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Jeff Chen has a pithy pitch for his new startup Taste: “We made the Instagram of nice food.”
In other words, just as Instagram made it easy for regular smartphone users to look like talented photographers, Taste makes it easy for customers to prepare impressive meals at home.
That’s because the real preparation is being done by fine-dining restaurants — Chen told me there are 16 Michelin-starred and Michelin-rated restaurants currently on the platform — whose food doesn’t translate easily to a delivery or takeout experience. Taste offers “dinner kits,” which Chen said are neither standard takeout (where everything has been fully prepared but doesn’t necessarily travel well) or a regular meal kit (where “everything is separate and raw”).
Instead, he suggested Taste’s dinner kits are “this in-between thing” where the food is mostly, but not entirely, prepared in advance, allowing customers to “heat and assemble much faster.”
Image Credits: Taste
For example, when I tried out Taste last week, my girlfriend and I received three-course meals from Intersect by Lexus and its “restaurant in residence” The Grey. A couple of the (delicious) courses and sides had to be heated in the oven or the microwave for five, 10 or 20 minutes, but there was no real prep or cooking required — the real work was cleaning up afterward.
Even the packaging was impressive (if a little overwhelming), with a large, fancy box for each kit, and then individual packages for each course, plus a separate package for spices. There are optional wine pairings, and some restaurants will also provide plating instructions and a Spotify playlist for the meal.
Taste — which is part of the winter 2021 batch of startups at Y Combinator — is currently New York City-only, where it works with restaurants including Dirt Candy, Meadowsweet and the Musket Room. As you might expect, these kits cost more than your standard dinner delivery. Many of them are in the $60-to-$100 per person range, although there are also dinners below $40, as well as a la carte options.
Chen (who sold his last startup Joyride to Google) said that he and his co-founder Daryl Sew have been excited to help New York City chefs reinvent their offerings for delivery and weather the pandemic.
Taste founders Daryl Sew and Jeff Chen. Image Credits: Taste
“We also do a very key thing, which is pre-ordering and batching for the restaurant,” he added. “When a restaurant works with Taste, all the orders come in two days before to the restaurant, and we pick it up at designated times, which helps tremendously with capacity lift.”
And while Taste might seem particularly appealing now, when indoor fine dining options are either illegal, unsafe or transformed by social distancing and mask-wearing, Chen anticipates healthy demand even after the pandemic. After all, he suggested that before COVID-19, there were many people — busy parents, for example, or people who work long hours — who felt like they couldn’t take advantage of these restaurants as often as they wanted, or at all.
“Everything is getting moved into the home,” he said. “Movies are getting moved into the home with Netflix, workouts are getting moved into the home with Peloton and Tonal, and now we’re going to move nice dining experiences into the home.”
Google today introduced a suite of updates for its online education tools whose adoption and further development have been accelerated by the pandemic, including Google Classroom, Google Meet and the next generation of G Suite for Education, now rebranded as Google Workspace for Education. In total, Google is promising more than 50 new features across its education products, with a focus on meeting educators’ and admins’ needs, in particular, in addition to those of the students.
When Google first introduced Google Classroom, it didn’t set out to create a Learning Management System (LMS), the company says. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Google found that many educators had begun to use Classroom as the “hub” for their online learning activities. Today, the service is used by over 150 million students, teachers and school admins, up from just 40 million last year.
As a result of the pandemic-prompted adoption and user feedback, Google is introducing a range of new features for Classroom this year, some of which will be made available sooner than others.
To better cater to those who are using Classroom as the hub for online learning, a new marketplace of Classroom “add-ons” will allow teachers later this year to select their favorite edtech tools and content and assign them directly to students, without requiring extra log-ins. Admins will also be able to install these add-ons for other teachers in their domains.
Also later this year, admins will be able to populate classes in advance with Student Information System (SIS) roster syncing and, for select SIS customers, students’ grades from Classroom will be able to be exported directly to the SIS. Additional logging, including Classroom audit logs (to see things like student removals or who archived a class), as well as Classroom activity logs (to check on adoption and engagement) will be available soon.
When students attend in-person school, teachers can easily notice when a student is falling behind. A new set of Classroom tools aims to do the same for virtual learning, as well. With the new student engagement tracking feature, teachers will be able to see relevant stats about how students are interacting with Classroom, like which students submitted assignments on a given day or commented on a post, for example.
Image Credits: Google
Other tools will tackle the realities of working from home, where internet connections aren’t always reliable, or — for some low-income students — not available at all. With an updated Classroom Android app, students will be able to start their work offline, review assignments, open Drive attachments and write in Google Docs without an internet connection. The work will sync when a connection is again available. And when students upload assignments by taking a photo, new tools will allow students to combine photos into a single document, crop and rotate images and adjust the lighting.
Classroom will also gain support for rich text formatting — like bold, italics, underline and adding bullets across web, iOS and Android.
Image Credits: Google
Originality reports, which help to detect plagiarism, will be available soon in 15 languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, French, Italian, Indonesian, Japanese, Finnish, German, Korean, Danish, Malaysian and Hindi.
And Google’s own free, introductory computer science curriculum, CS First, is immediately available in Classroom.
Beyond Classroom itself, Google Meet is also being updated with the needs of educators in mind.
One must-have new feature, rolling out over the next few weeks, is a “mute all” button to give control of the classroom back to teachers. In April, teachers will also be able to control when a student can unmute themselves, as well.
Image Credits: Google
Other moderation controls will roll out this year, too, including controls over who can join meetings, chat or share their screen from their iOS and Android devices. Policies over who can join video calls will be able to be set by admins in April, as well, enabling rules around student-to-student connections across districts, professional development opportunities for teachers, external speakers visiting a class and more. Students will also not be able to join Meets generated from Classroom until their teacher has arrived. Teachers, meanwhile, will be made meeting hosts so multiple teachers can share the load of managing classes.
Google Meet is adding engagement and inclusivity features for students, too. Students will be able to select emoji skin tones to represent them and react in class with emoji, which teachers will be able to control.
Image Credits: Google
Finally, Google’s “G Suite for Education,” which includes Classroom, Meet, Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and more, will be rebranded as Google Workspace for Education. The tools themselves, now used by 170 million students and educators globally, won’t change. But the set will be available in four editions instead of just two to better accommodate a wider variety of needs.
The free version will be rebranded Google Workspace for Education Fundamentals, and will remain largely the same. The paid version, meanwhile, will become available in three tiers: Google Workspace for Education Standard and Google Workspace for Education Plus, as well as the Teaching and Learning Upgrade, which can be added on to Fundamentals or Standard to provide video communication in Google Meet, and other Classroom tools, like originality reports.
Standard has everything in Fundamentals, in addition to enhanced security through Security Center, audit logs and advanced mobile management. Plus has everything in the three other versions, as well as advanced security and analytics, teaching and learning capabilities, and more.
Fundamentals and Plus are available today and the others will go live April 14, 2021. Those who already have G Suite for Enterprise for Education will be upgraded to Education Plus.
Related to these changes, the storage model will be updated to a new, pooled storage option that aims to better allocate storage resources across educational institutions. The new model offers schools and universities a baseline of 100 TB of pooled storage shared by all users, which goes into effect for current customers in July 2022, and will be effective for new customers in 2022. Google says less than 1% of institutions will be impacted by the updated model, whose baseline supports over 100 million documents or 8 million presentations or 400,000 hours of video, to give an idea of size.
The company plans several updates for its Google Workspace for Education product line in the weeks to come, including saved drafts in Google Forms (in Fundamentals) Google Meet meeting transcripts (in the Teaching and Learning Upgrade) and more.
Outside of software product updates, Google is launching over 40 new Chromebooks, including a set of “Always Connected” branded devices that have an LTE connectivity option built in. Chrome’s screen reader, ChromeVox, has also been improved with new tutorials, the ability to search ChromeVox menus and voice switching that automatically changes the screen reader’s voice based on the language of the text.
Parents, who are now participating in their child’s online learning in a number of ways, will be able to add their child’s Google Workspace for Education account to their child’s personal account with Family Link — Google’s parental control software. That means kids can still log into their school apps and accounts, while parents ensure they stay focused on learning by restricting other apps and overall device usage.
Jeff Chen has a pithy pitch for his new startup Taste: “We made the Instagram of nice food.”
In other words, just as Instagram made it easy for regular smartphone users to look like talented photographers, Taste makes it easy for customers to prepare impressive meals at home.
That’s because the real preparation is being done by fine-dining restaurants — Chen told me there are 16 Michelin-starred and Michelin-rated restaurants currently on the platform — whose food doesn’t translate easily to a delivery or takeout experience. Taste offers “dinner kits,” which Chen said are neither standard takeout (where everything has been fully prepared but doesn’t necessarily travel well) or a regular meal kit (where “everything is separate and raw”).
Instead, he suggested Taste’s dinner kits are “this in-between thing” where the food is mostly, but not entirely, prepared in advance, allowing customers to “heat and assemble much faster.”
For example, when I tried out Taste last week, my girlfriend and I received three-course meals from Intersect by Lexus and its “restaurant in residence” The Grey. A couple of the (delicious) courses and sides had to be heated in the oven or the microwave for five, 10 or 20 minutes, but there was no real prep or cooking required — the real work was cleaning up afterwards.
Image Credits: Taste
Even the packaging was impressive (if a little overwhelming), with a large, fancy box for each kit, and then individual packages for each course, plus a separate package for spices. There are optional wine pairings, and some restaurants will also provide plating instructions and a Spotify playlist for the meal.
Taste — which is part of the current batch of startups at Y Combinator — is currently New York City-only, where it works with restaurants including Dirt Candy, Meadowsweet and the Musket Room. As you might expect, these kits cost more than your standard dinner delivery. Many of them are in the $60-to-$100 per person range, although there are also dinners below $40, as well as a la carte options.
Chen (who sold his last startup Joyride to Google) said that he and his co-founder Daryl Sew have been excited to help New York City chefs reinvent their offerings for delivery and weather the pandemic.
“We also do a very key thing, which is pre-ordering and batching for the restaurant,” he added. “When a restaurant works with Taste, all the orders come in two days before to the restaurant, and we pick it up at designated times, which help tremendously with capacity lift.”
Taste founders Daryl Sew and Jeff Chen
And while Taste might seem particularly appealing now, when indoor fine dining options are either illegal, unsafe or transformed by social distancing and mask-wearing, Chen anticipates healthy demand even after the pandemic. After all, he suggested that before COVID-19, there were many people — busy parents, for example, or people who work long hours — who felt like they could’t take advantage of these restaurants as often as they wanted, or at all.
“Everything is getting moved into the home,” he said. “Movies are getting moved into the home with Netflix, workouts are getting moved into the home with Peloton and Tonal, and now we’re going to move nice dining experiences into the home.”
Australian Facebook users will be forced to go elsewhere to read news after the company announced Wednesday that they will be restricting users in the country from sharing or viewing news links on the platform. The drastic move follows debate on proposed legislation from the Australian government that seeks to push internet platforms — with a particular focus on advertising giants Facebook and Google — to pay news publishers directly for access to share their content.
Pulling back entirely was a nuclear option for Facebook which had previously floated the possibility. In a blog post, the company sought to minimize the material impact of the decision to Facebook’s bottom line, while emphasizing what the move will cost users in Australia and around the globe. The company disclosed that just 4% of the content in Australian users’ feeds was news, though the platform did not break out other engagement metrics tied to news consumption.
In their post, Facebook sought to drive a distinction between how news content was shared on Facebook by users while content is algorithmically curated by Google inside their search product. “Google Search is inextricably intertwined with news and publishers do not voluntarily provide their content,” William Easton, Facebook’s managing director for the region, wrote. “On the other hand, publishers willingly choose to post news on Facebook, as it allows them to sell more subscriptions, grow their audiences and increase advertising revenue.”
Google has already begun working with publishers to drive lump sum payments so that they continue to surface news content in the country, striking a deal Wednesday with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, despite their own earlier threats to shut down in Australia. Facebook’s action has ramifications for global users outside Australia who will be unable to share links on the platform to news publications based in the country.
This legislation is an aggressive example of regional legislation having the potential to drive global change for how internet platforms continue to operate. It’s clear that plenty of other countries are watching this saga play out. Facebook taking a hard line approach while Google seeks to strike private deals to stay active showcases different approaches from very different platforms being forced to reckon with how they operate in the future.
Massachusetts-based Locus Robotics today announced a $150 million Series E. The round, led by Tiger Global Management and Bond, brings the firm’s total to around $250 to date, and values the robotics company at $1 billion. Locus is notable for a more modular and flexible solution for automating warehouses than many of its competitors (see: Berkshire Grey). The company essentially leases out robotic fleet for organizes looking to automate logistics.
“We can change the wings on the plane while it’s flying,” CEO Rick Faulk tells TechCrunch. Basically no one else can do that. Companies want flexible automation. They don’t want to bolt anything to the floor. If you’re a third-party logistics company and you have a two, three, four-year contract, the last thing you want to do is invest $25-$50 million to buy a massive solution, bolt it to the floor and be locked into all of this upfront expense.”
The company currently has some 4,000 robots deployed across 80 sites. Roughly 80% of its deployments are in the U.S., with the remaining 20% in Europe. Part of this massive funding round will go toward expanding international operations, including a bigger push into the EU, as well as the APAC region, where it presently doesn’t have much of a footprint.
The company will also be investing in R&D, sales and marketing and increasing its current headcount of 165 by 75 in the coming year.
The pandemic is clearly a driver in interest around this brand of automation, with more companies looking toward robotics for help.
“COVID has put a spike in the growth of online ordering, clearly, and that spike is probably a four to five year jump,” says Faulk. “If you look at the trend of e-commerce, it’s been on a steady upward tick. It was about 11% last year and COVID put a spike up to 16/17%. We think that genie’s out of the bottle, and it’s not going back any time soon.”
The funding round also points to a company that seemingly has no desire to be acquired by a larger name, akin to Kiva Systems’ transformation into Amazon Robotics.
“We have no interest in being acquired,” the CEO says. “We think we can build the most and greatest value by operating independently. There are investors that want to invest in helping everyone that’s not named ‘Amazon’ compete.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/17/locus-robotics-has-raised-a-150m-series-e/
