Year: 2018

Mapbox, the open source mapping service that competes directly with Google’s Maps Platform, today announced a new software development kit (SDK) that will make it easier for developers to build applications that provide AR navigation. That by itself would be cool, but by using ARM’s Project Trillium AI platform, the Mapbox Vision SDK can also recognize other vehicles, pedestrians, speed limit signs, construction signs, crosswalks and more, all without having to train their own machine learning models to do so.

It’s easy to see how this could be useful for navigation apps, but Mapbox is going a step further by also integrating its service deeply with Microsoft’s Azure IoT platform. Indeed, the company has integrated the open source Azure IoT Edge runtime into its SDK to allow developers to easily push events that the Vision SDK detects into the cloud. Thanks to this, you could easily crowdsource data about roadside construction, for example, or how busy a given intersection currently is. And in the context of a navigation app, the driver could get the same info in real-time, too (just in case you missed that construction sign…).

“The future of location is building live maps in real-time from distributed sensor networks embedded in vehicles and mobile devices at scale,” said Eric Gundersen, CEO of Mapbox, in today’s announcement. “Every vehicle and mobile device utilizing the Vision SDK creates a better map, and this same data is streamed back to Microsoft Azure for further processing. The Vision SDK not only runs in real-time to improve the driving experience in the vehicle, but also generates data for the back end to update the map based on changing conditions, powering larger solutions for smart cities or insurance companies.”

Using ARM’s Project Trillium platform, the SDK is able to make use of the mobile device’s onboard CPUs, GPUs and AI chips (if available) to perform the necessary object recognition. Once new phones launch with ARM’s new ML and object detection processors, the SDK will be able to perform all of these functions even faster, but for now, it can extract features from the video feed at a speed of about ten times a second.

Mapbox notes that its SDK will work on iOS and Android, but developers could also use it directly in a car that uses ARM embedded automotive chipsets.

The company says that it currently has about 1.1 million developers on its platform. It uses a variety of sources for its mapping data, but the core of its data comes from the OpenStreetMap project.

 

Starling, the U.K. challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, is in the early stages of raising a significant new funding round as part of plans to double down on its newly launched business current account, TechCrunch has learned.

According to a person familiar with the matter, Starling is looking to raise around £80 million in additional capital from new investors. To assist in the process, the company is hiring a new international advisory firm, pointing to an investor search that potentially goes beyond the U.K. and could include large international institutional investors. Up until now, Starling has been funded to the tune of £48 million by hedge fund manager Harald McPike, who, as a result, owns more than 50 per cent of the venture.

The need for Starling to increase its capital is thought to be related to the bank’s bid to be one of the recipients of the Capability and Innovation fund, which was set up by Royal Bank of Scotland to fulfil European state aid conditions arising from the bank’s £45 billion U.K. government bailout during the financial crisis. The fund will be split into different grants to help “challenger banks and other financial services providers” diversify and develop their business current account offerings for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Thought to be up against incumbents Santander, Metro Bank, Clydesdale Bank, and TSB, Starling is looking well-placed to win the £120 million “Pool A” grant, which is being decided by an independent panel — not least if the fund is to meet its remit of genuinely increasing competition within SME banking. ( Starling’s Boden has been quite outspoken on the matter.)

Related to this, Starling is busy recruiting a “double-digit” team for its SME banking unit. I understand from sources that executive search consultants have been engaged to work on senior hires and that this will include a new head of SME banking.

Meanwhile, Starling recently launched international payments within its consumer-facing current account, news it published on its blog and that was picked up in the fintech media. However, less well reported it that the bank has quietly dropped its previously announced partnership with fintech unicorn TransferWise.

Bank in March 2017, the two companies issued a joint press release detailing the partnership that would have given Starling customers “direct, in-app access” to TransferWise’s international money transfer service. The functionality was due to launch the following summer but never materialised (something that seemingly went unnoticed by most outlets). Now I understand the partnership has dissolved entirely as Starling has chosen to go it alone.

Asked what happened, TransferWise’s Head of Business, Stuart Gregory, issued the following statement:

“TransferWise is working with many banks to transform international payments for their customers, with more to come in the near future. In this instance Starling have chosen another route but it’s fantastic to see they’ve kept the price transparency of the real exchange rate and clear separate fees.”

Likewise, Starling’s Boden told TechCrunch: “Our partnership with TransferWise was always about meeting customer demands. As we developed out our payments business it became clear to us that integrating with a third party payments provider in the Starling Marketplace didn’t offer the best customer experience. We figured that we could provide a better user experience by doing it ourselves. As you know, Starling is all about customer service”.

Of course it’s never a good look when two companies announce with fanfare a major partnership that delivers nothing vapourware — Starling were still briefing that it was working with TransferWise in late 2017 — even if it is perfectly reasonable for an upstart bank to switch strategy as the broader competitive climate changes. In this instance, since the original announcement, Starling has made significant headway on its own Starling Payments business, and TransferWise launched its own “borderless” banking product and debit card. Perhaps this is simply the case that partnering whilst increasing feature parity doesn’t always make for happy bedfellows.

Oh, MoviePass, what are you doing now? Buying up a movie production company, apparently. MoviePass’s parent company and majority shareholder, Helios and Matheson Analytics, today announced its plans to acquire the entire film library and current production slate of Emmett Furla Oasis Films (EFO Films) in order to create MoviePass Films LLC.

Helios will own 51 percent of the new company, while EFO Films will own 49 percent.

EFO Films’ library includes titles like Lone Survivor, Broken City, Rambo, The Amityville Horror, Escape Plan, The Frozen Ground, and has upcoming titles that include 2Guns, Escape Plan 2, Escape Plan 3; and a movie based on the video game Asteroids by Atari, among others.

Variety was first to report the news, in an interview with Helios and Matheson CEO Ted Farnsworth; MoviePass has also put out a press release.

The acquisition is part of MoviePass’ larger plan to not only push moviegoers back into theaters by offering them a more affordable, subscription service for in-person movie watching, but also to back, distribute and profit from its own movies or stakes in movies. The company had already taken steps into this space, by buying distribution rights to films, as with The Orchard’s “American Animals” at Sundance. It also has a low seven-figure equity stake in the John Travolta “Gotti” film, Deadline reported last month – which is part of the EFO slate.

MoviePass is promising distributors its app can push its 3 million subscribers to the film’s opening weekend, but it also aims to generate revenue further down the road from things like international and streaming distribution, merchandising, music, and other ancillary rights.

The move to acquire EFO Films comes at a critical time for MoviePass, where questions are swarming over how long this company – and its cash – can really last. Its stock has been dropping, last week reaching a record low of 40 cents a share. An SEC filing confirmed earlier this month the company had just $15.5 million in the bank, and the firm has been going through around $21.7 million per month.

To keep going, MoviePass could sell more stock or borrow cash – like from that $300 million line of credit Farnsworth mentioned at Cannes –  but its business model is increasingly been viewed as unsustainable. And yet MoviePass keeps doubling down on what appears to be a losing hand – even bringing back its unlimited subscription plan after pulling it the month before, with little explanation beyond “we’re experimenting.”

Despite the chaos surrounding the company, the stock actually got a bump up last week, on news of Citadel Securities’ disclosure of its 5.4 percent stake in Helios and Matheson. Other shareholders include Farnsworth himself, and Verizon’s Oath (which also owns TC), as result of Oath’s recent sale of its Moviefone business to Helios and Matheson in April.

“Ever since we co-acquired our first film with MoviePass Ventures, American Animals, which is set for release this coming June 1, we’ve been looking for an opportunity to acquire and produce content on a larger scale, and prove the power of the MoviePass service in the process,”said Ted Farnsworth, Chairman and CEO of Helios, in a statement about the acquisition. “We believe we’ve found that opportunity with Emmett Furla Oasis Films. MoviePass Films and MoviePass Ventures, our studio driven production company and our independent film investment division, will both play integral roles in our grand business strategy,” he added.

Meanwhile, EFO Films’ founder Randall Emmett praised MoviePass’s ability to drive traffic.

“To do a deal with Helios and MoviePass is epic for us,” he said. “The MoviePass subscription service has totally disrupted the movie industry, for the better.  When we worked with MoviePass Ventures on the movie Gotti…I immediately saw how revolutionary the MoviePass service is.  I have never seen any player in our industry move so quickly and gain such a large following in such a short period of time,” Emmett continued. “What impresses me the most is that MoviePass can guarantee box office attendance, which is a game changer.  I don’t believe anybody else can do that.”

Yes, but for how long?

 

As companies get bigger and bigger, odds are who has access and owns what information is going to get more and more fragmented — and the risk of the last person knowing how to do something, like knowing a code base, leaving the company starts to become a real existential threat.

One way to fix that is, obviously, to ensure that people are talking to each other. But since that usually won’t be the case once companies hit the thousands of employees, Adam Weinstein and his co-founders Patrick Farrell and Jason McGhee started a company called Cursor that’s designed to help make that problem a little easier internally. Cursor serves as a sort of internal search tool for information, whether that’s inside SQL queries, database metadata, existing platforms like Tableau and others. The whole goal there is to reduce the communication gap between employees to as close to zero as possible, and ensure that it’s not just a single person that knows how to get something done that’s constantly inundated with requests.

“Silicon Valley has a way of putting on rose tinted glasses,” Weinstein said. “What I found was, even in the leadership of analytic functions, everyone had this problem. There’s been such a sprawl of software in general that data and the knowledge behind it [is fragmented]. If you use Mixpanel and Google Analytics, each has some level of data protections, and the ability to cross them is increasingly a problem. It gets more and more difficult as a business grows to extract value at an aggregate level. There’s this challenge we don’t have someone who can keep track of it. If somebody was a knowledge person on each team, and they even took a vacation, that was a risk.”

The startup said today that it has raised $2 million in a financing round from Toba Capital, with participation from Ride Ventures and several angel investors, and is launching its Cursor data search and analytics hub.

Cursor more or less behaves like a search engine internally. Users can search for information, which will surface up anything from a Tableau worksheet to an actual segment of SQL. Users can then comment on the information coming up from those searches, which are tagged with metadata to help employees find that information more easily. The idea is that if someone over on one side of a production team needs something (like a segment of code), they should have some kind of intuitive way for finding it rather than having to start an email chain with dozens of people on it.

Most of this was born from ideas Weinstein had when he joined LinkedIn through its acquisition of Bright in 2014. Weinstein was working with the data analytics team, but like any good engineer, was trying to “engineer himself out of a job” by making processes like these more efficient.

“If I did this right, there’s always a way to make things happen that are faster and cheaper for things around you,” Weinstein said. “I was one of our only people that dealt with litigation [in China], dealt with M&A, cost reduction efforts, and all those things. I was the limiting reagent. I became the human knowledge manager, and I thought, there has to be a solution to manage all this, and that was the idea behind Cursor.”

Already some internal search tools are becoming pretty popular, especially when it comes to programming. While it’s not an exact comparison, Sourcegraph is doing somewhat similar work in terms of making code easily searchable and find out who is working with it. It all speaks to a movement toward trying to make all this information more easily searchable and reduce the overhead in email or Slack, and it’s certainly something larger companies are going to begin noting going forward.

It looks like the capital continues to flow into startups looking to provide some easy way for users to share GIFs, with another startup called Emogi announcing today that it’s raised $12.6 million in a new financing round.

Already there’s an enormous activity in the GIF space, of all things. Google earlier this year acquired Tenor, a GIF platform that supplies a GIF search engine across multiple messaging channels (the company recently added LINE as one service). Tenor earlier had said it had around 12 billion GIF searches every month. Meanwhile, Gfycat, which focuses on creator tools, says it has around 180 million monthly active users with more than 500 million views every month. Giphy, one of the other largest GIF platforms, says it has around 300 million daily active users (and we hear recently held talks for a massive funding round).

So, in total, this is a very hot space, and potentially for good reason. As messenger services — iMessage or otherwise — become the dominant form of communication, users are looking for ways to compress more and more information into a small amount of space. Whether that’s stickers on LINE or animoji for iMessage, there’s a clear hole for companies to find some new or creative way to help users send over what amounts to some snippet of emotion baked into a clip of their favorite game, movie, or huge moment in a basketball game.

“We were looking at the behavior of consumers [in our previous app and] we realized they weren’t even reading the content,” co-founder Travis Montaque said. “They were literally reacting with emoji, and that’s it. That behavior was interesting to us. At the time it was me, a team of several engineers and data scientists, and we decided this way of expressing yourself could increase engagement. We decided we should take a look at how the environment is treating these types of formats, and that caused us to transition the business to being Emogi, working with lead investors to provide richer content experiences across their apps — whether that’s in the camera or the keyboard.”

Partners integrate Emogi’s SDK into their keyboards, which then sends information about the user’s context — like typing or other attributes — to figure out the best GIFs to show and drop a model onto the phone. Montaque, however, stressed that delivers the model to a user’s keyboard and does analysis on the device without sending any info back to its servers about the user’s conversations. Amid the massive privacy-related snafu Facebook faces, it does seem like many of these communications companies are tuning their tone to emphasize that. That information includes views, shares, and other kinds of information about what type of content users engage with as a means to understand what content to deprecate over time.

There’s also a consumer-facing side with the Emogi app, where users can move up stickers or GIFs within messaging services. Emogi’s goal is to surface that content directly based on context, rather than providing a search engine like something like Tenor. Obviously that search component was a tantalizing one, as Google found it an attractive company to acquire. But Tenor, too, sought to find ways to figure out the exact right GIF for the exact right moment — and removing that clicking around and lowering the barrier to getting a GIF out the door is one that makes sense in the scope of messaging.

Like some other GIF platforms (including Tenor), Emogi works with brands like Proctor and Gamble to give them an alternative vertical for their marketing efforts that can capture a different slice of a user’s behavior outside of the advertising juggernauts. All of this is still in the sort of experimental case — while some of these platforms have a lot of engagement, they obviously aren’t Facebook — it does offer a second or third option to the traditional firms as a way to find new buckets of users that they might otherwise not reach.

But all this does mean Emogi is entering an increasingly crowded space, and one that larger companies are definitely starting to take notice. While platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn look to tap ones like Tenor, it’s clear that all these companies are seeing that figuring out a way to compress that emotion into a short window is increasingly important when it comes to messaging. It may be that Tenor and Giphy end up building a strong enough content base and moat, though alternative players like Gfycat are still showing they’re able to grow. Montaque says the company’s content shows up in messaging apps around 1 billion times a month, which seems like at least a good start to see if it can keep rolling.

Amazon is expanding its program that pays developers directly for their top-performing Alexa skills, by now offering these “developer rewards,” as they’re called, to those based in the U.K. and Germany who publish “kid” skills. This emerging skill category was one of the last to be included in the developer rewards program, which already offered payments for top skills in over half a dozen other categories, including Education & Reference; Food & Drink; Games, Trivia & Accessories; Health & Fitness; Lifestyle; Music & Audio; and Productivity.

The developer rewards program quietly launched just over a year ago, as a way to encourage developers to build voice apps for Alexa before the ecosystem had expanded to include support for other monetization options like the in-app purchases and subscriptions offered today. The program helped to seed Amazon’s skill store with more content, while also rewarding quality apps that gain traction with consumers.

The initiative has seemingly had an impact – Alexa is now adding 5,000 new skills every 100 days, and reached over 30,000 in the U.S. as of March.

Amazon says today it has since paid out “millions” to developers in 23 countries as a result of this program.

Some individual voice app developers, like game maker Volley, have reported earning in the five-figure range on a monthly basis from Amazon’s program, to give you an idea of the payout potential.

With the expansion to Kids skills in the U.K. and Germany, the hope is now to encourage U.S. developers to roll out their app (or localize it) for other markets.

Making other markets a priority will be important for Amazon, as the smart speaker race heats up outside the U.S. Earlier this month, analysts at Canalys noted that U.S. smart speaker market share fell below 50 percent for the first time. Notably, Google outsold Amazon for the first time as well, with 3.2 million Google Home and Home Minis sold to Amazon’s 2.5 million Echo shipments.

This also comes on the heels of Amazon’s launch of an Echo Dot Kids Edition, which combines Echo Dot hardware with a FreeTiime Unlimited subscription for kid-safe content, including, now, the ability to whitelist voice apps.

In addition to the inclusion of kid skills in the developer rewards, Amazon also announced a new perk for developers: free Echo devices. If the skill gains 100 customers in the first 30 days live, developers earn an Echo Dot. If it has the most unique users that month, they earn an Echo Spot. And just for publishing, they’ll receive an Amazon Alexa backpack. These are limited time promotions, however – more details are here (U.K.) and here (Germany).

Editor’s note: This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and TechCrunch earn affiliate commissions.

There are few scenarios where enjoyable music pumping out of a good speaker is an annoyance. Outdoor gatherings, casual cleaning sessions at home, and parties (big and small) call for entertainment that can be provided through sound.

While speakers and systems are known to be pricey, there are a variety of affordable options that perform exceptionally well. We did some digging and found speakers that are worth buying now—or anytime you need a durable, high-quality speaker.

Computer speakers: Mackie CR3

For listening to music or playing games on your desktop computer, the Mackie CR3 speakers (Amazon) are our top recommendation. The set delivers better sound than you’d expect from computer speakers in this price range. Aside from the decent sound quality, we like the user-friendliness of the Mackie CR3 best. The sturdy speakers have a front AUX input and volume knob for easy access. They can be used with a phone and have acoustic sound pads that minimize transferred vibrations. If Bluetooth is a must, a compatible adapter can enable this set.    

Portable Bluetooth Speaker: UE Roll 2

Portable Bluetooth speakers are great for taking anywhere. Our top pick, the UE Roll 2, comes with a bungee cord and whether you hang it in the shower or on a tree, it’ll bounce back from a fall. If things get out of hand at your pool party, rest in knowing that it’s waterproof and can be submerged 3 feet underwater for 30 minutes. It has a 60-foot Bluetooth range, and during testing its playback time averaged around 11.5 hours. Its bass is deep and its sound is full enough to entertain intimate or large crowds on a camping trip, picnic, a spot on the beach or at a home get-together.                   

Portable Bluetooth speaker: EcoXGear GDI-EXBLD810 EcoBoulder+

Some gatherings need a portable Bluetooth speaker that offers bigger sound than an option you can toss around. The EcoXGear GDI-EXBLD810 EcoBoulder+, our “also great” pick, will get the job done at tailgates and large outdoor parties that require high-volume sound. Though its cup holder is made for two, it has a bottle opener on its side to service all of your guests. If they need to use a microphone or speakerphone, it offers these functions, too.

We like its built-in AM/FM radio, long-lasting battery life, waterproof and dust-proof design, and price, which is considerably lower than competitor models. The EcoBoulder+ is large, but it has wheels and a retractable handle that make moving it less of a hassle.                     

Budget soundbar: Vizio SB3651-E6

A starter home theater setup doesn’t have to be packed with speakers, and it doesn’t have to be super expensive. The basic, affordable route to getting high-quality sound for listening to music and watching TV or movies is to invest in a good soundbar. Our top pick for budget soundbars with sub, the Vizio SB3651-E6, offers the best combination of value, connectivity and performance.

It doesn’t support HDMI 2.0 for external 4K sources, but you can connect video sources (game consoles, Blu-ray players, etc.) to your TV and run an optical or coax cable to the soundbar as a workaround. Its stereo mode will give your setup noticeable surround sound that makes watching movies and TV better. You can also stream music from your phone over Bluetooth, or by using Google Chromecast.

Wireless multiroom speaker systems: Sonos One

Wireless multiroom speaker systems are great for anyone who wants to build out and link a home sound system. If you’re looking for an entry point to the Sonos system, the Sonos One is one of our top recommendations. It’s a newer smart speaker with multiroom functionality, which means you’ll be able to group it with other speakers, or play and control them independently.

While the Sonos One is in the process of being updated to stand as a voice-controlled speaker that works with Apple AirPlay 2, Google Assistant, and Amazon’s Alexa—for now, it’s only Alexa-enabled. Still, we think it’s a great multiroom speaker addition for most homes. The Sonos One sounds impressive on its own, but when you’re ready to add deep bass, a bookshelf speaker, a soundbar or another Sonos One, this pick will pair seamlessly.

This guide may have been updated by Wirecutter.

Note from Wirecutter: When readers choose to buy our independently chosen editorial picks, we may earn affiliate commissions that support our work.

 

 

Humans still have an edge over computers when it comes to navigating a city. In areas we are familiar with, we know precisely the cadence of traffic, when to avoid the subway, when biking makes sense, and how that all fits with the current weather and our moods. We have transit intuition, which is why we get so frustrated when Google Maps suggests a route that just doesn’t match the available options to get around.

Yet, even humans are starting to break down under the increasing complexity of mobility options. Whether its subways or buses failing or new options like bikeshares, electric scooters, or crowdsourced bus routes becoming available, our intuition on how to get to our destinations can be out-of-date or quite simply wrong. In the patchwork quilt of transit options available in most American cities, people often need to take two or even four different modes of transit just to get to their final destinations.

That’s where urban data startup Coord comes in. A spinout of Alphabet-owned urban innovation org Sidewalk Labs, Coord wants to make it easy for developers to build mobility-rich applications using the best data available. Today, the company is announcing a fusion of its Routing API and Bikeshare API, which will allow app developers to perform multi-modal pathfinding — including transit and bike shares — in a snap. The company has released a demo router app to experiment with as well.

As benign as that announcement sounds, routing remains hard for most transit users according to Stephen Smith, the founder and CEO of Coord. If a trip includes multiple types of transit, “You probably still need to run 2-3 apps to make that trip happen,” he explains. “Frankly, in this day and age, it feels like more work than it should be.” We buy complicated airline itineraries using simple online travel agents, so “why can’t we have that in urban transportation?”

In order to offer those well-abstracted endpoints to developers though, Coord has had to do painstaking work to collect and normalize transit data from across the country. It’s first API was for curbs, which sounds about as interesting as watching water boil. However, Smith said “It’s hard to come up with something that is more useful but less understood.” Curbs determines street parking, transit flow, and so many other critical variables to getting transit right. Yet, as important as those questions are, most cities in the United States actually have no idea what curbs are used for, which meant that there was no dataset actually available.

So Coord built a surveyor app based on augmented reality so that they could drive up and down streets and automatically collect this data, identifying things like curb paint and hydrants to create a map of potential curb usage. It then normalized all that data and offered it to developers in a slick API so that everyone else can build on top of its platform.

Coord has performed the same painstaking data normalization for toll roads (there are more than 200 of them, and almost all use their own proprietary data format, which required the company to integrate with all of them) as well as bikesharing (dozens of providers across the country). With those datasets in place, the company was able to offer a comprehensive router API that integrates all that data into one clean set of endpoints.

“Ultimately, we are building a platform for the mobility market, which we define as buying and selling mobility services,” Smith says of Coord. His mission is to make transit data as open and easily accessible as possible so that developers can integrate transit options into their apps, and also be responsive to new mobility options as Silicon Valley entrepreneurs invent them.

Coord wants to be a neutral data broker, which means that it doesn’t attempt to advocate for a particular mode of transit to users and urban planners alike. Instead, it wants to provide an objective look at what options are available and how they work together so that apps and ultimately end users can make their own decisions. Smith said, “I used to be in the edtech space, and what I learned from that experience is that data, and insights from data, is what gives public officials and elected officials the confidence to make policy changes.”

As the scooter wars heat up, and autonomous vehicles increasingly ply the roads, it’s the data platforms like Coord that will undergird those mobility experiences. Humans may have had the upper hand in knowing how to get from there to here, but computers are quickly gaining that native intuition and providing the right advice on how to realistically navigate complex cities.

Salesforce just keeps on growing revenue. In another remarkable quarter, the company announced 3.01 billion in revenue for Q1 2019 with no signs of slowing down. That puts the CRM giant on a run rate of over $12 billion with the company’s most optimistic projections suggesting it could go even higher. It’s also the first time they have surpassed $3 billion in revenue for a quarter.

As you might expect Salesforce chairman and CEO Marc Benioff was over the moon about the results in the earnings call with analyst yesterday afternoon. “Revenue for the quarter rose to more than $3 billion, up 25%, putting us on $12 billion revenue run rate that was just amazing. And we now have $20.4 billion of future revenues under contract, which is the remaining transaction price, that’s up 36% from a year ago. Based on these strong results, we’re raising our full year top line revenue guidance to $13.125 billion at the high end of our range, 25% growth for this year,” Benioff told analysts.

Brent Leary, an analyst who has been watching the CRM industry for many years, says CRM in general is a hot area and Salesforce has been able to take advantage. “With CRM becoming the biggest and fastest growing business software category last year according to Gartner, it’s easy to see with these number that Salesforce is leading the way forward. And they are in position to keep moving themselves and the category forward for years to come as their acquisitions should continue to pay off for them,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Bringing Mulesoft into the fold

Further Benioff rightly boasted that the company would be the fastest software company ever to $13 billion and it continued on the road towards its previously stated $20 billion goal. The $6.5 billion acquisition of Mulesoft earlier this year should help fuel that growth. “And this month, we closed our acquisition of MuleSoft, giving us the industry’s leading integration platform as well. Well, integration has never been more strategic,” Benioff stated.

Bret Taylor, the company’s president and chief product officer, says the integration really ties in nicely with another of the company’s strategic initiatives, artificial intelligence, which they call Einstein. “[Customers] know that their AI is only as powerful as data it has access to. And so when you think of MuleSoft, think unlocking data. The data is trapped in all these isolated systems on-premises, private cloud, public cloud, and MuleSoft, they can unlock this data and make it available to Einstein and make a smarter customer facing system,” Taylor explained.

Leary thinks there’s one other reason the company has done so well, one that’s hard to quantify in pure dollars, but perhaps an approach other companies should be paying attention to.  “One of the more undercovered aspects of what Salesforce is doing is how their social responsibility and corporate culture is attracting a lot of positive attention,” he said. “That may be hard to boil down into revenue and profit numbers, but it has to be part of the reason why Salesforce continues to grow at the pace they have,” he added.

Keep on rolling

All of this has been adding up to incredible numbers. It’s easy to take revenue like this for granted because the company has been on such a sustained growth rate for such a long period of time, but just becoming a billion dollar company has been a challenge for most Software as a Service providers up until now. A $13 billion run rate is in an entirely different stratosphere and it could be lifting the entire category says Jason Lemkin, founder at SaasStr, a firm that invests in SaaS startups.

“SaaS companies crossing $1B in ARR will soon become commonplace, as shocking as that might have sounded in say 2011. Atlassian, Box, Hubspot, and Zendesk are all well on their way there. The best SaaS companies are growing faster after $100m ARR, which is propelling them there,” Lemkin explained.

Salesforce is leading the way. Perhaps that’s because it has the same first-to-market advantage that Amazon has had in the cloud infrastructure market. It has gained such substantial momentum by being early, starting way back in 1999 before Software as a Service was seen as a viable business. In fact, Benioff told a story earlier this year that when he first started, he did the rounds of the venture capital firms in Silicon Valley and every single one turned him down.

You can bet that those companies have some deep regrets now, as the company’s revenue and stock price continues to soar.  As of publication this morning, the stock was sitting at $130.90, up over 3 percent. All this company does is consistently make money, and that’s pretty much all you can ask from any organization. As Leary aptly put it, “Yea, they’re really killing it.”

On the back of a big merger and rebranding under owner Verizon, and preparing to launch an OTT video strategy, the companies formerly known as Aol and Yahoo (which also owns TC), and now known as Oath, has been making a lot of changes in its executive bench. Today comes the latest development on that front. Natalie Ravitz is starting today as Oath’s new chief communications officer and “chief storyteller.”

She’s replacing Caroline Campbell, who is leaving the company after nine years with Oath and before that AOL. Campbell was based first in New York and then relocated down to Washington. More recently, Oath has been looking for a comms person to work in the role out of NYC, and as Campbell wants to stay in the DC area, it seemed like a good time for the change, TechCrunch understands.

Ravitz is the latest hired in a string of executive appointments that Armstrong has made over the last several months. Others include Guru Gowrappan as Oath’s president and COO; Vanessa Wittman as CFO; and Joanna Lambert running the company’s finance and tech verticals.

But one very important thing to note is that Tim Armstrong, who runs Oath, will not be among the many people moving around or leaving the company, and Campbell’s departure — she’s been closely linked with Armstrong at the company — does not imply that he will soon go, too. We’d heard rumors that he might be tipped to go to WPP, so we asked Armstrong about that directly, and he dismissed the notion. “You’re the second person to ask me,” he said in an interview, laughing. “I’m being totally direct when I say there is nothing with me leaving. Zero.”

Ravitz comes from the NFL, where she was the SVP of communications through the most recent Super Bowl (meaning: she has been tied into a lot of the glitz and excitement, but also the tougher job of handling the Colin Kaepernick story, a controversy that is still ongoing). Before that, she’s was a comms leader for other big-but-also-tough organizations, including 21st Century Fox and News Corp, where she was chief of staff and SVP strategy to Rupert Murdoch; communications director for NYC public schools under Mayor Mike Bloomberg; and press secretary and deputy chief of staff for U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, among other roles.

That list of experience fits the bill at Oath. As we reported earlier this year, the company is working on an OTT video strategy that will bring content from across its existing properties, as well as from premium third-party providers, into a new set of apps. Armstrong confirmed that the plan is going ahead with the first of its “super channels”, as he called them, to launch this coming autumn.

“We are progressing with our plans with super channels in news, sports, entertainment and finance,” he said, “OTT channels that will be of significant scale over the next 12 months.” He said Natalie’s hiring is directly related to that. “We’re following through with this right now.”

The branding for these has yet to be announced — as have the official plans — but the plan is to make the content that is produced at Oath more visible, and thus monetisable.

“Oath is an innovative young company being built around incredible platforms and brands in media and tech, with the great advantage of being part of the Verizon family,” said Natalie Ravitz, incoming Chief Communications Officer at Oath, said in a statement. “I’m excited to help Oath tell that story in new ways and to new audiences.”