Month: September 2020

As TikTok’s fate in the U.S. remains murky, YouTube today announced the launch of a new short-form video experience it’s calling YouTube Shorts. The feature will allow users, initially in India, to upload 15-second or less short-form videos using a new set of creator tools, including a multi-segment camera, similar to TikTok, speed controls, and a timer and a countdown feature. The videos can also be set to music, thanks to YouTube’s access to a large library of songs that it says will continue to grow over time.

The multi-segment camera lets users string together multiple video clips into one short clip. The other controls enable YouTube creators to be more creative than if they simply pressed a “record” button.

These are tools common to the TikTok video recording experience today and are the same features that Instagram recently cloned for its own TikTok rival, known as Reels.

Image Credits: YouTube

The feature will be prominently highlighted within the YouTube app on Android, and will expand to iOS in time.

YouTube says India — notably, a large market where Chinese-owned TikTok is already banned — will be the first to gain access to YouTube Shorts at launch. However, the plan is to bring the feature to more markets in time. YouTube didn’t offer a timeline for when that would happen, though.

Related to this, YouTube will introduce a new watch experience that lets you swipe through YouTube Shorts vertically — also, just like TikTok. The company had already added a new row on the YouTube homepage for watching short videos, and now the new watch experience will make it easier to watch that content and discover new short videos, too, YouTube says.

YouTube earlier this summer announced its plans to begin testing a short-form video feature, but hadn’t offered many details, or even the feature’s name. At the time, YouTube had said that the test would involve recording 15-second videos on both iOS and Android, but only among a small group of creators.

The news of the larger launch of YouTube Shorts comes as the M&A deadline for TikTok’s U.S. operations are coming to an end. Microsoft has now announced it won’t be the buyer and reports claim Oracle is winning the bid, but its deal isn’t structured as an outright sale.

TikTok’s potential exit had already seen many rival social platforms looking to woo TikTok users to their own app. Instagram, Snapchat and now YouTube, are among those looking to gain an advantage by leveraging the instability around TikTok to launch their own short-form video products. More direct TikTok competitors, like Triller, Dubsmash, Byte and others, have picked up some new customers, as well.

YouTube says the new feature is rolling out in India over the next few days. It characterizes YouTube Shorts as a test it aims to learn from, with the goal of expanding access and improving the product over time.

Microsoft has concluded a years-long experiment involving use of a shipping container-sized underwater data center, placed on the sea floor off the cost of Scotland’s Orkney Islands. The company pulled its ‘Project Natick’ underwater data warehouse up out of the water earlier this year at the beginning of the summer, and spent that last few months studying the datacenter, and the air it contained, to determine the model’s viability.

The results not only showed that using these offshore submerged data centers seems to work well in terms of performance, but also revealed that the servers contained within the data center proved to be up to eight times more reliable than their dry land counterparts. Researchers will be looking into exactly what was responsible for this greater reliability rate, in the hopes of also translating those advantages to land-based server farms for increase performance and efficiency across the board.

Other advantages included being able to operate with greater power efficiency, especially in regions where the grid on land is not considered reliable enough for sustained operation. That’s due in part to the decreased need for artificial cooling for the servers located within the data farm, because of the conditions at the sea floor. The Orkney Island area is covered by a 100% renewable grid supplied by both wind and solar, and while variances in the availability of both power sources would’ve proven a challenge for the infrastructure power requirements of a traditional, overland data center in the same region, the grid was more than sufficient for the same size operation underwater.

Microsoft’s Natick experiment was meant to show that portable, flexible data center deployments in coastal areas around the world could prove a modular way to scale up data center needs while keeping energy and operation costs low, all while providing smaller data centers closer to where customers need them, instead of routing everything to centralized hubs. So far, the project seems to have done specularly well at showing that. Next, the company will look into seeing how it can scale up the size and performance of these data centers by linking more than one together to combine their capabiilities.

The European Commission has begun testing backend infrastructure that’s needed to make national coronavirus contacts tracing apps interoperate across the bloc’s internal borders.

It’s kicked off test runs between the backend servers of the official apps from the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Latvia, and the newly established gateway server — which is being developed and set up by T-Systems and SAP, and will be operated from the Commission’s data centre in Luxembourg, it said today.

The service is due to become operational in October, meaning EU Member States with compatible apps will be able extend digital contacts tracing for app users travelling within the group of listed countries.

Interoperability guidelines were agreed for national coronavirus contacts tracing apps back in May.

The Commission says the gateway service will only exchange a minimum of data — namely the arbitrary identifiers generated by the tracing apps.

“The information exchanged is pseudonymised, encrypted, kept to the minimum, and only stored as long as necessary to trace back infections. It does not allow the identification of individual persons,” it adds.

Only decentralized national coronavirus contacts tracing apps are compatible with the gateway service at this stage. And while the Commission says it is continuing to support work being undertaken within some Member States to find ways to extend interoperability to tracing apps with different architectures, it’s not clear how viable that will be without risks to privacy.

The main advantage of the interoperability plan for national coronavirus contacts tracing apps is to avoid the need for EU citizens to install multiple tracing apps — provided they’re traveling to another country in the region that has a national app with compatible architecture.

However, in addition to varying choices of app architecture, some EU Member States don’t even have a national app yet. So it’s clear there will continue to be gaps in cross-border coverage for the foreseeable future which increases the challenge of breaking (non-domestic-)travel-related coronavirus transmission trains.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

What a weekend behind us, and what a week ahead. Disrupt kicks off today, so the TechCrunch crew is busy as heck getting all the final touches put on. Snag a ticket here and we will see you soon.

On the podcast this morning:

• Stocks are set to open sharply higher as we hit record, a good and welcome comeback for investors in both private and public tech companies.
• The NVIDIA-ARM deal is finally a go, so we can put the entire saga to rest at last.
• All things TikTok: Microsoft losing the deal, Oracle possibly winning the deal, the Chinese government saying no to the whole affair, and the Chinese government only saying no to part of the deal? What is clear is that the deal is under pressure to happen and not to happen. We’ll know more soon.
• Descartes Underwriting raised $18.5 million for its insurtech solution, while Xometry raised $75 million in a Series E for offshore manufacturing in factories with spare capacity.
• GoJek and Grab may merge.
• And, finally, the CBP is a huge mess and an embarrassment.

Ok, that’s all we have time for today. See you at Disrupt in a few hours!

We’re excited to announce that Extra Crunch memberships are now available in Australia. That adds to our existing support in:

• United States
• Canada
• Argentina, Brazil, Mexico
• UK
• Select European countries

We’ve been polling readers for the past year and a half about where to expand, and Australia was one of the most requested regions. 

Join our growing community of founders, startup teams, and investors by signing up for Extra Crunch membership here. Use the discount code AUSLAUNCH to get 20% off an annual or 2 year plan (expires October 31).

Much of the attention for Australian tech gets focused on startups that have gone public, been acquired, or raised massive funding rounds like Atlasssian, Canva, and Afterpay. We know there are TONS of other startups in Australia pushing the envelope and innovating because we regularly write about them. 

Thanks to everyone who voted on where to expand next. If you’d like to see Extra Crunch memberships available in your country, let us know here.

Join Extra Crunch by heading here, and use the code AUSLAUNCH to get 20% off an annual or 2-year membership plan.

What is Extra Crunch?

Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features market analysis, weekly investor surveys and how-tos and interviews on growth, fundraising, monetization and other work topics. Members can save time with access to an exclusive newsletter, no banner ads or video pre-rolls on TechCrunch.com, Rapid Read mode and our List Builder tool. 

Committing to an annual and two-year plan will save you a few bucks on the membership price and unlock access to TechCrunch event discounts and Partner Perks. Extra Crunch annual membership gets you 20% off tickets to virtual events like Disrupt 2020 in September and TC Sessions: Mobility in October. The Partner Perks program features discounts and savings on services from Canva, DocSend, Crunchbase, and more.

You can sign up or learn more about Extra Crunch here.

Indulging in American food companies’ favorite pastime of marketing innovations that no one needs but potentially everyone wants, Beyond Meat is launching Beyond Meatballs in grocery stores nationwide this week.

The new product can be put on top of spaghetti, all covered with cheese, and comes pre-spiced with a blend of Italian spices, according to a company statement.

The company’s meatballs have 30% less saturated fat and sodium than real meat and will be available at Whole Foods, Stop & Shop, Sprouts, Harris Teeter, Kroger and Albertsons, and more by early October, according to the statement.

The suggested retail price for these pre-spiced and pre-rolled protein replacement balls of soy is $6.99 for 12 meatballs.

For Beyond Meat, which already has a line of breakfast sausages and pre-made burgers under the “Cookout Classic” brand, the new product is the latest effort to win more of the meat aisle at the 26,000 outlets across the U.S. that stock the company’s products.

“We’re thrilled to introduce Beyond Meatballs as they deliver on consumers’ growing demand for delicious and nutritious plant-based meat options without GMOs or synthetic ingredients,” said Stuart Kronauge, Chief Marketing Officer, Beyond Meat. “We are proud to introduce our newest innovation at retailers nationwide and know our fans will be excited about the great taste and convenience of Beyond Meatballs.”

As part of the marketing campaign the company is offering free meatballs and spaghetti or a meatball hero at Beyond Meatball pop-up shops in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday.

Would-be Beyond Meatball eaters will have to reserve their complimentary meal and pick-up time in advance via The Beyond Meatball Shop’s LA and NY pages on Resy, while supplies last.

The spreadsheet-centric database and no-code platform Airtable today announced that it has raised a $185 million Series D funding round, putting the company at a $2.585 billion post-money valuation.

Thrive Capital led the round, with additional funding by existing investors Benchmark, Coatue, Caffeinated Capital and CRV, as well as new investor D1 Capital. With this, Airtable, which says it now has 200,000 companies using its service, has raised a total of about $350 million. Current customers include Netflix, HBO, Condé Nast Entertainment, TIME, City of Los Angeles, MIT Media Lab and IBM.

In addition, the company is also launching one of its largest feature updates today, which start to execute on the company’s overall platform vision that goes beyond its current no-code capabilities and bring more low-code features, as well new automation (think IFTTT for Airtable) and data management tools to the service.

As Airtable founder and CEO Howie Liu told me, a number of investors approached the company since it raised its Series C round in 2018, in part because the market clearly realized the potential size of the low-code/no-code market.

“I think there’s this increasing market recognition that the space is real, and the spaces is very large […],” he told me. “While we didn’t strictly need the funding, it allowed us to continue to invest aggressively into furthering our platform, vision and really executing aggressively, […] without having to worry about, ‘well, what happens with COVID?’ There’s a lot of uncertainty, right? And I think even today there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the next year will bear.”

The company started opening the round a couple of months after the first shelter in place orders in California and for most investors, this was a purely digital process.

Liu has always been open about the fact that he wants to build this company for the long haul — especially after he sold his last company to Salesforce at an early stage. As a founder, that likely means he is trying to keep his stake in the company high, even as Airtable continues to raise more money. He argues, though, that more so than the legal and structural controls, being aligned with his investors is what matters most.

“I think actually, what’s more important in my view, is having philosophical alignment and expectations alignment with the investors,” he said. “Because I don’t want to be in a position where it comes down to a legal right or structural debate over the future of the company. That almost feels to me like the last resort where it’s already gotten to a place where things are ugly. I’d much rather be in a position where all the investors around the table, whether they have legal say or not, are fully aligned with what we’re trying to do with this business.”

Just as important as the new funding though, are the various new features the company is launching today. Maybe the most important of these is Airtable Apps. Previously, Airtable users could use pre-built blocks to add maps, Gantt charts and other features to their tables. But while being a no-code service surely helped Airtable’s users get started, there’s always an inevitable point where the pre-built functionality just isn’t enough and users need more custom tools (Liu calls this an escape valve). So with Airtable Apps, more sophisticated users can now build additional functionality in JavaScript — and if they choose to do so, they can then share those new capabilities with other users in the new Airtable Marketplace.

Image Credits: Airtable

“You may or may not need an escape valve and obviously, we’ve gotten this far with 200,000 organizations using Airtable without that kind of escape valve,” he noted. “But I think that we open up a lot more use cases when you can say, well, Airtable by itself is 99% there, but that last 1% is make or break. You need it. And then, just having that outlet and making it much more leveraged to build that use case on Airtable with 1% effort, rather than building the full-stack application as a custom built application is all the difference.”

Image Credits: Airtable

The other major new feature is Airtable Automations. With this, you can build custom, automated workflows to generate reports or perform other repetitive steps. You can do a lot of that through the service’s graphical interface or use JavaScript to build you own custom flows and integrations, too. For now, this feature is available for free, but the team is looking into how to charge for it over time, given that these automated flows may become costly if you run them often.

The last new feature is Airtable Sync. With this, teams can more easily share data across an organization, while also providing controls for who can see what. “The goal is to enable people who built software with Airtable to make that software interconnected and to be able to share a source of truth table between different instances of our tables,” Liu explained.

Image Credits: Airtable

Another big M&A play is going down in the the world of media. Publishing group Red Ventures today announced that it is buying CNET Media Group from ViacomCBS for $500 million. The deal will include the eponymous CNET tech site, as well as ZDNet, Gamespot, TVGuide, Metacritic, and Chowhound.

The news puts paid to speculation that had been circulating for months that ViacomCBS was looking for a buyer for CNET and the wider media group, after ViacomCBS’s CEO Bob Bakish floated the idea of offloading non-core assets post-the Viacom/CBS merger. (And even earlier than that, insiders tell us that there were rumors that CBS had wanted to offload CNET and its tech stable “for literally years.”)

Bakish had been looking for cost savings of $500 million, a neat coincidence since that is the price Red Ventures is paying.

Red Ventures has been around since 2000 — a veteran and beneficiary, you could argue, of the late-nineties dot-com crash. It already owns 100 digital brands in categories like health, finance, travel, entertainment, home services and education. Its titles include Healthline.com, Greatist.com, Medical News Today, Bankrate.com, The Points Guy, and CreditCards.com. It has also collaborated with Time on a personal finance site, NextAdvisor.

The focus across many of these is reviews that the company subsequently monetizes. Given that this is a huge emphasis for CNET and other sites in its media group, you can see where the synergies might lie for Red Ventures. 

“Red Ventures believes in the power of premium content from trusted brands that help people make better life decisions,” said Ric Elias, Red Ventures CEO and Co-Founder, in a statement. “Over the last 25 years CNET Media Group has built a dynamic portfolio of brands with well-earned authority on such topics as consumer tech and gaming that play an increasingly important role in people’s lives. Red Ventures is eager to invest in CNET Media Group’s growth with more personalized consumer experiences that will reinvigorate CNET Media Group’s brands and unlock unprecedented opportunity for all.”

CBS, prior to being combined with Viacom, originally acquired CNET and related sites in 2008 for $1.8 billion. CNET was a veritable leviathan in online tech journalism and the ambition was to create much more reach into online media. That deal did not include Gamespot, TVGuide, Metacritic or Chowhound.

The significantly discounted price being paid today for a larger group of assets underscores the changing — and often declining — value of more traditional media and publishing brands — even those “born” and solely existing in digital form — as well as the difficulties of the current market.

But it’s not all bad news. Red Ventures’ message seems to be that even if older, ad-based, mass-market models are under strain for some — in particular in a world where publishers like Facebook and Google continue to take the lion’s share of online advertising revenues — there are ways to run media businesses well, if you shift the models and re-set your expectations on how that business scales. (There are alternatives, of course, to diversify in other ways, such as building out paywalls around premium content, building out events businesses and more.)

Mark Larkin, who is the the EVP and GM of CNET Media Group, will continue to lead the business at Red Ventures.

“I am incredibly excited about CNET Media Group’s future. I believe that the combination of Red Ventures customer experience platform and CNET Media Group’s rich content and deep editorial expertise greatly benefits both our audiences and our partners,” he said in a statement. “Red Ventures shares our vision and is committed to realizing the full potential of our portfolio of world-class brands.”

The companies said that the deal is expected to close in Q4.

Another class action style lawsuit has been lodged against a tech giant in the UK alleging violations of privacy and seeking major damages. The latest representative action, filed against Google-owned YouTube, accuses the platform of routinely breaking UK and European data protection laws by unlawfully targeting up to five million under-13-year-olds with addictive programming and harvests their data for advertisers.

UK and EU law contain specific protections for children’s data, limiting the age at which minors can legally consent to their data being processed — in the case of the UK’s Data Protection Act to aged 13.

The suit is being brought by international law firm Hausfeld and Foxglove, a tech justice non-profit, which says they’re seeking damages from YouTube of more than £2.5BN (~$3.2BN).

Per the firms, it’s the first such representative litigation brought against a tech giant on behalf of children and among the largest such cases to date. (Last month a similar class style action was filed against Oracle in the UK alleging breaches of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) related to cookie tracking.)

If the case succeeds, they say millions of British households whose kids watch YouTube may be owed “hundreds of pounds” in damages.

Duncan McCann, a researcher on the digital economy and father of three children all under 13 who watch YouTube and have their data collected and ads targeted at them by Google, is serving as representative claimant in the case.

Commenting in a statement, McCann said: “My kids love YouTube, and I want them to be able to use it. But it isn’t ‘free’ — we’re paying for it with our private lives and our kids’ mental health. I try to be relatively conscious of what’s happening with my kids’ data online but even so it’s just impossible to combat Google’s lure and influence, which comes from its surveillance power. There’s a massive power imbalance between us and them, and it needs to be fixed.”

“The [YouTube] website has no user practical age requirements and makes no adequate attempt to limit usage by youngsters,” notes Hausfeld in a press release about the lawsuit.

While a Foxglove release about the suit points to YouTube pitch materials intended for toy makers Mattel and Hasbro (and made public via an earlier FTC suit against Google) — in which it says the platform described itself as “the new Saturday morning cartoons”, “the number one website visited regularly by kids”, “today’s leader in reaching children age 6-11 against top TV channels”, and “unanimously voted as the favorite website of kids 2-12”.

Reached for comment, a YouTube spokesperson sent us this statement: “We don’t comment on pending litigation. YouTube is not for children under the age of 13. We launched the YouTube Kids app as a dedicated destination for kids and are always working to better protect kids and families on YouTube.”

The tech giant maintains that YouTube is not for under 13s — pointing to the existence of YouTube Kids, a dedicated kids’ app it launched in 2015 to offer what it called a “safer and easier” space for children to discover “family-focused content”, to back up the claim.

Although the company has never claimed that no children under 13 use YouTube. And last year the FTC agreed a $170M settlement with Google to end an investigation by the regulator and the New York Attorney General into alleged collection of children’s personal information by YouTube without the consent of their parents.

The rise in class action style lawsuits being filed in the UK seeking damages for breaches of data protection law follow a notable appeals court decision, just under a year ago, also against Google.

In that case the appeals court unblocked a class-action style lawsuit against the tech giant related to bypassing iOS privacy settings to track iPhone users.

In the US, Google paid $22.5M to the FTC back in 2012 to settle the same charge, and later paid a smaller sum to settle a number of US class action lawsuits. The UK case, meanwhile, continues.

While Europe has historically strong data protection laws, there has been — and still is — a lack of robust regulatory enforcement which is leaving a gap that litigation funders are increasingly willing to plug.

In the UK the challenge for those seeking damages for large scale violations is there’s no direct equivalent to a US class action. But last year’s appeals court ruling in the Safari bypass case has opened the door to representative actions.

The court also said damages could be sought for a breach of the law without needing to prove pecuniary loss or distress, establishing a route to redress for consumers that’s now being tested by several cases.

Facebook today is rolling out a new feature that will allow friends and family to watch videos together over Messenger. The feature, called “Watch Together,” works with all Facebook Watch video content, including its original programs, user uploads, creator content, live streams, and soon, music videos. At launch, the co-watching experience can be used by up to 8 people in a Messenger video chat on mobile, or by up to 50 people in Messenger Rooms.

The COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged a number of streaming services — including Hulu, Plex and Amazon Video — adopt similar co-viewing features, or at the very least, unofficially permit third-party apps that enable co-watching, like Netflix Party.

However, Facebook didn’t just jump on this bandwagon. It actually announced its plans to develop a co-viewing experience for Messenger at its F8 developer conference two years ago. And the product has been in development ever since.

Image Credits: Facebook

To roll out something like co-viewing across Messenger is a significant technical challenge. The service hooks into the Facebook Watch CDN (content distribution network), to pull the videos into Messenger. It also then developed a system that allows for tight synchronization between the various users’ streams of the same video. That, too, can be difficult, as someone in a rural area may have slower bandwidth speeds than someone in an urban metro, but the service has to make sure they’re seeing the same part of the video at the same time.

Image Credits: Facebook

To use the feature, users have to first be in a Messenger video call or a Messenger Room — it can’t be kicked off from the Facebook Watch tab or anywhere else. From Messenger, they’re able to start a co-watching session by selecting the new option from a drawer that pulls up from the bottom of the screen. Initially, this feature is only available on iOS and Android mobile devices, Facebook says.

From the interface that appears, users can then browse or search to find something to watch together. Facebook Watch content is organized into categories like “TV & Movies,” “Watched” (your recently watched content), “Uploaded” (your own videos), and “Suggested.”

While users can’t create playlists or queues, all participants can help choose videos. That is, there’s not one person directing the experience for others. Everyone can also stop, pause, jump forward or back in the videos, too.

Though many may use the feature for a sort of lean-back co-watching experience, it has other potential. For example, a group could get together to watch a fitness video and workout together.

Though official music videos recently became available on Facebook Watch, thanks to Facebook’s new deal with record labels, they’re not immediately available in this co-viewing experience. However, Facebook says that they’ll be added in the next few weeks, initially in the U.S., India and Thailand to start. Each market will also feature localized content under the “TV & Movies” section, too.

The feature will begin rolling out globally across iOS and Android, but Facebook intends to have web support ready in a matter of weeks, and other platforms, like desktop, will follow.