Meet TechCrunch in Tunis, Cairo, Dubai and Beirut this month

TechCrunchjust announced our first-everStartup Battlefield MENAtaking place in Beirut, Lebanon in October. We&re hitting the road to meet with regional early-stage startups, investors and entrepreneurs in July. Sign up below.

Startups and investors can meet the TechCrunch team and learn more about TechCrunchStartup Battlefield program. Founders will learn how to apply for Startup Battlefield with a solid application, and investors will learn how to refer early-stage companies in their portfolio.

We&ll be visiting Tunis, Cairo, Dubai and Beirut to meet with founders, investors, angels and established entrepreneurs across the Middle East and North Africa.

Startup Battlefield is TechCrunchrenowned startup launch competition. The Startup Battlefield alumni community comprises almost 765 companies that have raised more than $8 billion USD and produced over 105 successful exits and IPOs.

Applications are now open, and founders canapplyhere until July 31. You can also refer founders here and speakers or judges here.

For questions, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Hold the dates in your calendar below, and sign up here to get updates as RSVP links go live.

2018 TechCrunch MENA Meet and Greets

Tunis, Tunisia

July 12th, Thursday Host: Cogite Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pmRSVP

Cairo, Egypt

July 17th, Tuesday Host: TBD Time: TBDRSVP COMING SOON

July 18th, Wednesday Host: TBD Time: TBDRSVP COMING SOON

Dubai, UAE

July 24th, Tuesday Host: TBD Time: TBDRSVP COMING SOON

Beirut, Lebanon

July 26th, Thursday Host: TBD Time: TBD

RSVP COMING SOON

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Pitching a dollar-pegged token that offers cryptocurrency speculators a way to move their investments across volatile exchanges, TrustToken (the first public investment from a16z crypto) is now looking for public investments from accredited investors on CoinList.

The companyfirst token is TrueUSD, a stablecoin that is redeemable one-to-one for U.S. dollars. In its first four months of trading, the speculative investors that are looking for some sort of island of security have boosted the coinmarket price to more than $85 million.

Therea $61 million hard cap on the token allocated over three tranches at $0.12, $0.14 and $0.16 per trust token.

Other investors in TrustTokeninitial $20 million pre-sale include BlockTower Capital, Danhua Capital, GGV Capital, Jump Capital and other undisclosed investors.

As it expands its investor base to include accredited investors, the TrueUSD currency is also expanding its reach, with an agreement between the company and HitBTC to list the stablecoin as a quote currency. The TrueUSD coin can be used as a stalking horse to secure investments in Ethereum, Bitcoin, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Monero, 0x and NEO, according to a statement from the company.

Every TrueUSD token is redeemable one-for-one with U.S. dollars, which the companyfounders think should open the door for more institutional investment (or speculation depending on your point of view) into the market.

Using TrueUSDsystem, dollars are held in the escrow accounts of multiple trust companies rather than in a bank account. Those accounts are verified by an independent third party that issues monthly reports on the amount of dollars held in collateral.

A buyer of TrueUSD needs to pass a know your customer and AML check and then can send dollars to one of TrueUSDtrust company partners. Once that transaction is verified, the TrueUSD smart contract issues tokens on a one-to-one ratio before sending the tokens to a buyer. The company uses Prime Trust, a Las Vegas-based company for its financial services.

Once tokens are delivered to a wallet, those tokens can be transferred or used as payment to buy other cryptocurrencies.

&The users of this space are really the traders,& says TrustToken co-founder and chief executive Danny An. &They want a native crypto asset thatstable. They want to be able to hedge against volatility.&

An said the company does have a broader vision than just helping traders secure speculative assets so they can come up with even more arcane financial instruments. &For the entire crypto-economy to work, a lot of people believe that a stablecoin or multiple stablecoins need to be created,& An said.

TrustToken makes money whenever its coins are minted or burned, An says. &Whenever USD is involved we take a small cut,& which is 10 basis points per transaction, he said.

Ultimately, TrustToken (like other alt-coins) wants to tokenize all real-world assets. And one of the most attractive markets for An and his co-founders is real estate. &There is $200 trillion dollars of real estate that is offline,& said An. Tokenizing those assets would create more wealth in the world overall, he said. &Assets that are not liquid are not as valuable as assets that are liquid,& An said.

Ita far cry from the work that An and his co-founders Rafael Cosman and Stephen Kade were doing at Kernel — a company that was developing technologies to create neural interfaces between humans and machines.

&The problem with Kernel or Google Brain [where the team also spent time] was that the timelines were very long,& An said.

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Snapchat is building a visual product search feature, codenamed &Eagle,& that delivers users to Amazon listings. Buried inside the code of SnapchatAndroid app is an unreleased &Visual Search& feature where you &Press and hold to identify an object, song, barcode, and more! This works by sending data to Amazon, Shazam, and other partners.& Once an object or barcode has been scanned you can &See all results at Amazon.&

Visual product search could make Snapchatcamera a more general purpose tool for seeing and navigating the world, rather than just a social media maker. It could differentiate Snapchat from Instagram, whose clone of Snapchat Stories now has more than twice the users and a six times faster gro

wth rate than the original. And if Snapchat has worked out an affiliate referrals deal with Amazon, it could open a new revenue stream. Thatsomething Snap Inc. direly needs after posting a $385 million loss last quarter and missing revenue estimates by $14 million.

Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search&

TechCrunch was tipped off to the hidden Snapchat code by app researcher Ishan Agarwal. His tips have previously led to TechCrunch scoops about Instagramvideo calling, soundtracks, Focus portrait mode and QR Nametags features that were all later officially launched. Amazon didn&t respond to a press inquiry before publishing time, and itunclear if its actively involved in the development of Snapchat visual search or just a destination for its results. Snap already sells its Spetacles v2 camera glasses on Amazon — the only place beyond its own site. Snap Inc. gave TechCrunch a &no comment,& about visual search but the companycode tells the story.

Snapchat first dabbled in understanding the world around you with its Shazam integrationback in 2016 that lets you tap and hold to identify a song playing nearby, check it out on Shazam, send it to a friend or follow the artist on Snapchat. Project Eagle builds on this audio search feature to offer visual search through a similar interface and set of partnerships.The ability to identify purchaseable objects or scan barcodes could turn Snapchat, which some view as a teen toy, into more of a utility.Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search&

Whatinside SnapchatEagle eye

Snapchatcode doesn&t explain exactly how the Project Eagle feature will work, but in the newest version of Snapchat it was renamed as &Camera Search.& If you remember, Snap used another animal name, &Cheetah&, as the secret word for its big redesign. The appcode liststhe ability to surface &sellers& and &reviews,& &Copy URL& of a product and &Share& or &Send Product& to friends — likely via Snap messages or Snapchat Stories. In characteristic cool kid teenspeak, an error message for &product not found& reads &Bummer, we didn&t catch that!&

Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search&

Eaglevisual search may be connected to Snapchat&context cards,& which debuted late last year and pull up business contact info, restaurant reservations, movie tickets, Ubers or Lyfts and more. Surfacing within Snapchat a context card of details about ownable objects might be the first step to getting users to buy them… and advertisers to pay Snap to promote them. Iteasy to imagine context cards being accessible for products tagged in Snap Ads as well as scanned through visual search. And Snap already has in-app shopping.

SnapchatCamera Search could become a direct competitor for PinterestLens, which identifies objects and brings up related content. Pinterest has evolved the product, embedding it inside the apps of retailers like Target. Beyond shopping, Camera Search could let Snapchat users find Stories that contain the same object they&re snapping.

Being able to recognize what you&re seeing makes Snapchat more fun, but italso a new way of navigating reality. In mid-2017 Snapchat launched World Lenses that map the surfaces of your surroundings so you can place 3D animated objects like its Dancing Hotdog mascot alongside real people in real places. Snapchat also released a machine vision-powered search feature last year that compiles Stories of user-submitted Snaps featuring your chosen keyword, like videos with &puppies& or &fireworks,& even if the captions don&t mention them.

Snapchat code reveals team-up with Amazon for ‘Camera Search&

PinterestLens visual search feature

Snapchat was so interested in visual search that this year, it reportedly held early-stage acquisition talks with machine vision startup Blippar. The talks fell through with the U.K. augmented reality company that has raised at least $99 million for its own visual search feature, but which recently began to implode due to low usage and financing trouble. Snap Inc. might have been hoping to jumpstart its Camera Search efforts.

Snap calls itself a camera company, after all. But with the weak sales of its mediocre v1 Spectacles, the well-reviewed v2 failing to break into the cultural zeitgeist and no other hardware products on the market, Snap may need to redefine what exactly that tag line means. Visual search could frame Snapchat as more of a sensor than just a camera. With its popular use for rapid-fire selfie messaging, italready the lens through which some teens see the world. Soon, Snap could be ready to train its eagle eye on purchases, not just faces.

In related Snapchat news:

Snapchatnew Snap Store teases in-app commerce potential

Snapchat launches privacy-safe Snap Kit, the un-Facebook platform

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PlayVS CEO Delane Parnell to talk high school esports at Disrupt SF

The gaming world is evolving at a rapid clip. No longer is the idea of the lonely gamer a reality. Twitch and Discord have brought gamers together and given everyone the opportunity to see just how talented some of these young players are. Meanwhile, publishers and esports organizations have built out an infrastructure.

But there is plenty left to do, and PlayVS founder and CEO Delane Parnell is well aware of this.

We&re amped to announce that Parnell is joining us at TC Disrupt SF in September to talk about how high school esports could pave the way for even more growth in this industry.

PlayVS is a startup that has partnered with the NFHS to bring esports to the high school level, providing infrastructure around scheduling, refs, rules and state tournaments. Not only does this allow high school students to get extracurricular experience doing what they love (playing video games), but it offers a new way for esports orgs and colleges to look at the bright young talent coming up through the ranks.

PlayVS launched in April after securing its partnership with the NFHS. Through this partnership, the company will be able to bring organized esports to more than 18 states and approximately 5 million students across 5,000 high schools.

The company has since raised $15 million in Series A, and the inaugural season begins in October of this year.

We&re absolutely thrilled to get the chance to sit down with Parnell to discuss the launch of the platform and hear about how high school esports could set the tone for the industry as a whole.

Passes to Disrupt SF are available here at the Early Bird rate until July 25.

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Topbox helps businesses understand how their customers experience their products and where they run into issues by analyzing voice and text chats to surveys, social media posts and online reviews. Today, the company announced it has raised a $5 million funding round led by Telescope Partners, with participation from Cascade Angels, Flyover Capital and the Maryland Venture Fund.

Topbox CEO Chris Tranquill told me he first experienced the problem hetrying to solve when he was running call centers with thousands of agents. All of the companies that contracted his services faced the same problem: understanding the friction points their customers were experiencing.

Topbox raises $5M for its customer experience analytics service

&We always had this vision that being able to really understand those friction points with deep context — thatwhat the key is — but really getting to that granular level of detail so that you can have that context to support a decision,& Tranquill said. Say you want to understand what issues customers are having with a new shoe. Ideally, Topbox will aggregate all of the data across all channels about that shoe and help the company understand who the wearers are and what issues they are experiencing.

Theoretically, companies could do this on their own, but all of this data exists in various silos and combining those disparate data sets is a major challenge. Topbox uses its technology to ingest this data (and itpretty agnostic about where it comes from) and then runs it through its classification models. Indeed, as Tranquill told me, itthis model thatthe secret sauce behind the companyability to classify data.

Topbox raises $5M for its customer experience analytics service

Itnot just about getting a high-level overview of your customerreactions, though. Tranquill stressed that users can go deeper. &The big thing for us is granularity,& he told me. &I can find high-level data all day long, but can I find the root cause& With a few clicks, any Topbox user should be able to understand what issues their customers are facing, no matter whether thata product issue, a shipping problem or something else.

Current Topbox customers include the likes of Orvis, Bed Bath - Beyond and Western Union. With this new round, Topbox expects to build out its go-to-market strategy and continue to develop its product. Currently, the company focuses on a number of verticals where its model works best (retailers, mobile telcos, cable and broadband providers and healthcare companies), and Tranquill tells me this is where it will focus its energy for now. The company will also soon launch a new user interface and bring on more machine learning experts as it looks to provide its users deeper insights into their data.

Topbox raises $5M for its customer experience analytics service

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BigClapper does away with tedious clapping, happiness

&If you want a picture of the future, imagine a robot clapping over a human face, forever,& wrote George Orwell, and his dire prediction has finally come to pass. This product & a year old device that I have never seen before but now love & is called BigClapper and it is basically an orb with a funny face and big white hands. When you set it up in a location it will yell and clap endlessly, a sort of robotic tummler that can pick up your spirits while it drains your will to live.

The product, found by RobotStart, is wildly manic. BigClapper can be used at offices! In front of stores! At parties! It can clap as people walk by, encouraging them to come into your shop! It is red! It has hands!

While itnot yet Alexa compatible, the BigClapper looks to be a model of future human-computer interaction. After all what is more pure than a big red face howling at you on the street while it claps maniacally in an effort to sell you more products. Ita literal symbol of true capitalism in this modern era.

I, for one, welcome our clapping robot overlords.

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