Author: azeeadmin

Luis Mario Garcia grew up in Mexico making deliveries for the grocery stores in his neighborhood. After honing his startup skills in San Francisco, he returned to Mexico with the idea of building a software company.

That’s when he met his co-founder Javier Gonzalez and the pair started Orchata in 2020, a mobile app enabling consumers to get groceries delivered in 15 minutes, with no substitutes and at supermarket prices. Products delivered include fresh fruit, beverages, bread, medicine and household essentials, Garcia told TechCrunch.

Orchata does this by operating a network of micro fulfillment centers — it is already operating in two cities — with technology for efficient picking and hyperfast delivery.

Online food delivery sales in Latin America are projected to reach $9.8 billion by 2024, with the global pandemic driving demand for faster delivery, according to Statista. Garcia sees three different waves in this market: the first one being traditional supermarkets, where you can spend hours, which led to the second wave of food delivery companies, including some big players in the region — for example Rappi in Colombia, which in July raised $500 million in Series F funding at a $5.25 billion valuation in a round led by T. Rowe Price, and Cornershop in Chile, which was acquired by Uber in 2019.

However, Garcia said many of these services still take more than an hour from order to doorstep and may require phone calls if an item is not available. He wants to be part of a third wave — software that is integrated with inventory and delivery that is super fast, and no substitutions.

“This is similar to what is going on around the world, but there is a huge opportunity to bring convenience, to be the Gopuff for Latin America, and we want to build it first in the region,” Garcia said.

The Monterrey-based company was part of Y Combinator’s summer 2020 cohort and on Friday announced a $4 million seed round from a group of investors, including Y Combinator, JAM Fund, FJ Labs, Venture Friends, Investo and Foundation Capital, and angel investors Ross Lipson, Mike Hennessey, Brian Requarth and Javier Mata.

Jonathan Lewy, co-founder of Grin Scooters and founder of Investo, is also an investor in Rappi. He said Garcia was building a product for the end user, with the key being the building of the infrastructure and inventory. Lewy believes Garcia understands how quick delivery should be done and that it is not just about offering a mobile app, but building the technology behind it.

Meanwhile, Justin Mateen, general partner at JAM Fund, and co-founder of Tinder and an early-stage investor, met Garcia over a year ago and was one of the company’s first investors. He said Garcia’s and Gonzalez’s initial idea for the model of grocery stores was still not solving the problem, but then they pivoted to doing fulfillment and inventory themselves.

“He fits the mold of what I look for in a founder, and he is the type of founder that doesn’t give up,” Mateen said. “Luis finally agreed to let me double down on my investment. The model makes sense now, he is on to something and it is now going to be about execution of capital as he scales.”

Both Mateen and Lewy agree that there will be similar apps coming because food delivery is such a large market, but that Orchata has a clear advantage of owning the customer experience from beginning to end.

Having only launched four months ago, Orchata is already processing thousands of orders and is seeing 100% monthly growth. The new funding will enable Orchata to expand into three new cities in Mexico. Garcia is also eyeing Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Chile for future expansion.

The company is also targeting multiple use cases, including someone noticing a forgotten item while cooking to consumers shopping for the week or teenagers needing food for a party.

“We are going to be super convenient to customers, and we think every use case for food delivery will be this way in the future,” Garcia said. “We will eventually introduce our own brands and foods with the goal of being that app that is there anytime you need it.”

Houston-based ThirdAI, a company building tools to speed up deep learning technology without the need for specialized hardware like graphics processing units, brought in $6 million in seed funding.

Neotribe Ventures, Cervin Ventures and Firebolt Ventures co-led the investment, which will be used to hire additional employees and invest in computing resources, Anshumali Shrivastava, Third AI co-founder and CEO, told TechCrunch.

Shrivastava, who has a mathematics background, was always interested in artificial intelligence and machine learning, especially rethinking how AI could be developed in a more efficient manner. It was when he was at Rice University that he looked into how to make that work for deep learning. He started ThirdAI in April with some Rice graduate students.

ThirdAI’s technology is designed to be “a smarter approach to deep learning,” using its algorithm and software innovations to make general-purpose central processing units (CPU) faster than graphics processing units for training large neural networks, Shrivastava said. Companies abandoned CPUs years ago in favor of graphics processing units that could more quickly render high-resolution images and video concurrently. The downside is that there is not much memory in graphics processing units, and users often hit a bottleneck while trying to develop AI, he added.

“When we looked at the landscape of deep learning, we saw that much of the technology was from the 1980s, and a majority of the market, some 80%, were using graphics processing units, but were investing in expensive hardware and expensive engineers and then waiting for the magic of AI to happen,” he said.

He and his team looked at how AI was likely to be developed in the future and wanted to create a cost-saving alternative to graphics processing units. Their algorithm, “sub-linear deep learning engine,” instead uses CPUs that don’t require specialized acceleration hardware.

Swaroop “Kittu” Kolluri, founder and managing partner at Neotribe, said this type of technology is still early. Current methods are laborious, expensive and slow, and for example, if a company is running language models that require more memory, it will run into problems, he added.

“That’s where ThirdAI comes in, where you can have your cake and eat it, too,” Kolluri said. “It is also why we wanted to invest. It is not just the computing, but the memory, and ThirdAI will enable anyone to do it, which is going to be a game changer. As technology around deep learning starts to get more sophisticated, there is no limit to what is possible.”

AI is already at a stage where it has the capability to solve some of the hardest problems, like those in healthcare and seismic processing, but he notes there is also a question about climate implications of running AI models.

“Training deep learning models can be more expensive than having five cars in a lifetime,” Shrivastava said. “As we move on to scale AI, we need to think about those.”

Manish Maheshwari, the head of Twitter India, has taken a new role at the company and is relocating to the U.S., the latest in a series of developments for the American social giant after a tense stand off with New Delhi this year.

Maheshwari is moving on from the high-profile position, a role he assumed in April 2019, at a time when he was personally named in police cases in at least two Indian states — Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh — over complaints that Twitter was allegedly hurting sentiments of people in the South Asian market.

The update was shared with Twitter employees on Friday. Maheshwari will be taking on a new role in San Francisco as Senior Director, Revenue Strategy and Operations with focus on New Market Entry and report to Senior Director Deitra Mara, according to an internal email. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the move to TechCrunch.

Twitter has facing heat in India from New Delhi for not blocking some Twitter accounts or deleting tweets that the Indian government deemed objectionable and labeling its officials’ tweets as misleading. The company also briefly lost the safe harbor protection in the country, New Delhi said, after it failed to comply with the nation’s new IT rules, which went into effect in May.

The social network has since complied with the new law that requires, among other things, appointing several executives in the country to address on-ground concerns, a lawyer for the Indian government said in a court earlier this week.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

A group of senators sent new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy a letter Friday pressing the company for more information about how it scans and stores customer palm prints for use in some of its retail stores.

The company rolled out the palm print scanners through a program it calls Amazon One, encouraging people to make contactless payments in its brick and mortar stores without the use of a card. Amazon introduced its Amazon One scanners late last year, and they can now be found in Amazon Go convenience and grocery stores, Amazon Books and Amazon 4-star stores across the U.S. The scanners are also installed in eight Washington state-based Whole Foods locations.

In the new letter, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Jon Ossoff (D-GA) press Jassy for details about how Amazon plans to expand its biometric payment system and if the data collected will help the company target ads.

“Amazon’s expansion of biometric data collection through Amazon One raises serious questions about Amazon’s plans for this data and its respect for user privacy, including about how Amazon may use the data for advertising and tracking purposes,” the senators wrote in the letter, embedded below.

The lawmakers also requested information on how many people have enrolled in Amazon One to date, how Amazon will secure the sensitive data and if the company has ever paired the palm prints with facial recognition data it collects elsewhere.

“In contrast with biometric systems like Apple’s Face ID and Touch ID or Samsung Pass, which store biometric information on a user’s device, Amazon One reportedly uploads biometric information to the cloud, raising unique security risks,” the senators wrote. “… Data security is particularly important when it comes to immutable customer data, like palm prints.”

The company controversially introduced a $10 credit for new users who enroll their palm prints in the program, prompting an outcry from privacy advocates who see it as a cheap tactic to coerce people to hand over sensitive personal data.

There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical. Amazon has faced fierce criticism for its other big biometric data project, the AI facial recognition software known as Rekognition, which the company provided to U.S. law enforcement agencies before eventually backtracking with a moratorium on policing applications for the software last year.

Food delivery apps offer convenience for customers, but a host of headaches for restaurants, like commissions as high as 40% and very few tools to build customer loyalty. Based in Singapore, Tablevibe wants to help restaurants reduce their reliance on third-party delivery apps and help them get more direct orders and returning customers. The startup is part of Y Combinator’s current batch, which will hold its Demo Day at the end of this month.

Tablevibe’s founding team includes two former Googlers: Jeroen Rutten, formerly head of Google Search’s product strategy in APAC and Sneep, who was responsible for its app development go-to-market strategy and led large sales teams. They are joined by Guido Caldara, a lead teacher at coding bootcamp Le Wagon and Tablevibe’s chief technology officer.

The idea for Tablevibe came after Rutten, its chief executive officer, visited a restaurant in Singapore that used paper feedback forms.

“We thought, if they use a paper feedback form, it actually creates a lot of hassle, like entering all the data into an Excel spreadsheet,” he told TechCrunch. “How’s the restaurant owner going to get actionable feedback based on data in an Excel spreadsheet?”

The team began working on the first version of Tablevibe, with simple Google Forms for dine-in customers and Google Data Studio dashboards, and tested it with three restaurants a few months before COVID-19 emerged. They found that using Tablevibe instead of paper forms increased response rates by up to 26x and also had the benefit of creating more repeat customers, since they are given an incentive for filling out surveys.

Then the pandemic hit and restaurants had to suddenly pivot to deliveries. The team kept the same idea behind their feedback forms, but started using QR codes affixed to takeout packaging. The QR codes (usually in the form of stickers so food and beverage businesses don’t need to order new packaging) also offer an incentive if customers scan it and fill out a survey—but the discount or free item can’t be redeemed through third-party delivery apps, only through direct orders with the restaurant.

Restaurants can customize surveys, but about 80% use Tablevibe’s templates, which are quick to fill out, since most questions just ask for a rating from one to five stars (there’s also an optional form for customers to write their opinions). Customers fill out their name, email addresses, and then rank the food and atmosphere (for dine-in). For delivery, customers are also asked what app they used.

Tablevibe is integrated with Google Reviews, so if someone gives the restaurant a high rating, they are asked if they want to make it public. They also have the option to follow its Facebook or Instagram profile.

For dine-in customers, Tablevibe primarily works with F&B businesses that have multiple venues, including Merci Marcel and Lo and Behold Group. For its delivery survey, most users are smaller restaurants that have one location. It also serves cloud kitchens, like CloudEats in the Philippines.

“As a restaurant, you want to own and grow your customer relationships,” said Sneep, Tablevibe’s chief operating officer. “The first part is actually knowing who your customers are, what they experienced and how you can contact them, which is how we can help. The second piece is growing a customer relationship, which we do by giving a reward, but only if a customer reorders directly with a restaurant.”

Customers have generated over 25,000 reviews through Tablevibe so far, which gives the company data to help determine what kind of incentives will convince someone to scan a restaurant’s QR code and take a survey.

Tablevibe’s founders say it can deliver more than 100x return on investment to its clients. For example, Merci Marcel did an evaluation and determined that it got a 103x ROI, based on the number of customers who claimed incentives, average order value, how many people left a five-star Google Review and how much more business those reviews drove to their venues.

The startup plans to expand into other English-speaking markets, focusing first on Northern Europe and then North America later this year. Aside from Singapore, it’s already used by customers in the Philippines, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Portugal.

Rutten said that Tablevibe plans to build its development team, with the goal of becoming a “Salesforce for restaurants” that can help them build engagement through delivery or dine-ins, capture data and turn them into useful insights.

“Our roadmap has two levers—one is to get more data and the other is to provide more intelligence,” he said. “We’re working on API integrations so Tablevibe can integrate with point-of-sale systems. The second thing is to pull in more publicly available data from sources like Google Reviews. We will also build out more marketing features to leverage customer databases so businesses can send out emails about new restaurant launches, etc.” Eventually, Tablevibe also plans to use AI to help restaurants determine exactly what they need to do to improve customer experience, like change a menu item.

Disney’s streaming service is seeing improved growth, after initially seeing slower numbers of subscriber additions in Q2 as Covid lockdowns and mask mandates came to an end. Today, Disney+ beat analyst expectations for subscriber growth in Disney’s blowout third quarter, reaching 116 million paid subscribers — above the 114.5 million Wall Street had expected — and up over 100% year-over-year.

Disney also topped expectations across the board, with $17.02 billion in revenue versus the $16.76 billion expected, and earnings per share of 80 cents, above analysts’ expectations of 55 cents. Even Disney Parks were back in business. 

The pandemic had thrown a wrench in forecasting growth metrics across a number of industries, streaming included. Although Disney+ has well-established itself as one of the few competitors capable of challenging Netflix in an increasingly crowded market, it has seen some ups and downs due to Covid impacts. In the earlier days of the pandemic, streaming was on the rise. This March, Disney+ passed 100 million subscribers after just 16 months of operation. At the time, Disney execs said the service was on track to meet its projections of 260 million subscribers by 2024.

But in Disney’s second quarter earnings, the economy’s re-opening impacted Disney+ numbers, as people finally had more to do than just sit at home, and vaccinations become more widely available. Then, Disney+ only reached 103.6 million subscribers, when analysts were expecting 109.3 million, and the stock slipped as a result.

Disney wasn’t alone in feeling the impacts of Covid-induced lumpiness in subscriber additions. Netflix had also seen slower subscriber growth earlier in the year due to Covid and its far-reaching effects on things like production delays and release schedules.

But Netflix’s most recent quarter, where it once again topped subscriber estimates, had hinted that Disney+ may see a similar boost. Aiding in that growth, was Disney+’s recent market expansions in Asia. Disney+ Hotstar, arrived in Malaysia and Thailand in June, after prior launches in India and Indonesia last year.

The Hotstar version of Disney+, however, led to lowered average monthly revenue per user (ARPU) in the quarter due to its lower price points. In Q3, ARPU declined from $4.62 to $4.16 due to a higher mix of Disney+ Hotstar subscribers compared with the prior-year quarter, Disney said.

Disney’s other streaming services, Hulu and ESPN+, didn’t see the same trend.

Hulu’s subscription video service jumped from $11.39 to $13.15 year-over-year and its Live TV service (+SVOD) grew from $68.11 to $84.09. ESPN+ also grew from $4.18 to $4.47.

Subscriber growth also increased across the services, with ESPN+ growing 75% year-over-year to reach 14.9 million customers and total Hulu subscribers growing 21% to reach 42.8 million.

“…Our direct-to-consumer business is performing very well, with a total of nearly 174 million subscriptions across Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu at the end of the quarter, and a host of new content coming to the platform,” noted Disney CEO Bob Chapek in a press release.

Across Disney’s direct-to-consumer business, revenues grew 57% to $4.3 billion and its operating loss declined from $0.6 billion to $0.3 billion, thanks to improved results from Hulu, including subscription growth and higher ad revenues.

These gains were offset by a higher loss at Disney+ attributed to programming, production, marketing and technology costs that were somewhat mitigated by increases in subscription revenues and success of the Disney+ Premier Access release of “Cruella.” (Disney’s fiscal quarter ended July 3, so the impacts of the massive haul that “Black Widow” saw — nor the resulting lawsuit from star Scarlett Johansson, for that matter — have yet to be included in these figures.)

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 12, 2021. A few things to kick us off: First, the worlds of politics and technology are increasingly butting heads. We’re not talking about China or India (more here on the latter), though both countries have picked fights in recent months with tech firms foreign and domestic. This time it’s Zambia, which is restricting WhatsApp and other services within its borders. A trend to watch.

Also, Seth Rogen is coming to Disrupt! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Governments challenge app stores: The United States Senate, the upper chamber of our bicameral Congress, is chewing on a new bill that would “require companies that control operating systems to allow third-party apps and app stores,” per TechCrunch. The chances that this bill passes as-is are low, but the fact that it exists details the regulatory climate that tech finds itself in today.
• Box v. Investors: The saga of former startup-darling Box taking on an activist shareholder group took a new turn today with the enterprise productivity company releasing its earnings early. Why? Box had some reasonably good news to report, and there’s a vote underway. It wanted its results out to help control the narrative. We have the numbers for you.
• Reddit is raising $700M: Social giant Reddit has put together $410 million of a larger round to help fuel its long-term ambitions. The company did around $100 million in Q2 revenue and will be worth $6 billion after it closes its latest round. It’s a lot of capital for an internet property that was once sold to Conde Nast for a sum that we are 99.99% sure was but a fraction of its current worth.

Startups/VC

Kicking off our startup news, a note for students out there. You can get an inexpensive ticket to our upcoming SaaS event in case you are hoping to brush up ahead of founding your first company. I actually went to my first TechCrunch event on a student pass 1,000 years ago.

• Aalto wants you to sell your house directly: Sure, Opendoor just reported blowout earnings, but startups are still hammering away at what the future of home buying and selling may be. Aalto just landed $13 million from Sequoia to help folks sell their properties directly to buyers. That’s one way to cut costs.
• Crypto tax startup raises $130M: How to intelligently tax cryptocurrency transactions is a matter of national policy in the U.S. But TaxBit is forging ahead with its software solution to the problem, not waiting for the government to get its House (and Senate) in order. The company is now worth $1.33 billion after its latest round, implying a pre-money valuation of $1.2 billion. Crypto is big business, don’t forget.
• AI for chip designs? My first read of this news item? Hell yeah. Motivo, a startup that wants to improve microchip designs using AI, just raised a $12 million Series A. Why is this cool? Because what I want are better chips, faster. My work Macbook Pro can barely run Chrome. There has to be a better way. Perhaps Motivo will accelerate the development of better chips.
• Contact raises $1.9M for better creative business management: If you work in anything related to the entertainment business, be it acting, modeling, or the work that goes into making acting and modeling folks look show-ready, Contact wants to be your software hub. The Maisie Williams-involved startup now has more cash to pursue its vision. Founders Fund led the modest round.
• Agora raises $33M on the back of rapid ARR growth: Closing out our funding round coverage today, contractor-focused “materials management platform” Agora has closed a large Series B from Tiger. The company has now raised $45 million in total. In metrics terms, Agora saw its customers scale by 6x in the last year while its annual recurring revenue, or ARR, expand 766% over the same timeframe.
• To wrap up our startup coverage today, we have a robot roundup! Yep, Brian Heater’s latest is here for your enjoyment!

Disaster recovery can be an effective way to ease into the cloud

Given the rapid pace of digital transformation, nearly every business will eventually migrate some — or most — aspects of their operations to the cloud.

Before making the wholesale shift to digital, companies can start getting comfortable by using disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Even a partially managed DRaaS can make an organization more resilient and lighten the load for its IT team.

Plus, it’s a savvy way for tech leaders to get shot-callers inside their companies to get on board the cloud bandwagon.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Foxconn is going to build U.S. plants: Maybe for real this time? That’s our first read of the news, but the latest is that well-known manufacturing giant Foxconn may build EV plants in the U.S. and Thailand next year. Rubber, roads and meeting, but this is still encouraging.
• Arrival to begin EV production next year: London-based commercial EV company Arrival told investors that it is on track to meet production targets. Though, as with all EV companies, there are some moving parts to consider. Notably, Arrival also has aspirations to build some hardware in the United States. Call it a trend?
• TikTok to tinker with its app to protect teenagers: Per TechCrunch, social giant TikTok will roll out app changes for users in their teenage years to make its service “more private, safer and less addictive.” Which sounds like “less used,” frankly. Given that TikTok is owned by ByteDance, which is taking body blows from its domestic government, the changes aren’t entirely a surprise.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Home-stay giant Airbnb and on-demand delivery concern DoorDash reported their quarterly results today after the bell.

Both companies were heavily impacted by the onset of COVID-19. Airbnb saw its revenues collapse in 2020 during early lockdowns, leading the company to raise expensive capital and batten its hatches. The company recovered as the year continued, leading to its eventual IPO.

DoorDash, in contrast, managed a simply incredible 2020 as folks stayed home and ordered in. Given that we got both reports on the same day, let’s digest ’em and see how COVID has — and may — impact their results.

Airbnb’s Q2

In the second quarter, Airbnb reported revenues of $1.3 billion, which compares favorably with its Q2 2020 result of $335 million and its 2019 Q2 revenue total of $1.21 billion. In percentage terms, Airbnb’s revenue grew 299% from its Q2 2020 level and 10% from what the company managed during the same period of 2019.

Analysts had expected $1.23 billion in revenue for the period.

Airbnb lost $68 million in the quarter when counting all costs. The company’s adjusted EBITDA, a heavily modified profit metric, came to $217 million in the quarter. Cash from operations in Q2 2021 was $791 million. Looking ahead, here’s what Airbnb had to say regarding its revenue outlook:

[We] expect Q3 2021 revenue to be our strongest quarterly revenue on record and to deliver the highest Adjusted EBITDA dollars and margin ever.

How did the market digest Airbnb’s better-than-expected growth, rising adjusted profit, falling net losses, massive cash generation and expectations of record Q3 revenue? By bidding its shares lower. Airbnb is off around 4.5% in after-hours trading.

Confused? Investors may be worried about the following note from the company, also from the guidance section of its earnings letter:

In the near term, we anticipate that the impact of COVID-19 and the introduction and spread of new variants of the virus, including the Delta variant, will continue to affect overall travel behavior, including how often and when guests book and cancel. As a result, year-over-year comparisons for Nights and Experiences Booked and GBV will continue to be more volatile and non-linear.

While Q3 2021 is looking great for Airbnb, it appears that its future growth could be lumpy or delayed thanks to the ongoing pandemic. There are public indicators pointing to travel rates declining, which could impact Airbnb.

The company’s Q2 results and Q3 anticipations are impressive when compared to where Airbnb was a year ago. But that doesn’t mean that it is entirely out of the COVID woods.

DoorDash’s Q2

Despite generally lower COVID friction in its market during Q2 2021, DoorDash managed to set records for orders and the value of those orders. In the three-month period concluding June 30, 2021, the on-demand food delivery company turned $10.46 billion in order value (marketplace GOV) into $1.24 billion in total revenue. The marketplace GOV number was 70% greater than the Q2 2020 result, while DoorDash’s revenues expanded by 83%.

Investors had expected the company to post $1.08 billion in total revenues, so DoorDash handily bested expectations.

How profitable was DoorDash during the quarter? DoorDash was unprofitable overall, with a net loss of $102 million. In adjusted EBITDA terms, DoorDash saw $113 million in profit during Q2 2021. That’s not too bad, given that Uber cannot manage the same feat with its own food delivery business. DoorDash’s net income was worse than what it managed in Q2 2020, while its adjusted EBITDA improved.

Shares of DoorDash are off around 3.5% in after-hours trading.

Why? It’s not entirely clear. DoorDash said that it expects “Q3 Marketplace GOV to be in a range of $9.3 billion to $9.8 billion, with Q3 Adjusted EBITDA in a range of $0 million to $100 million.” Sure, that’s down a smidgen from its Q2 GOV number, but investors were anticipating DoorDash to post less revenue in Q3 than Q2, so you would think that GOV expectations were also more modest.

Is COVID the answer? Mentions of COVID-19 in the company’s earnings document tend to deal with trailing results and historical efforts to provide relief to restaurants that use DoorDash for orders or delivery. So, there’s not a lot of juice to squeeze there. However, the company did say the following toward the end of its report:

We believe the broad secular shift toward omni-channel local commerce remains nascent. However, the scale and fragmentation of local commerce suggests the problems to be solved will get more difficult, coordination between internal and external stakeholders will become more complex, and vectors for competitive threats will increase. At the same time, we expect the pace of consumer behavioral shifts to slow compared to the extraordinary pace of change in recent quarters.

Simplifying that for us: DoorDash expects slower growth in the future, a more complex business climate and rising competition as it enters new markets. That’s not a mix that would make any investor more excited, we don’t think.

Earlier this year, Nothing launched the Ear (1) with a grand idea: earbuds as fashion accessories. Sure, the company talked a lot about the non-invasiveness of transparent design, but at the end of the day, the product’s launch on StockX betrayed a focus on the fashion forward.

In that respect, Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds 2 are the anti-Nothing. They’re almost aggressively unassuming in their approach. It’s in keeping with previous generations of Buds, but still in stark — and refreshing — contrast for a company that prides itself on creating some of the world’s most ostentatious smartphones. Look no further than the two (!) new foldables launched along with the headphones at the Unpacked event.

Samsung’s almost casual approach to its headphones is something of a mixed blessing. The company could certainly be clearer with the branding of what seems to be an ever-shifting lineup of models. I asked for clarification of how things break down ahead of this week’s launch, and the company responded thusly:

As our premium offering, the Galaxy Buds Pro leverage cutting-edge technology to deliver immersive audio, intelligent Active noise cancelling, and effortless connectivity. For those looking to show off their unique style, the Galaxy Buds Live combine high quality sound with an eye-catching design.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

So, the short answer is there are three versions of Galaxy Buds on the market: Buds 2, Buds Pro and Buds Live. The above quote should confirm any suspicion you may have had that the new $149 version of the entry-level Buds make the $170 Buds Live Buds more or less redundant. Barring some major upgrade, they’re probably not long for this world, leaving a clearer two-level offering of the Buds 2 and the higher-end Buds Pro.

I’ve mentioned this before — the world of wireless earbuds were quick to reach a consensus of “pretty good.” Frankly, you’d have to go out of your way to find a bad pair for over $100. And for many or most intents and purposes, I’m inclined to recommend people go with a pair made by the company that made their phone. There’s a definite market advantage in having direct access to a device’s hardware and software.

That, of course, is a decided advantage for a company with as massive a global market share as Samsung. And the Galaxy Buds 2 are the epitome of “pretty good” in the pretty good way. They’re not flashy, and with a design that’s 15% smaller and 20% lighter than the already compact original Galaxy Buds, they’re designed to practically disappear, with minimal surface area exposed.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The size and shape makes for an extremely comfortable pair of buds. I’m not sure why I’m blessed with the gift of ear pain with roughly half of the earbuds I try out, but these are ergonomic and designed for the long haul. There’s enough surface area to access the touch control on the exposed side. The biggest downside to the small size is there’s really no way to adjust them in your ear without accidentally triggering that touch. That became a nuisance when I constantly found myself adjusting them to deal with sweaty ears during a run — a bad time to have to worry about dealing with music controls.

The sound is solid, courtesy of Samsung subsidiary AKG. Not exceptional, but pretty much exactly what you need/want out of a pair of $149 buds. I was impressed with the active noise canceling, as well. A perfectly good, totally unexceptional experience — utilitarian, really. Again: in a good way. If better sound is a must, the Pros are an easy upgrade — or else, there’s Nura’s new buds or Sony’s, depending on how lavish you want get. The Buds Pro also bring features like 360 Audio — which is likely only a make-or-break for an exceedingly small number of potential buyers.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Wireless charging for the case is a welcome touch, which along with ANC, catapults them above a number of other entry-level pairs. The battery is rated five hours with ANC and 7.5 with it off. The glassy little case bumps that up to a respectable 20 hours. The IPX2 water resistance, meanwhile, is good for sweat, but otherwise can be added to the list of things the company can improve next around.

All in all, it’s a pretty short list, however. The Galaxy Buds 2 are solid, unassuming and an easy addition for those in the Samsung Galaxy ecosystem.

Operating in the cloud is soon going to be a reality for many businesses whether they like it or not. Points of contention with this shift often arise from unfamiliarity and discomfort with cloud operations. However, cloud migrations don’t have to be a full lift and shift.

Instead, leaders unfamiliar with the cloud should start by moving over their disaster recovery program to the cloud, which helps to gain familiarity and understanding before a full migration of production workloads.

What is DRaaS?

Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is cloud-based disaster recovery delivered as a service to organizations in a self-service, partially managed or fully managed service model. The agility of DR in the cloud affords businesses a geographically diverse location to failover operations and run as close to normal as possible following a disruptive event. DRaaS emphasizes speed of recovery so that this failover is as seamless as possible. Plus, technology teams can offload some of the more burdensome aspects of maintaining and testing their disaster recovery.

DRaaS is a perfect candidate for a first step into the cloud for five main reasons:

• Using DRaaS helps leaders get accustomed to the ins and outs of cloud before conducting a full production shift.
• Testing cycles of the DRaaS solution allows IT teams to see firsthand how their applications will operate in a cloud environment, enabling them to identify the applications that will need a full or partial refactor before migrating to the cloud.
• With DRaaS, technology leaders can demonstrate an early win in the cloud without risking full production.
• DRaaS success helps gain full buy-in from stakeholders, board members and executives.
• The replication tools that DRaaS uses are sometimes the same tools used to migrate workloads for production environments — this helps the technology team practice their cloud migration strategy.

Steps to start your DRaaS journey to the cloud

Define your strategy

Do your research to determine if DRaaS is right for you given your long-term organizational goals. You don’t want to start down a path to one cloud environment if that cloud isn’t aligned with your company’s objectives, both for the short and long term. Having cross-functional conversations among business units and with company executives will assist in defining and iterating your strategy.