Month: June 2019

In developer lingo, quality-of-life updates are all about refining things that already work. Thanks to these incremental improvements, it should make the end user experience much more enjoyable. And with iOS 13, it feels like Apple’s main focus is on this concept.

Dark Mode is basically the only new flashy feature of iOS this year. But that’s not a bad thing. From my experience, all the tiny refinements across the board are really convincing. iOS 13 is a much more interesting release than iOS 12 for instance.

I’ve been playing with early beta versions of iOS 13, so here’s what you should be looking for.

Dark Mode is gorgeous

Dark Mode is here, and it looks great. It’s a system-wide trigger that completely transforms the look and feel of your iPhone — you have to play with it to really feel the difference. The easiest way to activate it is by opening the Control Center panel, long pressing on the brightness indicator and turning it on.

While you can trigger it manually, you can also select an automated mode in the settings. Right now, my phone becomes dark at night and lights up in the morning. iOS uses your current location to time the change with the sunset and sunrise.

Widgets, notifications and menus now use black or transparent black as much as possible. You can choose new Apple wallpapers that change when you turn on Dark Mode, or you can optionally dim your custom wallpapers at night.

Apple has updated all its apps to support Dark Mode, from Notes to Mail, Messages, Safari and more. And it works really well with those apps.

But the issue is that many third-party apps haven’t been updated for Dark Mode yet. So it’s a disappointing experience for now, but I’m sure many app developers will update their apps before the final release of iOS 13.

Many apps already support have a dark version that you can trigger in the app settings. But Apple really wants third-party developers to follow the system-wide option going forward. So those apps will have to be updated as well.

Low-level improvements

iOS still looks like iOS. But if you carefully pay attention to your first experience of iOS 13, you’ll notice two things. First, animations have been sped up — it feels like unlocking your phone, opening and closing an app or swiping on a notification are much faster. It’s hard to know if those actions have been optimized or if it’s just Apple hitting the fast-forward button.

Second, Face ID is better. It’s not a dramatic change, but your phone recognizes you a tiny bit faster than before. iPhone users will appreciate that they don’t have to buy a new phone for this free improvement.

The two other iOS 13 changes that you can experience in any app is that the keyboard now supports swipe-to-type and the share sheet has been updated. It is now separated in three areas: a top row with suggested contacts to send photos, links and more depending on your most important contacts.

Under that row of contacts, you get the usual row of app icons to open something in another app. If you scroll down, you access a long list of actions that vary from app to another.

Siri and the Shortcuts app have been improved and now work more closely together. In addition to a more natural Siri voice, Shortcuts is now installed by default with iOS, which is great news for automation and scripting on your phone.

And I was surprised to see all my voice-activated Siri Shortcuts in the Shortcuts widget. For instance, since iOS 12, I’ve been able to say “Hey Siri, I’m heading home with Citymapper” to launch Citymapper with directions to my home. There’s now a button in the Shortcuts app to trigger that Siri Shortcut.

More interestingly, you can now create automated triggers to launch a shortcut. For instance, you can create scenarios related to CarPlay, a location or even a cheap NFC tag. Here are some examples:

• Launch a music playlist when I connect my phone to CarPlay or to my car using Bluetooth.
• Dim my screen and turn on low power mode when I activate airplane mode.
• Turn off my Philips Hue lights when I put my phone on an NFC sticker on my nightstand.

App improvements

All first-party apps have been improved in one way to another. Some changes are small, but a few apps have received a massive update.

Photos looks completely different with a new main tab. Instead of relatively boring looking grid of photos, you now get four sub-tabs that should help you navigate your photo library more efficiently.

‘Years’ lets you jump straight to a specific year. The ‘Months’ view is the most interesting one as iOS tries to sort your photos in smart albums based on dates and locations. When you open an event, you get the best photos of this event in the ‘Days’ tab. Some photos, such as duplicates are hidden by default.

And the last tab, ‘All Photos’ features the traditional never-ending grid of all your photos in your camera roll. Everything is still there. Live photos and videos now automatically play by default in some views. I’ve never been a fan of autoplaying videos but I guess that’s what people like.

The camera has been slightly improved, especially when it comes to Portrait mode with better segmentation of hair. And photo editing has been redesigned — it looks more like VSCO now.

Maps is getting a gradual update with better mapping data. But most people won’t see any change for a while. You can see real-time transit data, your flight status and share lists of places with friends though. It might not replace Citymapper, FlightLogger or Mapstr, but more contextual data is key when it comes to competing with Google Maps.

Talking about Google Maps, there’s a new Look Around feature that could have been called Apple Street View. I recommend trying the feature in San Francisco because it’s stunning. This isn’t just 360 photo shots — those are 3D representations of streets with foregrounds and backgrounds.

Messages is getting some much needed improvements. You can now choose a profile name and profile picture and share it with your contacts. I hate the default grey avatar, so it’s great to let people push a profile picture to other people.

If you have a Memoji-compatible device, you can now share Memoji stickers. If you’ve used Bitmoji in the past, this is Apple’s take on Bitmoji. And finally, search has been improved and is now actually useful. You can find an address or a specific message in no time.

Health has been redesigned but features more or less the same data. But it’s worth noting that Apple now lets you track, visualize and predict your menstrual cycle from the Health app.

Privacy

iOS 13 has a big emphasis on privacy as well thanks to a new signup option called “Sign In with Apple”. I couldn’t try it as I couldn’t see the option in any app. But Sarah Perez already wrote a great explainer on the topic.

In a few words, this button will let you create an account for a service without inputing an email address and password, and without connecting with your Google or Facebook account. Apple keeps as little data as possible — it’s all about creating a unique identifier and storing that in your iCloud keychain.

Apple is adding more ways to control your personal information. If an app needs your location for something, you can now grant access to your location just once. The app will have to ask for your permission the next time. Similarly, iOS 13 can tell you when an app has been tracking your location in the background with a map of those data points.

But I didn’t realize iOS 13 also blocks Bluetooth scanning by default in all apps. Many apps scan for nearby Bluetooth accessories and compare that with a database of Bluetooth devices around the world. In other words, it’s a way to get your location even if you’re not sharing your location with this app.

You now get a standard permission popup for apps that actually need to scan for Bluetooth devices — Mobike uses Bluetooth to unlock bikes or Eve uses Bluetooth to interact with connected objects for instance. But the vast majority of apps have no reason to scan for Bluetooth devices. You can decline Bluetooth permission and use Bluetooth headphones normally.

Random tidbits

Let’s go through some tiny little updates:

• App updates are smaller because iOS doesn’t download everything from their servers — only files that are relevant to your current device.
• Files works with Samba file servers, and you can zip/unzip files.
• Safari features a new site settings popup to request the desktop site, disable a content blocker or enable reader view. This is much cleaner than before.
• Notes has a new gallery view.
• Mail lets you customize font style, size and color. You can also indent text, create bulleted lists, etc.
• Find My iPhone and Find My Friends have been merged in a new Find My app. It also theoretically can help you find misplaced devices using other Apple devices from other people around your device — everything is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted.

Things I couldn’t try

• CarPlay has been redesigned for the first time in years. But I don’t own a car.
• You can store security camera footage in iCloud if your camera is HomeKit-compatible. But I don’t own a security camera.
• ARKit has been improved and can detect people in the real world.
• You can install custom fonts from the App Store and manage them from the settings. You can then use those fonts in any app.
• Lyrics in the Music app now scroll just like in a karaoke. I haven’t tried that.
• The Reminders app has been redesigned but I wasn’t using the app before. It feels like a full-fledged task manager now. Maybe I should use it.

Overall, iOS 13 feels like a breath of fresh air. Everything works slightly better than it used to. None of the changes are outrageous or particularly surprising. But they all contribute to making iOS a more enjoyable platform.

This is your opportunity to get a glimpse of the future of iOS — and iPadOS. Apple just released the first public beta of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, the next major version of the operating systems for the iPhone and iPad. Unlike developer betas, everyone can download those betas without a $99 developer account. But don’t forget, it’s a beta.

The company still plans to release the final version of iOS and iPadOS 13.0 this fall (usually September). But Apple is going to release betas every few weeks over the summer. It’s a good way to fix as many bugs as possible and gather data from a large group of users.

As always, Apple’s public betas closely follow the release cycle of developer betas. And Apple released the second developer beta of iOS and iPadOS 13 just last week. So it sounds like the first public beta is more or less the same build as the second developer build.

But remember, you shouldn’t install an iOS beta on your primary iPhone or iPad. The issue is not just bugs — some apps and features won’t work at all. In some rare cases, beta software can also brick your device and make it unusable. Proceed with extreme caution.

I’ve been using the developer beta of iOS and it’s still quite buggy. Some websites don’t work, some apps are broken.

But if you have an iPad or iPhone you don’t need, here’s how to download it. Head over to Apple’s beta website and download the configuration profile. It’s a tiny file that tells your iPhone or iPad to update to public betas like it’s a normal software update.

You can either download the configuration profile from Safari on your iOS device directly, or transfer it to your device using AirDrop, for instance. Reboot your device, then head over to the Settings app. In September, your device should automatically update to the final version of iOS and iPadOS 13 and you’ll be able to delete the configuration profile.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s new in iOS 13. This year, in addition to dark mode, it feels like every single app has been improved with some quality-of-life updates. The Photos app features a brand new gallery view with autoplaying live photos and videos, smart curation and a more immersive design.

This version has a big emphasis on privacy as well thanks to a new signup option called “Sign in with Apple” and a bunch of privacy popups for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi consent, background location tracking. Apple Maps now features an impressive Google Street View-like feature called Look Around. It’s only available in a handful of cities, but I recommend… looking around as everything is in 3D.

Many apps have been updated, such as Reminders with a brand new version, Messages with the ability to set a profile picture shared with your contacts, Mail with better text formatting options, Health with menstrual cycle tracking, Files with desktop-like features, Safari with a new website settings menu, etc. Read more on iOS 13 in my separate preview.

On the iPad front, for the first time Apple is calling iOS for the iPad under a new name — iPadOS. Multitasking has been improved, the Apple Pencil should feel snappier, Safari is now as powerful as Safari on macOS and more.

Entrepreneurs take a long journey when naming their brainchild, comparable to a parent naming their own flesh and blood.

There are many reasons behind naming – one untalked-of and probably the most important. This is, how to choose a name that gets you more business.

Technology changes how we do business. So, when developing a business name, putting some thought into how people are going to find you and what you want them to do after they find you could go a long way.

Ignoring this could do just the opposite and result in being harder to find, getting less return from your advertising and having your competitors capitalize off your brand.

Businesses have been using things like alphabetical order, call to action, keywords and more to shape business names for optimized discovery, recall and responsiveness since the phone book.

When looking for a business, I’m sure you’ve seen at least one of these two business name optimizations frequently used in the past for discovery:

1. Optimizing for discovery in phone books

Pre-internet, a listing in the phone book was key to getting your business discovered – but how did businesses get to the top of the list in their category? Piece of cake. Free listings in the white pages were categorized by business type and ordered alphabetically. Many companies ended their name with a describing word of their category and started it with something like “AAA” “AA”, “AA1” and “A AAA” to be one of the first listings in their category. You will still find thousands of these business names in different locations by typing “AAA” into yellowpages.com.

2. And a similar strategy was used for search-engine discovery

Prior to 2012, search engine algorithms gave weight in their rankings to sites that included keywords in their domain, otherwise known as exact-match domains. So, Google was more likely to rank “accountantsmelbourne-dot-com” higher than “abc-partners-dot-com” if a user searched for “Accountants Melbourne” because the keywords matched the search with similar words in its domain.

Over time, domain names and business names alike grew longer. Many were purposefully packed with every major keyword applicable to their niche.

Early-stage startup founders it’s now or never, it’s do-or-die, it’s [insert your preferred time-crunch cliché here. The application deadline for the Startup Battlefield at Disrupt San Francisco 2019 expires in just 24 hours.

If you’re ready to go up against a cadre of approximately 15-30 outstanding startups on the Disrupt Main stage, then apply to compete in the Startup Battlefield before the application window slams shut on June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Competing in Startup Battlefield is free. TechCrunch does not charge fees or take any equity. If you make it through the vetting process — TechCrunch editors set a high bar — you’ll receive free, extensive pitch coaching from our Startup Battlefield-tested editors. Their advice, coaching and guidance will prepare you to deliver a killer, six-minute presentation to a panel of expert judges — notable VCs and technologists. And you’ll be ready to handle the nerve-wracking Q&A that follows your pitch.

The teams that make it into the final round will present their pitch and demo again — to a second set of judges. And from that select group, one startup will be named champion, claim the $100,000 cash prize, hoist the Disrupt Cup and get ready for a very bright future.

The entire event takes place in front of thousands of avid startup fans and influencers — investors, founders and journalists from more than 400 media outlets. We also live-stream the entire event around the world on TechCrunch.com, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter — and make it available later on-demand.

All Startup attlefield teams benefit from competing whether they win or not. You’ll be on the receiving end of intense media and investor attention. You’ll exhibit for free in Startup Alley for all three days of the show. You’ll receive invitations to VIP events, free passes to future TechCrunch events and complimentary subscriptions to our new editorial offering, Extra Crunch. That adds up to serious opportunity.

All that opportunity expires in just 24 hours. Don’t miss your chance — apply to the Startup Battlefield before June 25th at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

There’s more than one way to stand in the Disrupt SF spotlight. Apply for our TC Top Picks program. As part of this select group, you’ll receive a free Startup Alley Exhibitor Package, VIP treatment and plenty of investor and media attention — including an interview with a TechCrunch editor on the Showcase Stage.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Argo AI will invest $15 million over five years to create a center for autonomous vehicle research at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the latest efforts by the Ford-backed company to accelerate the development of self-driving cars.

The center, Carnegie Mellon University Argo AI Center for Autonomous Vehicle Research, will focus on advanced perception and decision-making algorithms for autonomous vehicles, the company said Monday.

The investment follows the introduction of Argoverse, a set of curated data and high-definition maps that Argo AI released for free to researchers. Argoverse was created to give academic researchers the ability to study the impact that HD maps have on perception and forecasting, such as identifying and tracking objects on the road, and predicting where those objects will move seconds into the future.

Argo sees Argoverse and now this research lab as ways to encourage more research and hopefully breakthroughs in autonomous vehicle technology.

“We are thrilled to deepen our partnership with Argo AI to shape the future of self-driving technologies,” CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. “This investment allows our researchers to continue to lead at the nexus of technology and society, and to solve society’s most pressing problems. Together, Argo AI and CMU will accelerate critical research in autonomous vehicles while building on the momentum of CMU’s culture of innovation.”

The announcement builds off of an earlier collaboration between CMU and Argo. In 2017, the company said it had formed affiliations with CMU and Georgia Institute of Technology to work with three faculty members to “push the limits in computer vision and machine learning.”

Argo’s investment in CMU makes sense. Argo’s headquarters aren’t far from CMU. And the university is known for its robotics program. There’s also a personal connection.

Argo was founded by a team with deep CMU roots. Co-founder and president Peter Rander earned his masters and PhD degrees at CMU. Rander and Argo AI CEO Bryan Salesky worked together for years at National Robotics Engineering Center, a unit within Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute.

Rander left and became the engineering lead at Uber ATG and Salesky went over to the Google self-driving project, now called Waymo. They left their respective jobs to form Argo in 2016.

This isn’t the first autonomous vehicle company to see potential in CMU.

In 2015, Uber announced a strategic partnership with CMU that included the creation of a research lab near campus aimed at kick starting autonomous vehicle development. But that relationship ended up gutting CMU’s own robotics lab known as as the National Robotics Engineering Center. Before the year was up, dozens of people, including the NREC’s director, had left to work at the Uber Advanced Technologies Center.

Google bought Kaggle in 2017 to provide a data science community for its big data processing tools on Google Cloud. Today, the company announced a new direct integration between Kaggle and BigQuery, Google’s cloud data warehouse.

More specifically, data scientists can build a model in a Kaggle Jupyter Notebook, known as Kaggle Kernels in the community. You can then link directly to BigQuery through the tool’s API, making it much simpler to query against the data in the data warehouse using SQL, a language data scientists tend to be very familiar with.

The benefit of this approach, according to Google, is that you don’t have to actually move or download the data to query it or perform machine learning on it. “Once your Google Cloud account is linked to a Kernels notebook or script, you can compose queries directly in the notebook using the BigQuery API Client library, run it against BigQuery, and do almost any kind of analysis from there with the data,” Google wrote in a blog post introducing the integration.

Data scientists, who have a particular way of working, get to work in a familiar fashion and it reduces the friction involved in building a model and conducting machine learning against it. Instead of moving back and forth between tools, you can do all your work in a smoother, more integrated way and it should save time and effort in the long run.

What’s more, because Kaggle is a public community of data scientists, you can share Kernels should you choose to do so. Conversely, you can search the public repository and use existing Kernels as a starting point or as a reference to experiment with different types of data sets.

The Kaggle community also provides a means to discuss issues with other data scientists in an open way. The community has 3 million users and there are currently 200,000 Kernels available to explore in the public repository.

There might be no better microcosm of 2019 Apple than Catalina. The latest version of macOS arrives during a transitional time for the company. The desktop is a showcase for increased focus on content, a continued push toward cross-platform compatibility and a renewed push to court creative professionals.

For a few years now, the desktop operating system has played second fiddle to iOS, but the long mobile honeymoon has begun to wane, as smartphone sales have begun to flag for the first time since Apple revolutionized the category with iPhone. The company clearly sees a future in the billion-dollar play of Apple TV+, while the return of products like long-lamented Mac Pro find it attempting to reassert its core audience.

macOS 10.15 has a lot updates to comb through, but the new stuff largely focuses on two primary categories:

• Changes in the way Apple serves up content, with new versions of Apple Music and Podcasts (farewell, iTunes) and TV.
• Playing more nicely with iOS and mobile devices. This, of course, has been a longtime push for the company, but the ease of porting iOS/iPadOS apps through Project Catalyst and Sidecar, which brings native second screen support to the iPad, are arguably the two biggest changes to the operating system this time around.

Apple Music

Apple users of a certain age got a little misty-eyed with this one. macOS updates are probably not the best way to mark the passage of time, but at least they appear year in, year out, like clockwork. Like the slow, silent death of the iPod Classic, the end of iTunes does point to the closing of an important chapter for the company — and digital music in general.

Apple, of course, has been prepping us for this inevitability for years now by breaking the iOS version of iTunes into separate Podcast and Music apps. Honestly, it’s a little surprising that it took so long for the desktop version to follow suit.

“Customers love iTunes and everything it can do. But if there’s one thing we hear over and over, is can iTunes do even more?” VP Craig Federighi jokingly asked onstage at WWDC — before offering a mock up of the application bundling in Calendar and Mail. That got a big laugh. Engineers love that stuff.

The company positioned the newer, leaner desktop version of Apple Music as part of the war against software bloat. That’s part of the story, but the real issue at play here is how the conversation has shifted from digital music ownership to subscription-based services. Apple Music is now more front and center, an added leg up in the company’s continued battle against services like Spotify.

Even with the name change and shift in focus, however, the app will prove familiar enough to longtime iTunes users, right down to the logo. And for those concerned about the total destruction of the nearly 20-year-old software, the iTunes name is, in fact, staying around in the form of the “iTunes Store,” which distinguishes the legacy download store from Apple’s streaming offering. No doubt labels are continuing to push access to music purchases, though whether “iTunes” will continue to exist in this small sliver of macOS remains to be seen.

For all of the sentimentality, the continued use of both “iTunes” and “Apple Music” has likely caused some level of confusion among consumers. Hell, I know I still refer to the Podcasts app as “iTunes” from time to time. Old habits, etc.

“For You” is now the centerpiece of the Apple Music experience. The homepage operates similarly to what you get with iTunes, offering up a combination of curated suggestions, recently played and recommendations from friends. The offering is more dynamic than before, tailoring more of the content to Apple Music listening.

If you’re like me (longtime Spotify user here), the app will prompt you to sign up for Apple’s service. This will no doubt serve as an annoyance for non-subscribers looking to listen to their own local music collection. You can largely avoid this by navigating directly to the Artists, Albums or Songs icons in the sidebar or by keeping your searches to “Your Library.”

Apple TV

The macOS version of the Apple TV app gets a major update following hot on the heels of its iOS counterpart. Apple’s very clearly priming the pump here to ready its billion-dollar premium streaming offering, which is due out at some point in the fall.

Like Apple Music, most of the big changes here are how the content, in preparation for what looks to be a pretty big paradigm shift for Apple heading into the end of the year. But while we’re all waiting for TV+ to drop, the company has brought one key addition to the app: Channels.

Announced at the company’s big TV event earlier this year, Channels integrates premium networks like HBO, Show and Start directly into the app. In addition to competing directly with Netflix, Hulu and the like, Apple is also hoping to replace your cable provider. And honestly, given the approval ratings of companies like Comcast and Time Warner these days, that might not ultimately be that much of a challenge. Of course, whether people look to Apple to take that step may depend on the success of TV+ as an effective Netflix replacement.

Up top, content is divided into four categories: Watch Now, Movies, TV Shows, Kids and Library. The format is similar to Apple Music, in that content discovery is pushed out from, with the library relegated to the last tab. For now, that means downloads and cable channels. In the future, that will no doubt mean a direct front up front to subscribe to Apple TV+. Likely the streaming service will have prominent placement among the Watch Now recommendation, along with its own tab up front.

Kids get their own tab this time out, as well. The tab curates family friendly fare into a single location, including some familiar IP like Mickey Mouse and Charlie Brown, along with movies and TV broken down by age groups (2-4, 5-7 and 8-10).

Podcasts

Podcasts have long had their moment in the sun on iOS with their own standalone app. Now they’ve been liberated on the desktop. Like the new Music app, Podcasts isn’t much of a departure from iTunes. Now that there’s something in the neighborhood of 700,000 individual shows, however, it’s probably about time they’ve got their own thing. Likely the app will take on more of its own individual voice as it matures.

As with the mobile version, Listen Now is the primary pane, offering up shows in reverse chronological order. This change was met with mixed results when the company implemented it on iOS. As someone who prefers to listen to podcasts in the order they’re posted, I’m not a particularly big fan of the setup. I’ll be spending more time listening from the bottom up in the Downloaded section.

I do wish the company offered a little more control over how shows are served up. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s extremely particular about these sorts of things.

Like all the the other content updates, discovery continues to be king. The company has invested a lot in editorial curation in recent years, knowing that recommendations are the best and easiest ways to get people to keep engaging. It’s always nice to see podcasts getting an increased focus from big companies — Apple in particular. After all, it was one of its product lines that gave the medium its name.

Sidebar syncing

Here’s an interesting piece that didn’t get much love during the keynote earlier this month. Device media syncing has traditionally been the realm of iTunes. Now that the company has broken up and effectively sunset the app, it’s opted to integrate the feature directly into the finder.

Now when you plug in an iOS device, it will pop up in the Finder sidebar alongside other drives. From here, you can check to see if your software is up to date, restore the phone and manage backups. It also shows how much storage you’ve got left, battery charge and a bunch of other pertinent information.

A menu up top gives options for managing music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audio books, books and photos. It’s a bit of an adjustment, managing all of that in the Finder, but it’s nice having it all up front, in one location.

Photos

I’ll be honest, I don’t really use Photos very often on the desktop. In fact, I’ve apparently never actually used it on the work laptop I’ve used to install Catalina (caution, meet wind), requiring me to walk through the install process. That said, there are some nice additions borrowed from the iOS version that do make the macOS version more engaging.

Users can view photos by Days, Months or Years. If you have location on for shots, the software will present things contextually, so you can view anniversaries and the like. Apple presented a really compelling application onstage with the birthdays of a child throughout the years, allowing you to see all of that date in one place. It’s a bit like a more powerful version of Facebook’s anniversary feature.

Like the iOS version, Apple uses AI to identify the “best” shots, which are presented in a larger format, while less aesthetically pleasing ones (I regularly snap photos of my hotel room numbers, for example) are removed from scrolling. The app will also auto-play live photos as you scroll through, for a more dynamic experience.

Sidecar

This is arguably the most eagerly awaited addition of the bunch — certainly it’s the one I’m most excited about. I’ve been a user of both Luna and Duet. And honestly, up until a few months ago, I didn’t expect this would be the sort of thing Apple would bake directly into their ecosystem. But here we are, and I’m excited. Third-party solutions have relied on clever workarounds with varying effects.

With Sidecar, iPads double as a secondary display. Third-party solutions have been a godsend for me on the road. When I get to my destination, I break out the iPad, set it up on a stand and use is it for my Tweetdeck feed and online resources while writing up stories in the main window.

All of this can be done with Sidecar’s extended desktop, but the feature takes things further, making this as close as we’ve come yet to an officially sanctioned touchscreen Mac, with touchscreen Apple Pencil input. The latter works by mirroring the display on the iPad. The effect is something like using a Wacom tablet to draw on the content housed on your primary display, while the Mac does all the heavy computational lifting.

That last part is particularly important, given who Apple is going after with the feature. Sure it’s handy among frequent travelers, but the real target here is creative professionals, a category that Apple once dominated outright, but for whom it has begun to experience increasing competition through the likes of Microsoft, with its Surface line.

The feature is compatible with pro apps with stylus support, from Photoshop to Maya. The MacBook Touch Bar, meanwhile, lives at the bottom of the iPad display. The secondary display features a wide range of touch gestures, as well, including:

• Cut: Double three-finger swipe up
• Copy: Three-finger swipe up
• Paste: Three-finger swipe down
• Undo: Three-finger swipe left
• Redo: Three-finger swipe right

Best of all, it works both wired and unwired, though the former is recommended in situations where there’s a lot of wireless noise around you. Per Apple, the system should be able to connect up to 10 meters away, using a combination of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to connect and send signals with minimal lag.

I’ve taken to using the feature to spread out a bit in my local coffee shop (yes, I’m that guy, now) and have been really impressed by the responsiveness. There are a few ticks here and there that I’d change (for example, adjusting the brightness on the iPad’s touchbar just impacts the primary solution), but

Accessibility

It’s always refreshing to see companies add features to make experiences more accessible for people with disabilities. Voice Control is the big one here. Thankfully, I’m not in a position that requires access to such features right now in my life, but I’ve been playing around with the feature using some of the actions highlighted in the video accompanying the announcement at WWDC.

Understandably, it takes a lot of getting used to, including learning the limitations of what the system is capable of. But playing around with it for a bit, it’s easy to see how this could be a game changer for users who are unable to access traditional input methods.

For example, I started with “Open Messages.” Then, “Show Numbers,” which overlays numbers on the variety of different actions. That means instead of saying “compose message” like I might with Siri, I say “15” and then begin inputting text on that line. It’s still early days for the feature, of course, and it may have limited application with some third-party apps, but I’m still glad to see Apple making a point of including it here.

Look for some more hands-on write-ups with various new features in the coming months. The public beta of Catalina drops today. The final version is set for release some time this fall.

It’s stunning how fast emerging new technologies can coalesce around a simple human need and suddenly change everything, not to mention spur billions in investment.

That’s what has happened in the past five years to the basics of humans getting around town, or “mobility” in the shorthand of Silicon Valley. And that’s the first of the five reasons TC Sessions: Mobility is a must: The Mobility category is too momentous to walk on by. Arguably no tech category has invoked a bigger spectrum of emerging technology to deliver results that touch more lives.

The second reason? Mobility is still the Wild West any way you look at it. Very little is settled on either the tech or business front. What is true vehicle autonomy, for example, and when will we have it? At TC Sessions: Mobility, attendees like Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov, Zoox co-founder Jesse Levinson and Lia Theodosiou-Pisanelli from Aurora, among others, will be weighing in on those topics — and many more.

Keeping those onstage interviews real when it comes to demanding topics is always a challenge, which brings us to the third reason: TechCrunch has some of the most respected editors anywhere when it comes to covering mobility. TechCrunch’s  Kirsten Korosec, Megan Rose Dickey and Matt Burns built this show and will handle most of the interviews onstage. You can trust them to ask the right questions.

Fourth, please check out the amazing agenda for the show. It really speaks for itself. There is no hot mobility topic — from autonomy to VC investing trends, from micro-mobility to mobility-first city design, to safety and security — that the agenda does not touch.

And the last reason, but perhaps most valuable of all: Consider who you will meet at this show, and how easily you will make new connections. Thanks to our CrunchMatch system, attendees can easily discover each other based on interests and arrange to meet at the show. At every TechCrunch event, literally thousands of new connections arise through CrunchMatch.

And here’s a bonus reason: The sponsors organizing breakout sessions and exhibits at this show are recognized mobility leaders and will have top team leads on site. Catch up with ABB, AAA, Merchants Fleet, Waymo and many more — see the breakout lineup here.

We hope to see you there! 

$295 tickets are still available. Book yours today as prices go up at the door. Bringing a group of four or more? Save 15% with a group discount here.

Psst – if you’re a student you can book a $45 ticket with this link.

The last few decades have produced many successful marketplaces. We went from goods marketplace pioneers such as eBay and Amazon to simple service marketplaces such as Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Upwork, Thumbtack, TaskRabbit, and Fiverr. But why haven’t we seen many successful B2B service marketplaces?

Table of Contents

• Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed
  • Horizontal marketplaces are stuck at the discovery process
  • Complex B2B services require workflow and collaboration tools
  • Horizontal marketplaces suffer high attrition
• What Makes A Successful Service Marketplace?
  • STEP 1: SaaS Workflow Platform Unlocks High-Value Collaboration
  • STEP 2: Integrated Network and Payments Automation Strengthens Connections
  • STEP 3: Embedding Into Content Solutions and Matching Automation
• Summary: Figure Out How to Unlock Value for All

Why Many B2B Service Marketplaces Failed

Some would argue that companies such as Upwork, Thumbtack, Fiverr, or TaskRabbit are horizontal B2B marketplaces in the sense that they provide access to suppliers of different services. But while businesses do indeed transact with freelancers on such “horizontal” marketplaces, for most service verticals these are limited-value, one-off transactions. They fail to enable long-term business collaborations.

So, such marketplaces haven’t delivered more valuable services nor introduced a new paradigm for how businesses buy specific services at scale and on an on-going basis. Why is that?

Horizontal marketplaces are stuck at the discovery process

Horizontal services marketplaces don’t provide much value beyond matching clients with quality service providers. In other words, they don’t facilitate collaboration between buyers and suppliers, never mind provide ways for the two parties to collaborate more efficiently over time as they engage in follow-on projects.

In essence, the model these marketplaces were built around is not much different from the likes of Craigslist, which put a convenient UX on traditional classified advertisements.

Complex B2B services require workflow and collaboration tools

In their article “What’s Next for Marketplace Startups?,” Andrew Chen and Li Jin found that there aren’t many successful service marketplaces because those offerings are complex, diverse, and difficult to evaluate. It’s challenging to define a successful transaction in a service marketplace because it’s harder to quantify success.

One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?

(Image via Getty Images / Lidiia Moor)

The $50 billion translation industry is a prime example of complex B2B services marketplaces. On the supply side are roughly 50,000 small agencies around the globe responsible for more than 85% of this $50 billion industry. (Note we are referring to agencies here as suppliers, though they play on both sides.)

On the demand side are businesses that need to translate text from one language into another. Plus about 1,500,000 freelance linguists work in this industry, many of whom are more specialized than professionals in other industries.

Anyone can find and hire a translator on Fiverr or Upwork. Both provide a vast selection of language translators. However, the quality and cost of the translation depends on the translation tools available to the translator as well as their subject expertise.

Neither Fiverr nor Upwork provide computer-aided translation (CAT) and collaborative workflow solutions for users of their platforms. Additionally, neither provides an effective way for all parties to collaborate and continuously improve the efficiency and quality.

But the problem with traditional marketplaces goes even further: Multiple translators and reviewers are usually needed to complete a single job for a customer. Multi-language translation projects are even more complicated. Such projects require multiple service providers and cost estimates, in addition to project management tools.

This is why building a B2B service marketplace is difficult. Service marketplaces must not only connect buyers and suppliers, but also provide tools to enable an efficient and collaborative workflow that reduces wasted time and effort.

Horizontal marketplaces suffer high attrition

In addition to the problems already outlined, traditional marketplaces experience another issue that prevents them from growing and retaining market participants: Buyer and supplier attrition.

Many business services are based on regularly recurring engagements. In some cases, a buyer and a service provider interact daily, requiring a different workflow than gig-marketplaces are built around.

Buyers and suppliers have little motivation to continue interacting on a platform with no workflow automation solutions. They lack a way to improve service efficiency and quality, automate collaboration, payment, paperwork, and other basic processes required for a business.

This is why many traditional marketplaces suffer from slow network effects and high attrition. (A network effect is what happens when a platform, product, or service delivers more value the more it is used.

Think Facebook, eBay, WhatsApp.) Why wouldn’t companies work directly with service providers outside of a marketplace after they were introduced? What incentives keep the service transaction on the marketplace? These are critical questions to answer when building a marketplace.

Traditional marketplaces target broad services, making it nearly impossible to provide workflow solutions for buyers and suppliers. Going forward, successful service marketplaces will be developed relying on an industry-specific SaaS workflow. This will focus buyers and suppliers on longer-term projects and interactions that serve the unique needs of collaborations and transactions in a specific vertical.

Image via Getty Images / OstapenkoOlena

What makes a successful service marketplace?

In “The next 10 Years Will Be About Market Networks,” James Currier, Managing Partner at NFX Ventures, defines a new era of service marketplaces, which he calls market networks.

A market network is a platform that combines elements of an n-sided marketplace, a network, and workflow solutions. An n-sided marketplace is one that requires coordination of multiple supply-side parties to provide a complex service for a single buyer.

Market networks enable multiple buyers and suppliers to interact, collaborate, and transact on the same platform. They provide users with industry-specific workflow solutions that enable efficient, ongoing collaboration on long-term projects. This reduces costs and leads to a higher quality of services and increased overall value for all users.

But how do you actually build a successful market-network platform? While the answer to that varies from company to company, here is our approach. We were able to build a market network for the translation industry that combines the components: network, marketplace, and workflow solution.

STEP 1: SaaS workflow platform unlocks high-value collaboration

The first step to building an effective complex market network is to develop a workflow that is easy for users to embrace. It might not seem like much, but this increases productivity by enabling teams to perform tasks that were previously impossible.

Trash is a new startup promising to make it easier for anyone to create well-edited videos.

Social video is an area that CEO Hannah Donovan knows well, having previously served as general manager at Vine (the video app that Twitter acquired and eventually shut down). She said that in user research, even though people had “really powerful cameras in their pockets,” when it came to editing their footage together, they’d always say, “Oh, I’m not technical enough, I’m not smart enough.”

Donovan, who also worked as head of creative at Last.fm, said she “got curious about whether we could use computer vision to analzye the video and synthesize it into a sequence.”

The result is the Trash app, which comes with a straightforward tag line: “You shoot, we edit.”

Donovan demonstrated the app for me last week, shooting a few brief clips around the TechCrunch New York office, which were then assembled into a video — not exactly an amazing video but much, much better than anything I could have done with the footage. We also got to tweak the video by adjusting the music, the speed or the “vibe,” then post it on Trash and other social networks.

Donovan founded the company with its Chief Scientist Genevieve Patterson, who has a Ph.D. from Brown and also did postdoctoral work with Microsoft Research.

Patterson told me that Trash’s technology covers two broad categories. First there’s analysis, where a neural network analyzes the footage to identify elements like people, faces, interesting actions and different types of shots. Then there’s synthesis, where “we try to figure out what are the most cool and interesting parts of the video, to create a mini-music video for you with a high diversity of content.”

The app should get smarter over time as it gets more training data to work with, Patterson added. For one thing, she noted that most of the initial training footage used “Hollywood-style cinematography,” but as Trash brings more users on-board, it can better adapt to the ways shoot on their phone.

It’s staring that on-boarding process now with what Donovan calls a “creator beta,” where the team is looking for a variety of creators — particularly talented photographers who haven’t embraced video yet — to try things out. You can request an invite by downloading the iOS app. (Donovan said there are plans to build an Android version eventually.)

Trash has raised $2.5 million from sources as varied as the National Science Foundation, Japan’s Digital Garage and Dream Machine, the fund created by former TechCrunch Editor Alexia Bonatsos. Donovan said the startup isn’t focused on revenue yet — but eventually, it could make money through sponsorships, pro features and by allowing creators to sell their footage in the app.

And if you’re wondering where the name come from, Donovan offered both a “snarky response” (“I don’t give a damn and I don’t take myself too seriously”) and a more serious one.

“We believe that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure,” she said. “With filmmaking, as you know, there’s a lot of things that get left on the cutting room floor. That’s one of the product concepts, in the longer term, that we want to explore.”