Year: 2019

Scoot, owned by Bird, has just unveiled what it’s calling the Scoot Moped.

At first glance, it appears to be Bird’s two-seater vehicle. In June, Bird unveiled the Cruiser, which can seat up to two people and be pedal-assist or just have a peg, depending on the market.

While the Scoot Moped is meant for one person, the design and engineering of the Scoot Moped were based on the Bird Cruiser, according to Scoot.

Bird Cruiser

Initially, the Scoot Moped will be available in Los Angeles as part of a pilot program. Later this year, the plan is to roll them out into other cities. Riders must be at least 18 years old and wear a helmet, which comes with each moped rental.

Scoot has operated its traditional electric mopeds in San Francisco since 2012 and Barcelona since May 2018. In San Francisco, the mopeds max out at 30mph and in Barcelona, max out at 60 mph. With the new moped, the max speed is 20 mph.

Bird bought Scoot back in June for around $25 million. Since then, Bird has gone on to raise another $275 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

Over the past year or two, Squarespace has been expanding beyond website-building with new products like email marketing and its first acquisition (of an online schedulign tool) .

Today, it’s announcing a move into social media content creation with the acquisition of Unfold, which offers templates for creating stories on Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat — you might even call it a Squarespace-style approach to social media.

“As part of our pursuit to be the all-in-one platform for anyone who wants to stand out, we’re excited to welcome the publishers of Unfold into the Squarespace family,” said Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena in a statement. “Whether building a business or personal brand, social media is a place where many creators get started before launching a website. As a first in our category, we’re excited to provide our customers with a way to stand out no matter how they are getting started.”

The Unfold app is available for free, with premium templates available for individual purchase or a $2.99 monthly subscription fee. In the announcement, Squarespace said that Unfold has been used to create more than 700 million stories.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Squarespace said Unfold co-founders Alfonso Cobo and Andy McCune will be joining the company.

New York Attorney General Letitia James is turning up the heat on the state’s antitrust investigation into Facebook, which i seeking “to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.”

Her coalition previously consisted of attorneys general from a total of 8 states (plus Washington D.C.), but now that crew has gotten a bit bigger. In an announcement today, James noted that AGs from 31 other states (and Guam) have signed onto the investigation.

“After continued bipartisan conversations with attorneys general from around the country, today I am announcing that we have vastly expanded the list of states, districts, and territories investigating Facebook for potential antitrust violations,” a statement from her office reads. “As we continue our investigation, we will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook’s actions stifled competition and put users at risk.”

There are now 46 other AGs involved in the investigation with James. This investigation is notably separate from existing antitrust investigations from the DOJ and FTC.

For those keeping score: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia are involved in the New York investigation

New York Attorney General Letitia James is turning up the heat on the state’s antitrust investigation into Facebook, which i seeking “to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.”

Her coalition previously consisted of attorneys general from a total of 8 states (plus Washington D.C.), but now that crew has gotten a bit bigger. In an announcement today, James noted that AGs from 31 other states (and Guam) have signed onto the investigation.

“After continued bipartisan conversations with attorneys general from around the country, today I am announcing that we have vastly expanded the list of states, districts, and territories investigating Facebook for potential antitrust violations,” a statement from her office reads. “As we continue our investigation, we will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook’s actions stifled competition and put users at risk.”

There are now 46 other AGs involved in the investigation with James. This investigation is notably separate from existing antitrust investigations from the DOJ and FTC.

For those keeping score: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming, the territory of Guam and the District of Columbia are involved in the New York investigation

Startup founders have a million things to worry about every day.

Finding product-market fit, great talent and and a sustainable plan for constant growth are top of mind, but perhaps most importantly, they need to keep the lights on, whether it’s by raising venture capital or managing cash flows while bootstrapping.

The flip side to thinking about fundraising and growth, however, is skipping ahead to the final chapter — whether that involves M&A, an IPO or perhaps a bankruptcy, eventually all startups come to an end.

Instead of thinking about an exit while in the final throes, founders need to strategically lay the groundwork, even if it is potentially years away. Here’s how.

On the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we had a deep conversation on what founders should do to prepare for an exit with Jess Lee of Sequoia, who sold her startup Polyvore to TechCrunch parent company Yahoo; Justin Kan, who sold Twitch to Amazon and now runs legal startup Atrium; and Mike Marquez, the founding managing director of boutique investment bank Code Advisors.

The good news is that the primary requirement for exiting a startup is really the same work that a founder has to focus on: building a great business. “The best way to sell your company is to actually build a good company,” said Kan, since no acquirer is looking to buy damaged goods.

But even if you are building a solid business, that’s not nearly enough to get a transaction done some time down the line. One consistent piece of advice from the group was that founders should be thinking about an exit much more regularly, even if they are steadfastly opposed to one. That means identifying key relationships that will make an M&A possible and working to build and maintain those relationships.

“I thought about it too late,” Lee said about her time running Polyvore . “The same way you build relationships with investors, you should spend at least a little bit of time building relationships with partners who could become potential acquirers.”

Kan elaborated further. “I think that in the beginning, your responsibilities as a founder is just to find product-market fit [and] work on your product,” he said. “And then once you have a product that people want, you want to figure out how to get it in the hands of more people, and that’s when it starts to become really valuable to know everyone in your market and then adjacent markets.”

Far from being a completely separate task from the other duties of being a CEO, connecting with potential acquirers often has benefits for growing a company in the first place.

Announced this summer at IFA in Berlin, LG’s G8X ThinQ offers yet another take on the folding/dual-screen phenomenon. Rather than the outright foldable display of the Samsung Galaxy or the dual-screen of the forthcoming Microsoft Surface Duo, the device sneaks in additional screen real estate through an accessory.

Available here in the States starting November 1, the G8X ThinQ will arrive as a bundle with the LG Dual Screen accessory, starting at the extremely reasonably price of $699. Using a USB-C connector, the combo offers up a number of different dual-screen experiences, including a standard two screen, a game pad, and a keyboard, working a a sort of mini-laptop.

Early reviews and hands on have been a bit mixed. Given the nature of the product, there’s unsurprisingly a pretty sizable gap between the two screens. That rules out some of the primary folding phone case uses like movie watching. Honestly, the setup seems a bit more like an attempt to appeal to the growing interest in foldables without actually fully committing to the form factor. 

LG certainly seems to have the resources to go all-in a foldable, but the category still has a long way to go in terms of proving itself. And honestly, the early Galaxy Fold hiccups and Huawei Mate X delays aren’t exactly helping speed things along.

Still, there’s something to be said for the ability to go either single or dual screen, depending on the day and the use case. The Fold leaves something to be desired when closed. It’s a thick device with a tiny front screen. The G8X ThinQ certainly offers more in terms of flexibility. Plus the specs aren’t at all bad for the price, including a Snapdragon 855, 6GB of RAM and a 4,000mAh battery.

Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers.

The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers.” After all, it reflects the interest and behavior of all readers, not “not just the ones who remember to .”

According to Smith’s post, Medium has now paid out more than $6 million total to 30,000 writers.

When CEO Ev Williams explained the partner model to me shortly after it launched in 2017, he described it as an evolving formula that incorporated claps and reading time, but now it sounds like reading time has won out as the metric that matters.

“We believe in reading time because it represents the core value that our readers receive from Medium,” Smith writes. “It may not be a perfect measure of value, but we find that it’s a powerful proxy.”

To be more specific, Smith says Medium is measuring and determining compensation based on active reading time, so if someone keeps the window open when they step away for a few minutes, that shouldn’t count.

Smith also says Medium is looking at reading time in two ways — there’s the more straightforward measurement of “how long members spend reading your story” (this include readers who find your story and subscribe in the next 30 days), but also the percentage of their total reading time that members spend on your stories, which is meant to “support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers.”

In addition to changing the way earnings are calculated, Medium is also changing the frequency with which they’re calculated, from weekly to daily. And the reader data that Medium shares with writers will include “new metrics to explain your earnings.”

Despite all these changes, Smith notes that claps aren’t going away, and that they still matter: “Claps will remain a great way for readers to support stories they love. When your readers clap, they’ll boost your stories to a wider audience. And as more people read, you’ll earn.”

As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts.

“What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early on in the lifecycle of Figma as a company. Today, that vision is brought to life with the launch of Figma Community. (Figma Community is launching in a closed beta for now.)

In a crowded space, with competitors like Adobe, InVision, Sketch and more, Figma differentiates itself on its web-based multiplayer approach. Figma is a design tool that works like Google Docs, with multiple designers in the same file, working alongside one another without disrupting each other.

But that’s just the base level of the overall collaboration that Figma believes designers crave. Field told us that he sees a clear desire from designers to not only share their work, whether it’s on a portfolio webpage or on social media, as well as a desire to learn from the work of other designers.

And yet, when a creative shares a design on social media, it’s just a static image. Other designers can’t see how it went from a blank page to an interesting design, and are left to merely appreciate it without learning anything new.

With Figma Community, designers and even organizations can share live design files that others can inspect, remix and learn from.

Individual designers can set up their own public-facing profile page to show off their designs, as well as intra-organization profile pages so other team members within their organization can learn from each other. On the other hand, organizations can publicly share their design systems and philosophy on their own page.

For example, the city of Chicago has set up a profile on Figma Community for other designers to follow the city’s design system in their own materials.

As far as remixing design files goes, Figma is using a CC4 license, which allows for a remix but forces attribution. That said, Field says the company is using this closed beta period to learn more about what the community wants around different license types.

Community is free and is not meant to drive revenue for the company, but rather offer further value to designers using the platform.

“It’s early,” said Dylan Field. “This is just the scaffolding of what’s to come. It’s the start of a lot of work that we’re going to be doing in the area of collaboration and community.”

Figma has raised a total of $83 million from investors like Index, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Grelock, according to Crunchbase.

European launch provider Arianespace announced some exciting news regarding its ambitions for the Moon at the International Astronautical Congress today. Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël revealed on stage that its forthcoming space launch vehicle, the Ariane 6, will aim to deliver the first rideshare mission to the Moon in four years.

”By 2023 we are ready to offer the first ride share mission to the Moon with Ariane 6 and we are contemplating the first public and private customers for that launch,” he said during a fireside discussion on stage at the event.

This rideshare mission will be able to transport up to 8.5 tons of cargo, and deliver that to direct lunar transfer orbit. Israël said that while it currently in Arianespace’s planning scope to transport crew aboard their spacecraft, they could delivery landers and orbiters aboard the Ariane 6, which would set the stage for crew missions to follow – including potentially NASA’s Artemis program.

Ariane 6 is a two-stage medium-heavy lift launch system currently in development by Arianespace, under the direction of the European Space Agency. It’s aiming to have its first test flights next year, which makes the 2023 target for its first lunar orbit mission with paying customer cargo on board ambitious.

If Ariane 6 can make that target, however, it could become a crucial transport mechanism for any long-term attempts to not only ensure we can get crew to the Moon, but establish a working infrastructure and stay there, with humans spending long spans of time there living, working and researching.

Roku is beefing up its advertising business with the acquisition of Boston-based dataxu, a demand-side platform that will allow marketers to plan, buy and optimize their video ad campaigns that run on Roku’s devices and services. The deal, a mixture of cash and stock, is for $150 million and has been approved by each company’s board of directors. It’s expected to close in the fourth quarter.

The deal is meant to help Roku further grow its suite of tools for advertisers, at a time when its platform business is a larger contributor to Roku’s bottom line compared with hardware sales. The company today has over 30.5 million active users who watch via Roku’s OS either on Roku streaming media players or Rokus TV.

With the addition of dataxu, Roku will be able to provide advertisers with a data-drive solution they can use plan and buy their ad spend across Roku’s platform. The deal will also bring in dataxu’s experienced team,  which includes talent in software engineering, data science, and analytics.

In announcing the deal, Roku noted that the market for over-the-top advertising will continue to expand as the cord-cutting race heats up. Today, advertisers send over $70 billion on traditional TV. Over-the-top viewing accounts for only 29% of TV viewing, but has so far only captured 3% of TV ad budgets. With more consumers adopting streaming, automated solutions will help to unlock those additional TV ad dollars, Roku believes.

“TV advertising is shifting toward OTT and a data-driven model focused on business outcomes for brands,” said Anthony Wood, chief executive officer at Roku, in a statement. “The acquisition of dataxu will accelerate our ad platform while also helping our content partners monetize their inventory even more effectively,” he said.