Technology

Support pilot fish gets an escalated trouble ticket: A divisionweb-based application has stopped working, and itcritical to get it working again.

&It stopped working about the same time that engineering implemented some new security settings,& says fish. &Some checking and testing shows the new security settings are to blame.

&Engineeringrecommendation: Add the web server to the ‘trusted sites& list. Thatno good, says the on-site IT guy.&

But if thatno good, theregoing to be a lot of red tape involved in getting a security setting reversed once itbeen directed by headquarters. A manager in engineering tells fish privately that he has never gotten one of these requests past the security group.

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Petnet, the smart pet feeder backed by investors including Petco, recently experienced a week-long system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders. While the startupcustomer service tweeted over the weekend that its SmartFeeders and appfunctionality have been restored, Petnetlack of responsiveness continues to leave many customers frustrated and confused.

Petnet first announced on Feb. 14 that it was investigating a system outage affecting its second-generation SmartFeeders that made the feeders appear to be offline. The company said in a tweet that the SmartFeeders were still able to dispense on schedule, but several customers replied that their devices had also stopped dispensing food or weren&t dispensing it on schedule.

On Feb. 19, the company said that it is &working closely with our third-party service provider in regards to the outage,& before announcing on Feb. 22 that the SmartFeeders are returning online.

During that time, customers voiced frustration at the companylack of responses to their questions on Twitter and Facebook. Messages to the companysupport email and CEO Carlos Herrera were undeliverable.

TechCrunch tried contacting their emails and got delivery failure notices. A message sent to their Twitter account was also not replied to. We have contacted the company again for comment.

Petnet also experienced a similar system outage last month.

According to Crunchbase, Petnet.io has raised $14.9 million since it was founded in 2012, including a Series A led by Petco.

In a statement sent to TechCrunch over the weekend before Petnet said the outage was resolved, a Petco representative said &Petco is a minor and passive investor in Petnet, but we do not have any involvement in the companyoperations nor insight into the system outage they are currently experiencing.

With Windows 7's retirement from support now behind everyone, the next major marker for a Microsoft expiration arrives in a little less than 10 months, when Office 2010 falls off the servicing list.

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Chattermill, the London startup that offers what it calls a &customer understanding& platform that uses machine learning to gain scalable insights into customer feedback, has raised $8 million in Series A funding.

Leading the round is DN Capital, alongside Ventech and btov Partners. Silicon Valley Bank also participated, in addition to a number of angel investors including Matt Price (Senior Vice President at Zendesk), and Nilan Peiris (VP Growth at Transferwise). Existing investors Entrepreneur First, Avonmore Developments and 2be.lu also followed on.

I&m also told that Price, who previously led Zendeskgrowth in EMEA, will join the Chattermill board as Non-Executive Director.

Co-founded by Mikhail Dubov and Dmitry Isupov in 2015 while going through the company builder program run by Entrepreneur First, Chattermill was born out of a frustration that it can take weeks or months for customer research to yield any quality insights, which would then be out of date by the time it reached decision-makers and action could be taken. Like many problems of scale, the pair believed machine learning could be an important part of the solution, coupled with an accessible user interface that surfaces customer feedback across multiple channels in an actionable way.

Since then, Chattermillplatform has been used by a number of high-growth companies, such as HelloFresh, Uber, Deliveroo, and Zappos. London fintech darling Transferwise was also an earlier customer — so perhaps unsurprising that its VP of Growth is now an investor.

Comments TransferwisePeiris: &Chattermill enables our team to take customer insights deeper than ever before and focus on the key factors that make a difference to our users and drive our growth. I&ve seen first-hand the value a product like Chattermillcan add to a company and thatwhy I decided to invest in this round&.

Agonistic to where the customer feedback is generated, Chattermill integrates with lots of third-party software, aggregating various feedback such as surveys, reviews, support tickets, and social media.

&We have built a large library of pre-built connections to the most popular customer feedback systems such as SurveyMonkey, Trustpilot, Zendesk and Salesforce,& explains Chattermill co-founder Mikhail Dubov.

&A new customer would usually connect a few of these data sources to start with. We then build a model to understand their customer experience from both the data we see and knowledge already embedded in our system. Once this is done, we can start delivering analytics and insights directly to their users in real time and with high accuracy, enabling businesses to make better-informed decisions at a faster speed and scale&.

Asked what assumptions Chattermill got right after raising its seed round in December 2017, Dubov says two key strategies have panned out well. One was to go after &customer-focused& businesses at the start, and the other was to double down on the depth of insights and the productease of use versus &over-investing& in specific machine learning technologies.

&This meant our offering became even more powerful as NLP made a huge step forward in the last two years with models such as GPT and BERT,& Dubov explains. &We were able to swap out parts of our model to improve quickly rather than being attached to a specific architecture&.

However, not everything was foreseen, and Dubov says he didn&t anticipate how much the tech landscape around customer experience would change. &With the acquisitions of Qualtrics and IPOs from Medallia and SurveyMonkey, we now see a lot more attention to the sector from both customers and investors,& he says. &We also see a lot more interest in extracting insight from customer conversations via chat and voice than we did two years ago&.

Sony has announced its first 5G smartphone: The Xperia 1 II — which, for the curious and/or confused, is pronounced ‘Xperia One, Mark Two&. Which isn&t at all confusing, er.

&No one understands the entertainment experience better than Sony,& said president of mobile communications, Mitsuya Kishida, claiming the company is &uniquely positioned& in the era of 5G cellular technology to offer its target users an &enriched& experience thanks to Sonyextensive content portfolio.

&Whether you are a broadcast professional who requires dynamic speed or an everyday user who desires enhanced entertainment Xperia with 5G takes your mobile experience to the next level,& he said.

As ever with Sony — a major b2b supplier of image sensors to other smartphone makers (rather than a major seller of its own phones) — itmade the camera a huge focus for the new Android 10 flagship, which has a 6.5in 21:9 &CinemaWide& 4K HDR OLED (3840×1644) display and is powered by a Qualcomm 865 Snapdragon chip (with 8GB of RAM on board).

Round the back the Xperia 1II packs three lenses which offer a selection of focal lengths (16mm, 24mm and 70mm) for capturing different types of photos — from super wide angle to portraits.

All three rear lenses have a 12MP sensor, while round the front therean 8MP lens. Sony is also using Zeiss optics for the first time in a smartphone, expanding a long-running collaboration to a new device type.

Talking up the camera, Kishida touted ultrafast low light autofocus, noting too that it supports 20fps autofocus and auto-tracking burst (which he called a world first in a smartphone) — for capturing crisp action shots.

&Our new continuous auto focus keeps tracking moving subjects. Whatspecial about this is with 20fps it calculates the object 3x per frame — that60x per second — capturing the very moment,& he said.

&With the power and speed of 5G you will be able to share those moments more quickly and more easily across the network,& he added.

Another photo-friendly feature is real-time eye auto focus. Sony demoed this by showing it working on a video of a cat playing with a toy. So, tl;dr, Sony has trained its model on data-sets of pets too, not just humans.

A ‘Photo Pro& interface on the handset, meanwhile, has been designed to be familiar to users of Sonymirrorless Alpha cameras — letting photographers tune shots via access to tweakable parameters they&re used to using on Sonyhigh end digital cameras.

Sony is paying the same mind to video makers, with a video editing interface on the device that offers features such as touch autofocus and custom white balance — which Kishida said will help &visual storytellers& control the camera more easily.

Therealso a noise reduction feature to improve audio capture.

Best of all, the Xperia 1II has a 3.5mm headphone jack — enabling audiophiles to enjoy the simple pleasure of plugging in their favorite pair of high-end wired headphones and tuning out everything else.

Kishida flagged the use of an AI technology, called DSEE Ultimate, which he said upscales the sound signal to &near high resolution audio& — including when streaming. &This the best on the go acoustic experience available,& he claimed.

On the games front he touted a collaboration that will let users of the device play a mobile optimized version of Call of Duty using Play Station 4Dualshock 4 wireless controller.

The handset, meanwhile, packs a 4,000mAh battery as well as fast wireless charging.

Per Kishida the Xperia 1II will start shipping from Spring onwards, though itnot yet clear which markets Sony will be bringing the device to (last year the companymobile division was reported to have defocused most of the global market in a bid to focus on profitability).

The Xperia 1II may have a fairly niche target buyer, as Sony is a relative bit player in consumer smartphone sales vs giants like Samsung and Huawei, but is intended to act as a showcase for what the companycamera technologies can offer other mobile makers.

Sonymobile chief was making the announcements at a virtual press conference screened via YouTube after the company became one of the first big companies to pull out of attending the Mobile World Congress tradeshow.

MWCorganizer, the GSMA, subsequently cancelled the annual mobile industry event, which had been due to take place in Barcelona this week, after scores of exhibitors said they would not attend — citing public health concerns attached to the novel coronavirus.

MWC typically attracts more than 100,000 visitors across four days. So the sight of Sonypress conference being streamed to an empty room — entirely devoid of cameras, claps or woos but still with built in pauses for the media to take photos of the new hardware — was more than a little surreal.

Kishida had another 5G handsets to tease: aka the Xperia Pro — a flagship handset aimed at video professionals. It features 5G mm wavelength technology for improved capability to stream high-resolution video, as well as a handy micro HDMI port for easy plugging in of other high end camera kit.

Sony touted tests itdone with US carrier Verizon (aka TechCrunchparent company) to use the forthcoming 5G handset for live streaming of live sports events.

&Sonyexpertise and long history in providing profession digital imaging solutions is very unique,& added Kishida. &Only Sony has such deep and well established relationships and we are bringing decades of experience to an end-to-end solution — from professional content creation to mobile communications technology in 5G.&

There was a mid range smartphone announcement too, also shipping from Spring onwards: The Xperia 10 II packs a 6in display and also features a triple lens camera as well as water resistance.

Cobee, a Spanish fintech startup that has developed an employee benefit management app and accompanying card, has closed €2.1 million in &pre-Series A& funding.

The round was co-led by Speedinvest, and Target Global. Other backers include Chris Bouwer (co-founder of Adyen) and existing investors Encomenda Smart Capital, BStartup (Banco Sabadell), Lanai Partners and Abac Nest.

Founded in 2018 by Borja Aranguren and Daniel Olea, Cobee aims to help employees &leverage better economic performance& from their salary via a range of employee benefits and discounts offered through the platform. These are managed within the Cobee app and redeemed through use of the Cobee payment card.

The draw for companies signing up is that Cobee already claims its platform has higher engagement than many existing employee benefit programmes. And by being a fully digital and automated solution, there is considerably less administration needed to manage the programme.

&We realized that there is an increasing number of solutions that are being sold as benefits or products to the end employees through their HR department (gyms, insurance products, perks, vouchers, salary sacrifice formulas, etc.),& Cobee co-founder and CEO Borja Aranguren tells TechCrunch. &This, on the one hand, means administrative hassle for the HR departments to manage all the different providers and processes and, most importantly, on the other hand, brings a totally fragmented and unclear value proposition for the employee&.

With this problem in mind, Aranguren and Olea set out to build Cobee, which the pair describe as a fintech HR solution that empowers employees to consume their compensation and benefits on-demand.

&All our efforts are focused on making employees feel happy about their benefits, trying to unify the value proposition in an understandable and easy to use formula,& Aranguren explains. &For the companies, we offer an easy-to-use SaaS platform to configure their benefit offering and upload their employees. For the employees, it is an app and a payment card to consumer those benefits as they like, with funds coming from a company subsidy or from their own salary&.

The current Cobee offering includes benefits like meals, transportation, childcare, health insurance and training courses. Additional options, such as gym membership, are said to be coming in the next few months.

&Our product can cater for companies of all sizes, from SMEs or startups to large corporations of any sector,& adds Aranguren. &However, our main target segment are those companies ranging between 50 to 5,000 employees. We have customers and users like Petronas, Avis Budget Group, Auto1 Group, Opinno, Glovo, and Willis Towers Watson&.

Meanwhile, Cobee says it will use the new funding to &scale up its business model& in Spain and expand into international markets. To support its mission to become a European category leader, the company plans to strengthen its team and enhance its platform by integrating new products and benefits.

The business model is straightforward, too: Cobee charges companies a SaaS fee per active employee. &We follow a pure success-based approach and we only win if the employees win, which, after all, makes the companies win,& says the Cobee CEO. &Besides that, we leverage purchasing volumes to build a marketplace that we can monetize and that also allows us to create savings that can be transferred to our end customers/employees&.