The Mendel Air Sensor app is the first app I open every morning. Before Reddit, before Gmail, before NYT. I roll over, grab my phone and check my plants. I don&t know if therea higher honor I can bestow on an app.

The Mendel Air Sensor is a game-changer for indoor growers. It offers a sophisticated suite of sensors that collects critical information about growing conditions. With a price of $99, therevery little else on the market that offers the same sort of data collection at an affordable price.

The company behind the Mendel Air Sensor started by building similar sensors for at-home aquariums. This group knows data collection and teamed up with an experienced manufacturer to develop and ship the Mendel Air Sensor.

I know very little about growing plants indoors. I&ve watched some YouTube videos, read a lot of blog posts and asked friends for advice. And yet I have a small growing operation in my basement: tomatoes, romaine lettuce, carrots and, you know, other leafy greens.

Several weeks in, I&m starting to appreciate the data behind growing plants. Therea lot to consider, from the temperature to types and amount of light, to humidity and how the plants react to humidity through a calculation to determine the vapor pressure deficit (VPD).

I have a Mendel Air Sensor hanging in one grow tent (pictured at the top), and itmy new obsession. The small green device collects four data points every 15 minutes and displays the information through a web app or smartphone app. This is allowing me to fine-tune the controlled environment through exhaust fans, light placement and humidifier levels.

As I&ve found, itcritical to watch this data throughout the day. I&ve yet to stabilize the environment to a point where I set it and forget it. About twice a day, because of the Mendel Air Sensor, I make slight changes to the growing tent, which results in dramatic changes to the environment. Without access to this data, I wouldn&t know something is off until the plant shows warning signs — and as I understand it, thatwhen ittoo late.

At $99, ita good value, and there are only a few competitors in the space. Most are double or triple the price, though their charting products seem more mature.

CEO Nate Levine tells TechCrunch Mendel started as a 50/50 partnership with another bootstrapped company, RapidLED out of the Bay Area. This company has sold lights for indoor growers for the last few years and already has an established base of customers in this field. But Levine didn&t start to build a product for monitoring plants; instead, he created, FishBit, a product for monitoring aquariums.

The parallels between the two markets helped Levineteam jump into the indoor gardening space. As Levine told TechCrunch, the consumer demands are similar, and like with aquariums, indoor growers are increasingly looking for ways to increase capabilities. Instead of keeping fish alive, though, they&re trying to get more tomatoes. Or weed.

Levine said that unlike with aquariums, indoor growers can be less stingy with their cash, though, right now, with cannabis, margins are slim. There isn&t a gold rush, he said, but noted that the cannabis market, in particular, is at the right spot for companies to launch new products.

The company is marketing the same product to home growers, and commercial growers thought this could be a challenge with the current web app. It lacks robust features found on other products. For a small grower like me, itokay, but I expect commercial customers expect better logging, more detailed analysis and a variable monitoring cycle instead of just every 15 minutes.

To make it available for international users, the company needs to swap out the USB power supply.

Don&t call this is a pivot. Or at least Levine doesn&t call it a pivot. As he told TechCrunch, if he goes back to the original pitch deck, the company is still driving at the same goal for FishBit, and everything the team learns on Mendel is implemented in FishBit, too. The goal is to build an entire product line of smart hardware and software for the indoor grower.

RapidLED approached Levine and the team at an aquarium conference and offered to build the hardware if Levine could make the software. My plants are happy that the two companies forged the partnership.

As for my plants, I&ve learned a few things because of the Mendel Air Sensor. First, my grow lights put out much more heat than I expected, and I need to dump the cheap set and get a name brand unit. Second, the humidity was much lower than I had expected, so I added a humidifier. Finally, monitoring the VPD is much easier than it seems if the calculations are automated.

Google has announced that it blocked millions of phishing emails from reaching Gmail users as cybercriminals continue to leverage the coronavirus outbreak in their online scams and attacks.

In the last week alone, the search giant observed 18m daily malware and phishing emails related to Covid-19 in addition to more than 240m coronavirus-related

Another startup has turned to downsizing and fund raising to help weather the uncertainty around the economy amid the global coronavirus health pandemic. People.ai, a predictive sales startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Iconic, Lightspeed and other investors and last year valued at around $500 million, has laid off around 30 people, working out to about 18% of staff, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.

Alongside that, the company has quietly raised a debt round in the &tens of millions of dollars& to make strategic investments in new products and potentially other moves.

Oleg Rogynskyy, the founder and CEO, said the layoffs were made not because business has slowed down, but to help the company shore up for whatever may lie ahead.

&We still have several years of runway with what we&ve raised,& he noted (it has raised just under $100 million in equity to date). &But no one knows the length of the downturn, so we wanted to make sure we could sustain the business through it.&

Specifically, the company is reducing its international footprint — big European customers that it already has on its books will now be handled from its U.S. offices rather than local outposts — and it is narrowing its scope to focus more on the core verticals that make up the majority of its current customer base.

He gave as an example the financial sector. &We create huge value for financial services industry but have moved the functionality for them out to next year so that we can focus on our currently served industries,& he said.

People.ai software tracks the full scope of communication touch points between sales teams and customers, supposedly negating the tedious manual process of activity logging for SDRs. The companymachine learning tech is also meant to generate the average best way to close a deal — educating customer success teams about where salespeople may be deviating from a proven strategy.

People.ai is one of a number of well-funded tech startups that is making hard choices on business strategy, costs and staffing in the current climate.

Layoffs.fyi, which has been tallying those losing their jobs in the tech industry in the wake of the coronavirus (itbased primarily on public reports with a view to providing lists of people for hire), says that as of today, there have been nearly 25,000 people laid off from 258 tech startups and other companies. With companies like Opendoor laying off some 600 people earlier this week, the numbers are ratcheting up quickly: just seven days ago, the number was just over 16,000.

In that context, People.ai cutting 30 may be a smaller increment in the bigger picture (even if for the individuals impacted, itjust as harsh of an outcome). But it also underscores one of the key business themes of the moment.

Some businesses are getting directly hit by the pandemic — for example, house sales and transportation have all but halted, leaving companies in those categories scrambling to figure out how to get through the coming weeks and months and prepare for a potentially long haul of life and consumer and business behavior not looking like it did before January.

But other businesses, like People.ai, which provides predictive sales tools to help salespeople do their jobs better, is (for now at least) falling into that category of IT still in demand, perhaps even more than ever in a shrinking economy. In People.aicase, software to help salespeople have better sales conversations and ultimately conversions at a time when many customers might not be as quick to buy things is an idea that sells right now (so to speak).

Rogynskyy noted that more than90% ofcustomers that are up for renewal this quarter have either renewed or expanded their contracts, and it has been adding new large customers in recent weeks and months.

The company has also just closed a round of debt funding in the &tens of millions& of dollars to use for strategic investments.

Itnot disclosing the lender right now, but it opted for debt in part because it still has most of its most recent round — $60 million raised in May 2019 led by Iconic — in the bank. Although investors would have been willing to invest in another equity round, given that the company is in a healthy position right now, Rogynskyy said he preferred the debt option to have the money without the dilution that equity rounds bring.

The money will be used for strategic purposes and considering how to develop the product in the current climate. For example, with most people now working from home, and that looking to be a new kind of &normal& in office life (if not all the time, at least more of the time), that presents a new opportunity to develop products tailored for these remote workers.

There have been some M-A moves in tech in the last couple of weeks, and from what we understand People.ai has been approached as well as a possible buyer, target and partner. All of that for now is not something the company is considering, Rogynskyy said.&We&re focused on our own future growth and health and making sure we are here for a long time.&

Too Hot to Handle on Netflix is the spiritual successor to Love is Blind, and the new steamy dating show is now streaming on the service, just in time for the weekend.

The Netflix series casts a number of gregarious, good-looking singles, sends them to an island resort, and asks them to cohabitate for a few weeks. 

The catch here, because these

Asus has quietly unveiled a new graphics card that can support up to four monitors, but it's definitely not aimed at gamers.

Instead, the GT710-4H-SL-2GD5 targets businesses looking to improve productivity by “enabling quiet multi-monitor” setups. In other words, it will handle most non-gaming applications, provided they're not too resource int

For a limited time, you can snag a cheap iPhone deal at Apple. The retailer is offering up to $350 in savings on the iPhone 11, 11 Pro, XR, and the all-new iPhone SE when trade-in an old device.

After you purchase your new iPhone, you'll get a trade-in email that explains how to get your old device ready to ship. Apple will send you a trade-in kit