Technology

MessageBird, the Amsterdam-based cloud communications platform backed by Accel in the U.S. and EuropeAtomico, is unveiling a new product today that aims to make it easier for enterprises to communicate with customers across various channels of their choosing.

Dubbed &Programmable Communications& (yes, really!), the product takes the form of a single API that unifies customer interactions across multiple channels into a single conversation thread. Out of the box these include WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Line, Telegram, SMS and voice interactions. The idea is that by providing a consolidated view of a customerentire communication history with an enterprise, customer support agents and other customer-facing staff will have the firepower to stay on top of their game in terms of the customer service they provide.

Or, put another way, more communication channels inevitably lead to fragmented conversations, which, especially when multiple support staff are involved, can lead to a degradation of service. Programmable Communications is an attempt to help solve this problem.

In a call with MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis, he told me that more broadly enterprises — and fast-growing startups — no longer have the luxury of dictating how and through what channels customers converse with them. Traditionally, customer service would be delivered via a dedicated phone number, but the plethora of established and emerging online messaging and communications channels has radically increased the number of options customers have and expect.

However, this creates a headache for businesses as each channel needs developer time to be integrated into an existing CRM or business process and additional staffing to service conversations across multiple channels.

It is this heavy lifting that MessageBirdProgrammable Communications takes care off — keeping conversations in sync across multiple channels, for example, isn&t technically simple — thus cutting down on not just initial implementation time and cost, but also continued maintenance and upkeep.

Vis also explained that Programmable Communications is designed to enable comms for enterprises that are global — including scale-ups with global ambitions from the get-go — in terms of the territories, carrier integrations and messaging platforms the company supports.

&Delivering communications experiences that improve customer satisfaction and loyalty has to be a focus of businesses today,& adds the MessageBird CEO in a statement. &Consumers today want to connect with businesses in the same way they do with their friends and family & on their own time, via their preferred channel with all the context of previous conversations. With Programmable Conversations enterprises can now easily build a modern communications experience while reducing the burden of their often over-tasked developers&.

Founders for Change, an initiative from All Raise, is hosting its first-ever meetup for its group of founders focused on diversity and inclusion in tech. Since launching in March, Founders for Change has grown to more than 800 founders from companies like Pandora, Patreon, Shippo, PagerDuty, Udacity and others.

&Itone of those things where the movement really resonated with a number of founders,& Freestyle Capital Partner and AllRaise FfC co-lead Jenny Lefcourt told TechCrunch. &It was an online movement and everywhere for a period of time. People continued to sign up but it was just online. This is the beginning.&

Thatto say that this is likely not the last meetup for founders. The aim of this particular meetup is to share best practices, learnings and offer tools for founders to better implement diversity and inclusion at their respective startups.

&Thatthe impetus for the event on Monday,& Lefcourt said. &Itthe first gathering of so many of these founders on this subject.&

Throughout the day, there will be breakouts and sessions about building belonging, how, why and when to build a diverse board, why itimportant to implement diversity and inclusion efforts early on and more.TK says sheexpecting about 100 founders to be in attendance.

&We were pretty amazed that this many founders are going to give such a big chunk of the day and evening to diversity and inclusion,& Lefcourt said. &It makes it clear how important they all recognize it is.&

All Raise,the nonprofit organization thatbehind diversity and inclusion efforts likeFemale Founder Office Hours(FFOH) andFounders for Change(FfC), wants to increase the amount of funding female founders receive.Currently, female founders receive just 15 percent of all venture funding, according to All Raise. Within the next five years, All Raise wants to increase that to 25 percent, while also doubling the percentage of women in VC partner roles in the next 10 years.

When Anki invited us by the office last week to check out their latest creation, we weren&t sure what the expect. In the eight years since the company was founded by a trio of Carnegie Mellon graduates, itoffered up a handful of distinctly different smart toys, from its Drive smart cars to 2016Cozmo robot.

The truth is that the companylatest creation looks an awful lot like its last. In fact, the only immediately apparent change is a dark coat of paint, akin to what the iMac received when it graduated to the iMac Pro. In fact, thatprobably a pretty solid analogy beyond just the color change, so letstick with that.

Simply put, Vector is Cozmo for adults. In many ways, the new ‘bot is built on the lessons learned from Cozmo, coupled with more advanced internals. Vector has ~700 parts — double the number of its predecessor, while its brain is a much more advanced Snapdragon processor. Vectorface also features a higher res display, making it capable of expressing subtler emotion redesigned by that staff of ex-Pixar and Dreamworks animators the company employs.

So, what does all of this add up to, exactly The company certainly has some grand ambitions. Anki believes its well positioned to offer users the gateway to the next generation of home robots. Both R2-D2 and Rosie from the Jetsons are casually name-checked in the companypress release, naturally.

The truth about Vector is more modest, though the product does seem like a much more mainstream solution than the recently departed Kuri. For one thing, it will run less than half the price at $250. Thatstill $70 more than Cozmo, mind. Unlike Cozmo, however, Vector doesn&t require a constant smartphone connection — just WiFi — which is part of why having a more advanced on-board computation system is important.

Along with that, Vector also gets an HD camera with a 120-degree field of view, so it can double as a roaming security device (that functionality is coming next year) and four microphones, which allow it to Alexa-style commands with a &Hey Vector.& Like Cozmo, the robot will also initiate conversation when you make eye contact, so you don&t have to summon it ever time. Instead of opting for Alexa or Google Assistant, however, the company used third-party knowledge graphs to build its own system, so Vector doesn&t break character by launching another assistant.

Like Cozmo, I suspect the companygot a lot planned for the robot by way of software updates. For the time being, however, I haven&t seen a lot that convinces me that Vectormuch more than a slightly more advanced Cozmo — which could make the pricey a robot toy a hard sell for serious adults. Broader ambitions should include a robot that can traverse more than limited range of a desktop, in order to better patrol the home.

iRobotupcoming smart home plans for the Roomba serve as a potential way forward for home robotics, though Anki believes that it has the upper hand here, by investing a good deal in personality from the outset. Perhaps people really do need that human to robot connection to really entrust their lives to such a device, though a compete lack of personality certainly hasn&t hurt AmazonEcho or Google Home.

But Anki gets the benefit of the doubt here. This is all very early stages, and our early skepticism about Cozmo being a niche product was put to rest when the company managed to sell 1.5 million globally. Launching as a Kickstarter campaign should also help Anki assess early interest in the product and scale from there.

I remain skeptical as ever that Vector is the mainstream home robot of the future — it seems more of a stepping stone, really. And certainly Anki is being transparent about its job of constantly building on the learnings of past models. At the very least, the companygot the interest, revenue and the funding to avoid the recent pitfalls of Sphero and Kuri.