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FarmLogs raises $22 million
to make agriculture a more predictable business
Ann Arbor, Michigan-based FarmLogs has raised $22 million in a Series C round of funding for technology
that helps farmers monitor and measure their crops, predict profits, manage
risks from weather and pests and more. Naspers
Ventures led the round, joined by the company’s
earlier backers Drive
Capital, Huron
River Ventures, Hyde
Park Venture Partners,SV Angel and individual investors including Y Combinator president Sam Altman.
According to CEO and co-founder of
FarmLogs Jesse Vollmar, the company has invested heavily in satellite imagery
and data since it graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator in 2012. It
develops predictive models on top of that raw data to help farmers “program”
their fields, Vollmar says.
“We analyze fields all around the U.S.
all season long. We can highlight and alert farms when we see a problem
developing, and send them out to examine and fix things they never would have
caught on the ground. It’s all thanks to a multi-year history of performance
satellite imagery,” he explained.
In one recent case, FarmLogs was able to
help farmers who knew their neighbors were experiencing grasshopper
infestations to pinpoint the bugs in their own massive operation, and stop the
pests from spreading. In another typical case, FarmLogs users can see if
an irrigation system has stopped working properly and part of their field is
over- or under-watered, then go out and fix the system before washing away
expensive inputs, like fertilizers or organic pesticides.
Vollmar grew up in a farming community
and working for the family business, an organic corn farm. His company has
focused on row crops, including corn and soybeans, which make up the bulk of
agricultural production in the U.S. Vollmar said farmers like the company’s
mobile app and website because it gives them access to data science without
having to buy and install a bunch of new high-tech gear in their fields.
FarmLogs works with all matter of data gathered from the farm equipment that
agronomists do use, however, including tractors and other heavy equipment built
by John Deere, Holland, Case Corporation and others.
FarmLogs, which employs about 70
full-time, plans to use the new round of capital for further hiring, and to
make its technology known to even more row-crop farmers. With the funding
round, Naspers Ventures’ head of U.S. investments, Mike Katz, will join
FarmLogs board of directors.
The company’s main competition comes
from Monsanto-owned Climate Corp. and its Climate FieldView application.
JetBlue completes its rollout of Fly-Fi, with free high-speed
Wi-Fi on all planes
by Brian Heater (@bheater)
JetBlue today announced that it has officially completed its fleet-wide rollout of Fly-Fi, bringing free wireless internet to all of its
planes. The carrier first introduced the service in late 2013, bringing speeds
of around 12 to 15Mbps — far surprising the wireless offerings available on
other domestic flights at the time.
Along with installation on all of its
planes, JetBlue has also been adding in-flight streaming service partners,
including Amazon Video, part of a partnership between the two companies that
lets non-Prime members shop through Amazon’s offerings, while Prime members get
access to the usual content. A pretty good way for Amazon to get its hands on a
captive audience.
The Wi-Fi offering also gives users the
ability to stay connected from the gate to the plane, and vice versa — doing
away with the standard airline cruising altitude requirement to fire up the
wireless service. It’s night and day from the sluggish and pricey options
offered by airlines that rely on third-party services like Gogo, where in-flight
passes often cost around $19.
As the carrier also handily notes, it
also helped pioneer the now-standard back-of-the-seat TV sets in domestic
airlines.
Instagram
Stories hits 150M daily users, launches skippable ads
Instagram Stories now has as many users
as the last number announced by Snapchat, the app Instagram copied. And it’s
swiftly moving to monetize that massive audience. Along with the new 150
million daily user stat, Instagram today announced the launch of ads mixed into Stories. The unclickable five-second photo and 15-second
video ads appear between different people’s stories and can be easily skipped.
Instagram will also provide business accounts with analytics on the reach,
impressions, replies and exits of their Stories.
Monetizing the feature just five months after its August launch might seem premature and could potentially slow its
rapid growth. It hit 100 million dailies in
October thanks to Stories appearing atop the Instagram feed home screen instead
of a different tab or app.
Yet Stories now has the same user count as Instagram’s
feed did when it started showing ads in late 2013. It’s just that it took
Instagram, now with 600 million monthly and 300 million daily users, three
years to get there.
The new Story ads will eventually roll out globally on all interfaces,
but will first be tested over the next few weeks with a group of 30 partners,
including Capital One, General Motors, Nike and Netflix. Seventy percent of
Instagram users already follow a business, and one-third of the most-watched
Stories on Instagram were created by businesses, so the company thinks its
partners can make ads that won’t bore people into closing the app. They’ll be
able to check analytics on their Stories through the Insights button on their
profiles.
For now, Stories ads will be sold on a
cost-per-1000-impressions basis and priced via auction, with any length of view
counting as an impression rather than needing to play for three seconds to be
counted as a view (like Facebook videos). Currently there’s no option to click
or swipe up to open an advertiser’s website, but Instagram’s VP of business
James Quarles tells me “In the future people might want to buy
a click or buy a video view and those would be measured differently… We plan to
incorporate that in the coming months.”
Users won’t see any signs of the ads
until they watch through multiple friends’ Stories in sequence. When the app
auto-advances from the end of one friend’s story to the start of another’s,
Instagram will sometimes slip in an ad with a “Sponsored” label on it. Just
like user posts, ads can be either a photo lasting up to five seconds or a
video lasting up to 15. Users either watch the ad to completion before it
auto-advances to the next friend’s story, or they can swipe to skip it.
The format, just like the Stories feature itself, is a copy of
Snapchat’s Snap Ads. Snapchat’s ads work the same, except that users there have
to choose several people’s Stories to watch as a
playlist, with ads appearing in between since
Snapchat stopped letting you watch all your friends’ Stories in sequence.
Instagram could have waited until later this year when Snapchat is
supposed to IPO before showing ads. This would have allowed it to retain the
advantage of offering Stories without interruption. But clearly Instagram views
the growth of its Stories as strong enough to endure any drop-off in usage that
ads cause, and parent company Facebook is eager to see more revenue from its
photo acquisition.
As
UAV internet proves too complex, Alphabet shifts the Titan team to Projects
Loon and Wing
by Brian Heater (@bheater)
When Google picked up Titan Aerospace in
April 2014, the sky was, as
they say, the limit. The high-flying drone producer seemingly had a lot to
offer the tech giant, including the potential to expand Project Loon, its
balloon-based plan to develop low-cost internet access to remote rural areas.
The UAV maker, which was reportedly also being courted by Facebook around the same time, also had the potential to deliver high quality,
real-time imagery to Google Maps and assist with disaster relief, the
company said at the time.
In early 2015, Google head Sundar Pichai
announced that the company was set to begin its first test flights with Titan
late that same year. The division has since moved around a bit under the
Google/Alphabet umbrella, eventually winding up in the company’s experimental X
division, the department devoted to so-called moonshots.
Now, as 9to5Google notes, the Titan division has been shut down by the
company, with its employees being reassigned to different Alphabet teams,
including Projects Loon and Wing, a team dedicated to cracking drone-based
deliveries.
As far as the decision to shut down
Titan is concerned, the company notes that it shifted its exploration
of drone-based internet shortly after folding Titan into X, instead opting to
shift the project’s focus to the more successful pursuit of Project Loon’s
balloon-based internet model.
The company has since confirmed the
move with TechCrunch, with an X spokesperson issuing the following
statement,
The team from Titan was brought into X in late 2015.
We ended our exploration of high altitude UAVs for internet access shortly
after. By comparison, at this stage the economics and technical feasibility of Project Loon present a much more promising way to connect rural and remote parts of
the world. Many people from the Titan team are now using their expertise as
part of other high flying projects at X, including Loon and Project Wing.
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