Month: June 2019

You know the deal: a console is nothing without games. Same goes for streaming plans. Google jumped the gun on E3 this week with its Stadia Connect, a livestream that takes more than a page or two from Nintendo’s Direct offering. The event offered a little more insight into pricing, availability and specs — and, mostly importantly showed off some of the titles coming to the streaming platform.

The list includes some familiar franchises and a couple of exclusives, which will be available for a $10 a month subscription fee or for individual purchase.

The first, Moonshine Studios/Coat Sink’s Get Packed will be a Stadia Exclusive at launch. The title brings Overcooked style game play to furniture packing — arguably the most frustrating thing in the world. The co-op title allows up to four players to participate, because you know how easy it is recruiting friends to help you move.

Bungie’s received Destiny sequel will be arriving on Stadia. The first-person shooter includes the new chapter, Shadowkeep, which features a return to the lunar surface.

Another Stadia exclusive, the single player puzzle adventure title Gylt features some dark, supernatural gameplay. The Tequila Works title centers on a young girl’s search for her missing cousin.

Google closed things out with a sizzle reel focused on the breadth of titles coming to the platform, including games from top tier publishers like Ubisoft, Take 2, SquareEnix, Warner Bros, Bandai Namco and Bethesda.

The service launches this November.

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1. Google to acquire analytics startup Looker for $2.6 billion

Google Cloud has been mired in third place in the cloud infrastructure market, and grabbing Looker gives it an analytics company with a solid track record. The startup has raised more than $280 million in funding.

Like other big acquisitions, this deal is subject to regulatory approval, but it is expected to close later this year if all goes well.

2. Uber Copter offers on-demand JFK helicopter service for top-tier users

Uber is adding regular helicopter air service with Uber Copter — a new service line launched today that will provide on-demand transportation from Lower Manhattan to JFK airport for, on average, between $200 and $225 per person. That price includes car service to and from the helipad at each end.

3. In trying to clear ‘confusion’ over anti-harassment policy, YouTube creates more confusion

After a series of tweets that made it seem as if YouTube was ignoring its own anti-harassment policies, the video platform published a blog post in an attempt to clarify its stance. Instead, the post raises more questions about YouTube’s commitment to fighting harassment and hate speech on its platform.

4. Sources: Bird is in talks to acquire scooter startup Scoot

The stage of the negotiations is not clear, but it sounds like the deal is not closed. Both Scoot and Bird declined to comment.

5. Apple’s global accessibility head on the company’s new features for iOS 13 and macOS Catalina

“One of the things that’s been really cool this year is the [accessibility] team has been firing on [all] cylinders across the board,“ Apple’s Sarah Herrlinger told us. “There’s something in each operating system and things for a lot of different types of use cases.”

6. A first look at Amazon’s new delivery drone

The drone has an ingenious hexagonal hybrid design with very few moving parts, and Amazon says it’s chock-full of sensors and a suite of compute modules to keep the drone safe.

7. This year’s Computex was a wild ride with dueling chip releases, new laptops and 467 startups

Computex picked up the pace this year, with dueling chip launches by rivals AMD and Intel and a slew of laptop releases. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

Spotify just announced a partnership with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground.

Through this deal, Spotify says the Obamas will “develop, produce, and lend their voices to select podcasts, connecting them to listeners around the world on wide-ranging topics.”

Higher Ground was founded in 2018 as the Obamas signed a content partnership with Netflix. The company’s initial slate for Netflix was announced just over a month ago, covering everything from a Sundance documentary about industrial development in Ohio, to a scripted anthology adapted from a New York Times series profiling noteworthy names who didn’t previously receive Times obituaries.

Spotify, meanwhile, has been getting more serious about podcasting with the acquisition of startups Gimlet and Anchor, as well as by hiring longtime media executive Dawn Ostroff as its chief content officer.

Like the initial Netflix announcement, the release from Spotify doesn’t include launch dates or information about specific titles. As part of this collaboration, the production company will be launching Higher Ground Audio, a new division focused on podcasts.

“We’re excited about Higher Ground Audio because podcasts offer an extraordinary opportunity to foster productive dialogue, make people smile and make people think, and, hopefully, bring us all a little closer together,” said the former U.S. president in a statement.

We got the full rundown on Google’s Stadia game-streaming platform this morning in the company’s livestream launch ahead of E3 next week. The Stadia platform will let you play console-quality games across a variety of systems on the Chrome browser.

Top-level details are the company’s Stadia Pro service will launch in November for $9.99 per month. The price gets you 4K 60fps streaming but you’ll need at least a 35 mbps internet connection to get that speed. Alongside the streaming capabilities, you’ll get access to some Stadia games with the Pro subscription.

The company will be offering a Founders edition bundle that packages a Stadia copy of Destiny 2, the Stadia controller, a Chromecast Ultra and three months of the Pro service for $130. The Stadia controller alone will be $69.

Google will be offering a base subscription later that lets gamers who purchase titles from the Stadia store stream them for free at a lower resolution. This is a major announcement and something that Google really slid into the stream at the very end.

Updating

 

Google is introducing more about the launch of its Stadia streaming gaming service today, and VP Phil Harrison gave us performance specifics today so you can see exactly how the company thinks the service will perform based on what kind of internet connection you have. It tops out at an impress 4K resolution, with HDR color, 60fps frame rate and 5.1 surround sound, but you’ll have to have at least a 35 Mbps connection to get that level of quality.

Meanwhile, at 20 Mbps you’ll get full HD 1080p output, while retaining HDR video, 60fps and 5.1 surround. And Google has optimized for smoothness of stream by retaining 60 fps all the way down to its recommended minimum bandwidth connection quality of 10 Mbps (and even potentially below that based on this chart). You’ll only get 720p streams at that level, however, and stereo instead of surround sound.

“With Stadia, our goal is to make gaming more accessible for everyone,” is how Harrison framed it, and that applies to its range of connection support as well as its device availability. At launch you’ll be able to play stadia games on your TV (via Chromecast Ultra), desktop, laptop, and tablet (via browsers) and on smartphones, though only Pixel phones to begin with starting with Pixel 3 and Pixel 3a (via dedicated Stadia app).

Manifold, a startup known for providing all of the tools developers need in a single marketplace, has decided to make its core product available as a service, so that other companies can build a catalogue of related services without a fuss.

Everyone wants to be a platform these days, but creating the infrastructure to offer a set of related services, often might not be worth the effort. Beyond developing the actual catalogue of services, it requires skills like collecting money and distributing revenue. Most companies don’t have the skill set or resources to set all of that up, and Manifold decided to use its expertise to help out.

Jevon MacDonald, co-founder and CEO says they set out to build a complete management solution when they released their initial product last year. “The way we do that is by bringing things like billing, a single transaction for a developer, account management, teams and all the sort of things you have to do every time you use a cloud-based service or API.”

They felt the next logical step was to help their customers do something similar within their own ecosystems. “Now we’re here to talk about a Marketplace as a Service, which brings that power to these developer ecosystems directly by integrating with their existing products and platforms to make all the services the developers love to use available no matter where they run the code,” MacDonald explained.

He says that today, companies are really struggling to create marketplaces themselves and this gives them the ability to do that in a fairly straightforward fashion. “There’s a lot more companies attempting to launch marketplaces, and what we’re hearing from customers is that they’re going back to the drawing board on a lot of these fundamental pieces every time, and this is our bread and butter,”

Manifold’s plan is to make that capability available as an out-of-the-box service to allow anyone who wants to launch a marketplace to do it. The company launched in 2016 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and has raised over $13 million (18.5 million Canadian).

David Krane has a very big job. He’s the CEO and managing partner of GV, and he oversees the fund’s global activities, investing in tech companies including Uber, Nest, and Blue Bottle Coffee among hundreds of others.

Yet the journalism major and former director of global communications and public affairs for Google maintains a surprisingly low profile. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find news about Krane beyond the revelation several years ago that he was succeeding his far more public-facing predecessor, Bill Maris.

Then again, Krane seems to have a penchant for counterprogramming. He joined Google more than 19 years ago, when even its founders couldn’t imagine it would become one of most dominant companies in the world. He also moved over to GV as a general partner in 2010, making what now looks like a smart bet that the company’s venture arm would not get lost in its other machinery.

Another bold bet Krane made was on Uber, convincing his colleagues to pump nearly $260 million into the company six years ago — its largest deal ever at the time — when Uber was breaking away from the ride-hailing pack from very far from becoming the Goliath that it is today.

In fact, when we sat down with Maris at a StrictlyVC event in 2016, he credited Krane almost entirely with the deal, telling us, “David Krane brought in Uber and we pushed all in [financially] when people thought [Uber’s then valuation of $4 billion] was crazy . . . There was no computer that told us that was as good decision.”

Of course, Krane and the 28 investors who work alongside him at GV have funded a wide variety of consumer, enterprise, life sciences and frontier tech startups since — which is partly why we’re thrilled to announce that Krane is joining us at our upcoming Disrupt show, happening October 2nd through October 4th in sunny San Francisco.

We’ll talk for the first time with Krane about the inner workings of GV circa 2019. How does its decision-making process work, under his leadership? How does the team think about new areas of investment? What are Krane’s views on SoftBank and other giant pools of capital to come into the venture world? And how do GV and Alphabet’s growth-equity investment fund, Capital G, work together?

And that’s merely just the beginning. If you’re interested in understanding GV, its thinking, its processes, and where it’s shopping on Krane’s watch, you won’t want to miss this rare stage appearance. We just hope he’ll put up with our many (many) questions.

Tickets are available here.

Customers have described Ampush as the “McKinsey of growth marketing,” and in many ways, it’s apt. Ampush has a relentlessly quantitative, full-funnel approach to growth marketing, and they’ve built proprietary software to back it up. Co-founder and CEO Jesse Pujji explains why Ampush exclusively works with direct to consumer companies, and why they went from serving 100 companies in 2015 to forming deeper partnerships with less than 20 companies today.

On Ampush’s evolution

“From 2011 to 2015, we were one of a handful of companies that could do Facebook really well, although that’s all we did.  As a result, we ended up working with a ton of growth brands and Fortune 1000 brands, like Dollar Shave Club, Uber, Stitch Fix, and all of these direct to consumer brands and businesses.

By 2015, we realized, “what got us here won’t get us there,” and so we started to question how we would evolve our offering and our company. Just doing Facebook would be okay, it would be good, but it wouldn’t be great, and we always said, “We want to be really great.”

Advice to early-stage founders

“It’s important for a founder to understand the right metrics and what levers can be pulled because they’re going to need to understand it to keep growing their business. I typically recommend that one of the founders spend 50% of their time for 90 to 180 days with one or two contractors who really know the technicalities of Facebook and Google you don’t have to learn those if you’re a founder, but you do want to understand which copy is resonating, which creative, which audience, etc.  It takes a founders’ level of depth to crack the nut, and then Ampush can come in.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.

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Interview with Ampush CEO & Co-Founder Jesse Pujji

Yvonne Leow: Tell us about your journey. How did you find yourself working in growth?

Jesse Pujji: I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. My dad was an immigrant so I learned early on how to also be a small business entrepreneur. I was always running a snow-shoveling business, a lemonade stand business, a DJ-ing company. We cornered the Indian DJ-ing market in St. Louis. It turns out there weren’t a lot of Indian DJs in Missouri!

The City of Paris has had enough. There are currently 12 (yes, twelve) scooter startups in Paris. As reported by Le Monde, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo announced in a press conference a series of restrictions to regulate the space.

First, there are just too many scooter startups — Bird, Bolt, Bolt by Usain Bolt, Circ, Dott, Hive, Jump, Lime, Tier, Voi, Ufo and Wind. They all have funny-sounding names and there are even two different companies with the same name (Bolt).

Paris plans to hand out two or three licenses to operate. The French government is currently working on a mobility law. The City of Paris plans to select companies after the parliament approves the law. As part of the selection process, they want to make sure that companies have a sustainable approach when it comes to fixing broken scooters and not dumping them after a few weeks. Companies will also be selected based on how they pay workers charging scooters overnight.

Paris had already taken some actions against scooter startups before today. You can’t ride a scooter on the pavement and scooter operators have to pay €50 per scooter per year.

And yet, there are already 20,000 scooters in the streets of Paris. That’s why the city is going one step further and banning scooters from parks. You also won’t be able to park a scooter on the pavement.

You have to find a parking spot for cars and put your scooter over there. That sounds like a mess and I’m not sure how it’s going to work but it’s clear that there are too many scooters and not enough areas to park them in Paris right now.

While electric scooters aren’t as fast in Europe as in the U.S., Paris wants to limit top speed even more. The maximum speed will be 20kmph instead of 25kmph (12mph down from 16mph).

Let’s see if Paris can implement those restrictions quickly and if scooter startups are going to comply with this new set of rules.

Google Stadia is arriving with competitive pricing later this year but 2020 will be the platform’s ultimate test. Details of the service’s pricing and availability were being shared by Google at 9am PT today, but were leaked Thursday morning by Canadian newspaper La Presse, a post which has since been taken down but was translated by Kotaku.

Here are the leaked details, prices are given in Canadian dollars fyi:

Google’s game-streaming platform Stadia is reportedly arriving in November and will cost $11.99 Canadian per month. This base subscription get you 4K/60fps streaming, but the big news is that the company will launch a free model in 2020 that will let you play games you purchase through the service at 1080p resolution.

($11.99 Canadian is about $9 in USD currency, though there’s no guarantee Google will maintain pricing this way across markets)

To get onboard, the minimum internet connection speed is 10mbps download, so if you’re running any slower than that, tough luck, perhaps you’ll have better fortune with the lower-resolution streaming when it launches.

The subscription will come with some games for free, but you won’t get everything for $11.99 Canadian, you’ll have to buy most new games a la carte it sounds like. Popular titles like Doom, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey,The Division 2, Destiny 2 and the Tomb Raider trilogy will be coming to the service.

There’s an individual package called the Stadia Founder’s edition that will retails for $169 Canadian and will include a Chromecast Ultra, Stadia Controller, copy of Destiny 2 and three months of the service.

This is some fairly aggressive pricing for Google, high-resolution game-streaming is a bandwidth-intensive technology that’s extremely expensive. Basically unless you own the cloud and aren’t stuck with AWS fees, there’s no way you’re going to be able to compete with these prices, so fresh out the gate Google may already have a huge advantage if all of these details hold true when the company shares more details on Stadia this afternoon.