Author: azeeadmin

Apple unveiled macOS 11 Big Sur earlier this week and talked about some of the improvements for Safari. In addition to native extensions, Apple is adding support for web extensions. It’s going to make it much easier to port an existing extension from Chrome, Firefox or Edge.

The company shared more details about how it’s going to work in a WWDC session. Safari already supports extensions, but if you’re using Safari, you know that there aren’t a ton of extensions out there.

On iOS and macOS, you can install content blockers and apps that feature a share extension. Content blockers let you provide a list of content to block when you load web pages, such as trackers and ads.

Share extensions let you add features in the share menu in Safari. For instance, Pocket or Instapaper take advantage of share extensions to run JavaScript on a web page and return the result to the app.

On macOS, developers can also take advantage of app extensions. 1Password uses that to integrate its password manager with Safari.

“These are great if you’re a native app developer already familiar with Swift or Objective-C,” Safari engineer Ellie Epskamp-Hunt said.

Other browsers have taken a different approach. They leverage web technologies, such as JavaScript, HTML and CSS. That’s why Apple is adding another type of extension with Safari Web Extensions.

Like other Safari extensions, web extensions designed for Safari are packaged with native apps. It means that developers will submit extensions to the App Store. Users will download an app that comes with an extension. The app doesn’t have to do anything, it can just be a place holder.

Apple is shipping an extension converter to let you port your extension quickly. When you run it, it’ll tell you if everything is going to work as expected. You can then package it in an Xcode project, sign it and submit it to the App Store.

Some extensions require a ton of permissions. They can essentially view all web pages you visit. That’s why Apple lets you restrict extensions to some websites, or just the active tab. You can also choose to activate an extension for a day so that it doesn’t remain active forever.

The user will get a warning sign the first time an extension tries to access a site and there will be a big warning banner in Safari settings before you activate an extension that can access all your browsing data.

This change could potentially mean that there will be a lot more extensions for Safari in the future. Many Chrome users don’t want to leave Chrome because they can’t find the same extensions. If developers choose to port their extensions to Safari, Apple could convince more users to switch to Safari.

Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID have made it easier for users to log into their mobile devices like iPhones and iPads and on some Macs offering the Touch ID button. Now Apple is bringing Face ID and Touch ID to the web. At the company’s virtual Worldwide Developers Conference this week, Apple introduced a way for web developers to add support for Face ID and Touch ID to their websites, allowing Safari users to log in without having to enter their username and password.

In a WWDC session aimed at web developers, the company showed off the new functionality which Apple touted would provide a “frictionless experience” for users.

Similar to how Face ID and Touch ID work today in iOS apps, web developers who choose to implement the new technology could prompt their users to choose a biometric authentication method the next time they visit their website.

The technology was built via the Web Authentication (WebAuthn) API which allows developers to build authentication via the FIDO2 specification, developed by the FIDO Alliance. It will be made available starting with Safari 14 for macOS and iOS, the organization said.

As CNET explains, Apple isn’t the first to use the browser technology — it’s already available in Firefox, Chrome and Microsoft Edge, for example.

Apple’s adoption, however, could push forward the larger biometrics movement. This in part, is due to Apple’s way of making complicated technology consumer-friendly and taking on the work of user education. Apple also has a sizable community of developers who get excited to roll out Apple’s latest technology.

The new system will be, by default, multi-factor in nature.

Apple’s platform authenticator uses the secure enclave of the iPhone or iPad to provide the private keys, and guarantees they can’t leave the device. It also verifies the user by either their fingerprint or facial recognition. That makes it multi-factor, as it combines something you have — the iPhone — with something you are — your biometrics information.

A report by Biometric Update also noted the WWDC session revealed Apple built its own attestation service, which is an optional service for those with higher security needs — like a bank. Because this technology can sometimes be used to violate privacy, Apple built its own version where it generates a unique attestation certificate for each credential. This prevents websites from tracking users across the web. This service isn’t immediately available, but will be soon.

Apple joined the FiDO Alliance earlier this year, signaling its intention to work towards a way to replace passwords with trusted devices and biometrics. It has also patented a way to use Face ID on a Mac, but this hasn’t launched.

Google announced today that it’s working on a “new news experience” that will launch later this year, for which it will pay publishers to license their content.

Axios broke the news, with Google’s Brad Bender offering more details in a blog post, in which he said the project will first launch on Google News and Discover, and will “help participating publishers monetize their content through an enhanced storytelling experience that lets people go deeper into more complex stories, stay informed and be exposed to a world of different issues and interests.”

The extent to which the large internet platforms generally — and Google specifically — pay publishers has often been a contentious topic. Both Facebook and Google have bankrolled sizable news initiatives that combine directing funding for journalism with new products, research and partnerships. However, some publishers and regulators have also pressed Google to pay for including snippets of news content in search results.

“While we’ve previously funded high-quality content, this program is a significant step forward in how we will support the creation of this kind of journalism,” Bender said. “To start, we have signed partnerships with local and national publications in Germany, Australia and Brazil.”

The blog post mentions Germany’s Spiegel Group, Australia’s InQueensland and InDaily and Brazil’s Diarios Associados as some of the participating publishers. Apparently Google is also offering to pay publishers to provide free access to otherwise paywalled content.

“We are always keen to explore innovative ways to attract readers to our high-quality content,” says Spiegel Group Managing Director Stefan Ottlitz in a statement. “This interesting new partnership with Google will allow us to curate an experience that will bring our award-winning editorial voice into play, broaden our outreach and provide trusted news in a compelling way across Google products.”

Facebook announced Thursday that it would introduce a notification screen warning users if they try to share content that’s more than 90 days old. They’ll be given the choice to “go back” or to click through if they’d still like to share the story knowing that it isn’t fresh.

Facebook acknowledged that old stories shared out of their original context play a role in spreading misinformation, a fact that the social media company said “news publishers in particular” have expressed concern about old stories being recirculated as though they’re breaking news.

“Over the past several months, our internal research found that the timeliness of an article is an important piece of context that helps people decide what to read, trust and share,” Facebook Vice President of Feed and Stories John Hegeman wrote on the company’s blog.

Image via Facebook

The notification screen is an outgrowth of other kinds of notifications the company has experimented with recently. Last year, Instagram introduced a pop-up notification to discourage its users from sharing offensive or abusive comments with a similar set of options, allowing them to click through or go back. The company said that its initial results with the experiment showed promise in shaping users toward better behavior.

In a blog post announcing the new feature, Facebook said that it is now considering other kinds of notification screens to reduce misinformation, including pop-ups for posts about COVID-19 that would provide context about source links and steer users toward public health resources.

As the IPO market heats up, one offering slipped beneath our radar. This morning, then, we’ll catch up on Accolade’s initial public offering and what its proposed pricing may tell us about the state of the IPO market.

The Exchange is a daily look at startups and the private markets for Extra Crunch subscribers; use code EXCHANGE to get full access and take 25% off your subscription.

Catching everyone back up, Accolade sells its service to employers who in turn offer it to their employees; the company’s tech provides a portal for individuals to “better understand, navigate and utilize the health care system and their workplace benefits,” Accolade states in its S-1 filings.

The firm goes on to point out that the U.S. health care system is complex, which puts “significant strain on consumers.” Correct. Its solution? To help “consumers make better, data-driven health care and benefits-related decisions” through its service by selling a “platform to support and influence consumer decision-making that is built on a foundation of mission-driven people and purpose-built technology.”

Yeah.

Regardless of that verbiage, Accolade’s business has proven sufficiently attractive to allow the firm to file to go public in late February, around when Procore filed. Both companies delayed their offerings, but Procore raised more private capital, a $150 million round that values it at around $5 billion. Accolade, to our knowledge, did not raise more funds. So, its IPO is back on and today we have its pricing interval.

Let’s unpack its pricing range, write some notes on its recent financial results and try to figure out how ambitious Accolade is being in terms of its expected valuation as it counts down to trading publicly.

Accolade’s S-1/A

According to Accolade’s June 24th S-1/A, the company expects a $19 to $21 per-share IPO price range. The company intends to sell 8.75 million shares in its debut, not counting a 1,312,500 share greenshoe option offered to its underwriters. Discounting the extra shares, Accolade would raise between $166.3 million to $183.8 million in its debut; inclusive of greenshoe shares, the total fundraise grows to a range of $191.2 million to $211.3 million.

Homebuilding is not for the faint of heart, particularly those who want to build something custom. Selecting the right architect and designer, the myriad of contractors, the complexity of building codes and siting, the regulatory approvals from local authorities. It’s a full-time job — and you don’t even have a roof built over your head.

Atmos wants to massively simplify homebuilding, and in the process, democratize customization to more and more homeowners.

The startup, which is in the current Y Combinator batch, wants to take both the big decisions and the sundries of construction and combine them onto one platform where selecting a design and moving forward is as simple as clicking through a Shopify shopping cart.

It’s a vision that has already piqued the attention of investors. The company disclosed that it has already raised $2 million according to CEO and co-founder Nick Donahue from Sam Altman, former YC president and now head of OpenAI, and Adam Nash, former president and CEO of Wealthfront, along with a bunch of other angels.

It’s also a vision that is a radical turn from where Atmos was before, which was centered in virtual reality.

Donahue comes from a line of homebuilders — his father built home subdivisions as a profession — but his interests initially turned toward the virtual. He dropped out of college after realizing process engineering wasn’t all that exciting (who can blame him?) and headed out to the Valley, where he built projects like “a Burning Man art installation and [an] open-source VR headset.” That headset attracted the attention of angels, who funded its development.

The concept at the heart of the headset was around what the team dubbed the “spatial web.” Donahue explained that the idea was that “the concept of the web would one day flow from the 2D into the 3D and that physical spaces would function more like websites.” The headset he was developing would act as a sort of “browser” to navigate these spaces.

Of course, the limitations around VR hit his company as much as the rest of the industry, including limits on computation performance to build these 3D environments and the lack of scaling in the sector so far.

The thinking around changing physical spaces though got Donahue pondering about what the future of the home would look like. “We think the next kind of wave of this is going to be an introduction to compute,” he said, arguing that “every home will have like a brain to it.” Homes will be digital, controllable, and customizable, and that will revolutionize the definition of the home that has remained stagnant for generations.

The big vision for Atmos going forward then is to capture that trend, but for today at least, the company is focused on making housing customization easier.

To use the platform, a user inputs the location for a new home and a floorplan for the site, and Atmos will find builders that best match the plan and coordinate the rest of the tasks to get the home built. It’s targeting homes in the $400,000-800,000 range, and its focus cities are Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Atlanta, Denver, and Austin.

It’s very much early stages for the company — Donahue says that the company has its first few projects underway in the Raleigh-Durham area and is working to partner and scale up with larger homebuilders.

Photo by KentWeakley via Getty Images.

Will it work? That’s the big question with anything that touches construction. Customization is great — everyone loves to have their own pad — but the traditional challenge for construction is that the only way to bring down the cost of housing is to make it as uniform as possible. That’s why you get “cookie-cutter” subdivisions and rows of identical apartment buildings — the sameness allows a builder to find scale: work crews can move from one lot to the next in synchronicity saving labor costs and time while building materials can be bought in bulk to save costs.

With better technology and some controls, Atmos might be able to find synergies between its customers, particularly if it gets market penetration in individual cities. Yet, I find the longer-term vision ultimately more compelling for the company: redefining the home may not have made much sense three months ago, but as more people work from home and connect with virtual worlds, how should our homes be redesigned to accommodate these activities? If Atmos can find an answer, it is sitting on a gold mine.

Atmos team pic (minus two). Photo via Atmos.

In addition to Altman and Nash, Mark Goldberg, JLL Spark, Shrug Capital, Daniel Gross’ Pioneer, Venture Hacks, Yuri Sagalov, Brian Norgard and others participated in the company’s angel/seed round.

Back in 2013, Robin McGraw, wife of U.S. television personality Dr. Phil, launched an app to help domestic violence victims covertly signal for distress. It was quickly heralded as a potential lifesaver for those in harm’s way.

Aspire News, which claims over 300,000 downloads, is disguised to look like an innocuous news reading app that domestic violence victims can use to alert friends and family to abuse or danger. When a victim taps the top bar of the app three times, the app can alert trusted contacts with a prewritten message, a prerecorded voice note, and the victim’s precise location by text message to indicate that they need help or are in danger.

But a security lapse meant that those uploaded voice recordings were left exposed on an unprotected cloud server for anyone to access.

Security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar found the exposed recordings and reported the incident. The database was pulled offline shortly after. Rotem and Locar shared their findings exclusively with TechCrunch.

The cloud server contained over 4,000 recordings, dating back to September 2017. The recordings varied in length and nature, but some contained personally identifiable information, such as their name, address and phone number, information which could be relayed to the emergency services.

At least one recording we listened to explicitly stated the name of the victim’s abuser.

Given the sensitivity of the data, we did not reach out to app users for fear that it would compromise their safety.

Instead, we confirmed that the data belonged to Aspire by downloading the app and recording a short voice snippet in the app. When we triggered the alert, we received a text message with a web address to the recording file stored on the cloud server. That means anyone who received a similar link to a recording file could have easily found other recordings simply by shortening the full link.

We asked the foundation run by the McGraws, When Georgia Smiled, how long the cloud server was exposed and if it had plans to inform users of the security lapse, but a representative for the foundation did not comment.

A spokesperson for CBS, which airs Dr. Phil, did not respond to a request for comment.

If you or someone you know needs help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) provides 24/7 free, confidential support to victims of domestic abuse and violence. If you are in an emergency situation, call 911.

Even before the pandemic pushed most employees to work from home, sales people often worked outside of the office. Salesforce introduced a new tool today at the Trailheadx Conference called Salesforce Anywhere that’s designed to let teams collaborate and share data wherever they happen to be.

Salesforce VP of product, Michael Machado says that the company began thinking about the themes of working from anywhere pre-COVID. “We were really thinking across the board what a mobile experience would be for the end users that’s extremely opinionated, really focuses on the jobs to be done and is optimized for what workers need and how that user experience can be transformed,” Machado explained.

As the pandemic took hold and the company saw how important collaboration was becoming in a digital context, the idea of an app like this took on a new sense of urgency. “When COVID happened, it really added fuel to the fire as we looked around the market and saw that this is a huge need with our customers going through a major transformation, and we wanted to be there to support them in Salesforce with kind of a native experience,” he said.

The idea is to move beyond the database and help surface the information that matters most to individual sales people based on their pipelines. “So we’re going to provide real time alerts so users are able to subscribe to their own alerts that they want to be notified about, whether it’s based on a list they use or a report that they work off of [in Salesforce], but also at the granularity of a single field in Salesforce,” he said.

Employees can then share information across a team, and have chats related to that information. While there are other chat tools out there, Machado says that this tool is focused on sharing Salesforce data, rather than being general purpose like Slack or other business chat tool.

Image Credit: Salesforce

Salesforce sees this as another way to remove the complexity of working in CRM. It’s not a secret that sales people don’t love entering customer information into CRM tools, so the company is attempting to leverage that information to make it worth their while. If the tool isn’t creating a layer of work just for record keeping’s sake, but actually taking advantage of that information to give the sales person key information about his or her pipeline when it matters most, that makes the record keeping piece more attractive. Being able to share and communicate around that information is another advantage.

This also creates a new collaboration layer that is increasingly essential with workers spread out and working from home. Even when we return to some semblance of normal, sales people on the road can use Anywhere to collaborate, communicate and stay on top of their tasks.

The new tool will be available in Beta in July. The company expects to make it generally available some time in the fourth quarter this year.

In the first few minutes of pitching his new company, Candidate Labs, Jonathan Downey admitted that he’s operating in a market that is “done to death”: recruitment technology. But Downey, whose previous startup Airware shut down after burning $118 million, remains optimistic because of a little company named Zoom.

“There were lots and lots of videoconferencing companies and yet everybody’s experience was really bad,” he said. “It just took [Zoom] coming along and getting just a few more things right that totally transformed” videoconferencing.

Zoom lesson in mind, Candidate Labs launched today as a modern talent agency, after operating in stealth for the past seven months. The company also announced today that it has raised $5 million in seed funding. Investors in the round include SignalFire, Leah Solivan of Fuel Capital, BoxGroup, Lattice CEO Jack Altman and the founders of Opendoor, Eric Wu and Ian Wong.

Candidate Labs connects a data platform with 100 million professionals to its database of 60,000 jobs. Then it creates short lists of talent recommendations that clients can then screen and interview.

Jonathan Downey, CEO and co-founder of Candidate Labs (Image Credits: Candidate Labs)

Its competitive edge is not in its access to data, but rather the technology it lays atop it. Downey said that Candidate Labs uses “human in the loop” machine learning, similar to Stitch Fix, which combines data and human judgement to better recommend style guides.

Candidate Labs leverages a big data set to get a product that is quality, not quantity. Using machine learning, Candidate Labs might extract a 25-person candidate list to help companies fill a singular role. Then a seasoned recruiter will look over the list to see the quality of the candidates, pull in personal judgement and create a final list. Once a client sees the list, Candidate Labs will see who it chooses to interview and then digest that feedback. Over time, humans and machines will get better at recommendations.

In an industry like recruitment, which has a lot of messy and unstructured data, human in the loop machine learning makes sense. There needs to be a two-pronged approach to hiring people, one that speeds up the bits that are purely logistical, but gives room for humans to make a correction if needed.

Candidate Labs’ big sell is that it connects sales and marketing professionals to jobs at a fraction of the time of normal recruitment tools. In over half of cases to date, Candidate Labs has introduced employers to candidates that are eventually hired within seven days. More than 50% of the talent it has placed has been diverse talent, according to Downey.

Leah Solivan, a general partner of Fuel Capital, invested in Candidate Labs in mid-2019 and said Candidate Labs’ launch compass is at a “critical inflection point for talent within the startup ecosystem.”

“During the best of times, candidates tend to rely largely on limited insights and a handful of network referrals to make a critical life decision with long-term consequences,” she said. “Their next role.”

Downey is a customer of his COO and co-founder, Michael Zhang, who founded custom menswear service Trumaker .

“Candidate Labs is a recruiting firm that we wish we had been able to work with in building our own companies,” Downey said.

Along with the financing, Candidate Labs is announcing a job search tool. Sales and marketing professionals, among the most impacted by pandemic-related job losses, can use search filters to look for job openings. In early April, a ton of new tools were launched to help support those without jobs secure their next gig.

According to Downey, the tool will help Candidate Labs work directly with people within what is now a saturated job market.

Restaurants, hotels and other public venues where we spend leisure and business time have started to reopen in many parts of the world after a period of going dark to try to slow down the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Now, a startup called SevenRooms, which builds software to help those venues with their guest management is announcing a growth round of $50 million — to double down on providing tools for venues that now have to handle a whole new layer of management to implement social distancing and more.

The funding, a Series B, is coming from a single investor, Providence Strategic Growth, the company tells me. SevenRooms has some notable backers on its cap table already: Amazon (who invested via its Alexa Fund and directly), Comcast (via Comcast Ventures) and BoxGroup, along with a number of individuals.

The company has now raised about $75 million in total and it’s not disclosing its valuation, but CEO Joel Montaniel (who co-founded the company with Allison Page, CPO; and Kinesh Patel, CTO) said in an interview that it’s a significant upround. (PitchBook estimates that its previous valuation was a modest $28 million.)

SevenRooms serves restaurants, hotels and other venues, although food service establishments account for about 95% of its business in terms of customers and revenues. Another new opportunity has emerged out of the need for a lot of other in-person venues, like shops, needing to consider how to implement reservations to help with social distancing.

Today, it counts a number of large chains, including 70% of the restaurants along the Las Vegas Strip (because MGM is a customer), among its users. In all some 500 million bookings globally have been made through its software since it was founded in 2011, and other customers include Bloomin’ Brands, Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, Wolfgang Puck, Michael Mina, D&D London, Corbin & King, Jumeirah Group, Black Sheep Restaurants, Zuma, and Topgolf.

Montaniel described the last three months of business as something like a “tale of two cities” — a reference to the Charles Dickens novel, which starts out with the famous line, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

In the context of SevenRooms, that has played out as a big drop in its mainstay business, which was focused around reservations, customer loyalty and other services sold as white label services directly to the venues (or the operators, as Montaniel calls them) who in turn customised them for their customers, and created experiences across multiple platforms, including their own sites and apps, as well as Google Maps.

“It’s been really tough to see the industry go through the pandemic,” he said. “A lot of operators closed doors overnight. It created a lot of challenges for businesses.”

On the other side of the issue, necessity has been the mother of invention for SevenRooms and its customers. The company has built out a new tool for letting its customers take online orders for delivery — something it had been planning to launch later in the year but decided to launch earlier, given the state of things. It’s sold with a licensing fee, with no commission to SevenRooms, and links in with SevenRooms’ marketing and loyalty tools, and it has done well, so much so that Montaniel said it and the longer-term customer relationships it’s building offset the drop in its other business.

“Delivery and pickup grew like crazy,” Montaniel said. And like some of the other “digital transformation” we’ve seen where retailers have accelerated their e-commerce strategies simply to stay in business, he believes that the switches and packages they we were proud to generate tens of thousands per month of savings. 

There are a lot of companies that have built out tools to serve the hospitality industry, and specifically to help with bookings, with some of the bigger names including OpenTable and Yelp. Montaniel believes that SevenRooms stands out because of its focus primarily on its operators, rather than providing a business in being the interface between operators and their customers, and on how it views its role in not just helping perform functions but expanding the wider business, by way of data that it can use to help grow customer loyalty and help people who are regulars feel like it.

There remain a lot of potential competitors who are also sometimes partners. Google, and Google Maps, is perhaps the most obvious, although these days Montaniel says Google Maps and the entry point it gives to discovering restaurants is a great boost to its business.

“Google is a company that every company in the world thinks about and talks about in their strategy sessions,” he said. “But there are others too. Big companies always can be competition: they do so many things so well, and they are a team away and a cash infusion away from competing with you, and those who don’t think they are are rivals are not thinking big enough.”

All the same, there are also two potential allies in SevenRooms’ corner that make this bet a little more interesting.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund is about strategic investments: SevenRooms used the backing to build out an Alexa integration into its white-label tools. But there are other ways in which that connection might potentially develop. The company has dabbled in travel services (including bookings) in the past, via Amazon Destinations, and although that was short-lived, the company continues to serve a number of hospitality and travel businesses via AWS, and frankly you can’t really count Amazon out of any vertical with an online component, which is to say, you can’t really count Amazon out of any vertical at all.

Meanwhile, Comcast has been making a number of investments into the kinds of services that it could potentially resell as part of larger business connectivity packages, which includes a focus on local businesses, spelling out another opportunity for how SevenRooms might expand.

Interestingly, SevenRooms is already close to profitability, and it didn’t need this funding — in contrast to a lot of other startups that have found it hard to make ends meet in these difficult months. Montaniel said that it raised because it had a list of “seven things we wanted to do, and without the extra cash we could only do three of them,” without elaborating on what those product features will be.

It’s a big area, though, and now that so much activity has been cut off for so many of us, we’re only now starting to realise how critical it can be, one reason why investors were interested.

“SevenRooms is a category-defining company that provides a vital solution to hospitality operators worldwide,” said Adam Marcus, Managing Director at PSG. “Joel and the talented SevenRooms management team have built the only vertically-integrated solution in the hospitality industry, which has enabled them to scale into a global powerhouse. SevenRooms is uniquely positioned, and we are excited to partner with the team to support their next phase of growth.”