Month: September 2020

If you’ve got a large online following, as well as knowledge that might be valuable to that audience, Prox is a startup currently in beta testing that’s building tools to help you make money.

Michael Mathieu, formerly the CEO of YuMe, joined Prox as CEO in January. The goal, he told me, is to create an entire suite of “back office” tools for experts and influencers, but the company is starting out by offering an easy way to host one-on-one video sessions with fans and “knowledge seekers.”

“People who are influencers on social media and on YouTube, they don’t control that customer,” Mathieu said. “It’s a YouTube customer, so if you’re going to monetize, it’s through slice of YouTube ad revenue.”

So Prox is designed to help those experts make money more directly from anyone who wants to connect with them, and to understand that audience. Mathieu suggested that the need has intensified during the pandemic, with more experts and creators asking, “How do I connect to my audience in more significant ways, have multiple revenue streams and actually have really good visibility into who they are?”

Head of Customer Success Nicole Healy said that many of the “pros” already using Prox are “published authors looking for another connection point.”

Image Credits: Prox

The Prox team gave me a tour of the platform from both the knowledge seeker and pro side. It looks fairly straightforward for someone to try to schedule a meeting with a pro and then jump into a video call. The knowledge seeker controls the meeting agenda, but the pro also gets to screen appointments and topics in advance, and they also set their own rates for how much their time is worth. (Head of Product Matt Coalson said some pros are able to charge $150 for a 15 minute call.)

Afterwards, both the knowledge seeker and the pro can rate the experience, and they can schedule follow-up calls if it went well. Prox also provides analytics for pros around the kinds of feedback they’re getting and the most commonly asked questions.

I’ve previously written about Superpeer, another startup helping influencers and experts make money from one-on-one calls, but when I brought it up, Mathieu suggested that the competitive landscape is much broader, with influencers having access to a range of tools for marketing and monetization.

“The way we position ourselves compared to the competition is, we’re really purpose built for providing value to that pro,” he said. “It’s not just about that platform — video, audio, ratings, that has significant value, but our goal is to provide the layer above that, to give the pro, in essence, a roadmap: If you’re on Prox and you do these two or three things, you’ll make 10x more money.”

Working at the intersection of biology and computing may be the most exciting new spot for technologists at the moment.

That’s the word from Daphne Koller, the founder and chief executive officer of Insitro — the biotech company that’s raised over $243 million in the two short years since it launched.

Speaking at our virtual TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Koller, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Coursera and briefly served as the chief computing officer for the Alphabet subsidiary focused on human health, Calico, views digital biology as the next big technological revolution.

“Digital biology is an incredible place to be right now,” Koller said in an interview.

It’s certainly been an incredible opportunity for Koller whose work now spans the development of treatments for potential neurological diseases and a nearer term research and development effort on hepatitis with Gilead Pharmaceuticals.

Koller’s Insitro takes its name and inspiration from the combination of two different practices in biological research — the in vitro experiments that are done on living samples in labs and the in silico experiments that are done on the computer.

By synthesizing these two disciplines Koller’s company flips the process of drug discovery on its head, the company is designed sift through massive amounts of data to search for patterns in the expression of certain conditions. Once those patterns are determined, the company can examine the pathways or mechanisms associated with that expression to determine targets for potential therapies.

Then Insitro will pursue the development of novel molecules that can be used to intervene and either reverse or stop the progression of an illness by stopping the biological mechanisms associated with it.

“We now have massive amounts of data that is truly relevant to human disease,” Koller said. “Machine learning has given us a bunch of tools to really make sense of data.”

The company can identify new patient segments, new interventions new drugs that may modulate the expression of those conditions. “We view ourselves as being on the first phase of a very long journey using machine learning,” said Koller.

Take the company’s work on hepatitis in conjunction with Gilead. There, Koller and her team were able to take a small, high-quality dataset from Gilead’s trials and identify how a disease progressed by looking at the patient data from different points in time. Looking at the progression allowed the company to identify drivers that facilitated the progression of fibrosis that causes tissue damage. Now the company is using those targets as a starting point to find modifiers that could slow down the progression of the disease. 

It comes down to using computers to understand the biology, new biotechnology to model that biology in a Petri dish, and from the different models determine the interventions that will make a difference, Koller said.

“What we’re trying to do is so different and so out of alignment with how these [pharmaceutical] companies do their work,” Koller said. “It’s trying to shift the trajectory of these companies of hundreds or thousands of people and shift the culture to a tech culture that is going to be really a challenge.”

It’s the main reason Koller launched her own company rather than joining a big pharma play, and it’s a classic example of the innovator’s dilemma and the disruptive power of technology laid out in the theories of Clayton Christensen that give the Disrupt conference its name.

“[It’s] the notion of the innovator’s dilemma and coming in with a mindset that says we’re going to do this a completely different way,” said Koller. “The drug discovery effort is becoming increasingly expensive and increasingly prone to failure and if we do this in a different way will it enable us to generate better outcomes.”

If in-person events were still a thing in 2020, there’s a pretty good chance we’d know a lot more about the PlayStation 5 by now. With tech companies setting their own event schedules, however, Sony and Microsoft have offered themselves a more leisurely schedule with which to portion out news. Microsoft struck first, with aggressive pricing, two different launch models and a financing plan.

Now it’s Sony’s time to shine. Today’s big event answered some of the lingering questions about the next generation console. The company waited until the bitter end for the most important details. The PS5 will arrive in select markets on November 12 for $500, while the Digital Edition (sans-optical drive) runs $400.

On that date, the console will be available in North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea. The rest of the world will get their hands on the console a week later on November 19.

Developing…

As ever, the event leaned very heavily toward trailers and gameplay demos, showcasing the titles the PS5 will have on offer. Thing kicked off with some major franchise blockbusters including Final Fantasy XVI and the best look yet at Spider-Man: Miles Morales, which featured an extremely compelling bridge battle.

The Spider-Man expansion is due this holiday, to coincide with the console’s launch. Ditto for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, which got a brand new trailer, including some RC car action.

The long-rumored Harry Potter RPG finally got a name and official trailer. Hogwarts Legacy looks like an an epic time in the Wizarding World. That’s due out at some point in 2021.

What’s this? A non-franchise game? Yes, it’s Bethesda’s Deathloop. The tine looping adventure game is due out in mid-2021. The sufficiently creepy trailer for zombie favorite Resident Evil: Village answered more questions than it answered. The title is also slated for next year.

Other titles include Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition (due at launch), Oddworld: Soulstorm and the Demon Souls remaster. Also a little time for Fornite, which is set to be available for the console at launch.

“Scandal” and “Little Fires Everywhere” star Kerry Washington won her first Emmy Award yesterday, but when she joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt today, she was much more focused on her work as an investor.

Washington traced much of her interest in technology to the premiere of “Scandal” in 2012. It had, she said, been “almost 40 years since a Black woman was the lead on a network drama,” which meant that the pressure was high — and that “Scandal” was considered a “bubble show,” with the network “taking a big risk by putting a Black woman in the lead.”

So Washington said she drew on her experience as a volunteer with Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and particularly her work with social media organizing, to try to rally support.

“From the very beginning of that show, we leveraged the power of technology to support the show in ways that traditional media wasn’t supporting us — or was waiting to see what the public response would be,” she said. “Really, I think the Twitter-verse allowed us to have a second season, and then we kind of took off from there.”

As for how that led to investing her own money into startups, Washington suggested that she wanted to be more involved.

“When it comes to my engagement with any sort of any creative relationship that I’m in, I’m not really good at having a seat at the table without a voice,” she said. For example, she noted, “I gravitated very quickly in my career …  toward being a producer.”

Similarly, she said that using tech tools was exciting, “but figuring out how to have more stake, more input, more creative voice, more ability to impact the technology itself was really exciting for me.”

Washington’s first investment was in female co-working space The Wing. which she explained as being part of her commitment to “ideas of inclusivity and community, celebrating identity in a really inclusive way, supporting women’s voices, supporting marginalized voices.”

The Wing has seen its share of success, but also controversy, with a New York Times article reporting that a number of employees (particularly women of color) felt that they had been mistreated. In the wake of these criticisms, CEO Aubrey Gelman departed this summer.

When asked about her response to the controversy, Washington said, “As somebody who’s an investor, as a woman of color, it’s important to me that there is increased transparency and also accountability.” She said that over the past few months, her role as an investor has been “really just supporting leadership in this transition,” while also expressing a “deep desire” for that transparency and accountability.

Other investments include Community, which allows celebrities to manage text message conversations with fans. (Washington promised that if you text her, she will really be the one who responds — though she also asked for patience, since she’s texting with “thousands and thousands of people.”) There’s also direct-to-consumer teeth-straightening startup Byte, which Washington said she uses herself.

As for her dream startup, Washington said she has a not-yet-announced investment in a direct-to-consumer fashion startup, “and it feels really dreamy at the moment.”

Again, these have all been personal investments so far. Would Washington consider raising a fund or joining a venture capital firm?

“I have considered it, but at this point, I really like having the more intimate and really hands-on relationship with the investments that I’ve made,” she said. “I feel like I’m really able to be in the trenches and bring more value as an individual investor.”

Despite the surprise release of iOS 14 that left app developers unprepared, an ambitious few have managed to push their way through — or even pull an all-nighter — in order to make their apps available with iOS 14 support on launch day. For the first time in years, the new version of iOS offers a new way for consumers to organize their homescreens. Now, your less frequently-used apps can be shuffled away to the App Library on the iPhone’s back screen, while those apps offering information and updates can feature their content through new homescreen widgets.

In time, widget support will be a standard feature for a large number of apps. But due to the way Apple chose to release iOS 14 this year, there may not be as many app widgets offered on day one.

Below are some of the first apps launching today alongside iOS 14 that include interesting iOS 14 widgets. These apps and their widgets should be available today shortly after the iOS 14 release.

Aviary

Twitter client Aviary released widgets that allow you to view either 1, 2, or 4 of the latest tweets (depending on which widget size you select) from your Twitter timeline. The widgets will update periodically by themselves, as well. The app will be available today after iOS 14 rolls out.

Image Credits: Aviary (widget shown in top right)

Brief

Unbiased news app Brief is keeping to its promises to avoid clickbait with its minimalist, monochromatic widget designed to stop attention hijacking. The “Front Page” widget’s content will be carefully curated by its news team, so only the most important stories of the day will show up on your homescreen.

A second “Election Snapshot” widget will let you keep track of the current presidential, house, and senate races at a glance. Users can customize this widget to track their own most-watched races, like those in their home state, for example.

Image Credits: Brief

Soor

Soor, a premium music player app for iPhone users, has released three widgets in various sizes. The “Now Playing” widget shows the current song and what’s up next, and updates in near real-time. There’s also a “Magic Mixes” widget for your mixes and a “Music Collection” widget that can be configured to show 8 types of curated content.

Image Credits: Soor

Readdle: Spark Mail, Calendar 5, Documents

Readdle has released widgets for its Calendar iOS app that show your appointments and the month.

Image Credits: Readdle/Calendar 5

Its Spark Mail app offers widgets for email and calendar, too.

Image Credits: Readdle/Spark Mail

And Documents by Readdle is adding widgets for quick access for file actions like VPN, music, player, browser, etc.

Image Credits: Readdle

Cheep

Cheep’s app lets you know about mistake fares or other ridiculously discounted flight deals. Its new iOS 14 widgets can be customized to feature deals from your airports and can stacked together to make it easy to see the deals without opening the app.

Image Credits: Cheep

Dice

Dice, from the maker of PCalc, is a physics-based simulation of polyhedral dice for use in tabletop role-playing games. The app’s new widgets bring its dice to your homescreen allowing you to open the app with just a tap.

Image Credits:

Weather Line

Forecasting app Weather Line already offers a lot of visual data related to weather and forecasts. Now it’s bringing its insights and graphs right to the iOS 14 homescreen. The app’s all-in-one weather widget delivers current conditions, forecasts, and other content like high/low, sunrise/sunset, incoming rain, extreme weather warnings and more.

Image Credits: Weather Line

Nighthawk

Nighthawk’s Twitter client will release its first widget today, “Vanity,” lets you keep an eye on your Twitter profile metrics, like how many followers you have and how many you’re following.

Apollo for Reddit

Popular Reddit client app Apollo is offering a collection of widgets, including a Post widget that shows a post from a Reddit feed of your choosing, a Multiple Posts widgets that will show several posts from your favorite feed, a Post Feed Grid that presents posts in a more visual, grid-style layout, a Wallpaper widget that will rotate through photos from image-heavy subreddits you like, as well as Showerthoughts and Jokes widgets that put a little humor on your homescreen.

Image Credits: Apollo for Reddit

Carrot Weather

The iOS 14 release of Carrot’s humorous weather app brings a forecast widget, hourly and daily widgets, a weather maps widget and — in true carrot fashion — a snark widget that delivers your weather with the app’s classic snarky comments.

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Tangerine

Habit and mood tracking app Tangerine will offer a variety of widgets to remind you about your progress on your day’s goald, like your committments to run, exercise, drink water or whatever else you may be tracking.

Image Credits: Tangerine

Nudget

Nudget’s mobile budgeting app will introduce widgets for keeping up with your household budget, including things like those categories where you’ve spent too much or have dropped your spending, and how much money you have left this week.

Image Credits: Nudget

Birch

Organized photo notes app Birch includes a Featured Photo widget that lets you put a photo on your homescreen — a neat trick, since there’s not a way to do so with the iOS Photos app. (Submitting today)

Image Credits: Birch

The above apps should be live today after iOS 14 releases, barring some unforeseen rejection.

Asset management might not be the most exciting talking topic, but it’s often an overlooked area of cyber-defenses. By knowing exactly what assets your company has makes it easier to know where the security weak spots are.

That’s the problem JupiterOne is trying to fix.

“We built JupiterOne because we saw a gap in how organizations manage the security and compliance of their cyber assets day to day,” said Erkang Zheng, the company’s founder and chief executive.

The Morrisville, N.C.-based startup, which spun out from healthcare cloud firm LifeOmic in 2018, helps companies see all of their digital and cloud assets by integrating with dozens of services and tools, including Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, and GitLab, and centralizing the results into a single monitoring tool.

JupiterOne says it makes it easier for companies to spot security issues and maintain compliance, with an aim of helping companies prevent security lapses and data breaches by catching issues early on.

The company already has Reddit, Databricks and Auth0 as customers, and just secured $19 million in its Series A, led by Bain Capital Ventures and with participation from Rain Capital and its parent company LifeOmic.

As part of the deal, Bain partner Enrique Salem will join JupiterOne’s board. “We see a large multibillion dollar market opportunity for this technology across mid-market and enterprise customers,” he said. Asset management is slated to be a $8.5 billion market by 2024.

Zheng told TechCrunch the company plans to use the funds to accelerate its engineering efforts and its go-to-market strategy, with new product features to come.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m entering my second year in the U.S. under a five-year J-1 research visa from Italy. When we came we thought it would be temporary, but our plans have changed and now we want to try to stay in the U.S. My husband started his own company here on his J-2 visa work permit, and our daughter was born here. However, we’re supposed to return to Italy for two years. How can we get a 212(e) waiver?

—Positive in Palo Alto

Dear Positive:

Congrats on your accomplishments — the birth of your daughter, your research position and your husband’s startup. Happy to share about the J-1 visa, the two-year home residency requirement (a section of the law called “212(e)”) and obtaining a waiver so you can seek a green card or another type of visa. For more background, check out my podcast on the two-year foreign residency requirement and filing a waiver and last weeks’ Dear Sophie column with an overview of the types of J-1 visas. The earlier you begin preparing your waiver application, the better.

The J-1 Educational and Cultural Exchange Visa is intended for people from around the globe to work or study in the U.S. and then take their newly acquired knowledge and skills back to their home country. Given that, it is not a direct path if you decide after your arrival to remain longer term in the U.S. I recommend working with an experienced immigration lawyer to devise a strategy for reaching your goals beyond getting a waiver. I also recommend talking with your employer to assess whether they can later sponsor you for a green card.

Apple has just released the final version of iOS 14, the next major version of the operating system for the iPhone. It is a free download and it works with the iPhone 6s or later, both generations of iPhone SE and the most recent iPod touch model. If your device runs iOS 13, it supports iOS 14. The update may or may not be immediately available, but keep checking because people are now receiving the update.

The company is also releasing major updates for the iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV today. So you can expect some new features with iPadOS 14, tvOS 14 and watchOS 7 as well.

The release of those updates caught many developers by surprise. Apple announced yesterday that iOS 14 would be ready for prime time today. Usually, the company announces the release date a week or two in advance. This way, developers have enough time to fix the last remaining bugs and submit updates to the App Store.

If you update your iPhone today, don’t be surprised if you encounter a few bugs here and there from third-party apps. There are some major changes under the hood and nobody expected such a short turnaround.

The update is currently rolling out and is available both over-the-air in the Settings app, and by plugging your device into iTunes for a wired update. But first, back up your device. Make sure your iCloud backup is up to date by opening the Settings app on your iPhone or iPad and tapping on your account information at the top and then on your device name. Additionally, you can also plug your iOS device into your computer to do a manual backup in iTunes (or do both, really).

Don’t forget to encrypt your backup in iTunes. It is much safer if somebody hacks your computer. And encrypted backups include saved passwords and health data. This way, you don’t have to reconnect to all your online accounts.

Once this is done, you should go to the Settings app, then ‘General’ and then ‘Software Update.’ Then you should see ‘Update Requested…’ It will then automatically start downloading once the download is available.

The biggest change of iOS 14 is the introduction of widgets on the home screen, a new App Library to browse all your apps and the ability to run App Clips — those are mini apps that feature a small part of an app and that you can run without installing anything.

There are also many refinements across the board, such as new features for Messages, with a big focus on groups with @-mentions and replies, a new Translate app that works on your device, cycling directions in Apple Maps in some cities and various improvements in Notes, Reminders, Weather, Home and more.

If you want to learn more about iOS 14, I looked at some of the features in the new version earlier this summer:

According to a new report in Bloomberg, Social Capital Hedosophia has filed plans confidentially with the SEC to raise $500 million for its newest blank-check company.

It will be the fourth special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, to be raised by the outfit, which is headed up by Chamath Palihapitiya and his longtime investment partner, Ian Osborne.

Astonishingly, dozens more may be in the works. On the “All-In Podcast,” co-hosted by Palihapitiya, he revealed recently that has reserved the symbols from “IPOA” to “IPOZ” on the New York Stock Exchange. He also said he has $100 million of his own involved in each deal to demonstrate his alignment with potential investors.

What’s the play? In the podcast, Palihapitiya pointed to the Federal Reserve’s economic and interest rate forecasts and its plans to keep interest rates at zero for years to come. “I mean, quite honestly,” Palihapitiya said, “there’s no path to any near-term inflation of any kind whatsoever.”

It’s why he thinks investors are going to “get paid to be long [on] equities, because your risk-free rate is zero and will soon be negative. And what are you supposed to do if you’re an asset manager?”

Here’s how he framed it: “Let’s say you’re the California pension system, you have hundreds of billions of dollars, and you need to generate five or 6% a year to make sure that your pension isn’t insolvent, and the government is paying you zero. When everybody is in that situation, you’re overwhelmingly long equities . . .So all of these opportunities are generally buying opportunities, and I’m more bullish now than I was before.”

Indeed, when it comes to private or public market investing, said Palihapitiya, “I think it really is just public companies [that are worth getting behind]. . . I mean like, no offense, but if you’re a very good stock picker in the public markets, you’re generating better returns [than] Sequoia, Benchmark — name your best venture fund.  I see all these people spouting off on Twitter about how good they are in the early-stage markets, but it’s all kind of small dollars and not that meaningful.”

Certainly, he has reasoned to feel emboldened. The first SPAC of Social Capital Hedosophia, raised in 2017, ultimately merged last year with the space tourism company Virgin Galactic, and it’s now valued at slightly more than $4 billion by public market shareholders.

The outfit’s second fund, which was raised in April, announced yesterday that it will merge with Opendoor, a company that buys and sells residential real estate and that might have had trouble going public through a traditional IPO process, given its still-uncertain economics.

Social Capital Hedosophia’s third SPAC, also raised in April, has not yet named its target but the company has said it will use its IPO proceeds to buy a tech company that’s primarily outside of the United States.

Certainly, SPACs — which haven’t had a stellar reputation historically — have a growing number of other investors intrigued. According to SPACInsider, nearly 100 SPACs have been raised in 2020 already up from just 7 a decade ago.

Though Sequoia Capital is having a stellar year — given its stake in Zoom, Bytedance, and Snowflake, among many other headline-leading companies — its U.S. head, Roelof Botha, suggested in an interview yesterday that Sequoia hasn’t ruled out the possibility of forming SPACs, even while he implied that it was unlikely. “I love the fact that there’s more innovation” around the IPO process, he said. “It gives more choice to the companies.”

Fortnite may not be available in VR (or on iOS), but Quest users will soon be getting their own Fortnite clone for virtual reality.

Nearly two years after its funding and initial launch announcement, BigBox VR is finally ready to roll out its battle royale game, “POPULATION: ONE” to players on the Quest (and the sunsetting Rift hardware).

Co-founders Chia Chin Lee and Gabe Brown started their game development for virtual reality with a shooter called Smashbox Arena, but “POPULATION:ONE” is the big gambit for the game studio.

The COVID-19 pandemic has managed to boost the sales of the Quest, turning it into more of a genuine consumer device instead of just something for the technorati and digital power users. If this new audience for virtual reality can take to the battle royale game in the same way that they’ve taken to Epic Games’ Fortnite title, it could go a long way toward giving Facebook’s platform a wedge to gain market share in what’s become the newest social network.

A lot has been written about how Fortnite has become the social forum for Gen Z and the cohort that’s coming up after them. As these users gravitate to TikTok and Fortnite, Facebook is becoming an afterthought for a new consumer demographic that the social network needs.

And as we wrote earlier, BigBox VR’s title shares more than a passing similarity to Fortnite.

To say the game shares some similarities with Fortnite is an understatement. Not only is it a battle royale title with a shrinking environment, but certain mechanics like gliding in at the beginning to scrounge for weapons and even Fortnite’s building feature are central to the gameplay. That being said, battle royale titles have exploded in the wake of PUBG and they seem to all share a lot among each other. For BigBox, VR is the distinguishing feature, with motion controls and the general feeling that everything is life-sized and in your control.

If the game can replicate Fortnite’s popularity in virtual reality, that could be a coup for Facebook and BigBox VR in a space where the social networking giant has traditionally been pwned.