Year: 2018

Facebook today announced a redesign of its “Life Events” feature, which allows people to share significant milestones in their life, like an engagement, graduation, a new job, a move to a new city, and more. The feature has existed since the launch of Timeline, but has to date offered a fairly nondescript type of post. Today, that’s changing, Facebook says. Now, users will be able to add animated photos or videos, photos from the people or Page you’ve tagged (like those of your partner or your new workplace), or you you can pick an image from Facebook’s own art collection, if you don’t have your own.

The photos and videos you post will also have subtle animations, like slowly zooming in, to give the post more attention. And you can still pick an icon to represent the life event, as before.

The idea behind the redesign is to give these sorts of posts a better way to stand out from other posts, the company explains

Of course, Facebook likely wants to increase the feature’s adoption, too, as it’s a straightforward way to collect profile data on an individual that they may not have otherwise filled out – like where they live, where they work, or their alma mater, for example.

Facebook will also now alert your friends directly when you’ve shared some life events, it says.

For certain types of life events – like changes in your current city, work, education, and relationship status – your friends may receive a notification to let them know about the news. This ensures they won’t miss the update if they were just casually scrolling their News Feed. And it’s a way to make sure the event gets seen by your broader network of Facebook friends – including those acquaintances whose updates don’t regularly show in your News Feed, as Facebook’s algorithms have determined you aren’t close.

In addition, when you react to a life event someone else posted with a like, wow, heart, etc., Facebook now shows all the other reactions from friends alongside your own.

Perhaps most importantly, is that Facebook is finally giving life events a place of importance on users’ profiles.

While the feature for years has been touted as a way to remember significant events, it’s actually been fairly difficult to relocate your older life event posts from years ago. With the update, however, life events will have their own dedicated section on user profiles. (You can opt to hide a life event here by tapping the “…” button then selecting “Hide from Timeline,” if you choose).

This will give people visiting your profile for the first time a way to get to know you, by way of the most important moments you’ve shared through this feature. That may not be something everyone is comfortable with, though, so you’ll want to check to see if there are any older life event posts you need to hide or delete.

The updated life events are rolling out worldwide on iOS, Android and desktop beginning today, and completing in the days ahead.

China’s online youth entertainment platform Bilibili said it has agreed to buy major assets from the comics arm of gaming giant NetEase, which helped introduce Marvel’s first batch of Chinese superheroes in May.

The deal announced on Wednesday will see Bilibili acquire the copyrights of a large number of popular storylines from NetEase to beef up its content offering for a community of anime, comics and gaming users — or collectively known as ACG fans.

Nine-year-old Bilibili raised $483 million from a U.S. initial public offering in March.

“The addition of [NetEase Comics’] extensive library of well-known content deeply enriches our online comic offerings. It not only complements our core users’ growing appetite for premium licensed ACG content, but also solidifies our leading position in China’s ACG industry,” said Carly Lee, chief operating officer of Bilibili, in a statement.

Update: A NetEase spokesperson provided the following comment:

“We are positive about the deal between Bilibili and NetEase Comics. NetEase will continue its exploration in the ACG industry and operation of Marvel and other works from our licensing partners. In the future, we will further launch deep partnerships with Bilibili in the ACG field,” a NetEase spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The move comes as China’s game publishers struggle with a title approval freeze starting March that has hammered the stock prices of the market’s leader Tencent and second fiddle NetEase.

Like Tencent and NetEase, Bilibili generates a bulk of its income from games, which accounted for 69 percent of its total revenues during the third quarter.

Until recently, Bilibili’s services to its mainly young user base centered around videos, live streaming, and mobile games. In November, the company launched a comics-specific mobile app that would demand heavy content investment to net new users. A lineup of rivals await Bilibili as it plugs itself into the online comics market. Leading the race is Kuaikan Manhua with smaller players including Tencent Comics and NetEase Comics trailing behind, according to an app ranking by market research firm Analysys.

Tencent’s comics app topped 120 million monthly active users last December, said Zou Zhengyu, general manager of Tencent Comics and Animation, at a company event.

Bilibili has also leaned on partnerships to grow its reservoir of gaming titles. In October, it struck a deal that would allow it to run more Tencent games on its own platform. The tie-up followed a $318 million investment from Tencent in Bilibili that lifted Tencent’s ownership to around 12 percent of Bilibili’s total issued shares.

Hello, Las Vegas! We are all heading to LV for CES next month and instead of spending all our cash on a booth we’ll be wandering the halls and want to meet you as far away from the Convention Center as possible without ending up in the Grand Canyon.

And we need your help.

While I have some ideas, I’d love it if someone could recommend a nice place to host about 150 people with drinks, food, and other goodies. We’ll have beer, exhibitors, and some good times.

If you have any ideas or would like to take part as a sponsor or exhibitor, please drop me a line at john@techcrunch.com. I’m thinking something nice out in Old Las Vegas or somewhere off the strip where we don’t have to push through crowds of people in lanyards. This event will be open to all of you so get your blue suede dancing shoes ready.

AtScale, the startup that helps companies move massive amounts of data into business intelligence and analytics tools, announced a $50 million Series D round today.

Morgan Stanley led the round with previous investors Storm Ventures and Atlantic Bridge joining in. New investor Wells Fargo also participated. The funding comes almost exactly a year after the company announced its $25 million Series C. Today’s funding brings the total amount raised to $120 million.

Bringing on an institutional investor like Morgan Stanley is often a signal that the company has reached the stage where it is at least beginning to think about the possibility of going public at some point in the future. AtScale CEO Chris Lynch acknowledged such a connection without making any broad commitment (as you would expect). “We are not close to being IPO-ready, but that was a future consideration in selecting Morgan Stanley,” Lynch told TechCrunch.

What the company does is help take big data and move it into tools where customers can make better use of it. AtScale co-founder Dave Mariani used to be at Yahoo where he helped pioneer the use of big data in the 2009/2010 timeframe. Unfortunately, systems at the time couldn’t deal with the volume of data and that is still a problem, one that AtScale says it is designed to solve. “We take a bunch of data silos and put a semantic layer across the data platforms and expose them in a consistent way,” Mariani told TechCrunch last year at the time of the Series C round. This allows company to get a big picture view of their data, rather than consuming it smaller chunks.

AtScale reported a banner year bringing on 50 new customers across their target verticals of retail, financial services, advertising and digital sales. These include Rakuten, Dell Technologies, TD Bank and Toyota. What’s more, the company stretched out this year, taking advantage of the last funding round to expand more into international markets in Europe and Asia.

The company was founded in 2013 and is based in San Mateo, California.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple is thinking about multiple scenarios when it comes to tariffs and iPhone production. Right now, iPhones are not affected directly by the trade war between China and the U.S.

But if U.S. President Donald Trump decides to raise tariffs on smartphones, it could be a big deal for the company. Apple manufactures most of its iPhones in China right now and works with Foxconn for the final assembly of those devices.

In some countries with high tariffs, Apple has worked with suppliers outside of China. For instance, Taiwanese manufacturer Wistron has built an assembly facility in Bengaluru, India. At first, the plan was to manufacture iPhone SE devices in India.

Similarly, Foxconn opened a facility in Brazil back in 2011. But results have been disappointing as devices were still much more expensive in Brazil than in the U.S.

But the U.S. is such a key market for Apple that tariffs on U.S. imports could have significant consequences. According to Bloomberg, Apple would keep the same supply chain even if the U.S. decides on a 10 percent tariff on smartphones. If might move production away from China with a 25 percent tariff.

It’s unclear if all production would move to another country or just production for the U.S. But nothing is changing for now. It’s just executives playing a little game of “what if.”

After raising $55 million in October at a $500 million valuation, business software marketplace G2 Crowd is making its first-ever acquisition to bring more features to its platform. It is acquiring Siftery, a startup that has built its own database of business software not on user reviews, but by providing a service to businesses where it identifies what is actually getting used and when across their networks.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, G2 Crowd’s CEO and founder Godard Abel said in an interview. Siftery had been around for a couple of years and had raised a seed round of $4.1 million from a group of notable investors, including Founders Fund, Felicis and Venrock. All 20 employees, including co-founders CEO Vamshi Mokshagundam and CTO Ayan Barua, are joining G2 Crowd.

G2 Crowd has been building a name for itself as a place where IT buyers can discover and buy software and services for solving specific issues; and if they already are already using or considering a product, a place where they can read other’s reviews and compare it against competitors.

There are some 550,000 reviews on the site today across nearly 60,000 products in 1,200 categories (those reviews are up by 50,000 in the last two months). Around 2 million business professionals visit and use the site each month, which they may go to because they are repeat users, or because G2 Crowd happens to have a very strong SEO game, with its links turning up at the top of the list when you do a search for a specific product or product category.

That economy of scale makes G2 Crowd a pretty logical home for Siftery, which had also provided a database of software for businesses, but at a much smaller scale and before it had been truly commercialised. Abel said that the startup had only around 1,500 customers, with most of them on a free version of the product.

“They were just getting to the point where there was a fork in the road,” he added. “What they hadn’t done yet is monetise and build a business, and we are product people at G2 Crowd.”

This also seems to be the stated logic for Siftery, too. “We’re excited to join the G2 Crowd team so we can more quickly realize our joint vision,” said Vamshi Mokshagundam, co-founder and CEO of Siftery, in a statement. “By becoming part of the G2 family, Siftery’s technology can reach millions more people, continue to develop rapidly, and have a bigger impact around the world in helping to eliminate wasted and inefficient software spend.”

Siftery’s additional functionality is interesting in terms of how G2 Crowd will develop going forward.

The smaller startup engaged with customers and their networks and provided insight into how much each product or service is actually getting used (not just enthused). That makes a handy way to determine whether money was being wasted on licenses for certain apps; or conversely whether companies are suffering from “shadow IT”: overpaying by not consolidating their purchasing and bargaining power. All that data subsequently also helped to provide insight to people searching its database to discover software.

The problem of overspending on software and apps happens to be a big one. G2 Crowd cites data from Netskope which estimates that the average enterprise now runs 1,246 cloud services, a figure that is growing over 10% each year. At the small business end, Siftery estimates that the average organization had 55 SaaS tools, more than doubling over the last three years.

And the challenge is still growing: across the range of company sizes, 35 percent more software gets trialled each year, with software budgets growing by 50 percent year-on-year for the past four. Some $1.4 trillion was spent on software and services last year, with waste in the UK and US collectively estimated at $34 billion, G2 Crowd said.

Abel said that for now the idea will be to keep Siftery’s product separate while it gets gradually integrated into G2 Crowd. There, it will potentially give the company another string in its bow in terms of the services it offers to businesses coming to its platform — and opting for paid usage tiers.

Interestingly, while G2 Crowd will likely continue to be popular as a marketplace to search for apps and services, this deal underscores how the company hopes to develop going forward. It has the opportunity to build a platform where organizations can manage their software, and potentially provide further tools to optimise how it is used, plan more deployments connected to it, and so on.

Abel has a long history building and selling startups focused around software productivity (most recently to Salesforce, but also to Oracle and before that CA), and that appears to be the direction he’s taking G2 Crowd, too. (Indeed, it seems to be part of a mini-wave of tech startups rethinking how businesses interact with software. Just earlier today, Nexthink out of Switzerland raised $85 million for its solution that helps enterprises monitor, triage and assist employees who encounter annoying software issues.)

Abel said that the engineering talent at Siftery was also a big attraction, and that could help shape other acquisitions going forward.

“I think we will look opportunistically,” he said. “It depends on finding a strong product and team.”

I’m heading back to Europe to hang out in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

I’ll be at a Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, which is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th at WeWork in Warsaw. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

This is the Echo I’ve been waiting for.

Throughout my house, I have Amazon Echo Dots connected to stereo systems. In my office, I have a Dot connected to an Onkyo receiver and amp. In my basement, I have one hooked up to a small bookshelf system. Outside on the deck, a Dot serves audio to a small amp that powers outside speakers. There’s more, but the point is made. The Dot is a great device to add voice services to existing speakers. But with its built-in speaker, I’m paying for features I’m not using.

That’s why Amazon made the Echo Input.

The premise is simple: The Input is a Dot without a speaker. It has a mic, two buttons, and most importantly, a 3.5mm output. This output lets the Input serve media to amps and powered speakers — just like I’m doing so with a Dot.

Since the Input doesn’t have a speaker, it’s much smaller. It’s only a half an inch thick. It’s a tiny thing, and I found it does the job as well as a Dot

Plug it in, set it up, and the Input adds voice services to speaker systems. From Bluetooth speakers to bookshelf speakers, it’s a great way to bring the convenance of Alexa to speakers.

The device is basic. To be clear this is not a Hifi device. To me, that’s okay on most speaker systems since I’m just streaming Spotify and NPR. Hopefully Amazon makes good on producing the Input’s HI-Fi cousin, the $199 Echo Link. This device was announced a few months back and does the same job as the Input, but features TOSLINK and coaxial digital audio outputs for connections to a proper DAC. The $299 Echo Link Amp does the same but features a built in amplifier to directly power a set of speakers. The Input is great for smaller speaker, but the Echo Link should provide a higher fidelity experience — and now that Tidal is available on the Echo, there’s a proper source too.

The Echo Link is said to be released on December 13.

For $35 the Echo Link does its job well. However, during the holidays, the Echo Dot is only $29.99 or less and features the same 3.5mm output. Unless size is a concern, I would recommend buying the Dot while it’s on sale just in case you need the speaker at a later time.

Juniper Square, a four-year-old startup at the intersection of enterprise software, real estate and financial technology, has brought in an additional $25 million in Series B funding to fuel the growth of its commercial real estate investment platform. Ribbit Capital led the round, with participation from Felicis Ventures.

Founded in 2014 by Alex Robinson, Yonas Fisseha and Adam Ginsburg, the startup’s chief executive officer, vice president of engineering and VP of product, respectively, Juniper has raised a total of $33 million to date.

The company operates a software platform for commercial real estate investment firms — an industry that has been slower to adopt the latest and greatest technology. Robinson tells TechCrunch those firms raise money from pension funds, endowments and elsewhere to purchase and then manage commercial real estate, using Juniper’s software as a tool throughout that process. Juniper supports fundraising and capital management with a suite of customer relationship management (CRM) and productivity tools for its users.

The San Francisco-based company says it currently has hundreds of customers and manages half a trillion dollars in real estate.

“The private markets are just as big as the public markets … but the private markets have typically not been accessible to everyday investors, and that’s part of what we are trying to do with Juniper Square,” Robinson told TechCrunch. “It’s a tremendously large market that almost nobody knows anything about.”

Juniper will use its latest investment to double headcount from 60 to 120 in the year ahead, with plans to beef up its engineering, product and sales teams specifically as the company expects to continue experiencing massive growth. Robinson said it’s grown between 3x and 4x every year for the last three years.

Felicis Ventures managing director Sundeep Peechu said in a statement that Juniper “is one of the fastest growing real estate tech companies” the firm has ever seen: “They are building technology for an industry that touches nearly every human and every corner of the economy. It’s a hard problem that takes time to solve, but the benefits of making these huge markets work better are tremendous.”

Existing in a relatively niche intersection, Juniper’s job now is to prove itself more efficient and user-friendly than Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which, Robinson says, are still its biggest competitor.

“Our goal is to be the de facto platform for real estate investment and we are well on our way to becoming that.”

Audi has a new CEO. Bram Schot was just named the car company’s chief executive after serving in that role on an interim basis since June. He was appointed to the spot after  then-CEO Rupert Stadler was arrested in Germany on charges surrounding the emissions scandal.

The CEO appointment takes effect on January 1, 2019.

Schot was previously on the Board of Management Member for Sales and Marketing for Audi. He joined the Volkswagen Group in 2011 as an overseer of strategic procjects in Group Sales, later taking charge of the Marketing and Sales division of VW Commercial Vehicles.

Schot takes the helm at a pivotal time for Audi. The German automaker is shaking off fallout from its parent company, VW, emission scandal and is looking to the future where electric cars make up a sizable chunk of the industry. The car company is preparing the release of its first EV in 2019, which will quickly be followed up by three more. Competitors are gearing up to do the same, but as it sits right now, Audi is in a commanding position and it will be within Schot’s purview to ensure the car company stays there.