful and connective. Dance Church doesn’t ask people to change, and people love that.”

October 18, 2021

Dance Church raises $4.7M to get your bootie back on the (virtual) dance floor

One of the powerful drivers for Dance Church is inclusivity, with a very Seattle “come as you are” approach.

The investors agreed, shaking the money tree to the tune of $4.7 million led by MaC Ventures.

October 14, 2021

Reliable Robotics lifts $100M to take autonomous cargo planes where none have gone before

When flying cargo from one part of the world to another, you typically need a pilot for two parts: The take-off and the landing. As so elegantly outlined in the 1980 Jim Abrahams movie !Airplane — the rest of the time, you’re pretty much on instruments. Reliable Robotics is aiming to solve that pesky needing-to-have-a-pilot-in-the-plane problem by, instead, putting the pilot on the ground when you need it, and leave the plane to find its destination on its own the rest of the time. Coatue Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Teamworthy Ventures and Pathbreaker Ventures all believe this is the future, to the point of backing the Mountain View, California-based company with a $130 million of total funding. The company today announced its $100 million Series C funding, led by Coatue Management.

The funds will go toward scaling the team and supporting its first aircraft certification program — working toward commercial cargo operations. In the first instance, the company is working on automation systems for existing aircraft. They have been experimenting and developing using a Cessna 172, which started flying unmanned flights a couple of years ago.

Back in September 2019, Reliable Robotics flew a Cessna 172 with no one on board in airspace just outside of San Jose, California.

The company was founded in 2017, and was operating in stealth mode until last year. Its technology handles all phases of flight, including taxi, takeoff, landing and parking, while licensed pilots remotely supervise the flights from a control center. Reliable Robotics suggests that the systems they’ve developed are able to auto-land on smaller airstrips in rural or remote areas without requiring additional infrastructure or technology to be installed at the airports.

The business case is simple: Pilots are the most expensive aspects of running cargo operations, with similar restrictions to road-based trucking operations: The vast majority of trucking is boring and monotonous work where the drivers are the most common source of failure. In the air, replacing the qualified pilots with autonomous systems that can be overridden from the ground means that the cost goes down, and the utilization of the aircraft skyrockets.

Who needs pilots, anyway? Image Credits: Reliable Robotics

“We believe Reliable Robotics is a leader in aircraft automation for commercial aviation,” said Jaimin Rangwalla, a senior managing director at Coatue. “We were impressed by the team’s clear vision, measured certification progress and track record of industry achievement. We are proud and excited to support Reliable’s goal to be the first to deliver FAA-certified, remotely piloted systems to market.”

The company’s main selling point is connecting regional and municipal airports across the country. For starters, the company is focusing on increasing efficiency and decreasing the cost of hauling cargo around. Reliable Robotics also hints at a future where passengers can step aboard the remotely piloted planes. The company is also evaluating emerging electric and hybrid aircraft platforms.

Of course, people are a little twitchy about the safety aspects of self-driving cars — and planes add a literal additional dimension to the mix. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is keeping a close eye on Reliable and other commercial operators in this space, but the agency has greenlit a number of authorizations for experimental unmanned aircraft.

“We appreciate our public-private partnership with the FAA and NASA as we work to integrate our Remotely Operated Aircraft System into the airspace. We intend to bring unprecedented safety and reliability to today’s commercial aircraft,” said Robert Rose, co-founder and CEO of Reliable Robotics. “Close collaboration with our public institutions, strong backing from visionary investors and keen interest within the cargo industry further accelerates our mission to expand everyone’s access to air transportation.”

October 14, 2021

Female Founders Alliance raises a $9M fund, renames to Graham & Walker

Starting as a Facebook support group for founders, the Female Founders Alliance community has done a lot of evolving and changing since its inception. Today, it announces a name change and the fact that it’s started writing checks out of its inaugural fund. With $9 million to play with, the newly minted Graham & Walker is focusing its attention on “the potential of all women in business,” including through community-building, investments and various programs.

The fund has its work cut out, too — even in an extraordinarily frothy market. As VC Claire Diaz-Ortiz points out in a column last month, only 9% of all funds deployed to technology startups went to founding teams that included at least one woman. Solo woman founders and all-women teams raised just 2% of all VC dollars. As far as we are aware, Diaz-Ortiz is not involved with Graham & Walker, but echoing her sentiments: it’s encouraging to see initiatives like Graham & Walker coming into the picture with an agenda to change that.

“[Women founders] need to be unleashed in the hard local and global problems,” says Merrie Williamson, Corporate VP for Microsoft Azure Apps, Infrastructure & IOT — and an investor in Graham & Walker. “My participation in this fund is in part a nod to all women and their potential.”

The name “Graham & Walker” might be tripping you up, conjuring up old-school partnerships from days gone by. Shed your first impressions — the firm isn’t named after its founders or investors, but includes an elegant nod to influential women in history.

“We know that when people first hear Graham & Walker, they imagine that it is named after two men, like a very old-school law firm,” explains Leslie Feinzaig, founder and managing director. “But when you dig deeper and see who we are and what we do, that makes you question what inspired your own assumption. The ampersand also has a lot of significance, it represents you and me, it represents our community.”

Specifically, the firm is named after Katharine Graham — newspaper publisher of The Washington Post and the first female CEO of a Fortune 500 company — and Madam C. J. Walker, an African American woman who is widely recognized as the world’s first female self-made millionaire.

The Graham & Walker team: Rohre Titcomb (COO) Es Famojure (program manager), Leslie Feinzaig (founder and managing director), Amanda Eldridge (VP of Business Development), Divya Kakkad (VP of Marketing)

“A big reason for this rebrand is our own evolution of seeing the world as binary (founders and non-founders) and realizing we are all the same person. It is women who want to take ownership of their careers,” says Feinzaig. “Graham & Walker is a way for us to grow into serving that woman at any point in her trajectory — not just in the time she’s a founder but as an investor, advisor, corporate leader, board member and so on.”

The fund started investing in early 2021. Early investments include adoption facilitation software PairTree, culturally aware telehealth marketplace Health in Her Hue, eco-friendly living and shopping community Brightly and data marketplace Datacy.

The fund’s investors include Bank of America, Carta and a slew of private investors. In total, more than 100 investors contributed to the $9 million fund. Graham & Walker reports that two-thirds of the investors are women, a third are people of color and almost half of the investors are first-time fund investors.

October 13, 2021

Astropad’s Luna Display (finally) ships with Windows support

The Luna Display from Astropad is a clever product enabling you to use your iPad as a second display. It was originally launched for Mac only, but Apple launched a competing product, putting the company in jeopardy for a couple of years. Today, it’s available for Windows machines as well, completing Astropad’s pivot to a multiplatform product.

To say that the company has had a hard time with bringing its products to market would be the understatement of the century. We’ve been following the company and its product for its long and arduous route. The company originally launched its product about five years ago, then added a wireless module back in 2018 to get rid of the pesky wires. Its rapid rise to stardom was torpedoed when Apple launched Sidecar back in 2019, effectively making Luna’s product moot, and sending the company into crisis mode.

To its credit, the company and its founders have been good at staying transparent with its offering throughout. Once Apple beat it at its own game, the founders kept the lights on and announced a year ago that it pivoted to working on a Windows product instead, fueling its product development with a $400,000 Kickstarter project.

The red dongle on the left of the computer is the Luna Display. Here, it’s wirelessly throwing to an iPad operating as a secondary display. Image Credits: Astropad

As part of the Kickstarter project, Astropad originally promised a May 2021 launch, but as things go in the world of product development, the company and its 6,000 Kickstarter backers were treated to a number of delays along the way. It’s been a long time coming, but that Windows product is finally here, along with version 5.0 of Luna Display. On paper, at least, the product looks promising; the Luna dongle plugs in and communicates with Mac or Windows operating systems, unlocking iPad support for gestures, Apple Pencil and the use of external keyboards. The company claims a latency of only 16ms. Not as good as Apple’s claimed 9ms latency for its Sidecar product, but it’s quick enough for most use cases that don’t require real-time input. Don’t expect to be doing heavy-duty design work or gaming on the display, in other words, but showing a Chrome tab or a Word document will work perfectly fine.

The company claims that its customers have been clamoring for Windows support, with a total of 8,000 preorders. No doubt, its patient and loyal followers will be delighted that they can finally get their mitts on the product they’ve been waiting for.

The solution supports a few different modes of operation — you can use an iPad as a secondary display, you can use another Mac (including older equipment) as a secondary display, or you can run the product in “headless mode.” In this configuration, you can use your Mac or PC as the primary display for your desktop Mac — such as a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro.

To build out the software stack powering the solution, Astropad relied on the Rust programming language. For fans of such things, the company’s CEO Matt Ronge did an interesting deep-dive into the pros and cons of using a relatively new language to build a low-latency solution.

“With Rust, we’ll have a high-performance and portable platform that we can easily run on Mac, iOS, Linux, Android, and Windows,” says Ronge. “Not only will this drastically expand our potential market size, but we also see many interesting new uses for our LIQUID technology that we’ll be able to pursue with our Rust based platform.”

Luna Display costs $129, and is available directly from Astropad starting today, for both Mac and Windows, using USB-C, Mini DisplayPort or HDMI connectivity.