Year: 2019

California Governor Gavin Newsom earlier today proposed a so-called digital dividend that would let consumers share in the profits generated by California-based tech companies that have been “collecting, curating and monetizing” their users’ personal data. Newsom added that he has asked his administration to develop a proposal for a “new data dividend for Californians, because we recognize that data has value, and it belongs to you.”

It’s an idea that tech companies will surely argue against if it begins to take shape beyond a talking point, but it has at least one early proponent: Jim Steyer, the founder and CEO of the hugely popular,15-year-old nonprofit organization Common Sense Media. In fact, says Steyer, the idea is his, and Common Sense, which also has powerful advocacy and educational arms, is working on related legislation right now.

Steyer’s involvement in the background might surprise some of the 125 million people who visit the site each year for advice on what movies, shows, apps, and games are age appropriate for their children. But it’s well-known to executives in politics, media, and tech,who Steyer has befriended and sometimes harangued, all in the pursuit of putting children first, he suggests.

As renowned GOP strategist Mark McKinnon told Politico in 2014, Steyer knows everyone, and he doesn’t shy from tapping his vast network when he wants to get something done. In fact, McKinnon told the outlet that he couldn’t remember how he came into Steyer’s orbit initially, but that their meeting was no accident. “He figured I could help him, and he found me . . . He’s connected to more big names than Kevin Bacon.”

We talked with Steyer today as he was en route to the airport in New York to talk with him Common Sense’s reach, how he views tech, and the ways he has been using his powerful platform in ways that might surprise. Our chat with Steyer (who is big brother of billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer) has been edited for length and clarity.

TC: You have 300 employees, 125 million unique users, and you’ve said that Common Sense’s research-based curriculum and tools are used in over 75,000 U.S. schools. Are people constantly trying to persuade you to turn Common Sense into a for-profit venture?

JS: Forever. All the time. But we’re Switzerland. It’s important to us that you can’t buy our reviews and ratings, even if you’re [CEO] Bob Iger at Disney. We’re there for parents who need an independent resource about TVs, movies, video games, books, cells phones, social media. Our mission is to make children the number one priority in our society.

TC: And you’re financed–

JS: We’re extremely well-financed because we license our ratings to Comcast, to Charter, Cox, Netflix. They all use us, but we’re also their biggest critics on the advocacy front.

TC: I didn’t realize what a political force Common Sense has become, by your telling.

JS: We’re the biggest advocates for [Governor Gavin} Newsom’s early-childhood agenda. We wrote the privacy law that passed in California last year [and offers California consumers sweeping new internet privacy protections beginning next year]. Gavin announced the data dividend today in today’s address; we’re about to introduce legislation on this.

TC: Why this for your life’s work?

JS: Because I was a school teacher in Harlem in the South Bronx. Then I ran the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and started [my first advocacy venture] Children Now [in 1988]. My life’s work has been kids, and there was nobody doing anything like what Common Sense does. There were advocacy groups, but our goal was really to create the AARP for kids.

TC: You went to high school with Roger McNamee, who has written a new book called “Zucked” about the damage Facebook has wreaked on society. We talked with him about it last week. What did you think of the book?

JS: I’m in the book. Did you read the whole thing?  Roger and Tristan [Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who is now the director and a co-founder of The Center for Humane Technology] were based out of our office for a year.

I wrote “Talking Back to Facebook,” which basically said the same thing, in 2012. You could see it coming way before “Zucked,” which I told Roger, who was a terrible guitarist in high school, by the way. You can quote me on that. He’s my good friend but he was terrible.

TC: You have four kids. What’s your stance on technology?

JS: My stance? It’s limit it. Set clear rules and follow them. The world of tech and social media is here to stay. The genie is out of the bottle. So you have to come up with a healthy tech diet. You have kids? Don’t let them have cell phones. Delay, delay, delay, baby.  The Steyer kids didn’t get a cell phone until high school. Except the fourth. You get tired. He’s also a true digital native, where the older kids have graduated from Stanford and I ask them, Aren’t you glad you didn’t have phones earlier on? You turned out okay.

TC: We’re having that battle right now with our 11-year-old. In fact, I’m on Common Sense maybe 10 times a week doing research to counter his arguments. The platform does seem conservative when it comes to age appropriateness.

JS: We’re rating things for people wnot just who live in San Francisco but who live in Greenville, South Carolina and rural Alabama and in Kabul, Afghanistan. We don’t presuppose that local standards are the same everywhere. That said, we understand that you might subtract a year or two from our recommendations. My own children did that.

TC: What’s the fastest-growing aspect of your content? Is it around social media?

JS: A lot of interest centers on social media — Instagram, Snapchat. People are also very focused on where their kids now watch TV, which is YouTube .

TC: YouTube is very actively driving me crazy right now.

JS: It should be. There are many disgraceful elements and I tell Sundar [Pichai] and Susan [Wojcicki] and they would like to help us. They know it’s a huge pain point.

TC: You sound like Roger McNamee, who talks about Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg eventually seeing the light. Does Google want to work with you? Do you think these platforms should be regulated?

JS: We want to regulate them and we want to work with them. I like Sundar. I like Ruth [Porat, Google’s CFO]. I like the people running Google more than their predecessors, who I also know quite well. But YouTube is the single-most popular platform for kids these days and there are zero controls, zero rules. It’s a completely unregulated environment.

TC: How does Common Sense approach the morass that is YouTube? How can you help parents steer through the content?

JS: We’re looking at the whole picture right now and taking a holistic approach. Sundar is a power user; he has three kids. Susan is my friend. She has five kids. We go to football games together. We are having that discussion. They know it’s a big deal.

TC: And Mark Zuckerberg? Sheryl Sandberg? What’s your take on Facebook, more than six years after writing your book? 

JS: I think all this pressure is an existential threat to their brand. Last year, they were largely mute. Even though they didn’t like when we wrote and passed that privacy act they stayed out of it, because their brand has been so tarnished. Parents know they can’t trust their kids with Facebook and Instagram. And [Instagram founders] . Kevin [Systrom] and Mike Krieger have left. Jan Koum of WhatsApp has left. Its record speaks for itself.

We have a complicated relationship because of my book and because we refuse to partner with them. We work through political efforts instead.  Do I get invited to Sheryl’s Hanukkah party any more? No.

I respect their extraordinary success. We’ve just disagreed with them on so many levels for so long that I wrote a book about them and I was right. Go read it. You can probably find it for $2.

TC: Is Amazon part of Common Sense Media’s purview?

JS: We highlight kids making purchases without their parents’ knowledge all the time. This is a brave new world, and we’re trying to bring some order to the chaos.

There’s a lot of this libertarian ethos in Silicon Valley that I don’t agree with. The consequences for kids are too steep. It’s been ‘damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.’  And the chickens are coming home to roost.

The large majority of venture dollars are invested in companies run by white men with a university degree, according to a new report by RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC.

This new data reveals that despite the lip service investors have paid to backing founders from diverse backgrounds, much, much, more work needs to be done to actually achieve the industry’s stated goals. It also shows the vast gulf that separates the meritocratic myth that Silicon Valley has created for itself from the hard truths of its natural nepotistic state.

In 2017, venture capital investment reached $84.24 billion, a height not seen since the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s. The data from RateMyInvestor and Diversity VC covers a survey of the seed to Series D investments made during that year from what the two organizations selected as the top 135 firms by deal activity. Those firms invested in 4,475 companies, which collectively included 9,874 co-founders, according to the report.

Of those co-founders only 9 percent were women, while 17 percent identified as Asian American, 2.4 percent identified as Middle Eastern, 1.9 percent identified as Latinx and 1 percent identified as black.

“VCs should make more of a deliberate effort to spend quality time with communities of color that are otherwise unfamiliar,” said Suzy Ryoo, a venture partner and vice president of technology at Cross Culture Ventures . “Another tactical suggestion would be to co-host salon dinners community events with the growing group of early-stage venture funds managed by diverse investors, such as Cross Culture Ventures, Backstage Capital, Precursor Ventures, etc.”

The data compiled by Diversity VC and RateMyInvestor contains some other staggering statistics. Ivy League-educated founders captured 27 percent of all the dollars invested in venture capital startups, while all graduates from all other universities across the U.S. represented 50 percent of venture funding. Founders who graduated from international institutions had nearly 16 percent of venture funding. Founders without a university degree accounted for around 6 percent of the total capital invested.

Finally, investors are still wildly reluctant to leave Silicon Valley to look for new deals, according to the survey. This despite skyrocketing prices for real estate and talent and the emergence of big technology ecosystems in cities across the U.S.

“Silicon Valley has done a poor job of fostering diversity of all forms, especially diversity of thought,” said DCM partner Kyle Lui. “VCs and founders tend to back/hire people who are in their existing network who most likely share the same views as them, went to the same school as them, and shared similar life experiences as them.”

I’m not in the habit of getting naked during meetings at startup offices, but this time it felt appropriate.

Nebia, a shower startup that has attracted investments from the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s foundation is back with some new cash (though it won’t divulge how much) and a new generation of its thoughtfully designed shower heads that aim to dramatically reduce the amount of water people use while cleaning up.

After a lengthy chat with Nebia CEO Philip Winter who discussed all of the nuances of the Nebia’s second-gen “Spa Shower” that they just launched a crowdfunding campaign for today, he asked whether I’d like to try it out. With a couple hours of empty space in my calendar, I said “Why not?” and wandered over to the startup office’s shower showroom.

Shower Thoughts

This was probably the most analytical thinking I’ve done in the shower about the process of showering itself.

The shower head in my bathroom at home is pretty standard and basically concentrates the water into a couple dozen streams organized in a circle that are firing at an even pace. It’s nothing fancy, I couldn’t tell you the brand, but I can say that I spend at least 20-30 minutes in there everyday without exception.

Nebia’s shower is wildly more complicated — as a $499 shower should be — but it’s the combination of different techniques that leads to a shower that feels full and refreshing but is using significantly less water than you’re used to. The customer for this is probably placing a healthier premium on the fact that it’s great for the environment than that it’s a spa-type experience, the shower head uses 65 percent less water than your average shower head, the company says.

The Nebia shower is all a very strange feat of engineering and involves the water being “atomized” as they called it, with water droplets being significantly smaller when it exits some nozzles leading to an enveloping mist and larger and warmer jets being shot out of the shower head’s center. The big improvement in this generation is that the water is about 29 percent warmer.

How does the shower head even control warmth? Isn’t all the water coming from the same heater? As Winter explained to me, things are a lot more complicated when it comes to how Nebia handles thermodynamics. Smaller water droplets means increased surface area exposed to the room temperature which means greatly sped up heat dissipation. In practice, this means that the distance the water can travel from the shower head before getting chilly is a much shorter journey than your current shower. To adjust that, Nebia fires the water droplets three times quicker and maintains some larger droplet streams to maintain the heat for longer.

Nebia does a bit of cheating by also having a second shower head firing from the hip. The wand adds to the water being used but still keeps the system using about half of the amount of water that the average shower head uses.

Thankfully, there was also room for a side-by-side comparison as I was able to try out both the gen-1 and gen-2 Spa Shower in the same bathroom. The shower experience didn’t feel wildly distinct but the difference in water heat when cranked to full blast was notable, my own temperature sensing isn’t quite finely tuned enough to confirm the 29 percent figure, but that doesn’t seem off.

Ultimately, it was the best shower I’ve had in a startup’s offices to date, but it was also a shower that didn’t feel as though I was resting my head under a light trickle of cold water like other low-flow showers. It’s a real product though at this point it’s also a decidedly premium product, even with the $100 crowdfunding discount of the $499 retail price. Beyond the warmer water, the new shower’s easy-install system is now compatible with about 95 percent of American homes, the company says. There’s also a new matte black color option and a little matching shower shelf you can add to keep that high-design look.

The company, which launched out of Y Combinator, has attracted some top investors who seem to be intrigued by the water-saving impact. The company says they’ve already shipped over 16,000 shower heads and that over 100 million gallons of water have been saved.

This Series A investment was led by Moen, the faucet and shower head maker which also announced a partnership with the startup. The latest round also boasts follow-on investment from Tim Cook and The Schmidt Family Foundation as well as some new investors like Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Starwood Hotels co-founder Barry Sternlicht, Fitbit co-founder James Park and Stanford StartX.

The crowdfunding campaign kicked off today and has already blown through $300k in pre-orders (they’ve already sold most of the $349 early bird deals); the company hopes to ship the first 2.0 shower heads in June.

Google for Startups has expanded a partnership with startup training program Founder Gym to better serve underrepresented founders through a new scholarship program.

The program typically charges $396 to participate, but thanks to this partnership with Google for Startups, Google will cover the costs for select scholarship recipients to participate in the six-week program. This partnership is an extension of a pilot program that started last March.

“Google for Startups took an early bet on Founder Gym when we were less than six months old, and as any founder knows, you never forget the first people to say ‘yes’ to your dream,” Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said in a statement.

“Our team at Founder Gym has used that early vote of confidence to help fuel our efforts to train a groundbreaking number of founders around the world in our inaugural year.”

Founder Gym, co-founded by Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon and Gabriela Zamudio,* unveiled its online platform in November 2017 to support and train underrepresented founders building tech startups.

“We are deeply committed to supporting the growth and success of underrepresented founders,” Google for Startups VP Lisa Gevelber said in a statement. “At Google we know that innovation can come from anywhere, but the resources needed to succeed are not evenly distributed. Founder Gym is truly moving the needle in this space – their unique program delivers the tangible resources necessary to level the playing field for founders and help them grow their businesses.”

Instead of describing it as a school, bootcamp or incubator, Founder Gym describes itself as a topical, six-week training program that covers topics like fundraising, pitching, user growth and problem validation. In Founder Gym’s first 12 months of operation, its cohort has collectively raised $35 million in funding.

“As we enter year two of this journey, we couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership with Google for Startups, an organization that has a long history of supporting the entrepreneur’s journey,” Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said. “There is no doubt in my mind, this partnership will help us achieve our mission of developing the next generation of great innovators and leaders.”

Update 3:14 pm: This story has been edited to reflect the fact that Zamudio is no longer at Founder Gym. 

When it comes to the cloud market, there are few known knows. For instance, we know that AWS is the market leader with around 32 percent of market share. We know Microsoft is far back in second place with around 14 percent, the only other company in double digits. We also know that IBM and Google are wallowing in third or fourth place, depending on whose numbers you look at, stuck in single digits. The market keeps expanding, but these two major companies never seem to get a much bigger piece of the pie.

Neither company is satisfied with that of course. Google so much so that it moved on from Diane Greene at the end of last year, bringing in Oracle veteran Thomas Kurian to lead the division out of the doldrums. Meanwhile, IBM made an even bigger splash, plucking Red Hat from the market for $34 billion in October.

This week, the two companies made some more noise, letting the cloud market know that they are not ceding the market to anyone. For IBM, which is holding its big IBM Think conference this week in Las Vegas, it involved opening up Watson to competitor clouds. For a company like IBM, this was a huge move, akin to when Microsoft started building apps for iOS. It was an acknowledgement that working across platforms matters, and that if you want to gain market share, you had better start thinking outside the box.

While becoming cross-platform compatible isn’t exactly a radical notion in general, it most certainly is for a company like IBM, which if it had its druthers and a bit more market share, would probably have been content to maintain the status quo. But if the majority of your customers are pursuing a multi-cloud strategy, it might be a good idea for you to jump on the bandwagon and that’s precisely what IBM has done by opening up access to Watson across clouds in this fashion.

Clearly buying Red Hat was about a hybrid cloud play, and if IBM is serious about that approach, and for $34 billion, it had better be, it would have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk. As IBM Watson CTO and chief architect Ruchir Puri told my colleague Frederic Lardinois about the move, “It’s in these hybrid environments, they’ve got multiple cloud implementations, they have data in their private cloud as well. They have been struggling because the providers of AI have been trying to lock them into a particular implementation that is not suitable to this hybrid cloud environment.” This plays right into the Red Hat strategy and I’m betting you’ll see more of this approach in other parts of the product line from IBM this year. (Google als acknowledged this when it announced a hybrid strategy of its own last year.)

Meanwhile Thomas Kurian had his coming out party at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco earlier today. Bloomberg reports that he announced a plan to increase the number of salespeople and train them to understand specific verticals, ripping a page straight from the playbook of his former employer, Oracle.

He suggested that his company would be more aggressive in pursuing traditional enterprise customers, although I’m sure his predecessor, Diane Greene, wasn’t exactly sitting around counting on inbound marketing interest to grow sales. In fact, rumor had it that she wanted to pursue government contracts much more aggressively than the company was willing to do. Now it’s up to Kurian to grow sales. Of course, given that Google doesn’t report cloud revenue it’s hard to know what growth would look like, but perhaps if it has more success it will be more forthcoming.

As Bloomberg’s Shira Ovide tweeted today, it’s one thing to turn to the tried and true enterprise playbook, but that doesn’t mean that executing on that approach is going to be simple, or that Google will be successful in the end.

These two companies obviously desperately want to alter their cloud fortunes, which have been fairly dismal to this point. The moves announced today are clearly part of a broader strategy to move the market share needle, but whether they can or the market positions have long ago hardened remains to be seen.

In August 2016, the Australian government released to the public a data set containing the medical billing history of nearly three million persons: every procedure they had undergone or prescription they had received. Needless to say, their names and all other identifying features had been redacted.

Nevertheless, within a few weeks a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne discovered how easy it was to re-identify the individuals in this ostensibly anonymous data set and extract their medical history. The researchers did this by using information readily available on the internet.

The media coverage of their paper bordered on hysteria; the Australian government was forced to remove the data set from its website — but not before it had been downloaded nearly 1,500 times.

In Israel in March 2018, the government decided to adopt a National Digital Health plan in order to exploit a rare Israeli asset — an extraordinary volume of computerized healthcare information, on a scale available in very few countries. Over the next five years, the Israeli government intends to invest more than 250 million dollars on collaboration between the Israeli healthcare system and corporations, startups and international investors.

The use of big data and its analysis by machine learning and artificial intelligence offer unparalleled prospects for improving medical care: first of all, in the area of predictive medicine, including early diagnosis and disease prevention; second, with regard to decision-support systems that produce more accurate diagnoses than human physicians can; and third — precision medicine. There is good reason why this market has become a goldmine, with annual revenues of billions of dollars.

What is surprising is that the government’s decision, despite its broad economic implications and the significant questions it raises, passed without almost any public discussion of the issue.

It is true that the resolution includes the explicit stipulation that all uses of health-related information must comply with statutory provisions and maintain medical privacy and confidentiality. It seems, however, that this decision and the report on the  National Digital Health plan appended to it, which refers to the conclusions of a Health Ministry committee that considered the secondary uses of health-related information, view privacy mainly as a legal impediment to be bypassed.

The working assumption of the policy documents is that as long as we are dealing with an anonymized data set, there is no need to require the active consent of individuals whose data is contained in it, but only to allow deletion from the data set upon explicit request. Let’s face it: Most of us are not experts in this domain, will not be aware of the dangers involved and will not be interested in something that seems to be complicated. How convenient…

The ability to take an anonymized data set of cellphone locations, for example, and use it to identify individuals was already demonstrated in 2013 in an article published in Nature. In Germany, researchers discovered that an anonymous internet search history could be linked to an actual identity. An extensive investigation by The New York Times recently showed how it is possible to reconstruct identifying information from anonymous smartphone app data. As the trail of digital crumbs we leave behind grows longer, the ability to re-identify “anonymous” data sets increases.

In the best-case scenario, those who extract information about us will be our bosses, who want to know if we were really home with the flu the day we called in sick; or law-enforcement agencies searching for a criminal. In the worst, politicians seeking to embarrass an opponent, insurance agents or advertising executives who want to convince us to buy a specific product or change our views of a candidate for office.

To put it bluntly, anyone who releases a medical database today without obtaining individuals’ consent for the use of their health records, with the excuse that the information is anonymous, is conning us. What validity can there be to a promise of anonymity in a world of ready re-identification? Decision-makers need to re-evaluate the risks involved, weighing the costs against the benefits, while considering privacy to be an immutable value, a basic human right and a precondition for the ability to realize one’s autonomy, independent thought and the democratic process — not a constraint.

How can we explain what is going on here? One possibility is that startup nation advocates pushed hard to ratify the plan as soon as possible, because of its contribution to innovation; these advocates view considerations of privacy as obstacles. Or maybe decision-makers simply lack an adequate understanding of the implications of this assault on privacy.

Also, the fact that those who draft new legislation are dragging their feet has made them seem incapable of providing a relevant response in real time, so it is simply better to circumvent them.

We can assume that no one in the government intends to grant anyone the right to traffic in our most sensitive personal data. The question is whether there is an adequate supervision mechanism to ensure that this will not happen. Has there been a public discussion of the serious ramifications of re-identification of medical data sets? Has a decision been made about the need for legislation on this matter? Has there been a national campaign to educate the public about it? The answer is no.

The re-identification of personal medical data sets is not some wild dystopian nightmare, but a real and rational fear. Such re-identification will not only generate social problems at the macro level, but will also introduce a significant element of distrust into the healthcare system, mainly at the level of the doctor-patient relationship.

The day we can no longer consult our family physician and tell him or her that we are suffering from delirium and hallucinations will be a sad day indeed. At that point, no slogan about a startup nation will help Israel.

Donde Search has just closed a $6 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors such as senior leaders from AliExpress, Google, and Waze.

Donde first launched in 2014 as a consumer-facing app that helped users search and discover apparel items based on visual characteristics rather than text-based searches. In early 2018, the company pivoted to the enterprise space, helping retailers power suggestions and related items on their websites.

Here’s how it works:

Retailers partnered with Donde hand over their product catalog and run it through the Donde algorithm, which identifies all the visual features associated with each product. Retailers can then add a widget to their site to let users search based on those features (like sleeve length or type, color, or material).

As users interact with the products, the website adapts to that behavior to offer personalized product recommendations and related items.

Moreover, Donde offers an analytics dashboard that not only provides insights on the customer’s own website, but a look into trends being featured on competing ecommerce websites to understand the industry in general.

Donde was founded by Liat Zakay, who previously served as a software engineer and R&D team manager in the Israeli intelligence unit 8200. Using her technical expertise, she built Donde to solve her own problem of not having the time or energy to go through the tedious process of online shopping.

Zakay told TechCrunch that Donde is focused on apparel for now, but that the technology can be applied to almost any vertical.

“One of the interesting pieces about Donde is that it’s language agnostic,” said Zakay. “You don’t need to know what it’s called and it doesn’t matter what language you speak, you can still find what you want based on visual features. Which makes us extremely relevant to global retailers.”

The new funding, which will be used to expand the product and the team, came shortly after the announcement of Donde’s partnership with Forever 21. The fast-fashion retailer tested out the Donde platform on its mobile app and, after a month, saw a 20 percent increase in average purchase value and higher conversions. Forever21 has now expanded the program, putting Donde on the web as well.

Donde said it is working on pilot programs with several other retailers across the U.S. and Europe.

Fast fashion, in particular, represents a big opportunity for Donde. Because product turnover is so fast, retailers rarely have reliable data around a certain SKU, with the website being run on outdated data from last ‘season.’

This latest round brings Donde’s total funding to $9.5 million, with backing from UpWest, Afterdox and Golden Seeds.

The latest figures out of NPD show a continued uptick in smartwatch sales here in the States. The category has been a rare bright spot in an overall flagging wearable space, and the new numbers show gains pretty much across the board. In fact, the study puts smartwatch ownership at 16 percent among U.S. adults as of December — that figure is up from 12 percent a year prior.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a younger demo driving that growth — specifically 18-34-year-olds, where smartwatch ownership is around 23 percent. Of course, Apple and the like have been looking to increase purchases with the older crowd, courtesy of more serious health features like last year’s addition of an ECG meter.

Apple, Samsung and Fitbit continue to dominate the market, making up 88 percent of the nearly $5 billion in sales tallied for the year ending in November. But companies like Fossil and Garmin made some market-share gains. Google, naturally, will be looking to make a larger dent in the market, with its recent purchase of Fossil IP. Wear OS’s growth has been pretty flat, but that could change in 2019 with the rumored arrival of the Pixel Watch.

Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that lets people chat without the app. If, or more likely, when this rolls out publicly, users on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, a non-Android or iPhone, or that access Instagram via a mobile web browser will be able to privately message other Instagrammers.

Instagram web DMs was one of the features I called for in a product wishlist I published in December alongside a See More Like This button for the feed and an upload quality indicator so your Stories don’t look crappy if you’re on a slow connection.

A web version could make Instagram Direct a more full-fledged SMS alternative rather than just a tacked-on feature for discussing the photo and video app’s content. Messages are a massive driver of engagement that frequently draws people back to an app, and knowing friends can receive them anywhere could get users sending more. While Facebook doesn’t monetize Instagram Direct itself, it could get users browsing through more ads while they wait for replies.

Given Facebook’s own chat feature started on the web before going mobile and getting its own Messenger app, and WhatsApp launched a web portal in 2015 followed by desktop clients in 2016, it’s sensible for Instagram Direct to embrace the web too. It could also pave the way for Facebook’s upcoming unification of the backend infrastructure for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct that should expand encryption and allow cross-app chat, as reported by the New York Times’ Mike Isaac.

Mobile reverse-engineering specialist and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong alerted us to Instagram’s test. It’s not available to users yet, as it’s still being internally “dogfooded” — used heavily by employees to identify bugs or necessary product changes. But she was able to dig past security and access the feature from both a desktop computer and mobile web browser.

In the current design, Direct on the web is available from a Direct arrow icon in the top right of the screen. The feature looks like it will use an Instagram.com/direct/…. URL structure. If the feature becomes popular, perhaps Facebook will break it out with its own Direct destination website similar to https://www.messenger.com which launched in 2015. Instagram began testing a standalone Direct app last year, but it’s yet to be officially launched and doesn’t seem exceedingly popular.

Instagram’s web experience has long lagged behind its native apps. You still can’t post Stories from the desktop like you can with Facebook Stories. It only added notifications on the web in 2016 and Explore plus some other features in 2017. only added notifications and Explore.

Instagram did not respond to requests for comment before press time. The company rarely provides a statement on internal features in development until they’re being externally tested on the public, at which point it typically tells us “We’re always testing ways to improve the Instagram experience.” [Update: Instagram confirms to TechCrunch it’s not publicly testing this, whch is its go-to line when a product surface that’s still in internal development.]

After cloning Snapchat Stories to create Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned app decimated Snap’s growth rate. That left Snapchat to focus on premium video and messaging. Last year Instagram built IGTV to compete with Snapchat Discover. And now with it testing a web version of Direct, it seems poised to challenge Snap for chat too.

Insta-chat addicts, rejoice. You could soon be trading memes and emojis from your computer. Instagram is internally testing a web version of Instagram Direct messaging that lets people chat without the app. If, or more likely, when this rolls out publicly, users on a desktop or laptop PC or Mac, a non-Android or iPhone, or that access Instagram via a mobile web browser will be able to privately message other Instagrammers.

Instagram web DMs was one of the features I called for in a product wishlist I published in December alongside a See More Like This button for the feed and an upload quality indicator so your Stories don’t look crappy if you’re on a slow connection.

A web version could make Instagram Direct a more full-fledged SMS alternative rather than just a tacked-on feature for discussing the photo and video app’s content. Messages are a massive driver of engagement that frequently draws people back to an app, and knowing friends can receive them anywhere could get users sending more. While Facebook doesn’t monetize Instagram Direct itself, it could get users browsing through more ads while they wait for replies.

Given Facebook’s own chat feature started on the web before going mobile and getting its own Messenger app, and WhatsApp launched a web portal in 2015 followed by desktop clients in 2016, it’s sensible for Instagram Direct to embrace the web too. It could also pave the way for Facebook’s upcoming unification of the backend infrastructure for Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram Direct that should expand encryption and allow cross-app chat, as reported by the New York Times’ Mike Isaac.

Mobile reverse-engineering specialist and frequent TechCrunch tipster Jane Manchun Wong alerted us to Instagram’s test. It’s not available to users yet, as it’s still being internally “dogfooded” — used heavily by employees to identify bugs or necessary product changes. But she was able to dig past security and access the feature from both a desktop computer and mobile web browser.

In the current design, Direct on the web is available from a Direct arrow icon in the top right of the screen. The feature looks like it will use an Instagram.com/direct/…. URL structure. If the feature becomes popular, perhaps Facebook will break it out with its own Direct destination website similar to https://www.messenger.com which launched in 2015. Instagram began testing a standalone Direct app last year, but it’s yet to be officially launched and doesn’t seem exceedingly popular.

Instagram’s web experience has long lagged behind its native apps. You still can’t post Stories from the desktop like you can with Facebook Stories. It only added notifications on the web in 2016 and Explore plus some other features in 2017. only added notifications and Explore.

Instagram did not respond to requests for comment before press time. The company rarely provides a statement on internal features in development until they’re being externally tested on the public, at which point it typically tells us “We’re always testing ways to improve the Instagram experience.” [Update: Instagram confirms to TechCrunch it’s not publicly testing this, whch is its go-to line when a product surface that’s still in internal development.]

After cloning Snapchat Stories to create Instagram Stories, the Facebook-owned app decimated Snap’s growth rate. That left Snapchat to focus on premium video and messaging. Last year Instagram built IGTV to compete with Snapchat Discover. And now with it testing a web version of Direct, it seems poised to challenge Snap for chat too.