Year: 2020

Music streaming service Soundcloud is capitalizing on consumer demand for live entertainment amid the COVID-19 quarantine with the launch of its own slate of originally produced live programming. The company today announced its plans for a new Twitch channel where it will air live chat series and other panel conversations plus music sets, and shows focused on music discovery. The programming will feature artists, producers and other industry experts in an effort appeal to both music creators and fans alike.

While the company has offered other music discovery and creator resources in the past, this is the first time it’s offered live video and a way to interact with the music community in real-time, as it will by way of Twitch’s built-in chat.

The new slate of originals begins on Wednesday, May 6th, at 2 PM ET, with “Studio Sessions with Soulection,” a 90-minute music show hosted by Soulection Founder, Joe Kay. The show promises to feature “surprise guests” who will dig through Soundcloud to find the most exciting, undiscovered tracks and discuss what makes a track stand out.

On Thursday, May 7th, Soundcloud will begin airing its 3-hour weekly live chat series “Cloud Bar,” where creators, industry execs, and influencers will take on topics like how to build a career in music and look at new trends in music discovery, culture, and more.

This week’s guests include CAA music agents, Zach Iser and Caroline Yim; artist managers Byron Wilson, Matthew Burnett, and Jordan Evans, Dae Bogan of The Mechanical Licensing Collective; XXL’s Editorial Director, Georgette Cline; hip-hop entrepreneur, Roger Gengo; recording artist, activist, and entrepreneur, Vic Mensa; and Founder and CEO of Biz 3 Publicity, PCC, ICF certified Personal/Professional Coach, Kathryn Frazier.

The discussion will be in three parts, beginning with the timely topic of how the music community is coping with the COVID-19 cancellations of live music, and how they’re working to bring their music to fans online. The other two parts of the conversation will focus on the changes in music discovery occurring due to the pandemic and the subject of self-care for artists.

On May 11th, Soundcloud will introduce two more shows, “Fresh Pressed” and “Fast Track.”

The former aims to give the latest scoop on the best new tracks while the latter will have rising artists creating their own beat in 60 minutes or less using software and instruments in digital music making. “Fresh Pressed” will continue to air every Monday from 2-3:30 PM ET and “Fast Track” will air every other Wednesday from 2-3:30 PM ET.

Twitch has been working to make its resources available to music artists and other creators during the COVID-19 pandemic as it sees the potential to expand beyond gaming.

On that front, the company just hired Spotify’s former director of Product Management Tracy Chan as its new head of Product and Engineering for Music. The company also recently partnered with Bandsintown and Soundcloud to fast-track artists onto its Twitch Affiliates platform, so they can make money from their live streams. According to some artists, it’s been easier to make money on Twitch compared with mainstream social platforms.

Twitch is also preparing to air a two-hour “Sessions” music and conversation series on its front page on four consecutive Wednesdays, starting this week at 4 PM ET. Guests will include CAM, Skip Marley, Steve Earle, Brandy Clark and DJ Twin Shadow for the debut show. Viewers will be able to donate to the MusiCares charity’s COVID-19 relief fund during the event.

Soundcloud on Twitch begins Wednesday, May 6th, at 2:00 PM ET, but users can follow the channel and opt to turn on notifications on Twitch now.

The company says it will publish its schedule for the week here on its own site.

As expected, Robinhood has closed a new round of capital. The late-stage, consumer investing app announced today that it has closed a $280 million Series F funding at an $8.3 billion valuation. This closely tracks prior coverage that the firm was hunting for a nine-figure round at a valuation of around $8 billion.

Robinhood raised capital several times in 2019, including a $323 million mid-year Series E that valued the firm at around $7.6 billion, counting the value of the investment. 

The valuation gains that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based unicorn has enjoyed over time are slowing. The firm’s 2017 Series C valued it at around $1.3 billion. That rose to around $5.6 billion the next year when it raised $363 million in its Series D. The firm’s Series E’s $7.6 billion valuation was strong, then, but a deceleration. And today’s $8.3 billion valuation brings its slimmest valuation gain in years.

It seems likely that Robinhood is growing into its valuation as it scales. According to its blog post, Robinhood has added 3 million accounts this year.

According to Bloomberg, which broke the news of the firm’s then-impending funding round, Robinhood recorded around $60 million in revenue this March, three times its February result. It is unclear if the firm can continue that pace of revenue generation during the remainder of 2020, but Robinhood’s trailing valuation multiple would decline sharply if the feat was possible. (Revenue multiples are broadly contracting as the economy slows, and investors project slower growth amongst startups.)

But while Robinhood is caught in an updraft that is lifting the fortunes of many savings and investing apps, its road has not been entirely smooth this year.

Growing pains

Robinhood made headlines in March with less fortuitous news: three outages in two weeks. An outage, in the company’s case, means that consumers were unable to trade during specific hours due to technical difficulties. As the financial services startup handles people’s money — often tied to specific market movements — making any disruption to its operations the opposite of good news. 

The stability of apps that handle your money is especially important right now, as people try to get their financial health in order amid rising unemployment and an uncertain future economy at large, let alone the stock market.

We don’t know whether the round was closed before the outages and before COVID-19, but we wouldn’t be surprised if discussions were underway months earlier. (We asked; Robinhood declined to comment.)

It’s worth noting that when Robinhood suffered its first massive outage, its co-CEOs noted that the cause was largely due to a stress on infrastructure due to an unprecedented load of usage. 

Robinhood has spent time in the last few weeks figuring out how to handle another increases in usage — sensibly, the new capital will be used to build out capabilities and prevent future crashes. (The company said in its announcement that it intends to “continue to invest in scaling our platform.”) 

It’s going to need that platform stability if the market keeps moving as swiftly toward its portion of the fintech world as it has in the last few months.

A savings boom

Robinhood’s citing of “unprecedented load” as part of the cause of its difficulties drove some snark. It’s hard to fit a small brag into an apology, after all. But one thing TechCrunch has learned is that individuals are investing and saving during the pandemic.

Data for this abounds. Acorns, a savings and investing app, saw a record of signups on March 19, the same day that the company noted the stock market recorded their second-worst day of trading since 1987. 

We’ve collected further data in the same vein, with Public (another free stock-trading app) reporting surging usage, and other fintech providers telling TechCrunch that more folks than ever are looking to save and buy stocks. Indeed, Robinhood later said that in March it saw “more than 10x net deposits” when compared to the monthly average it set in the last quarter of 2019.

The company, then, raised around a usage high. This makes its failure to generate a larger valuation premium nearly confusing; after all, when would there be a better time for it to raise? The answer appears to be that the same market dynamic that gave it a surge in demand (the pandemic) is likely also the reason that its valuation gains were slight (falling revenue multiples and falling private investor sentiment).

Sequoia Capital led the round, which saw participation from NEA, fintech-focused Ribbit and smaller firms 9Yards Capital and Unusual Ventures.

Other companies are riding the same fundraising wave. Last week, investing app Stash raised a $112 million round led by LendingTree. In its most recent quarter Stash claims it had an over 100% increase in weekly customer deposits across banking and investing. 

There are no shortages of other investing platforms for consumers during this time, even if that looks like a traditional incumbent bank. With a new nine-figure round, Robinhood will have to prove that it is competitive, and more importantly, reliable. 

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in big shifts across industries, but the development of more long-term solutions that address a future in which what we need to do is mitigate the impact of the new coronavirus seems like a worthwhile place to invest time and effort. Projects like a new one from Northwestern University researchers working with the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago that resulted in a wearable to potentially provide early warnings to COVID-19 patients are a prime example of that kind of work.

The wearable is designed to be worn on the throat, and it’s already in use by around 25 individuals, who are providing early data via at-home and in-clinic monitoring about its effectiveness. The hardware involve monitors coughs and respiratory activity, and then feeds that into a set of algorithms developed by the research team that can identify what might be early symptoms of COVID-19, and potential signs that the infection is progressing in a dangerous way that could require more advanced care.

The gadget is designed to be worn around the clock, and provides a continuous data stream. This has the advantage of providing insight as it becomes available, instantly, instead of relying on regular check-ins, or waiting for when symptoms are clearly bad enough that someone needs additional help, at which point it’s usually past the stage of early intervention. The wearable essentially looks like a thin bandage the size of a postage stamp, and it can monitor not only cough sounds and frequency, but also chest movements, heart rate, body temperature and respiratory rate.

It’s tuned specifically to what health experts have generally tagged as the most common early symptoms of COVID-19, which include fever, coughing and problem breathing. The ‘suprasternal notch,’ which the technical name for the site on the throat where the wearable rests, is “where airflow occurs near the surface of the skin” through the respiratory pathways of the body, according to Northwestern researcher John A. Rogers who led the device’s development team.

This hardware can potentially be useful in a number of ways: First, it’s a valuable tool for frontline healthcare workers, offering them what will hopefully be an early warning sign of any oncoming illness, so that they can avoid infecting their colleagues and get the treatment they need as efficiently as possible. Second, it could be used by those already diagnosed with COVID-19, to potentially provide valuable insight into the course of the infection, and when it might be getting worse. Third, it could eventually also be used to tell scientists working on therapies what is working, how, and how well with live information from test subjects both in-clinic and at home.

The device is also relatively easy to produce, with the team saying they can do-so at a rate of around hundreds per week, without even needing to lean very heavily on outside suppliers. That’s a considerable advantage for any hardware that might need to be leveraged in volume to address the crisis. Plus, people can wear it almost unnoticed, and it’s very easy to use both for clinicians and patients.

There are other projects in the works to see how devices that monitor biometrics, including the Oura ring, and the Kinsa thermometer, can help contain the epidemic. The researchers behind this wearable have spun up an engineering company called Sonica to manage their device’s development, and will now be working with various agencies (including through funding by BARDA) to deploy it in more places, and see about potentially productizing the wearable for wide scale use.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in big shifts across industries, but the development of more long-term solutions that address a future in which what we need to do is mitigate the impact of the new coronavirus seems like a worthwhile place to invest time and effort. Projects like a new one from Northwestern University researchers working with the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago that resulted in a wearable to potentially provide early warnings to COVID-19 patients are a prime example of that kind of work.

The wearable is designed to be worn on the throat, and it’s already in use by around 25 individuals, who are providing early data via at-home and in-clinic monitoring about its effectiveness. The hardware involve monitors coughs and respiratory activity, and then feeds that into a set of algorithms developed by the research team that can identify what might be early symptoms of COVID-19, and potential signs that the infection is progressing in a dangerous way that could require more advanced care.

The gadget is designed to be worn around the clock, and provides a continuous data stream. This has the advantage of providing insight as it becomes available, instantly, instead of relying on regular check-ins, or waiting for when symptoms are clearly bad enough that someone needs additional help, at which point it’s usually past the stage of early intervention. The wearable essentially looks like a thin bandage the size of a postage stamp, and it can monitor not only cough sounds and frequency, but also chest movements, heart rate, body temperature and respiratory rate.

It’s tuned specifically to what health experts have generally tagged as the most common early symptoms of COVID-19, which include fever, coughing and problem breathing. The ‘suprasternal notch,’ which the technical name for the site on the throat where the wearable rests, is “where airflow occurs near the surface of the skin” through the respiratory pathways of the body, according to Northwestern researcher John A. Rogers who led the device’s development team.

This hardware can potentially be useful in a number of ways: First, it’s a valuable tool for frontline healthcare workers, offering them what will hopefully be an early warning sign of any oncoming illness, so that they can avoid infecting their colleagues and get the treatment they need as efficiently as possible. Second, it could be used by those already diagnosed with COVID-19, to potentially provide valuable insight into the course of the infection, and when it might be getting worse. Third, it could eventually also be used to tell scientists working on therapies what is working, how, and how well with live information from test subjects both in-clinic and at home.

The device is also relatively easy to produce, with the team saying they can do-so at a rate of around hundreds per week, without even needing to lean very heavily on outside suppliers. That’s a considerable advantage for any hardware that might need to be leveraged in volume to address the crisis. Plus, people can wear it almost unnoticed, and it’s very easy to use both for clinicians and patients.

There are other projects in the works to see how devices that monitor biometrics, including the Oura ring, and the Kinsa thermometer, can help contain the epidemic. The researchers behind this wearable have spun up an engineering company called Sonica to manage their device’s development, and will now be working with various agencies (including through funding by BARDA) to deploy it in more places, and see about potentially productizing the wearable for wide scale use.

Nvidia today announced its plans to acquire Cumulus Networks, an open-source centric company that specializes in helping enterprises optimize their data center networking stack. Cumulus offers both its own Linux distribution for network switches, as well as tools for managing network operations. With Cumulus Express, the company also offers a hardware solution in the form of its own data center switch.

The two companies did not announce the price of the acquisition, but chances are we are talking about a considerable amount, given that Cumulus had raised $134 million since it was founded in 2010.

Mountain View-based Cumulus already had a previous partnership with Mellanox, which Nvidia acquired for $6.9 billion. That acquisition closed only a few days ago. As Mellanox’s Amit Katz notes in today’s announcement, the two companies first met in 2013 and they formed a first official partnership in 2016.  Cumulus, it’s worth noting, was also an early player in the OpenStack ecosystem.

Having both Cumulus and Mellanox in its stable will give Nvidia virtually all of the tools it needs to help enterprises and cloud providers build out their high-performance computing and AI workloads in their data centers. While you may mostly think about Nvidia because of its graphics cards, the company has a sizable data center group, which delivered close to $1  billion in revenue in the last quarter, up 43 percent from a year ago. In comparison, Nvidia’s revenue from gaming was just under $1.5 billion.

“With Cumulus, NVIDIA can innovate and optimize across the entire networking stack from chips and systems to software including analytics like Cumulus NetQ, delivering great performance and value to customers,” writes Katz. “This open networking platform is extensible and allows enterprise and cloud-scale data centers full control over their operations.”

As the quarantine dramatically transforms social and romantic lives, a new dating app advised by Grindr founder Joel Simkhai and former YC chief Sam Altman is aiming to capitalize on the skyrocketing popularity of video chat.

CEO Brenden Strauss hopes his NYC-based startup Curtn can approach video calling in a mindful way during a time when so many people are sheltering in place and significantly cutting back on social interactions. Video chat can offer a temporary alternative for users that might otherwise meet up in the real world for a first date.

“What’s going on right now has entirely changed the dating game,” Strauss tells TechCrunch. “As people are struggling to connect, we’re giving people a better way to connect while they’re physically apart.”

The app is pushing video as its differentiating factor, encouraging users to create short videos for their dating profiles and aiming to move conversations to video chat after users match. Most of the major dating apps have had a complicated with rich media over the past several years, moving away from sending pics or videos in favor of sidestepping the associated expenses as well as potential for abuse.

Bumble launched video calling in early 2019, Tinder does not support video communications.

While the company presents users with the ability to video chat with new matches, one user must get the okay from the other inside the app if they’re interested in making a call. Strauss says the team has built in reporting features from the beginning so that once bad actors pop up, they can be handled quickly.

“Safety is our top priority,” Strauss says. “The last thing we want is for this to turn into chatroulette.”

Strauss has some noteworthy advisors to help him build a next-gen dating app. For one, Strauss’ boyfriend Joel Simkhai is the co-founder of Grindr and was one of his biggest inspirations for building out the app, he says. Former YC president and current OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also serving as an advisor and is one of the startup’s first investors.

The team has raised a small $425K pre-seed round of investment to get the app ready to share with the world.

The app’s launch is a crucial time for the company to make a splash, capitalizing on the renewed interest in video chatting apps across the board. During an earnings call this past week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said time on group video chats had increased 1000%. Last week, House Party shared they had received 50 million sign-ups in the past month.

Strauss says the team has been building out a marketing strategy with a spread of social media influencer partnerships.

Curtn’s biggest challenge is reaching critical mass and acquiring a network of users across different geographies that can encourage widespread usage of the app. The app is casting a wide net, aiming to court users of any and all sexual orientations. For the time being, users of the service only receive 10 matches per day, an effort to limit the geographic spread of suggestions and make the most of the early user base.

With video calling continuing to be a rare feature for dating apps, Curtn hopes it can own the feature and make the most of how the quarantine is shifting user habits.

With Windows 10X, Microsoft introduced a new version of its flagship operating system last October that was specifically designed for dual-screen devices. The original plan was to launch the first set of Windows 10X dual-screen devices before the 2020 holidays and in February of this year, it announced a slew of tools to help developers get ready for this new form factor. Today, it announced that it is pivoting Windows 10X away from dual-screen devices for the time being. And that means we likely won’t see any dual-screen Windows devices anytime soon.

In a blog post today, Microsoft’s Windows and devices chief Panos Panay said that the company has made this decision because at this time, it wants to focus on what it’s customers need right now and to “focus on meeting customers where they are now.” While Panay doesn’t quite spell it out in his blog post, the idea here is clearly that given the unprecedented environment during the coronavirus pandemic, Microsoft doesn’t want to emphasize new form factors but put its efforts behind improving its existing tools and services.

“With Windows 10X, we designed for flexibility, and that flexibility has enabled us to pivot our focus toward single-screen Windows 10X devices that leverage the power of the cloud to help our customers work, learn and play in new ways,” Panay writes. “These single-screen devices will be the first expression of Windows 10X that we deliver to our customers, and we will continue to look for the right moment, in conjunction with our OEM partners, to bring dual-screen devices to market.”

A single-screen Windows 10X device sounds a lot like a regular laptop, 2-in-1 or tablet. Microsoft declined to define what these first Windows 10X devices will look like and only told us that there’s “more to come.” We’ll be here when that happens.

In his post today, Panay also stressed that the company wants to accelerate innovation in Windows 10 “to ensure that Windows devices are the best way to work, learn and play.” He didn’t share any further details of what exactly that means.

What Panay did say, though, is that Microsoft users now spend 4 trillion minutes a month on Windows 10. That’s an increase of 75 percent year-over-year.

Taika Waititi already reinvigorated the Thor franchise. Now he’s looking to do the same for Star Wars.

Waititi is probably best-known for directing “Thor: Ragnarok” — easily the best of the Thor movies and one of the most delightful films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. More recently, he wrote and directed the Nazi comedy “Jojo Rabbit,” for which he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

He’s actually worked in Star Wars universe already, directing the first season finale of “The Mandalorian” on Disney+ (and also lending his voice to a droid assassin).

According to the announcement from Disney (presumably timed with its annual “May the 4th” promotional event for Star Wars), Waititi will be directing a Star Wars film, which he will co-write with Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”). The movie does not yet have a release date – Waititi probably needs to get the next Thor sequel done first.

Star Wars and Lucasfilm are in a bit of flux right now, with the recent “Rise of Skywalker” wrapping up the nine-film Skywalker Saga to mixed reviews and significant lower box office than either “The Force Awakens” or “The Last Jedi.” Former Disney CEO Bob Iger even admitted that the company “might’ve put a little bit too much in the marketplace too fast.”

While “The Mandalorian” looks a hit, and although there are more Star Wars shows in the works for Disney+, it’s not clear what’s next for the franchise on the big-screen. In addition to Waititi’s film, “Last Jedi” director Rian Johnson is also supposed to be working on his own trilogy, while “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have apparently abandoned their Star Wars plans to focus on their work for Netflix.

Disney’s announcement confirms previous reports of Waititi’s move to Star Wars, and it confirms another rumor — that Leslye Headland is developing a Star Wars series for Disney+, which she will write, executive produce and showrun. Since Headland was co-creator and showrunner of “Russian Doll” (my favorite streaming show of 2019), this is good news indeed.

There are some startups that behave like sprinters, and others that run a marathon. I came across Instabug when I was in Cairo in 2013. Born during the chaotic era of the Arab Spring, this plucky startup managed to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt, then Y Combinator in 2016, then a $1.7M in Seed round led by Accel Partners. Originally part of the Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs Cairo, they raised $300K from angel investors in 2013.

Today they announce a $5M in a Series A round, once again led by Accel. Other angel investors joining include Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera, and Jim Payne, founder and CEO of MoPub, both of whom have invested previously.

Instabug provides mobile developers with real-time insights throughout the app lifecycle, with its bug and feedback reporting, secure crash reporting and in-app surveys. All the more important these days, given so many people are relying on apps during their pandemic lockdowns.

Omar Gabr, Cofounder and CEO of Instabug said in a statement: “We’ve been working with Accel since 2016 and we’re very excited to continue our partnership. We grew 120% in revenues in the last 12 months, adding dozens of Enterprise customers. We’ve always been running a disciplined business, we’re almost profitable for some time now. This is what made our fundraising fast in the middle of all the current events. Our fundraising conversations with Accel started after the pandemic outbreak.”

Instabug says that since the COVID-19 outbreak, it has seen a “massive surge” in usage, which has grown since 45% since January. It’s also designed to streamline the communication between QA and Developers which is very relevant now since many are working remotely.

Some 28 of the top 100 apps on the App Store use Instabug. Several competitors have been acquired, including Crashlytics (by Google) and HockeyApp (by Microsoft).

Given that the startup still has most of its team back in Egypt, this is once again a great win for the MENA region.

Facebook is expanding its Community Help hub to better serve local communities amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The hub has already seen significant usage by those requesting food, supplies and information about local resources, as well as use by volunteers and groups willing to lend a hand. Now, Facebook is adding more features to the hub to allow people to support local businesses, blood banks, nonprofits, and more.

As part of Facebook’s efforts with GivingTuesday, it will roll out these new additions on May 5th, it says.

Typically, the GivingTuesday charitable giving event is held on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving in the U.S. — after Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales wrap. But in response to the unprecedented need caused by the pandemic, GivingTuesday announced an emergency day of giving, called Giving Tuesday Now.

This new event happens tomorrow, May 5th, and already has a number of partners and supporters, including Facebook, as well as PayPal, America’s Food Fund, Ford, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CDC Foundation, LinkedIn, United Way, GoFundMe, and many others.

Starting tomorrow, Facebook users will be able to go to Community Help at Facebook.com/covidsupport in order to buy gift cards to local businesses, sign up to donate to local nonprofits and fundraisers, sign up to be a donor at local blood banks, and find local job opportunities.

In some cases, Facebook already had built the technology and formed partnerships needed to launch these features. For example, Facebook began its work to connect Facebook users with blood banks back in 2017, then expanded the blood donations feature to the U.S. last June.

It also offers a fundraising platform of its own and announced last month it was working on tools that would allow businesses to offer gift cards to their customers via its platform. It’s been working on its jobs portal since 2018, too.

On Tuesday, these efforts are being centralized in the Community Help hub, which will give them increased visibility.

Facebook is not the only platform helping local businesses and nonprofits by rolling out new features.

Neighborhood social network Nextdoor also recently launched tools to allow businesses to promote their fundraisers and gift cards; Yelp just added a way for businesses to promote their virtual services; Instagram has introduced a range of tools for businesses, including those for connecting customers to Facebook’s gift cards or stickers for food ordering and more.

The revamped Community Help section will be live tomorrow, May 5, 2020.