Year: 2018

Microsoft today announced its plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in stock. Unsurprisingly, that sent a few shock waves through the developer community, which still often eyes Microsoft with considerable unease. During a conference call this morning, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, incoming GitHub CEO (and Xamarin founder) Nat Friedman and GitHub co-founder and outgoing CEO Chris Wanstrath laid out the plans for GitHub’s future under Microsoft.

The core message everybody on today’s call stressed was that GitHub will continue to operate as an independent company. That’s very much the approach Microsoft took with its acquisition of LinkedIn, but to some degree, it’s also an admission that Microsoft is aware of its reputation among many of the developers who call GitHub their home. GitHub will remain an open platform that any developer can plug into and extend, Microsoft promises. It’ll support any cloud and any device.

Unsurprisingly, while the core of GitHub won’t change, Microsoft does plan to extend GitHub’s enterprise services and integrate them with its own sales and partner channels. And Nadella noted that the company will use GitHub to bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services “to new audiences.”

With Nat Friedman taking over as CEO, GitHub will have a respected technologist at the helm. Microsoft’s acquisition and integration of Xamarin has, at least from the outside, been a success (and Friedman himself always seems very happy about the outcome when I talk to him), so I think this bodes quite well for GitHub. After joining Microsoft, Friedman ran the developer services team at the company. Wanstrath, who only took over the CEO role again after its last CEO was ousted after harassment scandal at the company, had long said that he wanted to step down and take a more active product role. And that’s what’s happening now that Friedman is taking over. Wanstrath will become a technical fellow and work on “strategic software initiatives” at Microsoft.

During today’s call, Friedman also stressed Microsoft’s commitment to keeping GitHub as open as it is today — but he also plans to expand the service and its community. “We want to bring more developers and more capabilities to GitHub, he said. “Because as a network and as a group of people in a community, GitHub is stronger, the bigger it is.”

As for the product itself, Friedman noted that everything GitHub does should be about making a developer’s life easier. And to get started, that’ll mean making developing in the cloud easier. “We think broadly about the new and compelling types of ways that we can integrate cloud services into GitHub,” he noted. “And this doesn’t just apply to our cloud. GitHub is an open platform. So we have the ability for anyone to plug their cloud services into GitHub, and make it easier for you to go from code to cloud. And it extends beyond the cloud as well. Code to cloud. code to mobile, code to edge device, code to IoT. Every workflow that a developer wants to pursue, we will support.”

Another area the company will work on is the GitHub Marketplace. Microsoft says that it will offer all of its developer tools and services in the GitHub Marketplace.

And unsurprisingly, VS Code, Microsoft’s free and open source code editor, will get deeply integrated GitHub support.

“Our vision is really all about empowering developers and creating a home where you can use any language, any operating system, any cloud, any device for every developer, whether your student, a hobbyist, a large company, a startup or anything in between. GitHub is the home for all developers,” said Friedman.

It’s unclear whether all of these commitments today will easy developers’ fears of losing GitHub as a relatively neutral third-party in the ecosystem.

Nadella, who is surely aware of this, addressed this directly today. “We recognize the responsibility we take on with this agreement,” he said. “We are committed to being stewards of the GitHub community, which will retain its developer-first ethos operate independently and remain an open platform. We will always listen to develop a feedback and invest in both fundamentals as well as new capability once the acquisition closes.

In his prepared remarks, Nadella also stressed Microsoft’s heritage as a developer-centric company and that is it already the most active organization on GitHub. But more importantly, he addressed Microsoft’s role in the open source community, too. “We have always loved developers, and we love open source developers,” he said. “We’ve been on a journey ourselves with open source and the open source community. Today, we are all in with open source. We are active in the open source ecosystem. We contribute to open source project and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open-sourced when it comes to our commitment to all source judges, by the actions we have taken in the recent past our actions today and in the future.”

Apple is holding a keynote today at the San Jose Convention Center, and the company is expected to unveil new updates for iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS and maybe also some new hardware. At 10 AM PT (1 PM in New York, 6 PM in London, 7 PM in Paris), you’ll be able to watch the event as the company is streaming it live.

Apple is likely to talk about some new features for all its software platforms — WWDC is a developer conference after all. Rumor has it that Apple could also unveil some MacBook Pro update with new Intel processors.

If you have the most recent Apple TV, you can download the Apple Events app in the App Store. It lets you stream today’s event and rewatch old events. Users with old Apple TVs can simply turn on their devices. Apple is pushing out the “Apple Events” channel so that you can watch the event.

And if you don’t have an Apple TV, the company also lets you live-stream the event from the Apple Events section on its website. This video feed works in Safari and Microsoft Edge. And for the first time, Apple says that the video should also work in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

So to recap, here’s how you can watch today’s Apple event:

• Safari on the Mac or iOS.
• Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.
• Maybe Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
• An Apple TV gen 4 with the Apple Events app in the App Store.
• An Apple TV gen 2 or 3, with the Apple Events channel that arrives automatically right before the event.

Of course, you also can read TechCrunch’s live blog if you’re stuck at work and really need our entertaining commentary track to help you get through your day. We have a big team in the room this year.

It’s been a busy year in delivery robot land.

Starship Technologies sounded the starting gun to bring autonomous delivery vehicles to market with a $17.2 million round led by Daimler back in January 2017. Then in January this year the Mountain View, Calif.-based company Nuro, raised the curtain on its own vision for robo-delivery with a whopping $92 million in funding. Meanwhile, upstart Robomart has its own notion for delivery vehicles that it unveiled at CES. And not to be outdone, everyone’s favorite Chinese retail powerhouse, Alibaba, announced its own self-driving delivery vehicle.

Now, there’s Boxbot, the still-stealthy startup developing autonomous delivery somethings, which has picked up new cash as the race to build delivery bots rolls on.

Boxbot is a latecomer in the field. The Oakland-based company boasts impressive pedigrees from its founders — former Tesla engineer Austin Oehlerking and Mark Godwin, an entrepreneur who was working on improving logistics services through machine learning before he was acqui-hired by Uber.

As part of the new $7.5 million round, which was led by Artiman Ventures with participation from Toyota AI Ventures, Boxbot’s bulking up its executive team. The company poached Steve Sanchez from Amazon Logistics, where he was working on Amazon Flex, Amazon’s crowdsourced delivery service.

The investment is also the first in an autonomous delivery company for Toyota AI Ventures, and one of at least five the firm has made since its launch in 2017.

For the last few years, automakers have spent several millions launching investment funds to tap startup expertise around technologies of autonomous vehicles.

In January, Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi launched the $1 billion Alliance Ventures fund to invest in new automotive technologies. The firm has made $50 million in commitments already to the Sinovation Ventures fund in China and the Maniv Mobility investment fund — focused on mobility — in Israel. Volvo has its own Cars Tech Fund, to invest in startups focused on new mobility technology and BMW is investing $500 million in autonomous vehicles through its iVentures fund.

These commitments are part of a broader acknowledgement from the world’s biggest automakers that their industry is changing faster than their internal research and development teams can address.

The delivery dilemma

Delivery is emerging as a crucial service in the new world of autonomous mobility. From the dream of autonomous long haul trucking to last mile delivery to personal transportation, companies are scrambling to develop new technology. McKinsey predicts that autonomous vehicles will make up 85% of last mile deliveries by 2025. That’s a huge slice of a massive market, that Toyota AI Ventures managing director Jim Adler called “a global problem that McKinsey & Company priced at more than $80 billion in 2016.”

With a market that large, there’s no wonder it’s so tantalizing a problem for automakers of all stripes to try and solve.

“Over the next few years, self-driving vehicles will transform the last-mile, making it cheaper to make deliveries and easier to receive them,” said Brian Wilcove, a partner at Artiman Ventures and investor in Boxbot.

And Toyota’s Adler sees Boxbot as an extension of the technologies that have solved the problem of autonomy inside warehouses at companies like Amazon.

“Logistics automation within warehouses has made remarkable progress in the last decade due to advances in robotics and automated interfaces that streamline interactions between human and supply chains. An inflection point came in 2012 when Amazon bought Kiva which put them on a path to automate their fulfillment centers,” Adler wrote in a blog post. “The same autonomous technologies (i.e., sensors, perception, prediction, planning) used to pack boxes in the warehouse are now being pressed into the service of delivering those packages that last mile to your door  — the most complex and expensive leg of the supply chain.”

 

As the developer community prepares for Apple to unveil its latest software efforts at the company’s WWDC keynote later this morning, there are a younger subset of student developers feverishly roaming about excited to see what they can build next too.

WWDC is a pretty pricey affair at $1,599 per ticket. Like some other tech companies, Apple has opted to make it a bit easier for students to attend their conference. They’ve done so through a scholarship where younger developers can submit applications and, if selected, get into the event for free with their lodging paid for as well.

The more than 350 scholarship recipients this year represented 42 different countries and 34 languages. This year, those students got another added perk as their regular agenda was interrupted by a trip to Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus and a meet-and-greet with CEO Tim Cook. Later, the exec tweeted a video of what some of the students were working on, saying, “Nothing inspires us more than fresh ideas.”

I had the chance to sit down with a few of these young attendees, the youngest of whom was 16 years old (though students as young as 13 could apply), and chat about some of the things that they were building.

“This is my third year at WWDC,” Nathan Flurry, 19, told TechCrunch.”I grew up in a very rural community and I rarely ever left the town, so WWDC was like the first time I got to meet people who cared about the same thing I did.”

As part of the application, students had to build and submit an interactive Swift playground that could be experienced in a few minutes. Flurry built a visual programming language powered by Apple Pencil interactions.

Another student I chatted with, Joseph Lou, 16, submitted a project for the scholarship that was aiming to recreate the system which the late Stephen Hawking used to communicate. “The app that I built for this scholarship was actually my first app and it was also my first time working with Swift,” Lou said.

It was clear that all of these exceedingly bright teens were also working on some pretty big projects of their own. Gabrielle Ecanow, 18, is working on an app called Study Buddy that allows students to coordinate tutoring and studying. Roland Horváth, 17, has built several apps, the latest of which is Try Not to Smile, which plays a bunch of funny videos for users and utilizes the iPhone’s front camera to see how long they can make it without cracking a smile.

Harish Yerra, 16, built an app called Greeta that allows users to turn hand-written notes into greeting cards.

“I started programming when I was 12, and I just thought it would be super cool to build an iOS app,” Yerra told TechCrunch. “I’d say WWDC 2016 was a major breaking point because that’s when I actually met a couple of my best friends and we went on to build an app…”

As the group heads into the conference starting Monday, many of them are focused on using the opportunity to connect with other developers and see what they can build next.

“I come back for the connections,” Flurry said. “The keynote is great, I love being here and it’s cool to see it, but I really love being around all of the engineers and meeting other developers who share a passion.”

Walmart’s ongoing push to cut away unprofitable or slow-growing international operations, to shore up its resources to compete against Amazon at home and in Asia on digital fronts, had another development today. The world’s largest retailer today announced that it has finalised a deal to sell 80 percent of its business in Brazil to private equity firm Advent International, with Walmart keeping the remaining 20 percent.

The deal has been in the works for months and is expected to close later this year.

Walmart and Advent are not disclosing the terms of the deal (we are asking) but Walmart did note in a statement that it would record a non-cash net loss of $4.5 billion in Q2 as a result.

“A significant portion of the net loss is due to the recognition of cumulative foreign currency translation losses and the final loss could fluctuate significantly due to changes in currency exchange rates up to the date of close,” noted Walmart.

Although Brazil represents the biggest single market in Latin America, the company has found it a struggle to grow that business substantially and last quarter said that it would wind down its first-party e-commerce business in Brazil, too. “Walmart is committed to building strong, resilient businesses that continuously adapt to local customers’ needs in a rapidly changing world,” said Enrique Ostale, EVP and CEO of Walmart UK, Latin America and Africa, in a statement. “We will retain a stake in Walmart Brazil and continue to share our global retail expertise, giving our Brazil business the best opportunity for long-term growth, providing opportunities for associates and low prices for customers.”

Advent is a prolific investor and controls a number of businesses in Brazil, including many retail companies, and the idea appears to be to use some of that to expand the operation in ways that Walmart hadn’t managed to do on its own.

“We have been in Brazil for over 20 years and are excited about this partnership with one of the country’s leading retailers,” said Patrice Etlin, a Managing Partner at Advent International in Brazil, in a statement. “We believe that with our local market knowledge and retail expertise we can position the company to generate significant results and reach new levels of success in Brazil. We plan to invest in the business, work with the Walmart Brazil management team, associates, Walmart and our industry advisors to create a more agile and modern company to accelerate its development and improve the customer experience.”

Walmart stepping back from its Brazil efforts comes at the same time as it is stepping up in another so-called BRIC economy.

The divestment comes just weeks after Walmart announced that it would be taking a majority stake in Flipkart, the largest online retailer in India, its largest deal to date. To double down on growth in Asia and also to compete better against Amazon in online retail globally, Walmart is taking a 77 percent stake in the Indian startup for $16 billion. Just before that, Walmart had announced that it would be selling a majority of its holdings in Asda, its UK business, to local rival Sainsbury’s. Unlike the Brazil deal, that Asda divesture will net Walmart about $4 billion.

After a week of rumors, Microsoft today confirmed that it has acquired GitHub, the popular Git-based code sharing and collaboration service. The price of the acquisition was $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. GitHub raised $350 million and we know that the company was valued at about $2 billion in 2015. Microsoft expects the acquisition to close by the end of the year, barring any regulatory roadblocks.

Former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman (and now Microsoft corporate vice president) will become GitHub’s CEO. GitHub funder and former CEO Chris Wanstrath will become a Microsoft technical fellow and work on strategic software initiatives. Wanstrath had retaken his CEO role after his co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned following a harassment investigation in 2014.

The fact that Microsoft is installing a new CEO for GitHub is a clear sign that the company’s approach to integrating GitHub will be similar to hit it is working with LinkedIn. “GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries,” a Microsoft spokesperson told us.

GitHub says that as of March 2018, there were 28 million developers in its community, and 85 million code repositories, making it the largest host of source code globally and a cornerstone of how many in the tech world build software.

But despite its popularity with enterprise users, individual developers and open source projects, GitHub has never turned a profit and chances are that the company decided that an acquisition was preferable over trying to IPO.

GitHub’s main revenue source today is paid accounts, which allows for private repositories and a number of other features that enterprises need, with pricing ranging from $7 per user per month to $21/user/month. Those building public and open source projects can use it for free.

While numerous large enterprises use GitHub as their code sharing service of choice, it also faces quite a bit of competition in this space thanks to products like GitLab and Atlassian’s Bitbucket, as well as a wide range of other enterprise-centric code hosting tools.

Microsoft is acquiring GitHub because it’s a perfect fit for its own ambitions to be the go-to platform for every developer, and every developer need, no matter the platform.

Microsoft has long embraced the Git protocol and is using it in its current Visual Studio Team Services product, which itself used to compete with GitHub’s enterprise service. Knowing GitHub’s position with developers, Microsoft has also leaned on the service quite a bit itself, too and some in the company already claim it is the biggest contributor to GitHub today.

Yet while Microsoft’s stance toward open source has changed over the last few years, many open source developers will keep a very close look at what the company will do with GitHub after the acquisition . That’s because there is a lot of distrust of Microsoft in this cohort, which is understandable given Microsoft’s history.

In fact, TechCrunch received a tip on Friday, which noted not only that the deal had already closed, but that open source software maintainers were already eyeing up alternatives and looking potentially to abandon GitHub in the wake of the deal. Some developers (not just those working in open source) were not wasting time even to wait for a confirmation of the deal before migrating.

While GitHub is home to more than just open source software, if such a migration came to pass, it would be a very bad look both for GitHub and Microsoft. And, it would a particularly ironic turn, given the very origins of Git: the versioning control system was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 when he was working on development of the Linux kernel, in part as a response to a previous system, BitKeeper, changing its terms away from being free to use.

The new Microsoft under CEO Satya Nadella strikes us as a very different company from the Microsoft of ten years ago — especially given that the new Microsoft has embraced open source — but it’s hard to forget its earlier history of trying to suppress Linux.

“Microsoft is a developer-first company, and by joining forces with GitHub we strengthen our commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation,” said Nadella in today’s announcement. “We recognize the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world’s most pressing challenges.”

Yet at the same time, it’s worth remembering that Microsoft is now a member of the Linux Foundation and regularly backs a number of open source projects. And Windows now has the Linux subsystem while VS Code, the company’s free code editing tool is open source and available on GitHub, as are .NET Core and numerous other Microsoft-led projects.

And many in the company were defending Microsoft’s commitment to GitHub and its principles, even before the deal was announced.

Still, you can’t help but wonder how Microsoft might leverage GitHub within its wider business strategy, which could see the company build stronger bridges between GitHub and Azure, its cloud hosting service, and its wide array of software and collaboration products. Microsoft is no stranger to ingesting huge companies. One of them, LinkedIn, might be another area where Microsoft might explore synergies, specifically around areas like recruitment and online tutorials and education.

The beauty of serverless computing services like AWS Lambda is that they abstract away the server itself. That enables developers to create applications without worrying about the underlying infrastructure, but it also creates a set of new problems. Without a static server, how do you debug a program that’s running? It’s a challenge that Israeli startup Rookout has solved in its latest release.

The company has achieved this by providing a way to mark the serverless code with “breakpoints.” Rookout can then collect developer-defined information about the serverless code, allowing them to track issues even while the application is live running in a serverless environment.

This ability to run a trace, which is common in traditional applications, is much more difficult in a serverless one because there is no permanent underlying machine on which the application is running, says Rookout CEO Or Weis.

“Specifically with serverless, it is extremely hard to predict how your software will behave in that new environment [because] it’s extremely hard to know where software is running and [it has been] almost impossible to see how it’s behaving in production,” Weiss explained.
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He said the only way to solve that to this point has been writing more code in the form of log lines and SDK calls, which creates a whole administrative layer that Rookout wanted to eliminate from the process. By providing an interface to see what’s happening inside the code, the company is giving developers a way to debug live code running in a serverless environment in the same fashion they have debugged more traditional applications.

They can share this information with a myriad of popular adjacent tools including application performance management (APM) like New Relic, log management like Splunk or alerting like PagerDuty. They can also use it to simply go back in and fix the code issue if that’s what’s required.

While serverless computing isn’t truly serverless, there isn’t a dedicated server running the application. Instead, the vendor provides the required amount of server resources based on a particular event trigger. When that event happens, the code runs and the customer gets charged. This is in stark contrast to traditional development where you allocated a server to run the application and you pay for it, regardless of whether you use it or not.

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Rookout Lambda debugging demo:

PlayVS, the startup building esports infrastructure at the high school level, has today announced the close of a $15 million Series A funding round. The financing was led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investor Science, as well as CrossCut Ventures, Coatue Management, Cross Culture Ventures, the San Francisco 49ers, Nas, Dollar Shave Club founder Michael Dubin, Twitch cofounder Kevin Lin, and others.

PlayVS first publicly launched out of the LA-based Science startup studio in April. The company partnered with the NFHS, the equivalent of the NCAA for high school-level sports, to build out leagues, rules and more around high school esports.

Most high school sports are governed by the NFHS, which writes the rules, hires referees, schedules seasons and determines the format of playoffs and state championships. That same infrastructure might carry over from one high school sport to another, but esports represents a new challenge for the NFHS.

PlayVS brings to market a platform that schedules games, helps schools hold tryouts and form teams, and pulls in stats real-time from games thanks to partnerships with game publishers.

In October, PlayVS will launch its inaugural season, bringing organized esports to more than 18 states and approximately 5 million students across 5,000 high schools.

As esports continue to grow, colleges and professional organizations have already started investing in scholarship programs and pro teams respectively. But whereas other high-level teams look at high school athletes for recruiting, the same infrastructure has not yet been put into place for esports.

PlayVS wants to change that. The new round of funding will go towards expanding the product and the team to eventually put PlayVS in every high school across the country. The company has yet to announce which schools will participate and which games will be available during the first season, but PlayVS has confirmed that the games will be PC-based and will come from the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena, Fighting and Sports genres.

Back in 2013, Yelp was a 9-year old company built on a set of internal systems. It was coming to the realization that running its own data centers might not be the most efficient way to run a business that was continuing to scale rapidly. At the same time, the company understood that the tech world had changed dramatically from 2004 when it launched and it needed to transform the underlying technology to a more modern approach.

That’s a lot to take on in one bite, but it wasn’t something that happened willy-nilly or overnight says Jason Yellen, SVP of engineering at Yelp . The vast majority of the company’s data was being processed in a massive Python repository that was getting bigger all the time. The conversation about shifting to a microservices architecture began in 2012.

The company was also running the massive Yelp application inside its own datacenters, and as it grew it was increasingly becoming limited by long lead times required to procure and get new hardware online. It saw this was an unsustainable situation over the long-term and began a process of transforming from running a huge monolithic application on-premises to one built on microservices running in the cloud. It was a quite a journey.

The data center conundrum

Yellen described the classic scenario of a company that could benefit from a shift to the cloud. Yelp had a small operations team dedicated to setting up new machines. When engineering anticipated a new resource requirement, they had to give the operations team sufficient lead time to order new servers and get them up and running, certainly not the most efficient way to deal with a resource problem, and one that would have been easily solved by the cloud.

“We kept running into a bottleneck, I was running a chunk of the search team [at the time] and I had to project capacity out to 6-9 months. Then it would take a few months to order machines and another few months to set them up,” Yellen explained. He emphasized that the team charged with getting these machines going was working hard, but there were too few people and too many demands and something had to give.

“We were on this cusp. We could have scaled up that team dramatically and gotten [better] at building data centers and buying servers and doing that really fast, but we were hearing a lot of AWS and the advantages there,” Yellen explained.

To the cloud!

They looked at the cloud market landscape in 2013 and AWS was the clear leader technologically. That meant moving some part of their operations to EC2. Unfortunately, that exposed a new problem: how to manage this new infrastructure in the cloud. This was before the notion of cloud-native computing even existed. There was no Kubernetes. Sure, Google was operating in a cloud-native fashion in-house, but it was not really an option for most companies without a huge team of engineers.

Yelp needed to explore new ways of managing operations in a hybrid cloud environment where some of the applications and data lived in the cloud and some lived in their data center. It was not an easy problem to solve in 2013 and Yelp had to be creative to make it work.

That meant remaining with one foot in the public cloud and the other in a private data center. One tool that helped ease the transition was AWS Direct Connect, which was released the prior year and enabled Yelp to directly connect from their data center to the cloud.

Laying the groundwork

About this time, as they were figuring out how AWS works, another revolutionary technological change was occurring when Docker emerged and began mainstreaming the notion of containerization. “That’s another thing that’s been revolutionary. We could suddenly decouple the context of the running program from the machine it’s running on. Docker gives you this container, and is much lighter weight than virtualization and running full operating systems on a machine,” Yellen explained.

Another thing that was happening was the emergence of the open source data center operating system called Mesos, which offered a way to treat the data center as a single pool of resources. They could apply this notion to wherever the data and applications lived. Mesos also offered a container orchestration tool called Marathon in the days before Kubernetes emerged as a popular way of dealing with this same issue.

“We liked Mesos as a resource allocation framework. It abstracted away the fleet of machines. Mesos abstracts many machines and controls programs across them. Marathon holds guarantees about what containers are running where. We could stitch it all together into this clear opinionated interface,” he said.

Pulling it all together

While all this was happening, Yelp began exploring how to move to the cloud and use a Platform as a Service approach to the software layer. The problem was at the time they started, there wasn’t really any viable way to do this. In the buy versus build decision making that goes on in large transformations like this one, they felt they had little choice but to build that platform layer themselves.

In late 2013 they began to pull together the idea of building this platform on top of Mesos and Docker, giving it the name PaaSTA, an internal joke that stood for Platform as a Service, Totally Awesome. It became simply known as Pasta.

The project had the ambitious goal of making their infrastructure work as a single fabric, in a cloud-native fashion before most anyone outside of Google was using that term. Pasta developed slowly with the first developer piece coming online in August 2014 and the first  production service later that year in December. The company actually open sourced the technology the following year.

“Pasta gave us the interface between the applications and development teams. Operations had to make sure Pasta is up and running, while Development was responsible for implementing containers that implemented the interface,” Yellen said.

Moving to deeper into the public cloud

While Yelp was busy building these internal systems, AWS wasn’t sitting still. It was also improving its offerings with new instance types, new functionality and better APIs and tooling. Yellen reports this helped immensely as Yelp began a more complete move to the cloud.

He says there were a couple of tipping points as they moved more and more of the application to AWS — including eventually, the master database. This all happened in more recent years as they understood better how to use Pasta to control the processes wherever they lived. What’s more, he said that adoption of other AWS services was now possible due to tighter integration between the in-house data centers and AWS.

The first tipping point came around 2016 as all new services were configured for the cloud. He said they began to get much better at managing applications and infrastructure in AWS and their thinking shifted from how to migrate to AWS to how to operate and manage it.

Perhaps the biggest step in this years-long transformation came last summer when Yelp moved its master database from its own data center to AWS. “This was the last thing we needed to move over. Otherwise it’s clean up. As of 2018, we are serving zero production traffic through physical data centers,” he said. While they still have two data centers, they are getting to the point, they have the minimum hardware required to run the network backbone.

Yellen said they went from two weeks to a month to get a service up and running before this was all in place to just a couple of minutes. He says any loss of control by moving to the cloud has been easily offset by the convenience of using cloud infrastructure. “We get to focus on the things where we add value,” he said — and that’s the goal of every company.

When people think of music startups in the tech world, the focus is often on streaming, or figuring out how to better track and monetise those streams, or perhaps hardware to make those streams sound better.  But today comes news of funding for a startup that is tackling a different kind of challenge: tapping innovations from the tech world to develop new instruments and ways of creating music.

Roli, a London-based startup that develops new styles of keyboards to compose and play music that subsequently can be consumed and engaged with using smartphones and other devices, has announced new strategic investment from the Sony Innovation Fund, the VC arm of the Japanese consumer electronics and entertainment giant. The plan is to use the funds to expand its range of connected instruments — or, as the tech world might call it, hardware — as well as to develop the software that runs on them.

“We’re developing new music-making tools across hardware and software,” founder and CEO Roland Lamb said. “It’s part of our long-term plan to create the first totally integrated hardware-software platform for music creation. The funding from SIF accelerates this, and positions us to continue focusing on innovative research and development as we scale.”

This is a strategic investment for Sony across a number of areas. Among two of the biggest: Sony has a sizeable business in audio hardware; and, by way of Sony Music, one of the world’s biggest recording label conglomerates. (It’s also the owner of a vast gaming empire and film and television studios, giving it a number of entry points to working with Roli .)

Neither Roli nor Sony are disclosing the amount of funding, but for some context, PitchBook notes that Roli had previously raised around $46 million, and today the company said that the total raised is “over $50 million.” Sony is not the first strategic investor in the company: others from the music world include Universal Music; Pharrell Williams, who is also Roli’s chief creative officer; and Onkyo, the Japanese audio company that also controls the Pioneer brand of home entertainment devices — which had invested previously but is only getting disclosed today.

Technology backers, meanwhile, include a strong list of VCs such as Index Ventures, Foundry Group, Balderton, Horizons Ventures, Founders Fund, Kreos, BGF and Local Globe, Saul Klein’s new fund.

The fact that there are so many tech investors in the company is notable. It underscores how Roli is aiming to build not just a music company, but one that is rooted in tech and views a large part of the effort here as one of hardware and building software that is able to recreate on digital platforms something that has in its traditional way remained an analogue undertaking. It also speaks to how investors are looking for what new frontiers tech might be tackling, beyond those where it is already alive and well.

Roli is not disclosing its valuation with this investment, but from what we understand, Sony’s funding will have a “neutral” impact. PitchBook’s records note that the most recent round before this (in January 2017) put the company’s valuation at around $82 million.

To date, Roli has released two primary devices: the Seaboard, which resembles a traditional keyboard; and the modular ROLI BLOCKS, square-shaped pads that use light to indicate sounds, pitches and volumes. Both are characterised by their touch-sensitive squidgy material covering, which isn’t hit (as you would a normal piano or keyboard) as much as it is pressed, smudged and tapped in order to create and bend different sounds.

These work in conjunction with each other, as well as an array of other accessories and variations, with prices for the main building blocks starting at $200 and reaching up to the $3,000 range depending on what combination of devices and accessories you get.

The idea is that by changing the interface a musician or composer has with the device that producer uses to create the sounds, you are opening up a new world of music that couldn’t have been made before, or could have been made but with more work and expense involved.

One big question for me with Roli has always been the mainstream potential of its products. There has long been a gulf between creating music yourself and consuming it, with the latter being much easier to do than the former. But now that we have lightweight devices that link up with your smartphone, and make music-making something that is not the exclusive terrain of those who have put in many hours of practice time, or those who have the space to accommodate instruments, will this actually lead to more people wanting and using those devices?

The company has never released any numbers that indicate how well they sell, but they are sold in 30 markets and the plan will now be to expand that number. Of note, Roli has a deal with Apple to sell its devices in Apple’s retail stores, which speaks to how the company pitches its products and, presumably, some of the success it has had with sales.

The Sony investment being announced today is another indicator of Roli’s traction. Sony has a long legacy in audio equipment and audio technology, and one result of this partnership could be closer integration between Roli devices and, for example, Sony’s line of speakers and audio services to help the latter with its sales, in particular to a new wave of consumers who might not be as swayed by Sony’s storied history and brand as older users might be.

“A Sony Walkman was one of the first music products I ever owned,” Lamb said. “I took it on my first trip to Japan as a teenager. It was a magical way to bring my musical world with me everywhere that I went.”

Lamb himself is not a technologist by training but an avid amateur musician who studied philosophy and product design, and believes that there is a parallel between the innovations Sony helped usher in and what Roli is trying to do. “What ROLI is doing with BLOCKS is very similar to what Sony did with the Walkman, but in our case we’ve made a music creation device that you can take with you anywhere. It’s pioneering a new, liberating way of making music, just like Sony pioneered the modern revolution of music listening which hundreds of millions of people benefit from today.”