Technology

While knowledge workers are handling increasingly difficult tasks — ones that may be much easier to handle with just a Python script —Alex Yaseen thinks that in the future not everyone will actually need to learn how to code.

Instead, he hopes that tools like the one hebuilding, called Parabola, will bridge that gap between the complex technical problems and otherwise nontechnical employees. Instead of running through massive excel spreadsheets, Parabola is designed to make it easier for employees that might not be highly technical to piece together the kinds of processes that will help automate mundane tasks that run through each action. The company said it has raised a new $2.2 million financing round led by Matrix Partners.

&The logical version of the future doesn&t look like everyone coding by running Python or whatever language,& Yaseen said. &Ita very valid opinion, but we talked a lot with various investors about that perspective of the future where all knowledge workers have to increasingly be more productive to compete. We thought about how we could bridge that gap by giving nontechnical people these tools to work like an engineering without being an engineer.&

At its core, Parabola is a more visually-oriented way of designing a workflow where users can piece together a complex work problem in a kind of flowchart, piece by piece. These are all functions that you might find built into Excel or other spreadsheet tools, like Google Sheets, but Parabola is a tool that is designed to make it easier to automate all those updates into new fields, as well as make the model pretty flexible and easy to manipulate.

Parabola is designed to take those account executives or salespeople that run through hundred-plus step processes in order to do their jobs through dozens of excel tabs. Users can figure out how to describe those steps in Parabola and then begin executing them without having to constantly tweak formulas and ensure that everything is operating properly. At the same time, Parabola is designed to ensure that the whole experience feels like a spreadsheet, where making small changes causes the whole data set to update — something that nontechnical users actually gravitate toward, Yaseen said.

&The reason people love using spreadsheets even though they&re not the right tool for most of these experiences, is that they can make a change and see things immediately,& Yaseen said. &Nontechnical people don&t adapt to [an engineering] mindset, they value the process of making a change and everything updating. Thatone of our hypotheses, and other tools don&t give you those options, and therefore are not really geared to a true nontechnical user.&

Still, the whole idea of trying to simplify programming down to something thatmore palatable for a nontechnical user is both a significant challenge and a very crowded market. There are many approaches to the problem, though Yaseen says they target different niches or use cases, like Airtable or Zapier — many of which have raised large sums of money. But some companies have different demands and users may gravitate toward different options, so those aren&t the direct competition. Instead, the competition is larger firms hiring engineers to handle all these processes in the back-end, as well as users just sitting in Excel all day.

Everence co-founder Patrick Duffy knows you might be skeptical about the companytechnology, which takes a DNA sample and using it to synthesize a substance that can be added into tattoo ink.

In other words, you can have the DNA (and soon hair or cremated ash) from a loved one included in a tattoo on your body.

&Therea definite ick factor [at first],& Duffy admitted, while others might find it &gimmicky& or think &itsnake oil, itfake,& if they don&t take the time to learn more.

But Duffy said the idea behind Everence is to &give people a way to stay connected emotionally in a way that was permanent.&

&It all comes down to emotional connections, intangible links to the things that make us or break us,& he said.

Take Duffyco-founder Boyd Renner, who said he served 28 years in the Navy, but was ultimately most inspired by his wife, who has cystic fibrosis: &She does an hour and ahalf of treatments in the morning, but she still runs half marathons.& So Renner got an &everence& that incorporates his wifeDNA into a tattoo design that combines elements of lungs, trees and roses.

Or take Johnny Walker, a New York City police officer and 9/11 first responder who has been diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Walker said that he used Everence technology to incorporate DNA from his family into tattoos, so that they could be with him as he undergoes chemotherapy.

&And if this life was going to take me somewhere else, I didn&t want to go there and be alone,& Walker said. &I wanted to have my family with me.&

As for the technology, Duffy noted that Everence is being advised by medical and scientific experts, including Bruce Klitzman, associate professor of surgery at Duke University, and Edith Mathiowitz. professor medical science and engineering at Brown University. He also said that while the FDA doesn&t systematically regulate tattoo ink, &We went ahead and proactively submitted to them.&

Synthesizing the DNA-based material was the &highest bar& technologically, Duffy said, as well as &the one we could build the strongest intellectual property protection bar around.&

As for using ash or hair, he said it¬hing new& to add ash to a tattoo, but many tattoo artists are understandably hesitant to do it. Duffy is hoping to address their concerns both technologically (by purifying the ash and reducing it to a uniform particle size) and economically (by offering insurance case there are any issues). Healso recruited a group of tattoo artists who can advocate for the product.

&It can be applied by any tattooer in the world, added in with any existing ink with no special equipment, training or materials,& he said. &It lasts forever.&

Everencesynthesized DNA substance is currently available for preorder at a price of $245.

Amuse, the Swedish startup that offers a free distribution service for artists wanting to get their music on Spotify, Apple Music et al., coupled with what itcalling a &next generation& record label, has raised $15.5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by Lakestar, and Raine Ventures, and will be used to expand the company operations globally, including building out a bigger presence in the U.S.

Founded in Stockholm in 2015 by a team of music industry experts including Diego Farias, Christian Wilsson, Jimmy Brodd, Andreas Ahlenius, and Guy Parry — and later joined by music artist and entrepreneur will.i.am — Amuse is aiming to create a new way for musicians to distribute their music globally and, crucially, to be discovered.

As co-founder and CEO Farias explained in a call, it does this via a free music distribution service that makes it easy and cost-free for new and unsigned artists to get their music into all of the major music services like Apple Music, Spotify, and Deezer etc., and in a way that means they keep 100 percent of the royalties. Similar services typically either charge an annual fee or take a cut of any revenue generated or both.

Amuse also provides a dashboard displaying and helping to make sense of data relating to how well your tracks are performing on the streaming apps and download stores you have chosen to distribute on. And its this data — or, rather, the value of it — that underpins the startups unique business model: come for the free distribution, stay for the record deal.

Namely, Amuse uses the data that it has access to via users of its music distribution service to analyze music consumption and listening habits to identify &rising talent&. The company then offers to sign the most promising artists to its own re-imagined record label through a licensing deal whereby they still own their work, rather than a traditional recoding contract. This consists of a 50/50 split of streaming and download revenue and means artists have access to what Amuse claims is large-scale promotion.

Throughout our conversation Farias was very keen to stress that he sees this as a partnership of equals, where the interests of scaling up the success and reach of an artist signed by Amuse are equally aligned. The type of value-add that the Amuse team will bring will vary depending on artist and what they need most, but will include things like public relations, marketing, branding, and having a more direct line to the online distributors it partners with. Farias didn&t rule out more traditional A-R services either, such as help with recording or preparing an artist for follow-up releases.

Meanwhile, I&m told Amuseboard of directors includes Edgar Berger, former Chairman and CEO of Sony Music International, and Jörg Mohaupt, former Warner Music Group board member. Gordon Rubenstein, Managing Partner, Raine Ventures, is also joining as a board observer.

Dharmash Mistry, General Partner at Lakestar, says that the Amuse team have &reimagined every step of the A-R process from inverting the commercial model to be artist-friendly and discovering new musicians to changing how individual songs are marketed&. He is also talking up Amuseearly success in Sweden — I understand the startup has already signed licensing deals with 40 or more artists — and says the investment will help the company roll out the model across the U.S. and Europe. To that end, Farias tells me Amuse is opening an office in L.A.