#AI training on Substack content

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

New Submission Guidelines for Curated Newsletters

Welcome to Curated Newsletter on Medium, where the future of writing is crafted now with guidance and collaboration Dear Readers and Writers,  In August 2024, I made the difficult decision to close ILLUMINATION-Curated, a publication that has been near and dear to my heart. It was a moment filled with mixed emotions — tears not just of sadness for what we were leaving behind but also of joy for…

[rubyvroom]

Silicon Valley's Parasite Culture

From Ted Gioia's substack -- and I do realize the irony of reposting a substack post about parasitical behavior as content on my Tumblr yes -- that said, I really want people to read this

...For the first time in history, the Forbes list of billionaires is filled with individuals who got rich via parasitical business strategies—creating almost nothing, but gorging themselves on the creativity of others. That’s how you get to the top in the digital age. Instead of US Steel, it’s Us steal. Instead of IBM, it’s IB Robbing U. But when parasites get too strong, they risk killing their hosts.

Recall that only ten percent of animal species are parasites. What happens if that number grows to 30% or 50% or 70%? That must have catastrophic consequences, no? This is precisely the situation in the digital culture right now. Google’s success in leeching off newspapers puts newspapers out of business. Musicians earn less and less, even as Spotify makes more and more. Hollywood is collapsing because it can’t compete with free video made by content providers. It’s no coincidence that these parasite platforms are the same companies investing heavily in AI. They must do this because even they understand that they are killing their hosts. When the host dies, AI-generated content can replace human creativity. Or—to be blunt about it—the host will die because of AI-generated content. And then the web billionaires won’t even need to toss those few shekels at artists. It’s every parasite’s dream. The host can die, but the leech still lives on! But there’s one catch. Training AI requires the largest parasitical theft of intellectual property in history. Everything now gets seized and sucked dry. No pirate in history has pilfered with such ambition and audacity.

now, I think we are finding that there are diminishing returns on the AI training at this point (in this gen of the technology at least) such that they are not able to replace human creativity. But if they could, they would, is the point. And when we talk about AI we need to address the parasitical business models that make it an inevitability.

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT SEO & MARKETING NEWS FOR ECOMMERCE, AUGUST 2024

Hello, and welcome to my very last Marketing News update here on Tumblr.

After today, these reports will now be found at least twice a week on my Patreon, available to all paid members. See more about this change here on my website blog: https://www.cindylouwho2.com/blog/2024/8/12/a-new-way-to-get-ecommerce-news-and-help-welcome-to-my-patreon-page

Don't worry! I will still be posting some short pieces here on Tumblr (as well as some free pieces on my Patreon, plus longer posts on my website blog). However, the news updates and some other posts will be moving to Patreon permanently.

Please follow me there! https://www.patreon.com/CindyLouWho2

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

A US court ruled that Google is a monopoly, and has broken antitrust laws. This decision will be appealed, but in the meantime, could affect similar cases against large tech giants. 

Did you violate a Facebook policy? Meta is now offering a “training course” in lieu of having the page’s reach limited for Professional Mode users. 

Google Ads shown in Canada will have a 2.5% surcharge applied as of October 1, due to new Canadian tax laws.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Search Engine Roundtable’s Google report for July is out; we’re still waiting for the next core update. 

SOCIAL MEDIA - All Aspects, By Site

Facebook (includes relevant general news from Meta)

Meta’s latest legal development: a $1.4 billion settlement with Texas over facial recognition and privacy.  

Instagram

Instagram is highlighting ���Views” in its metrics in an attempt to get creators to focus on reach instead of follower numbers. 

Pinterest

Pinterest is testing outside ads on the site. The ad auction system would include revenue sharing. 

Reddit

Reddit confirmed that anyone who wants to use Reddit posts for AI training and other data collection will need to pay for them, just as Google and OpenAI did. 

Second quarter 2024 was great for Reddit, with revenue growth of 54%. Like almost every other platform, they are planning on using AI in their search results, perhaps to summarize content. 

Threads

Threads now claims over 200 million active users.

TikTok

TikTok is now adding group chats, which can include up to 32 people.

TikTok is being sued by the US Federal Trade Commission, for allowing children under 13 to sign up and have their data harvested. 

Twitter

Twitter seems to be working on the payments option Musk promised last year. Tweets by users in the EU will at least temporarily be pulled from the AI-training for “Grok”, in line with EU law.

CONTENT MARKETING (includes blogging, emails, and strategies) 

Email software Mad Mimi is shutting down as of August 30. Owner GoDaddy is hoping to move users to its GoDaddy Digital Marketing setup. 

Content ideas for September include National Dog Week. 

You can now post on Substack without having an actual newsletter, as the platform tries to become more like a social media site. 

As of November, Patreon memberships started in the iOS app will be subject to a 30% surcharge from Apple. Patreon is giving creators the ability to add that charge to the member's bill, or pay it themselves.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (EXCEPT INDIVIDUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AND ECOMMERCE SITES) 

Google worked with Meta to break the search engine’s rules on advertising to children through a loophole that showed ads for Instagram to YouTube viewers in the 13-17 year old demographic. Google says they have stopped the campaign, and that “We prohibit ads being personalized to people under-18, period”.

Google’s Performance Max ads now have new tools, including some with AI. 

Microsoft’s search and news advertising revenue was up 19% in the second quarter, a very good result for them. 

One of the interesting tidbits from the recent Google antitrust decision is that Amazon sells more advertising than either Google or Meta’s slice of retail ads. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER TRENDS, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

More than half of Gen Z claim to have bought items while spending time on social media in the past half year, higher than other generations. 

Shopify’s president claimed that Christmas shopping started in July on their millions of sites, with holiday decor and ornament sales doubling, and advent calendar sales going up a whopping 4,463%.

[kenyatta]

The internet has been decentralizing for a while. According to my own archives, it became enough of a thing for me to start writing about it back in January 2021, when Twitter bought Revue (RIP). My hunch is that going from the deeply polarized era of centralized feeds from 2015-2020 directly into COVID-19, which quite literally jammed the whole world into those centralized feeds, caused a deep reaction against those centralized feeds. Basically, four companies carved up the internet into easy-to-use silos, then, suddenly, everyone had to use those silos, and found them deeply wanting. And ever since then we’ve been searching, in various ways, for something else. Whether it’s Web3 or Discord communities or Telegram groups or Substack or live audio or whatever. The big winner so far, though, of this mass exodus from “social media” has been AI. Which is especially true if you remember that TikTok runs on AI. We don’t tend to think of TikTok as being similar to something like ChatGPT, but both products are owned by rising AI companies, ByteDance and OpenAI respectively, and use a form of artificial intelligence called machine learning that is at the root of these tools’ immense popularity and, also, a lot of hysteria. In TikTok’s case, machine learning informs how the app recommends content. We don’t know a lot about its core algorithm, but anyone that’s used it can tell you how much more “alive” and reactive it feels compared to, say, Instagram’s. And ChatGPT runs on GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 at the moment. The “GPT” stands for generative pre-trained transformer, which is a type of large language model that feels just as “alive” and reactive as TikTok. Both tools are also very good at what I’ll call content colonization, albeit in different ways. TikTok absorbs trends and conversations around the web and funnels them back into its own network only to then, via its downloadable watermarked videos, spit that content back out across the rest of the web. This effectively turns any other social network that allows video uploads into an extension of TikTok. And generative-AI tools like ChatGPT colonize the web more literally, using almost everything on the public internet as a potential source for its machine learning. There are now already whole platforms like Wikipedia, Google News, and Reddit that can be functionally replaced by ChatGPT’s easy-to-use interface. And our institutions seem to have reached a breaking point when it comes to these tools eating the web and, thus, the world. And are utterly lost in a confusing moral panic over how to respond.

Two sides of the same coin - by Ryan Broderick (@ryanhatesthis)

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

A Short Video Intro to Our Substack Mastery Program

All authentic and ethical writers are welcome to join our exciting journey, Dear subscribers, I am a volunteer editor, content curator, and media coordinator of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications on Medium.com and Substack.com. We recently created a new publication called Substack Mastery to showcase the newsletters and posts of our writers on Medium. Now our next initiative is to give…

[head-post]

How to stop AI-powered companies from using your online content to train their models

A US company Cloudflare created a button for website owners to block AI crawlers, according to Euronews.

Previously, users had an ad blocker, but now there is an artificial intelligence (AI) blocker. US cybersecurity company Cloudflare created a button for website customers to block AI crawlers from using their data. These are internet bots that roam the web to collect training data.

John Graham-Cumming, the company’s chief technical officer, said:

We helped people protect against the scraping of their websites by bots (…) so I really think AI is the new iteration of content owners wanting to control how their content is used.

When a connection is made to a website hosted on Cloudflare, they can see who is requesting access to the website, including any artificial intelligence scanners that identify themselves. The blocker will respond by showing them an error.

Graham-Cumming stated that some AI bots impersonate human users when accessing a website, so Cloudflare built a machine learning model that estimated the likelihood that a website request was coming from a human or robot user.

The CTO could not say which customers were using the new button, but said it was “very popular” among many small and large companies. According to a study by the Data Provenance Initiative, a group of independent AI researchers, blocking AI scanners is becoming increasingly popular in general.

Their recent analysis of more than 14,000 web domains found that five per cent of all data collected in the Internet’s publicly available C4, RefinedWeb, and Dolma databases was found restricted. However, the researchers note that this number rises to 25 per cent if the highest quality sources are considered.

Ways to block AI crawlers

There are ways to manually block AI scanners from accessing your content. Raptive, a US-based company that advocates for authors, wrote in a guide that website owners can manually add commands to robots.txt. This is a file that tells search engines who can access your site.

To do so, add the name of popular AI companies, such as Anthropic, to the user-agent and then add “disallow” via a colon and a forward dash. The website host will then clear the cache and add /robots.txt to the end of the website domain in the search bar.

In 2023, OpenAI published lines of code for website users to block three types of bots on websites: OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, and GPTBot. OpenAI is also working on Media Manager, a tool that will allow creators to better control what content is used to train generative AI.

This will (be) (…) the first-ever tool of its kind to help us identify copyrighted text, images, audio and video across multiple sources and reflect creator preferences.

Some websites, such as Squarespace and Substack, have simple commands or toggles to disable AI scanning. Others, such as Tumblran and WordPress, have “prevent third-party sharing” settings that can be enabled to avoid AI learning. Some websites, such as Squarespace and Substack, have simple commands or toggles to disable AI scanning. Others, such as Tumblran and WordPress, have “prevent third-party sharing” settings that can be enabled to avoid AI learning.

Users can also opt out of AI scraping with Slack by sending their support team an email.

Read more HERE

[elizabethtai]

Google: All your content are belong to us

In a move that surprised absolutely nobody, #Google has changed its privacy policy to declare that they will scrape up anything you post online to train their #AI tools. How should writers and artists protect their content from now on? #Privacy #Tech

Apparently, Google has changed their privacy policy and now says that they’ll scrape everything you post online to train their AI tools. I post my Fiction online on Substack and my WordPress blog and now wonder if this is a bad idea. What makes me most mad about this Google “will scrape what you post online to train AI tools” thing is the gall of them to claim they have the right to do so. They…

[bravecompanynews]

Big AI Funding and OpenAI’s GPT Next - Notice Global Web - #GLOBAL https://www.merchant-business.com/big-ai-funding-and-openais-gpt-next/?feed_id=189677&_unique_id=66d970c279ad3 Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week.There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding.1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-42. Two $125 Billion AI Training Centers, Starting at 0.5-1 GW and Scaling to 5-10GW3. XAI 100k H100 AI data Center4. AI Research5. Major recent AI funding announcements including Safe Superintelligence1. OpenAI GPT Next and Orion in 2025GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4.GPT-4 NEXT, which will be released this year, is expected to be trained using a miniature version of Strawberry (for better reasoning) with roughly the same computational resources as GPT-4, with an effective computational load 100 times greater.The AI ​​model called ‘GPT Next’ that will be released in the future will evolve nearly 100 times based on past performance. Unlike traditional software, AI technology grows exponentially.This 100 times increase does not refer to the scaling of computing resources, but rather to the effective computational volume + 2 OOMs, including improvements to the architecture and learning efficiency.Orion, which has been in the spotlight recently, was trained for several months on the equivalent of 10k H100 compared to GPT-4, adding 10 times the computational resource scale, making it +3 OOMs, and is expected to be released sometime next year. Two $125 billion AI Training Data Centers Two companies are looking to develop artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in North Dakota. Commissioner of Commerce Josh Teigen revealed during a Public Service Commission meeting in August that two companies had approached him and state Governor Doug Burgum about developing AI data centers. The data center projects would start between 500MW and 1GW projects, but could scale up to 5-10GW facilities eventually. The projects would cost up to $125 billion each. This should enable the 10,000 greater compute compared to what was used for GPT 4. This should enable GPT 6 class LLM (Large language models).See the substack article for more.Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts.  He is open to public speaking and advising engagements. http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/OpenAIs-Startup-Investment-Fund-attracts-175-million-in-capital-.jpg BLOGGER - #GLOBAL

[technologycompanynews]

Big AI Funding and OpenAI’s GPT Next - Notice Global Web - BLOGGER https://www.merchant-business.com/big-ai-funding-and-openais-gpt-next/?feed_id=189675&_unique_id=66d970be7c78f Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week.There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding.1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-42. Two $125 Billion AI Training Centers, Starting at 0.5-1 GW and Scaling to 5-10GW3. XAI 100k H100 AI data Center4. AI Research5. Major recent AI funding announcements including Safe Superintelligence1. OpenAI GPT Next and Orion in 2025GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4.GPT-4 NEXT, which will be released this year, is expected to be trained using a miniature version of Strawberry (for better reasoning) with roughly the same computational resources as GPT-4, with an effective computational load 100 times greater.The AI ​​model called ‘GPT Next’ that will be released in the future will evolve nearly 100 times based on past performance. Unlike traditional software, AI technology grows exponentially.This 100 times increase does not refer to the scaling of computing resources, but rather to the effective computational volume + 2 OOMs, including improvements to the architecture and learning efficiency.Orion, which has been in the spotlight recently, was trained for several months on the equivalent of 10k H100 compared to GPT-4, adding 10 times the computational resource scale, making it +3 OOMs, and is expected to be released sometime next year. Two $125 billion AI Training Data Centers Two companies are looking to develop artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in North Dakota. Commissioner of Commerce Josh Teigen revealed during a Public Service Commission meeting in August that two companies had approached him and state Governor Doug Burgum about developing AI data centers. The data center projects would start between 500MW and 1GW projects, but could scale up to 5-10GW facilities eventually. The projects would cost up to $125 billion each. This should enable the 10,000 greater compute compared to what was used for GPT 4. This should enable GPT 6 class LLM (Large language models).See the substack article for more.Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts.  He is open to public speaking and advising engagements. http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/OpenAIs-Startup-Investment-Fund-attracts-175-million-in-capital-.jpg BLOGGER - #GLOBAL Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week. There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding. 1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4 2. Two $125 Billion AI Training … Read More

[onlinecompanynews]

Big AI Funding and OpenAI’s GPT Next - Notice Global Web https://www.merchant-business.com/big-ai-funding-and-openais-gpt-next/?feed_id=189674&_unique_id=66d96fa2b4f69 Nextbigfuture at substack has all o... BLOGGER - #GLOBAL Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week.There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding.1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-42. Two $125 Billion AI Training Centers, Starting at 0.5-1 GW and Scaling to 5-10GW3. XAI 100k H100 AI data Center4. AI Research5. Major recent AI funding announcements including Safe Superintelligence1. OpenAI GPT Next and Orion in 2025GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4.GPT-4 NEXT, which will be released this year, is expected to be trained using a miniature version of Strawberry (for better reasoning) with roughly the same computational resources as GPT-4, with an effective computational load 100 times greater.The AI ​​model called ‘GPT Next’ that will be released in the future will evolve nearly 100 times based on past performance. Unlike traditional software, AI technology grows exponentially.This 100 times increase does not refer to the scaling of computing resources, but rather to the effective computational volume + 2 OOMs, including improvements to the architecture and learning efficiency.Orion, which has been in the spotlight recently, was trained for several months on the equivalent of 10k H100 compared to GPT-4, adding 10 times the computational resource scale, making it +3 OOMs, and is expected to be released sometime next year. Two $125 billion AI Training Data Centers Two companies are looking to develop artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in North Dakota. Commissioner of Commerce Josh Teigen revealed during a Public Service Commission meeting in August that two companies had approached him and state Governor Doug Burgum about developing AI data centers. The data center projects would start between 500MW and 1GW projects, but could scale up to 5-10GW facilities eventually. The projects would cost up to $125 billion each. This should enable the 10,000 greater compute compared to what was used for GPT 4. This should enable GPT 6 class LLM (Large language models).See the substack article for more.Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts.  He is open to public speaking and advising engagements. http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/OpenAIs-Startup-Investment-Fund-attracts-175-million-in-capital-.jpg #GLOBAL - BLOGGER Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week. There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding. 1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4 2. Two $125 Billion AI Training … Read More

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

On the Path to Substack Success

How I’m building my Substack newsletters one step at a time with a supportive community I love to write. I love to write about what I love. Travel, relationships, books, deep insights, AI, photography, storytelling and a whole lot of interesting, sparkly, pretty topics that catch my eye. I like to think I’m good at it, with people who follow me and a steady income on Medium. A pleasant little…

[smartcompanynewsweb]

Big AI Funding and OpenAI’s GPT Next - Notice Global Web - #GLOBAL https://www.merchant-business.com/big-ai-funding-and-openais-gpt-next/?feed_id=189671&_unique_id=66d96f9e3f625 Nextbigfuture at substack has all of the big AI news for the week.There was big news this week in AI, AI startups, AI research and AI funding.1. OpenAI’s Japan CEO reveals GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-42. Two $125 Billion AI Training Centers, Starting at 0.5-1 GW and Scaling to 5-10GW3. XAI 100k H100 AI data Center4. AI Research5. Major recent AI funding announcements including Safe Superintelligence1. OpenAI GPT Next and Orion in 2025GPT-Next will be released this year, and its effective computational load is 100x greater than GPT-4.GPT-4 NEXT, which will be released this year, is expected to be trained using a miniature version of Strawberry (for better reasoning) with roughly the same computational resources as GPT-4, with an effective computational load 100 times greater.The AI ​​model called ‘GPT Next’ that will be released in the future will evolve nearly 100 times based on past performance. Unlike traditional software, AI technology grows exponentially.This 100 times increase does not refer to the scaling of computing resources, but rather to the effective computational volume + 2 OOMs, including improvements to the architecture and learning efficiency.Orion, which has been in the spotlight recently, was trained for several months on the equivalent of 10k H100 compared to GPT-4, adding 10 times the computational resource scale, making it +3 OOMs, and is expected to be released sometime next year. Two $125 billion AI Training Data Centers Two companies are looking to develop artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in North Dakota. Commissioner of Commerce Josh Teigen revealed during a Public Service Commission meeting in August that two companies had approached him and state Governor Doug Burgum about developing AI data centers. The data center projects would start between 500MW and 1GW projects, but could scale up to 5-10GW facilities eventually. The projects would cost up to $125 billion each. This should enable the 10,000 greater compute compared to what was used for GPT 4. This should enable GPT 6 class LLM (Large language models).See the substack article for more.Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts.  He is open to public speaking and advising engagements. http://109.70.148.72/~merchant29/6network/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/OpenAIs-Startup-Investment-Fund-attracts-175-million-in-capital-.jpg BLOGGER - #GLOBAL

[masonpelt]

Oliver Bateman: GPT-4 Couldn’t Resurrect My Dad

“The article tells the story of a man who, after his father’s death, turned to GPT-4, an advanced language model, to analyze his father’s thousands of emails and try to generate new ones in his father’s voice.” So starts the ChatGPT summary of an article by Oliver Bateman, a digital pal of mine, who did in fact input thousands of his fathers emails into ChatGPT. His article documenting the experiment highlights the limitations of AI, and perhaps more the complexity of humans.

GPT-4 was able to generate text that resembled Bateman’s dad’s writing to some extent. However the idiosyncratic, likely dyslexic writings are poorly reflected by the AI. The limitations of artificial intelligence and deeply personal, often nonsensical aspects of human language, cannot now, and never can be properly captured by a machine.

The WGA is on strike right now, in part because of a fear that creatively bankrupt media executives will try to replace writers with generative AI. The concern is valid only because of a reduction of media, from semi magical story telling, into content units. Without quirks and imperfections communication is meaningless.

GPT-4 Couldn’t Resurrect My Dad

In my day job, as a senior content manager for a research consultancy, I often use GPT-4. It is competent at various brute-force operations — turning lengthy transcripts into notes, proofreading content — even if the inputs require constant fine-tuning and the outputs require careful attention to ensure accuracy. But could it write content that would bring back the dead? Could GPT-4, if sufficiently trained, analyse my father’s emails — and perhaps even write new ones?

Oliver Bateman, April 20, 2023, unherd.com

Originally published at https://www.masonpelt.com on May 6, 2023. Photo: “ 3d render of the minecraft character at a computer typing” by chris-hayes is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Social

Substack — Tumblr –Mastodon — Post News

Podcast (audio articles)

I’ve been adapting more of my articles as podcasts for accessibility and ease of consumption. These are available in most of the normal places.

Apple Podcasts –Spotify — Google Podcasts — Stitcher

More Articles

The Business of Helping Build Businesses May 3, 2023

Ad Fed Brains, And Other Stories April 27, 2023

BuzzFeed News And Twitter Blues April 24, 2023

Advertising Demon, And Other Stories April 18, 2023

Brands As People, People As Brands April 17, 2023

Get Woke, Gain Earned Media Coverage April 10, 2023

A Blue Check On A Pike Warns Us Not To Give Up The Web April 7, 2023

Stephen King’s Happiness Is A Twitter Success Metric April 3, 2023

TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly March 31, 2023

How Forbes Monetizes The Frauds They Create March 29, 2023

Sunil Paul Lead Spring Free EV Breaches Contracts Without Hesitation March 15, 2022

[dalepwithchari]

These are the 64 startups unveiled at Y Combinator W18 Demo Day 2

Buy some great High Tech products from WithCharity.org #All Profits go to Charity

Microbiome therapeutics, Photoshop for augmented reality, and cancer treatments were some of the ideas presented at Day 2 of startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 Demo Day. YC is increasingly using its massive class size (141 startups this time around) to fund especially risky frontier technology and biotech moonshots, while tempering the portfolio with more predictable enterprise companies.

Investors say that valuations for post-Demo Day raises have risen steeply recently. Some speculate that people who made a fortune on cryptocurrency are trying to invest their returns elsewhere, driving up demand for YC startups.

The accelerator still admits many international copycats of U.S. successes, and YC is also repeating itself a bit. The Podcast App pitched the exact same product and strategy as Breaker, which debuted at YC exactly a year ago. But there were plenty of ambitious and unique businesses unveiled today on the Mountain View Computer History Museum stage, and the room was — as always — packed with a who’s who of tech investors.

Check out our coverage of all 64 startups that launched on the record yesterday, plus our picks for the top 7 companies from yesterday. (Tomorrow morning we’ll have our favorites from today.)

Here are the 60+ startups that launched at YC’s Winter 2018 Demo Day 2:

Callisto

Callisto is a sexual misconduct reporting software built for victims.

The company’s product works by asking people who are looking to report a perpetrator to give certain unique identifiers, like a LinkedIn profile or phone number. If two victims name the same perpetrator, they are put in touch with each other and then with with an “options counselor,” a lawyer who can give them options on how to proceed in handling the situation. The company says that victims that visit Callisto’s website are 5x more likely to take action. They’ve started by rolling out their product on college campuses and are now taking donation from investors to roll out the service to the startup community.

Bump

Bump is a peer-to-peer streetwear marketplace.

It’s the “eBay for Generation Z.” They’ve been rapidly building an online community, and achieved $25,000 revenue on $430,000 GMV already in the month of March. They claim to be profitable and also have a user community that’s engaged. Bump says that 600,000 messages are sent be users for every week. They believe they can eventually move beyond streetwear.

Read more about Bump on TechCrunch here.

The One Health Company

One Health wants to improve the treatment of canine cancer, using genomic testing and gene sequence to improve diagnosis and the efficacy of treatments.

They are running currently 2 test pilots, where they’ve made $39,000 in about two weeks

Onederful

Onederful is an API for dental insurance.

Onederful says dentists offices lose $6B in revenue per year due to insurance claim problems, and spend $3 billion a year on high friction claim verification. Onederful’s API integrates with 240 insurance providers to rapidly and reliably verify a patient’s insurance and make sure the dentist gets paid.

Onederful doesn’t have to sell dentist by dentist, and instead is developing partnerships with the top dentist software suites for distribution. It’s currently in 120 offices.

Anjuna

Anjuna protects applications running in the public cloud.

The company says that right now about 30 percent of workloads are in the public cloud, and their goal is to help migrate the other 70 percent. The startup is using its memory encryption technologies to protect applications while in use, at rest and in transit. The company claims it can keep them protected even if someone nefarious has root access to the host.

BioRender.io

BioRender.io wants to standardize the “visual language of biology and the software to communicate it.”

They believe there’s a $11 billion market opportunity to eliminate “ugly science pictures. So far they’ve been working with 300 institutions, including SaaS businesses in the life science industries. Their work has also been featured in science journals.

Airship

Airship is building a feature flagging framework that lets small startups roll out products the same way the the big tech companies do.

While A/B testing startups generally tackle small content changes like different headlines, Airship is letting customers ship entirely different features to swaths of users so that companies are more informed about how their audiences will react to redesigns or updates.

Read more about Airship on TechCrunch here.

Gainful

Gainful makes personalized protein shakes.

Most protein shakes are designed for and marketed to male jocks and body builders. Gainful has customers take a five minute health quiz, then get personalized shakes delivered. 80K people have taken the quiz, building a huge health data archive for the startup. It has 2700 customers, with over half of whom buy a bottle. Gainful is growing 85 percent monthly with $40K in sales in February, and it’s profitable on each customer’s first purchase. Eventually, Gainful could expand into sports drinks, meal replacements, and personalized fitness plans utilizing the data its competitors aren’t collecting.

Quantierra

Quantierra sources real estate investments for developers.

It uses their database and algorithms to determine what can be built, its value, and the probability of it selling. Taking a 1.5% cut of any property they help sell, They’ve made $141,000 in revenue in 3 months, and say they have $310,000 in signed term sheets.

BloomJoy

BloomJoy wants to be the “associated press for lifestyle content.”

They create and syndicate the content that they claim is currently seeing five million weekly readers in just a few short weeks. So far, they work with 19,000 publishers and have been generating $25,000 per week in ad revenue. It’s a $5 billion market opportunity, they believe. The team has a media background and previously sold a startup for $18 million.

YouTeam

YouTeam lets you “rent” engineers who work at consulting firms but aren’t currently doing anything.

The company takes a 20% cut of each job. They say they’re currently making $55k in net revenue per month.

Substack

Substack is a subscription publishing platform.

Subscription payments free journalists from relying on clickbait and sensationalism to get clicks and ad views. Substack lets any publisher or individual instantly launch a subscription product. Substack has 7,000 subscribers paying an average of $70 per year, and it takes a 10 percent cut. Its top writer now earns $300K. Eventually Substack wants to turn subscriber bases into communities, and expand into podcasts and video. With Kik’s CTO and a former journalist on its founding team, Substack wants to bring back the journalism revenue that’s slipped away to the social networks.

For more on Substack, read TechCrunch’s coverage here.

HelloVerify

HelloVerify is doing online instant background checks in India where the the government has recently announced it will begin digitizing all personal records.

The startup has lined itself up to be among the first to take advantage of this legislation. The company currently has $3 million in annual revenue and has closed $1 million in orders in the past 60 days. The company’s early customers include Accenture, Infosys and Cognizant.

Look After My Bills

Look After My Bills is for people who want “lower bills with less hassle.”

The UK-based startup claims it can save users $320 per year by helping them manage energy, cell phones and broadband bills, by helping them switch providers and optimize for saving. They make $60 in commission every time a user switches businesses and have generated $84,000 so far this month from its 4000 users.

Station

Station wants to be the app store of software-as-a-service by becoming the web browser people use while at work.

It bakes workplace apps into a sidebar on the browser for easy access that doesn’t see you getting lost in endless tabs. It’s integrated 500 different SAAS applications, with users downloading an average of 12. Station now has 11K weekly active users who spend more than 4.5 hours a day in the app. Eventually it wants to sell opportunities for deeper integrations to the big SAAS companies, and promotional discovery of their apps.

Torch

Torch want to bring executive coaching to entire companies.

The startup uses video-based conferencing software to help coach managers on skills that can help that improve. Managers can log in, set goals and track progress in Torch’s analytics dashboard. Torch was founded by a former executive coach and a data scientist. The team says that the startup’s revenue has been growing 45 percent month-over-month.

Edwin

Edwin uses AI to teach English.

They say they can teach English in ⅓ of the time, at a ⅓ of the cost. You communicate with Edwin via Facebook Messenger or a voice assistant; on Facebook, for example, they have already obtained 757,000 users.

Meitre

Meitre aims to be “Opentable for the world’s top restaurants.”

Focusing on the “top 3%” of restaurants that don’t have trouble getting reservations, Meitre says that instead of paying Opentable, they’ve found 55 restaurants that will pay them to reduce no-shows, sell more tasting menus and move demand to off-peak hours. This can result in “hundreds of thousands of more revenue each year,” they claim. So far, they haven’t had any customers churn and hope to expand to the estimated 50,000 restaurants worldwide that need this.

Pathrise

Pathrise helps train students to get better jobs in exchange for a percentage of their future salary via an income sharing agreement.

University career counselors are outnumbered by students 2900 to 1 on average, and their offices are outdated. First it learns about the student and uses data to surface relevant job openings. Its training can improve students’ cold emailing of recruiters, resumes, interview skills, and salary negotiations. It expects to earn $5K per student it gets hired. Starting with the 750K software engineering students, Pathrise sees a $3.75 billion market, and plans to eventually expand into other job types. Students spend a ton on their education, they scramble to get a job to pay back loans. Path rise could help them better leverage their schooling and find the right job for them.  

TrapFi

TrapFi pays freelance developers for contributing to projects as soon as their pull request is approved, rather than waiting for a monthly check.

They charge 1.5% of earnings made on the platform; in 2 weeks, they say they’ve picked up 500 users and generated $25,000 in transactions.

Sixfold Bioscience

Sixfold designs nanoparticles for treating cancer and other diseases.

They claim to be able to deliver gene editing drugs developed in CRISPR in a way that targets diseased cells without impacting healthy cells. They’re currently testing their nanoparticles in mice.

Jido Maps

Jido Maps is an AR startup that’s approaching the problem of persistence, or getting digital objects to stay affixed to the real world environment even when the sensors aren’t there to observe them.

The company calls itself a “save button” for AR, allowing users to place objects, save them and share that information with other users. After one month of beta, 59 companies are using the startup’s API and will soon deploy it to their combined 300k monthly active users.

Atrium

Justin Kan, formerly of Justin.TV and Twitch, announced a “tech-enabled law firm for startups.” called Atrium.

He said that through his experience co-founding and investing in startups, he had “become an involuntary power user of corporate legal services.” Estimating that there is a $158 billion market for outside spend on law firms, Kan believes that Atrium’s software will help turn legal documents into data. He says that his services are being used to save clients from hourly billing fees for contracts, M&A, blockchain and other paperwork. Atrium “makes legal services fast, transparent with upfront pricing.”

LUS Brands

LUS makes haircare products for curly hair.

After decades of media pressure for people to straighten their hair, the public is now embracing curly hair. But managing it can require tons of expensive products and time. LUS makes products for specific curliness levels for a range of ethnicities. It bootstrapped its way to $1 million in sales a year selling $17 products. Gross profit is 70 percent, and the company has $400K in the bank. Now it wants capital to scale up to dominate the $50 billion a year curly hair product market with a brand that stands for “Love Ur Self”.

Read more about LUS Brands on TechCrunch here.

ZBiotics

ZBiotics has made a genetically engineered drink that it says can prevent your hangovers.

The startup’s engineered probiotics break down acetaldehyde, one of the chief byproducts of alcohol metabolization that is thought to cause hangovers. Zbiotics says that when its product goes on sale at $5 per dose it will be the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic on the market.

Shogun

Shogun helps companies quickly set up storefronts.

Small businesses looking to get off the ground and get their products online might be paralyzed by the sheer volume of stuff that needs to get done before a click-to-buy button even appears. Shogun wants to create a simpler workflow for a page editor to set up an online store on platforms like Shopify. The service is specifically designed with nontechnical people in mind.

Read more about Shogun on TechCrunch here.

DearBrightly

DearBrightly offers personalized skincare prescriptions online.

Their primary product is a “retinoid”, which are used to help treat acne, psoriasis, and other inflammatory skin disorders. You send images of your skin to one of their partner dermatologists, you helps you establish a skin care regimen and get the necessary prescriptions.

Read more about DearBrightly on TechCrunch here.

Sketchbox

Sketchbox is photoshop for AR and VR.

They believe that someday there will be just as many AR/VR designers as there are web and graphic designers today. So far, they’ve worked with over 2000 designers and found that the “power users” are spending an average of 3.5 hours per week on the platform. Companies like Microsoft, Oculus and Eon Reality have tested out Sketchbox. It’s a $6 billion market opportunity, Sketchbox believes.

Read more about Sketchbox on TechCrunch here.

EnvKey

EnvKey wants to be the LastPass of API keys.

As companies get bigger and bigger, the complex network of tools and APIs they have to access might start to get out of hand really quickly. EnvKey is there to try to keep track of all those keys and secrets and make sure they get updated properly. EnvKey also has tools in place to make sure only the right people have access to them internally.

Read more about EnvKey on TechCrunch here.

Tradewind Bioscience

Tradewind Bioscience is working on drugs that block the spread of cancer.

Its two founders both independently identified a cancer protein that occurs during the metastasization of cancer and chose to team up to tackle the problem. They’re focusing first on ovarian cancer, though they say that their therapies will work with “most” cancers.

Read more about Tradewind Bioscience on TechCrunch here.

Arrow

Arrow wants to build Instagram for augmented reality.

Its app lets users attach text and emojis to real world objects and share videos of their AR creations. Its Autoemoji identifies common objects and facial expressions, and fills the screen with related emoji. The startup expects the number of modern AR-enabled phones to grow to 500 million in 2019, expanding its potential user base. Arrow’s public beta has seen 25K videos shared in 2 months. Building a new social content feed will be very difficult in the face of Instagram and Snapchat, but the autoemoji feature is innovative.

Wing It

Wing It is a Facebook Messenger bot that tries to get you out of the house on a weekend trip.

It recommends AirBNBs, local hikes, and other activities based on your preferences — things like distance from home, cost per person, etc. They’re currently seeing 70% weekly engagement from their existing users.

Read more about WingIt on TechCrunch here.

Tipe

Tipe is a tool for developers that takes needless text out of their lives.

The startup makes it easier for developers to navigate code without have to constantly make content edits on the behalf of marketing, by enabling non-developers to make these changes quickly and easily.

Swayable

As our own Jon Shieber wrote here, “Swayable was founded by three former physicists to help craft political messages that actually inform and persuade rather than simply incite and propagandize.”

They aim to help political groups a/b test their messaging to determine what messaging works best, while only sharing information that is accurate. They currently have $100k in monthly books, with customers including the DNC, and the ACLU

Read more about Swayable on TechCrunch here.

Quantstamp

Quantstamp automatically checks smart contract security.

The new popularity of the blockchain has led to more enterprises using smart contracts. But manually checking their security is time consuming and expensive. Last year $300 million was compromised due to smart contract hacks. Quantstamp has developed an automated process that scans smart contracts for vulnerabilities.

It’s already earned $2.4 million in revenue doing six enterprise smart contract audits, and it has 50 customers in the pipeline who’ll pay $500K per audit. Quantstamp could take smart contracts mainstream by making enterprises confident they won’t get hijacked.

Glimpse K12

Glimpse is trying to cut ineffective spending at schools.

The company meshes education institutions’ accounting systems with student achievement data to help education institutions understand what they’re pumping money into and see where they’re getting the best return on investment when it comes to positive student outcomes. The team’s ultimate goal is to “fundamentally changing the way $800B is spend in education each year.”

ClearBrain

ClearBrain helps companies target ads at the users most likely to sign up for a subscription, buy a product, or cancel their account (for example).

It pulls data from the tools that businesses are already using (like Segment, Optimizely and Heap), then deploys artificial intelligence to analyze and group users based on how likely they are to perform a specific action. The ultimate goal, according to CEO Bilal Mahmood, is “to democratize AI for marketers.”

Read more about ClearBrain on TechCrunch here.

Players’ Lounge

Players’ Lounge is an online platform where gamers can compete for cash.

Players can deposit money into their account and then search for other players who are willing to throw down a few bucks over a game of FIFA or Fortnite. The startup’s rating system lets gamers know if they’re taking on someone with a similar skill set or are out of their league.The company takes 10 percent of wagers and says they are growing 25 percent week-over-week.

Memora Health

Memora Health is “building a virtual nurse for patient follow-up.”

It turns out that every time someone leaves a doctor’s office, nurses are getting paid to follow up with the patient about treatments. Memora aims to automate that interaction using artificial intelligence. So far they’ve achieved $70,000 in monthly recurring revenue and have $3.8 million secured in LOIs. They say they’ve “built the infrastructure to follow up with every single patient in the United States.”

Treasury Prime

Treasury Prime makes APIs for banks.

Most banks still run on old mainframe computers and manual changes, leading to delays for banking services. Treasury Prime says its can accelerate the process of opening a bank account from 3 days to 3 minutes. The startup is building APIs for checking balances and transaction history, sending and receiving money by ACH and wire, and more.

It now has a live integration with a bank that’s issuing real bank accounts with Treasury Prime’s API. With a team that built APIs for Silicon Valley Bank and Stripe, and who sold a previous company for $200 million, Treasury Prime wants to modernize banking.

Hunter2

The moment a massive breach happens, Hunter2 hopes to already have a lab demo online for engineers to practice on.

Hunter2 serves as a tool to train engineers to better handle web app security through a soft-touch approach, giving employees semi-regular reminders of what skills the need and then having exercises build around real-world experience like the Equifax hack.

Read more about Hunter2 on TechCrunch here.

Slite

Slite is trying to reimagine collaborative tools for teams.

Imagine if Google Docs were developed by someone at Slack. Google Docs is already a pretty simplistic experience, but Slite aims to create a set of collaboration tools around a traditional notes application. The goal is to create a kind of hub where teams can come in and drop notes, ending up with something similar to an internal wiki.

Read more about Slite on TechCrunch here.

The Podcast App

The Podcast App wants to be the Netflix for…podcasts.

With 500,000 shows and 30 million episodes out there, The Podcast App helps people listen to spoken audio content, but eventually wants to move into discover and exclusive content subscriptions. The company expects there to be 500 million monthly podcasts listeners in five years, and wants to get 10 percent of them to pay $10 per month for exclusive access to top creators. The Podcast App has grown 50 percent month over month for a year, and now has 40,000 daily active users. But it will have to rise above a legion of other podcast apps, including previous YC startup Breaker which has the same strategy.

Read TechCrunch’s full coverage for more on The Podcast App

Groww

Groww wants to be the Robinhood for India.

The company says that while there are 250 million people in the middle class in India, only about 10 million of them are investing online. The startup is beginning its efforts with mutual funds, earning a 1 percent commision on transactions. Next the company is looking to take on stocks, bonds and cryptocurrencies.

Persephone Biome

Persephone Biome is trying to retune the gut microbiome to help cancer drugs work. They’re making a pill that contains gut bacteria.

They expect to go into clinical trials in 2019.

Biobot Analytics

Biobot Analytics analyzes city sewage “to estimate opioid consumption.”

Currently, “the best data is counting people who die,” which isn’t enough to help cities make predictions. The MIT-experienced founders said they are “passionate about using our skills to tackle the biggest drug crisis in American history.” So far they’ve received 17 letters of interest and believe this is a $1.5 billion per year market opportunity in the U.S. and Canada alone. In addition to drug use, they hope to also measure pharmaceuticals, infections disease and food consumption. This is “data that companies would pay billions for.”

Nectome

Nectome aims to preserve people’s brains, for when and if scientists ever develop a method to upload your memories to a computer.

The catch (as explained by co-founder Robert McIntyre) is that the method is “100 percent fatal” — the company’s plans involve terminally ill patients, under anesthesia, to a heart lung machine that will pump embalming chemicals into their arteries.

Read more about Nectome on TechCrunch here.

Promise

Promise is a bail reform startup, offering counties and local governments an alternative to holding low-risk people behind bars simply because they can’t afford bail.

For each participant, Promise provides counties with a comprehensive intake procedure and then sets up each participant with a care plan specific to them. Promise will then monitor and support participants by helping them ensure they know when they’re supposed to appear in court, and remind them of obligations like drug testing or substance abuse treatment needed. The app also provides participants with job training, housing, counseling and referrals.

Read more about Promise on TechCrunch here.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk is an indoor farming startup that can grows produce at the cost of outdoor farming.

The company simplifies operations while reducing cost with its own custom machinery that takes on some of the high-cost areas for outdoor farming. Beanstalk holds some advantages, namely they don’t have to worry about weather and don’t need pesticides. They’re focusing on heirloom greens like spinach to grow to start and are focused on customers within 100 miles of where they’re growing.

Nutrigene

Nutrigene makes personalized supplements based on your own health data.

Users upload their 23andme (or similar) data, and they try to create tailored supplements accordingly. Eventually, they intend to move into personalized medicine.  They’ve say they’ve made $17,328 in revenue since launching 2.5 months ago, with a margin of 50% per order.

Read more about Nutrigene on TechCrunch here.

Precious

Precious is an iPhone app that uses AI to curate your baby photos.

It “scans that mess and finds the meaningful moments,” they said on stage. So far they’ve gotten 54,000 paying monthly subscribers and “create and update the perfect album for every child as they grow.” Using specialized AI, it determines what it thinks are the best photos and sends them to customers regularly. So far they say they have $180,000 in monthly recurring revenue and are profitable. They believe this is a $20 billion market opportunity.

Zyper

Zyper wants to “re-create social networks for brands”.

It identifies a brand’s most engaging users, and offers them rewards relevant to the brand’s products (not money) in exchange for posting content about that brand. The company says they’ve made $1m in revenue since launching 9 months ago.

Cognition IP

Cognition IP is a tech-enabled patent law firm focused on getting the job done quicker and cheaper.

The startup claims they charge half the price of traditional law firms and that they file patents in 14 days while larger firms spend as much as 30 days getting patents filed. The company did this by building automation tools, like a smart search engine that takes a patent application and finds similar ones. They’ve also automated formatting, and built software that fills out forms for users. The company launched three months ago and is profitable with $200k in revenue.

Mirror AI

Mirror AI takes a photo and creates “thousands” of emoji that look like you. A few weeks after launching, they’ve got 300,000 installs.

Tarjimly

Tarjimly connects refugees and immigrants with native speakers of their language for help navigating difficult situations, from paperwork to disaster response.

It’s anonymous, free, and works entirely within Facebook Messenger, with more platforms on the way. Read more about Tarjimly on TechCrunch here.

OurMenu

OurMenu replaces ordering from a waiter with ordering from a website.

Labor costs are huge for restaurants. OurMenu wants to let you order from your phone at your table instead of talking to a waiter, and without downloading an app. You scan a QR code on the table, choose your food, order and pay, and then the food is brought to you.  OurMenu plans to charge restaurants $300 per month for the tech, and will aggregate the menu choice data to sell back to them.

Archform

Archform is teeth aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices.

The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth aligner startups and cut down on the cost of Invisalign.

Read more about ArchForm on TechCrunch here.

Ropeo

Ropeo wants to be the Stitch Fix of Latin America.

The company offers a monthly clothing subscription service with some features optimized for its particular market. The company allows users to try before they buy and takes cash on pickup because credit card use is so low in LatAm. The company believes that they’ll be able to negotiate better deals with partners as they scale and that after clothing, they’ll be able to grow to sourcing different types of apparel.

Pulse

Pulse is trying to crowdsource research and advisory reports by tapping a community of IT execs.

They currently have 3,000+ IT executives on the platform, and say they’re growing by over 100 companies per week. Its reports are free, instead aiming to make money buy connecting IT buyers and vendors.

Read more about Pulse on TechCrunch here.

Playbook

Playbook is for college students who want to hang out.

It’s an app with 240 beta users at Harvard, 30% of whom use it daily. In March, they organized 101 get togethers and “most the people that hung out and had a great time didn’t know each other beforehand.” It’s available on both iOS and Android.

Read more about Playbook on TechCrunch here.

Delphia

Delphia works with publishers to create applications that help their readers make decisions — think of them as BuzzFeed quizzes, but for complex decisions, and with real data science on the backend. The company’s first application was called Vote Compass, which told users how their political views line up with election candidates. Now it’s expanding beyond politics. Read more about Delphia on TechCrunch here.

Dana Cita

Dana Cita offers student loans in Indonesia.

Previously, there were no loans in the 260 million-person country where 76 percent of people are unbanked. Dana Cita believes student loans can be the start of an adult’s financial life, and a way to recruit long-time customers for other financial services. It’s originated $100K in loans to 52 borrowers so far. The question is whether after seeing the student loan debt crisis in America, Indonesians will want to take money from a startup.

Tributi

Tributi wants to build a TurboTax for Latin America.

The startup says that the vast majority of people in Latin America have their taxes prepped by individual accountants rather than using software products. The company says upcoming tax reform across the continent will drive even more traffic to solutions like theirs. The startup says it is growing 25 percent week over week since launch.

EasyEmail

EasyEmail is a Chrome plugin that analyzes your emails finds your most common phrases and autocompletes sentences for you.

So much of the emails that we send feel like they’re being written on autopilot. Wouldn’t it be great if they actually were? For users sending a lot of repetitive sales or PR emails, the service offers a system that will keep you from copy-pasting up a storm and let you intelligently blaze through your emails.

Read more about EasyEmail on TechCrunch Here.

Ben

Ben aims to be a unified platform for learning about, buying, selling, and storing cryptocurrency.

With the hundreds of wallets and exchanges floating around in the blockchain ether, it’s easy for novices to get lost in the fray. Ben’s mobile app distinguishes itself from other wallet exchanges by integrating crypto education, using the platform to also deliver news about currencies and offer Q&As related to crypto investing.

Medumo

Medumo aims to reduce day-of medical procedure cancellations.

Last minute schedule changes can be costly for both the patients and the medical facilities.

But a lot of these cancellations aren’t by choice, but rather because patients forgot to fast or avoid certain foods before a procedure. Medumo offers support over text and email, providing instructions so that the patient is ready when they need to be. For its customers, they say it’s resulted in a 30% reduction in no shows.

[Read More …]

These are the 64 startups unveiled at Y Combinator W18 Demo Day 2

[sheminecrafts]

These are the 64 startups unveiled at Y Combinator W18 Demo Day 2

Microbiome therapeutics, Photoshop for augmented reality, and cancer treatments were some of the ideas presented at Day 2 of startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2018 Demo Day. YC is increasingly using its massive class size (141 startups this time around) to fund especially risky frontier technology and biotech moonshots, while tempering the portfolio with more predictable enterprise companies.

Investors say that valuations for post-Demo Day raises have risen steeply recently. Some speculate that people who made a fortune on cryptocurrency are trying to invest their returns elsewhere, driving up demand for YC startups.

The accelerator still admits many international copycats of U.S. successes, and YC is also repeating itself a bit. The Podcast App pitched the exact same product and strategy as Breaker, which debuted at YC exactly a year ago. But there were plenty of ambitious and unique businesses unveiled today on the Mountain View Computer History Museum stage, and the room was — as always — packed with a who’s who of tech investors.

Check out our coverage of all 64 startups that launched on the record yesterday, plus our picks for the top 7 companies from yesterday. (Tomorrow morning we’ll have our favorites from today.)

Here are the 60+ startups that launched at YC’s Winter 2018 Demo Day 2:

Callisto

Callisto is a sexual misconduct reporting software built for victims.

The company’s product works by asking people who are looking to report a perpetrator to give certain unique identifiers, like a LinkedIn profile or phone number. If two victims name the same perpetrator, they are put in touch with each other and then with with an “options counselor,” a lawyer who can give them options on how to proceed in handling the situation. The company says that victims that visit Callisto’s website are 5x more likely to take action. They’ve started by rolling out their product on college campuses and are now taking donation from investors to roll out the service to the startup community.

Bump

Bump is a peer-to-peer streetwear marketplace.

It’s the “eBay for Generation Z.” They’ve been rapidly building an online community, and achieved $25,000 revenue on $430,000 GMV already in the month of March. They claim to be profitable and also have a user community that’s engaged. Bump says that 600,000 messages are sent be users for every week. They believe they can eventually move beyond streetwear.

Read more about Bump on TechCrunch here.

The One Health Company

One Health wants to improve the treatment of canine cancer, using genomic testing and gene sequence to improve diagnosis and the efficacy of treatments.

They are running currently 2 test pilots, where they’ve made $39,000 in about two weeks

Onederful

Onederful is an API for dental insurance.

Onederful says dentists offices lose $6B in revenue per year due to insurance claim problems, and spend $3 billion a year on high friction claim verification. Onederful’s API integrates with 240 insurance providers to rapidly and reliably verify a patient’s insurance and make sure the dentist gets paid.

Onederful doesn’t have to sell dentist by dentist, and instead is developing partnerships with the top dentist software suites for distribution. It’s currently in 120 offices.

Anjuna

Anjuna protects applications running in the public cloud.

The company says that right now about 30 percent of workloads are in the public cloud, and their goal is to help migrate the other 70 percent. The startup is using its memory encryption technologies to protect applications while in use, at rest and in transit. The company claims it can keep them protected even if someone nefarious has root access to the host.

BioRender.io

BioRender.io wants to standardize the “visual language of biology and the software to communicate it.”

They believe there’s a $11 billion market opportunity to eliminate “ugly science pictures. So far they’ve been working with 300 institutions, including SaaS businesses in the life science industries. Their work has also been featured in science journals.

Airship

Airship is building a feature flagging framework that lets small startups roll out products the same way the the big tech companies do.

While A/B testing startups generally tackle small content changes like different headlines, Airship is letting customers ship entirely different features to swaths of users so that companies are more informed about how their audiences will react to redesigns or updates.

Read more about Airship on TechCrunch here.

Gainful

Gainful makes personalized protein shakes.

Most protein shakes are designed for and marketed to male jocks and body builders. Gainful has customers take a five minute health quiz, then get personalized shakes delivered. 80K people have taken the quiz, building a huge health data archive for the startup. It has 2700 customers, with over half of whom buy a bottle. Gainful is growing 85 percent monthly with $40K in sales in February, and it’s profitable on each customer’s first purchase. Eventually, Gainful could expand into sports drinks, meal replacements, and personalized fitness plans utilizing the data its competitors aren’t collecting.

Quantierra

Quantierra sources real estate investments for developers.

It uses their database and algorithms to determine what can be built, its value, and the probability of it selling. Taking a 1.5% cut of any property they help sell, They’ve made $141,000 in revenue in 3 months, and say they have $310,000 in signed term sheets.

BloomJoy

BloomJoy wants to be the “associated press for lifestyle content.”

They create and syndicate the content that they claim is currently seeing five million weekly readers in just a few short weeks. So far, they work with 19,000 publishers and have been generating $25,000 per week in ad revenue. It’s a $5 billion market opportunity, they believe. The team has a media background and previously sold a startup for $18 million.

YouTeam

YouTeam lets you “rent” engineers who work at consulting firms but aren’t currently doing anything.

The company takes a 20% cut of each job. They say they’re currently making $55k in net revenue per month.

Substack

Substack is a subscription publishing platform.

Subscription payments free journalists from relying on clickbait and sensationalism to get clicks and ad views. Substack lets any publisher or individual instantly launch a subscription product. Substack has 7,000 subscribers paying an average of $70 per year, and it takes a 10 percent cut. Its top writer now earns $300K. Eventually Substack wants to turn subscriber bases into communities, and expand into podcasts and video. With Kik’s CTO and a former journalist on its founding team, Substack wants to bring back the journalism revenue that’s slipped away to the social networks.

For more on Substack, read TechCrunch’s coverage here.

HelloVerify

HelloVerify is doing online instant background checks in India where the the government has recently announced it will begin digitizing all personal records.

The startup has lined itself up to be among the first to take advantage of this legislation. The company currently has $3 million in annual revenue and has closed $1 million in orders in the past 60 days. The company’s early customers include Accenture, Infosys and Cognizant.

Look After My Bills

Look After My Bills is for people who want “lower bills with less hassle.”

The UK-based startup claims it can save users $320 per year by helping them manage energy, cell phones and broadband bills, by helping them switch providers and optimize for saving. They make $60 in commission every time a user switches businesses and have generated $84,000 so far this month from its 4000 users.

Station

Station wants to be the app store of software-as-a-service by becoming the web browser people use while at work.

It bakes workplace apps into a sidebar on the browser for easy access that doesn’t see you getting lost in endless tabs. It’s integrated 500 different SAAS applications, with users downloading an average of 12. Station now has 11K weekly active users who spend more than 4.5 hours a day in the app. Eventually it wants to sell opportunities for deeper integrations to the big SAAS companies, and promotional discovery of their apps.

Torch

Torch want to bring executive coaching to entire companies.

The startup uses video-based conferencing software to help coach managers on skills that can help that improve. Managers can log in, set goals and track progress in Torch’s analytics dashboard. Torch was founded by a former executive coach and a data scientist. The team says that the startup’s revenue has been growing 45 percent month-over-month.

Edwin

Edwin uses AI to teach English.

They say they can teach English in ⅓ of the time, at a ⅓ of the cost. You communicate with Edwin via Facebook Messenger or a voice assistant; on Facebook, for example, they have already obtained 757,000 users.

Meitre

Meitre aims to be “Opentable for the world’s top restaurants.”

Focusing on the “top 3%” of restaurants that don’t have trouble getting reservations, Meitre says that instead of paying Opentable, they’ve found 55 restaurants that will pay them to reduce no-shows, sell more tasting menus and move demand to off-peak hours. This can result in “hundreds of thousands of more revenue each year,” they claim. So far, they haven’t had any customers churn and hope to expand to the estimated 50,000 restaurants worldwide that need this.

Pathrise

Pathrise helps train students to get better jobs in exchange for a percentage of their future salary via an income sharing agreement.

University career counselors are outnumbered by students 2900 to 1 on average, and their offices are outdated. First it learns about the student and uses data to surface relevant job openings. Its training can improve students’ cold emailing of recruiters, resumes, interview skills, and salary negotiations. It expects to earn $5K per student it gets hired. Starting with the 750K software engineering students, Pathrise sees a $3.75 billion market, and plans to eventually expand into other job types. Students spend a ton on their education, they scramble to get a job to pay back loans. Path rise could help them better leverage their schooling and find the right job for them.  

TrapFi

TrapFi pays freelance developers for contributing to projects as soon as their pull request is approved, rather than waiting for a monthly check.

They charge 1.5% of earnings made on the platform; in 2 weeks, they say they’ve picked up 500 users and generated $25,000 in transactions.

Sixfold Bioscience

Sixfold designs nanoparticles for treating cancer and other diseases.

They claim to be able to deliver gene editing drugs developed in CRISPR in a way that targets diseased cells without impacting healthy cells. They’re currently testing their nanoparticles in mice.

Jido Maps

Jido Maps is an AR startup that’s approaching the problem of persistence, or getting digital objects to stay affixed to the real world environment even when the sensors aren’t there to observe them.

The company calls itself a “save button” for AR, allowing users to place objects, save them and share that information with other users. After one month of beta, 59 companies are using the startup’s API and will soon deploy it to their combined 300k monthly active users.

Atrium

Justin Kan, formerly of Justin.TV and Twitch, announced a “tech-enabled law firm for startups.” called Atrium.

He said that through his experience co-founding and investing in startups, he had “become an involuntary power user of corporate legal services.” Estimating that there is a $158 billion market for outside spend on law firms, Kan believes that Atrium’s software will help turn legal documents into data. He says that his services are being used to save clients from hourly billing fees for contracts, M&A, blockchain and other paperwork. Atrium “makes legal services fast, transparent with upfront pricing.”

LUS Brands

LUS makes haircare products for curly hair.

After decades of media pressure for people to straighten their hair, the public is now embracing curly hair. But managing it can require tons of expensive products and time. LUS makes products for specific curliness levels for a range of ethnicities. It bootstrapped its way to $1 million in sales a year selling $17 products. Gross profit is 70 percent, and the company has $400K in the bank. Now it wants capital to scale up to dominate the $50 billion a year curly hair product market with a brand that stands for “Love Ur Self”.

Read more about LUS Brands on TechCrunch here.

ZBiotics

ZBiotics has made a genetically engineered drink that it says can prevent your hangovers.

The startup’s engineered probiotics break down acetaldehyde, one of the chief byproducts of alcohol metabolization that is thought to cause hangovers. Zbiotics says that when its product goes on sale at $5 per dose it will be the world’s first genetically engineered probiotic on the market.

Shogun

Shogun helps companies quickly set up storefronts.

Small businesses looking to get off the ground and get their products online might be paralyzed by the sheer volume of stuff that needs to get done before a click-to-buy button even appears. Shogun wants to create a simpler workflow for a page editor to set up an online store on platforms like Shopify. The service is specifically designed with nontechnical people in mind.

Read more about Shogun on TechCrunch here.

DearBrightly

DearBrightly offers personalized skincare prescriptions online.

Their primary product is a “retinoid”, which are used to help treat acne, psoriasis, and other inflammatory skin disorders. You send images of your skin to one of their partner dermatologists, you helps you establish a skin care regimen and get the necessary prescriptions.

Read more about DearBrightly on TechCrunch here.

Sketchbox

Sketchbox is photoshop for AR and VR.

They believe that someday there will be just as many AR/VR designers as there are web and graphic designers today. So far, they’ve worked with over 2000 designers and found that the “power users” are spending an average of 3.5 hours per week on the platform. Companies like Microsoft, Oculus and Eon Reality have tested out Sketchbox. It’s a $6 billion market opportunity, Sketchbox believes.

Read more about Sketchbox on TechCrunch here.

EnvKey

EnvKey wants to be the LastPass of API keys.

As companies get bigger and bigger, the complex network of tools and APIs they have to access might start to get out of hand really quickly. EnvKey is there to try to keep track of all those keys and secrets and make sure they get updated properly. EnvKey also has tools in place to make sure only the right people have access to them internally.

Read more about EnvKey on TechCrunch here.

Tradewind Bioscience

Tradewind Bioscience is working on drugs that block the spread of cancer.

Its two founders both independently identified a cancer protein that occurs during the metastasization of cancer and chose to team up to tackle the problem. They’re focusing first on ovarian cancer, though they say that their therapies will work with “most” cancers.

Read more about Tradewind Bioscience on TechCrunch here.

Arrow

Arrow wants to build Instagram for augmented reality.

Its app lets users attach text and emojis to real world objects and share videos of their AR creations. Its Autoemoji identifies common objects and facial expressions, and fills the screen with related emoji. The startup expects the number of modern AR-enabled phones to grow to 500 million in 2019, expanding its potential user base. Arrow’s public beta has seen 25K videos shared in 2 months. Building a new social content feed will be very difficult in the face of Instagram and Snapchat, but the autoemoji feature is innovative.

Wing It

Wing It is a Facebook Messenger bot that tries to get you out of the house on a weekend trip.

It recommends AirBNBs, local hikes, and other activities based on your preferences — things like distance from home, cost per person, etc. They’re currently seeing 70% weekly engagement from their existing users.

Read more about WingIt on TechCrunch here.

Tipe

Tipe is a tool for developers that takes needless text out of their lives.

The startup makes it easier for developers to navigate code without have to constantly make content edits on the behalf of marketing, by enabling non-developers to make these changes quickly and easily.

Swayable

As our own Jon Shieber wrote here, “Swayable was founded by three former physicists to help craft political messages that actually inform and persuade rather than simply incite and propagandize.”

They aim to help political groups a/b test their messaging to determine what messaging works best, while only sharing information that is accurate. They currently have $100k in monthly books, with customers including the DNC, and the ACLU

Read more about Swayable on TechCrunch here.

Quantstamp

Quantstamp automatically checks smart contract security.

The new popularity of the blockchain has led to more enterprises using smart contracts. But manually checking their security is time consuming and expensive. Last year $300 million was compromised due to smart contract hacks. Quantstamp has developed an automated process that scans smart contracts for vulnerabilities.

It’s already earned $2.4 million in revenue doing six enterprise smart contract audits, and it has 50 customers in the pipeline who’ll pay $500K per audit. Quantstamp could take smart contracts mainstream by making enterprises confident they won’t get hijacked.

Glimpse K12

Glimpse is trying to cut ineffective spending at schools.

The company meshes education institutions’ accounting systems with student achievement data to help education institutions understand what they’re pumping money into and see where they’re getting the best return on investment when it comes to positive student outcomes. The team’s ultimate goal is to “fundamentally changing the way $800B is spend in education each year.”

ClearBrain

ClearBrain helps companies target ads at the users most likely to sign up for a subscription, buy a product, or cancel their account (for example).

It pulls data from the tools that businesses are already using (like Segment, Optimizely and Heap), then deploys artificial intelligence to analyze and group users based on how likely they are to perform a specific action. The ultimate goal, according to CEO Bilal Mahmood, is “to democratize AI for marketers.”

Read more about ClearBrain on TechCrunch here.

Players’ Lounge

Players’ Lounge is an online platform where gamers can compete for cash.

Players can deposit money into their account and then search for other players who are willing to throw down a few bucks over a game of FIFA or Fortnite. The startup’s rating system lets gamers know if they’re taking on someone with a similar skill set or are out of their league.The company takes 10 percent of wagers and says they are growing 25 percent week-over-week.

Memora Health

Memora Health is “building a virtual nurse for patient follow-up.”

It turns out that every time someone leaves a doctor’s office, nurses are getting paid to follow up with the patient about treatments. Memora aims to automate that interaction using artificial intelligence. So far they’ve achieved $70,000 in monthly recurring revenue and have $3.8 million secured in LOIs. They say they’ve “built the infrastructure to follow up with every single patient in the United States.”

Treasury Prime

Treasury Prime makes APIs for banks.

Most banks still run on old mainframe computers and manual changes, leading to delays for banking services. Treasury Prime says its can accelerate the process of opening a bank account from 3 days to 3 minutes. The startup is building APIs for checking balances and transaction history, sending and receiving money by ACH and wire, and more.

It now has a live integration with a bank that’s issuing real bank accounts with Treasury Prime’s API. With a team that built APIs for Silicon Valley Bank and Stripe, and who sold a previous company for $200 million, Treasury Prime wants to modernize banking.

Hunter2

The moment a massive breach happens, Hunter2 hopes to already have a lab demo online for engineers to practice on.

Hunter2 serves as a tool to train engineers to better handle web app security through a soft-touch approach, giving employees semi-regular reminders of what skills the need and then having exercises build around real-world experience like the Equifax hack.

Read more about Hunter2 on TechCrunch here.

Slite

Slite is trying to reimagine collaborative tools for teams.

Imagine if Google Docs were developed by someone at Slack. Google Docs is already a pretty simplistic experience, but Slite aims to create a set of collaboration tools around a traditional notes application. The goal is to create a kind of hub where teams can come in and drop notes, ending up with something similar to an internal wiki.

Read more about Slite on TechCrunch here.

The Podcast App

The Podcast App wants to be the Netflix for…podcasts.

With 500,000 shows and 30 million episodes out there, The Podcast App helps people listen to spoken audio content, but eventually wants to move into discover and exclusive content subscriptions. The company expects there to be 500 million monthly podcasts listeners in five years, and wants to get 10 percent of them to pay $10 per month for exclusive access to top creators. The Podcast App has grown 50 percent month over month for a year, and now has 40,000 daily active users. But it will have to rise above a legion of other podcast apps, including previous YC startup Breaker which has the same strategy.

Read TechCrunch’s full coverage for more on The Podcast App

Groww

Groww wants to be the Robinhood for India.

The company says that while there are 250 million people in the middle class in India, only about 10 million of them are investing online. The startup is beginning its efforts with mutual funds, earning a 1 percent commision on transactions. Next the company is looking to take on stocks, bonds and cryptocurrencies.

Persephone Biome

Persephone Biome is trying to retune the gut microbiome to help cancer drugs work. They’re making a pill that contains gut bacteria.

They expect to go into clinical trials in 2019.

Biobot Analytics

Biobot Analytics analyzes city sewage “to estimate opioid consumption.”

Currently, “the best data is counting people who die,” which isn’t enough to help cities make predictions. The MIT-experienced founders said they are “passionate about using our skills to tackle the biggest drug crisis in American history.” So far they’ve received 17 letters of interest and believe this is a $1.5 billion per year market opportunity in the U.S. and Canada alone. In addition to drug use, they hope to also measure pharmaceuticals, infections disease and food consumption. This is “data that companies would pay billions for.”

Nectome

Nectome aims to preserve people’s brains, for when and if scientists ever develop a method to upload your memories to a computer.

The catch (as explained by co-founder Robert McIntyre) is that the method is “100 percent fatal” — the company’s plans involve terminally ill patients, under anesthesia, to a heart lung machine that will pump embalming chemicals into their arteries.

Read more about Nectome on TechCrunch here.

Promise

Promise is a bail reform startup, offering counties and local governments an alternative to holding low-risk people behind bars simply because they can’t afford bail.

For each participant, Promise provides counties with a comprehensive intake procedure and then sets up each participant with a care plan specific to them. Promise will then monitor and support participants by helping them ensure they know when they’re supposed to appear in court, and remind them of obligations like drug testing or substance abuse treatment needed. The app also provides participants with job training, housing, counseling and referrals.

Read more about Promise on TechCrunch here.

Beanstalk

Beanstalk is an indoor farming startup that can grows produce at the cost of outdoor farming.

The company simplifies operations while reducing cost with its own custom machinery that takes on some of the high-cost areas for outdoor farming. Beanstalk holds some advantages, namely they don’t have to worry about weather and don’t need pesticides. They’re focusing on heirloom greens like spinach to grow to start and are focused on customers within 100 miles of where they’re growing.

Nutrigene

Nutrigene makes personalized supplements based on your own health data.

Users upload their 23andme (or similar) data, and they try to create tailored supplements accordingly. Eventually, they intend to move into personalized medicine.  They’ve say they’ve made $17,328 in revenue since launching 2.5 months ago, with a margin of 50% per order.

Read more about Nutrigene on TechCrunch here.

Precious

Precious is an iPhone app that uses AI to curate your baby photos.

It “scans that mess and finds the meaningful moments,” they said on stage. So far they’ve gotten 54,000 paying monthly subscribers and “create and update the perfect album for every child as they grow.” Using specialized AI, it determines what it thinks are the best photos and sends them to customers regularly. So far they say they have $180,000 in monthly recurring revenue and are profitable. They believe this is a $20 billion market opportunity.

Zyper

Zyper wants to “re-create social networks for brands”.

It identifies a brand’s most engaging users, and offers them rewards relevant to the brand’s products (not money) in exchange for posting content about that brand. The company says they’ve made $1m in revenue since launching 9 months ago.

Cognition IP

Cognition IP is a tech-enabled patent law firm focused on getting the job done quicker and cheaper.

The startup claims they charge half the price of traditional law firms and that they file patents in 14 days while larger firms spend as much as 30 days getting patents filed. The company did this by building automation tools, like a smart search engine that takes a patent application and finds similar ones. They’ve also automated formatting, and built software that fills out forms for users. The company launched three months ago and is profitable with $200k in revenue.

Mirror AI

Mirror AI takes a photo and creates “thousands” of emoji that look like you. A few weeks after launching, they’ve got 300,000 installs.

Tarjimly

Tarjimly connects refugees and immigrants with native speakers of their language for help navigating difficult situations, from paperwork to disaster response.

It’s anonymous, free, and works entirely within Facebook Messenger, with more platforms on the way. Read more about Tarjimly on TechCrunch here.

OurMenu

OurMenu replaces ordering from a waiter with ordering from a website.

Labor costs are huge for restaurants. OurMenu wants to let you order from your phone at your table instead of talking to a waiter, and without downloading an app. You scan a QR code on the table, choose your food, order and pay, and then the food is brought to you.  OurMenu plans to charge restaurants $300 per month for the tech, and will aggregate the menu choice data to sell back to them.

Archform

Archform is teeth aligner software startup that lets orthodontists create, design and 3D print aligners within their own offices.

The idea is to provide orthodontists with a way to better compete against some direct-to-consumer teeth aligner startups and cut down on the cost of Invisalign.

Read more about ArchForm on TechCrunch here.

Ropeo

Ropeo wants to be the Stitch Fix of Latin America.

The company offers a monthly clothing subscription service with some features optimized for its particular market. The company allows users to try before they buy and takes cash on pickup because credit card use is so low in LatAm. The company believes that they’ll be able to negotiate better deals with partners as they scale and that after clothing, they’ll be able to grow to sourcing different types of apparel.

Pulse

Pulse is trying to crowdsource research and advisory reports by tapping a community of IT execs.

They currently have 3,000+ IT executives on the platform, and say they’re growing by over 100 companies per week. Its reports are free, instead aiming to make money buy connecting IT buyers and vendors.

Read more about Pulse on TechCrunch here.

Playbook

Playbook is for college students who want to hang out.

It’s an app with 240 beta users at Harvard, 30% of whom use it daily. In March, they organized 101 get togethers and “most the people that hung out and had a great time didn’t know each other beforehand.” It’s available on both iOS and Android.

Read more about Playbook on TechCrunch here.

Delphia

Delphia works with publishers to create applications that help their readers make decisions — think of them as BuzzFeed quizzes, but for complex decisions, and with real data science on the backend. The company’s first application was called Vote Compass, which told users how their political views line up with election candidates. Now it’s expanding beyond politics. Read more about Delphia on TechCrunch here.

Dana Cita

Dana Cita offers student loans in Indonesia.

Previously, there were no loans in the 260 million-person country where 76 percent of people are unbanked. Dana Cita believes student loans can be the start of an adult’s financial life, and a way to recruit long-time customers for other financial services. It’s originated $100K in loans to 52 borrowers so far. The question is whether after seeing the student loan debt crisis in America, Indonesians will want to take money from a startup.

Tributi

Tributi wants to build a TurboTax for Latin America.

The startup says that the vast majority of people in Latin America have their taxes prepped by individual accountants rather than using software products. The company says upcoming tax reform across the continent will drive even more traffic to solutions like theirs. The startup says it is growing 25 percent week over week since launch.

EasyEmail

EasyEmail is a Chrome plugin that analyzes your emails finds your most common phrases and autocompletes sentences for you.

So much of the emails that we send feel like they’re being written on autopilot. Wouldn’t it be great if they actually were? For users sending a lot of repetitive sales or PR emails, the service offers a system that will keep you from copy-pasting up a storm and let you intelligently blaze through your emails.

Read more about EasyEmail on TechCrunch Here.

Ben

Ben aims to be a unified platform for learning about, buying, selling, and storing cryptocurrency.

With the hundreds of wallets and exchanges floating around in the blockchain ether, it’s easy for novices to get lost in the fray. Ben��s mobile app distinguishes itself from other wallet exchanges by integrating crypto education, using the platform to also deliver news about currencies and offer Q&As related to crypto investing.

Medumo

Medumo aims to reduce day-of medical procedure cancellations.

Last minute schedule changes can be costly for both the patients and the medical facilities.

But a lot of these cancellations aren’t by choice, but rather because patients forgot to fast or avoid certain foods before a procedure. Medumo offers support over text and email, providing instructions so that the patient is ready when they need to be. For its customers, they say it’s resulted in a 30% reduction in no shows.

from iraidajzsmmwtv http://ift.tt/2pxvQbd via IFTTT

[mehmetyildizmelbourne-blog]

Substack Mastery Book: Chapter 6

This chapter is about How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons

How to Configure and Maintain Privacy of Substack Publications with Compelling Reasons Dear beta readers, Thank you for your invaluable feedback, which is helping refine this book and enhance it as a valuable resource for fellow writers. I’ve covered five critical aspects that have already helped many readers jumpstart their Substack journey. Just yesterday, the discussion on editorial…