Year: 2020

Okta, the popular identity and access management service, today used its annual (and now virtual) user conference to launch Lifecycle Management Workflows, a new tool that helps IT teams build and manage IFTTT-like automated processes with the help of an easy to use graphical interface.

The new service is an extension of Okta’s existing automation tools. But the key here is that IT teams and developers can now easily build complex identity-centric workflows across a wide range of applications. With this, these teams can easily automate an onboarding process where setting up a new Okta account also immediately kicks off processes on third-party services like Box, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Slack to set up accounts there. The same goes for offboarding workflows and username creation. A lot of companies still do this manually, which is not just a hassle but also error-prone.

“Adopting more technology is incredibly beneficial for enterprises today, but complexity is a significant side effect of a changing technology ecosystem and workforce. There is no better example of the potential challenges it can create than with lifecycle management,” said Diya Jolly, Chief Product Officer at Okta. “Okta’s vision of enabling any organization to use any technology goes deeper than just access; it’s about improving how organizations use technology. Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows improves the efficiency and security of enterprises through its simple user experience and broad applicability, keeping organizations secure, and efficient without requiring the complexity of writing code.”

Okta, of course, had lifecycle management features before, but now it is also putting its acquisition of Azuqua to work and using that company’s graphical interface and technology for making it easier to create these automation processes. And while the focus right now is on processes like provisioning and de-provisioning accounts, the long-term plan is to expand Workflows with support for more identity processes.

As Okta also stresses, administrators can also manage very granular access across the supported third-party tools like assigning territories in Salesforce or access to specific group channels in Slack, for example. For temporary employees, admins can also set up automatic de-provisioning workflows that revoke access to some tools but maybe leave access to payroll services open for a while longer. There are also built-in tools for automatically managing conflicts when two people have the same name.

“Millions of people rely on Slack every day to make their working lives simpler, more pleasant, and more productive,” said Tamar Yehoshua, Chief Product Officer at Slack, one of the early adopters of this service. “Okta Lifecycle Management Workflows has significantly increased efficiency for us by automating the provisioning and de-provisioning of users from applications in our environment, without us ever having to write a line of code.”

This new feature is part of Okta’s new Platform Services, which the company also debuted today and which currently consists of core technologies like the Okta Identity Engine, Directories Integrations, Insights, Workflow and Devices. The core idea behind Platform Services is to give Okta users the flexibility to manage their unique identity use cases but also to give Okta itself a platform to innovate on. One other new product that sits on top of the platform is Okta Fastpass, for example, which allows for passwordless authentication on any device.

Researchers reveal a number of security issues with videoconferencing app Zoom, investors warn Indian startups of tough times ahead and Uber Eats expands its grocery options internationally. Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 1, 2020.

1. Maybe we shouldn’t use Zoom after all

Zoom’s recent popularity has shone a spotlight on the company’s security protections and privacy promises. Yesterday, The Intercept reported that Zoom video calls are not end-to-end encrypted, despite the company’s claims that they are.

In addition, two security researchers found a Zoom bug that can be abused to steal Windows passwords, while another researcher found two new bugs that can be used to take over a Zoom user’s Mac, including tapping into the webcam and microphone.

2. Investors tell Indian startups to ‘prepare for the worst’ as COVID-19 uncertainty continues

In an open letter to startup founders in India, 10 global and local private equity and venture capitalist firms — including Accel, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners — cautioned that the current changes to the macro environment could make it difficult for a startup to close their next fundraising deal.

3. Uber Eats beefs up its grocery delivery offer as COVID-19 lockdowns continue

Uber’s food delivery division has inked a partnership with supermarket giant Carrefour in France to provide Parisians with 30-minute home delivery on a range of grocery products. In Spain, it’s partnered with the Galp service station brand to offer a grocery delivery service that consists of basic foods, over the counter medicines, beverages and cleaning products. And in Brazil, the company said it’s partnering with a range of pharmacies, convenience stores and pet shops in São Paulo to offer home delivery on basic supplies.

4. Grab hires Peter Oey as its chief financial officer

Prior to joining Grab, Oey was the chief financial officer at LegalZoom, an online legal services company based near Los Angeles. Before that, he served the same role at Mylife.com.

5. How to value a startup in a downturn

What’s been happening in public markets is going to trickle down into the private markets — in other words, startups are going to take a hit. To understand that dynamic, we spoke with Mary D’Onofrio, an investor with Bessemer Venture Partners. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. No proof of a Houseparty breach, but its privacy policy is still gatecrashing your data

Houseparty was swift to deny the reports of a breach and even go so far as to claim — without evidence — it was investigating indications that the “breach” was a “paid commercial smear to harm Houseparty,” offering a $1 million reward to whoever could prove its theory.

7. YouTube sellers found touting bogus coronavirus vaccines and masks

Researchers working for the Digital Citizens Alliance and the Coalition for a Safer Web — two online safety advocacy groups in the U.S. — undertook an 18-day investigation of YouTube in March, finding what they say were “dozens” of examples of dubious videos, including videos touting bogus vaccines the sellers claimed would protect buyers from COVID-19.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Hulu co-founder and former chief executive Jason Kilar has been named the new chief executive of WarnerMedia .

It’s the latest executive reshuffling at the AT&T-owned media giant, which saw its previous CEO, John Stankey promoted to president and chief operating officer while still holding the media subsidiary’s reins.

Stankey will remain in those roles, and Kilar will be reporting to him starting on May 1 — right before the launch of WarnerMedia’s new streaming service HBO Max.

Kilar has plenty of experience in the streaming world, not just through his time at Hulu (which he left at the beginning of 2013), but also as co-founder and CEO of video service Vessel, which was acquired and shut down by Verizon (which also owns TechCrunch). And before all that, he spent nearly a decade at Amazon, where his roles include senior vice president of worldwide application software.

The fact that Kilar is taking the lead at all of WarnerMedia, including its film and TV divisions, suggests that streaming is going to the company’s biggest priority moving forward.

“Jason is a dynamic executive with the right skill set to lead WarnerMedia into the future,” Stankey said in the announcement. “His experience in media and entertainment, direct-to-consumer video streaming and advertising is the perfect fit for WarnerMedia, and I am excited to have him lead the next chapter of WarnerMedia’s storied success.”

There have been some signs of tension between Stankey and other WarnerMedia executives, include reports of an awkward town hall meeting at the HBO after AT&T acquired what was then known as Time Warner. Then there was the departure of HBO CEO Richard Pleper, who subsequently signed an exclusive production deal with Apple TV.

HBO Max — which will include HBO itself, along with a broader library of Warner Bros. films, original content aimed at younger viewers and more — is likely to face additional challenges. Although it builds on HBO’s success with HBO Now, WarnerMedia’s big bet is coming relatively late to the streaming wars. And at $14.99 per month, it has a higher price tag than most other services.

Analyst Matthew Ball suggested that with WarnerMedia planning to eventually launch a lower-priced, ad-supported version of HBO Max, this could be the end of the company’s traditional pay TV model:

AT&T, meanwhile, is essentially raiding all of TBS, TNT, and TruTV’s most promising original series as HBO Max exclusives, plus it’s taking exclusive digital rights these networks’ most valuable reruns (e.g. Impractical Jokers). Some shows are still premiering on these linear networks — at least for now — such as the upcoming Snowpiercer TV series (which will be TNT’s most expensive show ever). However, these are expected to “re-premiere” shortly thereafter on HBO Max, potentially as early as the next day (which essentially makes them HBO Max Originals). …

And by the time HBO Max launches a low-cost AVOD service in 2021, it’ll be unclear why anyone would pay to access any of WarnerMedia’s content via linear and ad-heavy Pay-TV channels.

 

Maurice Werdegar is the longtime CEO of venture debt shop Western Technology Investment, one of the most active venture debt lenders in the U.S.

It’s also one of the older firms, having loaned out money for roughly 40 years to startups that needed to achieve certain milestones, reach profitability or wanted additional runway and didn’t necessarily want to raise a new round (especially if that next round might be at a lower valuation).

It’s a needed service and a boon for startups in good times. But when the market turns, debt can prove much trickier.

Indeed, though Werdergar understands founders well — he was once the CEO of a venture-backed restaurant chain that did really well, until they didn’t — he also has to make certain that when the market shifts, things don’t go south for WTI, as well. That can mean long, hard conversations with founders who need to renegotiate their debt payments.

Because COVID-19 is wreaking widespread economic havoc, we talked with Werdegar last week to learn what’s happening in his world and what WTI can do for clients who are now in a bind. Our chat has been edited for length.

TechCrunch: There are other venture debt players out there. How do you differ from your competitors?

Maurice Werdegar: One is we’re not publicly traded; we’re a private BDC [business development company], so we get our money from institutional investors, university endowments, nonprofits, sovereign wealth funds and groups like that. We’re a team that’s comprised primarily of former entrepreneurs; all of us have started and run our own businesses and work closely in the entrepreneurial environments. And we don’t use financial covenants, nor do we use subjective defaults.

An undertaking that involved combining massive amounts of graphics processing power could provide key leverage for researchers looking to develop potential cures and treatments for the novel coronavirus behind the current global pandemic. Immunotherapy startup ImmunityBio is working with Microsoft’s Azure to deliver a combined 24 petaflops of GPU computing capability for the purposes of modelling, in a very high degree of detail, the structure o the so-called “spike protein” that allows the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 to enter human cells.

This new partnership means that they were able to produce a model of the spike protein within just days, instead of the months it would’ve taken previously. That time savings means that the model can get in the virtual hands of researchers and scientists working on potential vaccines and treatments even faster, and that they’ll be able to gear their work towards a detailed replication of the very protein they’re trying to prevent from attaching to the human ACE-2 proteins’ receptor, which is what sets up the viral infection process to begin with.

The main way that scientists working on treatments look to prevent or minimize the spread of the virus within the body is to block the attachment of the virus to these proteins, and the simplest way to do that is to ensure that the spike protein can’t connect with the receptor it targets. Naturally-occurring antibodies in patients who have recovered from the novel coronavirus do exactly that, and the vaccines under development are focused on doing the same thing pre-emptively, while many treatments are looking at lessening the ability of the virus to latch on to new cells as it replicates within the body.

In practical terms, the partnership between the two companies included a complement of 1,250 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs designed for use in machine learning applications from a Microsoft Azure cluster, working with ImmunityBio’s existing 320 GPU cluster that is tuned specifically to molecular modeling work. The results of the collaboration will now be made available to researchers working on COVID-19 mitigation and prevention therapies, in the hopes that they will enable them to work more quickly and effectively towards a solution.

After months of regulatory maneuverings, T-Mobile and Sprint officially completed their $26 billion merger today. The new combined parent company is called T-Mobile and will now trade on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol TMUS with Sprint no longer trading on the NYSE.

For consumers, it will seemingly take a little time before the effects of the transition are meaningfully felt. T-Mobile did not comment on the future of the Sprint brand in today’s announcement, but they have previously promised that subscribers will have access to “the same or better rate plans” for three years as part of the deal.

Alongside news of the merger being finalized, T-Mobile shared that its CEO transition is taking place early. John Legere was supposed to stay on until the end of April, but Mike Sievert has been appointed CEO a month early, effective immediately. Sievert was previously T-Mobile’s COO.

Legere has led T-Mobile since 2012, mounting a turnaround at the company framing the service as a low-cost alternative to the duopoly of AT&T and Verizon. (Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media, but this does not affect our coverage in the slightest.) The company’s years-long “Un-carrier” marketing push often featured Legere and his antics prominently.

Legere is still on the company’s Board of Directors, but he’ll be stepping down at the end of his term through June.

DoorDash announced today it’s expanding beyond food to also deliver from convenience stores, like 7-Eleven, Wawa, CircleK, Casey’s General Store and others. The service is partnering with over 1,800 convenience store locations across the U.S., in order to provide easy access to household essentials like toilet paper, cleaning supplies, over-the-counter medicine, as well as hot and cold foods, drinks, snacks and more.

The expansion comes at a time when customers are staying home due to the COVID-19 outbreak, which has driven grocery delivery apps to record usage. But it doesn’t make financial sense to place a grocery delivery order with its built-in fees and limited time slots when you only need a few household items. That’s sent consumers out to convenience stores, which are considered essential businesses even during lockdown orders from local governments.

But unfortunately, that means consumers are risking exposing themselves to COVID-19, just because they needed a roll of toilet paper, for example.

For less urgent household needs, consumers have been placing Amazon orders. In fact, they sent so many orders that Amazon even had to temporarily close its household goods delivery service, Amazon Pantry,  as it cratered under increased order volumes.

 

DoorDash says it began to test convenience store delivery earlier this year but has accelerated the launch in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, when options for pickup and delivery services have become vital.

 

 

At launch, the new Convenience category will appear in a banner at the top of the DoorDash app. You can then add items to your cart as usual. The order will be delivered to your doorstep through a non-contact, drop-off option or they can be picked up, depending on availability.

“Local businesses have been forced to change how they operate, and through this effort we hope to support and empower franchise owners and local convenience stores to reach customers through the DoorDash platform,” notes a company blog post authored by Mike Goldblatt, DoorDash’s Head of Grocery Partnerships, and Fuad Hannon, Head of New Business Verticals.

The company plans to add more convenience stores to the app on a daily basis, as the category expands. So if you don’t see any options today, you may soon.

 

Cloud hosting company Scaleway has launched Kubernetes Kapsule, a new service that lets you manage Kubernetes clusters on Scaleway’s infrastructure. The service works with a wide-range of Scaleway instances and lets you create large clusters that scales depending on demand.

Kubernetes is an open-source platform to manage containers and the server infrastructure behind those containers. Building an application using containers lets you divide your application into multiple applications and services that you can deploy and upgrade individually without interacting with the main operating system of the server.

And thanks to Kubernetes, you can spin up more nodes (more servers) and containers to scale your infrastructure. This way, you always have enough resources to handle peaks. It can also scale down your cluster to save money.

Scaleway’s managed Kubernetes service is free of charge, which means you only have to pay for nodes that you use. Scaleway scales your cluster, checks that your nodes are working as expected every 15 minutes and gives you a web dashboard to monitor your cluster.

The company also says that there’s some redundancy for the control plane so that it remains available if your control plane fails (99.95% SLA). It supports 500 nodes at a time.

Kapsule supports Scaleway’s cloud instances, GPU-based instances, block storage and load balancers. The company also provides a container registry to store your container images. You could imagine building a cluster that looks like this:

Kapsule respects the Cloud Native Computing Foundation standards, which means that you can migrate existing CNCF clusters to Scaleway, or you could build a multi-cloud infrastructure.

A managed Kubernetes service could help Scaleway attract more enterprise and large-scale clients. It could be particularly useful for clients looking for another cloud hosting provider to add some redundancy.

Philter Labs aims to reduce the stigma associated with vaping tobacco and cannabis. The company’s product is simple enough: it’s a portable filter that, to my surprise, eliminates nearly all secondhand smoke and vapor.

The company today is announcing an additional $1 million in funding from a private equity firm that invests in the cannabis industry. This round brings the San Diego-based company’s total funding to $3 million had previously raised from Bravos Capital and Explorer Equity Group.

“PHILTER’s mission is to empower responsible adults with the choice to keep the air clean for those around them by filtering their emissions while still protecting a person’s right to vape,” said Philter Labs CEO Christos Nicolaidis. “This new funding allows us to continue to leverage science and our patented technology to eliminate secondhand smoke, reduce waste, and live out our mission to help lead a cultural shift for cleaner air and a better environment.”

The product works as advertised. Take a drag on a vape or joint or cigarette and exhale through the filter. The little filter then grabs all the particulate and, I guess, stores the bad stuff, leaving very little exiting the other side of the filter. Even the most considerable clouds of vapor disappear.

I tried both of the company’s current products, the Phlip ($30) and Pocket ($15). Both use the same filter. The difference is use. The Phlip is designed to put a filter alongside a vape pen. A silicon band ties the filter to most small vapes — it works fine with my Pax Era. This way, with the Phlip, the idea is a person inhales from one end and exhales through the other.

Does it eliminate all the smell and vapor? No, not totally, but the device makes a dramatic reduction.

There are similar products on the market. Smoke Buddy is a longtime favorite of mine, and these work in a similar fashion but have a more pocketable design. I’m more likely to carry this filter because it fits in a pocket without an issue.

There are no buttons to press or batteries to charge. The device is passive, and Philter Labs says each filter will last about 200 exhales. The company has filed half a dozen patents with three recently being approved for upcoming products.

Our Mission is to inspire a change in the habits that are already out there,” John Grimm, Co-inventor and CTO said. “We want to reduce emissions, not only to society but to the environment, and change smoking and vaping.”

Grimm explained that it’s more than reducing the harm. To him, it’s also about reducing the stigma that’s associated with smoking and vaping.

The system uses a propriety filtering process that breaks down the emissions at a molecular level through a five-step filtration process. The company says its technology captures and dissolves the particulates, pollutants, and VOCs, which results in clean air exiting the filter.

I asked Grimm if the company has published a white paper on their findings. They have not, though, he pointed out that Philter Labs founded a scientific advisory board (SSAB) that includes toxicologists formally from big tobacco, along with former executives from Dosist, Curaleaf, and Juul.

The spread of COVID-19 has already had a significant impact on the mobile app industry and that will continue in the years to come. According to a revised 2020-2024 market forecast from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower, a sizable increase in app downloads for industries like remote work and education will lead to a large surge in app installs for the early part of 2020 and beyond, despite other decreases in downloads for ride-sharing and fast food apps. However, the expected economic downturn resulting from COVID-19 will somewhat dampen revenue growth in the years ahead, the report found. Despite this, mobile app spending worldwide will continue to grow and will even double by 2024.

COVID-19’s impact on app stores’ revenue

Though COVID-19 is having an impact on the app stores’ revenue, growth remains strong.

Worldwide consumer spending in mobile apps is projected to reach $171 billion by 2024, which is more than double the $85 billion from 2019. This total, however, is about $3 billion (or 2%) less than the forecast the firm had released prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Still, it’s notable that even the slowest-growing regions on both app stores, Apple’s App Store and Google Play, will see revenue that’s over 80% higher than their 2019 levels by the year 2024.

The app stores will also hit several milestones during the next five years.

For starters, global spending in mobile apps will surpass $100 billion for the first time in 2020, growing at approximately 20% year-over-year to hit $102 billion.

Remarkably, the forecast also predicts that revenue from non-game mobile apps is expected to surpass that of mobile games for the first time by 2024, driven by the growth in subscriptions — particularly Entertainment, Social Networking, Music, and Lifestyle app subscriptions.

By this time, mobile games will reach $97.8 billion, or around 41% of total consumer spending. The App Store will account for a sizable chunk of that spending, with ~$57 billion in mobile game revenue in 2024 vs. Google Play’s ~$41 billion.

The App Store, not as surprisingly, will also maintain its sizable lead in consumer spending through 2024, accounting for 67% of total revenue across both it and Google Play. It will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.8% compared with Google Play’s 13.2%.

The top 5 countries by revenue will remain unchanged through 2024: China, U.S., Japan, Great Britain, and Taiwan. China will continue to be a top market, despite regulations on app and game publishing, and will reach $35 billion in App Store spending alone by 2024.

COVID-19’s impact on downloads

In terms of app downloads, the forecast predicts a lasting lift from the impacts of COVID-19.

By 2024, downloads will reach 183.7 billion, up 9% from the earlier forecast that came out before COVID-19 that had initially accounted for 7 billion fewer installs.

Much of this download growth is happening this year, when first-time app downloads are poised to reach 140.3 billion, up 22% from 2019.

In addition to increases in non-game apps — like education, grocery delivery, or remote work apps — mobile game downloads will grow 30% year-over-year in 2020 to reach 56.2 billion, compared with 10.4% growth between 2018 and 2019.

By 2024, mobile games will account for 41% of new installs, or 74.8 billion.

The early indication is that China will see a massive increase in downloads in 2020, particularly in Games and Education categories. This follows a drop in downloads over the past few years, due to government regulatory practices, like the games licensing freeze.

The U.S. will see a similar spike in downloads this year, also due to COVID-19. For 2020, this will lead to a 27% year-over-year increase in downloads. But by 2021 and in the years that follow, growth will settle around 7% annually from 2021 to 2024 in this market.

During the forecast time frame, download growth will slow in India and Brazil, as the markets become more saturated, while growing in Latin America (up 58%) and Asian markets outside of China (up 82%).

Another notable milestone may take place in 2022, when the U.S. pulls ahead of China in terms of App Store downloads to reach number one. The U.S. has been narrowing the gap between the two in recent years, from 3.5 billion in 2017 to 1.1 billion in 2019. It will continue to close the gap during parts of 2020 and 2021, as well.

Other top countries for downloads in 2024, besides the U.S. and China, include Japan, Great Britain, and Russia.