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The FDA has its eye on Juul Labs, the e-cigarette company that has captured nearly half of the $2 billion e-cig market.

Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced a new initiative called the Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan. While the agency is focused on making sure kids don’t have easy access to any e-cigs, the Juul vaporizer seems to be of particular concern to them.

As part of the initiative, the FDA has sent a request for information to Juul Labs in an effort to understand why young people are so attracted to the product.

Over the past year, a number of reports have suggested that teen vape use, especially with the Juul, is steeply on the rise.

The request is for documents related to “product marketing; research on the health, toxicological, behavioral or physiologic effects of the products, including youth initiation and use; whether certain product design features, ingredients or specifications appeal to different age groups; and youth-related adverse events and consumer complaints associated with the products.”

In response, Juul Labs issued a press release announcing its plan to combat underage use. The strategy includes an initial investment of $30 million over the next three years going towards independent research, youth and parent education and community engagement efforts. Juul Labs also said it will support federal and state initiatives to raise the legal minimum purchase age to 21+. The company website has required that purchasers be 21 or older since August 2017.

Here’s what Juul CEO Kevin Burns had to say about it:

Our company’s mission is to eliminate cigarettes and help the more than one billion smokers worldwide switch to a better alternative. We are already seeing success in our efforts to enable adult smokers to transition away from cigarettes and believe our products have the potential over the long-term to contribute meaningfully to public health in the U.S. and around the world. At the same time, we are committed to deterring young people, as well as adults who do not currently smoke, from using our products. We cannot be more emphatic on this point: No young person or non-nicotine user should ever try JUUL.

Juul Labs is not the only organization that the FDA is cracking down on. The agency said it had sent out 40 warning letters to retailers selling e-cigs, including the Juul, to minors. Some of those retailers were caught as the result of a ‘blitz’ that has been underway since the beginning of April.

The agency has also asked eBay to take down all listings of Juul vaporizers, which run the risk of being sold to minors.

Alongside the FDA’s request for information from Juul Labs, the agency is also sending out similar letters to other e-cig manufacturers.

Dolo is the kindness of strangers as an app. Where’s the prettiest place in the park? What’s the best thing on the menu? How do I skip the line? Dolo lets you leave helpful suggestions for anyone nearby. The new social app launches out of beta today to augment the world with serendipitous tips from strangers. Built by two ex-Apple employees and backed with pre-seed funding from Floodgate, Dolo could reveal the secrets and potential friends hidden in the ether around us.

Like any new social app, Dolo will have a steep uphill climb to user growth. There are also apps like Foursquare, guide books like Lonely Planet and social networks like Facebook and its Recommendations feature to compete with. But they’re often bloated, outdated or unfocused. Dolo hopes to build a new community around turning the whole world into a bulletin board.

“If you take the construct of a cocktail party or a neighborhood bar, people feel more naturally ‘allowed’ to just mingle, eavesdrop, start a conversation or even meet someone new,” says Dolo co-founder and CEO Raja Haddad. “In larger spaces (a park, a neighborhood, a city), there are no vehicles today that allow such frictionless, comfortable, fun socializing.” That means a local expert’s knowledge ends up trapped while tourists and first-timers wander aimlessly.

Haddad and co-founder Benjamin Vigier met when they joined Apple in 2010 and worked on its Apple Store App before Haddad move on to Apple Watch marketing and Vigier helped develop Apple Pay. They later met Andy Mai at Coachella, who grew the Men’s Fashion Advice subreddit to more than a million users. Together they set out “to enable serendipitous ways for people to socialize with other people around them, regardless of their pre-existing social bubbles.”

Dolo’s iOS and Android apps are now open everywhere, but it’s currently focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area, where it centered its 4,000-user beta. The app starts with a feed of the closest tips that automatically re-sort as you move around. Anyone can post that “I need some info or a favor,” “folks need to know this,” “I’m proposing an event,” or “just chatter and banter.” For example, my first contribution was that you can skip the line at famously overpopulated ice cream shop Bi-Rite Creamery by walking down the block to its soft-serve froyo window near SF’s Dolores Park.

That popular hipster picnic spot is actually where Dolo gets its name. And no, it’s not the same as the now defunct “bespoke app” called Dolo from 2013 that just helped you locate your friends in that park.

I was impressed by Dolo’s approach to safety and moderation that other anonymous and hyper-local apps like Yik Yak and Secret neglected until bullying led to their demise. You can use your real name or a pseudonym on Dolo, and choose a pixelated filter or mask sticker to obscure your face from the public. But then if you connect as friends with someone on the app, “the masks come off,” Haddad says, and your profile’s bio is revealed. Meanwhile, users are empowered to moderate comments on their own posts by getting alerted to flags that Dolo reviews too. And all photos get reviewed by a crowdsourced moderation service.

Dolo smartly plans to “focus on achieving density versus going directly for top-line scale,” Haddad explains. That mirrors Facebook’s growth strategy that tried to get lots of users at specific colleges or locations so they don’t enter a ghost town, rather than immediately striving for global scale. It’s already raised $680,000 in a pre-seed round a year ago, but will try to raise a seed round early this summer. It hopes to put that cash into product development, and marketing activations at colleges and public places in the fall. 

Advertisers might be keen to reach potential customers when they’re super close-by and looking for local information. But that will require plenty of users, as well as a tough-to-scale local ads sales team. Haddad admits, “It’s obviously very challenging to get a social platform off the ground, particularly one that relies on location and density.”

Nextdoor has at least proven that people are interested in local info, given it’s active in 160,000 neighborhoods. The question is if an app designed to alert you to what’s around you anywhere, rather than just close to home, will have the same legs. Dolo will also have to outlast specialized apps like Wildfire for celebrity sightings and safety alerts, Citizen for crime mapping and Hive Social for interest-based communities.

It’s somewhat depressing, but an app like Facebook that already has ubiquity, frequent use and local ad relationships might be better equipped to build this product than a startup. Dolo will have to figure out how to make adding and observing tips a constant enough behavior that users don’t forget about it.

But at least Dolo isn’t burdened by a hundred other features crowding out the local recommendations for attention, nor is it constrained by relying on your existing friend graph. A dedicated app for the insights of passersby holds the promise of not only illuminating what’s around us, but also mending our polarized society.

Netflix and BuzzFeed News are teaming up for a 20-episode documentary series called Follow This.

According to Variety, the show will be less focused on breaking news and more on taking us behind the scenes to show how BuzzFeed News reporters put together specific stories. For example, in the clip below, BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul talks about her reporting around ASMR.

Follow This will be produced by BuzzFeed News, with Jessica Harrop serving as showrunner and one of its executive producers. When it premieres on July 9, it won’t follow Netflix’s standard release strategy. Instead, a new 15-minute episode will come out every week.

Netflix executives have been emphatic about wanting to stay out of the live news business, but the streaming service has introduced more news- and reality-based programming over the past few years, including documentaries (like an upcoming film from Vice Media’s Motherboard) and talk shows.

BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has been creating video series for a variety of channels, including its AM to DM series for Twitter. The company told Variety it’s also pitching cable networks on a nightly news show.

Gentek's position as a leading Canadian distributor of VoIP solutions and phone systems is a great fit for Edgewater Networks' Network Edge Orchestration platform,” said Steve Pattison, Chief Operating Officer for Edgewater Networks. “We look forward to working with Gentek and its resellers to deliver a ...

If your company lets you expense the nicest hotel when you travel, why wouldn’t you?

But what if you got to split the savings with your employer by selecting a less expensive hotel?

A New York-based startup called Rocketrip believes most employees will opt to save companies money if they are incentivized to do so. It’s built an enterprise platform that rewards employees with gift cards if they go under budget on travel and transportation.

After five years of signing up business clients like Twitter and Pandora, Rocketrip is raising $15 million in Series C funding led by GV (Google Ventures) to keep expanding. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Canaan Partners are also in the round.

Inspired by Google’s internal travel system, Rocketrip CEO Dan Ruch calls his solution a “behavioral change platform.” Employees “always optimize for self-preservation, self-interest,” and are likely to book a cheaper flight if it means a gift card at a place like Amazon, Bloomingdale’s or Home Depot, Ruch claims. He said that the average business trip booked by Rocketrip saves companies $208.

Ruch believes that Rocketrip has built a currency that motivates teams. He says some employees even gift Rocketrip points to congratulate colleagues on birthdays and promotions.

When it comes to enterprise platforms, Rocketrip is “one of those unique situations where everyone is really excited to use it,” said Canaan Partners’ Michael Gilroy, who holds a board seat.

Yet Rocketrip is not the only startup looking to help employees make money by cutting on costs. TripActions and TravelBank have also created similar businesses. 

Gilroy insists that “Rocketrip was first” and that he views the others a “validation of the model.”

Rocketrip hopes to someday expand beyond travel to incentivize healthcare choices, like quitting smoking. It also thinks companies will use Rocketrip points to reward employees for community service. “Any time we can motivate an employee,” there’s an opportunity for Rocketrip, Ruch believes.

The 911 emergency response system was designed for landline phones, meaning a VoIP phone service that offers enhanced 911 will always be able to accurately and immediately provide your location to first responders. As many as 95% of cell phones can't accurately share their location with 911 ...

Gfycat is already a pretty popular host for lots of content like short clips from shows and movies, but there’s also a pretty substantial store of content centered around gaming — which is why the company is starting to put some extra focus on it.

Gfycat, which is centered around creator tools to make those short-form video clips and GIFs, said it’s going to create an interface specifically designed for gamers. Called “Gfycat for gaming,” the startup hopes to ride both the wave of ever-omnipresent GIFs getting shared around the internet and popular, highly shareable game titles like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Rocket League. GIFs serve as a pretty good vehicle for delivering highlight reel clips for those games, which is why it’s going to be putting some extra focus on that audience. Gaming is one of the most popular verticals on Gfycat, CEO Richard Rabbat said.

“As we were looking at different verticals, gaming is such a strong vertical, and we wanted gamers to get an experience that just really speaks to what they’re looking for,” he said. “We wanted to just focus on that as opposed to content that was much more mixed. You see a lot of teams or players that will play for hours, but that exciting moment was like 10 seconds or 20 seconds. They want to capture them and keep them, to chat about them, and share them.”

While the platforms are certainly a big component of this, creator tools for getting that content onto the Internet is also a pretty big segment. That’s what Gfycat focuses on, and the company says it has 180 million monthly active users, which is up from 130 million monthly active users in October last year. The service has more than 500 million page views every month, Rabbat said.

There are two changes that are coming with this update: first, there will be a direct home for gaming highlights on Gfycat, where users can follow creators in that area; second, the time limit for Gfycat clips is growing to around 60 seconds instead of just 15, which is a soft change the company made in the past few months. Both are geared toward making content more shareable in order to grab those highlights, which might not just fall into 15 second buckets. Down the line, the company will start working on subscribing to specific channel.

“A lot of gaming moments are created in 10 or 15 seconds,” Rabbat said. “Some of the gamers have been asking us for a longer period. We moved from 15 seconds to 60 seconds so people can share exciting experiences that take a little more time. GIFs are not only just a moment but also it’s a bit of storytelling. We wanted people to have the ability to do that storytelling.”

GIFs are already a big market, and there has even been some activity from the major players looking to dive further into that type of content. Earlier this month, Google acquired Tenor, a GIF platform that has its own keyboard and integrates with a variety of messenger services — even ones like LinkedIn. That a tool like Tenor or Giphy has grown to encompass all those messaging tools is just a further example of how much of an opportunity platforms centered around GIFs have.

The short-form video clips, as Gfycat likes to label them, are a good form factor for compressing a lot of information into a unit of content that’s easy to share among friends or an audience on the Internet. Rather than just sending a text message, a GIF can convey some element of emotion alongside just the typical information or response some user is trying to achieve. That’s led to a big boom for those companies, with Tenor hitting 12 billion GIF searches every month as an example.

Over the top Content Market (OTT), Content type (VoIP, Images, Videos), Deployment (Cloud and On Premise), Device/Platform (Gaming consoles, Smartphones and Tablets) - Global Forecast 2023. Market Scenario: The world over, millions are consuming over the top (OTT) content through varied ...

Dropbox is a critically important tool for more than 500 million people, which is why we’re so excited to have founder and CEO Drew Houston on the Disrupt stage in September.

Dropbox launched back in 2007 and Houston has spent the last decade growing Dropbox to the behemoth it is today.

During that time, Houston has made some tough decisions.

A few years ago, Houston decided to move the Dropbox infrastructure off of AWS. In 2014, Houston chose to raise $500 million in debt financing to keep up pace with Box, which was considering an IPO at the time. And in March 2017, Dropbox took another $600 million in debt financing from JP Morgan.

Houston also reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple.

All the while, Houston led Dropbox to be cash-flow positive and grew the company to see a $1 billion revenue run rate as of last year.

And, of course, we can’t forget the decision to go public earlier this year.

Interestingly, Houston first told his story to a TechCrunch audience at TC50 in 2008 as part of the Startup Battlefield. In fact, you can check out the original pitch from TC50 right here.

At Disrupt SF in September, we’re excited to sit down with Houston to discuss his journey thus far, the decision to go public and the future of Dropbox.

The show runs from September 5 to September 7, and for the next week, our super early-bird tickets are still available.

Kubernetes has gained in popularity quickly over the last 18 months, but like many highly technical solutions it requires a level of expertise many companies are lacking. A Bangalore/San Francisco startup called Hasura hopes to simplify all of that with a managed Kubernetes solution built with developers in mind.

Today, the company announced a $1.6 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from GREE Ventures.

Kubernetes is a tool that helps companies running containers juggle or orchestrate them. This level of organization is required because the number of containers can grow quickly. If you think of a conductor telling the musicians when to come in and when to leave, Kubernetes plays a similar role for the container system. (For a more complete explanation of containers, see this article.)

The company has focused on getting developers up to speed with the latest technologies quickly. “Our focus from the beginning has been making the application development super fast. How we do that is placing our APIs on top of a PostGres database to deploy any kind of code,” Tanmai Gopal, Hasura CEO and co-founder explained.

Gopal says the idea is to be more than a managed Kubernetes provider by giving developers the tooling they need to get going without having to build the underlying code for every application. “We are going to be the last mile. We’re not just managing the Kubernetes cluster for you. You should have Kubernetes to have control [over your containerized applications], but you also need developer tooling to build on top of it faster,” he said. “We want to automate the unnecessary code writing kind of grunt work. We started off by saying, ‘let’s automate this piece so you don’t have to write this code again’,” he added.

Once they wrote that piece, they realized that this is relevant because this approach enables cloud native in way that wasn’t possible before. “We suddenly realized we were in the right place at the right time, and part of it was luck,” Gopal admitted. It was also skill in providing a set of tools developers could use to build on top of Kubernetes.

Sameer Brij Verma, managing director at lead investor Nexus Venture Partners sees Kubernetes quickly becoming a foundational technology for developers and Hasura is providing a way to get up and running with little expertise. “Using Hasura’s platform, developers can now create cloud-native, portable and “elastic” applications within a few minutes without knowing anything about Kubernetes in the beginning,” Verma said in a statement.

The company launched last year and is split between Bangalore, India and San Francisco.

Rockerbox has acquired Eventable, bringing two digital marketing startups together.

Rockerbox’s technology includes attribution measurement to determine which ads are driving sales, as well as what it calls a Recency Marketing Platform, which targets advertising based on users’ most recent browsing behavior.

Eventable, meanwhile, is focused on bringing marketing to your calendar — its technology can be embedded in display ads, introducing an “add to calendar” button that allows marketers to send updates and personalized notifications to consumers who opt in.

Rockerbox founder and CEO Ron Jacobson said he connected with Eventable because both companies participated in the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (albeit in different years). When they started testing out ways to bring their services together, Jacobson said it became clear this was a “one plus one equals three situation.”

“Using the calendar as a marketing channel made perfect sense,” Jacobson said. “And on the attribution side, the calendar is another touch point.”

He added that Eventable co-founders Sameen Karim and Akash Malhotra are joining Rockerbox, along with their entire team.

The plan is for Eventable to continue operating as a separate brand and product. At the same time, the team will look for ways to integrate their products and to sell Eventable customers on Rockerbox’s broader marketing suite.

“It allows us to give our customers a more complete marketing solution,” Karim said.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Eventable had raised $1.2 million in funding from investors, including Alchemist Accelerator, Right Side Capital, Steelhead Ventures, Russ Holdstein and Howard Love.

Healing America’s broken healthcare industry has been at the top of the priority list for almost every politician, entrepreneur and inventor for at least the past 40 years.

Costs continue to climb (roughly 5 percent this year) and spending is already 20 percent of the nation’s GDP. For the trillions of dollars Americans spend on healthcare, they’re getting declining services, more frequent ailments and a steadily diverging standard of care for the rich and the poor in the country.

Something needs to be done — and venture capitalists and some of the biggest names in finance led by Goldman Sachs are investing $74 million in a technology startup they see as a potential solution.

The company is Doctor On Demand, and its solution is video-based telemedicine.

The new funding, led by Goldman Sachs and Princeville Global (with participation from existing investors, including Venrock, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital), will be used to continue the company’s rapid expansion in the U.S. and abroad — and brings the company’s total financing to $160 million.

“This trend of consumerization, which we’re leading, is really going to result in much greater patient-driven healthcare experiences, which will save the patient a lot of money,” says company chief executive Hill Ferguson .

Ferguson knows that the arc of internet services bends toward on demand and he says that healthcare should be no different. “Most people have no idea they can see a board-certified physician on their phone from their bed while they’re sick at two in the morning with a five-minute wait time,” he says.

That’s essentially the service that Doctor On Demand provides.

While the company’s consultations aren’t a panacea for everything that ails the healthcare industry, Ferguson claims his company’s board-certified staff can handle 90 percent of the consultations that happen every day in urgent-care facilities and for $300 less than insurers currently pay out.

While the service started out as something that consumers had to pay out of pocket, it has now transitioned to a more seamless (and cheaper) option for customers — it’s covered by most major insurance carriers.

“We’ve shifted from being a cash pay virtual practice to more of an enterprise player. We’re driving most of our volume through health insurance plans and employers,” Ferguson says.

The company employs its own doctors and staffs its video consultation service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Ferguson says. Despite the workload — which sees the company’s virtual doctors consult with four patients each hour on average — the company’s 14-day readmission rate (a standard measure of effective diagnoses) is on par with brick and mortar services, Ferguson says.

Roughly 5 percent of the consultations involve patients who need to be referred to specialists, according to Ferguson.

The service also can refer patients to diagnostics and testing facilities to get blood work and other tests that can supplement an initial diagnosis.

Through its agreements with insurers, Doctor On Demand stipulates what kinds of conditions its video consultations can cover, and which ailments and maladies require immediate medical attention. Increasingly, customers are taking advantage of the company’s mental health services — an area that’s grown 240 percent since it was introduced, according to Ferguson.

Mental health is one growth area for the company, and its testing services provide another. In all, Ferguson thinks there’s a $50 billion addressable market in the U.S. alone. A figure, he says, that more than justifies the company’s $160 million (and counting) in funding.

Doctor On Demand isn’t profitable yet, and the new financing still sees the company valued under $1 billion, but Ferguson is confident about the future. “I gotta wear shades,” the chief executive said.

Austin, Texas-based BigCommerce has completed a big round of funding.

The growth-stage startup, which powers e-commerce sites for Sony, Toyota and 60,000 other merchants, has raised $64 million to accelerate its business. The investment was led by Goldman Sachs, with participation from General Catalyst, GGV Capital and Tenaya Capital. And it brings BigCommerce’s total raised to more than $200 million since it was founded in 2009.

BigCommerce has developed a template for its customers to launch websites with manageable shipping and payments tracking. It also makes it easy to cross-sell on Amazon, eBay and Facebook. The company claims it is able to help e-tailers cut down on costs by as much as 80 percent.

“Every product company, brand company, physical retailer on the planet has decided they need to get serious about e-commerce,” said Jeff Richards, managing partner at GGV about why he’s invested. It’s a “huge category with a very big business that’s doing extremely well.”

BigCommerce has built a robust business in the United States and Australia, and hopes to use the capital to expand further internationally. It sees an opportunity to build out its presence in Europe.

The company also recently built an integration with Instagram to make it easier for consumers to purchase directly via the app. BigCommerce also has partnerships with PayPal and Google and plans to double down on cross-platform opportunities.

While BigCommerce’s business resembles Shopify and Salesforce’s recently purchased Demandware, CEO Brent Bellm says that while the former focuses on small businesses and the latter targets large enterprises, BigCommerce’s sweet spot is somewhere in-between. It aims to build sites for brands with between $1 million and $50 million in revenue.

Yet BigCommerce’s own revenue numbers exceed that of the clients it is targeting. Bellm said the company is approaching $100 million in annualized revenue.

When asked about whether that meant the company is targeting an IPO, he said that BigCommerce is “on a track where that’s possible” and that he believed this financing would be “the last round as a private company.”

If Shopify’s stock performance is any indication, public investors are hot on the space. Shares have gone up more than 600 percent since its IPO in 2015.

Competitor Magento, on the other hand, was taken private after spinning off from eBay. Bellm believes that BigCommerce is better positioned to take advantage of a growing preference for SaaS business models.

VoIP Services Market Estimate–2022 analysis of a market is man essential matter for various key players for instance market participants , CEOs , market traders, merchants etc. VoIP Services market report includes updated marketing information which is important to monitor efficiency and make ...

Starling, the U.K. challenger bank founded by Anne Boden, continues to execute on its “marketplace banking” vision, adding integration with Aviva-backed online investment service Wealthify.

Starling already has an existing partnership with digital investing service Wealthsimple — meaning that the Starling Marketplace is getting a little more competitive — along with mortgage broker Habito, travel insurance provider Kasko, and receipts & loyalty partner Flux.

However, the Wealthify integration goes a little deeper than most of the current partnerships and represents the next phase of the Starling Marketplace. Unlike PensionBee, for example, which only shares high level data with the Starling app (e.g. the size of your pension pot), Wealthify data-sharing is two-way, meaning that you can authorise Starling to share a limited set of your Starling data with Wealthify to make it a lot easier to sign up to the investment service.

“When a customer clicks ‘add’ from within Starling, new Wealthify users are then asked if they’d like to securely share Starling data with Wealthify (e.g. name, DOB, address, etc as well as account number and sort code for setting up the direct debit, if they want),” Starling’s Chief Platform Officer Megan Caywood explains. “And if they say yes then that auto-populates many of the fields in the Wealthify setup”.

Furthermore, Caywood says Starling is looking to advance each of it partnerships to get to this two-way integration, where Starling customers can more easily access products and services and manage them on an ongoing basis.

More broadly, the idea behind marketplace banking is that your bank will provide you with access to a choice of third-party money-related apps and services. The battle between banks and fintechs isn’t a zero sum game. Partnerships are being forged at a rapid pace, either formally or simply through open APIs mandated by Open Banking/PSD2 legislation.

Meanwhile, Starling isn’t the only challenger bank or fintech in the U.K./Europe building out a marketplace banking vision, in some form or another. To varying degrees, the likes of Monzo, Revolut, Tandem, Curve, and Cleo, are also exploring similar ideas with the end goal to become your financial control centre.

The research report, titled VoIP Software Market Analysis 2018, covers the current as well as the future scenario of the global VoIP Software Industry. It evaluates the VoIP Software market based on SWOT analysis and Porter's Five Forces Model, which analyzes the degree of competition in the global ...

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The research report, titled VoIP Software Market Analysis 2018, covers the current as well as the future scenario of the China VoIP Software Industry. It evaluates the VoIP Software market based on SWOT analysis and Porter's Five Forces Model, which analyzes the degree of competition in the China ...

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Intelligent use by using a multi-purpose router combined with slower traditional broadbands would allow users to use 4G for urgent real time traffic or for services such as VoIP and video which need better speeds and switch to the slower traditional broadband non time critical solutions such as overnight ...