Year: 2018

In November, Google Home gained the ability to multitask with added support for a feature called “multiple queries,” which allows you to combine two requests into one voice command. For example, “OK Google, turn up the volume and play music.” Now, Google Home is getting even smarter about multitasking by enabling support three requests at once.

The new feature was announced on Google’s @madebyGoogle Twitter account on Monday, where users quickly discovered its limitations. Unfortunately for Google’s global customer base, multiple queries is only available in the English language for the time being, in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia.

The feature works by combining voice queries with the word “and” in between them, to separate the different requests. Each command must also be the sort of thing Google Assistant can respond to on its own without further input or clarification.

That means you can’t ask it to just “set an alarm,” you’d have to say “set an alarm for 7 AM” so it doesn’t need to ask a follow-up question.

Multiple queries was first rolled out in November 2017, also with little fanfare.

But it’s not the only way Google Home can multitask. In February, Google Assistant gained support for Routines, as well, which allow you to create custom workflows kicked off with a single voice command.

For instance, your “I’m home” routine could turn on the lights, adjust the thermostat and play some music. (Alexa also offers routines, as of last October.)

Meanwhile, at Google’s I/O developer conference in May, the company formally announced multiple queries for Google Home (then referred to as “Multiple Actions”), along with a host of other upgrades for Google Home Actions. This included Routine Suggestions, which allow voice app developers to prompt users to add their app’s Action to a Routine, plus Action Notifications, which allows voice apps to alert users to new features and content, and more.

Google is not providing an ETA on when multiple queries will roll out to non-English users, saying only that:“We look forward to supporting additional languages, but have nothing to announce at this time.” 

h/t: Voicebot

First previewed during WWDC, Apple has just given us another peek at the iBooks revamp (a version of which has been floating around for some time now). Apple Books is launching on iOS during the fall. The “biggest books redesign ever” features a newer, cleaner UI, with a larger focus on cover art than its predecessor.

Also new here is the inclusion of an editorial section. That’s similar to what the company’s been doing with services like Apple News and the App Store, bringing human writers in to editorially curate book picks. Audiobooks are being served up more prominently here, as well, with the addition of a devoted tab.

The new Reading Now tab, meanwhile, is pretty much what it sounds like, offering up a place to jump back into titles users are currently reading/listening to. It also houses a Want to Read wishlist and curated recommendations, based on your reading habits. The bottom is rounded out with Book Store and Library tags.

The new version presents a conscious uncoupling from iTunes, from which various multimedia offerings have been spun off over the past several years as standalones. It also represents a clear stab the Kindle. Amazon’s offering has long been the leader in digital books, and its 2008 Audible acquisition has helped make audiobooks a much more prominent part of the equation.

The new version of the app is arriving in the fall, with Book Store content available in 51 countries. The macOS version of the app is also being renamed Apple Books, for the sake of consistency.

This is it, the absolute last chance for the professional-grade procrastinators out there. It’s do-or-die time. If you’re an early-stage founder who dreams of launching your business to the world, you have 24 hours left to stop dreaming and take action. Get your keister in gear and apply to Startup Battlefield right now.

Startup Battlefield, the premier startup-pitch competition and the best platform for launching your company to the world, takes place at Disrupt San Francisco 2018 on September 5-7. This year we’re producing our biggest, boldest, most ambitious Disrupt ever, with three times the floor space, more than 10,000 attendees and more than 400 accredited media outlets.

Yeah, that’s a big deal, and we’ve doubled the Startup Battlefield prize to match this super-sized event: $100,000 (we’re talking equity-free cash, folks). Don’t pass up this opportunity to compete with the very best. Yes, it’s a competitive vetting process. TechCrunch editors will review all applications and select between 15-30 of the top early-stage startups. Our acceptance rate ranges from three to six percent. But hey, if you’ve got the stuff, it won’t matter. We’ll see it.

It won’t cost you a thing to compete or to participate, and every team gets free pitch coaching from our Startup Battlefield-tested TechCrunch editors. Each team gets six minutes on the Disrupt Main Stage to pitch their company to a panel of judges — consisting of well-known investors, entrepreneurs and technologists — and then answer any questions they may ask. The judges will choose five teams to enter a second and final round of pitching to a fresh team of judges.

That panel of judges determines the overall winner, who will claim the largest Startup Battlefield prize in TechCrunch history — along with the Disrupt Cup, bragging rights and an enormous amount of investor and media interest.

Every moment of Startup Battlefield takes place in front of a live audience numbering in the thousands, and it’s also live-streamed around the world (and available later on demand) on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Every competing team receives an inordinate amount of exposure.

You’ll get even more exposure exhibiting in Startup Alley — our exhibition hall will showcase more than 1,200 early-stage startups — for all three days of the conference. It’s free for Startup Battlefield competitors, and it’s a huge networking opportunity.

And, of course, you can take advantage of Disrupt’s three content-packed days of exciting and inspiring tech programming, world-class speakers, Q&A Sessions, the Virtual Hackathon and world-class founder-to-investor networking made easy with the CrunchMatch platform.

So much potential. So many benefits. So little time left to apply. Disrupt San Francisco 2018 takes place on September 5-7 at Moscone Center West. You have just 24 hours left. Apply to Startup Battlefield right here.

Instagram’s shoppable tags are about to pop up in Stories. The company started testing the feature back in 2016 with a limited set of 20 partners. Since then it’s been a hit, expanding broadly to regular brand posts in the feed. Starting today, hitting a little shopping bag sticker in a Story will lead you to more details on the cute and/or dope thing that caught your eye and how to score it.

It’s a simple addition, but given the success of Stories it’s a potent one for brands that drive sales on the platform.

“With 300M using Instagram Stories everyday, people are increasingly finding new products from brands they love,” Instagram said in a press release.

“In a recent survey, Instagrammers said they often watch stories to stay in the-know with brands they’re interested in, get an insider view of products they like, and find out about new products that are relevant to them.”

As a longtime daily Instagram user, I used to be skeptical that people really engaged with brands like this and not just their friends or dogs they know. Now, after seeing my fiancée’s considerable #engagement around makeup brands running wildly popular accounts, Stories and all, I get it. Well, I don’t get it, but I get that some people get it and that the often vast and expertly crafted brand Stories are a logical evolution for a platform trying to get more users buying more stuff in the product categories that call to them.

Primary Venture Partners, a seed firm that invests exclusively in New York City startups, has raised a second fund of $100 million.

That focus is unusual — even Lerer Hippeau, a firm that’s closely associated with New York, makes some investments outside the region.

Primary’s Ben Sun (pictured above with his co-founder Brad Svrluga) said he’s betting, in part, on the New York workforce, particularly “the talent that came into the tech ecosystem post-financial crisis” — a shift that gave the city more talented entrepreneurs, plus a talent pool that they could draw from to build their companies.

After all, Sun noted that employment in New York’s tech sector grew by 57 percent between 2010 and 2016.

He also said that Primary (formerly known as High Peaks Venture Partners) offers more support and services than many seed firms — for example, Cat Hernandez, Primary’s partner focused on “human capital,” has been directly involved in hiring nearly 200 employees at the firm’s portfolio companies. Primary is able to offer that level of support with a team of 13 people, Sun said, by leveraging local connections and expertise.

The investment team has also grown, with the addition of Steve Schlafman as venture partner last month — Sun described him as “a super highly networked guy who has a really good nose for talent.” (When we talked to Schlafman prior to today’s announcement, he managed to dodge a question about the firm’s fundraising.)

“With a singular focus on this market, we were able to build an operating and portfolio impact model that provides concentrated, on-site support to our portfolio companies in a way that wouldn’t be possible across geographies,” Svrluga said in an emailed statement. Raising this second fund not only gives us the capital to continue to be a high-conviction seed round leader, but to continue to expand our Portfolio Impact team so that we can be an even better partner to our founders on their journey from Seed to Series A.”

Primary’s approach has resulted in some big successes already, like Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and Coupang (valued at $5 billion). Even beyond the most attention-grabbing deals, Sun pointed to the fact that of the 15 companies in the Primary portfolio that have tried to raise Series A rounds, 13 of them have succeeded.

As part of this announcement, VCs that Primary has worked with in the past also offered their praise, with Spark Capital’s Kevin Thau describing the firm as a team that “knows the New York Seed market better than anyone,” and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Eric Feng saying it’s “one of the top partners to startups in the city, providing true value guiding their portfolio companies from seed to Series A.”

While the firm raised significantly more this time around (Primary’s first fund was $60 million), Sun said it will remain focused on seed deals — with the occasional incubated startup, like dog food company Ollie. It will, however, be able to write slightly larger checks, say in the $1.5 million to $2 million range, with additional funding reserved for follow-on rounds.

“What we’re going to do with this $100 million is follow the same strategy,” Sun said.

Dreamit Ventures, a Philadelphia-based early stage investor and accelerator, announced it was moving into security today. To that end, it also announced it was bringing on Bob Stasio, an industry vet with roots in startups, IBM and work in the military and the NSA to run the new division.

The company is adding security to its existing verticals, health technology and urban technology. In fact, the news comes just weeks after announcing that Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik has invested $12 million in the company to move the urban vertical forward.

As for SecureTech, the company sees a big opening in this area as Fortune 500 organizations struggle with security in a constantly changing landscape. They want to find early stage startups wherever they are in the world with creative ideas on how to solve security problems.

Dreamit wants to connect these young startups with companies looking for solutions they can trust. Bringing in Stasio should help. His most recent job was Chief of Operations at IBM X-Force Command Center and prior to that he was global head of threat intelligence at Bloomberg and chief of operations branch at the Cyber Center, a branch of the NSA. That kind of background has built up connections and as his colleagues have moved into CISO positions at prominent companies, he can use his network to help his charges at Dreamit.

Stasio, who had his own attempts at the startup life, knows it’s not always easy for technically minded folks with a good idea to get in front of an executive at a big company and hit a home run. It takes coaching and practice.

“The really hot agile startups with really good tech tend to fail when they get in front of front of an enterprise CISO (chief information security officer) because they don’t know how to pitch. They don’t know the kinds of problems and trials and tribulations that go on at an enterprise. So we’re going to help coach them to get them to that point, so that their business model and what they’re doing, how they’re going to implement their solution is ready for a large company,” Stasio told TechCrunch.

The company is looking at security in three areas: logical, physical and social. Logical is the more traditional kind of cybersecurity software and hardware approaches with artificial intelligence, threat hunting and threat intelligence, but they also want to look at areas that are frequently ignored involving the physical side of security. That could include drones, imagery analysis, physical security of buildings, protection of people and places, VIP security and so forth. The social side is looking how to protect against dissemination of false information, a growing problem.

They run a couple of cohorts a year for each vertical. Typically they take no more than 10 companies and that’s out of about 300 applications per vertical, so it’s very selective, says Steve Barsh, partner and chief innovation officer at Dreamit. The companies go through a 14 week program, after which they can choose to write a check or not (and the company still gets the benefit of having been in the accelerator).

“They give us an investor right to write a check for up to $500,000 at a 20% discount, the 20% discount, which is the value we think of the 14 weeks of going through Dreamit. And we only get the discount if we write the check,” Barsh explained. Their goal is getting the participants to the next funding round, which is well aligned with the goal of the startup itself. If they get that round, then Dreamit writes a check too with the 20 percent discount.

They said being Philadelphia, allows them to bring their charges in for the program, and then allow them to present to executives in New York and DC, where a huge chunk of business is going to be.

TheSkimm, the female-led media company best known for its newsletter that summarizes, in plain language, the top news and highlights from the day before, is today launching a mobile app for Android devices. Previously available on the iPhone, theSkimm’s new app combines a mobile version of its newsletter, along with a calendar of important events, immediate updates on events happening now, weekly audio episodes focused on complex topics, and a new feature called “Text theSkimm.”

As you may have guessed by the name, Text theSkimm allows mobile app subscribers to text the company directly to receive information about important decisions they’re making, like those about investing, asking for a raise, or their healthcare options.

On this front, theSkimm competes with other self improvement-via-text services, including Shine, another female-founded startup which recently raised $5 million for its own suite of apps and services.

TheSkimm, meanwhile, is backed by $29 million in outside capital.

Founded by former TV news producers, Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg, what makes theSkimm compelling is the conversational tone it uses to discuss the key news events and provide the richer background on more complex topics. That makes it easier for people to understand what’s really going on in the world, and why it matters – even when they’re not good about turning on the TV news every day. (And really, can you blame ’em?)

The tone of the newsletter is not exactly full-on snark, but instead aims to be more humorous, as appropriate.

For example, today’s theSkimm was titled “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” with the lead story being, of course, President Trump’s meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

But it doesn’t joke its way through the explanations, which are concise summaries written using clear language and a shorter sentence structure. It’s very readable.

While theSkimm’s core product is its email newsletter – which is how the company got its start – it has later expanded to native apps and even audio programming.

The mobile app provides a home to the newsletter content, as well as theSkimm’s other news and information services.

Of particular use, is theSkimm’s Calendar which syncs up with your phone’s calendar so you won’t miss important events – like voting day or the start of the World Cup, for example.

The app also includes the texting service, Skimm Now’s breaking news, and Skimm Notes, topic-focused audio episodes that dive deeper into a single subject in 10 minutes or less.

However, unlike the newsletter, theSkimm’s app is not free. While you can try it out via a free preview, the full service is available as a $2.99 per month subscription, or $29.99 if you pay annually.

This isn’t the only source theSkimm’s revenue – other sources include native ads, affiliate, content licensing and distribution. However, subscriptions are proving to be a big revenue driver for mobile apps, as more consumers grow comfortable with the model popularized by streaming services, like Netflix.

In May, theSkimm closed on its $12 million Series C with the addition of notable, mostly female, investors joining, including Shonda Rhimes and Tyra Banks. At the time, the company had a reported seven million subscribers.

80 percent of its audience is female, and over half are millennials, theSkimm today says. Its highly engaged “Skimm’bassador” community has over 30,000 members, and 2 million follow theSkimm on social media.

While iOS is the preferred mobile platform among its user base, theSkimm says that 25 percent of its users are on Android. And that audience is growing – it doubled over the past 3 years, in fact.

That’s why the company needed to launch a native Android app.

The app quietly launched on June 11, ahead of today’s official announcement, but already has over 5,000 downloads on Google Play. The download is free with the option to preview the service before paying.

If you are a developer and you want to use the Google Maps Platform to power direction or other location-based features in your applications, things can quickly get expensive. Mapfit, which today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million funding round, promises to challenge Google on price while offering geocoding services and vector-based maps that are just as accurate as Google’s (and sometimes even better).

Among other things, Mapfit promises that it can figure out the correct entrances of buildings for 95 percent of addresses, making door-to-door navigation easier, for example. Mapfit also argues that it’s new vector-based maps are 95 percent smaller than the map tiles that other services often use. The service does offer those traditional tiles, too, though, and they include support for 3D buildings and public transit info.

The company was founded in 2015 and gets its data from a wide variety of sources, including both commercial and open data sets. It then takes this data and runs it through a number of steps to validate it and enhance it with its own algorithms for aligning addresses with pedestrian and vehicle entrances, for example.

Mapfits offers a free plan for non-commercial projects and developers who simply want to kick the service’s tires, as well as a $49/month ‘growth’ plan for startups that comes with 250,000 map views, 150,000 geocode requests and 150,000 directions requests. There is no limit to the number of mobile SDK and web users under this plan. For users who need more API requests, Mapfit charges $0.50 per 1,000 additional requests or users can opt for the $1,499/month enterprise plan which includes 5 million map views.

The company’s funding comes from a group of entrepreneurs and investors that include Cavalry Ventures, Weihua Yan (Diapers.com, Quidsi), Roderick Thompson (ePlanet Capital, Baidu, Skype), Auren Hoffman (Safegraph, Liveramp), Daniel Waterhouse (Balderton), Jeroen Seghers (Sourcepoint), Matias de Tezanos (Hoteles.com, PeopleFund) and Joost de Valk (Yoast).

Squarespace is launching its first email marketing product today.

CEO Anthony Casalena and Director of Product Natalie Gibralter both told me that the Squarespace platform has been gradually expanding beyond a simple website builder by adding things like e-commerce and analytics.

Gibralter said the goal is to turn Squarespace into an “all-in-one platform” for businesses, with email as “the first segue into a broader suite of marketing tools.”

There’s no shortage of email marketing products out there — not just standalone tools, but also email marketing options added to competing website builders like Weebly. But for Casalena and Gibralter, one of the main advantages is how Squarespace has integrated email marketing into the larger platform.

“We already have a lot of information about who’s been buying things from your site, we know if you have a blog … we can build all those touchpoints substantially better,” Casalena said. “It can be both simpler to use, easier to use and, you know, more on-point.”

It also seems that Squarespace has used what it learned on the website side to a straightforward email builder that nonetheless results in a slick, professional-looking message — which is what Gibralter ended up with after a few minutes of demoing the product for me.

The email builder includes customizable templates to start from, the ability to import content from your website or blog, and responsive layouts so that the emails will look good on desktop or mobile (not to mention a responsive design that allows you to compose or edit messages from your phone). It’s all managed from a central dashboard where you can see all your past campaigns, check their performance and reuse old layouts.

Plus, it’s integrated with the broader Squarespace analytics product, which means that you don’t just see which emails got opened, but which ones actually drove traffic and purchases on your site.

Gibralter said Squarespace is also helping businesses less obvious — but still important —ways like dropping in reminders about needed disclosures and options to ensure the emails are legally compliant, and saving colors for future use so that your emails reflect a consistent brand. (In fact, Gibralter said this feature is so useful that it will be added it to the website builder, too.)

At the same time, Gibralter described this as “really the beginning,” with additional features like customer segmentation and drip campaigns on the roadmap.

Squarespace says it’s starting to roll out email marketing to its existing customers at no cost. Starting in the fall, the company plans to begin selling this as an add-on to any subscription, with pricing starting at an additional $8 per month.

Looking to expand the footprint of its toolkit giving developers a unified database software that can work for both relational and post-relational databases, YugaByte has raised $16 million in a new round of funding.

For company co-founder, Kannan Muthukkaruppan, the new database software liberates developers from the risk of lock-in with any provider of cloud compute as the leading providers at Amazon, Microsoft and Google jockey for the pole position among software developers and reduces programming complexity.

“YugaByte DB makes it possible for organizations to standardize on a single, distributed database to support a multitude of workloads requiring both SQL and NoSQL capabilities. This speeds up the development of applications while at the same time reduces operational complexity and licensing costs,” said Kannan Muthukkaruppan, co-founder and chief executive of YugaByte, in a statement. 

Muthukkaruppan and his fellow co-founders know their way around database software. Alongside Karthik Ranganathan and Mikhail Bautin, Muthukkaruppan built the NoSQL platform that powered Facebook Messenger and its internal time series monitoring system. Before that Ranganthan and Muthukkaruppan had spent time working at Oracle . And after Facebook the two men were integral to the development of Nutanix’s hybrid infrastructure.

“These are tens of petabytes of data handling tens of millions of messages a day,” says Muthukkaruppan.

Rangantahan and Muthukkaruppan left Nutanix in 2016 to begin working on YugaByte’s database software. What’s important, founders and investors stress is that YugaByte breaks any chains that would bind software developers to a single platform or provider.

While developers can move applications from one cloud provider to another, they have to maintain multiple databases across these systems so that they inter-operate.

“YugaByte’s value proposition is strong for both CIOs, who can avoid cloud vendor lock-in at the database layer, and for developers, who don’t have to re-architect existing applications because of YugaByte’s built-in native compatibility to popular NoSQL and SQL interfaces,” said Deepak Jeevankumar,  a managing director at Dell Technologies Capital. 

Jeevankumar’s firm co-led the latest $16 million financing for YugaByte alongside previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners.

What attracted Lightspeed and Dell’s new investment arm was the support the company has from engineers in the trenches, like Ian Andrews, the vice president of products at Pivotal. “YugaByte is going to be interesting to any enterprise requiring an elastic data tier for their cloud-native applications,” Andrews said in a statement. “Even more so if they have a requirement to operate across multiple clouds or in a Kubernetes environment.” 

With new software infrastructure, portability is critical, since data needs to move between and among different software architectures.

The problem is that traditional databases have a hard time scaling, and new database technologies aren’t incredibly reliable when it comes to data consistency and durability. So developers have been using legacy database software from folks like Oracle and PostgreSQL for their systems of record and then new database software like Microsoft Azure’s CosmosDB, Amazon’s DynamoDB, Apache’s Cassandra (which the fellas used at Facebook), or MongoDB for distributed transactions for applications (things like linear write/read scalability, plus auto-rebalancing, sharding and failover).

With YugaByte, software developers get support for Apache Cassandra and Redis APIs, along with support for PostgreSQL, which the company touts as the best of both the relational and post-relational database worlds.

Now that the company has $16 million more in the bank, it can begin spreading the word about the benefits of its new database software, says Muthukkaruppan.

“With the additional funding we will accelerate investments in engineering, sales and customer success to scale our support for enterprises looking to bring their business-critical data to the cloud,” he said in a statement.