blogger better: 2020-05-17

Saturday, May 23, 2020

This Week in Apps: Facebook takes on Shopify, Tinder considers its future, contact-tracing tech goes live

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 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending three hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those...

3 views on the life and death of college towns, remote work and the future of startup hubs

The global pandemic has halted travel, shunted schools online and shut down many cities, but the future of college-town America is an area of deep concern for the startup world. College towns have done exceedingly well with the rise of the knowledge economy and concentrating students and talent in dense social webs. That confluence of ideas and skill fueled the rise of a whole set of startup clusters outside major geos like the Bay Area, but with COVID-19 bearing down on these ecosystems and many tech workers considering remote work, what does...

You read that right. The big announcement came yesterday — TechCrunch Disrupt is now fully virtual. What does this mean for Startup Battlefield? More opportunity. The best companies from across the globe, an even bigger launch platform, the eyes of more investors from around the world and press exposure at the biggest conference TechCrunch has held to date. The conference will be available globally, spanning five days — September 14-18. Founders. This. Is. Your. Shot. Applications will close June 19th, so get your app in ASAP. Successful startup...

Steve Case and Clara Sieg of Revolution recently spoke on TechCrunch’s new series, Extra Crunch Live. Throughout the hour-long chat, we touched on numerous subjects, including how diverse founders can take advantage during this downturn and how remote work may lead to growth outside Silicon Valley. The pair have a unique vantage point, with Steve Case, co-founder and former CEO of AOL turned VC, and Clara Sieg, a Stanford-educated VC heading up Revolution’s Silicon Valley office. Together, Case and Sieg laid out how the current crisis is different...

Thriva emerged in 2016 as an at-home blood-testing startup allowing people to check, for instance, cholesterol levels. In the era of a pandemic, however, at-home blood testing is about to become quite a big deal, alongside the general trend toward people proactively taking control of their health. It has secured a £4 million extension to its Series A funding round from Berlin-based VC Target Global. The investment takes Thriva’s total funding to £11 million. The investment comes from Target Global’s new Early Stage Fund II and will top up the £6...

Mikael Johnsson Contributor Share on Twitter Mikael Johnsson is a co-founder and general partner of Oxx, a venture capital firm investing in European SaaS companies at growth stage. A generation of companies now needs to forget what it has learned. The world has changed for everyone, and nowhere is this more true than in fundraising. I’ve been investing in technology companies for over twenty years, and I’ve seen how venture capitalists respond in bull and bear markets. I’ve supported companies through the downturns that followed the dot-com...

Statespace has today raised a $15 million Series A financing round led by Khosla, with partner Samir Kaul joining the board. Existing investors, such as FirstMark Capital, Lux and Expa, also participated in the round, as well as newcomer June Fund. Statespace launched out of stealth in 2017 with a product called Aim Lab, which recreates the physics of popular FPS games to help players practice their aim and work on their weaknesses. Statespace was founded by neuroscientists from New York University, and goes beyond the mechanics of aim itself to...

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. A cluster of related companies recently caught our eye by raising capital in rapid-fire fashion. TechCrunch covered a few of them, and I read coverage of others. Looking back through my notes and the media cycles that they generated, it feels safe to say that API-based startups are hot right now. What’s fun about this trend is that the startups we’re considering are all relatively early-stage, so they aren’t limping unicorns staring...

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. First, a big thanks to everyone who took part in the Equity survey, we really appreciated your notes and thoughts. The crew is chewing over what you said now, and we’ll roll up the best feedback into show tweaks in the future. Today, though, we’ve gone Danny and Natasha and Chris and Alex back again for our regular news dive. This week we had to leave the Vroom IPO filing, Danny’s group project on The Future of...

M17 Entertainment announced today that it has sold its online dating assets to focus on its core live streaming business in Asia and other markets. Paktor Pte, which operates Paktor dating app and other services, was acquired by Kollective Ventures, a venture capital advisory firm. The value of the deal was undisclosed. In its announcement, Taipei-based M17 said the sale will allow it to focus on expanding its live streaming business in markets including Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong. Earlier this month, the company said it had raised a $26.5 million...

VergeSense grabs $9M for its people-counting sensor tech as offices eye COVID changes

Facilities management looks to be having a bit of a moment, amid the coronavirus pandemic. VergeSense, a U.S. startup that sells a “sensor as a system” platform targeted at offices — supporting features such as real-time occupant counts and foot-traffic-triggered cleaning notifications — has closed a $9 million strategic investment led by Allegion Ventures, a corporate VC fund of security giant Allegion. JLL Spark, Metaprop, Y Combinator, Pathbreaker Ventures and West Ventures also participated in the round, which brings the total funding raised...

One of the biggest technology takeaways of the last couple of months has been that organizations need confident, wide-ranging digital strategies to stay afloat, and Facebook — in its wider bid to build products to serve businesses — is taking note. In the same week that the social network doubled down on business tools for small and medium enterprises with Shops, it is also sharpening its focus on larger enterprises and how they might use its platform. Today, Facebook announced a number of new products coming to Workplace, its enterprise-focused...

{rss:content:encoded} Google highlights accessible locations with new Maps feature https://ift.tt/2TnibST https://ift.tt/3ecQ5lj May 22, 2020 at 12:20AM Google has announced a new, welcome and no doubt long-asked-for feature to its Maps app: wheelchair accessibility info. Businesses and points of interest featuring accessible entrances, bathrooms and other features will now be prominently marked as such. Millions, of course, require such accommodations as ramps or automatic doors, from people with limited mobility to people with strollers or other...

The team behind Trash, an app that uses artificial intelligence to edit your video footage, launched a number of new features this week that should make it more useful for anyone — but especially independent musicians. I wrote about the startup last summer, when CEO Hannah Donovan told me that her work as Vine’s general manager convinced her that most people will never feel like they have the technical skills to edit a good-looking video. That’s why she and her co-founder Genevieve Patterson (the startup’s chief scientist) created that technology...

The Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha has created a new business line called High Alpha Innovation to bring its startup spin-up approach to big business. So far the firm has managed to sign on clients like the financial services firm Silicon Valley Bank, the industrial manufacturer Cummins and the security hardware and services company Allegion. Founded by the management team behind ExactTarget, the High Alpha studio shows how new technology ecosystems can emerge when successful founders reinvest in their local technology ecosystems....

{rss:content:encoded} The Trash app’s new features can create AI-edited music videos and more https://ift.tt/2WR7lqs https://ift.tt/2zWZdvo May 21, 2020 at 06:30PM The team behind Trash, an app that uses artificial intelligence to edit your video footage, launched a number of new features this week that should make it more useful for anyone — but especially independent musicians. I wrote about the startup last summer, when CEO Hannah Donovan told me that her work as Vine’s general manager convinced her that most people will never feel like they...

Daniel Graf has had a long career in the tech industry. From founding his own startup in the mid-2000s to working at Google, then Twitter, and finally Uber, the tech business has made him extremely wealthy. But after leaving Uber, he wasn’t necessarily interested in working at another business… At least, not until he spent an afternoon in the spring of 2019 with an old friend, General Catalyst managing director Hemant Taneja, walking in San Francisco’s South Park neighborhood and hearing Taneja talk about a new startup called Mindstrong Health. Taneja...

Skyflow, a Mountain View-based privacy API company, announced this morning that it has closed a $7.5 million round of capital it describes as a seed investment. Foundation Capital’s Ashu Garg led the round, with the company touting smaller checks from Jeff Immelt (former GE CEO) and Jonathan Bush (former AthenaHealth CEO). For Skyflow, founded in 2019, the capital raise and its constituent announcement mark an exit from quasi-stealth mode. TechCrunch knew a little about Skyflow before it announced its seed round because one if its co-founders,...

This afternoon, we’re chatting with Steve Case and Clara Sieg of Revolution as part of our new interview series, Extra Crunch Live. Topping our agenda, we will talk about jobs — in Silicon Valley, on the coasts and in the heartland. The technology sector is suffering through a contraction caused by the COVID-19 global health crisis, and layoffs are hitting nearly every company. We hope you’ll join the conversation. During our hour-long chat, Extra Crunch members can submit questions directly in the Zoom Q&A. Steve Case has a unique vantage...

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