Year: 2019

Seafood has blown past its iceberg lettuce stage and entered trendy greens territory, with eaters loading up on oceanic superfoods and falling in love with previously unknown species as fast as daters swipe right. Even inland-dwelling locavores can easily satisfy their seafood cravings. What once was waste is now a premium snack, or maybe a wallet. We get that farmed fish is good—in every sense of that word. Mystery fish are a thing of the past. Sustainability is a minimum standard, not a luxury.

Just two years ago, that’s what I thought the seafood world would look like in 2027. Back then, as I studied trends in consumer desires, seafood sustainability initiatives, technology and investment, I foresaw seven transformative changes happening within a decade.

At the time it seemed like I was surfing the edge of plausibility. But based on what I’ve learned from the 200 or so seafood innovators entering the Fish 2.0 network over this past year, it’s all happening—in many cases much faster than I expected. And it’s happening all over the world.

So what does the future of seafood look like today?

Our palates are getting schooled

I predicted more diverse seafood diets, and while lionfish is not (yet) the new kale, don’t be surprised to see it sitting atop a Caesar salad in a few years.

People are looking beyond the shrimp-salmon-tuna triumvirate and learning to love the less familiar. Barramundi and cobia are going mainstream in some markets. Sustainable seafood purveyors are turning species that used to get thrown away into high-end treats, and celebrity chefs are buying invasive species (like that lionfish) and overlooked delicacies (like scampi caviar). At the same time, it’s getting easier to grow healthful, great-tasting salmon and other popular species in land-based farms, thanks to better feeds, disease prevention and production systems.

It looks like we really will stop loving our favorite wild fish to death and become more adventurous seafood eaters.

Fish and boat, Saint Louis, Senegal, West Africa, Africa (Photo: Godong / robertharding/Getty Images)

We’re buying direct

Local seafood still isn’t easy to come by for many of us, but options for buying direct from fishers—near or far—are proliferating. The number of community-supported fisheries (seafood’s take on the farm-to-table model) on Local Catch has quadrupled since 2017, and some fishers are looking to copy Seattle’s Pike’s Place fish market model. Even more are selling direct to restaurants and fishmongers in their home markets and overseas.

Fishers are finding that quality and diversity earn a premium. By selling boat- or farm-fresh seafood direct to chefs and market owners, they can earn three to six times the price distributors pay. And mobile apps are making it fast and easy for those who provide top-notch seafood to connect with those who want it. This trend is likely to grow as food packaging and preservation technologies continue to improve, making shipping cheaper. Big picture: sustainable seafood is reaching a broader market than ever, at prices that reflect its value.

Mystery fish are so yesterday

So many startups are working on traceability and transparency challenges that there’s little doubt we’ll soon know who caught a fish, where they caught it, how cold they kept it and more. Mystery fish is well on its way to no longer being a thing, at least in regions where regulations are enforced.

The rise of seatech is speeding efforts to clear up seafood’s notoriously murky supply chain. Sensors, robotics, networked cameras and other technologies that operate in and out of the water are helping fishers and farmers collect and analyze real-time data, so they can catch and grow seafood in the best possible way. Labor practices are getting a dose of daylight too.

The questions today are not about whether we can collect essential data, but about who owns the data, how public it should be and which datasets are most important. This is a huge leap forward.

Courtesy of Mikael Damkier/Shutterstock

Fish feed solutions accelerate

Right now, most farmed fish eat food made from wild forage fish. That’s not sustainable, which is why two years ago we were thrilled by the mere existence of alternative fish feed ingredients. Now more sophisticated thinking about the problem is fueling surprisingly fast progress.

Today it’s all about optimizing and scaling production. Many companies are turning black soldier flies into fish feed, and now they’re working on genetics that make flies richer in omega 3s and function better as feeds. Others have turned algae, grains and even industrial methane emissions into nutritious fish feed ingredients, and they’re figuring out the best mix of ingredients to grow each species.

This confluence of creative thinking means the fish feed problem is likely to get solved sooner than we thought possible, and make an even bigger impact on the aquaculture industry.

Farmed fish are big—and that’s a good thing

Speaking of aquaculture, I said farmed fish would fill out more of our seafood plate, and they are. Aquaculture is growing at a clip of 5.8 percent a year and accounts for more than half the fish we eat.

Not all farmed fish are raised right, but they can be. Solutions to aquaculture’s sustainability challenges are heading to market. In addition to the fish feed problem, innovators are working on escape-proof ocean farms, resource-efficient land farms, natural remedies for healthier fish, capturing and upcycling fish farm waste, and more productive hatcheries. This is all good—we need sustainable fish farming to take the pressure off wild fisheries and meet global demand for clean protein.

Photo courtesy of GettyImages/Johanna Parkin

There’s a war on waste

Turning waste into value was a niche in 2017. Now it’s one part of a broader campaign to crack down on waste at every point in the seafood supply chain. Does throwing out heads, tails and bones really make sense? Increasingly, the answer is no. New processing and preservation technologies allow higher yield from each fish, and people are taking a fresh look at “trash.”

Fish jerky from California whitefish offcuts is making a splash, as are bone broths made from seafood. In Australia, new products like scampi caviar, honey bugs and GT shrimp (named by Aussies after the car)—all recently discarded as bycatch—are yielding higher profits than the traditional deep-water scampi catch. The challenge now shifts from reducing waste in these supply chains to making sure the full fisheries remain sustainable.

Sustainability is the table stake

Over 90 percent of large-scale, U.S.-based seafood buyers have committed to selling only sustainable products. They’re trying to pluck the junk from their supply chains—and they have plenty of work yet to do—so there’s no way they’re buying something new that’s not sustainable. And the seafood itself is just the start of the conversation. Buyers want to know what a supplier is doing about labor, packaging and resource use, and new products must beat the status quo to gain space on shelves and screens. Introducing an unsustainable seafood product to today’s marketplace would be like introducing a petroleum-powered Hummer to the current car market. We can’t claim victory on sustainability yet, but the tide truly has turned.

Change goes deeper and faster

What most surprises me about all this progress is not just how fast it’s happening, but how people are redefining the problems. Instead of simply creating different fish feeds, innovators are asking how we can cut the amount of feed needed to grow each fish, make feeds more nutritious and breed fish that are light eaters or thrive on vegetarian diets. Instead of wondering whether aquaculture can advance, they’re working on clearing bottlenecks around hatcheries, disease and genetics. Packaging waste was barely on the seafood world’s radar two years ago; now it’s a prime target.

This has a lot to do with the sheer number of talented entrepreneurs and investors entering the seafood sector. The more ideas and technologies we put in play, the more hits we’re going to have. It also has to do with connections. I’m struck by how eager people are to work together regionally and across oceans and borders, once they get out of their caves and meet each other. The entrepreneurs participating in Fish 2.0 are as interested in partnerships with other businesses as they are in investment. As these personal networks pull together pieces of innovation bubbling up around the world and more investors jump into the pool, the pace of change in seafood has moved from a simmer to a rolling boil.

Last month, Netflix was spotted testing a new section in its TV app called “Latest,” which would connect viewers with a personalized list of upcoming content due to be released over the course of the current week and the next. Today, Netflix is formally announcing the launch of the feature with a focus on its ability to remind you of shows and movies you want to watch.

Netflix had confirmed in August that the Latest section would be available on its streaming app for TVs, including Fire TV, Apple TV, Roku, and others. But it also had a similar feature available on Android and is testing the feature on iOS, it said at the time.

Today, the company confirms the new tab will now be available on many game consoles and Roku, with smart TVs and other devices getting the upgrade in the next couple of months.

The tab itself will feature content from across categories, like drama, comedy, horror, docs, foreign, original, licensed and kids, the company notes. These recommendations will be organized into three sections: New this Week, Coming this Week, and Coming Next Week.

When you see something of interest, you can click “Remind Me” to receive a notification when the title is available to stream.

Netflix says the new feature was inspired by its popular “Now on Netflix” newsletters which help subscribers keep up with the ever-changing content slate.

The feature’s launch is significant for a few reasons.

For starters, it’s a rare addition to Netflix’s top-level navigation in its app which before was limited to Home, Search, TV, Movies, and My List. The Latest section will now get a prominent position, just beneath the Home button.

It will also be an important tool that Netflix will use to keep viewers engaged with its content so they’ll continue to pay for the subscription service. This is now more of a concern for Netflix, which recently posted a disappointing quarter, where it lost U.S. subscribers for the first time since 2011. It’s also poised to face serious competition from newcomers to the streaming market including, most notably, Disney whose soon-to-launch Disney+ will cost less than Netflix and can be bundled with Hulu and ESPN for the same price as a standard Netflix subscription.

The new addition will help to address another challenge, as well — helping subscribers figure out what to watch. Unlike traditional linear TV, Netflix doesn’t just drop you into live TV — you have to make a decision. This often leads to people scrolling for several minutes to find a show to stream, getting frustrated or overwhelmed by the choices, then just launching an old standby, like “The Office.” With reminders and notifications, Netflix can gently nudge viewers towards titles they already want to watch, which could mean less timing browsing and more time streaming.

Holy price hike, startuppers — you have just 48 hours left to save up to $1,300 on passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 on October 2-4. Don’t let time stand in your way of saving serious dough. Release your inner savvy shopper and beat the deadline. Early-bird savings disappear at 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6. Avoid the price hike — buy your early-bird passes today.

More than 10,000 attendees will be on hand to experience the very best of startup culture. Whether you come to be inspired by today’s leaders and tomorrow’s most promising startups or to gain business insight from industry analysts, you’ll find it all at Disrupt SF 2019.

Let’s look at just some of the leading experts who will grace our various stages and discuss new innovations and game-changing technologies (you can see the full agenda here):

• The Ethics of Snipping DNA with CRISPR — Rachel Haurwitz is the founder of Caribou Biosciences, a startup on the cutting edge of gene editing technologies — including animal and human DNA. She will chat with us about the ethical and scientific questions surrounding CRISPRing human embryos and what that could mean for the future of humanity.
• How to Take a Digital Brand Offline — E-commerce has fundamentally changed the way we browse and buy physical goods. But even though online sales have taken a huge bite out of brick-and-mortar, it doesn’t mean that digital brands aren’t interested in the prospect of offline channels. Hear from Rich Fulop (Brooklinen), James Reinhart (thredUP) and Susan Tynan (Framebridge) — three founders who have taken their own unique approach to launching a store.
• The Fourth Big Wave: Talking Crypto — If you care about understanding crypto and the ways it may well impact you sooner than you might imagine, you won’t want to miss this fireside chat with Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon.
• How to Raise My First Dollars — Venture funding may have boomed over the last decade, but the decisions around your initial funding are as tricky as ever. Hear how to take advantage of the current landscape from top Silicon Valley early-stage thinkers, including pre-seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, early-stage investor Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures and Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend.

You’ll find plenty of networking opportunities in Startup Alley, where 1,200 early-stage startups and sponsors — including our TC Top Picks — showcase their latest innovations. Don’t miss out on the Startup Battlefield to watch an impressive group of startups launch on a world stage and compete for $100,000.

Be a savvy shopper and save big bucks. Buy your early-bird passes to Disrupt San Francisco 2019 by 11:59 p.m. (PST) on September 6.

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

It turns out GDPR was just the tip of the privacy iceberg. With California’s privacy law coming on line January 1st and dozens more in various stages of development, it’s clear that governments are taking privacy seriously, which means companies have to as well. New York-startup BigID, which has been developing a privacy platform for the last several years, finds itself in a good position to help. Today, the company announced a $50 million Series C.

The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from SAP.io Fund, Comcast Ventures, Boldstart Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and ClearSky. New investor Salesforce Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to over $96 million, according to Crunchbase.

In addition to the funding, the company is also announcing the formation of a platform of sorts, which will offer a set of privacy services for customers. It includes data discovery, classification and correlation. “We’ve separated the product into some constituent parts. While it’s still sold as a broad-based solution, it’s much more of a platform now in the sense that there’s a core set of capabilities that we heard over and over that customers want,” CEO and co-founder Dimitri Sirota told TechCrunch.

He says that these capabilities really enables customers to see connections in the data across a set of disparate data sources. “There are a lot of products that do the request part, but there’s nobody that’s able to look across your entire data landscape, the hundreds of petabytes, and pick out the data in Salesforce, Workday, AWS, mainframe, and all these places you could have data on [an individual], and show how it’s all tied together,” Sirota explained.

It’s interesting to see the mix of strategic investors and traditional venture capitalists who are investing in the company. The strategics in particular see the privacy landscape as well as anyone, and Sirota says it’s a case of privacy mattering more than ever and his company providing the means to navigate the changing landscape. “Consumers care about privacy, which means legislators care about it, which ultimately means companies have to care about it,” he said. He added, “Strategics, whether they are companies that collect personal data or those that sell to those companies, therefore have an interest in BigID .”

The company has been growing fast and raising money quickly to help it scale to meet demand. Starting in January 2018, it raised $14 million. Just six months later, it raised another $30 million and you can tack on today’s $50 million. Sirota says having money in the bank and seeing these investments helps give enterprise customers confidence that the company is in this for the long haul.

Sirota wouldn’t give an exact valuation, only saying that while the company is not a unicorn, the valuation was a “robust number.” He says the plan now it to keep expanding the platform, and there will be announcements coming soon around partnerships, customers and new capabilities.

Sirota will be appearing at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise on September 5th at 11 am on the panel, Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software.

LinkedIn, with 645 million users in 200 countries, is the undisputed leader when it comes to being the world’s biggest network of professionals, a position that it uses to leverage products in areas like recruitment and e-learning. But in achieving that size, it hasn’t really developed products for a more targeted approach for specific verticals or audiences. And that has opened the field of a wide variety of startups to fill in the gaps and compete with it. Today, one these hopefuls — a startup called RippleMatch that has built a recruitment platform to help organizations specifically to connect with recent graduates from more diverse backgrounds that match their needs — is announcing a Series A of $6 million to do just that.

The funding — which will be used to expand the platform as well as for business development — is being led by G20 Ventures, with Work-Bench, and previous investors Accomplice, Bullpen Capital, and AlleyCorp. also participating.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but from what I understand is that it’s a “material step up”, as it has been on a steady growth curve and counts companies like Pfizer, TripAdvisor, and Qualtrics among its customer base. This is also the first significant outside money that it has raised. RippleMatch’s very first funding, in fact, was the signing bonus that co-founder Eric Ho had received when he once got a job at Facebook. “It was the need to pay that back that led us to raising this Series A,” joked Andrew Myers, the other co-founder who is also the CEO.

Myers and Ho met and started the company when they were still students at Yale University. Ho was about to graduate, but Myers was still in the thick of his undergrad degree, which he still has yet to complete (and, as is the way of tech founders, may never finish).

The idea for the company came when Myers — who studied history and political science — was thinking about the predicament that a lot of his friends from back home in Colorado were facing in the working world.

Like Myers, they were also undergraduates. But unlike him, they were not at Yale nor any other top-shelf school that has the benefit not only of prestigious name recognition, but typically strong recruiting pipelines to some of the most competitive companies hiring graduates for lucrative entry-level positions.

“I was very cognisant of the divide coming from different socio-economic backgrounds,” Myers said in an interview. “I could see that a lot of my friends from home would be better hires for places than some of the people I knew at Yale. They just didn’t have the same opportunities. We didn’t think of this as a business venture in the early days: it was a problem that our friends had that I wanted to solve.”

Using AI to cut out the recruiter

RippleMatch’s approach is relatively straightforward: the company has built a platform that takes a potential candidate through a relatively quick set of questions about his/her career and geographical ambitions, interests and so on, along with a copy of the candidate’s resume.

It then combines these with basic information about a candidate’s GPA and test scores. Taking all that and combining it with more information sources outside of the candidate’s own input, it comes up with some 300 data points that it crunches that together to match candidates with job and internship opportunities. On the employer side, it not only sources job vacancies of the moment, but also works on matching up an employer’s wider hiring strategy with this trove of people — the idea being that it’s bringing up possibilities that the employer might have otherwise passed over, or even seen to begin with.

Myers says that the matching algorithms, which include the ability to ascertain what people might directly and indirectly be best suited to do, that RippleMatch has built essentially cut out the “middle man” in the process — that is, the recruiter, but also potentially of the relationships and pipelines that may already exist, and as a result level the playing field for everyone, making it just as likely that an employer will discover their next star hire from a small college in the midwest as from Stanford.

As Mike Troiano, the partner at G20 who led the firm’s investment in RippleMatch, describes it, a school’s name recognition and networking prowess aren’t the only things standing in the way of qualified candidates getting a look in the door. His daughter was having a hard time getting a response from a company she contacted for an internship and when they put together her LinkedIn profile, they realised that she simply lacked the professional network to figure out if there was someone to contact and help.

Indeed, while LinkedIn has proven to be a strong starting point for many professionals in their career progression, its shortcomings are most obvious in more specific examples like these. (It was one reason that LinkedIn made a big push some years ago to start trying to bring younger users on to the platform, to work on ways of getting them to start building up their profiles and networks.)

RippleMatch is part of a growing number of startups that have been identifying and (for their purposes) exploiting these kinds of holes in LinkedIn’s wider platform. Another startup that has been building a platform also aimed at graduates and specifically at trying to help source more diverse pools of candidates is Handshake (which itself raised $40 million less than a year ago).

Handshake takes a different approach in that it offers job boards and proactively works with universities and recruitment organizations and offers users a social network / community of sorts from which to source advice and exchange information. All this has helped boost that company’s database to 14 million people as of last year, likely more now that it’s opened up access to all university students in the US.

Others that have been pecking away at the LinkedIn hegemony include the likes of Triplebyte, another well-capitalised recruitment startup that targets specifically software engineers. The startup has built its own assessment platform (used by RippleMatch to recruit, incidentally) which its CEO and co-founder Harj Taggar also believes can help level the playing field between those who are coming from big-name companies and schools and those who are not, focusing solely on a person’s ability to code. LinkedIn might have millions of profiles of engineers to Triplebyte’s thousands, but the key with the smaller company is that it has profiles of people “who are actively job searching,” which he notes stands in contrast to the unsolicited contacts that many people get on LinkedIn, just by virtue of being there. “We’re getting two times the rate of responses that recruiting teams see on LinkedIn,” Taggar claimed. It’s now ramping up with a premium tier aimed at those recruiting at scale.

RippleMatch is still at a relatively small and early stage of its life in comparison to these two. While it has partnerships with some 1,200 diversity focused organizations on campuses to bring in more candidates, and today some 60% of its candidate pool are from underrepresented backgrounds, the company today only has about 100,000 candidates in total on the platform and agreements with 60 companies who tap RippleMatch to find them. But, at a time when the economic, societal and geographic rifts seem insurmountable in countries like the US, it’s more important than ever to work on ways to help close those gaps, paving the way for a big opportunity for tech-based solutions like RippleMatch’s.

London based adtech startup Spirable has closed a £6M Series A. The round was led by Smedvig Capital, with existing backers Frontline Ventures, Downing Ventures and 24 Haymarket also participating.

The startup is one of several playing in the customized video ads space — offering a platform that simplifies and scales video ad creation by enabling brands and advertisers to combine video templates with creative and data sources to automate the creation and delivery of scores of personalized marketing messages.

Spirable says its platform, which launched in 2014, is now used by more than 50 customers. Campaigns have run across 75+ countries, with more than 100M personalised videos distributed since launch.

Its most successful industries to date are CPG (consumer packaged goods), travel and telco, according to co-founders Dave and Ger O’Meara.

On the travel front, they give the example of a Deutsche Bahn ‘No Need to Fly’ campaign that used dynamic video to show a location-sensitive side by side comparison of flight costs juxtaposed with cheaper train trips to local beauty spots — which Spirable claims achieved a 397% increase in click throughs; a 849% performance increase; and 59% reduction in cost per click vs the control.

Another example they cite is a Vodafone campaign to promote two own brand smartphone models which integrates multiple data feeds (such as contextual weather and date data) with creative assets in order to dynamically spotlight different features of the devices. The personalized marketing messages were served across Facebook, YouTube and Display channels via APIs baked into the platform.

From five video templates the tech automated the creation of more than five and a half thousand “unique” videos, tweaked to be more relevant to the targeted viewers.

On that particular campaign, Spirable says Vodafone saw sales of its own-brand devices increase by 100%. While ad performance increased by up to 50%.

“We can use all the targeting available in Facebook and layer this with contextual live data like the weather, live sports scores etc. So if we know someone is in London (via geo-targeting via Facebook), we can pull the local weather for that location and tailor the video to people in that audience and also update the video when a goal is scored in a match by a team that the audience supports,” they explain. “Once set up the whole process if fully automated. When the weather, sports data etc change the videos update and change.”

As well as automating serving up personalized ads, the platform provides performance reports on the backend, and uses machine learning technology to optimize ad creative to boost engagement.

The startup notes it’s been a Facebook Marketing Partner for more than two years.

The privacy implications of such highly targeted ads are — or should be — plain.

Among the laundry list of data sources that Spirable’s platform lets advertisers plug in to automate “personalized” ads are “CRM data” which it says includes personal data, purchase data, website browsing, service usage data and preferences; “social audience data”, including behavioral data, audience persona, interests, preferences and intents; and “contextual” signals such as store locations, weather (including pollen and UV levels), markets and stock levels live spots, trending events, pricing, time & date, live travel data, Google traffic data and supermarket wi-fi data.

So, for example, a parent who recently logged into a supermarket’s wi-fi network to check their Facebook account and was tracked lingering near shelves of diapers might find themselves being served video ads for a discount on girlie pink baby products at a nearby store.

The sheer volume of data integrations Spirable offers is one of the areas it claims sets its platform apart from competitors — name-checking Clinch and Idomoo as its main rivals in personalized video ads.

“Spirable has an unparalleled amount of data integrations to uniquely personalise video ads in real-time,” it says, further claiming Idomoo “doesn’t talk about live data and pre-render ads and upload to Facebook — so there is a lack of data-driven pipelines”.

Other areas where it reckons its approach stands out vs the competition is because it’s offering a ‘self-serve’ platform — meaning advertisers and brands can use it to “create, scale and optimise personalised video in-house”, without the need for specialist teams or agencies trained in video effects software (such as After Effects) to make use of the platform.

The video ad building process is also “modular” and “100% customisable” — vs the two named rivals not supporting layer level manipulation, meaning it’s less easy for their users to make changes on the fly to optimize ads.

Another claimed differentiator is that Spirable’s platform is cross-channel — with support for “all major social, email, messenger and display channels”.

It says the Series A funding will go on expanding the business in the US, with a plan to ramp up spending there on sales, customer support and marketing. Product development will also get investment.

“We have an exciting product roadmap of new features that will enable us to reach our vision of making video ads as engaging and useful as any other content a person sees on digital. This requires investment to scale up our engineering and product teams,” the co-founders tell TechCrunch.

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Joe Knowles, principal at Smedvig Capital, added: “Spirable is a critical enabler of personalised video advertising, one of the major trends in video advertising today. Every marketer wants to use video in a more personalised way. But so far, slow and expensive content creation has been a barrier to mass adoption. Spirable’s Software as a Service removes this barrier and makes real time, automated video personalisation at scale a reality.

“Having tracked the business for over a year, we are excited to work with Ger, Dave and the high-quality team they are building at Spirable.”

YouTube today is launching a new vertical called YouTube Fashion that aims to capitalize on the popular style and beauty content that attracts millions of viewers to its platform. According to Statista, beauty videos last year alone generated more than 169 billion views on YouTube, and more recently, some of fashion’s biggest names have set their sights on YouTube. Today, YouTube says the number of Fashion & Beauty channels on the site have grown over 6 times from 2014 to 2018, and combined, generated billions of views in 2018.

The new vertical, YouTube.com/Fashion, will attempt to better organize some of this content, including style videos from top creators, industry collabs, live streams from the runway, inside looks into the fashion industry, behind-the-scenes video, vlogs from fashion icons, and more.

Among the names and brands YouTube mentioned as prominent examples of what you’ll find on the new, top-level destination, there’s:

• Fashion & beauty creators Camila Coelho, Jenn Im, Ingrid Nilsen, Safiya Nygaard, Jackie Aina, and Huda Beauty
• Collabs between fashion brands with creators like Emma Chamberlain, Dolan Twins, Wengie, the Merrell Twins, Dulceida, Juanpa Zurita, Violet Chachki, and Gigi Gorgeous
• Brands like Louis Vuitton, Dior,  Ralph Lauren, Michael Kors, Alexander Wang, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Gucci, and Alexa Chung
• Publications like LOVE Magazine and British Vogue
• Breakout channel ‘Being Naomi’ (Naomi Campbell’s new channel)

The launch comes at a time when Instagram has so well established its platform as a destination for style and fashion that it’s now entered into the e-commerce market as well, enabling brands to sell directly to Instagram users who can shop and check out through the social app itself. And with its IGTV platform for long-form videos, it’s working to become more of a YouTube rival.

YouTube, meanwhile, is better known for establishing beauty stars like Yuya, Bethany Mota, Michelle Phan,  Zoe Sugg, James Charles, Tati Westbrook, Jaclyn Hill, and others, who have gained traction for their makeup reviews and tutorials — and sometimes, their feuds. It has even launched a new ad unit targeting the beauty category, that uses AR to let viewers try on makeup themselves.

The company knows the potential in fashion, however — even if it’s been accused in the past of not paying enough attention to the category, despite having fashion-focused creators with millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of video views.

Things are now starting to change on this front. Last June, YouTube hired Derek Blasberg, previously the host of CNN Style and a Vanity Fair contributor, as its new head of fashion and beauty partnerships. At YouTube, Blasberg has fostered collaborations between top creators and brands in order to better elevate the profiles of the brands and the YouTube stars.

With the launch of /Fashion, YouTube now plans to bring more international voices to the new destination and localize the page for global markets, Blasberg says, writing on the YouTube blog.

Dedicating a vertical to a particular type of content is nothing new for YouTube. As YouTube moved away from running a standalone Twitch competitor, for example, it launched a /Gaming destination on YouTube.com. It’s now one of the fastest-growing verticals on the site.

YouTube Fashion can be found on the YouTube homepage and in the mobile app, where you can subscribe to the category itself, instead of just individual creators.

It’s now one of only a few categories to get top billing on YouTube — a list that also includes Movies & Shows, Gaming, and Live.

Here’s what we know for sure: Apple’s holding a big event on its campus at 10AM PT on September 10.

Here’s what we almost certainly know for sure: The iPhone 11 will launch with a new camera configuration. There will be probably be three different models.

From there, things get a bit more complicated.

There’s some speculation around whether the company will continue to offer the budget-minded iPhone R as an alternative to the flagship devices. Some rumors thus far have suggested that this year’s models will present a kind of paradigm shift for the line. Rather than introducing an iPhone 11R, the cheaper model could become the base level iPhone 11, with two pricier models taking up the Pro moniker, with a Pro and Pro Max model distinguishing the different screen sizes.

The shift would make some sense from the standpoint of the broader smartphone market. Pricing is one of the key reasons smartphone adoption has slowed considerably. Premium devices like the iPhone and Samsung’s S series routinely top $1,000. If Apple can reposition the price point, that could go a ways toward justifying a faster upgrade cycle.

One of the key distinguishing factors between the iPhone 11 and the Pro models is likely to be the camera. The base model will retain the XS’s two-camera setup, while the Pros will move to a three-camera array in a square configuration. The third lens will bring an additional wide angle to the device, similar to a number of Android handsets.

Using on-board AI and software, the cameras are said to create a composite image that can correct certain shooting errors, offer higher-resolution shots and get better images in low light. The video software on the Pro models is said to be significantly improved, as well, letting users correct color balances and apply effects on-device. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is said to have a wider field of view, which should help face unlock work from more angles, including while lying down on a table — one of the biggest complaints with the current Face ID configuration.

The device build is largely expected to stay the same, including the top notch, which has remained unchanged since the introduction of the iPhone X. Some have suggested that the invitation hints at additional colors for the handset, which would be in keeping with other entry-level devices, like the iPhone R. The Lightning port, for better and worse, is expected to remain, in spite of the addition of USB-C on the iPad Pro.

Jeff Williams, chief operating officer of Apple Inc., speaks during an event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2018. Apple will kick off a blitz of new products this week, ending a year of minor updates and setting the technology giant up for a potentially strong holiday quarter. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A couple of rumors have been floating around hinting at the arrival of a new Apple Watch. The Series 4 device is reportedly getting a new (likely very pricey) Titanium version. The line is also set to finally add some solid sleep tracking into the mix.

The event may well see some new MacBooks, the first to include new switch mechanisms for the keyboard. That will hopefully alleviate longstanding complaints against several generations of keyboard switches.

Expect some firm dates on the software and content front, as well, including availability for the public launch of MacOS Catalina, iPadOS and iOS 13. There’s a pretty good chance that the company will also firm up launch dates for long-awaited content plays like Apple TV+ and Arcade.

All (or some) of this and more (or less) will be revealed on Tuesday September 10. TechCrunch will, as always, be on hand, bringing it to you live.

Today, at the 8thth annual Breakthrough Prize Awards, hundreds of scientists will win their share of $10 million in awards for their outstanding work in the fields of Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics.

Breakthrough Prize was founded by DST Global partner and billionaire Yuri Milner, who has a particular passion for the sciences. In fact, Milner has invested $100 million of his own money to the related, but separate, Breakthrough Initiative, a multi-strategy approach to identifying intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Milner sees the Breakthrough Prize as the ‘Oscars of Science,’ and the award has grown tremendously in significance among the scientific community. Not only does the Breakthrough Prize rival the Nobel in terms of monetary awards (the Nobel is roughly $1 million), it is also beholden to less stringent rules than the Nobel, which requires real world observation of a theory to be awarded.

So without any further ado, here are the 2020 Breakthrough Prize winners:

Fundamental Physics:

The Event Horizon Telescope Team
For the first image of a supermassive black hole, taken by means of an Earth-sized alliance of telescopes.

You may remember seeing the news of the first-ever image of a black hole being captured by scientists on the Event Horizon Telescope team. Not only was this an incredible feat of collaboration — it took 347 astrophysicists across 60 institutions in 20 different countries using eight high-powered telescopes to pull it off — but it also gave us our first real look at the massive M87 black hole.

Each of the scientists who worked on the project will split the prize.

Life Sciences:

Jeffrey M. Friedman (The Rockefeller University)
For the discovery of a new endocrine system through which adipose tissue signals the brain to regulate food intake.

Since he discovered the molecular pathway that regulates body fat in 1994, Friedman has been uncovering the genetic and hormonal pathways that regulate when, what and how much we eat, aiming to put an end to fat-shaming.

Franz-Ulrich Hartl (Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry) and Arthur L. Horwich (Yale University)
For discovering functions of molecular chaperones in mediating protein folding and preventing protein aggregation.

Hartl and Horwich discovered the intra-cellular machinery that support proteins as they properly fold into their precise shapes within the body. As humans age, that machinery gets sloppier and results in protein clumping, which creates an environment ripe for cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. Because of this discovery, researchers are investigating how to keep that cell machinery working smoothly as we age.

David J. Julius (University of California, San Francisco)
For discovering molecules, cells, and mechanisms underlying pain sensation.

Julius has taken our understanding of pain to a much deeper level, looking at the cellular signaling mechanisms around how our bodies signal pain to our brain. For example, Julius’ work led to his discovery of the fact that chili peppers share a signaling pathway with things like a hot stove, telling your brain that something is ‘burning hot’ even if your tongue isn’t literally near fire. Through this work, his team is building the foundation for a new wave of non-opioid precision analgesics to deal with the chronic pain of IBS, arthritis, cancer, etc.

Virginia Man-Yee Lee (University of Pennsylvania)
For identifying TDP43 as a key protein aggregating in the cytoplasm in frontotemporal lobular dementia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and for capitalizing on the toxicity of alpha-synuclein to gain insight into cellular drivers of Parkinson’s disease and multiple system atrophy.

Dr. Lee and her team developed the tau hypothesis, which posited that the cellular tangles found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients might themselves be the cause of the neurons not firing properly. They worked to replicate the pathological evolution of the tau proteins that cause these tangles, giving neuroscientists and researchers a more thorough framework to develop treatments.

Mathematics:

Alex Eskin (University of Chicago)
For revolutionary discoveries in the dynamics and geometry of moduli spaces of Abelian differentials, including the proof of the “magic wand theorem” with Maryam Mirzakhani.

Eskin worked with famous Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhni, before her death in 2017, via Skype to develop theorems of dynamical, moduli spaces. Here’s what Alex had to say about the five-year process: “Like climbers on a mountain that had never been scaled, we could see the summit. But then we got stuck in a deep ravine for about a year-and-a-half, before going to the other side to create another path. That path didn’t get us to the summit either; but we had developed the tools to go back, build a bridge across the ravine, and make our final assent.”

Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Sergio Ferrara (CERN), Daniel Z. Freedman (MIT and Stanford), Peter van Nieuwenhuizen (Stony Brook University)
For the invention of supergravity, in which quantum variables are part of the description of the geometry of spacetime.

The discovery of supergravity in 1976 has yet to be empirically proven, which has kept the achievement out of the running for a Nobel prize despite its influence over the development of string theory and the advancement of physics as a whole.

Alongside the $3 million awards for each category of Breakthrough Prize, the awards also recognize early-career achievements in the form of $100K New Horizons prizes for physics, life sciences and mathematics.

According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple has been working on in-screen fingerprint readers. But that feature won’t be ready for the new iPhone that will be announced next week. It could be released in 2020, or maybe 2021 if Apple’s suppliers can’t meet deadlines.

If you’ve played with the most recent smartphones from Samsung, Huawei and other Android manufacturers, you know that in-screen fingerprint readers already work quite well. When you unlock your phone, you can see a fingerprint icon on the screen. It then works just like any fingerprint reader — you put your finger on the icon and it unlocks your phone.

In 2017, Apple introduced Face ID for the iPhone X as a replacement to Touch ID, its fingerprint technology. But it sounds like the company now wants to give users multiple options by re-adding Touch ID to its smartphones.

All 2018 iPhone models as well as the most recent iPad Pro models now all work with Face ID. But you can still buy some Touch ID devices, such as the iPad Air or the MacBook Pro. The fingerprint readers are integrated in a separate button.

Bloomberg also confirms a Nikkei report about a future iPhone SE. Apple could launch a new low-cost iPhone SE.

Despite the name, it would be based on the iPhone 8 design instead of the previous iPhone SE design. It would feature the same 4.7-inch display that you can find on the iPhone 6, iPhone 6S, iPhone 7 and iPhone 8.