Technology

PlayVS, the startup bringing an e-sports infrastructure to the high school level, has today announced that it will partner with RiotLeague of Legends for its beta season.

High school students across five states, including Connecticut, Georgia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, will be able to sign up to play for their school in Season Zero, which begins in October 2018.

Around 200 colleges and universities across the U.S. and Canada are offering esports scholarships, but without any infrastructure around high school esports, those recruiters are left at the mercy of the publishers and a grueling tournament schedule.

Meanwhile, young gamers who want to go pro are forced to gain a following via Twitch, or hit up all those tournaments and find a way to shine.

PlayVS offers access to recruiters while giving high school students the chance to play competitive esports at the high school level. The startup, backed by Science with $15.5 million in funding, has partnered with the NFHS (essentially the NCAA of high school) to offer turnkey competition through its dashboard.

PlayVS partners with publishers, and lets players sign up, receive team and league schedules, check standings and stats, and actually play the game all within the PlayVS online portal.

PlayVS has a no-cut policy, letting high schools submit as many unique teams as they like. Given that the company makes money from players themselves ($64/season/player), it makes sense that the company would take a ‘the more the merrier& approach.

The company then divides up those teams into conferences, and the teams play to be conference champions, advance to semi-finals, and eventually head to the state championship. All the games will be played from the students& own school through the online portal, except for the State Championship tournament which will have a live spectator audience.

This beta season, which includes five states, gives PlayVS a chance to roll out the platform to a smaller pool of players and work out any issues ahead of the inaugural season, which starts February 2019.

Mapillary, the Swedish startup that wants to take on Google and others in mapping the world by way of a crowdsourced database of street-level imagery, is taking an interesting step in the development of its platform. The company is now working with Amazon, and specifically its Rekognition API, to detect and read text in Mapillary database of 350 million images.

The first application resulting from the new feature will come from a large US city (that Mapillary will not name right now), which plans to use the information that will now be &readable& from parking signs to build a parking app.

&Parking is a super hot space and [parking information] is one of the most asked-for pieces of data that people want to useMapillary for,& saidJan Erik Solem, CEO and co-founder of the Malmo, Sweden-based startup. He said that while parking will be the first application and one that he expects other cities to use as well, there will be other applications coming out from matching up text in Mapillaryimages, and subsequently being able to pinpoint exact latitude and longitude for specific locations. &We&re starting with parking signs in the US because parking is one of the biggest issues in towns today, but text recognition will apply to many different types of objects and images, such as building facades.&

While it might sound odd that a city might not have a grip on the state of its on-street parking, this is apparently the case: cities, Solem said, have general analogue maps indicating parking regulations, but many of them lack digitised versions, which means that when they want to build new services (and in particular services that help them raise revenues either from parking fees, or parking fines), or consider whether they need to build more parking, they lack the datasets to be able to either.

Mapillary cites research that says that parking problems collectively cost $73 billion in the US — presumably that includes not just the fines that people pay for overstaying, the gas they gobble looking for a spot, and so on; but perhaps even the lost revenues in areas where they overstay and no one knows.

Notably, Mapillary is referring to its use of the Rekognition API as a &collaboration& with Amazon, although when I asked about the wording, he was a little less willing to collaborate with me.

&I can&t comment on what Amazon is doing or why,& he said. &It would be nice to have that part of the announcement, but it ended up not working out this time.&It seems that the two have been working together for a while now, although that is all under NDA.

Amazon has been doing a lot in the world of mapping, however, both as a provider of data to third parties, and for its own services. For starters, the company is a logistics powerhouse, and part of the reason for that is because of its intelligent routing around areas to figure out how best to collect and deliver and distribute goods bought and sold on its marketplace.

But that is just one part of how mapping and location are used at Amazon. The company uses maps from Here, and had at one point been rumored to be one of the parties interested in buying the mapping firm. Meanwhile, it also has built (and acquired other mapping IP and talent in the process) a mapping API, similar to Google&s, for developers that want to build apps that use location services in any way for any Amazon device.

For now, that has mainly meant building apps for its Fire tablet and Amazonburgeoning range of Echo devices, but Amazon is also very focused on also having a role to play in other kinds of hardware, such as connected vehicles.

In January, Toyota announced that it would be working with Amazon to integrate Alexa into its cars, and separately, Amazon has also been racking up patents in the area of autonomous vehicles.

In other words, there is a clear opportunity for a company like Mapillary, providing a viable alternative to Google Maps in terms of street-level imagery, to work as a strong partner to Amazon in these services, specifically in indexing and providing information about what is around you, and how to route you most efficiently from A to B.

And as a side note, as with other artificial intelligence platforms, Rekognition is also learning from each time that itused in an application, so through its collaboration with Mapillary, it too is picking up more detailed data about street signs and what they say, and where they are used.

Mapillary itself is an interesting startup that I&ve long thought is one to watch. Solem is a computer vision specialist who sold his previous company, the facial recognition startup Polar Rose, to Apple; and his latest venture has raised $24.5 million so far from the likes of Sequoia, Atomico, Navinfo,BMW and Samsung— leading the way to building some interesting inroads with potential customers.

One of these happens to include Here, Amazonmapping provider. Others are under NDA. Together, they are now also feeding Mapillary images to contribute to its wider database, although Solem said about 80 percent of its content of 350 million images still comes from individuals, much like Waze. &Everyone either seems to have a need to solve some kind of problem, or a desire to fix maps around the world,& he said.

While text recognition and reading is one problem Mapillary is tackling today, the next will be helping people capture more images, more automatically. &The next iteration of our product will help people fill out coverage,& Solem said without elaborating more on the details. &We are building out tools to deploy capture tasking.&

Jet.com, the e-commerce site Walmart acquired in 2016 for $3 billion, is relaunching itself today with an upgraded look and assortment, as well as a stronger focus on serving the needs of shoppers in urban metros. The siteupdated catalog now features an assortment thatmore relevant to city shoppers& interests across categories like grocery, home, fashion, beauty and electronics, the company says. It will also introduce 3-hour grocery delivery as a challenge to AmazonPrime Now.

Specifically, the site will now be localized to the city where the shoppers live.

This localization involves the use of localized imagery and messages on the homepage and elsewhere, as well as Jetdecisions about what products are featured in its assortment for that region. The site will also transition from a daytime theme to a nighttime theme as the day progresses.

These localization efforts begin with New York, but will roll out to other cities over time.

According toSimon Belsham, President of Jet.com, theNortheast will be a priority. After NYC, it will local sites for Boston, then Philadelphia, then D.C.

The site will also focus on helping shoppers more easily reorder items and will be personalized to shoppers& own preferences, in terms of things like product recommendations and when reorder reminders appear.

And it will tailor its shopping experiences for each product category in different ways.

&The way consumers are inspired by and shop for fashion is very different than food,& Belsham explains to TechCrunch. &When shopping for fashion, consumers want to shop the look, shop select styles and see the styles on real people so imagery and video are important.&

&For food, they want to see the brands and the products and confirm they will be fresh and quality,& he continues. &They also want to save time and get their weekly grocery needs plus stock up items. So itimportant for the imagery to be clear and crisp and offer scheduled delivery windows that consumers can get at a time convenient to their busy lives,& he says.

Voice computing is another key focus, but Walmart isn&t going to leverage rival Amazon.comAlexa platform for that, of course. Instead, it will allow iOS users to build lists using Siri voice commands.

For example: &Siri, add bananas to my grocery list.&

Another big shift for the revamped Jet.com is its new offering of three-hour same-day grocery delivery and next-day delivery options. Delivery will be provided through most of New York City via Parcel, the last-mile delivery startup it acquired in 2017 with the intention of launching same-day delivery in the city.

At launch, the majority of New York City customers will be able to select 3-hour delivery of groceries and other everyday essentials, including those from local and small businesses, likeBedford Cheese Shop, Pat LaFrieda meats, Orwashers Bakery, Big Gay Ice Cream, and Just Bagels. The decision to work with area businesses is similar to how Amazon Prime Now works with local shops, grocers, and restaurants.

Online grocery customers will be able to give Jet.com instructions on where to leave items, and groceries will arrive in recyclable, insulated bags that keep foods cold for up to three hours.

While not necessarily related to city shoppers& needs, Jet also today announced a strategic partnership with Nike that will see the site offering online consumers a selection of Nike and Converse products in a fully-branded experience.

The debut assortment will includehundreds of products across apparel, footwear and accessories for men, women and children, including essentials for running, training and sportswear, Jet.com says.

Fashion and apparel is one of the top-growing categories online and more retailers have figured out how to get shoppers to buy products that usually require try-on through innovative programs, like Amazonhome try-on service, Prime Wardrobe, or through leveraging their brick-and-mortar footprint for returns. Brands, meanwhile, have benefitted from the exposure provided by being available to consumers through these e-commerce giants& sites. For example, Lord - Taylor just set up shop on Walmart.com and just days ago, J.Crew announced it was launching a storefront on Amazon.

Despite these moves to prioritize the needs of urban shoppers, Jet.com will not close down its site to shoppers outside major metros. The site will remain available to all consumers nationwide, Belsham says.

&I am so excited to relaunch Jet to consumers today,& said Belsham, in a prepared statement about the launch of the updated site. &As a retailer, we must build experiences that customers love and trust, backed by strong values. For Jet, this means offering a more tailored shopping experience combined with a unique assortment of great brands in a way that brings empathy back into e-commerce. This is only the beginning for Jet,& he said.

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