Year: 2018

Google today announced a major change to its Chrome Web Store policy that aims to shield users from websites that try to fool them into installing their Chome extensions. Until now, developers who publish their apps in the Web Store, could also initiate app and extension installs from their own websites. Too often, though, developers combined these so-called ‘inline installs‘ with deceptive information on their sites to get users to install them. Unsurprisingly, that’s not quite the experience Google had in mind when it enabled this feature back in 2011, so now it’s shutting it down.

Starting today, inline installation will be unavailable to all newly published extensions. Developers who use the standard method for calling for an install from their site will see that their users will get redirected to the Chrome Web Store to complete the installation.

Come September 12, 2018, all inline installs of existing extensions will be shut down and users will be redirected to the store, too. Come December and the launch of Chrome 71, the API that currently allows for this way of installing extensions will go away.

“As we’ve attempted to address this problem over the past few years, we’ve learned that the information displayed alongside extensions in the Chrome Web Store plays a critical role in ensuring that users can make informed decisions about whether to install an extension,” James Wagner, the product manager for the extensions platform, writes in today’s update. “When installed through the Chrome Web Store, extensions are significantly less likely to be uninstalled or cause user complaints, compared to extensions installed through inline installation.”

As Wagner notes, inline installations have been an issue for a long time. Back in 2015, for example, sites that tried to deceive users into installing extensions by getting them to click on fake ads or error messages were the main issue.

Currently, when the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android has access to the internet, its translations are far superior to those it produces when it’s offline. That’s because the offline translations are phrase-based, meaning they use an older machine translation technique than the machine learning-powered systems in the cloud that the app has access to when it’s online. But that’s changing today. Google is now rolling out offline Neural Machine Translation (NMT) support for 59 languages in the Translate apps.

Today, only a small number of users will see the updated offline translations, but it will roll out to all users within the next few weeks.

The list of supported languages consists of a wide range of languages. Because I don’t want to play favorites, here is the full list: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian, Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jannada, Korean, Lavtian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh.

In the past, running these deep learning models on a mobile device wasn’t really an option since mobile phones didn’t have the right hardware to efficiently run them. Now, thanks to both advances in hardware and software, that’s less of an issue and Google, Microsoft and others have also found ways to compress these models to a manageable size. In Google’s case, that’s about 30 to 40 megabytes per language.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft also announced a similar feature for its Translator app earlier this year. It uses a very similar technique but for the time being, it only supports about a dozen languages.

French startup Exotec Solutions raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million) from Iris Capital with existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Breega also participating.

The startup has built an automated robot called the Skypods to optimize e-commerce warehouses. It’s easy to forget about it when you click on “buy now”, but there are a ton of people walking through endless aisles of products every day to pick up your next order.

Exotec is selling a complete solution to replace part of your warehouse with a robot-managed area. France’s second biggest e-commerce website Cdiscount has been experimenting with Exotec and now plans to buy more robots, racks and stations in the coming months.

Skypods are low-profile robots that can carry a standardized box and bring it back to a human operator. But the Skypods don’t just move on flat grounds. They can move up and down a rack and grab a box from the shelves.

This is the most visual part of Exotec, but designing efficient logistics software for automated warehouse solutions is arguably even harder. The startup promises few errors and the ability to add more racks and robots without having to stop your fulfillment center.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to build and sell a thousand robots by 2019. It’s clear that e-commerce companies won’t switch to Exotec overnight. Many companies face huge spikes of demand during the holiday season for instance. So they need to make sure that it can handle a lot of pickups during the most demanding times.

Other companies, such as CommonSense Robotics focus on smaller warehouses and groceries with a warehouse-as-a-service approach. Overall, automated fulfillment centers seem like the future. Warehouses are constrained and predictable environments. And this is perfect for automated systems. Now let’s see who is going to grab more market share in this space.

When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .

While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.

In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.

Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.

Hoffman left LinkedIn in 2007, but his contributions to the company certainly helped turn it into the behemoth it is today, going public in 2011 and selling to Microsoft for a whopping $26.2 billion in 2016.

At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:

Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.

Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.

Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.

Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.

Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.

Despite the growth of Amazon and other e-commerce giants, offline commerce — buying goods from brick-and-mortar stores — still accounts for around 90 percent of all retail spending. So in a bid to bridge the divide between online and in-store commerce — and potentially get itself a bigger piece of the action — Google is announcing a number of new features for Google Shopping aimed at physical and local merchants.

The company today launched a new feature called “See What’s In Store,” which will let physical stores provide a list of their inventory for free both in their Knowledge Panels (the boxes that appear in the right-hand column in the search results for a particular business) as well as on Google Maps.

The new feature was announced at the same time as a couple of other enhancements: Google will now provide location extensions on video campaigns on YouTube; and enhanced local catalog display ads that will let merchants feature larger “hero” images as well as full listings of their other in-store inventory, along with stock and pricing information.

The local catalog ads and inventory listings are coming by way of some new partnerships: Google will be working with point-of-sale and inventory data providers like Pointy, Cayan, Linx and yReceipts, who work directly with merchants, to provide the data to Google.

As one example of how this will work, Pointy — a startup from Mark Cummins, who sold his previous startup, a visual search engine called Plink, to Google in is first UK acquisition — is based around an app that integrates with POS services like Square, or a $499 standalone device, and merchants use these to scan items’ barcodes in order to upload them easily to their websites or other online portals with a minimum of extra labor and data entry; merchants will now have the option of porting that data directly to Google.

Providing more bridges between merchants and Google’s search and advertising portals serves a couple of different purposes for Google. First, it gives the company another springboard from which to sell more advertising to those merchants, since shoppers may be more inclined to enhance their online presence when they know they are already seeing traffic from potential buyers there.

According to a blog post on the new service from Surojit Chatterjee, Google Shopping’s head of product, some 80 percent of shoppers will visit a store if they know they will find there what they are looking for, so in theory providing that inventory list could increase that strike rate for businesses (or at the very least reduce frustration people may have when they do go to the store and find the product not there).

Second, it gives Google another way of providing a relevant platform for the so-called world of “omni-commerce,” or as some might refer to it, online-to-offline commerce, which in turn can drive more ad sales. Chatterjee said Boulanger, an early retailer trialling the new version of catalog ads, pictured above, drove more than 20,000 visits to its stores, with the sales bump resulting from that “delivering a return of 42 times its investment on ad spend.”

This is also particularly timely, given the work that Amazon is reportedly doing to expand the kinds of ads it delivers across third-party sites and apps: the e-commerce giant is said to be testing new display ads that would bypass Google to help promote products for merchants that sell through Amazon. Given that Amazon is also continually looking for inroads also to working with physical merchants, this presents one more threat to Google’s ad-based revenue model. It’s not the only move Google has made to expand its e-commerce reach. In its own riposte to WholeFoods and Amazon, it has started to work with grocery stores to sell their products online. The most recent customer for the service is Carrefour in France.

For the merchants, maintaining online an online presence via Google could also be helpful. Although some will still seek out a company’s own website or app, in many cases — especially for smaller businesses — maintaining these can be time-consuming and costly; and that’s before considering just how much traffic they might receive. Google, of course, provides a one-stop portal to search across everything, so this gives users a potentially bigger strike rate for online visibility.

The fact that the inventory will also come up in Maps is very interesting, too: aimed at consumers on the go, it could prove to finally solve the problem of running from place to place, or spending lots of time phoning, when a customer wants to buy something urgently.

Other Shopping features announced today include a new competitive pricing feature, which will let merchants check pricing for similar items sold by other retailers, and boost advertising bids if they know they have a better deal at their own store.

Google also provided an update on Shopping Actions, a program it launched in March for customers to be able to purchase items straight from search, Assistant or voice queries in Google apps. Google says that more than 70 retailers are live with the program today, which is also sold as an ad unit and runs as a conjunction to more basic Shopping ads.

Super Mario Party is coming to the Nintendo Switch but alongside the new party gameplay, there appears to be an interesting new use of the Switch hardware for multi-player purposes.

It appears you’ll be able to modularly connect at least two Nintendo Switch consoles to expand the size of the screen you’re working with. In gameplay it seems actions will be able to seamlessly move from one screen to the other after users draw where the connection between the consoles are.

Mario Party has long been a Nintendo franchise that pushes the technical limits of the systems in their most gimmicky capacities. It seems that the Switch will gain some cool applications of the controllers’ motion capabilities for the wide variety of party games.

This really seems like the idealized use for the Switch’s controller system and while Mario Kart 8 offered a lot of tabletop fun for using controllers on the tiny screen, Nintendo is really letting loose here bringing multiple Switches together and all of the controllers that they can handle.

How much a feature like this would actually be used in real life is a little dubious, but we’ll find out how much the mechanic fits into gameplay October 5.

After days of press conferences teasing games arriving in some time within the next decade, here’s a refreshing bit of news. As previously rumored, wildly popular sandbox survival game Fortnite is, indeed, coming to Nintendo Switch. Not only that, it’s  available starting today as a free download from the Nintendo eShop.

Epic’s title will be available at 10AM PT today (a little under an hour from now), bringing the battle royale mode that has made it such a massive money maker on the PC, consoles and iOS, which arrived in March. An Android version of the title is also in the works for later this summer. 

The game is a perfect fit for console. Nintendo’s long time focus on all ages entertainment certainly lines up with the title, which skews younger than many of the titles on display at the show this week, along with the (perhaps litigiously so) similar Player Unknown Battlegrounds (PUBG).

The battle royale game play means Switch players will be able to play against a gamers and the growing number of devices Fortnite is currently available for.

The advertising-lite days of Reddit are now firmly in the rear-view as the rapidly maturing company begins to seriously chase advertising revenues in users’ feeds. Today, the Reddit has announced that it is rolling out autoplaying video ads across the site on mobile and desktop.

Reddit is looking to tread as carefully as they can as the company begins to quickly scale its ad products; its vocal user base has often proven resistant to sweeping changes. Users will be able to turn off autoplay on video ads in their main feed. Additionally, for the time being, video ads will only be served to users that are utilizing the expanded card display type which is the default of three new modes in Reddit’s latest mobile and desktop redesign.

These are also just for standalone ad campaigns at the moment, this rollout will not add pre-roll ads to videos that users click on. Additionally, video ads will be available to managed advertising partners first with all partners gaining access in the next month or so.

The popular site, which currently reports 330 million monthly active users, has remained relatively unchanged for much of the first half of this decade, but over the past couple years has accelerated its product growth with a redesign of its mobile apps and desktop site, a move to host images on video natively and, more recently, a major push to integrate native advertising.

“We have an opportunity to business-build,” Reddit VP of Brand Partnerships Zubair Jandali told TechCrunch. “Reddit has remarkable product-market fit on the consumer side and we’ve not layered a business on top of it. There aren’t a lot of opportunities that tend to come around like that.”

The video ads business will be built onto the company’s native video product, which only recently came to exist. The company’s history with external sites like Imgur and YouTube hosting its linked content has been long, but this past August the company launched its own native video platform which the company says has continued to excel, with native video views growing 23 percent month-over-month.

Autoplaying video ads are a major progression for a site that only rolled out native ads to its mobile apps a couple months ago. Reddit has been making some big sweeping changes to its site, but by delivering a lot of new utility to users alongside new changes to its advertising platform, things seem to be progressing more smoothly that many would’ve expected, we’ll see if that continues.

More financing is coming in for Bird, this time potentially valuing the company at $2 billion, according to a new report by Axios.

There’s not a ton to add here compared to the last round (which happened just weeks ago), as the same dynamics are probably in play here. While Uber was a bet on car rides and generally getting around, Bird is that but at a dramatically more granular level — thinking short hops of a few miles in congested areas. Startups that are exceedingly hot can sometimes pull off these rolling rounds where investors are coming in at various points, especially as the model further proves out over time.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, you’ve probably seen Bird (and Lime) scooters hanging out on the sidewalks — potentially knocked over in a spot where someone might trip over them while checking his or her phone. That’s been a point of tension in areas like San Francisco, where Bird has had to temporarily come off the sidewalks as a permit system rolls out. Bird isn’t the first mobility-focused service that has faced regulatory challenges before, but it is one that’s become very popular very quickly.

This too, as Axios notes, could be an easy play to get into a hot market that a major ridesharing company could want to buy its way into. Uber acquired Jump, an on-demand bike service, in the midst of its own financing round. While bikes don’t seem to be getting quite the hype that scooters are, Lyft is also planning to acquire Motivate, an on-demand biking network.

Bird just weeks ago raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, while Lime raised an additional $250 million. Bird was valued at $300 million in a financing round earlier this year.

Amino has raised a big Series C round of funding — $45 million from GV, Venrock, Union Square Ventures, Goodwater Capital and Time Warner Investments, with Hearst Ventures joining as a new investor.

Co-founder and CEO Ben Anderson has described Amino as an way to help people who have “passionate niche interests” find others who feel the same way, via smartphone apps.

The company started out with apps focused a handful of topics like K-pop, anime and Doctor Who, but it later added the ability for anyone to launch a new community in the main Amino app, and there are now more than 2.5 million communities.

Of course, some of these communities are more active than others, and there’s some overlap between them — but Max Sebela, who’s general manager for Amino’s English-language apps, said there’s less than you might think, because “each interest is actually a universe of micro interest.” For example, there might be one community focused on sharing strategy and tactics around the video game Overwatch, while another might revolve around sharing Overwatch fan art.

Ultimately, Sebela said it’s up to the founders and leaders of each community to decide what the community wants to focus on, and which product features they want to use to enable that. Meanwhile, Anderson said Amino is constantly tweaking its algorithms to make sure it’s surfacing the best communities for each user.

“Instead of one big, blue ocean, we provide a million lakes and help you find the exact right one,” he added.

Perhaps even more impressive than the number of communities is the amount of time the average user spends in Amino — more than 70 minutes per day.

One of the initial inspirations for the startup was a real-world anime convention, and Amino getting closer to that experience with the addition of features like live voice and video chat, as well as the screening room, where you can watch videos with other users.

During our conversation, Sebela opened up one of the K-Pop communities on his phone and was quickly able to listen in on a chat room where multiple users were singing along together. (Sadly, we didn’t join the singing.)

“The technology not super unique,” Anderson acknowledged. “What makes it really special is, I can voice chat with my friends on a lot of idfferent networks, but here I can hop in and join a voice chat with 10 Harry Potter fans who I may not know in my real life.”

While these features are already live, Anderson said they’ve been “downplayed” while Amino tests them out and works out the kinks. Now it’s ready to put them “front-and-center” in the app.

Amino has now raised more than $70 million in total funding.

It’s also been testing out ways to make money, which Anderson said will occur primarily through a subscription service — though apparently it’s too early for him to offer more details.