Year: 2018

Twitter is unveiling the Ads Transparency Center that it announced back in October.

This comes as Twitter and other online platforms have faced growing political scrutiny around the role they may have played in spreading misinformation, particularly in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

For example, House Democrats recently released thousands of of Russian-funded political Facebook ads, and Facebook will reportedly release its own ad transparency tool this week. (In fact, as this story publishes, I’m at a Facebook press event focused on ad transparency.)

Twitter says that with this tool, you should be able to search for any Twitter handle and bring up all the ad campaigns from that account that have run for the past seven days. For political advertisers in the U.S., there will be additional data, including information around billing, ad spend, impressions per tweet and demographic targeting.

Everyone should be able to access the Ads Transparency Center, no login required.

As part of  the political ad guidelines that Twitter announced last month, the company says it will be visually identifying ads that are tied to federal elections in the United States. Over time, it plans to develop a policy specifically around “issue ads” (i.e., political ads that aren’t explicitly promoting a candidate) and looking for ways to expand these policies internationally.

“We are doing our due diligence to get this right and will have more updates to come,” writes Twitter’s Bruce Falck in a blog post. “We stay committed to iterating and improving our work in this space, and doing what’s right for our community.”

Eighteen months since its initial release, Oculus is delivering some major updates to its Medium “immersive sculpting tool” in a free 2.0 update that’s being released today.

The artistic tool is one of the company’s few first-party apps on the PC Rift platform. Today’s updates focus primarily on performance bumps, a UI revamp, and some features the company says were frequently requested by users, including snapping grids and increased layer limits.

“This is the culmination of a year of listening to our users and not only seeing what they’re creating but how—and learning what tools and features they love and lack,” Oculus’s Jessica Zeta said in a blog post.

While VR art apps like Google’s Tilt Brush have seemed a bit amateurish in vibes, Oculus has been looking to position Medium as a more professional application that’s easy to get going with but hard to master. Alongside the new layer limit of 100 layers, Medium 2.0 will have a new file managements system and some UI changes that the company hopes will make navigation a bit quicker.

Speaking of quicker, Oculus says that 2.0 will get a bump in rendering horsepower after a rewrite in Vulkan which the company says will improve performance handily.

Oculus has devoted quite a few resources in its latest Rift Core 2.0 updates to bringing some customizability to the home environments that users launch experiences from. With Medium 2.0, users will be able to export their creations directly into their Home area.

Oculus has learned quite a bit in the past 18 months about writing rules and leading a trail-blazing platform; Medium’s latest update seems to offer the group an opportunity to learn from users and just give them what they’ve been asking for.

And there we have it: Bird, one of the emerging massively-hyped Scooter startups, has roped in its next pile of funding by picking up another $300 million in a round led by Sequoia Capital.

The company announced the long-anticipated round this morning, with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joining the company’s board of directors. This is the second round of funding that Bird has raised over just the span of a few months, sending it from a reported $1 billion valuation in May to a $2 billion valuation by the end of June. In March, the company had a $300 million valuation, but the Scooter hype train has officially hit a pretty impressive inflection point as investors pile on to get money into what many consider to be the next iteration of resolving transportation at an even more granular level than cars or bikes. New investors in the round include Accel, B Capital, CRV, Sound Ventures, Greycroft and e.ventures, and previous investors Craft Ventures, Index Ventures, Valor, Goldcrest, Tusk Ventures, and Upfront Ventures are also in the round. (So, basically everyone else who isn’t in competitor Lime.)

Scooter mania has captured the hearts of Silicon Valley and investors in general — including Paige Craig, who actually jumped from VC to join Bird as its VP of business —with a large amount of capital flowing into the area about as quickly as it possibly can. These sort of revolving-door fundraising processes are not entirely uncommon, especially for very hot areas of investment, though the scooter scene has exploded considerably faster than most. Bird’s round comes amid reports of a mega-round for Lime, one of its competitors, with the company reportedly raising another $250 million led by GV, and Skip also raising $25 million.

“We have met with over 20 companies focused on the last mile problem over the years and feel this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity that can have a big impact in the world,” CRV’s Saar Gur, who did the deal for the firm, said. “We have a ton of conviction that this team has original product thought (they created the space) and the execution chops to build something extremely valuable here. And we have been long term focused, not short term focused, in making the investment. The “hype” in our decision (the non-zero answer) is that Bird has built the best product in the market and while we kept meeting with more startups wanting to invest in the space – we kept coming back to Bird as the best company.  So in that sense, the hype from consumers is real and was a part of the decision. On unit economics: We view the first product as an MVP (as the company is less than a year old) – and while the unit economics are encouraging, they played a part of the investment decision but we know it is not even the first inning in this market.”

There’s certainly an argument to be made for Bird, whose scooters you’ll see pretty much all over the place in cities like Los Angeles. For trips that are just a few miles down wide roads or sidewalks, where you aren’t likely to run into anyone, a quick scan of a code and a hop on a Bird may be worth the few bucks in order to save a few minutes crossing those considerably long blocks. Users can grab a bird that they see and starting going right away if they are running late, and it does potentially alleviate the pressure of calling a car for short distances in traffic, where a scooter may actually make more sense physically to get from point A to point B than a car.

There are some considerable hurdles going forward, both theoretical and in effect. In San Francisco, though just a small slice of the United States metropolitan area population, the company is facing significant pushback from the government and scooters for the time being have been kicked off the sidewalks. There’s also the looming shadow of what may happen regarding changes in tariffs, though Gur said that it likely wouldn’t be an issue and “the unit economics appear to be viable even if tariffs were to be added to the cost of the scooters.” (Xiaomi is one of the suppliers for Bird, for example.)

Adtech company Criteo is investing $23 million (€20 million) in a new artificial intelligence lab in Paris. Over the next three years, the company plans to hire researchers to work on AI-related projects.

Many of their projects will lead to public presentations, open-source releases and research papers. VP of Research Suju Rajan is going to lead the lab.

Many tech companies have created AI labs in Paris, including Facebook, Google, IBM and Samsung. All those companies want to hire the best AI researchers. That’s why they open multiple AI research centers around the world to attract local talent in multiple countries

Criteo has been a flagship company in the French tech scene. The company specialized in ad retargeting and filed for an IPO around five years ago.

But retargeting isn’t really popular right now. Some internet browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, have started offering tracking protection and enabling it by default. Criteo’s ads are much less effective if the company can’t track users around the web.

Similarly, many European users are now opting out of data sharing with adtech companies thanks to GDPR’s mandatory consent popups.

That’s why Criteo shares haven’t been performing well lately. Shares were trading at around $54 per share in April 2017. Ten months later, you could buy shares for $24 — that’s a 56 percent drop.

Criteo needs to diversify its product portfolio and find new ways to make ads effective again. Existing methods involving third-party cookies, browser fingerprinting and a ton of Javascript embeds won’t work forever.

M12, Microsoft’s venture fund which was previously simply known as Microsoft Ventures, has been making a series of investments in the last few weeks. Today, it’s leading a $5 million Series A round into Cerebri AI, a startup that uses machine learning to help companies track, analyze and predict their customers’ behavior.

The University of Texas Horizon Fund, WorldQuant Ventures and Leawood Venture Capital also participated in this round for the Austin-based startup, which brings Cerebri’s total funding to date to $10 million. The company plans to use the fresh cash to expand its operations.

Microsoft’s involvement here is maybe no major surprise, given the company’s interest in machine learning and that the Cerebri platform sits on top of Microsoft Azure.

“Cerebri has created a product that is fundamentally changing how customer-facing sales and success professionals can analyze the customer journey,”  said Elliott Robinson, a partner at M12. “By enabling companies to follow an individual customer across the various touchpoints within the enterprise, Cerebri has proven they’re able to improve customer experiences and generate revenue lift.”

In addition to today’s funding announcement, Cerebri also today officially launched its Cerebri Values product, which it describes as “this industry’s first universal measure of customer success.” The idea here is to quantify a customer’s commitment to a brand or product and then predict the “next best action” for each of these customers to seal the deal. Like similar products, Cerebri Values also allows marketers to create cohorts of similar customers for marketing campaigns. The focus here is on grouping customers by behavior, not demographics, which is a bit different from how similar tools often work.

To do all of this, Cerebri allows its users to combine data from a variety of sources and then uses its machine learning models to predict what will work best for this customer. In an age where customers are increasingly wary of companies that harvest their data, all of this may sound a bit dystopian. Cerebri says it has already ingested more than two billion customer touchpoints and events across 12 million consumers and that all of this data sits securely behind its corporate firewall, “ensuring the highest level of security and safeguarding personally identifiable information.”

We asked the company whether consumers can access this data or opt out of being tracked and have not received an answer yet, but it looks like the company’s privacy policy argues that it’s up to its corporate customers to comply with local laws, including the likes of the European Union’s GDPR. (Update: And here is the official answer: “Cerebri Values has these capabilities and can comply with any request direct from its business customers to provide both opt-out as well as deliver personal data. Cerebri AI does not directly hold customer data, as it provides a SaaS-based platform that sits behind its customers’ corporate firewalls.”)

Sequoia Capital has been at the top of its game in the U.S. for decades, thanks to early investments in Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and PayPal, as well as, more recently, its stakes in the messaging startup WhatsApp, the payments company Stripe and the video conferencing unicorn company Zoom.

Yet unlike a lot of top-tier firms in Silicon Valley, Sequoia is far from reliant on the Bay Area companies for huge returns. Instead, a dozen years ago, anticipating that the most impactful tech ideas could come from anywhere and be built around the world, the firm founded Sequoia China and Sequoia India, assembling local teams to invest in startups and help founders build their companies.

That strategy is now paying off, big time. As we reported earlier this week, Sequoia currently makes more than 50 cents from every dollar returned to its investors from its overseas bets.

Among the many companies Sequoia Capital China alone has funded: Meituan-Dianping, the group-discount service that sells locally found products and retail services and just filed to go public in Hong Kong; Ele.me, the food ordering company that sold a controlling stake in its business to Alibaba in April for $9.5 billion; DJI, the drone company, which was reported to be raising $1 billion in new funding this spring at a $15 billion valuation; VIP.com, the commerce platform that went public in 2012 and currently boasts a $7.2 billion market cap; and Didi, the mobile transportation giant that’s in a race against its U.S. rival Uber to conquer the global ride-hailing market.

To learn more about the new reality facing Silicon Valley startups — that competition is no longer next door, it’s global — we’re thrilled to announce that Sequoia Managing Partner Doug Leone is coming to Disrupt for a fireside chat. Leone oversees the firm’s global operations with Neil Shen, the founder and managing partner of Sequoia Capital China, and he knows better than nearly anyone in Silicon Valley how the investing and technology landscapes are evolving — and what founders globally should be mindful of as they build the next legendary company.

Leone also knows the value of grit. Leone immigrated to the U.S. from Italy and was reportedly called “Pasta” in high school before rising to the top of one of the most admired venture firms in history. It’s no wonder Leone is particularly passionate about founders from humble backgrounds like his own.

If you care about the global shifts that are majorly reshaping the tech industry right now, and the stuff that great founders are made of, you’re going to want to catch this conversation.

You can buy tickets to the show, taking place in San Francisco September 5th through September 7th, right here.

PayPal today is introducing new checkout technology for e-commerce sites that will dynamically present the most relevant payment method for each customer. That is, instead of retailers having to litter their checkout page with a variety of payment options, PayPal Checkout’s new “smart payment buttons” will update to display the right set of options for each customer in each geography.

That means retailers can more easily include alternative payment methods, like local wallets and country-specific options, alongside a PayPal button.

The company says it will begin with iDEAL in the Netherlands; Bancontact in Belgium; MyBank in Italy; Giropay in Germany; and EPS in Austria. These will arrive in a few weeks’ time. And it already has SEPA Direct Debit enabled for its customers in Germany.

The Smart Payment experience will also include access to PayPal’s own suite of checkout options, of course, including PayPal, Venmo, and PayPal Credit, as well as credit card payment options.

The new product will be One Touch-enabled, too – meaning online shoppers don’t have to keep logging in again with a username and password on each website they visit, following their initial PayPal sign-in.

To use PayPal Checkout with Smart Buttons, existing retailers will not have to reintegrate their sites with PayPal Checkout, the company tells us – they’ll only need to perform a small update. After doing so, they’ll have access to aggregated and anonymous insights about their online customers, including conversion rates, devices used, and a set of recommendations to help increase conversions and loyalty.

PayPal’s update comes at a time when it’s facing increased competition in online checkout from tech giants, Apple, Google and Amazon. With Safari on iOS devices and on the Mac, shoppers can pay with Apple Pay. Meanwhile, Google recently united all its payment tools under the Google Pay brand, which supports online retail checkout, too. And Amazon is simply sucking up ever more sales through its own One Click platform, often attached to its own payment cards or a customer’s Amazon Cash balance.

PayPal, however, touts its ability to convert at higher rates to ensure retailers continue to use its products. Specifically, it cites a comScore study that found its checkout product converted at 88.7 percent during checkout, or 82 percent higher than a checkout without PayPal.

Developer documentation for the new product is available today here.

LinkedIn — the social network with more than 560 million members who connect around work-related topics and job-seeking — continues to add in more features integrating technology from its new owner Microsoft, both to improve engagement on LinkedIn as well as to create deeper data ties between the two businesses.

Today, the company announced two more: users can now instantly view translations of content on the site when it appears in a language that is not the one set as a default; and they can now use QR codes to quickly swap contact details with other LinkedIn members.

In both cases, the features are likely overdue. The lingua franca of LinkedIn seems to be English, but the platform has a large global reach, and as it continues to try to expand to a wider range of later adopters and different categories of users, having a translation feature seems to be a no-brainer. It would also put it in closer line with the likes of Twitter and Facebook, which have had translation options for years.

The QR code generator, meanwhile, has become a key way for people to swap their details when they are not already connected on a network. And with LinkedIn this makes a lot of sense: there are so many people with the same name and it can be a challenge figuring out which “Mark Smith” you might want to connect with after coming across him at an event. And given that LinkedIn has been looking for more ways of making its app useful in in-person situations, this is an obvious way to enable that.

Translations are coming by way of the Microsoft Text Analytics API, the same Azure Cognitive Service  that powers translations on Bing, Skype, and Office (as well as third party services like Twitter). It will be available in more then 60 languages, with LinkedIn says more coming soon, to a “majority” of members using either the desktop or mobile web versions of LinkedIn.

The company says that it will be coming to LinkedIn’s iOS and Android apps in due course as well. Users will get the “see translation” link based on a number of signals you’re providing to LinkedIn that include your language setting on the platform, the country where you are accessing content, and the language you have used in your profile.

Content covered by the option to translate will include the main Feed, the activity section on a person’s profile, and posts if you click on them in the feed or share it.

Meanwhile, with QR codes, you trigger the ability to capture one by clicking in the search box on the iOS or Android app. Through that window, you can also pick up your own code to share with others.

LinkedIn suggests that the QR code can effectively become the replacement for the business card for people when they are at in-person events. But other options is that you can use this now in any place where you might want to provide a shortcut to your profile.

According to a report from The Information, Apple could choose to bundle all its media offerings into a single subscription. While Apple’s main media subscription product is currently Apple Music, it’s no secret that the company is investing in other areas.

In particular, Apple has bought the distribution rights of many TV shows. But nobody knows how Apple plans to sell those TV shows. For instance, you could imagine paying a monthly fee to access Apple’s content in the TV app on your iPhone, iPad and Apple TV.

In addition to that, Apple acquired Texture back in March. Texture lets you download and read dozens of magazines with a single subscription. The company has partnered with Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., Rogers Communications, and Time Inc. to access their catalog of magazines

Texture is still available, but it’s clear that Apple has bigger plans. In addition to reformatting and redistributing web content in the Apple News app, the company could add paid content from magazines.

Instead of creating three different subscriptions (with potential discounts if you subscribe to multiple services), The Information believes that Apple is going to create a unified subscription. It’s going to work a bit like Amazon Prime, but without the package deliveries.

For a single monthly or annual fee, you’ll be able to access Apple Music, Apple TV’s premium content and Apple News’ premium content.

Even if you don’t consume everything in the subscription, users could see it as a good value, which could reduce attrition.

With good retention rates and such a wide appeal, it could help Apple’s bottom line now that iPhone unit sales are only growing by 0.5 percent year over year. It’s still unclear when Apple plans to launch its TV and news offerings.

For the past twelve years I’ve followed the rise of the startup – defined as a small business with global ambitions – from my perch at TechCrunch. During that period I watched business reporting change from a sleepy backwater on the back of the Sports section into a juggernaut, a force that controls the global conversation. Why? Because business reporting became war reporting and the battles fought were between VCs, businesses, and ideas that changed the world.

In that period, VCs rose from glorified bank tellers to rock stars. Incubators popped up to socialize nervous founders and turn them into capital F Founders and the path for startups became a codified journey from failure to success.

Now we’re seeing the same thing happen in ICOs. But something is wrong. The startups coming out of the ICO craze aren’t being judged on the character of their founders, on their technologies, or their probability for success. They are being judged, quite simply, on quantitative metrics that interrogate a token with one question: “When Lambo?”

This is the wrong approach. Token-based startups must receive the same level of socialization and scrutiny as the old VC-based startup vetting process. But something is different, and it’s an important difference.

In the old VC model a group of men – and it was mostly men for a long time – would stand in judgement over an idea. If any number of arbitrary points of risk appeared they would smile and say “No” to the founder, sending them down the road for another “No.” Unless you were plugged in professionally, went to https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/15/clunk/, or had your own cash, seed to even late stage investment wasn’t available and the resulting https://twitter.com/kteare/status/391689067370278912 of undercapitalization sunk countless startups.

Now, however, something new is afoot. While it’s always nice to look at tokens in comparison with other tokens, this sort of quantitative masturbation can easily hide a multitude of sins. Due diligence on token-based companies must be done, but it must be done through the wisdom of crowds. Instead of trying to impress one dude in a fleece vest and chinos on Sand Hill Road a founder must impress the world. They must tell a true, human story of actual value and explain their product without mumbling and hand waving. And they have to do it again and again.

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to bring us an egalitarian age of decentralized decision-making and a mathematical certainty. But the founders forgot one thing: humans offer no mathematical certainty. Instead of looking at numbers, these startups must be assessed on the basis of their value to humanity, on their technical ability to solve a real problem, and on their understanding of human-to-human interaction. The future isn’t a number. Instead, the future is a many-to-one investigation of a startup and the decision – by the decentralized crowd – whether or not to continue funding.

Again, if your primary driver is greed then by all means check out a chart that compares TRON to TRON. It’s your right. But if your goal is to make startups that will drive us deep into the future, then the old ways are best. A lot of things are about to change.

A few years ago I spoke to Deepak Chopra about his vision for a global voting system. In short, he was working on a way to take the global temperature. If a politician wanted to spend money on a road or, god forbid, go to wore, they could put the question to the crowd via their cellphones. One vote per person, defined by biometric controls. This pie-in-the-sky idea is slowly coming to fruition and I think it’s going to be very exciting. And it will find its perfect home in the future of startup funding.

The age of centralized decision-making in which analytics were used to help make seat-of-the-pants decisions is over. Now we enter a new world and the folks used to the old ways should probably watch out. After all, when the crowd speaks even VCs listen.