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Read more Amid a pandemic that has closed down fitness centers worldwide, a spate of companies has muscled their way into the booming at-home fitness market.
In just the last two weeks, three-year-old Future, which promises at-home customers access to elite training, closed on $24 million in Series B funding; and Playbook, a nearly five-year-old fitness platform that helps personal trainers stream their content (and charge a monthly fee for it), raised $9.3 million in Series A funding.
Now, serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg — who has founded a number of venture-backed startups — is taking the wraps off another live-streaming platform and marketplace. Called Moxie, it connects fitness instructors of all stripes with existing and new students, then enables them to stream classes on a subscription basis — and to keep 85 percent of the revenue for themselves.
Well, according to Goldberg, it’s all far more sophisticated than that. Indeed, Moxie’s 45 employees were working on a very different company until COVID-19 took hold in Europe and the U.S., following its initial outbreak in China. (Moxie is based in Berlin.) After some soul-searching, the team pivoted completely to fitness, and they’ve been testing and tweaking Moxie ever since.
It’s a compelling proposition, even while other startup founders are also chasing after it. While a year ago, fitness instructors spent 90 percent of their time in studio settings, they now spend 90 percent of their time teaching online, which means they need really solid tools to do their jobs well.
While earlier in the pandemic, many of them turned to Zoom, emailing students links and taking payments via Venmo, it was a janky experience for everyone involved.
With Moxie, an instructor, says Goldberg, can live stream classes, as well as record them; access playlists that Moxie has already licensed through third parties (and whose volume Moxie’s technology can dampen when an instructor is talking); and access internal customer relationship management tools that make it easy to track and communicate with students, along with automatically collect payment from them.
The benefits are resonating, according to Goldberg. He says that largely by finding and pitching instructors on Instagram, Moxie has already attracted more than 2,000 instructors of yoga, pilates, and barre-centered classes among others, and that they are now teaching more than 6,500 classes for a range of prices that the instructors can set themselves.
Classes on average apparently range in price from $5 to $10, and Goldberg says that over the last four weeks, customers have been spending an average of $60 on the platform per month. (Moxie uses Stripe for payments and AWS to store and stream video.)
Investors like Howard Morgan, Geoff Prentice, Allen Morgan who’ve backed Goldberg time and again like the idea, clearly. Along with Tencent, they’ve provided Moxie with $2.1 million in seed funding, and Goldberg suggests he’ll be ready for more capital soon.
Whether new investors will need to be convinced that Moxie is “the one,” given Goldberg’s history, remains to be seen.
As longtime industry watchers might know, Goldberg launched his career as a startup founder long ago with Jobster, a recruiting platform that raised about $50 million before laying off half its staff and selling for undisclosed terms to a site called Recruiting.com.
Goldberg then founded a news aggregation service Social Median, which was was later acquired by a German LinkedIn competitor called XING for undisclosed terms; Fabulis, a social network for the LGBT community that pivoted to become a daily-deals site (and later shut down after spending $1 million in seed funding); and, most famously, Fab .com, a design-focused e-commerce site that was valued at $900 million by its investors at one point but later went out of business.
Not deterred, in late 2016, Goldberg launched a messaging app called Pepo that enabled anyone to create and join live messaging communities and that raised around $3 million from investors, including Tencent. It was a newer iteration of Pepo that Goldberg and his team decided to abandon in March for Moxie.
Certainly, his various endeavors underscore that Goldberg has no shortage of — dare we say it — moxie. To many investors, that’s the most crucial ingredient in growing a nascent company. In any case, Goldberg doesn’t seem worried about the fitness startup’s prospects. “We have no shortage of people who want to invest in Moxie,” he told us during a call yesterday.
President Trump’s campaign website was briefly and partially hacked Tuesday afternoon as unknown adversaries took over parts of the page, replacing them with what appeared to be a scam to collect cryptocurrency. There is no indication, despite the hackers’ claims, that “full access to trump and relatives” was achieved or “most internal and secret conversations strictly classified information” were exposed.
The hack, first noted by Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler on Twitter, seemingly took place shortly before 4 PM Pacific time. The culprits likely gained access to the donaldjtrump.com web server backend and inserted a long stretch of obfuscated JavaScript producing a parody of the FBI “this site has been seized” message, which appeared over the normal content.
“the world has had enough of the fake-news spreaded daily by president donald j trump,” the new site read. “it is time to allow the world to know truth.”
Claiming to have inside information on the “origin of the corona virus” and other information discrediting Trump, the hackers provided two Monero addresses. Monero is a cryptocurrency that’s easy to send but quite difficult to track. For this reason it has become associated with unsavory operations such as this hack.
One address was for people who wanted the “strictly classified information” released, the other for those who would prefer to keep it secret. After an unspecified deadline the totals of cryptocurrency would be compared and the higher total would determine what was done with the data.
The page was signed with a PGP public key corresponding to an email address at a non-existent domain (planet.gov).
The website was reverted to its original content within a few minutes of the hack taking place. There is no evidence to suggest that anything other than the one page was accessed, such as donor data; campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh confirmed the hack shortly afterwards, saying there was no exposure of sensitive data and that they are working with law enforcement.
Getting people to irreversibly send cryptocurrency to a mysterious address is a common form of scam online, usually relying on brief appearances on high visibility platforms like celebrity Twitter accounts and the like. This one is no different, and was taken down within minutes.
There is no indication that this attack was in any way state-sponsored, and while it strikes a partisan tone, one can hardly say that this is a very coherent attack against the Trump platform. Campaign and other elections-related websites are high-value targets for hackers because they are associated with entities like Trump but are not as secure as official sites like whitehouse.gov. Though the diction seems not to be that of a native English speaker, there is no other positive evidence that the hack is of foreign origin.
This is not the first time Trump has been hacked recently. His Twitter account was briefly taken over by someone who guessed his password (“maga2020!”) but was, luckily for the president, not of a mind to collect DMs or otherwise rock the boat. And of course, Trump’s hotels were hacked before as well.
Trump recently stated, mistakenly it seems, that “Nobody gets hacked. To get hacked you need somebody with 197 IQ and he needs about 15% of your password.”
Motional, the Hyundai-Aptiv joint venture, and on-demand shuttle startup Via plan to launch a shared robotaxi service for the public in a U.S. city in the first half of 2021. The companies said the aim is to develop a “blueprint” for on-demand shared robotaxis and learn how these driverless vehicles can be integrated into mass transit.
The details on this partnership and the service are scant — at least for now. The companies, which said more specifics would be shared at a later date, didn’t identify the city, provide information on the geographic scope of the service or number or type of vehicles that would be used. The companies did say that the service will be launched in one of the U.S. cities where Motional already operates, narrowing down the possible list to Boston, Pittsburgh, Las Vegas and Santa Monica.
Image Credits: Via
Under the partnership, Motional’s autonomous vehicles will be connected with Via’s platform, which handles booking, routing, passenger and vehicle assignment and identification, customer experience and fleet management. The partnership is similar to the arrangement that Motional has with Lyft in Las Vegas.
This shouldn’t be considered a “driverless” service just yet. All of the autonomous vehicles will have a human safety operator behind the wheel. The service will, however, charge users a fee, indicating that the companies are attempting to home in on all of the aspects that go into operating a commercially viable business. Riders will access the robotaxi service through the Via platform, which is open to the public. Users won’t be vetted in advanced nor do they have to sign non-disclosure agreements, a practice used by Waymo in its early rider program.
The pursuit of a commercial-scale on-demand shared robotaxis service that is part of a transit network is riddled with hurdles. Vehicles have to be on-demand, optimally routed and shared by multiple passengers, the companies said. The COVID-19 pandemic has added another layer of complexity — and even opportunity, according to Motional president and CEO Karl Iagnemma.
“This partnership comes at an especially significant moment, as COVID reshapes our views on transportation and consumers demand more, flexible, and varied options,” Iagnemma noted in the announcement, pointing to recent research by Motional that found 70% of Americans who were surveyed said the risk of infection impacts their transportation choices, and one-in-five are more interested in self-driving vehicles than they were before the pandemic.
Via and Motional said the service will take a number of security measures, such as partitions, personal protective equipment like masks, frequent sanitizing and contact tracing to ensure the health and safety of vehicle occupants.
Via already has some experience testing and demonstrating how its platform can be used to hail autonomous vehicles. Last October, Via, Hyundai and Chinese AV company Pony.ai partnered to offer a BotRide service in Irvine, California. The service used a fleet of electric, autonomous Hyundai Kona crossovers — equipped with a self-driving system from Pony.ai and Via’s ride-hailing platform. Via has also conducted demonstrations with Navya and Aurrigo, and in its “BusBot” AV service in New South Wales, Australia.