Technology

At CES in January, TechCrunch broke the news that media software maker Plexwas planning to expand its service with the addition of new media content, starting with podcasts. Today, itmaking good on that promise by launching support for podcasts into beta, along with a whole new look and more customization options for its Plex mobile apps.

While Plex got its start as a software application for organizing peoplehome media collections, itbeen expanding over the past couple of years to add new features in support of cord cutters who want to watch TV via their antenna, and record those shows. It also acquired the streaming news startup Watchup in order to add a dedicated news hub within its app.

Earlier this year, the company spoke of its ambitions to continue adding more types of content to its media center software, including audio and video podcasts, followed by digital, web-first and other longer-form creator content. (It had originally expected to add podcasts in Q1 2018, so this nearly-June launch is a bit of a delay.)

The larger goal, on Plexpart, is to organize all your media content in one place & from live and recorded TV to your personal media collections of music, photos, and videos, and your news and information & including, now, your favorite podcasts.

The feature, live today in beta, is available on the Plex web platform, Roku, and iOS and Android, with other device support coming soon.

You can browse and search across Plexpodcast library, filter podcasts by categories, or click into a title to see the details, episode lists, and related podcasts. To follow that podcast, you click the &Add to My Podcasts& button. This will add the podcast to your &On Deck& dashboard, as well.

If the podcast you like isn&t in the Plex catalog, you can add it by entering the feed URL, and Plex will treat it as if it is & it will retrieve all its metadata, related podcasts, and make it searchable. (Thatuseful because Plexcatalog isn&t as robust as others at launch.)

The feature also includes the standard media controls you&d expect, like forward and back and support for variable speed playback, as well as a &mark as played& option, all available through Plexupgraded media player. That option can help you transition to Plexpodcast platform from another app, as you won&t have to lose your place, in terms of what you&ve listened to, and what you&ve not. And it lets you continually mark off any episodes you may have caught elsewhere, or just otherwise want to skip.

Your listening progress is also synced across Plexsuite of apps.

The feature wasn&t perfect in brief testing, but it was in a pre-launch state, and today itonly arriving in beta & so ittoo soon to speak to how well it performs as a publicly-facing product.

In a few weeks, Plex will roll out a handful of other features for podcasts, including smart downloading with granular controls for managing the episodes you want to keep on a per show basis (e.g. keep the last three); additional metadata for richer show pages and better discovery options; and podcasts import and export (OPML) so you can move your current subscriptions more easily into Plex.

Along with the launch of podcasts, Plex is updating its mobile apps, too, to offer better customization options.

Now, if you want to listen to your podcasts and news while you&re on the go, on mobile, you can configure the app to show that media on your home screen. Or, if you use the app more for casting your videos to your living room TV, you could bring those favorite shows to the front of the experience instead. And so on.

On this new, customizable home screen you can re-order you content, remove any of its sections (like &Recently Added& or &On Deck,&), or add new ones from elsewhere in the app, including across servers (like Plex Cloud or your local server such as your home PC.)

Plex has also added tabs at the bottom of the screen for switching between your media type (e.g. movies, TV, podcasts, etc.), which are fully customizable, too. You can even customize the default source for each media type.

[gallery ids="1647814,1647815,1647813,1647812,1647811,1647806,1647805,1647803,1647802,1647799,1647795"]

The addition of podcasts to this more personalized media experience makes sense not only because of how popular podcasts have become, but also because many are tied to the shows you watch & they&re creator commentaries, roundtable discussions, fan chats, critic reviews, and more. Iteasy to imagine, then, moving from watching a show on the TV then heading out and launching the Plex app to listen to the podcast discussing the last episode.

Thatthe vision Plex has, at least. However, even with these additions, Plexsoftware overall still caters more to the DIY crowd & those who want set up their own antenna, rather than pay for an online TV service like YouTube TV or Sling. And it hasn&t yet solved the problem of media thatall over the place & favorite shows and movies are strewn across services like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Amazon, and ithard to know where the things you want to watch reside. Those are still challenges Plex could attack in the future, by becoming a hub that jumps you into streaming catalogs, too.

Itunclear how well Plexexpansions have been working to attract new users and paying subscribers.

The company doesn&t break out the latter figure. and it still claims today the same 15 million registered users it had at the beginning of the year. Becoming a podcast player could help bump that number up, though, and introduce more people to Plexsoftware, as a result.

Podcasts are in beta on web, mobile and Roku, and the mobile apps are rolling out starting today.

As the worlds of health and technology continue to knit closer together through advances in hardware and big data analytics, a startup called Ava, which has built a $199 wearable device and app to help women track their fertility cycles, has raised $30 million to expand into other aspects of female health.

The funding — led by unnamed existing investors plus new backers btov and SVC — comes at a time of fast growth for the company. Ava says it has now enabled 10,000 pregnancies, or &Ava babies& as they have sometimes been called. As a point of reference, in late 2016, around when the company — founded in Zurich and now co-based also in San Francisco — had raised a Series A round of $9.7 million, the company had tracked only 7 Ava babies due in 2017.

Lea von Bidder, AvaCEO and co-founder holding down the fort in SF (her co-founders Pascal Koenig, Peter Stein, and Philipp Tholen are based in Zurich) says that the company is not disclosing its valuation with this round. It brings the total raised by the company to $42.3 million since 2014 (showing off its device for the first time as part of our Battlefield competition in 2015), with previous investors including Khosla Ventures, Swisscom, DCM and more.

For some more context, other leading fertility startups (coincidentally also out of Europe) Clue and Natural Cycles have raised $30 million and $37.5 million respectively.

While Clue and Natural Cycles have focused on software — specifically, apps that track different markers that are either collected by the user inputting information directly, or by way of tapping diagnostics from other wearables (Clue, for example, has a Fitbit integration) — Avaunique selling point has been how it has married hardware development with advanced analytical software to read multiple diagnostics from its wearable and to use those analytics to help draw conclusions about what a womanbody is doing.

&Everything we do is artificial intelligence,& Von Bidder said of the analytics part. &We are clearly an AI company in the end. Itjust a fancy term for big data analytics and that is exactly what we do. When you think about what Ava does, we are measuring your body and understanding it, and the only way we could do that is with AI.&

Building a wearable can pose many challenges in the form of manufacturing, capital outlay, and simply getting people to buy them — hardware, as the tech world likes to say, is indeed hard. But when a company gets it right, building a vertically integrated business that brings in both together can prove to be a compelling business.

In the case of Eva, all the measurements — there are nine diagnostics being collected, includingheartrate, body fat, heat loss, and sleep movement, all of which are lined up with indicators of other physiological changes — are taken while a person is sleeping every night, removing some of the possibility for human error in the collection phase. And when you consider that many of the current products to measure your fertility are based either on a thermometer or a urine test, a wristband you need to remember to slip on at night might seem like a significantly cleaner and easier alternative.

While Eva continues to build out its existing operations, the bigger picture, Von Bidder said, is the companyplans for where it plans to take its business next.

Today, the company&sweet spot& for customers are women who are trying to conceive a child but have not been immediately successful, yet have not yet passed the one-year mark of trying, which is typically when those women might start to turn to medical help to get pregnant.

Eva is currently running a host of clinical trials not only to extend the kind of help it can offer other categories of women who want to get pregnant — for example those with pre-existing complications, and those who have been trying for more than a year — but also women who might not want to get pregnant at all. That is, helping with contraception, or with other phases of womenreproductive health, such as menopause.

&The overall vision of the app is to become a companion for all of a womandifferent life stages, including trying to prevent pregnancy and menopause,& said Von Bidder.

A large part of the investment being announced today will be going funding more clinical trials, which are based at theUniversity Hospital of Zurich with Professor Brigitte Leeners and cover areas like fertility challenges and pregnancy complications (which itself is another huge area, and leads Ava into one of the least understood aspects of pregnancy: miscarriage, especially those that happen in the first trimester). Other parts of the investment will be used to help fund the other very complex part of being a medical startup, which is navigating regulatory approvals after the trials have been completed, in order to build new products. (This part is overseen by the companychief medical officer, Dr Maureen Cronin, is a vet of Bayer Schering, one of the worldbiggest contraceptive companies.)

&Itexciting to work with a company that is literally reshaping the way we think about menstrual cycles, hormones and womenhealth,& said Prof. Leeners in a statement. &Combining the best in science, data insights and technology is not only helping to create families, but improving womenlives around the world.&

SQream, the GPU database developer, will deepen its focus on China after raising a $26.4 million Series B led by Alibaba Group. The round also included investors Hanaco Venture Capital, Sistema.vc, World Trade Ventures, Paradiso Ventures, Glory Ventures and Silvertech Ventures.

The startup describes the funding, which brings its total raised to a little over $40 million, as a strategic investment from Alibaba. Earlier this year, SQream and Alibaba Cloud announced a new agreement that will give Alibaba Cloud users access to the GPU database starting in October.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Chaoqun Zhan, director of Alibaba Database Business, said &Alibaba Cloud and SQream announced a collaboration in February and this investment deepens our relationship, and together we aim to provide the best cloud solutions to all kinds of businesses to enable their success in this digital age.&

Based in Tel Aviv, SQream was founded in 2010. Its SQL analytical database, called SQream DB, uses thousands of parallel processing cores in NVIDIA GPUs to allow large companies to perform big data analytics more quickly and cheaply (SQream claims its clients can &analyze up to 20 times more data, up to 100 times faster, at as little 10% of the cost&).

SQream co-founder and CEO Ami Gal told TechCrunch that one of SQreammain differentiators from other GPU databases, like Kinetica and MapD, is its ability to adapt to increasingly massive hoards of data. Kinetica and MapD use in-memory storage, so while they can analyze up to about 5 terabytes of data extremely quickly, their scalability is limited. On the other hand, SQream was created to handle data stores of up to hundreds of terabytes.

The companySeries B capital is being used to add new feature to SQream DB and grow its sales, marketing and delivery teams as it focuses on the Chinese market and other regions. In addition to Alibaba Cloud, SQreamother new customers in Asia include Thai mobile operator AIS and IndiaACL Mobile, an enterprise messaging service.