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Twitter announced this morning it has hired Sarah Personette, previously COO at Refinery29, as its new head of global Twitter Client Solutions. Personette will start in mid-October. She will be based in New York, where she’ll report to Head of Customers Matt Derella, also previously head of Twitter Client Solutions.

The company says this will allow Derella to focus on his expanded role leading Content Partnerships, Self-Serve Advertising, Operations, and Twitter Services.

Personette, meanwhile, will oversee all of the global regional TCS leaders, Client Solutions Development and Global Brands.

Derella welcomed Personette this morning in a series of tweets.

“Sarah will be taking the reins in overseeing our our strategy and execution in helping the world’s largest businesses grow with Twitter,” he said. “Sarah has a career anchored in putting the customer at the core. She’s led global marketing and agency teams across publishing, tech and advertising. We are thrilled to bring her range of expertise and her leadership to Twitter and our partners.”

Personette was not long in her last role as COO at Refinery29, where she had been only since January 2018. Before that, she was VP of global marketing at Facebook from 2014 to 2017, where she ran a 500-person group focused on getting its ad products into the hands of clients. She also built and led Facebook’s Global Agency Team.

Prior to Facebook, she was the U.S. President of Universal McCann Worldwide, Inc. and Senior Vice President at Starcom Mediavest Group.

Since 2016, she has been serving as a corporate director for publicly traded retailer, Build-A-Bear Workshop, which was recently in the news for a disastrous “Pay Your Age Day” deal that overwhelmed stores with crowds.

Personette is also a director of Northwestern University’s Alumnae Board, She Runs It, and the Reisenbach Foundation.

“I feel incredibly honored to be joining Twitter at this time and with this team,” Personette said, in a statement. “Twitter creates the forum for people’s voices to be heard, and that is hugely meaningful for brands who want to make genuine connections. I look forward to working with the top marketers in the world to help them move consumers from inspiration to action.”

The hire comes at a difficult time for Twitter, where it’s being hauled into the Senate to face questions over how foreign influence is impacting domestic politics, and how consumer data is protected.

The company also recently banned Alex Jones from using its platform, following a backlash that saw tens of thousands of Twitter users blocking the accounts of major brands like Nike, Pepsi, Uber, McDonald’s, Red Bull, Starbucks, IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Wells Fargo, Visa and Capital One, and others in an attempt to pressure the company into banning Jones.

The brand boycott had been led by #GrabYourWallet, an organization headed by Shannon Coulter. She had created a brand block list that included nearly 500 major companies, which Twitter users could subscribe with a click. Coulter said she would automatically unblock every company on the list when Twitter kicked out Jones – which she did on September 6.

The ease with which users could take a stance against Twitter’s policies – a stance that greatly impacted brands ability to do business on the platform – could continue to be trouble for the company, and a challenge for Personette, if users revolt against other executive decisions in the future.

A few days ago, I interviewed Ken Kocienda at TechCrunch Disrupt SF — he just released a book called Creative Selection. After working at Apple during some of the company’s best years, Kocienda looks back at what makes Apple such a special place.

The book in particular starts with a demo. Kocienda is invited to demo to Steve Jobs his prototype of what is about to become the iPad software keyboard.

And it’s the first of a long string of demos punctuating the book. As a reader, you follow along all the ups and downs of this design roller coaster. Sometimes, a demo clearly shows the way forward. Sometimes, it’s the equivalent of hitting a wall of bricks over and over again.

Kocienda’s career highlights include working on WebKit and Safari for the Mac right after he joined the company as well as working on iOS before the release of the first iPhone. He’s the one responsible of autocorrect and the iPhone keyboard in general.

If you care about user interfaces and design processes, it’s a good read. And it feels refreshing to read a book with HTML code, keyboard drawings and other nerdy things. It’s much better than the average business book.

New Relic CEO Lew Cirne was feeling a bit nostalgic last week when he called to discuss the announcements for the company’s FutureStack conference taking place tomorrow in San Francisco. It had been 10 years since he first spoke to TechCrunch about his monitoring tool. A lot has changed in a decade including what his company is monitoring these days.

Cirne certainly recognizes that his company has come a long way since those first days. The monitoring world is going through a seismic shift as the ways we develop apps changes. His company needs to change with it to remain relevant in today’s market.

In the early days, they monitored Ruby on Rails applications, but gone are the days of only monitoring a fixed virtual machine. Today companies are using containers and Kubernetes, and beyond that, serverless architecture. Each of these approaches brings challenges to a monitoring company like New Relic, particularly the ephemeral nature and the sheer volume associated with these newer ways of working.

‘We think those changes have actually been an opportunity for us to further differentiate and further strengthen our thesis that the New Relic way is really the most logical way to address this.” He believes that his company has always been centered on the code, as opposed to the infrastructure where it’s delivered, and that has helped it make adjustments as the delivery mechanisms have changed.

Today, the company introduced a slew of new features and capabilities designed to keep the company oriented toward the changing needs of its customer base. One of the ways they are doing that is with a new feature called Outlier Detection, which has been designed to address changes in key metrics wherever your code happens to be deployed.

Further, Incident Context lets you see exactly where the incident occurred in the code so you don’t have to go hunting and pecking to find it in the sea of data.

Outlier Detection in action. Gif: New Relic

The company also introduced developer.newrelic.com, a site that extends the base APIs to provide a central place to build on top of the New Relic platform and give customers a way to extend the platform’s functionality. Cirne said each company has its own monitoring requirements, and they want to give them ability to build for any scenario.

In addition, they announced New Relic Query Language (NRQL) data, which leverages the New Relic GraphQL API to help deliver new kinds of customized, programmed capabilities to customers that aren’t available out of the box.”What if I could program New Relic to take action when a certain thing happens. When an application has a problem, it could post a notice to the status page or restart the service. You could automate something that has been historically done manually,” he explained.

Whatever the company is doing it appears to be working It went public in 2014 with an IPO share price of $30.14 and a market cap of $1.4 billion. Today, the share price was $103.65 with a market cap of $5.86 billion (as of publishing).

Earlier today, Snap made some waves when it announced that Imran Khan, its chief strategy officer, was stepping down from his role to pursue other opportunities. We have now confirmed with sources close to the matter that he’s leaving the company to start his own investment fund.

Khan, who had been an early investor in Alibaba when still at J.P. Morgan & Chase, wants to put together a firm that will span the range of funding opportunities in the tech sector, with a focus on startups and other companies that are disrupting non-tech areas. Targets will include both private and public businesses, as well as private equity, buyouts and long-term stakes.

And given his crossover experience between the US and Asia — he was known for helping introduce US investors to soon-to-be-huge Chinese companies like Alibaba, Baidu and Sohu — you can expect interest to play on the global theme here, too.

While Snap dukes it out with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google over domination in social apps, there are countless areas that are only just beginning to get disrupted by technology. The overriding thesis, from what I understand, behind Khan’s move to start a new firm is that there is something close to $1 trillion in value that is at play because of that disruption, and so he wants to be in the thick of making “opportunistic” investments that will take advantage of the changes and shifts taking place.

Khan plans to base the firm in Los Angeles, where he lives now: “Silicon Valley is too dominated by the VC bubble, and New York is dominated by the hedge fund bubble,” the source said. (And what about London? “Many trips to Europe, too.” I’m glad to know we’re still thought of by some as part of Europe…)

Khan has long wanted to build his own investment firm, but the opportunity for operational experience at Snap (which was still going by Snapchat when he joined in 2014), a startup that was growing like a weed at that time and had just passed a $10 billion valuation, was too good to pass up.

One source I’d talked to characterised Khan’s departure as something that was due to happen after Khan spent four years at Snap. His time there spanned a period huge evolution, going from generating zero revenue to being on track to make about $1 billion this year, and from 100 employees to 3,000.

But Khan was brought in at a time when the company was starting to try to figure out how best to grow in a way that would resonate with investors, and you could also say that this has now been done. Now that Snap has essentally established what is going to drive its business (ad tech) it needs to move on to the next phase of how it will execute that — and execute it.

From what I understand, his departure is something that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel knew was on the cards for a while. Since Khan is not jumping to a new role elsewhere but starting his own thing, that is partly why he’s able to stay in place for a smooth transition.

Ahead the launch of its own video streaming service, Apple has been awarded its first-ever Primetime Emmy for its original video programming, for “Carpool Karaoke.” The series won the “Outstanding Short Form Variety Series” category on Sunday night. This is not Apple’s first-ever Emmy – it has won other technical and engineering awards in the past, including last year’s win for Siri integration in Apple TV – but it is its first for original video.

The series beat out “Between The Scenes – The Daily Show,” “Creating Saturday Night Live,” “Gay of Thrones,” “Honest Trailers,” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon – Cover Room.”

Apple’s “Carpool Karaoke” was spun out from a recurring sketch on CBS’ “The Late Show With James Corden” in 2016, and was one of the first originals from Apple, along with its Shark Tank-like “Planet of the Apps, which largely bombed.

Over “Carpool Karaoke’s” past episodes, it has featured a number of big-name guests, including Will Smith, Alicia Keys, John Legend, LeBron James, Billy Eichner, Metallica, Sophie Turner, Maisie Williams, Seth MacFarlane, Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Shaquille O’Neal, John Cena, Shakira, Trevor Noah, and many others.

The series itself received almost universally negative reception from critics, but nevertheless earned a second season.

Apple has since shifted its focus from shows like this to other more high-profile series with the hires of Sony TV vets, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht.

Its upcoming video streaming service now has a number of anticipated shows, including a Witherspoon-backed comedy starring Kristen Wiig, a thriller starring Octavia Spencer, a revival of “Amazing Stories” exec-produced by Steven Spielberg, a new space drama from “Battlestar Galactica’s” creator Ronald D. Moore, called “See,” a scripted basketball show based on Kevin Durant’s life, a show from “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle, an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation,” original shows produced by Oprah Winfrey, a psychological thriller produced by M. Night Shyamalan and many others.

It has also been making acquisitions to expand the service, with additions like the documentary “The Elephant Queen” and animated film “Wolfwalkers.”

The company is expected to launch its streaming service in March 2019 – something we may hear more about at Apple’s press event on Wednesday.

The Bay Area may be the center of the global technology industry, but that hasn’t stopped one wealthy enclave from protecting itself from the future.

The city council of Mill Valley, a small town located just a few miles north of San Francisco, voted unanimously late last week to effectively block deployments of small-cell 5G wireless towers in the city’s residential areas.

Through an urgency ordinance, which allows the city council to immediately enact regulations that affect the health and safety of the community, the restrictions and prohibitions will be put into force immediately for all future applications to site 5G telecommunications equipment in the city. Applications for commercial districts are permitted under the passed ordinance.

The ordinance was driven by community concerns over the health effects of 5G wireless antennas. According to the city, it received 145 pieces of correspondence from citizens voicing opposition to the technology, compared to just five letters in support of it — a ratio of 29 to 1. While that may not sound like much, the city’s population is roughly 14,000, indicating that about 1% of the population had voiced an opinion on the matter.

Blocks on 5G deployments are nothing new for Marin County, where other cities including San Anselmo and Ross have passed similar ordinances designed to thwart 5G expansion efforts over health concerns.

These restrictions on small cell site deployments could complicate 5G’s upcoming nationwide rollout. While 5G standards have yet to be standardized, one model that has broad traction in the telecommunications industry is to use so-called “small cell” antennas to increase bandwidth and connection quality while reducing infrastructure and power costs. Smaller antennas are easier to install and will be loss obtrusive, reducing the concerns of urban preservationists to unsightly tower masts that have long plagued the deployment of 4G antennas in communities across the United States.

Perhaps most importantly, these small cells emit less radiation, since they are not designed to provide as wide of coverage as traditional cell sites. The telecom industry has long vociferously denied a link between antennas and health outcomes, although California’s Department of Public Health has issued warnings about potential health effects of personal cell phone antennas. Reduced radiation emissions from 5G antennas compared to 4G antennas would presumably further reduce any health effects of this technology.

Restrictions like Mill Valley’s will make it nearly impossible to deploy 5G in a timely manner. As one industry representative told me in an interview a few months ago, “It takes 18 months to get the permit to deploy, and 2 hours to install.” Multiplied by the hundreds of sites required to cover a reasonably-sized urban neighborhood, and the 5G rollout goes beyond daunting to well-near impossible.

While health concerns have bubbled in various municipalities, those concerns are not shared globally. China, through companies like Huawei, is investing billions of dollars to design and build 5G infrastructure, in hopes of stealing the industry crown from the United States, which is the market leader in 4G technologies.

Those competitive concerns have increasingly been a priority at the FCC, where chairman Ajit Pai and his fellow Republican commissioners have pushed hard to overcome local concerns around health and historical preservation. The commission voted earlier this year on new siting rules that would accelerate 5G adoption.

Mill Valley’s ordinance is designed to frustrate those efforts, while remaining within the letter of federal law, which preempts local ordinances. Mill Valley’s mayor has said that the city will look to create a final ordinance over the next year.

Let the computers do the legal busy work so attorneys can focus on complex problem solving for their clients. That’s the lucrative idea behind Atrium LTS, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s machine learning startup that digitizes legal documents and builds applications on top to speed up fundraising, commercial contracts, equity distribution, and employment issues. For example, one of its apps automatically turns startup funding documents into Excel cap tables.

Automating expensive legal labor has led to a rapid rise to 110 employees and 250 clients for Atrium, including startups like Bird and MessageBird. Atrium only came of stealth a year ago with a $10.5 million party round before going into Y Combinator last winter. Today it announces it’s raised a $65 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz.

In characteristic dude fashion, Kan tells me “I’m pretty stoked about that because of having more resources for Atrium.” The venture firm’s partner Andrew Chen is taking a board seat and famed co-founder Marc Andreessen is joining as a board observer. “I wanted a visionary who’s always going to be pushing us to build something really big” Kan says. YC’s Continuity Fund and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures are also joining the round

With the massive influx of cash, Atrium will be able to develop more internal tools it can use to crank out client work faster than its traditional competitors. “We can ultimately be this platform on top of which you’re building these legal business and eventually other professional services and software services” Kan explains,”They’re all sitting on top of the platform that understands legal documents.”

In more Atrium news, Y Combinator’s leading partner Michael Seibel will join the startup’s board too. And it’s acquired Tetra, a YC artificial intelligence startup that had raised $1.5 million to analyze voice, “to help us build our platform that understands and structures data” Kan tells me.

What Kan didn’t initially mention is that two of Atrium’s co-founders, CTO Chris Smoak and legal partner BeBe Chueh. have left. He later admitted they had transitioned out of the company several months before the new funding. “BeBe wanted to spend time working on family (she just got engaged); Chris and I disagreed on his job role” regarding the definition of the CTO position, Kan tells me. He’ll now be running Atrium with remaining co-founder Augie Rakow, formerly of mega-law firm Orrick, and Kan’s long-term business partner and former McKinsey analyst Nick Cortes.

Justin Kan (Atrium) at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2017

The law firm business model has left the door open for disruption by technology companies like Atrium. “Law firms generate revenue from hourly billing, and lack an incentive to vastly improve efficiency” Chen writes. “Many law firms dividend out all their profits at the end of each year, making it hard to invest in the expensive investment of building software. Software is hard to build inside a software company, much less a law firm”.

But Atrium is an engineering company with a legal clientele. It takes the most common and time-consuming activities — often related to ingesting mountains of documents — and builds machine learning workarounds. Atrium’s lawyers can focus on advising their clients on what to do, rather than burning the midnight oil doing it as they look for tiny quirks in the paperwork. The legal services get faster, cheaper, and more predictable so Atrium can offer upfront pricing.

For now, Atrium’s tech is limited to a narrow band of use cases. But “over $300 billion is spent per year in the enterprise legal market” Chen writes, so there’s plenty of room to grow now that Atrium is well capitalized. It will have to convince big corporations to ditch the old way and let computers lend a hand. Luckily, Atrium isn’t a SAAS company forcing clients to use the tech themselves. Done right, they shouldn’t even know that it’s machine vision software, not junior associates, pouring over their docs. It will have to out-match fellow legal tech startups like Ravel, CaseText, Judicata, Premonition, and more, though they’re often just tools rather than software-equipped law firms.

Kan also cops to his lack of experience in legal. “I think for any full stack vertical startup started by a non subject matter expert (ie. me who is not a lawyer), there is a risk that you come in and are very prescriptive on how things work. Then you build software that says ‘the providers must do it this way!'” Kan tells me. “But the practical reality is that it doesn’t work with the nuanced, non-linear workflows that providers already have. So the technology doesn’t get adopted and fails to provide value. That to me is the biggest upcoming risk.”

Justin Kan, from lifevlogger to legal giant

Yet if Atrium can ease clients into this new world service by service, it could generate network effects that fuel the whole business. It’s just a matter of prioritization. “One of the things I always need to be focused on is…focusing. That’s sometimes a blindspot.” From Justin.tv to Twitch to its acquisition by Amazon to his role as YC partner, Kan delivers but can be frenetic. “As an entrepreneur, I have a tendency to take on too much.”

But after leaving YC because “I had felt like I’d stopped learning”, Kan has found the legal space so full of knowledge and opportunity that it can hold his attention. “Part of why I like this business is because it was so different. I didn’t think it was something that would be as easily competed with” Kan recalls. “I had this calendar company and Google came out with something similar. I told [Twitch co-founder] Emmett ‘We have to do something no one can compete with. At least Google will never do this’. Then they did.”

But unlike with that game streaming startup, Atrium doesn’t have to worry about beating or getting bought by some legal tech giant. Instead, it wants to become one.

Branch announced today that it has acquired TUNE‘s attribution analytics team and business, a part of the SaaS platform that focuses on optimizing and accurately attributing ad spend. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

TUNE, a Seattle-based startup founded in 2009, helps ad platforms tie marketing investments to measurable outcomes. 

Backed by Android co-founder Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, Branch creates links between websites and mobile apps, called deep links. The deal will help the company, which supports 40,000 apps with roughly 3 billion monthly users, expand its portfolio of linking and attribution analytics tools to become the ultimate marketing and measurement platform for businesses.

“TUNE has always been a steward of Branch’s core values, especially when it comes to putting user experience and privacy first,” Branch CEO Alex Austin said in a statement. “Combining TUNE’s years of learning with Branch’s innovation, raw product execution, and key strategic partnerships is the beginning of a new era of mobile marketing. It’s going to be an incredible ride.”

Formerly known as HasOffers, TUNE was founded by twin brothers Lucas and Lee Brown. Peter Hamilton joined the startup in 2012 and has served as the CEO since.

The performance marketing company completed a $9.4 million Series A investment in 2013 led by Accel, followed by a $27 million Series B in 2015 led by ICON Ventures. For its part, Branch is in the process of raising a fresh round of venture capital funding at a unicorn valuation. 

New York prosecutors have extradited a Russian hacker accused of breaking into JP Morgan, one of the world’s largest banking institutions.

Moscow resident Andrei Tiurin, 35, was charged Friday after he was extradited from neighboring Georgia, with the theft of over 80 million records from the bank in 2014. The alleged hacker is said to have been under the direction of Gery Shalon, who was separately indicted a year later following the breach.

Tiurin was also charged wire and securities fraud, and aggravated identity theft, racking up the maximum possible prison time to over 80 years.

“Andrei Tyurin, a Russian national, is alleged to have participated in a global hacking campaign that targeted major financial institutions, brokerage firms, news agencies, and other companies,” said Manhattan U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman in remarks.

Although the indictment did not name the New York-based financial news agency, The Wall Street Journal previously reported the victim as its parent company Dow Jones, following the following the first round of charges in 2015.

The hackers allegedly targeted other firms, including an unnamed Boston, Mass.-based mutual fund and online stock brokerage firm. The indictment said that the hackers exploited the “Heartbleed” vulnerability — a known flaw in the widely used OpenSSL cryptographic library — to gain a foothold into the institution’s network.

Tiurin was also accused of trying to artificially inflate the “price of certain stocks publicly traded in the United States,” and obtained “hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds” from various hacking campaigns.

“Today’s extradition marks a significant milestone for law enforcement in the fight against cyber intrusions targeting our critical financial institutions,” said Berman.

Dow Jones declined to comment. JP Morgan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Smart speaker ownership continues to grow, according to new research from Adobe Analytics out this morning. The company found that as of August 2018, 32% of consumers now own a smart speaker, up from 28% in January. That’s a 14% increase in just a matter of months – and those months didn’t include the busy holiday sales season, where 79% of smart speaker sales occur.

In addition, the firm is predicting that after the 2018 holidays, nearly half (48%) of U.S. consumers will own a smart speaker.

Over the holidays, it reports that 45% of consumers who currently own a smart speaker said they plan to buy another one for themselves, and 23% plan to buy one for someone else. Meanwhile, 23% of non-owners said they plan to buy one for themselves, and 9% plan to purchase one for someone else.

Adobe’s research is based of a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, and also delved into other aspects of smart speaker usage and voice computing.

For example, the most common voice activities today are asking for music (70%) and the weather forecast (64%).

Other popular activities include things like asking fun questions (53%), online search (47%), checking the news (46%), making a call (36%), basic research or confirming information (35%), asking directions (34%).

However, controlling the smart home using voice commands was only used by 31% of device owners, despite smart home controls being a key feature of these newer devices.

The study also somewhat contradicted an earlier report by The Information which said that only 2% of Alexa owners made a purchase using their voice. Though Adobe’s research looked at the overall smart speaker market in the U.S., not just Alexa devices, it didn’t find the same trend. Instead, it found that 30% of smart speaker owners used the devices for “shopping or ordering items.”

While not one of the top voice activities, it’s an activity Adobe pegged as an “emerging use case,” along with others like food delivery, sending messages, play games, smart home commands, travel research and managing finances.

But Adobe clarified its findings around voice shopping, saying that most people aren’t buying directly through their smart speakers, but are using them in the earlier stages of the shopping process. That is, nearly half of consumers (47%) reported using their device for product research or search, 43% used them for creating shopping lists, and 32% for price comparison.

Still, it reported a quarter of smart speaker owners had at least placed a one-time order, and 21% were using for re-orders of frequently bought items.

Telling Alexa to add something to a list is a fairly common use case, though that may not have been counted as a “purchase” in the numbers The Information had gotten ahold of previously. Still, it makes sense that smart speakers would be involved at the beginning of the shopping process – a reminder to buy something, so to speak – given that use of “alarms and reminders” is one of the top activities, Adobe said, with 46% usage.

Adobe also found that use of the voice assistants on smart speakers was growing, along with the install base. It said that, overall, 76% of smart speaker owners cited an increase in usage year-over-year, with 71% saying they used their device daily, and 44% who said they used it multiple times per day. Only a small 8% said they almost never used them.