Tech Blog - Page 263 of 2385 - 1010Computers | Computer Repair & IT Support1010Computers

Supabase raises $6M for its open-source Firebase alternative

Published December 15, 2020

Supabase, a YC-incubated startup that offers developers an open-source alternative to Google’s Firebase and similar platforms, today announced that it has raised a $6 million funding round led by Coatue, with participation from YC, Mozilla and a group of about 20 angel investors.

Currently, Supabase includes support for PostgreSQL databases and authentication tools, with a storage and serverless solution coming soon. It currently provides all the usual tools for working with databases — and listening to database changes — as well as a web-based UI for managing them. The team is quick to note that while the comparison with Google’s Firebase is inevitable, it is not meant to be a 1-to-1 replacement for it. And unlike Firebase, which uses a NoSQL database, Supabase is using PostgreSQL.

Indeed, the team relies heavily on existing open-source projects and contributes to them where it can. One of Supabase’s full-time employees maintains the PostgREST tool for building APIs on top of the database, for example.

“We’re not trying to build another system,” Supabase co-founder and CEO Paul Copplestone told me. “We just believe that already there are well-trusted, scalable enterprise open-source products out there and they just don’t have this usability component. So actually right now, Supabase is an amalgamation of six tools, soon to be seven. Some of them we built ourselves. If we go to market and can’t find anything that we think is going to be scalable — or really solve the problems — then we’ll build it and we’ll open-source it. But otherwise, we’ll use existing tools.”

Image Credits: Supabase

The traditional route to market for open-source tools is to create a tool and then launch a hosted version — maybe with some additional features — to monetize the work. Supabase took a slightly different route and launched a hosted version right away.

If somebody would want to host the service themselves, the code is available, but running your own PaaS is obviously a major challenge, but that’s also why the team went with this approach. What you get with Firebase, he noted, is that it’s a few clicks to set everything up. Supabase wanted to be able to offer the same kind of experience. “That’s one thing that self-hosting just cannot offer,” he said. “You can’t really get the same wow factor that you can if we offered a hosted platform where you literally [have] one click and then a couple of minutes later, you’ve got everything set up.”

In addition, he also noted that he wanted to make sure the company could support the growing stable of tools it was building and commercializing its tools based on its database services was the easiest way to do so.

Like other Y Combinator startups, Supabase closed its funding round after the accelerator’s demo day in August. The team had considered doing a SAFE round, but it found the right group of institutional investors that offered founder-friendly terms to go ahead with this institutional round instead.

Why SAFE notes are not safe for entrepreneurs

“It’s going to cost us a lot to compete with the generous free tier that Firebase offers,” Copplestone said. “And it’s databases, right? So it’s not like you can just keep them stateless and shut them down if you’re not really using them. [This funding round] gives us a long, generous runway and more importantly, for the developers who come in and build on top of us, [they can] take as long as they want and then start monetizing later on themselves.“

The company plans to use the new funding to continue to invest in its various tools and hire to support its growth.

“Supabase’s value proposition of building in a weekend and scaling so quickly hit home immediately,” said Caryn Marooney, general partner at Coatue and Facebook’s former VP of Global Communications. “We are proud to work with this team, and we are excited by their laser focus on developers and their commitment to speed and reliability.”

Twitter taps AWS for its latest foray into the public cloud

Published December 15, 2020

Twitter has a lot going on, and it’s not always easy to manage that kind of scale on your own. Today, Amazon announced that Twitter has signed a multi-year agreement with AWS to run its real-time timelines. It’s a major win for Amazon’s cloud arm.

While the companies have worked together in some capacity for over a decade, this marks the first time that Twitter is tapping AWS to help run its core timelines.

“This expansion onto AWS marks the first time that Twitter is leveraging the public cloud to scale their real-time service. Twitter will rely on the breadth and depth of AWS, including capabilities in compute, containers, storage and security, to reliably deliver the real-time service with the lowest latency, while continuing to develop and deploy new features to improve how people use Twitter,” the company explained in the announcement.

AWS announces new ARM-based instances with Graviton2 processors

Parag Agrawal, chief technology officer at Twitter, sees this as a way to expand and improve the company’s real-time offerings by taking advantage of AWS’s network of data centers to deliver content closer to the user. “The collaboration with AWS will improve performance for people who use Twitter by enabling us to serve Tweets from data centers closer to our customers at the same time as we leverage the Arm-based architecture of AWS Graviton2 instances. In addition to helping us scale our infrastructure, this work with AWS enables us to ship features faster as we apply AWS’s diverse and growing portfolio of services,” Agrawal said in a statement.

It’s worth noting that Twitter also has a relationship with Google Cloud. In 2018, it announced it was moving its Hadoop clusters to GCP.

This announcement could be considered a case of the rich getting richer as AWS is the leader in the cloud infrastructure market by far, with around 33% market share. Microsoft is in second with around 18% and Google is in third with 9%, according to Synergy Research. In its most recent earnings report, Amazon reported $11.6 billion in AWS revenue, putting it on a run rate of over $46 billion.

Twitter is moving a portion of its infrastructure to Google Cloud

Parsec raises $25M from a16z to power remote work and cloud gaming

Published December 15, 2020

Parsec, a startup that’s built streaming technology for both work and play, is announcing that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding.

This brings Parsec’s total funding to $33 million, according to Crunchbase. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with the firm’s general partner Martin Casado joining the board. Previous investors Lerer Hippeau, Makers Fund, NextView Ventures and Notation Capital also participated.

CEO Benjy Boxer told me that since he and CTO Chris Dickson founded the company in 2016, the vision has always been “to make it easier for people to connect to their technology, software and content from anywhere, on any device.”

They started out by helping gamers access their gaming PCs from other devices (the Parsec app is currently available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Raspberry Pi and the web).

“From the beginning, we thought that if we could build something that is great for gaming, it will be great for everything,” Boxer said.

But it was a natural transition to other use cases, since some of the people using Parsec to play games in their free time also turned out to work at TV production companies, video game companies or in other jobs where they need access to high-end workstations. That’s why the company launched Parsec for Teams this year, which offers the same low-latency remote experience, while also adding features like encryption, group permissions and collaboration on the same file.

Image Credits: Parsec

“The performance of Parsec is just way above everything else,” Boxer said. “People forget they’re using Parsec.”

Parsec works with major gaming clients like EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard Entertainment and Square Enix, and it’s also being used in industries like architecture, engineering and video broadcast/production/post-production.

And as you might imagine, the need for something like this has only increased during the pandemic. Boxer said customers have found that the platform is saving their employees more than an hour a day by eliminating the commute and giving them high-speed access to their workstations — rather than, say, having to wait an hour for a 100 gigabyte file to download.

And most of those clients anticipate that after the pandemic, their employees will continue for work from home for part of the time.

“So in that scenario, people are bringing their computers back to the office, and they can use Parsec to make sure it’s always accessible to them,” Boxer said.

On the consumer side, he said that where usage was previously heaviest during the weekends, during the pandemic “there’s no spike anymore on the weekends, people are playing all the time.”

Boxer added that the company will continue developing the core platform, leading to improvements for both gaming and enterprise users, while there’s a separate team focused on building administrative and collaborative features.

Is the time finally right for platform-agnostic cloud gaming?

Tive nabs $12M Series A to track shipment conditions in real time

Published December 15, 2020

Tive, a Boston-based startup, is building a hardware and software platform to help track the conditions of a shipment like say food or medicine to make sure it is stored under the proper conditions as it moves from farm or factory to market. Today, the company announced a $12 million Series A.

RRE Ventures led the round with help from new investor Two Sigma Ventures and existing investors NextView Ventures, Hyperplane Ventures, One Way Ventures, Fathom Ventures and other unnamed individuals. The company has now raised close to $17 million, according to Crunchbase data.

“Tive helps companies all over the world track their shipments in a very specific way,” company co-founder and CEO Krenar Komoni told me. Using a tracking device the company created, customers can press a button, place the tracker on a palette or in a container, and it begins transmitting shipment data like temperature, shock, light exposure, humidity and location data in real time to ensure that the shipment is moving safely to market under proper conditions.

He said that they are the first company to create single-use 5G trackers, meaning the shipping company doesn’t have to worry about managing, maintaining, recharging or returning them (although they encourage that by giving a discount for future orders on returned items).

Tive tracker over computer displaying tracking data software.

Tive hardware tracker and data tracking software. Image Credit: Tive

The approach seems to be working. Komoni reports that revenue has grown 570% in 2020 as the product-market fit has become more acute with digitization hitting the supply chain in a big way. He says that in particular customers and investors like the company’s full-stack approach.

“What’s interesting […] and why we are resonating with customers and also why investors like it, is because we’re providing the full stack, meaning the hardware, the software, the platform and the APIs to major transportation management systems,” Komoni explained.

The company has 22 employees and expects to double that number in 2021. As he grows the company, Komoni says that as an immigrant founder, he’s particularly sensitive to diversity and inclusion.

“I’m an immigrant myself. I grew up in Kosovo, came to the U.S. when I was 17 years old, went to high school here in Vermont. I’m a U.S. citizen, but part of who I am is being open to different cultures and different nationalities. It’s just part of my nature,” he says.

The company was founded in 2015 and its facilities are in Boston. It has continued shipping devices throughout the pandemic, and that has meant figuring out how to operate in a safe way with some employees in the building. He expects the company will have more employees operating out of the office as we move past the pandemic. He also has an engineering operation in Kosovo.

Fairmarkit lands $30M Series B to modernize procurement

2021 holds even more Samsung foldables

Published December 15, 2020

The foldable category got off to a famously rocky start. Fifteen months after the release of the first Galaxy Fold, Samsung has had time to work out some of the issues with the original device, giving the world the better-received Galaxy Z Flip and Z Fold 2 this year.

Likely due to various stumbles from mobile manufacturers, the form factor has yet to redefine the industry in a meaningful way — but meaningful change takes time. And in case there was any doubt surrounding Samsung’s commitment to foldable displays, Mobile president TM Roh penned a letter on the company’s site, noting an expansion of the portfolio next year.

Whether that means an additional device or something more meaningful remains to be seen, though it does seem to suggest the arrival of at least one more affordable model. Price has certainly been a major hurdle for the adoption of these products. In the letter, Roh notes that he/the company will be “sharing more in January” — perhaps an allusion to CES or a standalone Samsung event. Roh adds:

True to our heritage of staying ahead of the curve with trailblazing mobile tech, we’ll be expanding our portfolio of foldables, so this groundbreaking category is more accessible to everyone. And while we’re already known for our revolutionary cameras, we’ll never stop trying to outdo ourselves — so be on the lookout for super-intelligent, pro-grade camera and video capabilities in 2021. We’ve also been paying attention to people’s favorite aspects of the Galaxy Note experience and are excited to add some of its most well-loved features to other devices in our lineup.

Nothing particularly earth-shattering. With the race to 5G devices in the rear-view, the focus is seemingly back on cameras, in addition to folding screens. More after the holidays, no doubt.

Samsung’s new Galaxy Fold arrives September 18 for $2,000

Arya raises $21M to provide farmers in India finance and post-harvest services

Published December 15, 2020

Only about a third of the yields Indian farmers produce reaches the big markets. Those whose produce makes it there today are able to leverage post-harvest services. Everyone else is missing out.

A Noida-based startup is working with all the stakeholders — farmers, food processors, traders and financial institutions — to bridge this post-harvest services gap — and it just secured new funds to continue its journey.

Seven-year-old Arya said on Tuesday it has raised $21 million in its Series B financing round. The round was led by Quona Capital, a venture firm that focuses on fintech in emerging markets. Existing investors LGT Lightstone Aspada and Omnivore also participated in the round, while multiple unnamed lenders are providing additional debt financing to the startup, Arya said.

Nearly all post-harvest interventions that exist in India today are focused largely toward major agriculture centres such as Kota in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan and Azadpur Mandi in capital New Delhi, explained Prasanna Rao, co-founder and chief executive of Arya, in an interview with TechCrunch.

This uneven concentration has deprived millions of farmers in the country of reasonable options to efficiently store and sell their produce and of financing options to maintain their cash flow, he said.

“Our belief is that we should cater to the two-thirds of the market that are currently underserved. The Kota mandi (market), for instance, has 35 bank branches in a kilometre of radius. But if you travel 70 to 80 kilometres away from Kota, this really declines,” said Rao, who previously worked at a bank.

Arya is solving all the aforementioned challenges: It operates a network of more than 1,500 warehouses in 20 Indian states where it stores over $1 billion worth of commodities. This network allows farmers to store their produce at a centre that is much nearer to their farms, avoiding any spillage and exorbitant real estate costs of the big markets. On the credit side, Arya has disbursed over $36.5 million to farmers and its banking partners have disbursed more than $95 million.

“Arya is addressing a vastly underserved market of farmers in India, half of whom previously had little access to post-harvest finance,” said Ganesh Rengaswamy, co-founder and partner at Quona Capital, in a statement. “We believe Arya’s unique approach, providing a full-service digital platform with embedded finance and differentiated efficiencies for small farmholders, will drive the future of farming in India.”

The startup’s offerings have proven even more useful during the coronavirus pandemic, which saw New Delhi enforce one of the world’s strictest lockdowns earlier this year. The lockdown broke the supply chain network, and prices of agricultural commodities dropped by over 20%.

To navigate this, Arya connected farmer produce organizers, or FPOs, with buyers through its own digital marketplace a2zgodaam.com. “The need for immediate liquidity saw demand increase for credit against these warehouse receipts. Arya’s credit portfolio saw a 3x jump year-on-year,” wrote Prashanth Prakash, a founding partner at Accel in India, and Mark Kahn, managing partner at Omnivore in an industry report last week.

Rao said Arya will deploy the fresh capital to scale its fintech platform in a “big way” as the startup broadens its network of warehouses across the country. Additionally, the startup plans to fuel the growth of a2zgodaam.com, which also aggregates unorganized warehouses, and supercharge them with their own set of financiers and insurers and ways to allow farmers to sell directly through these warehouses if they need.

Amazon, Flipkart, Ola and Uber begin to resume their services in India

5 questions every IT team should be able to answer

Published December 14, 2020

Christy Wyatt
Contributor

Christy Wyatt is Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors at Absolute, a leader in endpoint resilience solutions and the industry’s only undeletable defense platform embedded in over a half-billion devices.

Now more than ever, IT teams play a vital role in keeping their businesses running smoothly and securely. With all of the assets and data that are now broadly distributed, a CEO depends on their IT team to ensure employees remain connected and productive and that sensitive data remains protected.

CEOs often visualize and measure things in terms of dollars and cents, and in the face of continuing uncertainty, IT — along with most other parts of the business — is facing intense scrutiny and tightening of budgets. So, it is more important than ever to be able to demonstrate that they’ve made sound technology investments and have the agility needed to operate successfully in the face of continued uncertainty.

For a CEO to properly understand risk exposure and make the right investments, IT departments have to be able to confidently communicate what types of data are on any given device at any given time.

Here are five questions that IT teams should be ready to answer when their CEO comes calling:

What have we spent our money on?

Or, more specifically, exactly how many assets do we have? And, do we know where they are? While these seem like basic questions, they can be shockingly difficult to answer … much more difficult than people realize. The last several months in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak have been the proof point.

With the mass exodus of machines leaving the building and disconnecting from the corporate network, many IT leaders found themselves guessing just how many devices had been released into the wild and gone home with employees.

One CIO we spoke to estimated they had “somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 devices” that went home with employees, meaning there could have been up to 20,000 that were completely unaccounted for. The complexity was further compounded as old devices were pulled out of desk drawers and storage closets to get something into the hands of employees who were not equipped to work remotely. Companies had endpoints connecting to corporate network and systems that they hadn’t seen for years — meaning they were out-of-date from a security perspective as well.

This level of uncertainty is obviously unsustainable and introduces a tremendous amount of security risk. Every endpoint that goes unaccounted for not only means wasted spend but also increased vulnerability, greater potential for breach or compliance violation, and more. In order to mitigate these risks, there needs to be a permanent connection to every device that can tell you exactly how many assets you have deployed at any given time — whether they are in the building or out in the wild.

Are our devices and data protected?

Device and data security go hand in hand; without the ability to see every device that is deployed across an organization, it becomes next to impossible to know what data is living on those devices. When employees know they are leaving the building and going to be off network, they tend to engage in “data hoarding.”

Atlanta-based gaming controller peripheral seller KontrolFreek has been bought by SteelSeries

Published December 14, 2020

After nearly a decade selling gaming and console peripherals to gamers looking to spice up their systems, Atlanta-based KontrolFreek has been acquired by the international peripherals retailer SteelSeries.

Terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but KontrolFreek has shipped more than 2 million units of its flagship product, which is available in over 9,000 retailers in 60 countries and can be found in over 16 online marketplaces.

That’s not bad for a company that was founded 11 years ago with a $50,000 check from BLH Venture Partners, the Atlanta-based investment firm co-founded by Billy L. Harbert and Ashish Mistry. Mistry, a co-founder of Virtex Networks and later an early team member at Air Defense.

Neither Harbert nor Mistry were much for gaming, but they did see the opportunity in selling peripherals to the folks who were, Mistry said in a direct message.

“Huge markets have large niches,” Mistry wrote.

By acquiring KontrolFreek, SteelSeries is further consolidating its position in the console gaming market by folding one of the leading sellers of high-performance controller accessories into its portfolio of products. Earlier this year, SteelSeries nabbed A-volute, which provides three dimensional sound systems for games.

SteelSeries also gets a vibrant user-generated media property in KontrolFreek’s FreekNation community, which boasts 4 million community members.

“With the next-generation consoles at the forefront of the gaming industry’s mind, there’s never been a better time to maximize our ability to provide the best gaming experiences and products to console gamers,” said Ehtisham Rabbani, CEO of SteelSeries. “With KontrolFreek’s expertise and global popularity, we know they’ll open new opportunities to entertain, delight, and assist new gamers across the world.”

IPO delays are bumming me out

Published December 14, 2020

A spurt of delays could derail the end-of-year IPO cavalcade, pushing some major flotations into 2021 and possibly complicating next year’s public-liquidity run.

On Saturday, the NYT reported that gaming development platform Roblox would delay its IPO into the new year. Its CEO informed employees that the hiatus would allow Roblox to “improve [its] specific process” for shareholders of all types.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

What the hell does that mean?

That after watching shares of DoorDash, Airbnb and C3.ai soar last week, Roblox doesn’t want to allow current shareholders to sell in the IPO, only to see the value of their now-sold shares open sharply higher. (The Roblox IPO has a line in its offering explanation that reserves the ability for existing shareholders to sell, implying liquidity for employees and investors; this makes the pricing issue more personal than academic.)

One delayed IPO isn’t such a bad thing. Roblox will still go out, we will still watch, it will still be interesting. But now fintech startup Affirm will likely delay its IPO as well, Axios and the WSJ report. That’s two.

And if Affirm and Roblox delay, others may too. This morning we asked on the Equity podcast if there could be too much of a good thing. The answer appears to be yes, at least as far as IPO pops go. Investor enthusiasm was so high for last week’s mostly brand-name debuts that the whole well could be poisoned for a while.

Great.

This is particularly grating as the 2021 IPO cohort could be massive. If you thought 2020 had a lot of deals, next year could really impress you. But only if the prevailing climate is right, it appears. Because if there is one thing we’ve learned about unicorns, it’s that they are spotlight-shy. Say “GAAP” too loudly and they tend to scatter.

But at some point unicorns have to exit. This is especially true today, as the birth rate of unicorns in the United States — the pace at which net-new startups reached a $1 billion valuation — rebounded in the third quarter. From a local minima of just 11 new unicorns in Q2 2020, 17 made the cut in the third quarter. That brought the number of unexited unicorns in the United States to 216 in the U.S. alone, according to CB Insights.

There are more than 500 unicorns in the world, all of which will want to exit while stocks are at or near all-time highs.

If the liquidity train is derailed because some IPO did too well, I will lose my gosh-darn mind.

What more do you want?

It’s somewhat amazing that we’re in this situation. The IPOs in question that present a problem did, in fact, incredibly well.

Klima publicly launches its consumer-focused carbon offset app

Published December 14, 2020

Andreas Pursian, Markus Gilles and Jonas Brandau, the three co-founders of Klima, an app focused on helping consumers understand and offset their carbon emissions, first found entrepreneurial success at Hyper.

The mobile magazine publishing toolkit they developed was sold to Mic in 2017, but it was only the most recent success in a string of collaborations dating back nearly a decade.

“We had a fascination for technology and all the great things you could do to improve society,” said Gilles, Klima’s chief executive, in an interview earlier this year.

Klima, which launched this month, is in some way the culmination of those efforts.

Gilles and Pursian first met in university and later with Brandau they launched their first app, Pino, a mobile-based video op-ed page that had German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an early contributor on the platform.

The connection to politics and media continued with Hyper, their publishing platform that sold to Mic, and continues with Klima. With the app, the three co-founders have taken their media savvy and applied it to getting consumers to reduce and neutralize their carbon emissions through offsets and behavioral changes.

“Offsets can remedy and buy us a lot of time while we’re rebuilding our society,” said Gilles. “We need to get to 50% emissions reductions in the next 10 years which is a herculean task. We can’t afford to leave any climate solution on the table right now.”

Like other apps, Klima has identified diet as one of the major personal steps a person can take to reduce their emissions footprint. Substituting cars with biking, or electric vehicles, and buying less fast-fashion and more used clothing also has an impact.

Klima’s app includes a carbon calculator, which measures a carbon footprint and allows users to offset that with a personalized monthly subscription. The company’s app also provides lifestyle tips to reduce emissions. Finally it offers a social sharing feature so that other would-be climate warriors can join the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

“We have a special situation right now,” said Gilles. “What we are doing as founders. We know that the climate crisis is not taking a pause because of the pandemic. We have raised enough funding right now to still be there when the pandemic is over.”

The company is backed by Jens Begemann, the founder of Wooga; Niklas Jansen, co-founder of Blinkist; Christian Reber, the founder of Pitch; and institutional investors including e.ventures, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and 468 Capital.

To date, Klima has raised $5.8 million in financing. The company offers three types of offsets for its users. The first is natural solutions, like tree-planting projects; the second is tech-based solutions like solar power installations; and the third is social solutions, like replacing wood-burning cookstoves with electric or gas stoves for homes.

“We’ve seen great traction with the app so far,” said Gilles. The company’s app is now live in 18 countries including the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and has the largest user base of any climate offset app currently on the market, the company said.