blogger better: 2020-03-01

Saturday, March 7, 2020

VCs warn coronavirus will impact fundraising for the next 2 quarters

As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 3,400 people around the globe and the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands more. But its impact has gone much further, causing major disruptions in public markets and leading corporations to pull out of conferences and delay travel. Big tech companies are asking workers to stay home and investors are now urging startups to prepare accordingly. Coronavirus fears are now affecting fundraising for startups. I am seeing advice that tells any company that might run out of cash in 2020 to start...

{rss:content:encoded} This Week in Apps: Google I/O canceled over coronavirus, App Store gets updated rules, TikTok’s owner launches Spotify rival https://ift.tt/2Tvzfq1 https://ift.tt/2IvnjP4 March 07, 2020 at 05:23PM Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently...

Facebook bans face mask ads to fight coronavirus price gouging

On Friday, Facebook announced that it would further attempt to limit coronavirus-related chaos on its platform by banning commerce listings and advertisements for medical face masks. “We’re monitoring COVID19 closely and will make necessary updates to our policies if we see people trying to exploit this public health emergency,” Facebook Director of Product Management Rob Leathern said in an update on Twitter. “We’ll start rolling out this change in the days ahead.” Update: We’re banning ads and commerce listings selling medical face masks. We’re...

The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates. If your organization doesn’t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won’t...

Hungry, a catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs, announced this week that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Hungry tells me that the funding valued the company at more than $100 million (pre-money). The investors were also pretty impressive: The round was led by Evolution VC Partners and former Whole co-CEO Walter Robb, who’s joining the startup’s board. Kevin Hart, Jay-Z, Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley, former Obama aide Reggie Love and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner also participated. CEO...

{rss:content:encoded} FCC looks to mandate anti-robocall tech after prodding from Congress https://ift.tt/38wGbrc https://ift.tt/2PT6LUW March 06, 2020 at 10:48PM The FCC is finally going to require wireless carriers to implement an anti-robocalling technology, after asking them nicely for more than a year to do so at their convenience. Of course, the FCC itself is now required to do this after Congress got tired of waiting on them and took action itself. The technology is called Secure Telephony Identity Revisited / Secure Handling of Asserted...

Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States. While we’ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren’t built for Oribi’s customers. “A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,” Shoor told me. “Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.” She said that Oribi, on the other hand, is...

Twitter’s CEO defends himself from activist investors, Google takes additional coronavirus precautions and a fizzy drink maker raises $30 million. Here’s your Daily Crunch for March 6, 2020. 1. Twitter CEO’s weak argument why investors shouldn’t fire him Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey spoke yesterday at a Morgan Stanley conference, where he delivered remarks (also shared via Twitter’s investor relations account) that responded obliquely to activist investor Elliott Management’s efforts to pressure Twitter into a slew of reforms, potentially including...

Startup accelerator Y Combinator has moved its famed demo day online, citing a “growing concern over COVID-19,” or coronavirus. The demo day has historically drawn crowds of Silicon Valley elite, journalists, and both national and international venture capitalists to watch more than 100 startups come out to the world. “While we won’t be able to recreate every aspect of Demo Day, we’ll try our best to create an amazing experience for our founders and investors,” Y Combinator said in a memo. Y Combinator’s 30th annual demo day will be pre-recorded...

If you’re an early-stage startup founder with a big vision and even bigger dreams, join us and more than 10,000 other like-minded startuppers at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 on September 14-16. Silicon Valley’s premiere early-stage startup extravaganza focuses on founders, investors and startup experts determined to disrupt and reshape technology. Attending is awesome but attending and exhibiting at Disrupt — for free — is even better. What magic is this? No hocus-pocus required. Simply apply to our TC Top Picks program. Applying...

Postmates announced today it would be adding a “non-contact delivery option,” for those concerned about COVID-19 exposure from workers bringing them food. Instacart set up something similar earlier this week, announcing sales were 10x’s higher this week over last due to coronavirus concerns and rolling out the “leave it at my door” option for customers concerned about coronavirus. This flu-like virus has already infected nearly 100,000 people worldwide, killing thousands of those with the disease, including one man so far in the Bay Area, the hub...

Extra Crunch is now past its first birthday. Over the past year, we’ve learned a lot, made some changes and generally found our groove. Toward the end of 2019, former TechCrunch writer Alex Wilhelm returned to the publication to help grow Extra Crunch, though he still writes for the main site as well. His daily columns dig into the financial side of the startup world and have resonated deeply with our audience, so I wanted to talk to him about what he’s doing and why more people might want to read his work. Normally, we’d run a Q&A like this...

If a player picks up an item in an online video game, who owns that item? The player, or the company that made the game? In most cases, the answer is probably closer to the latter. The item may be in the player’s digital inventory, but the company can take it away as they please, prevent the player from selling or giving it away, etc. Horizon Blockchain Games is trying to shift up the idea of ownership in games (starting with their own title), and they’ve raised another $5 million to get it done. Horizon is working down two paths in parallel here:...

{rss:content:encoded} Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6 https://ift.tt/2TIONFX https://ift.tt/3aCKuCL March 06, 2020 at 06:01PM Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch. True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and...

Short-form video service Quibi is announcing its full launch lineup today — exactly once month before launch. True to its name (which stands for “quick bites”), Quibi will focus on short videos that you can watch on your phone. Its content will include “movies in chapters” (longer, scripted stories broken into chapters that are between seven and 10 minutes long), as well as unscripted shows, documentaries and daily hits of news/entertainment/inspiration. The company, which is led by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzeberg and former eBay...

As the novel coronavirus, also known as COVID-19, spreads around the world, many companies are asking their staff to work from home. The boom in working remotely may prove temporary — even if the trend behind it is not — but having more staff operating away from traditional offices is having an impact on the tools that many companies use to coordinate and communicate while apart. Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing...

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Stocks are set to fall further today, likely forcing shares in SaaS and cloud companies down yet again. After two wild trading weeks, the high-flying tech category is off over 9% from recent highs before the bell this morning, putting it close to correction territory. (A correction is usually defined as a decline in value of 10% or more from recent highs.) With today’s expected declines, SaaS companies are likely set to close out...

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was packed with news, most of it pretty bad. But Zoom did well, so there’s that. Happily we had our dynamic pairing, Alex “Have I Died” Wilhelm and Danny “Good Hair” Crichton on hand to parse through it all. (A reminder that Equity now hits your podcast app twice a week now, so peep us Monday mornings!) So what was on the docket? A host of things, starting with a big new early-stage fund: Kleiner has...

Convert Group, a startup based in Athens that offers a SaaS to help FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands understand how they are performing across e-commerce, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. The investment comes from Uni.fund, which is backed by the EquiFund investment platform (an initiative created by cooperation between the Hellenic Republic and EIF). It is the first time the otherwise bootstrapped company has taken external funding since being founded in 2014 and initially offering e-commerce consultancy. The startup’s core product...

ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed backing from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time. Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and George Boyle — the original team behind the music discovery app Soundwave (acquired by Spotify) — and later joined by CEO Giles Tongue, formerly of wearable tech startup NURVV,...

{rss:content:encoded} Mark Cuban backs ChatableApps, developer of a hearing assist app that removes background noise https://ift.tt/2TJZcBc https://ift.tt/3cAY4bW March 06, 2020 at 10:00AM ChatableApps, a U.K. startup commercialising the work of auditory neural signal processing researcher Dr Andy Simpson, has quietly picked up seed backing from Mark Cuban. The company has built a smartphone app that provides hearing assistance by removing background noise in near real-time. Alongside Simpson, the company’s co-founders are Brendan O’Driscoll, Aidan...

Spindrift, maker of fizzy drinks, has raised $29.8 million

Spindrift, maker of fizzy soda and sparkling water, has raised $29.8 million in a funding round, per an SEC filing. The Charlestown, Mass. company was founded by Bill Creelman and has raised $70 million in known venture capital funding to date, per Crunchbase data. The company did not immediately respond to request for comment. Previous investors in the fizzy drink company include Almanac Insights, KarpReilly, Prolong Ventures, VMG Partners and more. Spindrift, founded in 2010, is up against big players, like the beloved and decades-old LaCroix,...

{rss:content:encoded} Mobile banking app Empower Finance just closed a $20 million Series A round https://ift.tt/2TqNaxF https://ift.tt/2VUOc6Z March 06, 2020 at 01:03AM Another afternoon, another round of funding for a mobile banking app. This time, it’s Empower Finance, a San Francisco-based company that’s headed up by former Sequoia Capital partner Warren Hogarth and which just closed on $20 million in Series A funding from Icon Ventures and Defy Ventures. David Velez, who is the founder and CEO of Nubank, the largest fintech in Latin America,...

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