Year: 2018

While organisations dedicate large budgets into marketing their services to the outside world, there’s also been a rising demand among companies to communicate their purposes to a more immediate audience: themselves. SocialChorus, a startup that has built a platform to help organizations coordinate and communicate better with their employees, is announcing today that it has raised $12.5 million, funding that it will be using to expand its business (namely in EMEA with a new office in London) at a time when the company is already seeing a lot of growth.

SocialChorus says that recurring revenues are up 120 percent this year, with the company’s customer list including more than 100 of the world’s largest companies, including USAA, Phillips 66, Cargill, Sound Physicians, American Cancer Society, Kohler Co., Lendlease, Lloyds Bank, Discover Financial Services, TD Bank, PG&E, Lincoln Financial Group and PVH Corp.

“As digital transformation, employee engagement, employee experience trends converge, we believe that SocialChorus is well positioned to serve the needs of large global enterprises,” said Gary Nakamura, CEO of SocialChorus, in an emailed interview. It’s not yet profitable.

The round was led by Arrowroot Capital and Kohlberg Ventures, with participation from Western Technology Investment (a prolific firm that has backed Facebook, General Assembly, Climate Corp, and many others), and the company is not disclosing its valuation. The raise is to give the company runway for the next 12 to 18 months. “Our $12.5M capital raise was all that was needed to fuel our growth trajectory and achieve optimal operating fundamentals,” Nakamura said. The company has raised around $37 million to date, according to figures from PitchBook.

The funding comes at a time when platforms like Slack, Workplace from Facebook and Microsoft Teams are getting a lot of attention for how they improve communication among staff, especially workforces that might be spread across far-flung geographies. SocialChorus is addressing a different area: getting businesses to be able to create better communication out to its staff about the company itself, for example from an organization’s HR or IT or marketing teams, not only to employees but also to contractors, franchises and others. 

“The need to improve employee experience has never been more critical,” Nakamura said. “Many of our customers are focused on digital transformation, and at the core, that is making sure employees know what digital transformation means and can support this change.”

In Nakamura’s view, and you may have noticed it yourselves if you also work in an organization using a lot of different communications tools. You may be using more than one channel to share what you are working on, questions that you might have, and your availability, not to mention alerts and other information that might still be getting passed via email and other means.

“Technology, in some ways, has made it more difficult because companies have more tools to communicate,” he said, and that becomes a challenge for people who are supposed to be focused on communicating things to the whole staff. “Instead of focusing on the important job of informing and aligning employees, communicators are overwhelmed with simply trying to keep the channels filled. And the more channels there are, the less workers seem to pay attention.”

The idea with SocialChorus is that it helps those needing to send out company messages, by letting them publish both on the SocialChorus app itself, but also to whatever other platform others are using. including SharePoint, Slack and Workplace by Facebook via API or RSS integrations.

The potential paradox here is that if you are a company using a multitude of platforms, you may have already lost the attention of some staff who want to disengage from all the noise, and also that SocialChorus simply becomes one more creator of the noise. The other is that you could potentially use the other apps that integrate with it as a replacement for what you are using SocialChorus to do.

SocialChorus and its investors believe that there is a place for a dedicated app, however, which provides those with a focus just on communicating information top-down to staff, around specific areas like HR, with a platform to do it. Nakamura said that this is particularly important in offices, for example, which are either downsizing or expanding through M&A: there is material you need to communicate to specific employees in an environment that is separate from where you are, for example, discussing your next work project.

“We passed on many workplace communication / collaboration / engagement opportunities as many of them were viewed as ‘nice to have’ tools and it showed up in their unit economics,” said Kareem El Sawy, Partner at Arrowroot Capital. “SocialChorus was an exception as it has built a truly enterprise-level platform that customers view as mission-critical to their daily operations.”

The Great Privacy Policy Email Deluge of 2018 may have finally petered out, but we are just starting to build an understanding of who the winners and losers will be in this newly regulated data economy.

Most of the attention so far has been focused on the losers post-GDPR, which can be broadly summarized as “advertising networks.” Indeed, as Jessica Davies at Digiday reported over the weekend, programmatic advertising in Europe plummeted post-GDPR this weekend, potentially threatening profits at product lines like Google’s DoubleClick network (at least temporarily until they figure out all the compliance issues).

However, the more interesting analysis is around who the winners of these laws will be (besides the lawyers of course). To me, it’s clear that the complexity around these data sovereignty laws ultimately benefits highly-scaled service providers who can manage the nuanced regulations around these laws in an automated fashion. That means, ironically, that Google will likely win long-term on its cloud side, along with other major cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft Azure.

Data used to be much simpler. Gone are my experimental teenage years of collecting user information on a school website and storing it on a MySQL database hosted on my personal computer in my home office with nary a privacy policy in sight (site uptime was about 80%, since I turned the computer off at night). Hosting your own data was easy, fast, and pretty much the Wild West when it came to any kind of legal or policy enforcement, as any startup in its early days can attest.

That free market in data is rapidly disintegrating as governments increasingly take an interest in data, not just for privacy reasons, but also for population thought control and economic growth purposes. For software developers writing applications, that portends a complicated world for managing global and even potentially national data laws — a context that is going to be deeply enriching for service providers who can successfully help clients navigate this new world.

These new laws can be broadly grouped under the term “data sovereignty,” which is one of those terms you say at the World Economic Forum to sound like you are in the know. The goal of these laws is to move data away from the geographically agnostic world of cyberspace, and plant those records directly under local jurisdictions. In short, data sovereignty is where data and meatspace connect, and it is something we have covered on TechCrunch for some time.

While the European Union’s GDPR regulation has gotten the most press (probably because of the several dozen emails you received about it), the EU is hardly the only government enhancing its data sovereignty. China placed into force a law requiring all cloud computing and Chinese customer data to be hosted on China-based servers, and Russia has also been blocking Google and Amazon cloud services in an increasing war with Telegram. Many other countries have laws affecting how data can be stored and transmitted as well.

These laws are quite different, but they all serve the same purpose — to bring data back home and ensure that the desires of a country’s people (and, of course, its leaders) can be imprinted on how that data is used.

Here’s the challenge: these laws are enormously complicated and completely incompatible with one another. For all the questions about GDPR, it is perhaps the easiest one of the batch to handle. China’s regulations around the cloud are so opaque, it’s not even clear that the Beijing government knows exactly what its law entails. As Samm Sacks, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, put it in a lengthy analysis:

Even as the [Chinese] government pushes to put in place a new regulatory framework around how data is managed and shared, there does not yet appear to be a higher-level consensus around how to do this in practice. From issues around cross-border data flows and what constitutes “important data,” to how to balance development of emerging technologies like AI with growing demands by Chinese users for data privacy, there is still unresolved internal debate in China about what this all should look like.

Multiply that complexity by dozens of governments around the world creating their own standards. Even within the United States, data laws are increasingly being drafted at the state-level. California’a legislature is debating a bill that could bring a sort of GDPR-lite protocol to the Golden State. These laws force startups and large companies alike to potentially adapt to dozens of variations just to stay legal.

Once simple, data is now ridiculously complicated. What data to collect, where and when it can be stored, and what it can be used for are increasingly questions that require significant legal work to answer. Startups and even Fortune 500 companies are in no position to be able to handle these complexities without significant assistance.

That’s where I think the cloud providers are going to strike even more gold. Storing your own data isn’t just risky from a security perspective, it is also increasingly untenable in the fast currents of this data sovereignty world. Is every Fortune 500 company going to start building data centers in countries throughout the world just to stay legal? In the past, that answer was perhaps a bit more blurry, but today it is obvious: everything is going to have to move to the cloud, the sooner the better.

That’s not to say that Google and Amazon have great data governance products — quite the contrary in fact. But don’t be surprised when they announce features this year that increasingly handle these data sovereignty problems. The winners in complexity are always the abstraction layers — the Stripes of the world that simplify the development of a company’s core product. While there are startups in that space today, it’s the largest tech companies that are going to have the comprehensive data services required to manage this new terrain effectively.

GDPR has been described as an anti-Google law, but it may turn out to be the greatest forcing function to drive adoption of Google Cloud. The irony may be that the supposed losers may well turn out to be the biggest winners after all.

“I’ve made a huge mistake.”

It may have been a while since you’ve heard GOB’s famous catch phrase, but there’s more where that came from.

Arrested Development Season 5 dropped today on Netflix . Creator Mitch Hurwitz promised that this season would be more in keeping with the original three seasons of Arrested Development, which aired from 2003 to 2006. But that might not be the only thing keeping viewers from reliving the delight of the original seasons.

Here’s how the story goes:

When the original three seasons aired on Fox in the early aughts, the show failed to get enough viewership and the series was cancelled. However, a cult following emerged that only grew stronger as the show was picked up by various streaming services.

Netflix signed a deal in 2013 to bring back Arrested Development for a fourth season, ten years after the series premiere aired on Fox.

While it was a valiant effort, the creators struggled to get the large band of cast members, many of whom had risen to new levels of fame, in a single location at once. This made for a disjointed and confusing season 4, with each episode dedicated to a different character’s story. In short, it wasn’t the Arrested Development we had spent 10 years loving.

Hurwitz went back to the drawing board on season four recently, ‘remixing’ the edits to transform the season into something more cohesive.

And today, Season 5 lands on Netflix.

But even with the remix, the series still faces a huge publicity problem.

About a week ago, the cast of Arrested Development sat down with The New York Times for an interview as part of the show’s press tour. In the interview, the cast is asked about allegations against Jeffrey Tambor (George Bluth Sr.) on the set of Transparent, as well as an incident where Tambor admitted to lashing out at Jessica Walter (Lucille Bluth) in a Hollywood Reporter interview.

If you haven’t read the interview, I suggest you do so now.

As Jessica Walter explains through tears that she’s never been treated in sixty years of working the way that Tambor treated her, her male costars (most notably Jason Bateman) went on to defend Tambor and excuse his behavior. Needless to say, this created a huge backlash and drove Netflix to cancel all appearances on the cast’s UK press tour.

Bateman, alongside Tony Hale and David Cross, later apologized for what they said in the interview.

BlaBlaCar is iterating once again on its marketplace strategy for all your car needs. You can now buy your car insurance from BlaBlaCar directly with a new product called BlaBlaSure.

The company is working with Axa for this insurance product. You’ll be able to select an insurance product between three different tiers, from basic third-party liability to comprehensive coverage.

You might think there’s no reason to buy your insurance through BlaBlaCar, but the company has worked on some particular benefits. First, you don’t have to pay any excess for damage that occurs when you’re driving on BlaBlaCar.

Second, BlaBlaCar is leveraging its data for the pricing structure. According to the company, active drivers on BlaBlaCar have to deal with fewer accidents on average. So BlaBlaCar drivers will end up with a lower premium compared to standard Axa clients.

For now, the product is only available in France but the company can expand it to other countries if there’s enough interest.

This isn’t the first time BlaBlaCar opens new services to find new revenue streams. For instance, the company lets you lease an Opel Corsa or an Opel Mokka and save on your monthly fees if you use this car on BlaBlaCar.

When Collaborative Fund is looking at whether to invest in a company, it’s looking for a startup that’ll be able to accomplish some kind of social good — but also actually make money and be a real business. It’s that theory that’s led the fund for eight years, and Collaborative Fund is going to keep going now with the announcement of closing its fourth fund.

Collaborative Fund has closed its fourth fund, this one a $100 million fund that includes LPs like Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, former Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson, Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow, former Sequoia partner Tom McMurray, and Indeed founder Rony Kahan. At a time when there are plenty of questions as to where the actual exits are going to happen in venture — including some kinds of creative activity by some firms or necessary ones by larger startups like Uber — Collaborative Fund is doubling down on its strategy of investing early in those companies, which has checked off a number of successful investments thus far.

Collaborative Fund raised its last fund in 2015, when it put together a $70 million fund. Since then, there’s been plenty of activity in some of its investments — perhaps one of the biggest events being Blue Bottle Coffee’s big exist in September last year. Collaborative Fund also includes investments in a number of other companies including  Kickstarter, Lyft, Reddit, Quora, Tala, Science Exchange, LTSE, and Outdoor Voices. The fund led (or co-led) 13 seed rounds, including Ava Winery, Spruce, Dandelion Energy.

“Our thesis works best when there’s clear alignment between founders and investors,” Collaborative Fund founder Craig Shapiro said. “…There’s a growing acceptance and excitement for our thesis. Eight years ago it was obscure and even belittled. More people understand it today.”

In addition, Taylor Greene will be Collaborative Fund’s new partner. Green was previously a partner at Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Shapiro said he’d known Greene for around five years (and competed on many investments, in addition to co-investing in some rounds). “It was through these experiences that I saw firsthand his work ethic, people skills, and steady hand,” Shapiro said. The firm announced it had added Lauren Locktev from New Island Capital around the time it announced its last fund.

Looking at those investments kind of gives a sense of what the firm is looking to accomplish: a company like Lyft has the potential to change the way we move around cities, reduce drunk driving, and have other substantial effects — but at the same time it has to figure out how to run it as a real business if it’s actually going to remain active. Lyft most recently raised $1 billion from Alphabet in a round that valued it at $11 billion.

Facebook is proving problematic for many governments worldwide, but few would think to shut it down entirely.

That’s exactly the approach that Papua New Guinea, the Pacific sea island nation located near Australia, is proposing to take with a new measure that could see the social network closed off for a month. During that period, the government plans to investigate the impact of fake accounts, pornography and false news and information which it said are rife on the social network in the country.

The prospect of a month-long ban was announced by Papua New Guinea’s communications minister Sam Basil who told Post Courier that the government “cannot allow the abuse of Facebook to continue in the country.”

Internet penetration in the country is thought to be less than 15 percent, which suggests at face value that Facebook isn’t particularly mainstream. However, that may not be an accurate measure of how many of the country’s eight million population use the social network since mobile is the primary access point in many parts of Asia Pacific. Still, the ban is unlikely to be welcomed by the population.

Post Courier reported that Basil even floated the idea of a dedicated social network to replace Facebook in the country.

At this point, the Facebook ban — however delicious it may sound given recent events — is not confirmed for Papua New Guinea. It remains a possibility once Basil has liaised with police, according to the media report.

Our attempts to reach Basil via phone and email to confirm the plan were not successful.

Facebook has been under fierce pressure around the way it handles data for its 1.5 billion users after it emerged that Cambridge Analytica, a consulting firm that worked on the successful Trump election campaign, hijacked data on nearly 90 million users of the social network.

The aftermath of the scandal has seen Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify on data security and processes in front of Congress and the House in the U.S., as well as the EU parliament in Europe.

Meanwhile, and of equal importance, Facebook has also been engaged in controversies in the emerging world. The UN has accused it of accelerating racial violence in Myanmar, while the service was closed for three days in Sri Lanka to stop anti-muslim violence. In the Philippines, it has been scrutinized for helping controversial President Rodrigo Duterte into power, while Vietnamese activists have expressed concern that it is helping the government crack down on people in the country.

Pandora this morning announced it has closed on its acquisition of AdsWizz, the digital audio ad technology company whose products will be used to upgrade the streaming service’s own ad tech capabilities in the months ahead. The $145 million deal was first announced in March, with a stipulation that at least 50 percent of the acquisition price would be paid in cash. Today, Pandora confirms that it paid $66.3 million in cash and 9.9 million shares of Pandora common stock, with an additional $5 million in cash paid after the achievement of certain milestone provisions.

AdsWizz will continue to operate as a subsidiary headed by its CEO Alexis van de Wyer.

Prior to joining Pandora, the company had developed an end-to-end technology platform that powers music platforms, podcasts and broadcasting groups. Its customer base includes Cox Media Group, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, Entercom, Omnicom Media Group, Spotify, Deezer, PodcastOne, GroupM, and others.

Its ad technology products are capable of things like dynamic ad insertion, advanced programmatic platforms, ad campaign monitoring tools, and more. It also offered new audio formats like “ShakeMe” that let users shake their phone to trigger an action while listening to an ad, as well as those that could target users based on activity (like jogging) or a situation (like the weather), along with other personalization-based ad tech.

Pandora had said the AdsWizz roadmap aligns with its own across areas like audio monetization and ad-buying capabilities and believed it would be able to bring new products to market faster with AdsWizz’ help.

Today, more of Pandora’s revenue is generated by ads. In Q1 2018, it pulled in $319.2 million in revenue, $104.7 million of which came from subscriptions, and $214.57 million from ads. But that balance is continuing to shift – it grew to 5.63 million paid subscribers in the quarter, up 19 percent year-over-year. Meanwhile, the ad revenue had declined year-over-year.

Better ad tech could help the company generate more revenue from its free listeners. This is especially important, given that content licensing fees climbed from $2.96 to $4.65 per user year-over-year, as result of the growth in premium listeners. And Pandora may soon be adding more premium listeners with the launch of its $14.99/month Premium Family Plan, which the company planned to announce on Wednesday. The news was instead leaked out over the Memorial Day holiday weekend in the U.S.

“We built the AdsWizz platform using innovative technology in service of a simple idea: provide value to all stakeholders in the digital audio ecosystem – including brands, listeners and publishers – with relevant, engaged and highly targeted advertising experiences,” said Alexis van de Wyer, CEO of AdsWizz, in a statement released this morning. “This will not change. We will continue to focus on building the best technology in the industry for our publisher partners everywhere, and on continuing to innovate and enhance our platform, which will be accessible to all.”

This confirms that Pandora doesn’t have any immediate plans to ditch AdsWizz’s existing customer base, even though some of those are Pandora competitors.

“As a publisher, Pandora has long understood the value that a sophisticated advertising platform can bring to everyone in digital audio. We are the leader in this space, and we remain committed to serving all constituents in the ecosystem,” added Pandora CEO Roger Lynch.

“Audio is the fastest growing format in digital advertising and the marketplace is rapidly evolving,” he said. “Completing the acquisition cements our position in the future of audio, making us more ready than ever to serve publishers and brands worldwide.”

In addition to AdsWizz CEO van de Wyer, Pandora’s acquisition will add 140 people to the company from across all AdsWizz locations, including its San Mateo headquarters.

Fortnite has eclipsed the once dominant PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds title, both in terms of mindshare and money. Last week, the former was reported to have pulled in $296 million for the month of April — a financial windfall that’s only likely to increase as the title makes its way to Android in the coming months.

Now the company behind PUBG is taking Fortnite’s creators to court. PUBG (the company), a subsidiary of Bluehole (the company behind PUBG, the game — slightly confusing, I know), has filed a suit against Epic Games over copyright infringement concerns. The South Korean suit, noted by The Korea Times, takes particular issue with Fortnite’s battle royale mode.

Bluehole has been vocal about the similarities since the new mode was released in September. The developer released a statement at the time, addressing “growing concerns” with its former partner.

“After listening to the growing feedback from our community and reviewing the gameplay for ourselves,” the developer wrote, “we are concerned that Fortnite may be replicating the experience for which PUBG is known.”

PUBG’s popularity has been declining since the beginning of this year, while Fortnite has continued to pick up steam. Last week, Epic announced that it would be investing $100 million into eSports competitions over the next two years.

Epic declined offer a comment for this story.

Uber has officially launched its 911 in-app calling feature, after first announcing it in April. As you can see below, riders can tap the safety icon at the bottom right corner of the app to call 911. Once on the line with the 911 dispatcher, you can easily communicate your location, since Uber clearly shows it in the app. In seven test markets, Uber is integrating with Rapid SOS to enable automatic location sharing with 911 dispatchers. Clicking on the safety icon also brings up an option to share trip details with trusted contacts.

Uber is testing the automatic location sharing with 911 dispatchers in seven cities: Denver, Colo., Charleston, S.C., Nashville, Chattanooga and Tri-Cities, Tenn., Naples, Fla. and Louisville, Ky. In terms of determining which cities to deploy automatic location sharing, Uber Director of Product Management Sachin Kansal told TechCrunch said it came down to “readiness of cities” and “how fast some of them were able to move in terms of training agents and testing functionality.”

Already, Uber is in discussion with several other cities to launch the feature, Kansal said. He added that the goal is to make it available everywhere.

As Uber started developing the 911 assistance feature, Kansal said, the team was looking for helpful ways to contribute. From the company’s research, Uber “found out that accurate location fo the caller is one of the biggest problems. Whenever you call 911, the first question is often, ‘What is your location?'”

Depending on what the situation is, it may not make sense to use the Uber app to call 911. In another case, if you already have the Uber app open, then maybe that would be the fastest way to get emergency help.

“At the end of the day, when a user is in an emergency, we want them to use whatever will be the fastest mechanism for them in that moment in time,” Kansal said. “If they’re already in a phone dialer, call 911 from there.”

He added, Uber’s approach is that if someone happens to be in the Uber app, the company wants to make it “extremely easy for them to dial, as well as to receive information at their fingertips.”

Given that some situations may entail a problematic driver, Uber drivers do not get notified when a rider seeks 911 assistance. But it’s worth noting the driver would obviously hear the passenger on the phone.

“Most of the scenarios that we see happening in an Uber are generally related to road accidents,” Kansal said.

However, Uber will only know the nature of the call if a rider explicitly lets the company know. Uber will know you dialed 911 through the app, but it won’t know what you said on the call. Afterward, Kansal said, Uber will send the rider a message to see if everything is ok and if there’s anything the company can do to help.

The feature will be available to all riders in the U.S. This summer, Uber plans to launch similar functionality for drivers in the U.S. and riders in international markets. Specifically, Uber plans to add the safety center icon, as well as the ability to call a local emergency number in international markets. In terms of automatic location sharing, there’s “nothing to announce,” he said.

Movable Ink has always prided itself on providing marketers with a way to deliver highly customized emails, but today the company decided to take that one step further. It announced an SDK that enables developers to build custom applets to add their own unique information to any email.

The company has always seen itself as a platform on which marketers can build these highly customized email marketing campaigns, says Bridget Bidlack SVP of product at Movable Ink.

“We built our business on making it easier for marketers to add intelligent content into any email campaign through a library of hundreds of apps. With our [latest] launch, we’re really opening up our development framework to agencies and system integrators so that they can create those apps on their own,” Bidlack explained.

This means companies are free to create any type of data integration they wish and not simply rely on Movable Ink to supply it for them. Bidlack says that could be anything from the current weather to accurate inventory levels, loyalty point scores and recent purchase activity.

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What’s more, Movable Ink doesn’t really care about the source of the data. It could come from the company CRM system, internal database or offer management tool. Bidlack says Movable Ink can incorporate that data into an email regardless of where it’s stored.

This all matters because the company’s whole raison d’etre is about providing a customized email experience for every user. Instead of getting a generic email marketing campaign, you would get something that pulls in details from a variety of sources inside the company to build a custom email aimed directly at the individual recipient.

Company co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma says that when they launched in 2010, service providers at the time were focused on how many people they could reach and open rate, but nobody was really thinking about the content. His company wanted to fill that gap by focusing specifically on building emails with customized content.

As Sharma said, they didn’t try to take on the email service providers. Instead they wanted to build this intelligent customization layer on top. They have grown increasingly sophisticated with their approach in the last 8 years and count companies like Dunkin Donuts, Bloomingdales, Comcast and Delta among their 500+ customers. They also have strategic partnerships with companies in the space like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Cheetah Digital, Epsilon and many others.

The approach seems to be working. The company has raised a modest $14 million since it launched in 2010, but today it boasts $40 million in annual recurring revenue, according to  Sharma.