Month: July 2018

CodeFights started out as a competitive coding platform, but has since morphed to focus more on interview prep and helping businesses recruit developers. To better reflect this focus, the service today announced that it is changing its name to CodeSignal. In addition to this, the company also today officially launched its Coding Score, a credit score-like ratings system for developers with scores that — just like today’s credit scores — range from 300 to 850. To round out its set of announcements, the company also announced that FICO CEO William Lansing is joining the CodeSignal advisory board.

“Our core strength and the tech we built is the ability to assess technical ability and to do it at scale,” CodeSignal CEO Tigran Sloyan told me. “The crown jewel of that is the Coding Score. The Coding Score is our equivalent of a credit score for developers because you need an easy way for the industry to agree on a standard for skills.”

I’m not sure everybody will agree with his assessment, but Sloyan is right that today’s methods of rating a developer’s skill based on what school somebody went to, resumes, GitHub projects and coding interviews doesn’t present a full picture of an applicant’s abilities. He also notes that this process, where the actual hiring decision is often based on the preferences of only a few people, can lead to biased decisions. The Coding Score, Sloyan argues, takes away many of these biases and purely focuses on an applicant’s abilities.

How does CodeSignal calculate this score? Sloyan tells me that a developer only has to solve three challenges on the site to get a score — and that first score is accurate to about 85 percent. As developers solve more challenges, the service starts refining the score. Developers are ranked based on their speed and accuracy (which are weighted according to the difficulty of the challenge), and how they solve those problems. CodeSignal benchmarks developers against each other. To do all of this this, the team trained a machine learning model on the vast trove of data the company has collected since it launched its first coding challenges in 2014.

CodeSignal started pitching the Coding Score to recruiters at major tech firms over the course of the last few months. Sloyan admitted that it took a while before these recruiters trusted these scores, but today a number of these companies use the scores to bypass phone interviews and move right to in-person interviews for some candidates.

Developers, it’s worth noting, can choose to share their scores publicly or keep them private until they want to share them with recruiters.

Looking ahead, CodeSignal wants the Coding Score to become the de facto standard in the developer hiring market. While this model is surely applicable to other fields, Sloyan noted that CodeSignal isn’t all that interested in branching out right now, but he left the door open for adding scores for other technical fields as well. “I do believe the model scales,” he told me. “What you need is a platform for people to practice and learn a certain skill. That platform needs to have an automatic assessment engine behind it.” And with enough data from that, it can then analyze those scores and calculate a score.

Bonus: To launch the new scoring system, CodeSignal calculated and ranked the average scores of users from a number of companies and colleges.

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Instagram is still exploring what types of more traditional (feed-based) social interactions in can inject into the Stories format. The company has integrated some of these experimentations into Stories pretty seamlessly so far, mainly because they haven’t been all that jarringly text-heavy. They’ve introduced a slider and polling widget that accompany questions users can slap onto photos or videos they’ve taken, but for the most part it’s all been pretty simplistic.

Instagram is wading deeper into the waters of a feed/stories hybrid as it seeks to foster greater interaction out of a medium that has always seemed to be at its best when it comes to passively sucking up content. A new “Questions Sticker,” which the company is introducing today, gives users a way to ask their followers for questions that they can then selectively share and reply to publicly inside their Stories feed.

This functionality could be a major boon to “influencers” on the platform who have plenty of curious fans who are interested in finding out more about them in a way that’s a little less aggressive than sending a DM. The way the original poster can see all the various responses while others cannot is certainly a bit unique compared to the typical commenting situation on an Instagram post, and while it might not give all users an eye into a conversation, there’s a lot less potential for things going wrong.

Instagram seems to be treading pretty carefully on the privacy front these days, you won’t even be able to see the handle of the person who asked a question to a user, this whole process is about the outward projection rather than the conversation which is a unique evolution for an interaction between two users on Instagram.

Whether these new updates are just tests or signs of an ideological shift is likely just dependent on how popular they grow to become. Instagram Stories is a copied feature that has become core to the app, but it’s clear that Instagram is looking to evolve the medium and put their own spin on it that builds out more interactions between users.

Mobile games publisher and marketer Tilting Point is dramatically increasing its commitment to its user acquisition fund.

The company announced a $12 million fund at the end of 2016, which it said would help developers grow their games while remaining independent. Today it  revealed that it’s committing $132 million in annual spending to the fund.

CEO Kevin Segalla said that as mobile app stores become more and more crowded, “user acquisition has gotten incredibly complicated,” so most indie developers “don’t have the tech and the expertise to do it.”

That’s where Tilting Point comes in. President Samir El Agili said the company has built “machine learning technology to maximize and optimize user acquisition.” It likes to work on games that are at the “crossroads,” taking a solid game with a sustainable business model, then dramatically accelerating its growth with advertising.

The initial fund led to partnerships on Disruptor Beam’s Star Trek Timelines and Nukebox Studios’ Food Truck Chef.

Segalla said that given the fund’s success, the question became, “How can we do this at a much larger scale?” which led to the much larger fund commitment, thanks to capital committed by CFC Capital (Tilting Point’s majority shareholder) and Metropolitan Partners Group.

Just to be clear, the $132 million isn’t a price tag that Tilting Point is putting on its own services, and instead represents money that will actually be spent on advertising.

Segalla argued that the deals are structured in a way where Tilting Point’s incentives are properly aligned with the developer’s.

“This is not a loan that we’re giving them, it’s not something where we’re looking for equity, there’s no ongoing revenue share,” he said. Instead, the company is betting that the spending will pay off in its relationship with developer and the resulting fees: “What we’re doing is risking our own capital because we believe in our marketing, our tech and our team.”

Tilting Point says it’s open to partnering with developers in any genre, and is also looking to work with developers internationally. Segalla predicted that fund could allow Tilting Point to work with 20 new games each year, though El Agili noted that the exact number will depend on the games: “The truth is, if get two to three games that do extremely well right away, we can start spending a lot of money.”

Slack’s search functions are getting another little quality-of-life update today with the introduction of filters, which aims to make search a little more granular to find the right answers.

The company also says searches are going to be more personalized. All of this is an attempt to get to the right files or conversations quickly as Slack — a simple collection of group chats and channels that can get out of hand very fast — something a little more palatable. As companies get bigger and bigger, the sheer amount of information that ends up in it will grow faster and faster. That means that the right information will generally be more difficult to access, and if Slack is going to stick to its roots as a simple internal communications product, it’s going to have to lean on improvements under the hood and small changes in front of users. The company says search is now 70% faster on the back end.

Users in Slack will now be able to filter search results by channels and also the kinds of results they are looking for, like files. You can go a little more granular than that, but that’s the general gist of it, as Slack tries to limit the changes to what’s happening in front of users. Slack threads, for example, were in development for more than a year before the company finally rolled out the long-awaited feature. (Whether that feature successfully changed things for the better is still not known.)

Slack now has around 8 million daily active users with 3 million paid users, and is still clearly pretty popular with smaller companies that are looking for something simpler than the more robust — and complex — communications tools on the market. But there are startups trying to pick away at other parts of the employee communications channels, like Slite, which aims to be a simpler notes tool in the same vein as Slack but for different parts of the employee experience. And there are other larger companies looking to tap the demand for these kinds of simpler tools like Atlassian’s Stride and Microsoft’s teams.

iOS users have been reporting problems with excessive battery drain after updating to iOS 11.4.

On Sunday, 9to5Mac reported on a raft of posts on Apple forums complaining about excessive battery drain since updating. ZDNet also flagged complaints around the issue early last month.

The update to Apple’s mobile operating system was released at the end of May, adding support for Messages in iCloud, plus some media and entertainment features, such as AirPlay 2 and support for two HomePod speakers to work as a stereo pair.

Safe to say, radically reduced battery life was not among the listed additions.

This TC writer also noticed an alarming depreciation in battery performance after updating to iOS 11.4 at the end of last month — with the battery level dropping precipitously even when the handset was left untouched doing nothing.

We reached out to Apple immediately after noticing the problem — but the company has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Judging by forum complaints, other iOS users have also found that updating to iOS 11.4 impacts the standby battery life of their device.

In my case checking the (beta) battery health feature in the iPhone settings threw no light on the abnormal performance, with maximum capacity reported as a (healthy sounding) 91%, as well a claim that “normal” peak performance was supported.

The ‘battery usage’ report that’s built into iOS also seemed unable to shed any light on what was causing the battery to drain so fast — listing an app that had been used prior to the previous charge as responsible for the largest chunk of usage. So evidently not identifying the real culprit.

In the end, rebooting my affected iPhone seemed to improve the battery drain issue. Though I can’t be sure whether or not the device has taken a small hit to battery performance as a consequence of the iOS update.

In the middle of writing this report, an additional update — iOS 11.4.1 — has been pushed out by Apple, though it’s not clear whether this explicitly fixes the battery drain issue or not. Battery drain is not listed among the bugs iOS 11.4.1 addresses. But, either way, it’s worth updating in case it helps.

Battery and performance issues have been something of a recurring problem for Apple’s iOS devices in recent years. Again in my case, my affected iPhone 6S only had its battery replaced under an Apple free battery replacement program last year — ironically as a result of a battery fault that caused unexpected shutdowns — so really the battery should have a decent amount of life left in it still.

And as (bad) luck would have it, the iPhone 5 I owned prior to this was also affected by an earlier Apple battery fault. So this is the third battery-related problem to strike the two iPhones I’ve owned over the past five years. Which is certainly unfortunate.

That said, two handsets lasting five years is a testament to Apple’s otherwise lasting build quality. (Albeit, this Samsung-branded portable battery pack has been the unsung workhorse hero stepping in when the batteries conked out, as TC colleagues can also testify…)

Meanwhile after more user complaints last year Apple was forced to apologize for not being more transparent with customers about how it handles performance on iOS devices with older batteries — clarifying that its software in fact slows down the maximum performance of iPhones with older batteries as a power management technique to avoid unexpected shutdowns.

The company has faced lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny as a result of this throttling of device performance.

Although it also quickly offered discounted $29 battery replacements to iPhone owners with an iPhone 6 (or later) whose battery “needs to be replaced” — as well as promising to add controls to iOS to enable users to switch off the feature if they choose.

For its forthcoming iOS 12 update — which was trailed at WWDC, and is due out this fall — Apple says the release will “double down” on performance, slating a slew of refinements, bug fixes and optimizations incoming. So, hopefully, any lurking battery and performance gremlins will soon be kicked into touch.

In the meanwhile, update. And reboot.

New York-based meeting room booking startup Convene announced a $152 Series D this week. The round is led by ArrowMark Partners, along with a number of real estate-related organizations, including Steve Case’s Revolution Growth.

It’s probably telling that the company simply refers to itself as a “WeWork competitor” in the pitch email that was sent on its behalf. Convene doesn’t exactly spur a lot of brand name recognition, but the company’s certainly got the fundraising cache. This round brings its total raise up to $260 million.

The well-funded startup certainly isn’t as ubiquitous as WeWork, but it’s got a number of the U.S.’s largest cities covered at present, including Washington D.C. Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston Chicago and its home court, New York. Convene currently lays claim to 23 locations totaling 700,000 square feet of office space.

This round will no doubt go a ways toward snapping up some key real estate, as well. The startup has plans to expand globally and add around one million additional square feet in a total of ten locations by the end of next year.

As for how it distinguishes itself from the competition, here’s CEO and co-founder Ryan Simonetti, from a press release tied to the news,

Unlike many players in the flexible office or space-as-a-service category, Convene’s landlord partnership model goes far beyond coworking, and we are proud to partner with the world’s most respected office owners to create inspiring workplace environments for today’s top companies. We will use our new funding to expand our alliance with landlords and increase the value of traditional commercial office buildings by putting the human experience above all else.

Scale Venture Partners, an 18-year-old, early-stage venture firm that focuses on software companies, has closed its sixth fund with $400 million, up slightly from the $335 million the firm had raised in early 2016. Among its biggest hits: the e-signature company Docusign, which went public in April; the online data storage company Box, which went public in 2015, and the marketing software company Hubspot, which went public in 2014.

We talked late last week with firm cofounder Rory O’Driscoll, who runs the firm with a handful of longtime colleagues, to learn where the team plans to invest their newest dollars. Our conversation has been lightly edited here for length.

TC: Congrats on your new fund. The size isn’t so afield from your last fund. Are there any dramatic changes from a staffing standpoint?

RO: No dramatic changes. The investing partners are myself, Stacey [Bishop], Andy [Vitus], and Arial [Tseitlin], all of whom were partners in fund five. Alex Niehenke was a principal and now he’s a partner in fund six. [Firm cofounder] Kate [Mitchell] stepped back in the middle of the last fund; she’s now a partner emeritus and advisor.

TC: You’ve had a fair number of IPOs. What are you looking for in a company typically, and what size checks can you write?

RO: We get involved once a company has product market fit and is seeing a couple of millions of dollars in revenue. As for checks, we’re participating in Series A and B deals, with typically $10 to $15 million coming from us in a $25 million deal, though we’ll go as low as $5 million. We’re leading that first go-to-market expansion round for a company.

TC: What are the trends you’re following most closely right now?

RO: The big trend is  clearly AI — software and hardware related, though it’s not new. I did some AI investments in the late ’90s. But we’ve also seen some of the same trends packed into the robotics space. Think artificial intelligence in industrial robots, or warehouse distribution. Collaborative robotics is a big trend, too, where typically humans do the things we are good at and robots do the things we aren’t so good at.

TC: What about crypto or blockchain Infrastructure type plays? Is that something Scale is considering?

RO: One of my partners has spent some time thinking about it. Going after the ICO space directly raises challenges that we’ve decided not to take on right now. But we do think on a technical level that the software behind block chain technologies could [lead to ] enterprise software opportunities.

TC: Did you talk with investors in your newest fund about being given the leeway to invest in these things?

RO: Because I haven’t developed an opinion yet and we haven’t done a deal — we still have questions about sheer scalability and distributability — we didn’t feel it was an issue. We didn’t see the need to raise that question with LPs or start an abstract conversation, saying ‘We might want to do this thing that we haven’t decided to do yet.’ It didn’t seem like a good use of time.

TC: Scale has long had a diverse group of investors, including endowments and pension funds. Of course, more money from around the world is trying to make its way to Silicon Valley. Did you raise more capital from overseas than in past funds?

RO: We definitely raised money from outside the U.S., including Europe and the Middle East. Our geographic perspective is very international in scope, though we think any enterprise company needs a go-to-market approach in the U.S.

TC: You’ve been in the business a long time. You’ve seen down cycles. How are you feeling about the market right now?

RO: You never know how every boom ends, but every boom does end. History doesn’t repeat itself. It rhymes.

This boom is very different than the ’99 boom, when companies were going public with $10 million in revenue. Now, the concern is that they’re going public too late. The problem used to be viability; now it’s valuation.

As an investor, all you can do is position your companies to succeed in the market at any point in time, and to turn on a dime if if need be. Twenty-four after the world changes, you better have a plan to get where you’re going with the cash you have.

Piece by piece Snap is trying to eek a developer platform out of Snapchat Lenses and give users something extra at the same time.

Today, we’re seeing the most user-facing of these efforts as Snapchat debuts a new Lens Explorer section which will give the user base greater access to scouting out new face filters beyond what’s sitting in the oft-refreshed Lens Carousel on the app’s central camera screen. The new update will be rolling out to iOS users slowly, the company says.

There are 70 million daily active users of Snapchat Lenses (more than one-third of total Snapchat DAUs) who spend an average of about three minutes playing around with them per day but up until now discoverability hasn’t been too extensive.

It’s honestly pretty surprising that its taken so long for Snapchat to gain this type of discovery feature, Lenses have long been a distinguishing feature of the platform though Facebook has been aiming to catch up with their own efforts. Why now after all this time? Well, Snap is likely hoping for a bit more of an influx of Lenses now that they’ve begun more heavily building up feature functionality in its Lens Studio software for third-party devs to create their own filters based on Snap’s face-tracking tech.

The company says that over 100,000 Lens filters have been submitted since the launch of Lens Studio and that these creations have been seen some 2.5 billion times by users as they explore. While many of these have undoubtedly been Sponsored Lenses — Snap’s own unique AR ad product — these filters will not be found in the Explorer section at launch, with the hub sticking to the freebies for the time being.

In the long-game as Snap looks to own their revamped vision at a bonafide camera company, something like Lens Explorer may offer a novel way to stack AR functionality into the app’s camera, allowing users to curate what sort of augmented reality functionality they want their device to have. Users can shop for what functionality they might like and the camera could have those abilities readily available. As the company looks at e-commerce and gaming verticals, it’s clear that there could be much more to their future plans than selfie filters alone.

Facebook is giving advertisers new ways to show off their products, including with augmented reality.

At its F8 developer conference earlier this year, Facebook announced that it was working with businesses to use AR to show off products in Messenger. Now a similar experience will start appearing in the News Feed, with a select group of advertisers testing out AR ads.

Ty Ahmad-Taylor, vice president of product marketing for Facebook’s global marketing solutions, showed off ads that incorporated his face into Candy Crush gameplay footage, and other ads that allowed shoppers to see how virtual sunglasses and makeup would look on their own faces.

“People traditionally have to go into stores to do this,” Ahmad-Taylor said. “People still really love that experience, but they would like to try it at home” — so this “bridges the gap.”

These ads look like normal in-feed ads at first, but they include a “Tap to try it on” option, which opens up the AR capabilities. And of course if you like the way it looks in AR, you can go ahead and buy the product.

Facebook says Michael Kors was the first brand to test out AR ads in the News Feed, with Sephora, NYX Professional Makeup, Bobbi Brown, Pottery Barn, Wayfair and King planning their own tests for later this summer.

Ahmad-Taylor made the announcement this morning at a New York City event for journalists and marketers highlighting Facebook’s advertising plans for the holidays.

In addition, he announced a new Video Creation Kit, which will allow advertisers to incorporate existing images into templates for mobile video ads. According to weight loss company Noom, which has been testing out these tools, the resulting videos performed 77 percent better than the static images.

Lastly, Facebook says it will continue to expand its support for shopping in Instagram Stories. It made shopping tags available to select brands in Stories last month, and for the holidays, it plans to roll that out to all brands that have enabled shopping in Instagram. It’s also making its collections ad format available to all advertisers.

After announcing plans to ship cars running Android and work with Nvidia to build automotive AI systems, Audi today put in place the latest piece of its self-driving car puzzle. The German carmaker has signed a memorandum of understanding with Huawei — the world’s third-largest smartphone maker after Samsung and Apple — to develop intelligent car technology, specifically in the areas of autonomous driving and services that use a new cellular standard, LTE-V, designed specifically for vehicles.

No financial details were disclosed with the deal, which Audi said is part of a wider agreement between Germany and China to develop more collaborations between the two countries’ respective businesses.

Audi and Huawei also are not providing a lot of specifics about what they would be developing together, except to note that the deal will cover the two building and testing data connectivity, and working on “intelligent driving and the digitalization of services in the vehicle environment.” Vehicles developed in the collaboration will initially be sold in China.

Huawei is one of the world’s big handset makers, but it originally started in networking equipment and this deal appears to be about building on that latter business, specifically in developing services for a new variation on LTE called LTE-V.

“We are entering a new era of intelligent vehicle that will see the emergence of new technological synergies between information and communications technology and the automotive industries,” commented Veni Shone, president of LTE at Huawei, in a statement. “With increased innovation in mobile connectivity, Huawei is committed to transforming the driving experience.”

Last year, Audi was one of the first non-Chinese car makers to test LTE-V services, which appear to work on regular LTE connections but are optimised for use in moving vehicles and for the kind of data communications you might need in a car, versus, say, over a smartphone.

Examples include traffic information that’s calculated by using data from traffic light systems and video monitors in intersections.

While a lot of the focus so far on connected and autonomous cars has been on who will be in the drivers seat when it comes of operating systems, and how soon we might be to watertight self-driving systems (and how we will get there), network connectivity will be one of the obvious, if unsung, aspects that will need to be addressed.

Audi, part of the Volkswagen group, is one of the shareholders of Here, the mapping business that was formerly a part of Nokia, and it has been making a number of moves to line up its strategy in connected and autonomous vehicles. That has also included investing in startups like Cubic Telecom, which is providing the technology that will allow for cars to connect to cellular networks, regardless of which country the cars are operating in and where they were purchased. It’s not clear how and if Audi’s new MOU with Huawei will link up with the work it’s been doing with Cubic. (We have reached out to Cubic to ask.)

“We are intensifying our joint research with Huawei in the area of intelligent connected vehicles,” explained Saad Metz, Executive Vice President of Audi China, in a statement. “Our aim is to improve safety and optimize traffic flows in order to create intelligent cities. The concepts will initially be concentrated on the Chinese market.”