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There are plenty of time-tracking apps for Mac that automatically log the hours you’ve spent signed-in. Some even offer granular data, telling you how much time you spent on a particular app. A new app called Balance is taking a slightly different approach to timekeeping, allowing users to manually punch in and punch out the time they are spending in front of a screen.

Balance hopes to help users build a set of healthy work habits rather than get granular data about their productivity. It won’t tell you long you had Slack, Microsoft Teams, Chrome or any other application open on your machine, but will offer general insights into your overall usage of the system and time spent in various sessions in a week.

To make this system work, Balance sends you a reminder if your machine has been on for more than five minutes but you have not clocked in. Clocking out is simple, too, just lock your Mac. Sadly, if your system goes to sleep, Balance doesn’t register a clock-out.

As there is no automatic tracking, the app can’t understand if you have taken a break even when you step away from the computer. So it will remind you to take a break after 60 minutes. You can easily fine-tune such settings as per your convenience.

Balance also offers you a Pomodoro timer (25 minutes on and 5 minutes off) through the Focus mode menu. The app lives in the menu bar of your Mac, so you can quickly access all the options. It shows the active time of the current session by default, but you can change it to the total session duration including breaks or time since the last break was taken.

Alexander Sandberg, the developer of Balance, says he built the app because he wanted a timekeeper that understands work-life balance. Working from home he often sat in front of his system way past his work hours, he told TechCrunch in an interview, and that’s when he thought of building Balance.

“I chose a manual clocking system for Balance because I believe it helps with creating a ‘ritual’ for checking in and out of work. Especially when working from home, it’s important to have something that helps you differentiate work time and non-work time. For instance, I’ve heard about people who go for a short walk to and from ‘the office’ at the beginning and at the end of the work days, even though their office is at home. This is to help the mind and body differentiate between life and work,” he told TechCrunch in an email.

While Balance is good for building the habit of clocking in and out, it could take a bit of time in getting used to. You might have many sessions that you forget to start or end. So you can end up with false positives on both ends.

Balance is available for free for everyone with the Pro version costing $2.49 a month (or $24.99 a year) as an introductory price. Paying customers will get features like session history with trends data. Balance also gives users an option to export their logs if they want to stop using the app or just want to analyze their data in a different way.

Sandberg said he’s building more pro features like a better session history overview with month and year; categorization and labeling of sessions; and app and website blocking to help users focus more.

Balance is a Mac timekeeper app that requires you to manually clock in your hours by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch

Baidu, the Chinese internet giant that became known for its search engines, is making some big strides in autonomous driving.

Starting this week, the public can ride its robotaxis in Wuhan between 7 am and 11 pm without safety drivers behind the wheel. Previously, its unmanned vehicles could only operate from 9 am to 5 pm in the city. The updated scheme is expected to cover one million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people.

Like most autonomous vehicle startups, Baidu combines a mix of third-party cameras, radars, and lidars to help its cars see better in low-visibility conditions, in contrast to Tesla’s vision-based solution.

In August, Baidu started offering fully driverless robotaxi rides, charging passengers at taxi rates. In Q3, Apollo Go, the firm’s robotaxi-hailing app, completed more than 474,000 rides, up 311% year over year. Accumulatively, Apollo Go had exceeded 1.4 million orders as of Q3.

That sounds like a potentially substantial revenue stream for Baidu, but one should take such figures with a grain of salt and ask: how many of these trips are subsidized by discounts? How many of them are repeatable, daily routes rather than one-off novelty rides taken by early adopters? To juice up performance numbers, it’s not uncommon to see Chinese robotaxi operators recruiting the public to ride in their vehicles.

It’s also tricky to tell which of China’s robotaxi upstarts have a lead at this stage. Their expansion isdependent on their relationship with the local city where they operate, and major cities often have the power to pass certain local legislations.

As one of the few remaining consumer internet sectors still with big room to grow, autonomous driving is getting warm support from local authorities nationwide. Case in point, Wuhan, an industrial hub in central China, is one of the first cities in the country to let robotaxis chauffeur the public without in-car safety operators. And now, the city seems to be comfortable with driverless cars roaming about even in low-light nighttime.

Setting aside a reasonable dose of skepticism, Baidu has indeed put a lot of effort into making the self-driving future arrive earlier. One of the moats it’s building is its visual-language model for identifying unseen or rare objects in long-tail scenarios. The AI is backed by Wenxin, the same large model that undergirds its text-to-image art platform.

“The model will enable autonomous vehicles to quickly make sense of an unseen object, such as special vehicle (fire truck, ambulance) recognition, plastic bag misdetection, and others,” Baidu previously explained. “In addition, Baidu’s autonomous driving perception model—a sub-model of the WenXin Big Model—leveraging more than 1 billion parameters, is able to dramatically improve the generalization potential of autonomous driving perception.”

Baidu starts offering nighttime driverless taxis in China by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch

Jakarta-based fintech Akulaku has raised $200 million from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), the largest bank in Japan. This is part of a strategic investment, with startup and MUFG planning to expand into new markets and product together in 2023. Earlier this year, Akulaku raised $100 million in funding from Siam Commercial Bank as part of another strategic investment. Its other backers include Ant Group (Akulaku launched a BNPL partnership earlier this year with Alipay+).

Akulaku, which operates in the Philippines and Malaysia in addition to Indoensia, offers a virtual credit card and installment shopping platform, as well as an investment platform and neobank. Founded in 2016, its target is to serve 50 million users by 2025.

As part of MUFG’s strategic investment, Akulaku has agreed to work with MUFG companies in Southeast on tech, product development, financing and distribution. MUFG is focused on growing its presence in the region, and earlier this year it purchased the Philippines and Indonesian units of Home Credit BV for 596 million euros. Its focus on Southeast Asia comes as homegrown banks, like Singapore’s DBS Group Holdings and Indonesia’s Bank Central Asia gain on MUFG in market cap.

In a statement, Kenichi Yamato, the managing executive officer and chief executive of MUFG Bank’s Global Commercial Banking Business Unit, said “Southeast Asia is key and a second market to MUFG. Our investment in Akulaku will further solidify our commitment in this region to meet growing financial needs of underserved customers.”

Jakarta-based fintech Akulaku raises $200M from Japan’s largest bank by Catherine Shu originally published on TechCrunch

High-growth companies often set significant goals, knowing full well that the idea of “overnight success” is for the storybooks. However, there is no better time than the middle of a market downturn to start planning for the leap from a private to a public company.

De-risking the path to going public requires strategic planning, which takes time. Companies with goals to go public in less than three years must therefore plan for it now — despite the downturn — to get the running start they’ll need to navigate the open market.

Let’s explore why this adverse economy is ideal for planning an IPO and what to do about it.

Growth investors have recently pulled back

Carta reports that private fundraising levels have declined across the U.S. from a record-breaking 2021. Unsurprisingly, late-stage companies have experienced the brunt of this blow.

Market experts are currently encouraging leaders not to pin their hopes on venture capital dry powder, even though there’s plenty of it. As the graph below indicates, the size of late-stage funding rounds has shrunk.

Although few enjoy market downturns, how this one unfolds can deliver insights to late-stage companies that pay attention. On one hand, many leaders are embracing the message of the Sequoia memo. We can agree with their ideas to prioritize profits over growth — scaling is different from what it used to be, and we must swallow that jagged pill.

On the other hand, cost-cutting and giving up hope of fundraising isn’t all doom and gloom. After all, when there is money to be found, some innovative founder will find it. We see it every day; only now, the path looks different.

Market downturns spur valuation corrections

Course-correcting is a concept frequently discussed amid market downturns. The pendulum swings one way for a period, then begins its journey toward a more balanced standard. In this case, the open market thrived on bloated valuations — most startups were overvalued before 2021.

Furthermore, many stated that 2021 was a miracle year, especially as VC investment nearly doubled to $643 billion. The U.S. sprouted more than 580 new unicorns and saw over 1,030 IPOs (over half were SPACs), significantly higher than the year before. This year has only welcomed about 170 public listings.

High-growth startups should start de-risking their path to IPO now by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch