Shuddle Raises $9.6M For Its Uber-Style Service For Kids And Seniors

As Uber continues to extend is well-funded tentacles into ever-more categories of transportation, a startup focusing on children and elderly people has raised some money of its own to compete. Shuddle, a car service and app founded one of the co-founders of Sidecar and aiming its service on minors and seniors, is today announcing a Series A round of $9.6 million led by RRE Ventures.

Existing investors Comcast Vento res, Forerunner Ventures, Accel Partners and angels also chipped in. The total amount raised by Shuddle is now $12 million.

CEO and founder Nick Allen (who left Sidecar in 2013) tells me that the funding will be used to expand the company’s business both in the Bay Area — its only market since coming out of beta in October 2014 — as well as into new markets.

“We are at capacity for the service today,” he says. “We are adding new drivers every week and we have grown five times in ride volume since coming out of beta.” He says new cities will be announced in the next couple of months. The service now has some 200 drivers on is books.

Shuddle sets itself apart from services like Uber in a couple of different ways: In addition to specialised insurance specifically designed for minor and elderly passengers and drivers that need to drive and accompany them outside of the car (more on that below), Shuddle makes people go through extra training and two different sets of background and reference checks before they can become drivers on the platform.

Right now the “vast majority” of its 200 drivers are only women, he says. And this in itself makes Shuddle a notable and often welcome alternative.

“Women have been largely excluded as drivers by other services because the experience can be unsafe,” he says. “They don’t know who they are picking up or where they are going. Women are attracted to our value proposition. These drives are in the daytime, you know it’s someone who isn’t threatening. It really is different and women are responding to this.”

He says that people who are signing up to drive on the Shuddle service include teachers and nannies “who are doing this kind of thing anyway so this fits into the routine.”

On top of this, there are differences in how the service presents itself to customers. To use Shuddle you need to pay a $9 membership fee each month to cover things like driver training and screening. Allen says that the per-ride fee is typically 15% more expensive than UberX “to compensate drivers for extra training.”

And while services like Lyft and Uber have built their credibility on being on-demand, Shuddle typically books for rides between 24 hours and one week in advance.

No plans yet to add on-demand into the mix, he says, because of the nature of what Shuddle does, which can include not just collecting passengers, but physically going into schools or other places to sign them in or out. But one thing they are looking at is a carpooling-style service, which is handy considering this is one way that parents today typically work around endless ferrying obligations.

All the same, Shuddle competes directly with the likes of Uber to drive kids and elderly people from points A to B — services like Uber and Lyft are already used in this way, and Allen tells me in fact that he came up with the idea for Shuddle when he was still at Sidecar.

“I saw parents using sidecar in LA for the purpose of driving their kids around, but we didn’t have the right insurance and the service just wasn’t built for that,” he says. “But I started talking to parents and they really emphasized how much of a pain point this was.” Indeed, as a parent myself that has to juggle work and small kids with activities every day of the week — I can attest to this first hand.

It’s the extra attention that attracted the extra investment.

“Nearly every parent struggles with getting their kid(s) from point A to point B because they often need to be in two places at once. Shuddle solves this problem,” said Steve Schlafman, Principal at RRE Ventures, in a statement. “RRE Ventures is incredibly excited to partner with Shuddle to bring safe, reliable and trustworthy transportation to millions of families across America.” The VC has funded other e-commerce marketplaces aimed at specific verticals before, including Bark & Co.

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U.K. Gov’t Aims Cash At Driverless Cars, Internet Of Things And Digital Currencies

Giving his final budget before the U.K. general election this May, and inevitable sales pitch to the U.K. electorate, Chancellor George Osborne has announced several tranches of cash for nascent technologies — including £100 million for driverless car technology; £40 million for research into the Internet of Things; and £10 million to go towards investigating the “future potential” of digital currency technology.

The budget also set out plans for a so-called ‘Google tax’ on diverted profits. So, should a Conservative (or Tory-led) government be elected to office later this year we can expect to see it taking extra money off Silicon Valley-based tech giants and putting some of that cash to work to try developing homegrown alternatives to SV tech.

There’s precious little detail about how these tech-focused cash injections will be spent at this point, beyond specifying they are intended for research initiatives. This is really about listing (and quantifying) a few tech priorities for a future Tory government.

After (fixed and mobile) broadband, which Osborne pledged £600 million for in this budget, driverless car tech comes out top of the tech priorities list. (Although he also announced £140 million for research into “infrastructures and cities of the future” — aka smart cities — which is pretty vague but will likely shake out into technology investments of some sort.)

The focus on driverless car tech is not surprising, given it’s been an area of interest for the current coalition government for some time. It named it as an infrastructure investment priority at the end of 2013, and following that up with an official robotics strategy document last summer which talked up testing autonomous vehicles in the wild.

U.K. driverless technology testing centres are also being set up and relevant regulations reviewed. Most recently a government reportgave the green light for hands-free driverless car tech to be tested on U.K. public roads. The government has also previously announced £19 million in funding to help establish driverless car testing centres around the U.K.

When it comes to the Internet of Things, Osborne didn’t put much meat on the bones of the budget funding announcement. The IoT was generally dubbed “the next stage of the information revolution”, and the Chancellor unboxed the hackneyed connected fridge cliche during the speech — albeit managing to make it make even less sense than it normally does.

“So should – to use a ridiculous example – someone have two kitchens, they will be able to control both fridges from the same mobile phone,” he said.

Urban transport and medical devices were also mentioned in relation to IoT.

Digital currencies, which are pegged for a modest investment, didn’t get any direct mention in the speech. But speaking at Disrupt London last October, Ed Vaizey, the U.K.’s minister for the digital economy, noted the government is keeping an open mind here and “looking at opportunities”.

“We want to make these e-payments faster, quicker, we want to make it as safe as possible. And we want to look at the kind of technologies that the digital currencies use to allow end systems to operate in a de-centralized way, with no intermediaries. We want to look at how the new technologies can benefit consumers and the wider economy. So that’s something the Treasury is very interested in,” Vaizey added at the time.

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PlayStation’s Vue Live Streaming Cord-Cutter TV Service Launches In The U.S.

PlayStation is officially debuting its live streaming video service in the U.S. today, launching PlayStation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia with pricing beginning at $50 per month. The on-demand and live-streaming video service includes content partners like Fox News, AMC and Turner Broadcasting and offers channels like CBS, Discovery, Animal Planet, Syfy, Food Network and many more, depending on the package you select.

Vue was originally announced late last year, and is intended to turn the PlayStation family of home consoles into a more powerful all-in-one media solution, in addition to their role as gaming devices. In addition to live broadcast and on-demand content, Vue also offers trending channels, granular personalization over the interface, cloud-stored DVR for recording tagged shows for instant storage for up to 28 days post-air date, without storage limits, and new discovery tools.

Packages don’t require any kind of commitment beyond a month, and come in three flavours at launch. Access is $50 and provides CBC, Fox and NBC as well as over 45 additional networks. Core offers all that, plus regional sports networks and more movie channels at $60 per month. An Elite offering is $70, provides access to everything in the other two packages, and also offers an additional 25 “lifestyle, music and family channels.”

It’s available on both PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 consoles, but only in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia at launch. There’s a wider launch planned for later this year, and Sony also intends to bring Vue to iPad and other devices in addition to its own hardware.

Vue comes alongside other over-the-top services, including Sling TV, and ahead of a similar service from Apple reportedly launching this fall.

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With $1 Million In New Funding, Dattch Lesbian Dating App Rebrands To Her

Dattch, the Pinterest-inspired dating app for queer women, has today re-launched with a new name (Her) as well as $1 million in new funding from investors such as Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian, YC’s Garry Tan and Michael Birch.

Founder Robyn Exton said that people too often thought Dattch stood for some combination of ‘dyke’ or ‘butch’ or ‘snatch’, and that ‘Her’ more closely represents the evolution of the product. “We are all Her,” said Exton. For the record, Dattch originally stood for ‘Date Catch.’

“I actually thought it was a rather clever combination of words at the time, but almost everyone thought it stood for ‘snatch,'” said Exton.

But it’s not only the name that has been given a makeover.

Her employs more of a match-based approach to communication than the old Dattch did. In the old version of the app, users could interact with other users profiles with total freedom, liking pictures or comments or sending direct messages. Users could see every person who had visited their profile and receive notifications for every like and message.

On Her, users only enter into a conversation when both parties have liked something on that users profile.

Exton says that 75 percent of the time, that was the usual behavior they were seeing on Dattch, so the shift made sense during the re-branding.







Her also focuses a good deal of attention on editorial content, offering up cool event and activity ideas where queer women can meet and connect. Exton told TechCrunch that the team is curating the content themselves, receiving local info from event partners and working with journalists in various markets to write informative community pieces.

Her is currently available in the UK, Ireland, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Miami, with half a million matches made on the platform.

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Fradio’s New App Lets Anyone Be A DJ, Broadcast Live Radio To Friends And Fans

A new application called Fradio is officially launching today, offering a service that allows anyone to become a DJ, broadcasting their favorite tracks to their friends or fans, and even talking over the tunes with a push of a button in order to engage their audience. The app, which is backed by Australian music service Guvera, is making its debut at the SXSW music festival in Austin where a number of artists, including Steve Aoki, A-Trak, and Crookerwill, be among its first testers.

Guvera may not be a household name here in the U.S., like competitors Spotify, Beats, or Rdio may be. But that’s because the service’s focus to date has been on emerging markets. Launched in 2008, and backed by $45 fromAMMA, Guvera has largely been targeting the “rest of the world” with its service, including regions like Southeast Asia, India, and Latin America, for example.

Today, the service is live in 20 markets, but is most popular in India and Indonesia, where it has music licensing deals with both major and local labels.

In more recent months, the company has been working to expand its footprint to other regions. It signed a deal with Lenovo last year to get its app pre-installed on millions of smartphones in over 60 markets. And just this year, Guvera scooped up the U.K. music service Blinkbox when its former owner, retail giant Tesco, unloaded it alongside their TV, books, and movie-on-demand offerings.

That deal brought an additional 2.5 million customers to Guvera, which now claims a user base of nearly 9 million.

Like several of its streaming competitors, the company charges customers for access to its premium, on-demand service at $9.99 per month – the same as Spotify. However, in emerging markets, it has also experimented with different models, including day-, week- and month-long passes to the premium product.







With the new app Fradio, the idea is to give Guvera another entry point into the more fiercely competitive streaming industry in the U.S. and other developed markets, by offering a differentiated experience. Unlike apps which let users build out custom playlists, Fradio users can not only create their own playlists, but they can broadcast them live, in real-time, to listeners. And they can introduce the tracks or chat with their fans with a press of button, which softens the music in the background, allowing for a DJ-like experience.

While this may appeal to would-be DJ’s who want to share music with friends, the larger goal is to get artists on board. By using Fradio, they would have another means of engaging with their fans – and that’s something the company may also want to monetize in the future, it says, which would give the artists access to a different kind of revenue sharing deal as well.

“We see this as a real opportunity for rewarding artists,” explains Guvera CTO Damien King, speaking to us from SXSW in Austin. “There’s been a lot of talk about how music streaming services are not providing enough value to artists – so this is part of our strategy. We have a number of things we’re doing in 2015 that are trying to address payments to artists,” he says.



At present, Guvera brings in revenue through its subscription service, video and audio ads played for its free users, and through its branded channels on Guvera. These channels let companies market their own products and services in the service. For example, a Beats channel would let you browse new headphones while listening to a curated playlist. But when Guvera’s deals with music labels come up for renewal, the company wants to negotiate on different sorts of revenue share deals for artists, too – including those for the “live performances” where artists talk to their fans via Fradio.

Guvera’s licensing deals vary by market, but it has the major labels on board in most markets. In the U.S., it has longtime partner Universal’s support, as well as Sony, but Warner is still being signed.



Fradio, which has been in beta testing since the fall, is now publicly available as a free download for iOS and Android, and will offer a Guvera subscription ($9.99/mo USD) through in-app purchase. This will also allow Fradio DJ’s to re-arrange track order and take requests, among other things. Without the subscription, DJ’s can only use pre-populated playlists from Fradio instead of building their own, nor can they really engage their fans. That encourages conversions to the premium product, the company believes.

“We think radio needs to come into 2015,” says King. “The younger generation wants something more interactive…they want something where they can chat together, listen to music together, and where they can interact with their artists. We believe it’s much more compelling than existing radio.te”

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Launcher, The Banned iOS Widget That Let You Launch Other Apps, Is Back

With iOS 8, Apple introduced a way for mobile applications to add widgets to its Notification Center that offered snapshots of information, like today’s weather, stock quotes, headlines, and more. But one clever app called Launcher took advantage of the new functionality to turn its widget into a tool that allowed you to tap to launch other apps installed on your phone. Last fall, Apple booted the app from the App Store for unknown reasons. But starting today, Launcher has returned, nearly unchanged, indicating a slight relaxing of the rules on Apple’s side.

Apple, explains Launcher’s creator Greg Gardner, is “now okay with the concept,” he says of receiving permission to bring his app back to the iTunes App Store.

In case you missed it the first time around,the Launcher app itself offered little functionality beyond configuring its included widget. The idea was to offer a way for you to add shortcuts to your most-used applications and various tasks (e.g. like placing a phone call or posting a tweet) to the Notification Center in iOS 8.

For instance, you could add a button for calling your most-often-dialed FaceTime contact, or a shortcut for directions to your most-frequented routes, and more. The company also offered an upgrade to a paid version that removed the “Sponsored Launcher” spot, which served as a promotional tool to market other apps.

We theorized once that the Sponsored spot may have contributed to the App Store ban, but what it really came down to was Apple’s policies around how it intended Notification Center widgets to be used. At the time of Launcher’s ban, it seems Apple hadn’t anticipated some of the more innovative use cases for its widget technology.

That problem reared its head again when Apple rejected, then later approved,calculator widgets like the popular one from PCalc, for example.







According to Gardner, the new version of his Launcher app basically offers the same functionality as the one Apple previously rejected. It even includes the Sponsored app, which users can pay $3.99 to remove.

Gardner explains that after being banned from the App Store, he continued to test what Apple found acceptable by submitting new apps based off Launcher functionality. Most of these were also rejected, except for one called “Music Launcher” whose rejection was overturned in December and was then released in January. Apparently, this app was allowed because it didn’t actually launch other apps – it only called the MediaPlayer API to start music.

In other words, until recently, Apple still had a problem with apps that solely existed as tools to launch other apps via a widget interface.

But a few weeks ago, Gardner says he resubmitted a stripped-down version of Launcher that only allowed you to set up launchers to call, email, FaceTime and message others, which he dubbed “Contact Launcher.” It, too, was initially rejected but was later overturned after a lengthy appeals process. With that approval in hand, the developer returned to Apple and asked why Contact Launcher was allowed, but Launcher itself was not.

With the first approval setting a precedent of sorts, Apple re-reviewed Launcher and made the decision to allow it back in the App Store, too. While the app is officially slated to appear live in all markets on Thursday, it has popped up early in Japan, Korea, and China just before midnight their time. Because of the press attention it had previously received, the app has now been downloaded by a number of users in the regions where it’s available,prompting Gardner to have to disclose its public debut a day earlier than he anticipated.

Gardner says he doesn’t really know why Apple changed its mind, but speculates that, based on what an App Store reviewer once said, the company starts off with a more conservative stance regarding how new iOS features are to be used, and then loosens up its policies over time.

Launcher really was a handy tool for getting to your most-used apps and tasks quickly, and it will be nice to put it to use again. When Launcher goes live in your market, you’ll be able to download it from the homepagehere or directly from the iTunes App Storehere. The new version also now allows paying users to make the icons smaller and hide the labels to make the widget more compact, the company notes.

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Head-To-Head Mobile Fantasy App Draft Raises $3.5 Million Led By Upfront Ventures

We all know that fantasy sports is a huge and growing business. But when it comes to fantasy sports on mobile, most apps are just companion experiences used by fantasy sports players to track how their teams are doing. A new fantasy sports app called Drafthopes to change that, and has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to do so.

Draft was founded by Jeremy Levine and Nicolo Giorgi, the guys who had previously built daily fantasy sports site StarStreet andsold it to Draftkings last year. After that acquisition closed in August, the two wasted no time in moving onto their next venture.

The Draft team hoped to create a real-money fantasy gaming experience that was built specifically for mobile. Levine notes that most daily fantasy players are doing their picks on a desktop with several browser windows open and spreadsheets to track the value of players each day. But that doesn’t translate very well to the smaller screen.

For Draft, the founders wanted to take all the fun of daily fantasy sports games but make it easy to enjoy on a smartphone. To make the game appealing on mobile, Levine and his team borrowed some of the mechanics of popular turn-based games and applied them to the real-money fantasy sports world.

So they drew inspiration from games like Words With Friends, Draw Something, and QuizUp, all of which rely on asynchronous turn-based gameplay between challengers. In Draft, players take turns drafting players against one another to see who can assemble the best team.

“It’s like Words With Friends, but instead of making a word, you’re drafting a team,” Levine told me.

Users can either play for free — if they’re not confident in their team — or match up to play for real money. Players can choose from different stakes and levels of payout, from a $5.50 match with a $10 prize to a $55 wager which pays out $100 to the winner.

The app launched on iOS in December, but already it’s attracted the interest of investors to the tune of $3.5 million. That funding was led by Upfront Ventures, and includes participation from Advancit Capital, David Tisch’s BoxGroup, The Chernin Group, and Nas’ QueensBridge Venture Partners. With the new capital, the founders hope to grow the team from four to nine in the coming months, mostly looking to hire iOS developers and engineers.

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