Month: October 2018

If Facebook Messenger’s redesign succeeds, you won’t really notice it even happened. I hardly did over the past week of testing. There’s just a subtle sense that the claustrophobia has lifted. Perhaps that’s why Facebook decided to throw a big breakfast press event with 30 reporters today at its new downtown San Francisco office, complete with an Instagram-worthy donut wall. Even though the changes are minimal — fewer tabs, color gradients thread backgrounds, and a rounder logo — Facebook was eager to trigger an unequivocally positive news cycle.

Old Messenger vs New Messenger

In the seven years since Facebook acquired group chat app Beluga and turned it into Messenger, it’s done nothing but cram in more features. With five navigation bar options, nine total tabs, Stories, games, and businesses, Messenger’s real purpose — chatting with your friends — started to feel buried. “You build a feature, and then you build another feature, and they are piling up” says Facebook’s head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky. “We either continue to pile on, or we build a foundation that will allow us to build simplicity and powerful features on top of something new that goes back to its roots.”

But suddenly uprooting the old design with a massive overhaul wasn’t an option. “It’s impossible to launch something for 1.3 billion people that will not piss people off” Chudnovsky told me. “It takes so much time to test things out and make sure you’re not doing something that will prevent people from doing things that are really, really important to them. At the end of the day, no one really likes change. People generally want things the way they are.”

So starting today, Messenger is globally rolling out an understated redesign globally over the next few weeks. It’s got a simpler interface with a lot more white space, a little less redundancy, and a casual vibe. Here’s a comparison of the app before and after.

Old Messenger: 

Previously, there were five main navigation buttons along the bottom of the app. Between the actually useful Chats section that’d been invaded by Stories and the chaotic People section, there were tabs for calls, group chats, active friends, . Between then  a camera button that aggressively beckoned you to post Stories, a dedicated Games tab, and a Discover tab for finding businesses and utility app.

New Messenger:

In Messenger v4, now there are just three navigation buttons. The camera button has been moved up next to the chat composer inside the Chat section above Stories, People now contains the Active list as well as all Stories by friends, and Discover combines games and businesses. The fact that Stories is in both the Chats and People section make it seem that the company wants a lot more than the existing 300 million users across Facebook and Messenger opening its Snapchat copycat.

While there 10 billion conversations with businesses and 1.7 billion games sessions happen on Messenger each month, and both hold opportunities for monetization, they’re not the app’s purpose so they got merged. And though 400 million people — nearly a third of all Messenger users — make a video or audio call each month, those typically start from a button inside chat threads so Facebook nixed the Calls tab entirely.

All the old features are still available, just not quite as prominent as before. The one new feature is several color gradients you can use to customize specific chat threads. If you rapidly scroll through the messages, you’ll see the bubble background colors fade through the gradient.  And one much-requested feature still on the way is Dark Mode, which Facebook says will launch in the next several weeks to reduce glare and make night-time usage easier on the eyes.

Finally, Messenger has a softer new logo. The sharp edges have been rounded off the quote bubble and lightning insignia. It seems designed to better compete with Snapchat and remind users that Messenger is fun and friendly as well as fast.

Inside The Messenger War Room

With the company’s downward scandal spiral of breaches, election interference, and fake news-inspired violence, it’s not just Messenger that’s a mess. It’s all of Facebook, both literally and metaphorically. Cleaning up, fighting back —  those are the messages the company wants to drive home.

Facebook scored a win on this front last week by getting dozens of journalists (myself included) to breathlessly cover its election “war room”, until everyone realized they’d played themselves for page views. Today’s Messenger event felt a little like deja-vu as Facebook drilled the word “simple” into our heads. Chudnovsky even acknowledged that Facebook had already milked the redesign for a press hit back in May. “We previewed this at F8 but that was when the work was just beginning.”

Hopefully, this will be the start of a company wide interface cleanup. Facebook’s main app is full of cruft, especially with products like Facebook Watched stuffed in the nav bar despite lukewarm user interest. Messenger did a good job of ceasing to shoehorn the camera and games into our chat behavior, though Stories still appear twice in the app even if some wish they disappeared permanently. The world would benefit from a Facebook more concerned with what users want than what it wants to show them.

With the news going live just an hour after the event ended, many reporters stayed, writing their posts about Facebook while still inside Facebook. Chudnovsky admitted that beyond educating users via the press, the event was designed to celebrate the team that had labored over each pixel. “You can imagine at a company like ours, how many conversations you have to have about changing the logo.”

Last month, the internet was a buzz with reports that Apple was sweetening up selfies on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The shots appeared to have an effect applied, in a manner similar to “beauty” filters offered on competing handsets. Apple denied it was intentionally touching photos, but not before it earned the predictable name, “Beautygate.”

Turns out it wasn’t just your imagination. The shots were getting softer, as a result of a software bug, according to the company. As The Verge reports, however, Apple will be fixing things with the upcoming iOS 12.1 update. Apple has since confirmed the fix with TechCrunch, noting that it’s also available in the current beta.

The long and short of what’s happening is this: the HDR processing has been defaulting to a longer shutter speed. That coupled with a loss of front-facing OIS leads to shakier images and blurrier photos. In other words, your phone wasn’t making you prettier, so much as a bit more blurry.

Honestly though, sometimes we’ll take what we can get.

The beta of the update is available now and should be rolling out to everyone else soon.

Last month, the internet was a buzz with reports that Apple was sweetening up selfies on the iPhone XS and XS Max. The shots appeared to have an effect applied, in a manner similar to “beauty” filters offered on competing handsets. Apple denied it was intentionally touching photos, but not before it earned the predictable name, “Beautygate.”

Turns out it wasn’t just your imagination. The shots were getting softer, as a result of a software bug, according to the company. As The Verge reports, however, Apple will be fixing things with the upcoming iOS 12.1 update. Apple has since confirmed the fix with TechCrunch, noting that it’s also available in the current beta.

The long and short of what’s happening is this: the HDR processing has been defaulting to a longer shutter speed. That coupled with a loss of front-facing OIS leads to shakier images and blurrier photos. In other words, your phone wasn’t making you prettier, so much as a bit more blurry.

Honestly though, sometimes we’ll take what we can get.

The beta of the update is available now and should be rolling out to everyone else soon.

The office might not seem like an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy — a Silicon Valley company used to sign in over 100,000 visitors at offices across the world each day; and a TechCrunch SF office neighbor! — has raised $43 million to do just that.

The company started life five years digitizing the sign-in book with a simple iPad-based approach, and it has moved on to office deliveries with an automated system that simply involves scanning a barcode. In both cases, alerts are routed directly to the person collecting the goods or visitor using an app.

The concept is simple: no more pen and paper, no calls or prompts, everything goes digital.

The result is an easier life for office workers and more efficiency for front desk staff, who have more time for important items. A basic version of Envoy is available for free, but the feature-rich options include two-tiered plans ($99/$249 per month) and bespoke packages for more advanced integrations.

This new Series B capital takes Envoy to $59.5 million raised to date. The round was led by Menlo Ventures with participation from existing backers Initialized Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Envoy’s previous round was a $15 million Series A in 2015, and its seed investors include Marc Benioff as well as Initialized Capital partners Gary Tan and Alexis Ohanian.

Envoy has certainly expanded since that first $1.5 million seed deal. CEO and founder Larry Gadea, who spent four years at Google after joining at 19 and later worked for Twitter, told TechCrunch in an interview that its customer base spans 72 countries. Over 32 million visitors have been signed in to date and Gadea is particularly proud that 80 percent of its 10,000 daily companies — which includes well-known names like Yelp, Mailchimp and Rakuten — are based outside of Silicon Valley. That, he rightly asserts, is evidence that the issue isn’t just a Silicon Valley/first world problem like so many ideas spun out of The Valley can be.

“The growth has been absolutely nuts. It’s a very viral product… people see it, use it and then take it back to their company,” Gadea, who joined Google from high school in Canada, explained. “The majority of our deals happening through inbound.”

Organic growth is a good start, but $43 million is a lot of money and it’ll be used to go push things further still and expand the Envoy team which is currently at around 100 people. You can expect more new office digitizations from the company since its ultimate goal is to make the entire office smarter. That could include products like meeting room booking and other small pieces which, when put together, Gadea hopes will allow workers to concentrate on their work not unnecessary admin. Just as Envoy has done with front desk staff.

“We’re known for the front desk and sign-in but where I think it’s really interesting, and where our future is, is that the rest of the office is just so broken,” he explained. “There’s so much low-hanging fruit we can go after.”

Gadea explained a little more in an Envoy blog post announcing the new round:

Though we’ve helped modernize over 10,000 lobbies with automated iPad-based sign-in, and started bringing some order to the chaos of the mailroom, the rest of the workplace remains largely untouched: people are losing their keys/badges (and being locked out of their office!), meeting rooms are reserved but are unoccupied, lights/heating are left on after-hours, there’s all sorts of out-of-place things that nobody’s reporting, etc. Where are the products to fix all those things? And to unify them all together.

The ultimate vision is a kind of ‘office OS’ platform that other companies can build off. Gadea compares the potential impact to what Nest has done to the home with its smart products, which started with the thermostat.

Gadea is still working on a name for the platform, and he isn’t saying exactly what features it might include. Certainly, now that there’s an additional $43 million in the kitty, expectations for what might (first) appear to be a modest proposal for the front desk have been raised.

Industry vets and students alike crammed into UCLA’s historic Royce Hall last week for TC Sessions AR/VR, our one day event on the fast-moving (and hype-plagued) industry and the people in it. Disney, Snap, Oculus and more stopped by to chat and show off their latest; if you didn’t happen to be in LA that day, read on and find out what we learned — and follow the links to watch the interviews and panels yourself.

To kick off the day we had John Snoddy from Walt Disney Imagineering. As you can imagine this is a company deeply invested in “experiences.” But he warned that VR and AR storytelling isn’t ready for prime time: “I don’t feel like we’re there yet. We know it’s extraordinary, we know it’s really interesting, but it’s not yet speaking to us deeply the way it will.”

Next came Snap’s Eitan Pilipski. Snapchat wants to leave augmented reality creativity up to the creators rather than prescribing what they should build. AR headsets people want to wear in real life might take years to arrive, but nevertheless Snap confirmed that it’s prototyping new AI-powered face filters and VR experiences in the meantime.

I was on stage next with a collection of startups which, while very different from each other, collectively embody a willingness to pursue alternative display methods — holography and projection — as businesses. Ashley Crowder from VNTANA and Shawn Frayne from Looking Glass explained how they essentially built the technology they saw demand for: holographic display tech that makes 3D visualization simple and real. And Lightform’s Brett Jones talked about embracing and extending the real world and creating shared experiences rather than isolated ones.

Frayne’s holographic desktop display was there in the lobby, I should add, and very impressive it was. People were crowding three or four deep to try to understand how the giant block of acrylic could hold 3D characters and landscapes.

Maureen Fan from Baobob Studios touched on the importance of conserving cash for entertainment-focused virtual reality companies. Previewing her new film, Crow, Fan noted that new modes of storytelling need to be explored for the medium, such as the creative merging of gaming and cinematic experiences.

Up next was a large panel of investors: Niko Bonatsos (General Catalyst), Jacob Mullins (Shasta Ventures), Catherine Ulrich (FirstMark Capital), and Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia). The consensus of this lively discussion was that (as Fan noted earlier) this is a time for startups to go lean. Competition has been thinned out by companies burning VC cash and a bootstrapped, efficient company stands out from the crowd.

Oculus is getting serious about non-gaming experiences in virtual reality. In our chat with Oculus Executive Producer Yelena Rachitsky, we heard more details about how the company is looking to new hardware to deepen the interactions users can have in VR and that new hardware like the Oculus Quest will allow users to go far beyond the capabilities of 360-degree VR video.

Of course if Oculus is around, its parent company can’t be far away. Facebook’s Ficus Kirkpatrick believes it must build exemplary ‘lighthouse’ AR experiences to guide independent developers towards use cases they could enhance. Beyond creative expression, AR is progressing slowly since no one wants to hold a phone in the air for too long. But that’s also why Facebook is already investing in efforts to build its own AR headset.

Matt Miesnieks, from 6d.ai, announced the opening of his company’s augmented reality development platform to the public and made a case of the creation of an open mapping platform and toolkit for opening augmented reality to collaborative experiences and the masses.

Augmented reality headsets like Magic Leap and Hololens tend to hog the spotlight, but phones are where most people will have their first taste. Parham Aarabi (Modiface), Kirin Sinha (Illumix) and Allison Wood (Camera IQ) agreed that mainstreaming the tech is about three to five years away, with a successful standalone device like a headset somewhere beyond that. They also agreed that while there are countless tech demos and novelties, there’s still no killer app for AR.

Derek Belch (STRIVR), Clorama Dorvilias (DebiasVR), and Morgan Mercer (Vantage Point) took on the potential of VR in commercial and industrial applications. They concluded that making consumer technology enterprise grade remains one of the most significant adoption to virtual reality applications in business. (Companies like StarVR are specifically targeting businesses, but it remains to be seen whether that play will succeed.)

With Facebook running the VR show, how are small VR startups making a dent in social? The CEOs of TheWaveVR, Mindshow and SVRF all say that part of the key is finding the best ways for users to interact and making experiences that bring people together in different ways.

After a break, we were treated to a live demo of the VR versus boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory, by developer Survios co-founders Alex Silkin and James Iliff. They then joined me for a discussion of the difficulties and possibilities of social and multiplayer VR, both in how they can create intimate experiences and how developers can inoculate against isolation or abuse in the player base.

Early stage investments are key to the success of any emerging industry and the VR space is seeing a slowdown in that area. Peter Rojas of Betaworks and Greg Castle from Anorak offered more details on their investment strategies and how they see success in the AR space coming along as the tech industry’s biggest companies continue to pump money into the technologies.

UCLA contributed a moderator with Anderson’s Jay Tucker, who talked with Mariana Acuna (Opaque Studios) and Guy Primus (Virtual Reality Company) about how storytelling in VR may be in very early days, but that this period of exploration and experimentation is something to be encouraged and experienced. Movies didn’t begin with Netflix and Marvel — they started with picture palaces and one-reel silent shorts. VR is following the same path.

And what would an AR/VR conference be without the creators of the most popular AR game ever created? Niantic already has some big plans as it expands its success beyond Pokémon GO. The company which is deep in development of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is building out a developer platform based on their cutting edge AR technologies. In our chat, AR research head Ross Finman talks about privacy in the upcoming AR age and just how much of a challenger Apple is to them in the space.

That wrapped the show; you can see more images (perhaps of yourself) at our Flickr page. Thanks to our sponsors, our generous hosts at UCLA, the motivated and interesting speakers, and most of all the attendees. See you again soon!

Following news of Hulu’s plans to move towards skinnier bundles, including those consisting of premium add-ons, the streaming service this morning announced the addition of Starz to its service. The Starz premium add-on will be available across all tiers of Hulu’s service, including its Limited Commercials and No Commercials plans, as well as its Live TV service.

It costs an extra $8.99 per month – the same price it sells for on rival services, like Amazon’s Prime Video Channels, for example.

This is the fourth premium add-on to come to Hulu, and the most affordable, following HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax, which cost $14.99/month, $10.99/month, and $9.99/month, respectively. Hulu, so far, has been surprisingly slow to roll out a customizable set of add-on subscriptions for those who want access to premium entertainment or sports programming.

Meanwhile, rival live TV service YouTube TV offers the NBA League Pass, Fox Soccer Plus, Curiosity Stream, Showtime, Starz, AMC Premiere, Shudder, and Sundance Now. Sling TV breaks up its extras into bundles customers can pick and choose from, and AT&T’s DirecTV Now offers programming tiers with optional add-ons, too.

But Hulu’s bundles and pricing may change in the future – CEO Randy Freer told The Information recently it’s eying a revamp of its service that will break up programming into smaller packages. Hulu wouldn’t comment today on whether it has plans for more add-ons in the future, however.

Hulu already had a deal with Starz to be the exclusive subscription streaming home to past seasons of Starz’ Original series “Power,” which arrived on Hulu last year, and has now been streamed for a total of 50 million hours by Hulu subscribers.

With the Starz add-on, subscribers can watch all seasons of the show, including Season 5 – and they can watch it live as it airs or on-demand.

Other Starz series of note include “Outlander,” Vida,” “Counterpart,” and “American Gods.” It’s also currently featuring movies like “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming” and exclusive documentaries.

 

Online dating is trash. Seriously, try to find anyone who disagrees with me.

Vibes, founded by an all-female team, aims to be different. Sure, the swipe mechanics are still there, but that’s about the only similarity you’ll find between Vibes and the likes of Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and others.

“Because of how crowded the space is, when people hear the words ‘dating app’ they’re like ‘ugh, why do I need another one? My dance card’s full,” Vibes co-founder Jenais Zarlin told TechCrunch. “But those same people are also the ones to say the ratio of good experiences to negative ones, or ones that feel transactional is way off.”

The basis for Vibes is that meaningful connections are rooted in respect and authenticity, Zarlin told me. That’s why she sees Vibes as an extension of physical safe spaces “we know and admire.”

“Text and semi-anonymity really embolden people to behave in ways they wouldn’t in person,” Zarlin said.

That’s why text-based messaging is not part of the experience at all. When you sign up (via Facebook)*, you first must agree to the app’s code of conduct. Vibes’ code of conduct centers around respecting difference (not being racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and body-shaming) and generally respecting others by not being sexually explicit or threatening harm.

Next, you select whether you’re down to vibe with people whose preferred pronouns are him, her or them.

“In other apps, the heteronormative agenda is pretty front and center and gender binaries are pretty core to them,” Zarlin said. “It feels like we’re at a time where we need to move past that.”

Next, you select some photos you want to feature and then choose a conversation starter. If you match with someone, you’ll record a short, pixelated video answering their question.

Vibes pixelates the video for those who may be shy. But even with the video pixelated, people can still hear your voice and pick up on mannerisms, just as they would be able to in person.

“It’s a much heavier lift sending a video message, but we expect that it will result in more quality interactions — but probably fewer overall interactions,” Zarlin said.

Its emphasis on moderation also sets Vibes apart from other dating apps. For every first message you receive, Vibes requires you to actively acknowledge if the message was or was not okay with you.

The present day also feels like the right time for Vibes to launch to the masses, Zarlin told me.

“2018 has been a very interesting year for a lot of reasons and there’s been dialogue around self-care, respect and equality,” Zarlin said. “We’ve never talked so much about those issues and yet I think we’re still not innovating around them, or not innovating enough. So Vibes really does to me feel like it has so much potential to be transformative and it was always designed with all of those ideals and values in mind.”

Vibes soft-launched back in July and currently has a few hundred people using the app. Vibes, which has $1.5 million in funding, is free to use but envisions developing a freemium model down the road.

*Zarlin said the decision to use Facebook was made before all of Facebook’s data scandals. Vibes does eventually plan to remove Facebook from the sign-up process.

Y Combinator, the wildly successful San Francisco-based startup accelerator, is issuing a request for startups that will focus on different kinds of geo-engineering technologies in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change.

With the acknowledgement earlier this month from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drastic measures are going to be required to reverse climate change and protect the globe from catastrophic climatological events by 2050, the startup accelerator is hoping that its call to action might spur some new thinking.

“I’ve been thinking about this over the past year or so. [And I] keep meeting really smart people, and the situation keeps seeming to get more dire. This isn’t anyone’s plan A, but we seem to totally be failing at curbing emissions fast enough,” wrote Y Combinator partner Sam Altman, in an email. “If one talented group of people decided to take this seriously and work on one of these ideas, I’d be delighted.  We have good luck with RFS’s that sound extremely ambitious in the past. I believe you have to set out very ambitious goals, and think about what’s at the edge of possible, in order to get significant breakthroughs to happen.”

Limiting the damage caused by climate change, global net human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050 — meaning that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air. No government is anywhere near achieving this goal and certainly not the world’s most populous and most polluting nations — including the U.S., India, and China.

Indeed, the response from the current U.S. administration seems to be “smoke ’em if you got ’em.”

As the Y Combinator statement announcing the new initiative itself suggests, the world is well past reversing climate change by simply reducing emissions.

“Phase 1” of climate change is reversible by reducing emissions, but we are no longer in “Phase 1.” We’re now in “Phase 2” and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. “Phase 2” is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don’t act soon, we’ll end up in “Phase 3” and be too late for both of these strategies to work.

So the company has put out its call for what it’s dubbing “frontier technologies”. These include developing new strains of ocean phytoplankton, carbon fixing through electro-geochemical processes, genetically modified enzymatic carbon fixing using cell-free systems, and desert flooding to create micro-oases and carbon sinks of new (somewhat arable) land.

If all of these things sound insane and completely unfeasible without government support, that’s because they essentially are.

But as we’ve written ourselves, it’s time for the world to start thinking about geo-engineering as an option.

Some iterations of Y Combinator’s plan for carbon sequestration already exist or have been tried by previous startups. In its blog post, the accelerator pointed to bio-energy with carbon capture and storage, which would require growing new biomass to convert into energy and then capturing the emissions created when that biomass is burned for power and burying it in the ground. Other methods that have been floated include direct air capture; a technology used by companies like Carbon Engineering — a Bill Gates-backed company that takes carbon dioxide from the air and converts it into fuels and chemicals; LanzaTech, a New Zealand company that converts carbon into chemicals and fuels; and the Australian cement manufacturer Calix.

Further afield is solar radiation management, which would reflect inbound sunlight back into space. Researchers have proposed sending satellites into space that would reflect solar energy, injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, cloud-seeding to make them more reflective, or whitening roofs and developing reflective crops that would not absorb as much sun.

Those technologies are (to some degree) here already, what Y Combinator is asking for from startups and entrepreneurs are the next generation of geo-engineering technologies.

This new initiative from Y Combinator is both the ultimate expression of Silicon Valley hubris and a clear-eyed attempt to wrestle with what is quickly becoming accepted as the reality of climate change and its impact on the world.

And fortunately or unfortunately for everyone, without the support of the word’s governments, none of these solutions, however viable or compelling will ever see the light of day. What’s equally troubling is the thought that some government, recognizing how dire the situation is, might go rogue and unilaterally implement some of these technologies without regard to the consequences of the global ecosystem.

If the apocryphal butterfly flapping its wings could create monsoons halfway around the world, what might the potential implications be of creating new life in the ocean to absorb global emissions?

Altman acknowledges that the best solution is still emissions reduction — and he’s invested in nuclear power companies that could be a part of that solution — but the growing consensus is that emissions reduction may no longer be enough (unless a moonshot discovery is made).

That leaves building a world that’s better able to adapt to the consequences or changing the world to the solve the problem.

Futrli, a cloud-based business decision-making platform aimed at small businesses, has raised a £4m Series A from e.ventures, Notion Capital and firstminute Capital.

Bootstrapped to date, Futrli claims to have over 40,000 businesses and 1,100 accountants in 130 countries using it.

The four-year-old business led by CEO and founder Hannah Dawson says it uses AI/ML techniques to produce actionable insights for small businesses.

Dawson said: “Futrli was born from my own typical experience as a small business owner. I needed a way to run my business that looked to the future, as making decisions is hard and full of risk when you haven’t got all of the information in one place.”

A spokesperson for Futrli said the way it works is that “static screens are removed, multiple sources of information have relationships drawn between them (sources well beyond just financial data from the likes of Xero, QBO etc.), are prioritized and then decisions and actions can be made and taken in one seamless smartspace.”

Giles Palmer, CEO of business intelligence company Brandwatch, joins as chairman.

Futrli competes with Manthan, among many, many others in the space.

Berlin-based startup GoEuro just raised a new $150 million funding round from Kinnevik and Temasek, with Hillhouse Capital also participating. According to Crunchbase, the company has raised nearly $300 million to date.

Chances are you’ve used some sort of flight aggregator before to compare prices and find the best deal. But if you live in Europe, this isn’t enough. Sometimes, you want to compare flights with trains and buses.

GoEuro allows you to do just that. After entering two cities, you can compare all possible routes and book a ticket.

This is a tedious problem as there are countless of airlines, train and bus companies. But it is also a different offering compared to all the flight aggregators out there.

You can see why investors see some value in GoEuro. Transportation in Europe is fragmented. You can book tickets for 80 percent of transport providers on GoEuro. It creates an important barrier to entry for other aggregators. In other words, in addition to generating revenue from ticket sales, GoEuro’s technology platform is valuable by itself.

GoEuro operates in 36 European countries and works with all transportation providers in 15 markets. In fact, GoEuro recently acquired BusRadar to improve bus search results. 27 million people use GoEuro every month.