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The rise of the new crypto “mafias”
Ash Egan
Contributor
Contributor
Ash Egan leads crypto investing at Accomplice. He formerly was a VC at ConsenSys Ventures and Converge.
In the early 2000s, journalists popularized the term “PayPal mafia” to describe the PayPal founders and employees who left to start their own wildly successful tech companies, including Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Elon Musk. Drawing from that idea, this article seeks to cover the formation and flow of talent within the crypto landscape today.
I’m fascinated by the concept of tech mafias, popularized by Paypal in the early 00s.
Early signs of crypto mafias:
Coinbase
@0xProject @dydxprotocol
Ethereum/ConsenSys
MIT
IC3Others?
— Ash Egan (@AshAEgan) April 3, 2019
The crypto world is in a constant state of flux, with new startups entrants joining the industry every single day. These new startups have the potential either to be superstars within a portfolio company or to start the next Coinbase. Additionally, there are already impressive spin-outs from some of the more established crypto companies.
For ease of framing, I’ve separated these early-forming mafias into four categories: Crypto, Tech, Wall Street, and Academia. Since 2009, there have been 186 spinout companies originating from those four categories (33% from Academia, 28% from Crypto, 24% from Tech, and 15% from Wall Street).
Obvious but important disclaimer: this article does not intend to promote organized crime within crypto.
Criteria
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New tickets available to the 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party
Could you use a little summer startup fun? We’re rolling out our next round of tickets to the TechCrunch Summer Party at Park Chalet, San Francisco’s coastal beer garden. If you want to join your startup peers to eat, drink and be merry, don’t delay. These limited-release tickets will be snapped up before you can say “hold my beer.” Buy your Summer Party ticket today.
Our 14th annual summer soiree offers an opportunity to connect and converse with like-minded entrepreneurs in a relaxed setting with ocean views. Take a break from the daily grind, have a local brew and strike up a conversation. You never know where it might lead or when lightning might strike — especially with Lead VC Partner Merus Capital along with firms August Capital, Battery Ventures, Cowboy Ventures, Data Collective, General Catalyst, and Uncork Capital in the house.
Party-planning details you need to know:
- When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
- Where: Park Chalet in San Francisco
- How much: $95
Don’t miss your chance to enjoy a fun night that fosters both opportunity and community. We always mix it up with games and door prizes — like fun TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
Remember, we release tickets to the Summer Party on a rolling basis and they sell out quickly. Buy your 14th Annual Summer Party ticket today. If you strike out this time, sign up to be notified when the next batch goes on sale.
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What startup names are most effective?
Adam Zelcer founded the advertising company Adboy.com.
Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.
There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.
Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.
Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.
Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.
When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:
1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books
Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.
2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery
Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.
Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.
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The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market-networks
Ivan Smolnikov
Contributor
Contributor
Ivan Smolnikov is the CEO and founder of Smartcat, the market network platform for the translation industry.
The last few decades have produced many successful marketplaces. We went from goods marketplace pioneers such as eBay and Amazon to simple service marketplaces such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. But why haven’t we seen many successful B2B service marketplaces?
Table of Contents
- Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed
- What Makes A Successful Service Marketplace?
- Summary: Figure Out How to Unlock Value for All
Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed
Some would argue that companies such as Upwork, Thumbtack, Fiverr, or TaskRabbit are horizontal B2B marketplaces in the sense that they provide access to suppliers of different services. But while businesses do indeed transact with freelancers on such “horizontal” marketplaces, for most service verticals these are limited-value, one-off transactions. They fail to enable long-term business collaborations.
So, such marketplaces haven’t delivered more valuable services nor introduced a new paradigm for how businesses buy specific services at scale and on an on-going basis. Why is that?
Horizontal marketplaces are stuck at the discovery process
Horizontal services marketplaces don’t provide much value beyond matching clients with quality service providers. In other words, they don’t facilitate collaboration between buyers and suppliers, never mind provide ways for the two parties to collaborate more efficiently over time as they engage in follow-on projects.
In essence, the model these marketplaces were built around is not much different from the likes of Craigslist, which put a convenient UX on traditional classified advertisements.
Complex B2B services require workflow and collaboration tools
In their article “What’s Next for Marketplace Startups?,” Andrew Chen and Li Jin found that there aren’t many successful service marketplaces because those offerings are complex, diverse, and difficult to evaluate. It’s challenging to define a successful transaction in a service marketplace because it’s harder to quantify success.
One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?
(Image via Getty Images / Lidiia Moor)
The $50 billion translation industry is a prime example of complex B2B services marketplaces. On the supply side are roughly 50,000 small agencies around the globe responsible for more than 85% of this $50 billion industry. (Note we are referring to agencies here as suppliers, though they play on both sides.)
On the demand side are businesses that need to translate text from one language into another. Plus about 1,500,000 freelance linguists work in this industry, many of whom are more specialized than professionals in other industries.
Anyone can find and hire a translator on Fiverr or Upwork. Both provide a vast selection of language translators. However, the quality and cost of the translation depends on the translation tools available to the translator as well as their subject expertise.
Neither Fiverr nor Upwork provide computer-aided translation (CAT) and collaborative workflow solutions for users of their platforms. Additionally, neither provides an effective way for all parties to collaborate and continuously improve the efficiency and quality.
But the problem with traditional marketplaces goes even further: Multiple translators and reviewers are usually needed to complete a single job for a customer. Multi-language translation projects are even more complicated. Such projects require multiple service providers and cost estimates, in addition to project management tools.
This is why building a B2B service marketplace is difficult. Service marketplaces must not only connect buyers and suppliers, but also provide tools to enable an efficient and collaborative workflow that reduces wasted time and effort.
Horizontal marketplaces suffer high attrition
In addition to the problems already outlined, traditional marketplaces experience another issue that prevents them from growing and retaining market participants: Buyer and supplier attrition.
Many business services are based on regularly recurring engagements. In some cases, a buyer and a service provider interact daily, requiring a different workflow than gig-marketplaces are built around.
Buyers and suppliers have little motivation to continue interacting on a platform with no workflow automation solutions. They lack a way to improve service efficiency and quality, automate collaboration, payment, paperwork, and other basic processes required for a business.
This is why many traditional marketplaces suffer from slow network effects and high attrition. (A network effect is what happens when a platform, product, or service delivers more value the more it is used.
Think Facebook, eBay, WhatsApp.) Why wouldn’t companies work directly with service providers outside of a marketplace after they were introduced? What incentives keep the service transaction on the marketplace? These are critical questions to answer when building a marketplace.
Traditional marketplaces target broad services, making it nearly impossible to provide workflow solutions for buyers and suppliers. Going forward, successful service marketplaces will be developed relying on an industry-specific SaaS workflow. This will focus buyers and suppliers on longer-term projects and interactions that serve the unique needs of collaborations and transactions in a specific vertical.
Image via Getty Images / OstapenkoOlena
What makes a successful service marketplace?
In “The next 10 Years Will Be About Market Networks,” James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX Ventures, defines a new era of service marketplaces, which he calls market networks.
A market network is a platform that combines elements of an n-sided marketplace, a network, and workflow solutions. An n-sided marketplace is one that requires coordination of multiple supply-side parties to provide a complex service for a single buyer.
Market networks enable multiple buyers and suppliers to interact, collaborate, and transact on the same platform. They provide users with industry-specific workflow solutions that enable efficient, ongoing collaboration on long-term projects. This reduces costs and leads to a higher quality of services and increased overall value for all users.
But how do you actually build a successful market-network platform? While the answer to that varies from company to company, here is our approach. We were able to build a market network for the translation industry that combines the components: network, marketplace, and workflow solution.
STEP 1: SaaS workflow platform unlocks high-value collaboration
The first step to building an effective complex market network is to develop a workflow that is easy for users to embrace. It might not seem like much, but this increases productivity by enabling teams to perform tasks that were previously impossible.
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Climate change, AI and ethical leadership in ‘big tech’, with Amazon principal UX design lead Maren Costa
“I just want to be proud of the company that I work for,” Maren Costa told me recently.
Costa is a Principal UX Design Lead at Amazon, for which she has worked since 2002. I was referred to her because of her leadership in the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group I covered earlier this week for my series on the ethics of technology.
Like many of her peers at Amazon, Costa has been experiencing a tension between work she loves and a company culture and community she in many ways admires deeply, and what she sees as the company’s dangerous failings, or “blind spots,” regarding critical ethical issues such as climate change and AI.
Indeed, her concerns are increasingly typical of employees not only at Amazon, but throughout big tech and beyond, which seems worth noting particularly because hers is not the typical image many call to mind when thinking of giant tech companies.
A Gen-X poet and former Women’s Studies major, Costa drops casual references to neoliberal capitalism running amok into discussions of multiple topics. She has a self-deprecating sense of humor and worries about the impact of her work on women, people of color, and the Earth.
If such sentiments strike you as too idealistic to take seriously, it seems Glass Lewis and ISS, two of the world’s largest and most influential firms advising investors in such companies, would disagree. Both firms recently advised Amazon shareholders to vote in support of a resolution put forward by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and its supporters, calling on Amazon to dramatically change its approach to climate issues.
Glass Lewis’s statement urged Amazon to “provide reassurance” about its climate policies to employees like Ms. Costa, as “the Company’s apparent inaction on issues of climate change can present human capital risks, which have the potential to lead to the Company having problems attracting and retaining talented employees.” And in its similar report, ISS highlighted research reporting that 64 percent of millennials would be reluctant to work for a company “whose corporate social responsibility record does not align with their values.”
Amazon’s top leadership and shareholders ultimately voted down the measure, but the work of the Climate Justice Employees group continues unabated. And if you read the interview below, you might well join me in believing we’ll see many similar groups crop up at peer companies in the coming years, on a variety of issues. All of those groups will require many leaders — perhaps including you. After all, as Costa said, “leadership comes from everywhere.”
Maren Costa: (Apologizes for coughing as interview was about to start)
Greg Epstein: … Well, you could say the Earth is choking too.
Costa: Segue.
Epstein: Exactly. Thank you so much for taking the time, Maren. You are something of an insider at your company.
Costa: Yeah, I took two years off, so I’ve actually worked here for 15 years but started 17 years ago. I actually came back to Amazon, which is surprising to me.
Epstein: You’ve really seen the company evolve.
Costa: Yes.
Epstein: And, in fact, you’ve helped it to evolve — I wouldn’t call myself a big Amazon customer, but based on your online portfolio, you’ve even worked on projects I personally have used. Though find it hard to believe anyone can find jeans that actually fit them on Amazon, I must say.
Costa: [My work is actually] on every page. You can’t use Amazon without using the global navigation, and that was my main project for years, in addition to a lot of the apparel and sort of the softer side of Amazon. Because when I started, it was very super male-dominated.
I mean, still is, but much more so. Jeff literally thought by putting a search box that you could type in Boolean queries was a great homepage, you know? He didn’t have any need for sort of pictures and colors.
(Photo: Lisa Werner/Moment Mobile/Getty Images)
Epstein: My previous interview [for this TechCrunch series on tech ethics] was with Jessica Powell, who used to be PR director of Google and has written a satirical novel about Google . One of the huge themes in her work is the culture at these companies that are heavily male-dominated and engineer-dominated, where maybe there are blind spots or things that the-
Costa: Totally.
Epstein: … kinds of people who’ve been good at founding these companies don’t tend to see. It sounds like that’s something you’ve been aware of and you’ve worked on over the years.
Costa: Absolutely, yes. It was actually a great opportunity, because it made my job pretty easy.
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Northzone’s Paul Murphy goes deep on the next era of gaming
As the gaming market continues to boom, billions of dollars are being invested in new games and new streaming platforms vying to own a piece of the action. Most of the value is accruing to the large incumbents in a space, however, and the entrance of Google and other big tech companies makes it difficult to identify where there are compelling opportunities for entrepreneurs to build new empires.
TechCrunch media analyst Eric Peckham recently sat down with Paul Murphy, Partner at European venture firm Northzone, to discuss Paul’s view of the market and where he is focusing his dollars. Below is the transcript of the conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Eric Peckham: You co-founded the hit mobile game Dots before moving to London and joining Northzone last year. Are you still bullish on investment opportunities in mobile gaming or do you think the market has changed?
Paul Murphy: I’m bullish on mobile gaming–the market is bigger than it has ever been. There’s a whole generation of people that have been trained to play games on mobile phones. So those are things that are very positive.
The challenge is you don’t really have a rising tide moment anymore. The winners have won. And so it’s very, very difficult for someone to enter with new content and build a business that’s as big as Supercell or King, regardless of how good their content is. So while the prize for winning in mobile gaming content big, the likelihood is smaller.
Where I’m spending most of my time is not on content, it’s on components within mobile gaming. We’re looking at infrastructure: different platforms that enable mobile gaming, like Bunch which we invested in.
Their product allows you to do live video and audio on top of mobile games. So we don’t have to take any content risk. We’re betting that this great product will fit into a large inventory ecosystem.
Peckham: New mobile game studios that are launching all seem to fall under the sphere of influence of these bigger companies. They get a strategic investment from Supercell or another company. To your point, it’s tough for a small startup to compete entirely on its own.
Murphy: It’s possible in mobile gaming still but it’s really, really hard now. At the same time, what you’ve seen is the odds of winning are lower. It is hard to reach the same scale when it costs you $5.00 to acquire a user today, whereas when Candy Crush launched, it was $0.05 per user. So it’s almost impossible to achieve King-like scale today.
Therefore, you’re looking at similar content risk with reduced upside, which makes that equation less attractive for venture capital. But it might be perfectly fine for an established company because they don’t need to do the marketing, they have the audience already.
The big gaming companies all struggle with the challenge of how to create the next hit IP. They have this machine that can bring any great game to market efficiently, with a large audience they can cross promote from and capital they can invest to build a big brand quickly. For them, the biggest challenge is getting the best content.
So it’s natural to me that the pendulum has swung towards strategic investors in mobile gaming content. Epic has a fund that they set up with Improbable, Supercell is making direct investments, Tencent has been making investments for years. Even from a content perspective, you’re probably going to see Apple, Google, and Amazon making more content investments in mobile gaming.
Image via Getty Images / aurielaki
Peckham: Does this same market dynamic apply to PC games and console games? Do you see a certain area within gaming where there’s still opportunity for independent startups to create the game itself and find success at a venture scale?
Murphy: The reason we made our investment in Klang Games, which is building an MMO called Seed that people will primarily play through PC, is that while there is content risk–you’re never going to get rid of the possibility that the IP doesn’t fly–if it works, it will be massive…an Earth-shattering level of success. If their vision comes to life, it will be very, very big.
So that one has all the risks that you’d have in any other game studio but the upside is exponentially larger, so the bet makes sense to us. And it so happens that it’s going to be on PC first, where there’s certainly a lot of competition but it’s not as saturated and the monetization methods are healthier than in mobile gaming. In PC, you don’t have to do free-to-play tactics that interfere with the gameplay.
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Amazon’s Twitch acquired social networking platform Bebo for up to $25M to bolster its esports efforts
While Facebook makes a bold move into cryptocurrency to capitalise on its multi-billion user base, a social network that was once a credible competitor to it has quietly been snapped up by a subsidiary of Amazon. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Bebo, one of the earlier platforms to let people share thoughts and media with their friends, has been acquired by Twitch, the streaming video platform owned by Amazon. Together the two will be working on building out Twitch’s esports business, and specifically Twitch Rivals.
A spokesperson for Twitch confirmed the acquisition, which includes both people (around 10 employees) and IP, but declined to provide further comment.
From what we understand from our sources, Twitch paid up to $25 million for the company earlier this month, after beating out at least two other bidders, Discord (which itself has been building out its own esports business), and… wait for it… Facebook. (Our source says the latter offered $20 million.) Indeed, LinkedIn profiles for ex-Bebo employees — see here, here, and here — now at Twitch note June as the changeover date. (Note: original sources say $25 million, others close to the deal say it was materially less than this. As you know, these things can be described differently depending on who is doing the describing.)
It has been a long and winding road for Bebo over the years. Starting out way back in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch as an early social networking site, Bebo quickly became the market leader in a couple of English-speaking countries, specifically UK and Ireland.
Bebo’s growth trajectory and the bigger opportunity in social were enough to get it acquired for about $850 million by AOL back in 2008, apparently beating out a number of other interested large tech and media companies interested in getting their own social media platform and the audience that would come with it (disclaimer: AOL eventually also acquired TechCrunch, too).
But the deal was a certifiable dud, with Bebo never managing to build on its early traction, and AOL not being in a position to know how to fix that. Less than two years later, it was sold on to Criterion Capital for $25 million.
Yet as the social wheels continued to turn, and even once-global market leader MySpace also fell back as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other mobile-friendly platforms pulled out ahead, even that $25 million price turned out to be too high. After Bebo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the original founders, the Birches, bought it back in 2013 for $1 million with a pledge to reinvent it.
And so they did, putting in place a small team led by Shaan Puri, who worked on a number of ideas to see which of them could fly. (And I don’t know if this was a tongue in cheek joke about how challenging they knew the task would be, but it seems that the holding company set up to house some of the IP and legal aspects of the endeavor was called “Pigs in Flight.”)
The new app studio effort, which went by the name Monkey Inferno (another great one), came out of the gates with “Blab”, a “walkie-talkie” ephemeral video messaging service, which picked up millions of users quickly but found it hard to retain them. It shut down a year later, and it looks like Monkey Inferno dabbled in a few other things before coming to esports.
From social networking to socialising esports
In that last pivot, Bebo first tried out streaming services for esports players, but that proved to be tough competition against dominant platforms like OBS and Xsplit. Then, in an interesting nod to its earlier history in social networking and organising groups of friends, it shifted once more, into organising and running tournaments for streamers, with leagues and more: the streams ran on Twitch and Bebo organised viewers, leagues and other things around that.
That site, Bebo.com, is now offline, and all its tweets seem to have been deleted, but the idea was to build out leagues and tournaments for any and all kinds of groups and players, for example complete beginners, or high school students.
It was the last of these that turned out to line up with a growing market segment.
According to a report in eMarketer, esports attracted some 400 million users in 2018 and pulled in revenues of $869 million from sponsorships, player fees and advertising, and it is projected to be worth between $1.58 billion and $2.96 billion by 2022. And Bebo was helping organise and build those communities.
And that is now linking up neatly with Twitch, which had been developing its own casual esports operation in the form of Twitch Rivals. This launched in beta in 2018 and is now widely available wherever Twitch is.
The Bebo tech and its team are now both being put to use on Twitch Rivals, to help continue expanding it with more features and more users. To be clear, though, it seems there is no intention — from what I understand — to parlay Bebo’s past efforts in social networking into a wider social networking play at Twitch: the focus is on esports.
Still, the acquisition comes at a key moment. Since January, there have been reports that Amazon is working on a new game streaming service (just like Apple, Google and others), which likely won’t be out until next year. While there is no news on that today, you can see how expanding the variety and breadth of content on Twitch by way of esports leagues and tournaments fits in with a wider effort to bring more regular, engaged users into the Amazon fold, using this as one of the big draws.
(Updated with more detail on the price.)
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More tickets available to the 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party
Get ready for summer in the city, TechCrunch -style. We just released a fresh batch of tickets to the 14th Annual TechCrunch Summer Party. Available on a first-come, first-served basis, tickets to our popular event sell out quickly, and they’ll be gone before you know it. Don’t wait — buy your ticket today.
Join us for TechCrunch’s fabulous summer fete at Park Chalet — San Francisco’s coastal beer garden — where you can enjoy ocean views, refreshing drinks and delicious appetizers. It’s a wonderful way to relax and celebrate the entrepreneurial spirit with more than 1,000 members of the startup community.
It’s also a wonderful way to meet your next investor, co-founder or — who knows? You’ll find startup magic in between the drinks, the games, the food and the fun. Opportunity happens at TechCrunch parties.
Check out the party particulars:
- When: July 25 from 5:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
- Where: Park Chalet in San Francisco
- How much: $95
Come and join the summer fun. Connect with community and opportunity. As always, you’ll have a chance to win great door prizes — like TechCrunch swag, Amazon Echos and tickets to Disrupt San Francisco 2019.
Tickets sell out quickly, so don’t wait. Buy your 14th Annual Summer Party ticket today.
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Climate justice and environmental ethics in tech, with Amazon engineer Rajit Iftikhar
Nearly 8,000 Amazon employees, many in prestigious engineering and design roles, have recently signed a petition calling on Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Board of Directors to dramatically shift the giant company’s approach to climate change.
By deploying a kind of corporate social disobedience such as speaking out dramatically at shareholders meetings, and by engaging in a variety of community organizing tactics, the “Amazon Employees for Climate Justice” group has quickly become a leading example of a growing trend in the tech world: tech employees banding together to take strong ethical stances in defiance of their powerful employers.
The public actions taken by these employees and groups have been covered widely by the news media. For my TechCrunch series on the ethics of technology, however, I wanted to better understand what participating actively in this campaign has been like some of the individuals involved.
How are employees in high-pressure jobs balancing their professional roles and responsibilities with being actively, publicly in defiance of their employers on a high-profile issue? How do leaders in these efforts explain the philosophy underlying their ethical stance? And how likely are their ideas to spread throughout Amazon and beyond – perhaps particularly among younger tech workers?
I recently spoke with a handful of the Amazon employees most actively involved in the Employees for Climate Justice campaign, all of whom inspired me– in similar and different ways. Below is the first of two interviews I’ll publish here. This one is with Rajit Iftikhar, a young software engineer from New York who moved to Seattle to work for Amazon after earning his Bachelor’s of Engineering in Computer Science from Cornell in 2016.
Rajit Iftikhar
Rajit struck me as a humble and precociously wise young man who could be a role model — though he seems to have little interest in singling himself out that way — for thousands of other software engineers and technologists at Amazon and beyond.
Greg Epstein: Your personal story has been key to your organizing with Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. Can you start by saying a bit about why?
Rajit Iftikhar: A lot of why I care about climate justice is informed by me having parents from another country that is going to be very adversely affected by [climate change]. Countries like Bangladesh are going to suffer some of the worst consequences from climate change, because of where the country’s located, and the fact that it doesn’t have the resources to adapt.
Bangladesh is already feeling the effects of climate crisis; it is much harder for people to live in the rural areas, [people are] being forced into the cities. Then you have the cyclones that the climate crisis is going to bring, and rising sea levels and flooding.
So, my background [emphasizes, for me] how unjust our emissions are in causing all these problems for people in other countries. And even for communities of color within our country who are going to be disproportionately impacted by the emissions that largely richer people [cause].
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Meet Hatch Baby’s portable, Wi-Fi-enabled sleep device Rest+
Menlo Park-based Hatch Baby has prided itself on introducing “smart” nursery devices — including Grow, a changing pad with a built-in scale and Rest, a device doubling as a sound machine and night light.
Now, the company is introducing an updated version of Rest, with Rest+ as part of an effort to help further establish Hatch Baby in the family sleep space.
The Rest+ device will still have the sound machine, night light and a “time to rise” feature found in the original. But, with feedback from many customers and Amazon reviews, Hatch Baby has now included the addition of an audio monitor and a clock.
The audio monitor is essential for letting parents check in on baby while they sleep without going into the room and potentially waking the baby.
The clock is also a fantastic addition, in my opinion, especially for those with toddlers who can read numbers. These little people are big enough to get out of their beds but not mature enough to know moms and dads need to sleep at 4 a.m. Often advice passed from parent to parent is to put a clock in the baby room and tell kids not to come out until it shows a certain number.
It also helps establish healthy sleep habits in little ones. Most toddlers (ages one to three) need about 12 to 14 hours of sleep in a day, spread out between nighttime and naps, according to the National Sleep Foundation. However, as any parent knows, the older a baby gets, the harder it is to get them to want to go to bed.
Rest+ features include:
- Audio monitor: Parents can now check in on their child in their room without the risk of disrupting their little one’s sleep, right from their phone — no extra gadgets necessary.
- Sound machine: Parents can choose from a range of sound options, from white noise to soft lullabies. They can simply crank up the volume remotely when the dog barks or the neighbors throw a party.
- Night light: This feature, which stays cool to the touch, provides soft and soothing lighting for midnight feeding sessions or bright and reassuring light when the dark feels scary for older kids. Parents and kids can choose from a rainbow of colors to make it their own, but the optional patented toddler-lock setting makes sure that parents are the only ones in control, when needed.
- Time-to-Rise: Green means go! This feature enables parents to teach toddlers and preschoolers to stay in bed until it’s time to rise once the light changes color (and enjoy those extra minutes of sleep).
- Clock: Rest+ features an easy-to-read clock so parents can stay on track with their busy schedules and can help teach children to read numbers.
Any one of these features could cost parents a good amount of dough when purchased separately. A Philips Avent audio monitor runs just under $100 on Amazon, for example. However, Rest+ is just $80 (slightly more than the original $60 price tag for the Rest device), for all five features.
Something else that may make the Rest+ attractive to parents — it is Wi-Fi-enabled and portable so you can take it with you when you travel.
Whipping a sound machine, nightlight, audio monitor and clock all into one portable, Wi-Fi-enabled device can also save precious space in the nursery, and makes this a must-have item for many parents hoping for just a little bit more sleep.
Hatch Baby co-founder Ann Crady Weiss tells TechCrunch the Rest+ will only be available on the Hatch Baby site and is part of a plan to launch a full line of products aimed at getting parents — and their children — more precious sleep. Though she wouldn’t say what the company was working on next, she did mention we’d hear something about it in the coming months. So stay tuned!
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