Month: October 2018

Twitch continues to dominate the live streaming market, with approximately 2.5 billion hours watched by viewers in the third quarter of 2018, according to a new industry report out this morning. While YouTube still trails, it’s begun to close the gap with Twitch, it appears. YouTube’s live streaming platform, YouTube Live, started the year with 15 percent of the overall live streaming market’s viewership, but by September 2018, it had grown to roughly 25 percent of all live streaming hours viewed.

These findings, and more, were the subject of a “state of the industry” report released today by StreamElements, which also dug into what’s making these live streaming sites tick.

Of course, Twitch is still the market leader, with around 750 million monthly viewers, on average, who watched over 813 million hours in September. YouTube Live, by comparison, saw over 226 million hours that month, and Microsoft’s Mixer saw just 13+ million.

Also of note is that Twitch’s growth is now coming from the long tail, the report claims. Its top 100 channels haven’t grown much since the beginning of the year – in fact, they’re down a bit, according to the findings. In January 2018, viewers watch around 262 million hours on the top 100, which dropped to 254 million in September.

In addition, Twitch is growing viewership thanks to its expanded focus outside of gaming content. IRL streaming – meaning, watching creators “in real life” going about their day, vlogging, or participating in other activities, for example – is now one of the site’s most consistently growing categories, with 41 million more hours watched in Q3 2018 than in Q1.

This growth likely impacted Twitch’s recent decision to do away with the overarching “IRL” category to instead break down the content into subcategories like music, food & drink, ASMR, beauty, and more, and other organizational changes to its site.

StreamElements also claims that game streams and other content – but not the competitions known as “esports” –  are what’s attracting viewers.

Esports viewership now makes up 9 to 17 percent of overall Twitch viewership, the report says. (This is consistent with findings Newzoo has reported in past years, as well.)

The report’s data, however, is not first-party – it comes from StreamElements’ position as a production and community management solutions provider for live streamers, which allows it some insight into live streaming trends. The company also partnered with streaming analysts StreamHatchet to compile this report, it says.

That being said, it’s not the only one to point to YouTube’s more recent growth. In StreamLabs’ Q2 report this year, it also found that YouTube’s live gaming streams were on the rise, as was viewership. But StreamLabs tends to look at concurrent streams and viewership, so it’s not a direct comparison.

YouTube recently did away with its standalone YouTube Gaming app, and incorporated gaming content more directly into its main site. This could impact its future growth even more than is reflected in this Q3-focused report.

Finally, the report also found that Fortnite’s popularity may have peaked – it’s still the most watched game on Twitch, but since reaching over 151 million hours watched in July, it’s been shedding viewers. The game saw 20 million fewer hours viewed in August, then dropped by another 25 million hours in September.

ShopRunner chief executive Sam Yagan conquered the online dating world. Can he conquer the e-commerce world, too?

Hot off the heels of its first profitable year, ShopRunner is announcing its first infusion of venture funding under Yagan, an acquisition of the shopping app Spring and, sources tell TechCrunch, it’s readying a major overhaul to its mobile app, signaling what could be a new era for the company.

Yagan, the co-founder of OkCupid, former CEO and vice chairman of The Match Group and managing director of the venture fund Corazon Capital joined ShopRunner in 2016 to test the waters of online retail.

“If you look at founding OkCupid, running Match and incubating Tinder, arguably, I had my hands on the three most important dating businesses ever,” Yagan told TechCrunch. “Finally, I was like, ‘what else is there?’ I am either going to the grave as the online dating guy, or this was the moment.”

Yagan replaced former PayPal president Scott Thompson as ShopRunner’s CEO, moved the Alibaba -backed subscription-based digital shopping company from Silicon Valley to his hometown, Chicago, and readied for battle against Amazon.

ShopRunner teams with mid- to high-end retailers to offer its paying members free two-day shipping and free returns on their sites, taking a small cut of each purchase. As much as it might like to, it doesn’t compete with Amazon Prime. It doesn’t even have a centralized marketplace where users can shop all the ShopRunner partner brands at once, but that may change.

This week, it announced a $40 million investment from August Capital, bringing its total equity funding to around $140 million since it was founded in 2009. The company says it plans to use the cash for product development, data science and to amp up its M&A strategy. It’s already begun the latter, confirming to TechCrunch that it’s acquired Alan and David Tisch’s Spring, a deal first reported by Recode.

Yagan declined to disclose both ShopRunner’s latest valuation and the terms of the Spring acquisition. Though he did say ShopRunner’s valuation is in the “hundreds of millions” range and that they had purchased Spring’s platform and 30 of its employees, a majority of which are engineers.

ShopRunner did not take on all of Spring’s employees. Why? Yagan said it was because the two were similar companies and there wasn’t a need for Spring’s entire team. As a result, Spring’s remaining employees, a mix of engineers and otherwise, are joining real estate tech startup Compass as part of a separate transaction, Spring’s CEO Alan Tisch confirmed to TechCrunch.

Backed with $105 million in VC funding, Spring had reportedly struggled to scale and had drifted from the mobile-first strategy it touted right out of the gate. TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden has more on this and Compass’ acquihire.

ShopRunner and Spring had some preexisting ties. Recode reports that Michael Rubin, the billionaire owner of ShopRunner via Kynetic, ShopRunner’s parent company, is close friends with Alan. Moving forward, Alan is serving as an advisor to ShopRunner, while Spring’s president Marshall Porter will continue to lead the startup.

“Shopping on your phone isn’t fun and it’s not easy,” Alan told TechCrunch. “And many of the brands that people love and shop every day you can’t find on Amazon. We wanted to create an experience that was as fun and easy as walking into a great store. We still don’t feel today that the dream has been fully realized but we think combining the scale of ShopRunner and the product Spring has really puts us in the position to make that happen.”

By pairing up with Spring, ShopRunner is multiplying the number of brands available to its paying members by 10 and offering, for the first time, an actual marketplace where customers can gain access to hundreds of those brands at once.

For now, both companies will continue to operate independently, but Yagan says they will revisit whether to fully merge the platforms in 2019.

Spring is ShopRunner’s first major M&A deal, but won’t be its last. Yagan said they have their eyes peeled for any-point solutions that help retailers take on Jeff Bezos, or that have large member bases and provide a great shopping experience.

Finally, according to sources familiar with the company, ShopRunner is planning to unveil a major update to its mobile app in November. Historically, users weren’t able to access ShopRunner brands via its app, making it an essentially useless piece of the company’s product. The update, coupled with the acquisition of Spring, will put ShopRunner on the path toward creating a digital mall with frictionless payments, a necessary step forward for the aspiring Amazon competitor.

Google Maps has been steadily rolling out new features to make its app more than just a way to find places and navigate to them. In recent months, it’s added things like group trip planning, music controls, commuter tools, ETA sharing, personalized recommendations, and more. Now, it’s introducing a new way for users to follow their favorite businesses, as well – like restaurants, bars, or stores, for example – in order to stay on top of their news and updates.

If that sounds a lot like Google Maps’ own version of Facebook Pages, you’re right.

Explains the company, once you tap the new “follow” to track a business, you’ll then be able to see news from those places like their upcoming events, their offers, and other updates right in the “For You” tab on Google Maps.

Events, deals and photo-filled posts designed to encourage foot traffic? That definitely sounds like a Facebook Page competitor aimed at the brick-and-mortar crowd.

Businesses can also use the Google Maps platform to start reaching potential customers before they open to the public, Google notes.

After building a Business Profile using Google My Business which includes their opening date, the business will then be surfaced in users’ searches on mobile web and in the app, up to three months before their opening.

This profile will display the opening date in orange just below the business name, and users can save the business to one of their lists, if they choose. Users can also view all the other usual business information, like address, phone, website and photos.

The new “follow” feature will be accessible to the over 150 million places already on Google Maps, as well as the millions of users who are seeking them out.

The feature has been spotted in the wild for some time before Google’s official announcement this week, and is rolling out over the next few weeks, initially on Android.

The “For You” tab is currently available in limited markets, with more countries coming soon, says Google.

Can’t wait to get your giant hand on Palm’s tiny “ultra-mobile?” Turns out it will be arriving sooner than later — next Friday, in fact. Verizon (you know, the giant telecom that owns the media conglomerate that owns TechCrunch) announced today that it will be launching the strange new thing on November 2.

The 3.3-inch device runs $349 off-contract. On-contract, it’s $14.58 a month for two years. It wll be available through the carrier’s stores o through Best Buy kiosks. The companies are also betting big on accessories, from companies including Kate Spade, Zagg, LifeActiv and some Verizon-branded products.

Makes sense, as the device is being positioned as somewhere between a smartphone and smartwatch, given its small size. It’s novel, for sure, the notion of what’s essentially a smaller, second phone. It’s also fairly retro, both from the standpoint of the startup licensing out the familiar name and the fact that it sports roughly the same size screen as the original iPhone.

I know I’m excited to try the thing out. The built quality is certainly there from my initial impressions, and you can’t really go wrong with a design that looks like nothing more than a shrunk down iPhone. Of course, the company has painted itself into a bit of a corner with a single carrier launch for a device that already includes a number of barriers to entry.

Of course, with the run that Steph’s been having lately, maybe they’ll pull it off, after all.

Streaming news company Cheddar announced this morning it’s acquiring Rate My Professors, the Viacom-owned site where students go online to rate and review their professors and schools across the U.S. The site, founded in 1999, has become something of a staple on the web, and by its nature it attracts the young demographic that Cheddar itself is also after.

According to Cheddar, Rate My Professors is being used by more than 6 million college students per month, who write an average of 125,000 new professor and class ratings monthly. Seasonally, these figures peak at 7 million and 300,000, respectively.

The site traffic has been steadily growing year-over-year, and it now boasts 20 million total ratings across 1.8 million professors. Its iOS app has thousands of reviews, and a 4.8 star rating, as well.

Cheddar already has big plans for its new purchase, promising a site redesign and a set of features for professors, it says.

“Rate My Professors is a trusted tool for millions of students each month; we’re excited to redesign the site, improve the user experience, and offer students a better toolset to search, evaluate and compare professors” said Eric Harris, President and Chief Operating Officer of Cheddar, in a statement. “In 2019, we also plan to offer educators a premium toolset similar to those offered to employers by Glassdoor.”

Despite the overlap in demographics, the site isn’t the most obvious choice for Cheddar, whose key focus to date has been on its streaming news networks.

Today, Cheddar operates two live video networks: the business news network Cheddar, which often scoops tech news stories; and the newer Cheddar Big News, which is its fast-paced general and headline news network. These channels are carried across streaming TV and video services, like Sling TV, Hulu, YouTube TV, fuboTV, Philo, and Amazon and on social platforms like Snapchat, Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter.

It also operates the place-based CheddarU network across 1,600 on 600 campuses – or a reach of 9 million students.

As part of the deal, Cheddar says it’s bringing in Taboola as a strategic in-feed discovery partner for Cheddar’s Rate My Professors. Taboola says it will bring an infinite scrolling experience to the site, through its Taboola Feed – a personalized experience designed for those who grew up scrolling through social media.

Rate My Professors is not the first move Cheddar has made recently as a part of a strategy to reach the coveted younger demographic.

It also in May 2018 bought Viacom’s MTV Networks on Campus, the distribution platform for Viacom’s campus-based service, MTVU – which then became CheddarU. Chegg and Pandora were launch partners, with Chegg collaborating on programming focused on education and study, and Pandora on daily coverage of artists, playlists and music charts.

With the new acquisition, Cheddar gains a user-generated content site that has a strong direct-to-consumer relationship, Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg tells us.

“We already have a superior model to traditional ad-supported media companies – we are in premium skinny bundles next to CNN and CNBC and focused on live, not page views. Everyone, even NBC is chasing us…but we are one step ahead!,” he said.

Deal terms were not disclosed. Cheddar told Axios it’s on track for nearly $30 million in revenue this year, up from the $25 million it estimated in July.

About 800 kilometers of unused fiber optic cable running down the U.S. eastern seaboard is set to become the first stateside quantum network.

The aim is to get the quantum network up and running and accepting customers by the end of the year, making it the first time that quantum keys will be exchanged commercially on U.S. soil.

Quantum Xchange, a Bethesda, Maryland-based quantum communications provider, has inked a deal for Zayo, a fiber network giant, to provide the stretch of fiber from Boston to Washington DC. Its first aim is to help connect Wall Street financiers with their back operations in nearby New Jersey, but the hope is that other industries — from healthcare to critical infrastructure — will soon use the network for their own secure communications.

Quantum cryptography and networking aren’t new concepts but have risen to prominence in recent years as both a threat to some encryption and also the savior of future secure communications. Relying on photons and the laws of quantum physics to share encryption keys over a long distance from one place to another makes it significantly harder to intercept the keys without breaking the beam or perfectly cloning a copy. This technique, known as quantum key distribution (QKD), is seen as a likely contender for the future of end-to-end encryption.

Although quantum cryptography has been around for years, it’s only been in recently that scientists and computer engineers have harnessed the technology for practical uses. Soon, the technology could be used for protecting elections, transmitting payments, and securing communications between datacenters — even from satellites back to earth.

Europe has already seen some success in building a small-scale quantum network, but “shortcomings” made bringing the system to the U.S. more difficult, said Quantum Xchange chief executive John Prisco.

His company uses trusted node technology that passes quantum key data from point to point over a larger distance, making it easier to scale a quantum network over wider geographical spaces.

“Organizations with offices in Boston will be able to send secure communications to a partner in D.C., and eventually even further – as the goal is to keep buying up optical fiber that is already in the ground all over the country so that we can provide a secure quantum network that will serve the entire nation,” he said.

Prisco said it’s “critical” to establish a quantum key distribution network as a defensive measure “before the unprecedented power of quantum computers become an offensive weapon.”

Big problems require big war chests. Ribbon wants the biggest chest of them all.

The startup, which was founded just about a year ago by ex-LendingClub head of strategic development Shaival Shah and ex-Twitter/TellApart engineer Jian Wei Gan (who, full disclosure, is married to TechCrunch columnist Joyce Yang), wants to replace the incredible stress of securing a mortgage during the home buying process with a Ribbon Offer: if a buyer can’t secure a mortgage in time for close, Ribbon will pay for the house itself and give the buyer extra time to get financing.

It’s a simple premise, but potentially revolutionary in its effect on home buying in the United States, and Ribbon’s investors have taken notice. After raising a small seed earlier this year, the company announced today that it has raised $225 million in a combination of debt and Series A equity financing. (The company refused to go on-the-record about the breakdown of debt and equity). The equity portion was led by its existing seed investors Bain Capital Ventures, Greylock, NFX, and NYCA.

Understanding Ribbon requires understanding the immense difficulties of consumer home buying. Home ownership remains a dream for most Americans, but actually purchasing a home in the United States remains incredibly challenging. From finding a home to negotiating with a seller and handling hundreds of pages of paperwork — all of it together can create one of the most stressful periods of anyone’s life.

And it is getting even more intense. For consumers buying homes, their competitors are often not their fellow humans, but rather large investment firms who come with all-cash offers and guarantees to close. As the Wall Street Journal noted last year in a deep dive on the practice, “All told, big investors have spent some $40 billion buying about 200,000 houses, renovating them and building rental-management businesses, estimates real-estate research firm Green Street Advisors LLC.”

That has made mortgage financing — necessary for most buyers — an increasingly common no-go for home sellers. To solve for this, Ribbon wants to give every consumer the leverage of an all-cash offer while eliminating the mortgage contingency in home buying.

Ribbon’s app allows home buyers to find houses and determine Ribbon Offer prices (Photo from Ribbon)

When purchasing a home, buyers who need mortgage financing will include a clause in the home purchase contract stating that if they are unable to get a mortgage in time for closing, they are able to walk away from a deal, generally without financial penalty. This is known as a mortgage contingency.

That clause puts sellers in a bind: move forward with such a buyer, and their creditworthiness will determine whether a transaction is completed. Yet, sellers don’t really know their buyers, and they have very little visibility into a buyer’s ability to get a mortgage. Pre-approved mortgages help here, when they are available, but are a poor substitute for cash.

Ribbon takes on home buyers as clients and assesses their likelihood of securing a mortgage using data science. If convinced that a buyer will get a mortgage, it then offers a Ribbon guarantee to the seller that if financing falls through, it will offer the cash needed to close the transaction.

“We guarantee a close and we guarantee a move in,” explained Shah, who is CEO. He emphasized that “we are not just providing a cash offer, but a guarantee to close … which creates certainty in the real estate process.”

One of Ribbon’s early purchases was this home (Photo from Ribbon)

Ribbon is free for buyers, and the company charges a 1.95% fee at closing from sellers. It is not uncommon for home sellers to discount their home price for all-cash offers due to the greater certainty of close, and Ribbon believes the same pattern will hold true for its Ribbon Offer. “Our view is that if discounts are going to exist because of the cash guarantee … let that discount flow through to the consumer ecosystem,” Shah explained.

If a mortgage falls through at the last minute, Ribbon will buy the home and wait for the buyer to secure a different mortgage. That process can sometimes be just a few days, which means that Ribbon doesn’t need to hold substantial housing inventory or take on macroeconomic risk, and can turnover its debt quite rapidly.

The company launched in Charlotte, North Carolina and has been in the market for about six months. Shah said that the company “tripled” transaction volume from Q2 to Q3, although demurred on deeper details of the company’s revenues. Charlotte was chosen both because home prices are cheaper than in major global cities like New York City and San Francisco, and because the percentage of cash offers locally has hovered slightly above a third in recent years according to company data due to a surge in corporate buying.

Ribbon wants to be “Switzerland” according to Shah, which means working with existing realtors and existing mortgage lenders in a neutral and non-competitive way. He doesn’t see a world in which the company would offer its own mortgage products (at least, not yet), and instead wants to focus on perfecting the data models that underwrite its guarantee.

Home buying startups have been heavily financed by venture capitalists, including Opendoor, which has raised $1 billion, and others like Perch and Knock. Shah says that his competitors primarily focus on sellers rather than buyers, and Ribbon wants to do the opposite.

The company intends to expand to ten new markets in the coming year, and has already grown organically through realtor referrals to expand to Asheville and Cary, North Carolina.

A China foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed yesterday’s damning report about spying on Trump’s unsecured iPhone, calling it, “fake news,” according to The South China Morning Post. She had a few other choice words for the president, suggesting he switch to a Huawei handset, or, failing that, just stop communicating.

The shade amounts to a pretty solid bit of trolling from the spokesperson, who added, “Seeing this report, I feel there are those in America who are working all-out to win the Oscar for best screenplay.”

Yesterday’s New York Times report noted that, “American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.”

Trump shot back on Twitter this morning, attempting to correct the record, while stating that he didn’t have time to do so, adding that it was “soooo wrong.” The president also insisted, contrary to the report, that he only uses “government phones.”

Hua’s statement takes things a few steps further, while wading into various on-going U.S. bans against Huawei handsets and networking equipment over government spying concerns.

Google this morning announced it’s bringing its A.I.-powered Lens technology to Google Image Search. The idea, explains the company, is to allow web searchers to learn more about what’s in a photo – including, in particular, items they may want to shop for and buy. For example, a photo of a well-decorated living room might have a sofa you like, but the photo itself wouldn’t have necessarily informed you who made the sofa or where it was for sale.

Google Lens – yes, acting very much like Pinterest – will now be able to help with that.

You’ll be able to tap on “dots” that appear within the photo, which designate items Google Lens has identified, or you can use your finger to “draw” around an object in the photo to trigger Google Images to search for related information. Google then searches across the web, including for other images, web pages, and even videos where this object may appear.

This isn’t just for shopping, of course. Google Lens can also be used to learn more about landmarks, animals, places you want to travel and more.

But Google naturally sees a good fit for Lens when it comes to directing users to products and, therefore, the websites of potential Google advertisers. This is the area where Pinterest has been steadily advancing.

Pinterest last month reported a 25 percent increase in monthly active users, as it gears up for its IPO. That means more people are starting their shopping journeys on its site, looking for purchase inspiration around things like fashion, home décor, travel, and other ideas. It’s also been beefing up its advertising product to further capture users’ interests and connect them with brands, having earlier this year added promoted videos to its ad products. 

And just a week ago, Pinterest announced it had rebuilt the infrastructure around product pins to make its site and app more “shoppable,” while reporting that tests of the changes had shown a 40 percent increase in visits to retailers’ site, as a result.

For these reasons – not to mention the looming threat of Facebook and Instagram ads sending users directly to retailers’ websites, and Amazon’s not insignificant entry into the advertising business – it’s clear that it was time for Google to leverage its own technology to help improve shopping and click-through rates for retailers on its site, as well.

Google says Lens in Images is now live on the mobile web for people in the U.S. searching in English, and will soon be rolled out to other countries, languages and Google Images locations.

Founders Fund has led the $6 million Series A for Summersalt, an early-stage e-commerce startup embracing the next-gen consumer’s penchant for inclusivity and affordability.

Headquartered in St. Louis, the 1-year old company sells swimsuits designed in-house with eco-friendly fabrics directly to consumers. Like other D2C brands, Summersalt cuts out the middlemen to give its customers access to its swimsuits for $95 or less. What sets it apart is its data-focused fit system. With a patent on recommending garments based on body type and consumer preference, it uses more than 10,000 scans of real women’s bodies and some 1.5 million measurements to create what it says are designer-quality garments.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Lori Coulter designs all the swimsuits herself and sources the fabrics directly with factories in the U.S. and Asia. With the latest investment, Coulter says the company will launch a line of travel wear and expand its inventory to offer more sizes.

“A core value of the brand really is inclusivity and we know from an economic perspective that by moving up to size 22, we really can acquire a broader set of consumers,” Coulter told TechCrunch.

Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin, co-founder and chief brand officer, said their strategy is to cater to women like them. Chamberlin herself is an immigrant, originally from Mumbai, while Coulter, a mother of two, was born and raised in Missouri.

“We were both tired of seeing the oversexualized approach to swimwear,” Chamberlain told TechCrunch. “We wanted a brand to appeal to women like us so we could feel sexy on our own terms. We wanted to appeal to women across the country, whether that’s a mom in Missouri or a stylish girl in Brooklyn.”

“Women like us are immigrants. Women like us are moms. Women like us are size 2 and women like us are size 22,” she added.

The pair said the move to incorporate a travel line is in keeping with their wanderlust-themed brand, which appeals to younger consumers.

“It’s a unique time in retail; women prefer experiences over things,” Coulter said. “We really see this as the next frontier in retail. We want to position Summersalt as the next-generation brand focused around travel.”

It’s the Peter Thiel -owned Founders Fund’s first investment in the startup, which previously raised a $2 million seed round in March 2018. Lewis and Clark Ventures, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Dundee Venture Capital, Breakout Capital, Cultivation Capital, Victress Capital, Amplifyher Ventures, M25 and Giuliana and Bill Rancic also participated in the funding.