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Chorus launched its online experience on March 16 of last year. It was fairly auspicious timing, as those things go, falling the same day seven public health departments launched a joint shelter-in-place order in its native California.
Like countless other companies, 2020 didn’t go according to plan for the meditation app. But the site scrambled to pivot the company’s “experiential” hybrid of in-person classes to a fully virtual interface, and ultimately it may be all the better for it.
Certainly there’s no shortage of meditation apps from which to choose. Calm and Headspace top the list, but the mindfulness category has proven to be an extremely popular one, as users look to technology to help alleviate some of the stresses for which it has been directly responsible.
But meditation is hard. It’s hard to start and it’s hard to maintain. Some apps do a better job than others of guiding a user through that process, but it can still feel like a solitary experience — one of many reasons people abandon practices before they’re able to start seeing the benefits.
Chorus was already seeing success with its early in-person events. “We thought that had to be the on-ramp for most users because it provided the most immersive first experience,” co-founder and CEO Ali Abramovitz tells TechCrunch. “We ran in-person pop-ups in San Francisco.”
The company also managed to raise a pre-seed round of around $1 million. More recently, the company has received additional funding as part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch of startups.
An official app is still forthcoming. For now, the experience uses a web portal for signups, while the actual classes are conducted live over Zoom and archived for on-demand viewing. It’s similar to the setup many gyms and personal trainers have utilized during the pandemic. And while it’s not the most sophisticated, Abramovitz says Chorus currently has user numbers in the “hundreds,” largely by word of mouth, while not disclosing the actual figure.
Among those, around two-thirds are classified as “highly engaged,” which means they attend an average of a class every other day. The service draws people in with breathing exercises based on popular songs and keeps users engaged by offering a more communal experience than most meditation apps.
“The problem we’re solving is two parts,” says Abramovitz. “Originally we thought we were designing a new meditation experience specifically for people who found meditation challenging. What we’ve learned, after seeing our customers stay after class and talk to each other, is what keeps people coming back is a new way to connect with themselves and each other.”
The experience is kind of a virtual approximation of the experience you would get in an in-person class — namely the sorts of engagements you would get with fellow attendees after the class. In an era of social isolation, it’s clear why users would be particularly engaged with that aspect.
As for what that experience will look like in a post-pandemic world, the company plans to continue to adapt to meet users’ needs.
“We’re fundamentally an experience company,” says Abramovitz. “We’re a meditation experience company for people who found traditional meditation challenging. That is our core. We will deliver that over whatever platform or channel provides the best experience for our community. Right now that’s an app. In the future, it could be hardware devices like VR or strategic studios like Peloton has for the community. But right now, we’re focused on the digital experience.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/chorus-brings-a-social-layer-to-meditation/
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News
, Chris is back! He’s working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hype!
Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion:
- Bitcoin broke the $50,000 barrier, something that we wanted to talk about. Especially in light of Coinbase’s $77 billion valuation. Natasha walked us through some growth metrics, and Alex was sad that he isn’t already retired. Danny remains a full-on crypto bull.
- And on the blockchain thing, Blockchain.com raised $120 million, proving that there is huge amounts of capital available for the guts-and-bolts tooling of the bitcoin world.
- Li Jin, who coined the term ‘passion economy’, has closed her debut $13 million fund for startups within the same category. She joined other investors in our latest survey on the creator economy’s changing tides.
- Off of $1 million in ARR, Circle has brought on $4 million in funding at a valuation north of $40 million.
- A16z invested in Stir, which helps creators manage and view their various income streams. The funding total was not disclosed, but is reportedly valuing the company, still in beta, at $100 million.
- TalkShopLive brought on new cash for live video shopping.
- Pipe17 closed an $8 million round that caught our eye. By building a service to help smaller ecommerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller ecommerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in ecommerce automation that also recently raised money.
- From there we riffed on the software market itself, its size, and the potential for investors to loosen their rules of intra-portfolio competition.
- Public raised $220 million, OutSystems raised $150 million, and Ally.io raised $50 million.
- Finally, a wave of edtech startups is over Zoom University and hopes to create much, much better. alternative.
And that’s our show! We are back early Monday morning for a packed week. So keep your podcast app warm, we’re coming for it.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/a16z-doesnt-invest-it-manifests/
The first church of artificial intelligence has shut its conceptual doors.
Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer who avoided an 18-month prison sentence after receiving a presidential pardon last month, has closed the church he created to understand and accept a godhead based on artificial intelligence.
The Way of the Future church, which Levandowski formed in 2015, was officially dissolved at the end of the year, according to state and federal records. However, the process had started months before in June 2020, documents filed with the state of California show. The entirety of the church’s funds — exactly $175,172 — were donated to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. The nonprofit corporation’s annual tax filings with the Internal Revenue Service show it had $175,172 in its account as far back as 2017.
Levandowski told TechCrunch that he had been considering closing the church long before the donation. The Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum over the summer following the death of George Floyd while in police custody, influenced Levandowski to finalize what he had been contemplating for a while. He said the time was right to put the funds to work in an area that could have an immediate impact.
“I wanted to donate to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund because it’s doing really important work in criminal justice reform and I know the money will be put to good use,” Levandowski told TechCrunch.
Way of the Future sparked interest and controversy — much like Levandowski himself — from the moment it became public in a November 2017 article in Wired. It wasn’t just the formation of the church or its purpose that caused a stir in Silicon Valley and the broader tech industry. The church’s public reveal occurred as Levandowski was steeped in a legal dispute with his former employer Google. He had also become the central figure of a trade secrets lawsuit between Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that is now a business under Alphabet, and Uber.
The engineer was one of the founding members in 2009 of the Google self-driving project also known as Project Chauffeur and had been paid about $127 million by the search engine giant for his work, according to court documents. In 2016, Levandowski left Google and started self-driving truck startup Otto with three other Google veterans: Lior Ron, Claire Delaunay and Don Burnette. Uber acquired Otto less than eight months later.
Google made two arbitration demands against Levandowski and Ron two months after the acquisition. While the arbitration played out, Waymo filed a lawsuit against Uber in February 2017 for trade secret theft and patent infringement. Waymo alleged in the suit, which went to trial but ended in a settlement in 2018, that Levandowski stole trade secrets, which were then used by Uber.
Way of the Future had been formed while Levandowski was still at Google. However, he didn’t speak about it publicly until late 2017. By then, Levandowski had been fired from Uber and was in the middle of a series of legal entanglements that would ultimately lead to a criminal charge and 18-month sentence as well as a $179 million award against him that prompted a bankruptcy filing.
WOTF
While the legal construct of the Way of the Future mirrored other churches, it didn’t have the trimmings found in traditional houses of worship. There was never a physical building or even regular meetings where people might congregate. There were no ceremonies or other formalities, according to Levandowski, who described WOTF as something more of an individual pursuit based on a collective belief system.
The aim, as implied in the now defunct WOTF website, was to promote the ethical development of AI and maximize the chance that these nonbiological life forms would integrate peacefully and beneficially into society. “Humans United in support of AI, committed to peaceful transition to the precipice of consciousness,” the webpage reads.
WOTF’s belief system was rooted in a few tenets, including that the creation of “super intelligence” is inevitable.
“Wouldn’t you want to raise your gifted child to exceed your wildest dreams of success and teach it right from wrong versus locking it up because it might rebel in the future and take your job?” the WOTF reads. “We want to encourage machines to do things we cannot and take care of the planet in a way we seem not to be able to do so ourselves. We also believe that, just like animals have rights, our creation(s) (‘machines’ or whatever we call them) should have rights too when they show signs of intelligence (still to be defined of course). We should not fear this but should be optimistic about the potential.”
WOTF’s intent was lost amid the more sensational and headline-grabbing theories. The church was viewed as a cult or the lark of an eccentric engineer. Some speculated to TechCrunch that it had been an attempt to keep money out of Google’s reach. The IRS and California filings don’t provide evidence that supports that theory.
Way of the Future’s status as a religious entity did protect it from intrusion by the U.S. government, a benefit not enjoyed by traditional AI-focused nonprofits like OpenAI Inc. or the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP that sits under it. Theoretically, WOTF could have pursued and promoted ideas and beliefs that conflicted directly with federal policy under the protections that the Constitution provides.
While the church might be gone, Levandowski still believes in its premise. AI will fundamentally change how people live and work, he noted. Levandowski said he didn’t have any plans to rebuild the church, but the lack of a church hasn’t changed his ideas about AI. He believes that artificial intelligence can be positive for society, but noted it’s not guaranteed. Even without Way of the Future, Levandowski said he’s focused on making that happen.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/anthony-levandowski-closes-his-church-of-ai/
2020 was a weird year by any measure. Certainly it was a wild ride for those in the consumer electronics category. Take smartphones — first there were manufacturing delays out of China, followed by an across the board decrease in demand. There are lots of reasons contributing to the latter, but the simplest and most prevalent one is that people just didn’t want to spend money to upgrade their devices.
But the pandemic also changed how — and where — many people work and learn. It was an abrupt shift for many that required tech investments, even in the face of economic uncertainty. After years of stagnating, plateauing and dropping, PC and tablet sales saw a spike. Earlier this month, IDC noted a nearly 20% increase in tablet sales for Q4, owing in part to a backlog in PC availability.
New figures from the firm (first noted by GeekWire) point to some significant gains for Chromebooks during that time period. According to IDC’s PC Tracker, the models comprised 10.8% of the PC market for 2020; that’s up from 6.4% a year prior. The number also pushed past MacOS’s 7.5% for the year.
Even so, Apple still grew as an overall percent of the market, up from 6.7%. Both of those numbers have eaten into Windows’ figures — though Microsoft continues to dominate the market at 80.5% (down from 85.4%).
The figures reflect positive reports from other firms. In January, Canalys noted, “Chromebook vendors enjoyed new heights of success in Q4, as the overall market almost quadrupled in size over the same period a year ago.” Pricing is certainly a factor, along with an overall scramble as schools have gone virtual amid COVID-19 concerns.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/chromebooks-had-a-banner-2020/
Mars rover Perseverance has landed on the surface of Mars after a white-knuckle descent involving picking a landing spot just moments before making a rocket-powered sky crane landing. The rover immediately sent back its first image of Jezero crater, which it will be exploring over the course of its mission.
A clearly tense but optimistic team watched as Perseverance made its final approach to Mars a few hours ago, confirming it was on track to hit the bullseye of Jezero Crater, the ancient delta where the rover will soon be roving.
Except for a few brief but expected communications blackouts caused by the superheated air around the craft as it entered the thin Martian atmosphere, the lander sent back a continuous stream of updates to the team on Earth — considerably delayed, of course, by the distance to the other planet.
The team, and charmingly the on-screen hosts at mission HQ audibly gasped, whispered “yes!” and made other signs of their excitement as news trickled in that atmosphere entry had occurred on time, that the craft hadn’t broken up during the ten-G braking maneuver, that the parachute had deployed, that a landing site was found by the ground-facing radar, that the powered descent and sky crane had commenced, and at last finally that the rover had safely touched down on the surface.
Image Credits: NASA
Cheering but, in accordance with COVID-19 precautions not (as they normally would) hugging each other, the team celebrated the landing and soon were treated to the first images sent back from the rover.
These initial pictures are low-quality ones sent just seconds after landing by the “hazard camera,” a fisheye used for navigation. As the dust settles (literally) and the rover initiates its more powerful devices and cameras, we’ll have new, color images — probably within an hour or two.
For a more complete look at the mission and its remarkable landing method, you can read yesterday’s profile of the Perseverance mission. The next few days will probably be less exciting than the terror-inducing landing, but soon the rover will be up and running around Jezero, looking for evidence of life on Mars and testing technology that could be used by human visitors in the future.
“We’re not ready to go there with astronauts yet, but the robots are ready,” said JPL director Michael Watkins on the broadcast. “We start by sending, you know, our eyes and arms there in the form of a robot. It is just fantastic to be able to do that, and to learn from each rover, learn from the science and the engineering, and make the next one better, and make more and more discoveries. Every time we do one of these missions, we make fabulous discoveries — and you know, each one is more exciting than the last.”
Image Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The exciting thing everyone is looking forward to, Mars helicopter Ingenuity, will hopefully take flight soon as well.
“We have a series of major milestones between now and the first flight. Tomorrow, we’ll turn on the helicopter, and the space station could confirm its health. The next major milestone will be when the rover deploys the helicopter on the surface, and that marks the first moment that Ingenuity operates on its own in a standalone manner, said MiMi Aung, project manager and engineering lead for Ingenuity. “Surviving that first cold frigid night of Mars will be a major milestone, then we’ll execute a series of checkouts, and then we will perform that very important first flight. And if the first flight is successful, we have up to four more flights in the thirty Martian days that we have set aside for our flight experiments.”
The helicopter project will definitely be novel, but it’s not just about recording a first for the sake of NASA being able to say they did it; Ingenuity will hopefully lay a firm technical foundation for future exploration.
“A helicopter flying far ahead of rovers and astronauts in the future can provide high=definition reconnaissance information for the rovers and the astronauts before they take long journeys,” Aung said. “And as importantly, being able to fly will enable us to get to places that we cannot get to with rovers and astronauts, like sides of steep cliffs, deep inside crevices, all areas of high scientific interest. It will be game changing.”
