Monthly Archives: June 2015

3-D Imaging Firm Matterport Raises $30 Million For Mobile Push

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From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

As virtual reality headsets such as Samsung Gear, Google’s Cardboard, and hotly anticipated devices from Magic Leap and Facebook’s Oculus Rift have gotten big press lately, one question is what we’ll actually do on these things besides play even cooler games.

Matterport, which last year started selling a $4,500 3-D scanning camera currently aimed mainly at real estate firms that want to provide a more immersive experience for potential buyers, hopes to enable a lot more applications to be created more easily. Today, the Mountain View-based company announced it has raised a $30 million Series C funding round led by Qualcomm Ventures to build out that vision.

The company plans to use the money in part to develop software to make it possible for almost anyone to capture 3-D content using future tablets and smartphones that incorporate 3-D sensors. In particular, CEO Bill Brown said in an interview, “We want to make it very easy for third-party apps to create and use this type of content.” Today, Matterport began accepting applications to its developer program.

As much buzz as Magic Leap, Oculus, and other VR devices have gotten, compelling content and apps will be key to making them the mass-market product that their makers keep insisting they will be. As Ben Miller, director of content development at WEVR, a VR studio in Venice, Calif., put it recently, there is no killer app for VR yet.

Matterport has found one that, if it isn’t a killer, is at least promising: real estate. …

Read the rest of the post.

Fetch Robotics Wins $20 Million Slug Of Funding Led By Softbank

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From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

One of the most prominent robotics companies that hasn’t yet been bought by Google just got a new round of funding.

Fetch Robotics, led by CEO Melonee Wise, one of the leading young figures in robotics, today announced a $20 million Series A round led by SB Group US, a unit of Japan’s Softbank. Also joining in the round, which brings total funding of the company to $23 million, are current investors Shasta Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

In April, the San Jose-based company announced a pair of robots in April that are intended to help automate warehouses and fulfillment centers. Fetch’s Freight robot works with human pickers in a warehouse as they gather products to be shipped, following them carefully much like a faithful dog. Workers toss product into bins Freight carries, and when they’re full, it goes off to a shipping area and another can be summoned. The one-armed Fetch potentially replaces the human picker, at least for many kinds of objects, and can work with Freight for more autonomous operation of a warehouse. Each can return to a charging base automatically.

The 18-person company plans to use the money across the board, from sales and marketing to manufacturing to software development. “We’re hiring like crazy,” says Wise. …

Read the full story and interview with Wise.

Google Wants To Own Your Mobile Moments

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From my Forbes.com blog The New Persuaders:

For a few months now, Google has been pushing a new vision of advertising in the mobile age: Advertisers, it says, must capture the “micro-moments” when peripatetic consumers land on an app, a video, a website or anywhere else.

That’s increasingly important because despite today’s “mobile first” mantra among tech companies and publishers alike, the fact remains that people use all kinds of devices throughout the day to find what they’re looking for online–their phone, their tablet, a laptop, a desktop computer, even an Internet-connected TV. What’s more, these people are often open to commercial messages for only short periods of time in just the right context: the age-old right-place, right-time, right-message but faster and more fleeting than ever.

And so Internet publishers and their advertisers need to reach not just faceless audiences but actual people, or at least detailed profiles attached semi-anonymously to real people. This “people-based marketing” is something Facebook has made huge coin on, and even companies such as Google are playing catch-up.

So today, Google is aiming to close some gaps in its powerful but (in the mobile age) rather less dominant advertising system. …

Read the rest of the story and interview with Google display and video ads VP Neal Mohan.