Technology

When it launched the Versa back in March, Fitbit also announced plans to pivot. While the company will continue to operate in consumer hardware, italso shifting much of its focus toward healthcare. A month earlier, the company had acquired Twine, a platform that serves as part of the foundation of its new health coachingservice, Care.

Announced today, the system uses the new Fitbit Plus, combined with the companyoff-the-shelf hardware to provide additional health insight, one-on-one health coaching and what the company calls &personalized digital interventions.&

The program is essentially looking to add a bit more a personalized, human touch to fitness tracking. It promises to step beyond algorithmic data by using custom social groups and human health coaches who communicate directly with users through the app or over the phone. The councilors are trained to help with everything from weight loss and smoking to serious conditions like diabetes and hypertension.

The new Fitbit Plus app is a big piece of that puzzle, offering those connections and integrating serious health tracking from third-party devices. That means users can add metrics like blood pressure and glucose levels.

This is one of the first key public facing steps for Fitbitshift into enterprise and healthcare. If it can get corporations and providers to take it more seriously as a medical device provider, the company can tap into a lucrative market beyond straight to consumer. Of course, Fitbit not alone in that push. Apple notably took another step in that direction with the addition of features like the ECG meter on the new Apple Watch.

Facebook will push users to register to vote through a partnership with TurboVote, has partnered with the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute nonprofits to monitor foreign election interference and will publish a weekly report of trends and issues emerging from its new political ads archive. Facebook has also confirmed that its election integrity war room is up and running and the team is now &red teaming& how it would react to problem scenarios such as a spike in voter suppression content.

These were the major announcements from todaybriefing call between Facebookelection integrity team and reporters.

Facebookvoter registration drive will also partner with TurboVote, which Instagram announced yesterday will assist it with a similar initiative

[Update: Facebook also today announced that its context button designed to deter the spread of false news by giving people information about an articlepublisher is now expanding to appear on all links shared to the News Feed, not just articles. Alongside a Wikipedia blurb about the publisher if available, the context button will now also show the age of the domain. This could help users spot sketchy, recently-created news outlets or ones attempting to spoof the brand of an established outlet by using a slightly different URL. Beyond the US and UK, the context button is now expanding to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland as well.]

Much of the call reviewed Facebookpast efforts, but also took time to focus on the upcoming Brazilian election. There, Facebook has engaged with over 1,000 prosecutors, judges and clerks to establish a dialog with election authorities. Itpartnered with three fact-checkers in the country and worked with them on Messenger botslike &Fátima& and &Projeto Lupe& that can help people spot fake news.

The voter registration drive mirrors Instagramplan announced yesterdayto work with TurboVote to push users to registration info via ads. Facebook says it also will remind people to vote on election day and let them share with friends that &I voted.& One concern is that voter registration and voting efforts by Facebook could unevenly advantage one political party, for instance those with a base of middle-aged constituents who might be young enough to use Facebook but not so young that they&ve abandoned it for YouTube and Snapchat. If Facebook can&t prove the efforts are fair, the drive could turn into a talking point for congressional members eager to paint the social network as biased against their party.

The partnerships with the Institutes that don&t operate domestically are designed &to understand what they&re seeing on the ground in elections& around the world so Facebook can move faster to safeguard its systems, says Facebookdirector of Global Politics and Government Outreach Team Katie Harbath. Here, Facebook is admitting this problem is too big to tackle on its own. Beyond working with independent fact-checkers and government election commissions, ittasking nonprofits to help be its eyes and ears on the ground.

The war room isn&t finished yet, according to a story from The New York Times published in the middle of the press call. Still under construction in a central hallway between two of FacebookMenlo Park HQ buildings, it will fit about 20 of Facebook300 staffers working on election integrity. It will feature screens showing dashboards about information flowing through Facebook to help the team quickly identify and respond to surges in false news or fake accounts.

Overall, Facebook is trying to do its homework so itready for a &heat of the moment, last day before the election scenario& and won&t get caught flat-footed, says Facebookdirector of Product Management for News Feed Greg Marra. He says Facebook is&being a lot more proactive and building systems to look for problems so they don&t become big problems on our platform.& Facebookdirector of Product Management for Elections and Civic Engagement Samidh Chakrabarti noted, this is &one of the biggest cross-team efforts we&ve seen.&

GitLab, the developer service that aims to offer a full lifecycle DevOpsplatform, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series D funding round at a valuation of $1.1 billion. The round was led by Iconiq.

As GitLab CEOSid Sijbrandij told me, this round, which brings the companytotal funding to $145.5 million, will help it enable its goal of reaching an IPO by November 2020.

According toSijbrandij, GitLaboriginal plan was to raise a new funding round at a valuation over $1 billion early next year. But since Iconiq came along with an offer that pretty much matched what the company set out to achieve in a few months anyway, the team decided to go ahead and raise the round now. Unsurprisingly, Microsoftacquisition of GitHub earlier this year helped to accelerate those plans, too.

&We weren&t planning on fundraising actually. I did block offsome time in my calendar next year, starting from February 25th to do the next fundraise,&Sijbrandij said. &Our plan is to IPO in November of 2020 and we anticipated one more fundraise. I think in the current climate, where the macroeconomics are really good and GitHub got acquired, people are seeing that thereone independent company, one startup left basically in this space. And we saw an opportunity to become best in class in a lot of categories.&

AsSijbrandij stressed, while most people still look at GitLab as a GitHub and Bitbucket competitor (and given the similarity in their names, who wouldn&t), GitLab wants to be far more than that. It now offers products in nine categories and also sees itself as competing with the likes ofVersionOne, Jira, Jenkins, Artifactory, Electric Cloud, Puppet, New Relic and BlackDuck.

&The biggest misunderstanding we&re seeing is that GitLab is an alternative to GitHub and we&ve grown beyond that,& he said. &We are now in nine categories all the way from planning to monitoring.&

Sijbrandij notes that therea billion-dollar player in every space that GitLab competes. &But we want to be better,& he said. &And thatonly possible because we are open core, so people co-create these products with us. That being said, therestill a lot of work on our side, helping to get those contributions over the finish line, making sure performance and quality stay up, establish a consistent user interface. These are things that typically don&t come from the wider community and with this fundraise of $100 million, we will be able to make sure we can sustain that effort in all the different product categories.&

Given this focus, GitLab will invest most of the funding in its engineeringefforts to build out its existing products but also to launch new ones. The company plans to launch new features like tracing and log aggregation, for example.

With this very public commitment to an IPO, GitLab is also signaling that it plans to stay independent. Thatvery muchSijbrandijplan, at least, though he admitted that &therealways a price& if somebody came along and wanted to acquire the company. He did note that he likes the transparency that comes with being a public company.

&We always managed to be more bullish about the company than the rest of the world,& he said. &But the rest of the world is starting to catch up. Thisfundraiseis a statement that we now have the money to become a public company where we&re not we&re not interested in being acquired.That is what we&resettingout to do.&