Technology

If a coffee fanatic decides they want to open up a coffee shop somewhere, odds are they&ll have to end up Googling &liability insurance& at some point — and trying to navigate the complex legal web to get all of that nailed down before they even sell their first iced latte.

InakiBerenguer instead hopes they&ll stumble upon CoverWallet in that Google search, which streamlines the process of setting up commercial insurance for a small business. The company is trying to take another step now by saying it will create an open-ended tool that allows third parties to plug directly into its services, giving small businesses a way to pick up commercial insurance while they are going through the flow of another set of SMB management software. All of this is geared toward ensuring that more and more users are able to start tapping the service, which allows it to pick up additional business — and data — even if it means partially handing off the branding and user experience to another service.

&[When I had founded my previous company] when we had three employees and we moved to New York, we were told, if you want to sign a lease you have to buy insurance.& Berenguer said. &I wanted to go to a website, and input my square footage, and my revenue, and get a quote, and do everything else in five to ten minutes — but I was told that didn&t exist for business insurance. I had to go to a general provider, complete a 20-page PDF, which the broker sends it to the insurance company, and then they&ll come back with a quote. This process is analog and time consuming and opaque. I know this process can be reinvented. There are 25m small businesses in the U.S., and they all need to buy insurance.&

CoverWallet is much like whatBerenguer explained in his dream scenario when he was moving his last company into an office. The insurance policies are personalized for restaurants, startups, retail stores, contractors, or various other types of commercial insurance products. Users input their business information, and then are able to pay for the policies — up front or in monthly installments — and get their policy set up in short order. If that doesn&t work, CoverWallet also has a team of agents to cover the rest of the questions they have, and users can modify any of those policies whenever they want.

But in the end, it may be that users are looking to keep things simple & especially if ita small- to medium-sized business that isn&t the kind of technically savvy ones you&ll often find in a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco. While CoverWallet looks to simplify the whole process of getting commercial insurance, which can be a major roadblock to getting something as simple as a coffee shop off the ground, integrating into other tools and making the whole process more and more seamless ensures that it&ll be able to keep that flow of businesses coming in — and those businesses may eventually start to spread the word on their own.

&Businesses might already be using accounting software or payroll,&Berenguer said. &Those systems have all the company info. Why do they need to come to a platform, and type everything, when that info is somewhere else.Itlike white labeling your solution. But if you want to be customer centric, the less they have to type the better.&

There likely isn&t much stopping the larger insurance carriers from offering a similar sort of plug-and-play API. ButBerenguer said building a whole aggregation across all of those insurance providers, andthen giving that pipeline to customers as they look to pick up insurance through another SMB tool like Gusto (though Gusto isn&t one of the clients,Berenguer said), gives them enough of a compelling argument for those employment suites to bring them in. Certain providers may only offer certain kinds of policies, or cover certain geographic regions, and CoverWallet hopes it will make a good enough case that it can cover all those gaps.

August Lock is getting into the homesharing industry, making the process of checking in an Airbnb guest a bit easier.

Airbnb has done what it can over the past few months to make checking in plain and simple. For example, the company built out a new tool that lets hosts spell out check-in instructions within the app, all in a simple flow, to make sure guests have all the info they need at their fingertips.

But that hasn&t solved the biggest problem of all: the key.

For one, people don&t often have a lot of interest in meeting strangers, especially when they&re fresh off a plane or road trip.Secondly, itannoying to block out that time (sometimes getting off work) to go hand off a key to an Airbnb guest. And then therethe matter of getting keys copied or re-tooling your smart lock to temporarily offer a stranger access.

Thatwhere August comes in to play.

August now letAirbnb and Homeaway hosts link their accounts to August. When a guest books at their home, August will generate a smart code that lasts for the duration of the stay and no longer, letting the guest easily check-in and come and go without the host having to babysit the process.

Guests will receive their pin code and instructions via email.

Hosts simply need an August Smart Lock and Smart Keypad to start letting technology do the heavy lifting. And, in fact, August is running a deal right now for 25 percent off the Smarter Hosting Bundle, which includes an August Smart Lock, August Connect Wi-Fi Bridge and August Smart Keypad.

This, coupled with other startup services like Handy, should make becoming an Airbnb host as simple as tapping a few buttons.

Mozilla today released version 61 of its Firefox browser. By now, itno secret that Firefox is back in contention as a serious competitor to GoogleChrome browser and while the new release doesn&t offer any groundbreaking new features, all of the new improvements and tools in Firefox 61 are good examples for why Firefox is worth another try.

Two of the new features focus on speed, something Firefox was sorely lacking for a while but now offers plenty of.

The first of these is tab warming, which essentially makes switching between tabs faster because Firefox already preemptively starts loading a tab (after a small delay) when you are hovering over it. Once you do click on that tab, much of the rendering has already been done, so switching between tabs now feels faster.

The other new performance-related feature is ‘retained display lists.& Whenever Firefox renders a page, it builds a display list that gathers the high-level items like borders, backgrounds and text that need to be displayed on the screen and then organizes them according to the CSS painting rules. Originally, Firefox would build a new list every time the screen changed — maybe because you scrolled down, for example. With high-res screens and complex websites, that process could take a while (though ‘a while& in this context means 4 or 5 milliseconds). Over the course of the last few months, the Firefox team re-built parts of this system to ensure that this list doesn&t have to be rebuilt every time, which led to a significant reduction in paint times.

Another major new Firefox feature for developers is the Accessibility Tool Inspector, which is part of the built-in set of developer tools in the browser. The idea here is to provide developers with a clearer view of how the browser would expose information to people with visual impairments, for example, so developers can ensure that screen readers work on their sites. This toolis turned off by default because it does have a bit of a performance and memory impact, but iteasy enough to enable it in the developer tools. You can read a bit more about all of the information it exposes here.

As usual, there are plenty of other tweaks in this release (including the ability for WebExtensions to hide tabs and a more streamlined way to add search engines to the location bar). You can find a full run-down of every change here.