Author: azeeadmin

Spotify is tapping into the increased usage of video conferencing during the coronavirus quarantine to grow its own podcast business. The company’s podcast creation platform Anchor, acquired for an estimated $140 million in 2019, is today introducing a new feature that will allow podcasters to turn their video chats and virtual hangouts into podcast-ready audio. The video-to-audio conversion tool works with a range of top video chat platforms, including Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, Twitch, and Instagram Live.

It will also support any .mp4 and .mov file you upload to its service.

The process of turning the video into audio is fairly straightforward. After you record the video chat and download the resulting video file, you’ll then upload it to Anchor’s web platform.

The converted file will show up immediately as a segment in Anchor’s episode builder, allowing you to split it, trim it, and add other edits. You can also add in Anchor’s built-in background music, interludes, sound effects and Voice Recordings to your recording, as usual.

Anchor hosts your podcast and offers free distribution to all major podcast platforms, including of course Spotify, as well as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, Breaker, Castbox, and others.

The trickier part to the process is not the video conversion, it’s recording the video file in the first place.

The process for acquiring the video of the group chat will differ depending on which platform you’re using for your video conference. Anchor has directly linked to the relevant Help documentation for a number of the top services in its announcement, but users should be aware that the video export option may require them to have a paid account on the video conferencing service, in some cases.

YouTube, however, does not offer an official way to download its videos into .mp4 or .mov format, but a Google search may point you to some alternative means of acquiring those videos.

Of course, you should to have the rights to use the video in question and the permission of all video chat attendees to use Anchor’s new feature.

The feature arrives at a critical time for the podcasting industry, which has been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic, like so many others. Podcasters can no longer record together in studios, due to social distancing requirements and government lockdowns.

Meanwhile, podcasts had seen weeks of pandemic-driven declines as many listeners’ routines were disrupted by transitions to working from home and home schooling their children. Others faced unemployment or were struggling to save their small business, leaving little time for podcast listening. And almost no one was commuting to work anymore.

This resulted in a decline in podcast listening in the initial weeks of the coronavirus outbreak and home quarantines. But now podcast’s numbers are inching back up, NiemanLab reports, with 4% growth last week in downloads and 2% growth in audience numbers.

In terms of podcast creation, the numbers are different. Spotify saw a sizable increase in podcast creation last month, Anchor told TechCrunch.

In March 2020, the number of new podcasts submitted to Spotify was up 69% month-over-month reaching a total of nearly 150,000 new shows. That made it the largest organic monthly growth in Spotify’s podcast catalog.

The video-to-audio feature is live today to Anchor on the web for all users.

 

Earlier today at the National Assembly, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe gave a lengthy speech about post-lockdown measures in France ahead of a debate with deputies. The government originally planned to discuss France’s contact-tracing app StopCovid. It broadened the subject of the debate to post-lockdown policies a couple of days ago.

But Philippe said that it was too early to discuss the rollout of StopCovid. According to him, as the app is not ready yet, it would be difficult to vet the advantages and risks of a contact-tracing app.

The section of Philippe’s speech on StopCovid wasn’t long, so here’s everything he had to say on contact tracing:

“Could we or should we leverage the extraordinary resources or digital tools in order to be more efficient? A European consortium has laid groundwork that should lead to the creation of the StopCovid app — the app would only be useful in addition to what I already described. It would come in addition to the health investigations that I described. Those investigations, whether they are physical or by phone, are essential but present a flaw.

They are sometimes hampered by the inability to establish transmission chains in urban areas, in the most dense areas and in particular in public transit. It’s hard to notify the person who was in the same metro train at 7:46 on line 12. You don’t know them, they don’t know you and [public transport company] RATP doesn’t know either of them.

That’s the goal of the StopCovid project. It would make it possible to notify people who crossed the path of a positive individual in order to indicate what to do next without, of course, collecting any data on the identity of the person you encountered.

A large number of political leaders, from all parties, including the president of the National Assembly himself, told me about their concern on that type of tools, on the questions that it would inevitably raise when it comes to civil liberties and individual liberties. Those questions, and I already said it before, are justified. They should be asked, they should be debated. I even think that it should lead to a vote.

For now, given the uncertainty around this application, it would be quite difficult for me to tell you if it works and how it works exactly. I have no doubt that engineers will work tirelessly and will deliver on this project.

But, as it is not the case right now, I think that holding a debate would be premature. But I want to reaffirm my pledge. When the application currently in development is working, and before its release, we will hold a debate dedicated to StopCovid followed by a vote.

While it seems like the French government is going back to the drawing board, the Digital Ministry told TechCrunch that it is still going ahead with its controversial ROBERT protocol.

“I can confirm that French authorities only work on a solution that avoids the circulation of a list (even encrypted) of Covid+ people as in the Robert protocol. The discussions with Germany haven’t stopped to find the best architecture,” a spokesperson for the Digital Ministry told TechCrunch.

Last week, research institutes Inria and Fraunhofer released the specifications of the protocol that the French and German governments planned to use at the time. Named ROBERT, it is a centralized protocol that uses pseudonymization to match contacts on a central server. A national authority manages the central servers.

But you have to trust your government that they’re not doing anything nefarious on their servers without telling you — a centralized design could lead to abuse and even state surveillance.

On Sunday, Germany reversed its stance and abandoned ROBERT altogether. German authorities are now working on a decentralized protocol that leverages smartphones to compute social interactions. Ephemeral IDs are stored on your device and you can accept to share ephemeral IDs with a relay server to send them to the community of app users.

Yesterday, hundreds of French cryptography and security researchers signed a letter to raise awareness about the potential risks of a contact-tracing app. “It is essential to thoroughly analyze the health benefits of a digital solution with specialists — there should be important evidence in order to justify the risks incurred,” the letter said.

The French government is now also betting heavily on health investigators in order to contact everybody who has been tested positive in order to list their social interactions. After that, investigators can contact those other individuals and tell them to get tested as soon as possible.

TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas contributed to this report

Graduation goes virtual, more details emerge about the U.K.’s contact tracing app and Shopify launches a mobile commerce app.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 28, 2020.

1. Facebook will stream a virtual graduation ceremony featuring Oprah and Miley Cyrus

Here’s some consolation for the Class of 2020: a virtual graduation ceremony, which kicks off at 11AM PT/2PM ET on May 15 via the Facebook Watch App. Oprah Winfrey will be giving the commencement address, while Awkwafina, Jennifer Garner, Lil Nas X and Simone Biles will all be giving speeches. And Miley Cyrus is set to perform.

Other sites are holding similar events — and many schools are also planning their own, less star-studded events to celebrate graduations remotely.

2. UK’s coronavirus contact tracing app could ask users to share location data

More details have emerged about a coronavirus contact tracing app being developed by U.K. authorities. NHSX CEO Matthew Gould said today that future versions of the app could ask users to share location data to help authorities learn more about how the virus propagates.

3. Shopify launches Shop, a new mobile app

The app is actually an update and rebrand of Arrive, an app for tracking packages from Shopify merchants and other retailers — in addition to package tracking, Shop allows consumers to browse a feed of recommended products, learn more about each brand and make purchases using the one-click Shop Pay checkout process.

4. Okta hires ex-Symantec executive as new chief security officer

David Bradbury, a security veteran with more than two-decades of security experience and recently served as chief security officer at Symantec, takes over from Yassir Abousselham, who departed for Splunk in February.

5. Five top gaming investors explain how the pandemic is reshaping MMOs and social games

This month, when we asked 17 VCs how this era would impact consumer startups, gaming was one of the top verticals they named. We wanted to learn more about how the venture community thinks about the future of this sector, so we asked five experienced gaming investors about where they do — and don’t — see new opportunities within this trend. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. DJI’s mini Mavic Air gets an upgrade with improved camera and battery life

The original Mavic Air’s 21 minutes of life was among Brian Heater’s key frustrations with the product. The company says the new drone should be able to get up to 34 minutes on a charge.

7. Partech raises $100 million seed fund

The firm is looking for companies at the very early stage, from pre-seed to pre-Series A. Partech can invest as little as a few hundred thousands dollars and as much as several million dollars, depending on the stage of the startup.

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.

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances, along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups.

This week: one step closer to self-powered on-skin electronics; people dressed as car seats; how to make a search engine for 3D data; and a trio of Earth imaging projects that take on three different types of disasters.

Sweat as biofuel

Monitoring vital signs is a crucial part of healthcare and is a big business across fitness, remote medicine and other industries. Unfortunately, powering devices that are low-profile and last a long time requires a bulky battery or frequent charging is a fundamental challenge. Wearables powered by body movement or other bio-derived sources are an area of much research, and this sweat-powered wireless patch is a major advance.

The device, described in Science Robotics, uses perspiration as both fuel and sampling material; sweat contains chemical signals that can indicate stress, medication uptake, and so on, as well as lactic acid, which can be used in power-generating reactions.

The patch performs this work on a flexible substrate and uses the generated power to transmit its data wirelessly. It’s reliable enough that it was used to control a prosthesis, albeit in limited fashion. The market for devices like this will be enormous and this platform demonstrates a new and interesting direction for researchers to take.

Sarah Kunst graduated from college in 2008 and went straight into the luxury marketing world with a job at Chanel.

Then, the stock market collapsed and Kunst was laid off. It was that layoff, Kunst says, that brought her to the world of startups and eventually to founding her own firm, Cleo Capital, to invest in diverse founders.

“Without the recession, I would probably still be at Chanel,” Kunst said. “Cleo wouldn’t exist.”

Silver linings amid a layoff is exactly the thesis of Kunst’s newest effort: a six-week fellowship, called Chrysalis, for anyone who has faced job cuts as a result of COVID-19. Kunst wants to bring together smart people that have been laid off from top companies.

The program will include a speaker series on topics like how to pitch, structure a cap table and plan for a fundraise. Participants will be put into a Slack group to communicate between each other across disciplines, there will be video chat sessions and the program will end with a peer presentation day.

And maybe by the end, the next big recession-born company will be born as a result.

“It’s time to build [but] you’re not giving me tools to build,” Kunst said, referring to famed investor Marc Andressen’s recent blog post. So, she started brainstorming the ways she could keep the scrappy spirit of Silicon Valley alive right now.

She landed on creating a startup program similar to OnDeck, which runs a fellowship for early founders at $1,290 a head. Chrysalis is free, and is tailored to people at an even earlier point in their entrepreneurial journey: the first few weeks are just for idea generation and by the third week team formation. Additionally, Cleo is hunting for both technical and non-technical individuals and you must be unemployed to join.

The Cleo Capital fellowship will cap at 100 people and is only available in the United States for now due to bandwidth constraints, Kunst said.

There are three buckets of people the fellowship is aimed at:

1. People who were at a startup who have been laid off
2. People who were planning to get a job in Q2 and now will not be able to.
3. Soon to graduate MBA students who have had their MBA or internship offers get pulled due to the pandemic.

“They’re on the market; they just aren’t physically on the market,” Kunst said. “You can’t go to a coffee shop and think with friends how to start a company.”

Through private outreach, Kunst claims that a number of people have shown interest, from the chief of staff at a gig economy startup to a VP of engineering at a tech unicorn to 27-year-old designers.

Cleo is also working with SVB, AWS and Clarky to procure free resources for participants.

Last week, NextView Ventures launched an accelerator program for startups as a way to show that they are open for business. Cleo Capital is taking a different approach by launching a free fellowship without equity or any promises for capital. It’s for good reason: Cleo Capital is significantly smaller than NextView with a $3.5 million fund, and it is newer to the investment scene.

Lowering the barrier to entry by making the program free might mean Cleo gets a more diverse bunch, which is a key focus of the firm. Of course, Kunst noted, she hopes some future deal flow comes out of it.

So Cleo’s new initiative isn’t a mimic of NextView or YC or Techstars. Instead, the firm is trying to create a welcoming environment for people before they have an idea, let alone have a need for capital.

“In my own self interest candidly, I need startups to exist,” she said.

A lot of restaurants have shuttered in the wake of stay-at-home guidance and government orders for non-essential businesses to close down, so a startup called Cheetah that provided a wholesale delivery service for them pivoted to selling to consumers, and now it’s raised a round of funding, both to expand its business and to help it stay the course through the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Today, the San Francisco startup is announcing that it has closed a Series B of $36 million led by Eclipse Ventures, with ICONIQ Capital, Hanaco Ventures, and Floodgate Fund also participating. The funding brings the total raised by Cheetah to $66 million, the company said. PitchBook puts its valuation at its last round at $180 million; we’ve asked for the latest figure and will update as and when we hear more.

Cheetah’s pivot comes at a key moment for the company and points to how there seem to be, generally speaking, two very different narratives underpinning the world of startups at the moment.

On one hand, some companies are seeing a huge boost to their business, when their existing business model perfectly addresses a current need. On the other, companies that are hard pressed to fit any current need are feeling the pinch.

Cheetah is an example of how a company in the latter category has used its resources and pivoted to becoming a business in the former.

Its wholesale delivery business for restaurants — which had some 300 customers before COVID-19, has largely (but not completely) dried up. So it’s now set up a new service called Cheetah For Me, where it offers bakery items to beverages, dairy, meat, poultry, seafood, fresh produce, condiments, snacks and cleaning supplies to individuals to buy, and distributes those orders via a selection of pick-up points.

At a time when people are unable to get delivery slots with Amazon or are avoiding physical grocery stores, Cheetah’s offering becomes another choice alongside Instacart and other food delivery services.

“The positive feedback from the community has been overwhelming,” said Na’ama Moran, CEO at Cheetah who cofounded the company with Christopher Elliott, Alon Har-Tal and Vincent Matranga, in a statement.“This funding allows Cheetah to build on our strong foundation and expand essential services directly to the consumer. Now, we can provide even more people with the food and supplies they need in a safe and cost-effective way, throughout this crisis and beyond. Our purpose has always been to help independent restaurants thrive. Now we are helping communities thrive.”

Currently its Cheetah For Me service is live in the Bay Area.

Cheetah is not the only startup that caters to the restaurant trade that is now opening up a new front offering direct-to-consumer sales.

Choco in New York, which helps restaurants source their supplies online to save cooks and buyers time shopping in person, also started a new service targeting consumers. In its case, it’s teaming up with its restaurant customers to resell vegetables, meat and other ingredients.

(Choco doesn’t take a cut itself and says it’s doing this to help the restaurants continue staying in business even when they cannot operate their physical venues and kitchens.)

Choco earlier this month also raised some money: $30.2 million at a $250 million valuation.

Founders have said that’s a challenge right now to raise money, not just because of business slowing down. They cannot see investors in person, and investors themselves are wary and hesitant because they don’t know what the next months will hold.

In that regard, some of the factors are emerging that are critical in sealing the deal. They include showing that the startup is resourceful and useful; and that the startup is based on a good enough idea, executed well, making it worth funding to help it stick around.

It seems that Cheetah ticked all of these boxes.

“This pandemic has shed light on how technology can be used to quickly adapt core services within the food industry like delivery, fulfillment, and supply chains,” said Lior Susan, Founder and Managing Partner at Eclipse, in a statement. “Cheetah’s team has demonstrated agility and ingenuity on behalf of their customers, and the resiliency of building a technology-centric operation. The company’s vertical integration and technology stack have enabled them to accommodate changing buyer behavior as food supply chains shifted from a focus on commercial operations to consumer homes.”

“Cheetah’s existing technology infrastructure has enabled them to quickly expand their offering to new customers,” added Sarah Kim, Head of Private Equity Funds and Co-Investments at ICONIQ Capital, in a separate statement. “Cheetah has demonstrated that it has the vision to uncover new opportunities and the ability to rapidly execute on programs that benefit multiple communities. We look forward to working with this talented team as they pave the way toward a better food supply chain.”

More than 150 investors and entrepreneurs in India are funding dozens of projects in a bid to help millions better combat the COVID-19 epidemic and help the nation’s booming startup ecosystem withstand the economic devastation it has caused.

The investors said they have contributed 1 billion Indian rupees — or $13 million — of their own money to the ACT Grants initiative, which was unveiled late last month.

The group — which includes several prominent industry figures including Nandan Nilekani, Paytm’s Vijay Shekhar Sharma, Flipkart’s Kalyan Krishnamurthy, Oyo’s Ritesh Agarwal, Udaan’s Sujeet Kumar, Freshworks’ Girish Mathrubootham, CRED’s Kunal Shah, and Times Internet’s Miten Sampat — has funded 32 projects to date.

These projects span six themes, including solutions that could help curtail the spread of the Covid-19 disease, development of testing and detection kits, building medical equipment such as ventilators, and taking care of mental health.

The group came together last month when India had just begun to see cases of the coronavirus disease.

“As governments across the globe started to take measures to combat this pandemic, one thing that came up in our conversations with other investors, startup founders, and startup employees was this urgency to not sit and watch what the government does but help and pitch in as an industry,” said Dev Khare, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, in an interview with TechCrunch.

There have been 29,435 known cases of coronavirus in India, according to the Ministry of Health and Welfare. As of Tuesday evening, at least 886 people had died.

Investors from dozens of venture capital and private equity firms including Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Matrix Partners India, Kalaari Capital, Eight Roads Ventures, 3One4Capital, Sequoia Capital India, and Tiger Global have personally participated in the initiative.

VCs in India moved quickly last month to warn startups in the country to be aware of the effect the pandemic might have on their businesses — despite the record $14.5 billion Indian startups raised in the past year.

In a joint letter earlier this month, several prominent tech investment funds told startup founders that they may find it especially challenging to raise fresh capital in the next few months as they enter the “worst period.” (They have also requested the government to provide a relief package.)

Several trade bodies including Nasscom and TIE Global that count American tech giants such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon among their members are also supporting ACT Grants. Amazon’s AWS additionally is helping these projects with infrastructure services.

One of the projects to receive the grant has been developed by Pune-based MyLab, a startup that has emerged as one of the biggest manufacturers of test kits in India.

“They manufactured between 20,000 to 25,000 test kits last year. In the past few weeks, the number has ballooned to 300,000,” said Abhiraj Singh Bhal, co-founder and chief executive of Urban Company, which runs an online marketplace for freelance labor.

“We offered them the grant money, but also our expertise in scaling their operation,” said Bhal. ACT Grants also went to to another six testing projects, he said.

Grants aren’t going solely to testing projects. StepOne, another grant-winning project, has built a cloud infrastructure to handle over 30,000 calls a day and offer telemedicine services to complement helpline numbers run by state governments that are struggling to keep up with high traffic.

And some of the projects that have received grants are developing masks and other items to supply enough protective gears to the healthcare workers. (A full list of the funded projects and the grant amounts they have received is here.)

There are no strings attached to these grants. Funding a project does not give investors any equity in the developer’s startup, said Prashanth Prakash, a partner at Accel in an interview. And there is a large team that screens and selects projects for providing grants, he said. They have received more than 1,500 applications to date.

An investor, who is not part of ACT Grants, said though the initiative is commendable, he believed this group could have made a bigger impact if they chose to help put food in front of hundreds of millions of Indians who don’t know where their next meal would come from. “There are better ways to be resourceful,” he said, requesting anonymity as he did not want to upset the community.

“That said, the fact that all of these people, many of whom aggressively compete for deals, have come together at all and contributed their own money — and not of their LPs — is unprecedented and they deserve all the praise and support,” he said.

The group’s influence and connection in the industry also means that these projects have better odds of seeing deployment at scale. The group is already engaging with various state governments and the federal government to explore ways to work together — and have started to make inroads, said Accel’s Prakash.

But as the projects scale, the group is seeking for more individuals from across the globe to contribute. “Anyone who wants to help India, one sixth of the world’s population, fight Covid-19 is welcome to contribute,” said Lightspeed’s Khare.

There’s even an international component for people outside of India to contribute. ACT Grants has partnered with United Way, a Virginia-based nonprofit that enables people outside of India to make charitable, tax-deductible donations.

The world has been turned upside down the past few weeks, but one lesson of business remains as important as ever: treating your customers well is the best avenue to future business strength, particularly at a moment of extreme stress.

As businesses come to terms with the economic crisis underway, executives are moving resources from customer acquisition to customer retention — and that’s proving very lucrative to startups that service the customer success market.

Case in point: New York City-based Catalyst, which I profiled just last summer following its $15 million Series A led by Accel’s Vas Natarajan, has seen huge revenue growth the past few months. The data-driven customer success platform has seen its revenue grow by 380% since the Series A financing according to CEO Edward Chiu.

Steep revenue growth is (unsurprisingly) attractive to investors, and in a moment of fortuitous timing, the company signed a $25 million Series B term sheet with Spark Capital just as the COVID-19 crisis was getting underway.

Chiu said Catalyst wasn’t seeking the investment, having much of its Accel round still in the bank, but he ultimately decided that having the extra capital in hand through a looming economic recession was the right decision. The capital officially hit the bank account at the end of March, and was led by the firm’s growth investor Will Reed.

While the company didn’t disclose the valuation, a source with knowledge of the matter quoted a valuation of $125 million. That’s a serious valuation for a company that launched just two years ago in April of 2018.

Outside of more funding, the core story of the company’s product remains the same. Catalyst wants to bring together all the data sources and team members who interact with customers — everyone from designers and engineers to customer success managers — into one dashboard to ensure that everyone has accurate and up-to-date access to all the information they need on the health of every customer.

The one airbrush: the company’s previous URL of getcatalyst.io has become catalyst.io, and officially re-launched this morning.

One growth area that the company is exploring outside of the B2B space of its existing customers is in healthcare, where the company has seen some inbound interest. Chiu says that Catalyst is exploring the steps required to reach HIPAA compliance with its platform, and hopes to expand to more sectors over time with the capital from its Series B.

When we last checked in with the company, Catalyst had 19 employees and was targeting 40 employees by July 2020. Chiu said that Catalyst is already at 35 employees, and will likely hit 60 to 70 employees by the end of the year.

With the company growing in leaps and bounds, Zoom went shopping for a cloud infrastructure vendor to help it with its growing scale problem. In a surprising choice, the company went with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Zoom has become the go-to video conferencing service as much of the world has shut down due to the pandemic, and life needs to go on somehow. It has gone on via video conferencing with Zoom growing from 200 million active users in February to 300 million in March. That kind of growth puts a wee bit of pressure on your infrastructure, and Zoom clearly needed to beef up its game.

What’s surprising is that it chose Oracle, a company whose infrastructure market share registers as a strong niche player in Synergy Research’s latest survey in February. It is well behind market leaders including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and even IBM (and that’s saying something).

Brent Leary, who is founder at CRM Essentials, says he sees this as a move to show that Zoom can move beyond the SMB market to power enterprise customers, no matter what they demand.

“I think Zoom went with Oracle because they are proven in the enterprise in terms of mission critical apps built on Oracle databases running on Oracle hardware in the cloud. Zoom needs to prove to enterprises that they are able to handle scale and data security needed to beyond what SMBs typically require,” Leary told TechCrunch.

In addition, Leary speculated that Oracle might have given Zoom a good deal to get a hot company into the fold and beat rivals like Amazon and Microsoft.

Others have speculated that it might have to do with keeping business away from a potential rival given that Amazon with Chime, Google with Hangouts and Microsoft with Teams all have competing products. However, none of them have become synonymous with online meetings as Zoom has during this crisis.

Zoom went public last year and has become the darling of the video conference market since in spite of a set of security issues that have developed as the company scaled, which they have been working to address.

The stock market is apparently not impressed with the choice. As we went to publish, the stock was down 3.38% or $5.56.