Technology

Reward miles are nice if you fly a lot but what if you bike or take Lyfts or just like to wander around town A new app called Miles aims to give you rewards for all of those things, bringing the concept of rewards out of the air and onto the ground.

Miles, co-founded by Jigar Shah, Paresh Jain and Parin Shah, is a San Jose-based company that looked at the problem of reward miles outside of airlines as well as the problems associated with city planning and traffic data generation. The app, which is now in the iOS App Store, can see when you walk, ride a bike, take the bus, drive yourself, or even hop in a Lyft or an Uber. It then rewards you on a sliding scale depending on how eco-friendly your trip is. Biking, for example, is worth more than driving or even taking the bus.

&Mobility today is a universal behavior that goes largely unrewarded,& said Jigar Shah. &To date, travel rewards have been siloed and limited to one form of travel & with consumers facing exclusions when comes to earning and redeeming rewards. Miles solves for this gap in market by allowing anyone to earn rewards & simply by traveling and commuting how they do every day.&

What can you get with your miles Just for signing up you can get 2,000 miles which is enough for a $5 Starbucks, Target, or Whole Foods gift card, among others. There are also &nearby& that bring up deals from merchants in your area but right now most of the deals are online. More miles gets you better deals.

&In contrast to rewards programs in the market today, Miles delivers value for every mile traveled, across every mode of travel, anywhere in the world. Whether by car (as a driver, passenger or rideshare), plane, train, subway, bus, boat, bicycle, or on foot, the Miles app effortlessly awards users& travel & regardless of where their journey takes them. Miles can be saved or redeemed at any time & with the value increasing every month as more merchants accept them as a form of payment,& said Shah.

Because the app tracks your movement on multiple types of transport the Miles team foresees connecting with city governments to supply traffic and usage data for various forms of transport. Further, because miles can be redeemed locally, they could also increase foot traffic.

The company raised $3 million from Porsche Digital, Scrum Ventures, and others. Former TechCruncher Keith Teare also worked with the team on the raise.

Interestingly, the platform can also work to create predictive recommendations based on your position and past likes and dislikes.

&By leveraging the Miles& predictive AI platform, business and brands can deliver value to customers by offering to meet their near future needs as they travel, such as when someone needs a meal, a fill-up at the gas station, or a ride,& wrote the team. &Annoying marketing can become true customer service by enabling hyper-targeted rewards related to immediate need. This not only leads to increased customer loyalty and repeat visits, but also increased sales.&

&We saw an opportunity to deliver more value to people as transportation continued to evolve,& said Shah.

Multiple city governments are looking to implement the technology locally and the Contra Costa Transportation Authority will &offer rewards as an incentive to promote alternative and sustainable mode of transportation through the Miles platform.& Seattle is next and maybe some day soon you&ll be earning miles for walking and driving in your home town. At least it will get us out of the house.

The feed has become the all-powerful determiner of success for creators. Facebook, Patreon, Medium, and other platforms have amassed considerable power over creation, determining what gets seen, by who, as well as the options creators have to get paid. Larger media companies struggle to stay independent against these platforms, complicating their relationships with readers and viewers.

There once was a wholly different vision of the web, one that was far more decentralized and independent. The feed wasn&t sponsored by a company, but rather was an open protocol known as RSS — one that has died, or perhaps has become undead. Yet, that vision of an open, decentralized world still animates some people, including Julien Genestoux.

Genestoux has worked for years to empower creators to spread their content and get paid in the process. He previously founded Superfeedr, which developed a &Feed API& that built upon RSS and Atom to make feeds more useful and real-time. The company was eventually acquired by Medium, which Genestoux joined as well. He also conceived the WebSub protocol, which has been recommended by the W3C, the international standards body behind the world wide web.

Now, he wants to rethink the ways that creators get paid through a new protocol called Unlock. His mission has quickly attracted the attention of venture capitalists, with the New York-based company behind the protocol announcing today that it has raised $1.675 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.

Unlockprotocol provides creators the ability to add &locks& (aka smart contracts) to their creations by adding a snippet of JavaScript to their website, similar to how one would add Stripe as a payment option today. The audience for that content then buys &keys& (aka tokens) to the lock. Creators control the economy around keys — whether they expire, how much they cost to buy, and more through their settings on the lock.

This basic framework has a couple of interesting properties. First, keys are tradable — they can be sold to other people. This creates a secondary market for content on the web, which is tough to build using todayexisting paywall technology. Like used books, Unlockkeys allow users to get delayed access to content for perhaps a more affordable price.

Genestoux also envisions Unlock being the future syndication layer of the web. Here, you might have to stretch a bit to see it, but the idea is that if locks and keys are how access to content gets shared, then Unlock has the opportunity to be the core protocol for all sharing and distribution.

To accelerate that vision, Unlock allows a creatorsupporters to reclaim some of the value of their tokens when others buy keys on there recommendation, creating a referral economy. The hope is that the incentives encourage more sharing of high-quality content, avoiding some of the fake news and other opprobrium that has hit Facebook so hard in the past two years.

Perhaps the most powerful point though is that Unlock is not a centralized platform, but rather just a protocol. Anyone can implement it on the web, and there aren&t any gatekeepers or filters between a producer and a consumer of a creative work. In this way, Unlock tracks back to RSS and other open feed protocols.

Itan ambitious vision, and one that up until now relied pretty much exclusively on Genestoux to see it through. Unlock also announced today that it has hired its first employee, Ben Werdmuller, who was formerly an engineer at Medium and then Director of Investments at Matter., the digital media accelerator. Unlock has also published the code for its protocol on Github.

In addition to GC and Cherry, Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, and Coinbase Ventures also joined the round.

For many people, their workplaces become like a second family. More companies are recognizing this with better benefits such as longer family leave and wellness programs. But when an employee needs to take a break or is going through a hard time, they can feel alienated&sometimes enough to seek a new job. MentalHappy wants to help them stay connected to their companies with care packages, called Cheerboxes, designed for people experiencing a major life event. Founded in 2016 by CEO Tamar Lucien and CTO Kwame Ampem, the Las Vegas-based startup is currently participating in Y Combinatoraccelerator program.

Cheerboxes help signal that employers care about their workforcemental health and also fill a gap in the &corporate wellness& space. Even though companies can now offer a wide range of benefits ranging from meditation apps to better insurance plans, there still aren&t a lot of ways for them to express interest in employees when they take time off. Customized for a wide range of life events, from positive ones like the arrival of a new baby to difficult experiences such as bereavement or illness, Cheerboxes are filled with tools for self-care, including journals and healthy snacks.

So far, MentalHappy has sent more than 10,000 Cheerboxes. The startup makes it simple for companies to personalize packages, no matter how many employees they have, and has handled orders of up to 500 Cheerboxes at a time.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, Lucien worked in human resources and managed more than 200 field employees. Cheerboxes were inspired by her own experiences with depression and the emotional tolls of entrepreneurship, which she says many founders are reluctant to talk about until they have achieved success. To cope, Lucien began practicing positive psychology and mindfulness techniques.

&I wished I could share everything I learned about easing anxiety and panic attacks. I told my co-founder and CTO that if I could put everything into a box, so someone else could take care of themselves through the journey and not just at the end when things are fine, I would want to do that,& Lucien tells TechCrunch. &And he was like, what would you call it&

MentalHappy founders Kwame Ampem and Tamar Lucien.

At the beginning, MentalHappy sold Cheerboxes to consumers, but then they noticed many of their buyers were taking the boxes to work. Employers wanted to purchase them as a benefit, while employees sent them to clients, colleagues or remote workers.

MentalHappy began focusing on enterprise customers, enabling them to purchase customized boxes frequently or in bulk. They realized that even though companies were providing more innovative benefits to attract employees, they still fell back on bouquets or fruit baskets when workers went through a hard time.

Cheerboxes, on the other hand, include items based on positive psychology practices. MentalHappyfounders say they look for items that are unique and not easily found on sites like Amazon. These may include simple games to distract people from anxiety and give them an alternative to staring at their phones, bracelets with positive affirmations, essential oils to aid with sleep or relaxation, &open when& envelopes with supportive notes to help recipients through particularly low points, and bite-sized snacks, since Lucien says many people lose their appetite when they are sad.

For recipients experiencing specific issues, like injury or trauma, the packages also include self-care guides MentalHappy created with psychologists.

&In the beginning, customers used to tell us this person is going through a hard time and they didn&t know what to say. So we reached out through our networks and found people who are really great with learning and motivational things,& Lucien says. &Some customers want to include a small note, so we allow them to circulate a link throughout their organization to include personalized notes in a Cheerbox.&

MentalHappy has worked with many large tech companies, which Lucien describes as &by far the most open to sending happiness to employees as part of their cultural mission and as an employee benefit,& as well as schools and non-profits. Its client list includes SAP Concur, Gusto, Silicon Valley Bank, Pepperdine University, Exclusive Resorts, Cura HR and UCSF Benioff ChildrenHospital.

Even though many of MentalHappyusers are human resources and employee engagement managers, the majority of Cheerboxes are still ordered by coworkers for each other.

&Many of the school districts we work with are gifting them to teachers and at hospitals, we see them gifted to doctors or nurses, especially people who work in some of the harder areas like neonatal care or intensive care,& says says Lucien. Companies have also given Cheerboxes to people in areas affected by a natural disaster or tragedy. For example, some of MentalHappyclients sent Cheerboxes to employees in Texas after Hurricane Harvey and Las Vegas after the October 2017 mass shooting.

Though itclear how MentalHappy can boost morale, it might be a little less obvious how ita tech company. Ampem explains that data is key to creating Cheerboxes at scale, while making sure they still have a personal touch. MentalHappyclients get access to a dashboard to manage orders, see when sending Cheerboxes would be the most beneficial and gather information about recipients to customize their packages. The company also provides its corporate customers with a unique subdomain, so anyone in the company can send a Cheerbox.

&We really want to companies to have that visibility and make it part of their culture to access this resource, especially when it comes to benefit programs they already offer,& says Ampem.