Technology

InVision today announced a newly expanded integration and strategic partnership with Atlassian that will let users of Confluence, Trello and Jira see and share InVision prototypes from within those programs.

Atlassian product suite is built around making product teams faster and more efficient. These tools streamline and organize communication so developers and designers can focus on getting the job done. Meanwhile, InVisioncollaboration platform has caught on to the idea that design is now a team sport, letting designers, engineers, executives and other shareholders be involved in the design process right from the get-go.

Specifically, the expanded integration allows designers to share InVision Studio designs and prototypes right within Jira, Trello and Confluence . InVision Studio was unveiled late last year, offering designers an alternative to Sketch and Adobe.

Given the way design and development teams use both product suites, it only makes sense to let these product suites communicate with one another.

As part of the partnership, Atlassian has also made a strategic financial investment in InVision, though the companies declined to share the amount.

Herewhat InVision CEO Clark Valberg had to say about it in a prepared statement:

In todaydigital world creating delightful, highly effective customer experiences has become a central business imperative for every company in the world. InVision and Atlassian represent the essential platforms for organizations looking to unleash the potential of their design and development teams. We&re looking forward to all the opportunities to deepen our relationship on both a product and strategic basis, and build toward a more cohesive digital product operating system that enables every organization to build better products, faster.

InVision has been working to position itself as the Salesforce of the design world. Alongside InVision and InVision Studio, the company has also built out an asset and app store, as well as launched a small fund to invest in design startups. In short, InVision wants the design ecosystem to revolve around it.

Considering that InVision has raised more than $200 million, and serves 4 million users, including 80 percent of the Fortune 500, it would seem that the strategy is paying off.

Down a two-lane road on the outskirts of Princeton, Ky., next to a cemetery and past the Light of Truth Church, is the Porter Road Butcher Meat Co. facility — a staging ground for what the Nashville-based startup Porter Road hopes will be a revolution in the American meatpacking industry.

For the companyco-founders, James Peisker and Chris Carter, the refashioning of the meat business in America is the next step in a nearly decade-long journey since the former chefs first met working in the restaurant of Nashvillehistoric Hermitage Hotel.

The two men started their butcher business selling locally sourced meat from the East Nashville FarmerMarket in 2010, and eventually moved to a storefront in the same neighborhood a year later.

&We ended up going around and raising funds and opened the brick and mortar shop in 2011,& Peisker said. &Chris worked a job at a friend of ours& deli in the morning and I worked at a restaurant at night.&

But from the beginning the two men had bigger ambitions, and as the business became increasingly successful, they began thinking about how to bring their approach to the meat industry to the entire country.

&What we see the future is is being able to reach as many people as we can in the country and offer them the best quality, most sustainably raised products,& said Carter in an interview.

As they began building the business in earnest, the two men realized there was a critical part of the process over which they had no control — the meat processing itself.

&I would love to be Omaha Steaks,& said Carter. &But I would love to bring change to the system that Omaha Steaks buys into.& To do that meant not just sourcing from sustainable farms, but making sure that their slaughterhouse and processing facility was operating to standards that the two co-founders set for themselves.

&They put up the curtain to hide whathappening,& said Peisker of the meat industry — although the dirty side of industrial animal husbandry is well known. &Ninety-nine percentof the meat is coming from these really disgusting places where the animals are near death and kept alive with injections…Tyson can say they get their chickens from family farms, but they sell the farmers feed, and chicks… small family farms are raising these animals but are doing it in a way that harms the animal. And our beef is born in the same manner. Ithow they spend the end of their lives. They&re force-fed chicken shit, chicken feathers, scrap and harvested in a manner thatdoing 60,000 head a day.&

Peisker and Carter envision a different path, one thatdecentralizing the commodity meat industry. Instead of industrial farms producing thousands of head, smaller sustainable farms could raise livestock in the hundreds. Those sustainably raised animals could then be sent to local processing plants and slaughtered in facilities that are better for workers and (more) humane for animals.

&One of the first things we did was to take away the electric prod sticks and cattle paddles,& said Peisker. Ultimately the men recognize that thereonly so much that can be done to make the industry operate more efficiently and humanely, but every little bit helps.

The alternative is continuing to operate at scales that are toxic for the entire country. For example, earlier this month a jury in North Carolina awarded residents near a Smithfield Farms hog farm $470 millionto address their complaints about the stench and the industrial pollution coming from the farm.

In all, industrial animal farms operated by just four companies produce 80 percent of the meat U.S. consumers eat. And the environmental impact of these industrial farms is well understood.

For Ryan Darnell, a managing partner of Max Ventures (and childhood friend of Carter&s), the Porter Road business makes good business sense beyond its social and environmental benefits.

&In this category thereroughly $55 billion of revenue tied up in the traditional supply chain,& Darnell wrote in an email. &Porter Road isn&t just selling meat online. They are rearchitecting the back-end system to eliminate a lot of the things we don&t like (and aren&t good for us). They are building an entirely new meat company from the ground up.&

Companies like Crowd Cow and ButcherBox offer organic meat for sale, but Darnell said the vertical integration that Porter Road has built makes it a fundamentally different company from those startups.

&Most of the competitors in this space have a digital storefront (for distribution) and buy out of the existing supply chain. A few will try to backwards integrate, but itdifficult to learn how to accurately evaluate farmers and implement best practices in a processing facility,& Darnell wrote.

All of this attention to detail in the process is also reflected in the price of Porter Roadmeats (they aren&t cheap). But the notion for Peisker is that people can eat fewer, higher-quality meat meals with Porter Road products (which may also be better for the environment too).

&You should eat less meat but better meat,& said Peisker. &Therea movement across the country of people who want flavor back in their food… and people who want to make a choice with their dollar about what they buy.&

Porter Roadevolution — which culminated in the company launching an online presence in 2017 — is coming at a time when shifting consumption patterns are changing the ways Americans shop and eat.

The Amazon acquisition of Whole Foods has changed the organic market as the once-mighty grocery chain becomes more incorporated into the Seattle e-commerce giantcommercial operations. Thatopened the doors for direct to consumer competitors to come in — including companies like Thrive Market, Crowd Cow and Porter Road.

&Whole Foods, post-Amazon is just another grocery store now,& said Peisker.

And Americans continue to love organic foods. Sales of organic food products hit a record $45.2 billion in 2017, according to the Organic Trade Association. While growth slowed to 6.7 percent from 9 percent in 2016, the overall numbers are still surpassing the anemic 1 percent growth of the U.S. food business overall, according to the report.

Porter Roadfounders say those numbers are reflected in its own business. &We get busier every day,& said Carter. Over the summer the company was averaging 60 boxes shipped per-day with roughly 5-8 pounds of meat in a box.

With the boost from the $3.7 million in venture funding it received earlier in the year backed by investors includingMax Ventures, Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, Tribeca Venture Partners, Collaborative Fund and Great Oaks VC, Porter Road is hoping to expand its operations.

&Our plan is to build,& Carter said. &We&ve built this amazing model in this location. We have a year or two before we see ourselves busting at the seams here. And we will move to communities across the country.&

The co-founders of Porter Road see opportunities to open a similar processing facility to the one already operating in Princeton — and ideally will be able to build a network of abattoirs around the country. &If we can make a better life for the animals that go into our food system and better food for consumers, why wouldn&t we do it& said Peisker.

Girls Who Code, an organization focused on closing the gender gap in tech, has raised $1 million from Lyft riders since the ride-hailing company added the non-profit organization to its Round Up - Donate program last year.

The program allows participating charities, which has included Habitat for Humanity and World Wildlife Fund, to receive small donations from Lyft riders, who can opt-in by visiting the Round Up - Donate tab within settings in the Lyft app. Launched in May 2017, the feature rounds up your trip payments to the nearest dollar and donates the difference.

&We couldn&t be more excited to be celebrating the $1 million milestone with our friends at Lyft,& Girls Who Code founder and CEO Reshma Saujani said in a statement. &And the moment is made even more special knowing that this was made possible by the riders themselves.&

Girls Who Code has received a lot of support from the tech industry, with backing from Amazon,Pivotal Ventures, GM, AppNexus, Google, Dell and more.

Uber has also provided financial support.The company donated $1.2 million to Girls Who Code as part of a partnership announced last August that had Uberformer chief brand officer Bozoma Saint John join the organizationboard of directors. Saint John has since left Uber but remains on Girls Who Codeboard.

Uber was working feverishly to support non-profits, especially those focused on diversity, as part of its effort to clean up its reputation following numerous reports that Travis Kalanick, Uber former CEO, had fostered a culture of discrimination and harassment during his tenure. One of the organizations they tried to donate to was Black Girls Code, but the non-profit turned down the cash, explaining at the time that they weren&t interested in what they believed was only a PR stunt.

&Their past history and ‘political& nature of maneuvering is and was troubling,& Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant told TechCrunch at the time.

Black Girls Code has, however, accepted donations from Lyft via its Round Up - Donate feature. Bryant has said itbecause Lyftmission more closely aligns with Black Girls Code:&We look very closely at prospective partners with that in mind and pay special attention to those that believe in the power of community to affect change. Through the work they&ve done over the years, we know Lyft embodies these same attributes.&

Black Girls Code was founded in 2011, the same year as Girls Who Code. Both organizations encourage young women to code through programming like immersion summer camps and after-school programs.

Fewer than 1 in 4 computer scientists are women, a number that may only be decreasing. According to Girls Who Code, 37 percent of computer scientists were women in 1995, though that number fell to 24 percent in 2017 and is projected to drop to 22 percent by 2027.

New data out this week, however, says that the number of young women taking the AP Computer Science exam rose 39 percent this year, per Code.org.