One of the many new features at TechCrunch Disrupt SF (Sept. 5-7) is the addition of a second stage and programming track at the show, which we’re calling The Next Stage. The goal of The Next Stage is to deliver more insights and wisdom to Disrupt SF attendees, especially founders, to help them navigate the startup odyssey better and faster. The Next Stage is also where much of the programming for the 14 tracks of Disrupt will take place.
Learn what’s next for The Lean Startup
Eric Ries is the author of the 2011 best seller, The Lean Startup, which has sold over a million copies and remains a must-read for aspiring founders who hope to keep the burn to a minimum. The Lean Startup helped familiarize the world with “pivots” and other features of early stage startup life, which in turn also helped investors place investments earlier than ever. Few understand that better than August Capital General Partner David Hornik, who has 20 years of venture investing experience, launched the first blog about venture capital, (aptly named Ventureblog), and teaches the Startup Garage class at Stanford Business School (which uses the lean startup methodology). They will discuss what’s changed (and what has not) for founders since The Lean Startup was published in 2011.
These two join a line-up of speakers we’ve already announced, including founder of AOL and Revolution Steve Case, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Forerunner Ventures founder Kirsten Green, and many more.
This is just some many great sessions you’ll get to see at Disrupt SF. Video of all the sessions from The Next Stage will be able available on demand only for Innovator, Insider, and Founder Pass holders. Time to get your pass now and take advantage of early bird pricing!
The genetic analysis and family tree website MyHeritage was breached last year by unknown actors, who exfiltrated the emails and hashed passwords of all 92 million registered users of the site. No credit card info, nor (what would be more disturbing) genetic data appears to have been collected.
The company announced the breach on its blog, explaining that an unnamed security researcher contacted them to warn them of a file he had encountered “on a private server,” tellingly entitled “myheritage.” Inside it were the millions of emails and hashed passwords.
Hashing passwords is a one-way encryption process allowing sensitive data to be stored easily, and although there are theoretically ways to reverse hashing, they involve immense amounts of computing power and quite a bit of luck. So the passwords are probably safe, but MyHeritage has advised all its users to change theirs regardless, and they should.
The emails are not fundamentally revealing data; billions have been exposed over the years through the likes of the Equifax and Yahoo breaches. They’re mainly damaging in connection with other data. For instance, the hackers could put 2 and 2 together by cross-referencing this list of 92 million with a list of emails whose corresponding passwords were known via some other breach. That’s why it’s good to use a password manager and have unique passwords for every site.
MyHeritage’s confidence that other data was not accessed appears to be for a good reason:
Credit card information is not stored on MyHeritage to begin with, but only on trusted third-party billing providers (e.g. BlueSnap, PayPal) utilized by MyHeritage. Other types of sensitive data such as family trees and DNA data are stored by MyHeritage on segregated systems, separate from those that store the email addresses, and they include added layers of security. We have no reason to believe those systems have been compromised.
Of course, until recently the company had no reason to believe the other system had been compromised, either. That’s one of those tricky things about cybersecurity. But we can do the company the credit of understanding from this statement that it has looked closely at its more sensitive servers and systems since the breach and found nothing.
Two-factor authentication was already in development, but the team is “expediting” its rollout, so if you’re a user, be sure to set that up as soon as it’s available.
A full report will likely take a while; the company is planning to hire an external security firm to look into the breach, and is working on notifying relevant authorities under U.S. laws and GDPR, among others.
I’ve asked MyHeritage for further comment and clarification on a few things and will update this post if I hear back.
Facebook users will no longer have their uploaded videos with copyrighted background music taken down thanks to a slew of deals with all the major record labels plus many indies.
Facebook is also starting to test a feature designed to steal users from teen sensation app Musically. Facebook’s new Lip Sync Live lets users pick a popular song to pretend to sing on a Facebook Live broadcast. Hundreds of songs will be available to start, including “Havana” by Camila Cabello, “Welcome to The Jungle” by Guns N Roses, and “God’s Plan” by Drake.
When users upload videos with music with the new rules in effect, they’ll be quickly notified if that song is allowed via the deals and fine to share, or if their video will be muted unless they submit a dispute to the copyright holder who then okays it through Facebook’s Rights Manager tool. Facebook will compensate artists and labels whose music is used, but it wouldn’t disclose the rates or whether they’re calculated by upload or video view.
The launch is separate from the Sound Collection feature Facebook announced in December that only lets users add sound effects or no-name music to their videos. Facebook won’t be offering a tool, at least not yet, that lets users select popular copyrighted music to add to their videos — a feature TechCrunch has been calling for and that was recently prototyped for Instagram.
That’s unfortunate, as most users don’t have the editing tools to add music before uploading a video, especially not from their phone. But at least if there’s a song playing on a stereo in the background, users won’t get their videos blocked like before. Luckily, Facebook says in the coming months it plans to “start testing options for adding the music you love to Facebook Stories.” That could use the same design as the Instagram feature we reported.
Instagram’s unlaunched music stickers prototype lets users add popular songs to their Stories.
Today’s announcement is a big step in right direction for Facebook as it seeks ways to encourage original sharing. A shaky, off-the-cuff video from a friend can be tough to watch in the feed, particularly if it’s longer than the 15 second clips people now add to their Stories. But with the right soundtrack, a boring clip becomes epic, or a nice one becomes truly sentimental. Music-equipped videos could boost watch time and engagement on Facebook without relying on viral pap the company has demoted in service of users’ mental well-being.
Facebook Vs Musically
Facebook has had a tough time keeping teens on its social network, as evidenced by declines in popularity amongst the demographic according Pew’s survey data. Though teens trying to look cool might say they use Facebook less than they actually do, the responses reveal a downward trend for the app amongst the youth.
One app that’s had no problem recruiting them is lip syncing app Musically . It’s rife with concerning, possibly Child Online Protection Act-violating videos of tween girls dancing to risqué pop songs. But the opportunity to perform without necessarily having singing talent and the easy to grasp content prompts have grown the app to 200 million registered and 60 million monthly active users.
Facebook wants to hook those kids as soon as they’re 13 so they become lucrative lifetime users. So Facebook is now testing Lip Sync Live in several markets. Users first go to broadcast Live, select the Lip Sync Live option, select a song, mouth the words while adding filters and effects during the stream, and then can permanently share the resulting video. The Live With feature for co-streaming with a friend lets people duet on their favorite jam. Viewers can tap on titling for the song and artist to follow that musician on Facebook, though I think there should be a way to tap through to hear the song on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube Music.
It’s going to be tough for Facebook to suddenly become cool enough for kids to enthusiastically lip sync, especially since it requires going Live which notifies their friends. That plea for attention could make some users too shy to strut their stuff on camera. Lip syncing might work better for static videos where people can be sure they looked good enough before sharing, or within Stories that friends have to actively go watch.
Music is one of the most core ways human share and connect. It’s actually surprising Facebook has stayed at arm’s-length from the record industry for so long.
iLike’s music streaming app was one of the most popular on v1 of Facebook’s platform, but the tech giant moved in a different direction. It also shut down landing tabs in 2012 that bands used to stream music from their Pages with apps like BandPage. And though Spotify got its big break in America through viral distribution in Facebook’s now defunct desktop sidebar ticker, Facebook never made a move to invest in or acquire the startup that’s since gone public.
At least, it’s good to see Facebook concentrating on the social side of music now that it has label deals in place rather than trying to build a Spotify competitor of its own. If it can legally build a way for anyone to add soundtracks to their videos, we might watch a lot more of them. Not only would that acclimate us to more video ads, but it could let friends express a different side of themselves with the emotional power of pop music.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a mature market with a clear market leader in Salesforce. It has a bunch other enterprise players like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP vying for position. SAP decided to take another shot today when it released a new business products suite called SAP C/4HANA. (Ya, catchy I know.)
SAP has taken these three pieces and packaged them together into a customer relationship management package. They see this term much more broadly than simply tracking a database of names and vital information on customers. They hope with these products to give their customers a way to provide consumer data protection, marketing, commerce, sales and customer service.
They see this approach as different, but it’s really more of what the other players are doing by packaging sales, service and marketing into a single platform. “The legacy CRM systems are all about sales; SAP C/4HANA is all about the consumer. We recognize that every part of a business needs to be focused on a single view of the consumer. When you connect all SAP applications together in an intelligent cloud suite, the demand chain directly fuels the behaviors of the supply chain,” CEO Bill McDermott said in a statement.
It’s interesting that McDermott goes after legacy CRM tools because his company has offered its share of them over the years, but its market share has been headed in the wrong direction. This new cloud-based package is designed to change that. If you can’t build it, you can buy it, and that’s what SAP has done here.
Brent Leary, owner at CRM Essentials, who has been watching this market for many years says that while SAP has a big back-office customer base in ERP, it’s going to be tough to pull customers back to SAP as a CRM provider. “I think their huge base of ERP customers provides them with an opportunity to begin making inroads, but it will be tough as mindshare for CRM/Customer Engagement has moved away from SAP,” he told TechCrunch.
He says that it will be important with this new product to find its niche in a defined market. “It will be imperative going forward for SAP find spots to “own” in the minds of corporate buyers in order to optimize their chances of success against their main competitors,” he said.
It’s obviously not going to be easy, but SAP has used its cash to buy some companies and give it another shot. Time will tell if it was money well spent.
Phantom Auto, a platform that can remotely control autonomous vehicles if something goes wrong, has partnered with Einride, Transdev and NEVS, formerly known as Saab Automobile.
Phantom Auto’s tech enables a remote driver to take control of an autonomous vehicle in the event the car encounters something it can’t handle on its own. The plan for NEVS is to use Phantom Auto’s technology to better ensure the safe deployment of electric, autonomous vehicles.
“Our AVs must be able to drive from any point A to any point B, which means driving through all edge cases they experience on the road, such as inclement weather, road work, and any other road obstructions,” NEVS CEO Stefan Tilk said in a statement. “Phantom Auto’s teleoperation safety technology ensures that passengers in our vehicles can safely and efficiently drive through any edge case, and that’s why I am excited and proud to call them NEVS’ partner.”
Phantom Auto, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., was founded just last year.
If content creators want to sell pricier monthly content subscriptions, offering stickers, pins, signed photos, or t-shirts can convince fans to pay a higher fee and keep them loyal with a physical connection. That’s why patronage platform Patreon just acquired Kit, a startup building a merchandise logistics backend so creators don’t have to fiddle with spreadsheets and stuff envelopes themselves.
“Over 60 percent of today of Patreon creators either want to or are already delivering some kind of physical merchandise” says Patreon’s VP of Product, Wyatt Jenkins. Together, they could help Patreon creators develop merch items that fans subscribe to get ahold of, potentially shelling out for $10 or $20 per month tiers rather than basic $1 or $5 online content-only tiers.
The deal could also help Patreon stay ahead of YouTube and Facebook, which are encroaching on its subscription patronage model. Patreon now has 2 million patrons backing 100,000 creators. It paid out $350 million over its first 5 years through 2017, and expects to send creators another $300 million in 2018, while taking a 5 percent cut.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 90 percent of Kit team, mostly product and engineering talent, will join San Francisco-based Patreon though they’ll stay put in NYC as a satellite office the rest of the year. Kit had raised $2.5 million from Social Capital, Expa, #Angels, Precursor, and Stanford’s StartX, as well as angels like Ellen Pao and Slack’s April Underwood.
“When we think about merch, it’s never been fully about the thing — the sticker or the t-shirt — there’s this relationship.This human-to-human connection” says Kit co-founder and CEO Camille Hearst.
Kit was in the process of pivoting towards merchandise logistics and raising a Series A when it began talks with Patreon, leading to the acquisition. The startup was originally built as a way for social media stars and online celebrities to earn affilliate marketing fees by recommending products to fans through Kit, which took a cut of the referral dollars. Some creators showing off their “Kit” of camera equipment, sportswear, or caffeination supplies were earning tens of thousands of dollars.
“We were at a stage where everything was going in the right direction. We had seen strong growth in monthly active users and how much creators were making” Hearst says, noting Kit had reached $15 million in gross merchandise value. “It just seemed like we would be able to accelerate what we were doing by joining with Patreon. Merch is very transaction focused compared with a subscription.” Hearst explains, touting the high lifetime value of recurring payments over one-off purchases. “You can help creators earn a lot more money if you use merch to sell subscriptions.”
The pre-Kit Patreon team
The plan at Patreon is to build out a new open merchandise provider platform. Creators will be able to choose between a variety of merch partners ranging from those that turn their existing logo into physical goods to those that will design items based on merely vague ideas from the star. But in the meantime, Kit won’t be shutting down or ditching its affilliate program because “we don’t want to turn off any revenue streams” that creators depend on, Hearst promises.
“Right now creators have to choose between different merch partners” without collective bargaining power or enoug data to know what works, says Jenkins. “We can have set pricing for all those merch partners that will be lower than they can get on their own”, while alleviating creators from having to juggle spreadsheets of who gets what and mailing it all themselves.
The plan for Patreon to monetize merch is a little less clear, though Jenkins says “We’re going to grow the pie and we want a piece of the growth.” The idea is that using Patreon’s merchandise platform will incur extra fees beyond the skimpy 5 percent it earns on subscriptions. If adding a merch item significantly boosts the subscriber number for a certain tier, Patreon will take a TBD cut. For comparsion, YouTube takes a much more hands-off approach, merely listing suggested merchandise partners to wrok with.
“We want creators to make a living. That’s not a side hustle. You have to make more money year over year, You have to be able to do things like buy a house or get healthcare” Jenkins concludes. “All the other platforms are ‘give us your content and we’ll give you a little side change’. That kind of led us down the mech path. Creators are were begging for merch.”
Highfive, a Redwood City-based startup, offers businesses an integrated video conferencing service through its own custom meeting room hardware. While Highfive has been quite successful in selling its service and hardware online, the company today announced that it is adding Best Buy and Ingram Micro as distribution partners in an effort to expand its reach to a wider audience.
Today’s announcement follows the company’s $32 million Series C round in February. That round was led by Dimension Data, a global technology integrator owned by Japan’s NTT Group. As part of this deal, Highfive signed a distribution deal with Dimension Data and it’s clear that company’s focus right now is on getting more of these deals on the books.
In the enterprise world that Highfive is targeting, getting distribution from Ingram Micro is obviously a big deal. The company has 155 distribution centers and works with over 200,000 resellers. And it’s through Ingram Micro that Best Buy for Business will also now offer Highfive’s products.
Since Highfive typically makes access to its services and hardware available through a subscription, this will be a slightly different sales process than usual, but to support its resellers, Highfive is launching an official channel program to help dealers sell its products effectively.
Pricing remains the same, though, no matter whether you go through Highfive’s online store or a reseller. Software-only plans start at $9.99 per month and user (which is paid annually) and then you can add the hardware on top of that for $99 per month (also paid annually) without any upfront cost.
“As the business demand for a conferencing platform that can manage every use case grows, our channel partner initiatives are paramount to equipping enterprises with the solution they need to improve team communication and workflow,” said Bobby Marhamat, CRO of Highfive. “Our certified partners are more than just a resource to deliver Highfive, we want to empower them with everything they need to provide customers full service—from purchase to deployment to maintenance.”
The fact that Microsoft is buying GitHub has left a lot of developers with a deep feeling of unease and a lot of them are now looking for alternatives. One of those is GitLab and that company has decided to strike the iron while it’s hot. To attract even more developers to its platform, GitLab today announced that its premium self-hosted GitLab Ultimate plan and its hosted Gold plan are now available for free to open source projects and educational institutions.
“Most education and open source projects don’t have access to enhanced security or performance management tools for their software projects,” GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij told me. “At GitLab, we are happy to have achieved a level of success that allows us to extend the full set of features to these important communities by offering GitLab Ultimate & GitLab Gold plans for free.”
The interest in moving to GitLab is very real as the company tells me that it saw more than 14,300 unique visitors to its site after the GitHub news was announced yesterday and that those developers opened more than 100,000 new repositories on GitLab.com. Most of these surely tried GitLab’s free but limited Core plan, which includes all of the basics but which isn’t really suited for larger projects.
The Gold and Ultimate offerings, however, would typically cost $99 per user per month and include virtually every feature you can think of, including all the basics you want from a code repository up to tools for publishing roadmaps, dependency and container scanning, Kubernetes cluster monitoring and, in the near future, tools for license and portfolio management.
One caveat here is that the free Gold and Ultimate plans do not include support. Developers and open source projects that do want support, though, can still buy it at $4.95 per user and month.
The other limitation is that this applies to schools but not individual students. “To reduce the administrative burden for GitLab only educational institutions can apply on behalf of their students,” the company says. “If you’re a student and your educational institution does not apply you can use public projects on GitLab.com with all functionality, use private projects with the free functionality, or pay yourself.”
Scooter startup Bird, which is headquartered in Venice, Calif., is looking to expand into Europe, according to a new job posting. The job is for a general manager based in Europe to lead market management and “raise the opportunities and concerns of the market and set the priorities that will grow Bird in your home country,” the listing states.
Responsibilities include “the successful launch of Bird in your home country in Europe” and expanding Bird by “launching new cities within the region.” Another new job listing seeks an executive assistant based in Amsterdam. TechCrunch has also heard Bird has brought on an executive to lead operations in Israel, but Bird says it doesn’t comment on launch plans.
Hot on the heels of announcing that it has partnered with France’s BPCE Groupe, TransferWise could be about to unveil another partnership with a bank. According to sources, the international money transfer service and European unicorn is working with the fast-growing with U.K. challenger bank Monzo.
The tie-in will likely see TransferWise functionality offered within Monzo’s mobile banking app, courtesy of the TransferWise API. It will give Monzo customers the ability to send money in various supported currencies at the ‘mid market’ rate in addition to TransferWise’s low and transparent fees.
Along with the newly-announced partnership with BPCE Groupe — which won’t ship until next year — TransferWise is also working with Estonia’s LHV, and German challenger bank N26 (which also has plans to launch in the U.K.).
Meanwhile, if confirmed, we can probably chalk this up as a decent win for TransferWise, which is best known for its consumer-facing international money transfer app, but has always had ambitions of being a broader platform play.
In fact, the company is attempting to position itself as entirely agnostic on how customers access the service: the more money moving via its infrastructure, the better, whilst economies of scale also mean potentially lower fees on specific routes.
This can be done directly via the TransferWise app and service for both consumers and SMEs, via third-party integrations, such as with incumbent and challenger banks, or via the company’s own Borderless account. In all three cases, TransferWise generates revenue, regardless.
I’ve reached out to both TransferWise and Monzo for comment and will update this post if and when I hear back.
