Spin, the electric scooter startup that Ford bought earlier this year for around $100 million, is gearing up to launch in 100 cities by the end of the year. This is thanks to a new partnership with Zagster, a dockless mobility startup that got its start with bike-share solutions for cities.
“A solid operations infrastructure is the key to making a dockless mobility program work smoothly,” Spin Chief Business Officer Ben Bear said in a statement. “As thousands of people take to the streets daily on shared two-wheeled vehicles, they need to be confident that the vehicles they hop on to have been checked and maintained. Zagster’s experience in managing dockless bike and scooter share programs across the country made them a natural partner to ensure we’re operating compliant, safe, and logistically sound programs.”
Already, Spin and Zagster have partnered to bring micromobility operations to four new markers, including Austin, Isla Vista, Calif., Oklahoma State and Troy University.
Spin also currently operates in Coral Gables, Fla., Washington, D.C., Charlotte, N.C., Durham, N.C., Lexington, Ky., Denver, Colo., Detroit, Mich. and Long Beach, Calif. Spin was one of the three companies that initially deployed its scooters in San Francisco back in March. Along with Bird and Lime, Spin was forced to remove its electric scooters from the city until the city determined a permitting process.
Earlier this year, San Francisco denied Spin’s appeal to operate electric scooters in the city. However, the neutral hearing officer in the appeals process recommended the SF Municipal Transportation Agency consider having Spin participate in the second half of the one-year pilot program.
Trello, Atlassian’s project management tool, is doubling down on its efforts to become a better service for managing projects at work. To do so, the team is launching thirteen new features in Trello Enterprise today, making this one of the company’s biggest feature releases since the launch of the enterprise version in 2015.
As the company also announced today, one million teams now actively use the service.
Most of these new features are for paying users, but even Trello’s free users are getting access to a few new goodies. In return, though, Trello is taking away the ability to create an unlimited number of boards for free Teams users (not regular users outside of a team). Going forward, they can only have 10 boards open in Trello at any given time. Teams without a subscription that already use more than 10 boards will continue to use them but will have to subscribe to a paid plan to add more. To help make all of this a bit easier, Trello will let existing free teams add up to 10 additional boards until May 1, 2019 — and they’ll be able to keep them going forward.
“We’re making this change to accelerate our ability to bring world-class business features to market, and Trello Business Class and Enterprise will get more useful and powerful to address our customers’ pain points in the workplace,” the company’s co-founder and today’s head of Trello Michael Pryor writes in today’s announcement — and to do bring those feature to market, it surely helps to convert a few more free users into paying ones.
One of the main new feature announcements here is that the Power-Up Butler is now available for free, for both paying and free users (though with some limitations if you aren’t on a subscription plan). Power-Up Butler is an automation extension for Trello that the company acquired in December. It makes it easier to automate workflows and other repetitive tasks in Trello — and that’s clearly something the service’s enterprise users were asking for.
With this update, Trello is also now getting a new board setting beyond ‘private,’ ‘team’ and ‘public.’ This new setting, ‘organization,’ allows you to share a board with the entire company, including those who are not on a particular team. Until now, that wasn’t really an option and creating a public board was obviously not an option for many companies.
Since IT admins love nothing more than access controls, the new version of Trello Enterprise also features a lot of new ways for them to create visibility controls, membership restrictions, board creation restrictions and more. Admins now also get tools to enforce the use of single sign-on solutions and new ways to manage public boards and users, as well as which power-up extensions employees can use.
The company also today announced that it has received SOX and SOC2 Type 1 compliance.
You probably have one electricity supplier for your house. But these days the average household could probably buy form several such companies, it just can’t easily access the market place of possible suppliers. Wouldn’t it be smarter in you had an AI in your house which could purchase energy from these producers, including those within the local grid, at the best prices and at the best time of day?
That’s what the Tibber startup does in Norway, and it’s just raised a $12M Series A funding from an iconic Silicon Valley VC.
Hailing originally from Stockholm, Tibber offers customers the ability to lower their energy bills in exactly the above manner, with the user using a simple app, and the purchasing of power is automatically done by its bots. That means Tiber is always looking for the lowest electricity prices as well as alerting customers to consume energy during the cheapest hours of the day.
The funding round was led by SF-based Founders Fund, known for their early investments in Spotify, Facebook, SpaceX, Palantir, Airbnb and Stripe. Tibber is the third investment ever in Europe for Founders Fund, which is quite something. The rest of the round came from existing investors including Wellstreet, BKK, Petter Stordalen and RFF Vest.
Prior to this round the company had raised $3-4m. It now plans to expand to Germany next.
In a statement Zack Hargreaves, Principal at Founders Fund said: “The tools we currently use to manage our utilities are completely outdated. Tibber combines wholesale electricity prices with IoT integrations to save users an average of 20 % on electricity bills. Consumers will see cost savings from simply downloading the app.”
Although Tibber only powers 40,000 homes right now, 25% of are smart homes, where customers are able to control their power usage through Tibber-connected devices, such as electric car charging, connected thermostats and smart plugs.
Edgeir Aksnes, CEO and founder says all their customer growth has come from word of mouth: “With this funding round complete, we are set to further expand in the Nordics, develop our product and launch Tibber in new markets in Europe.”
Tibber has a team of 21 people and currently operates in Sweden and Norway.
Last year, Tibber launched a smart charging feature for Tesla and other electric cars and hybrids. The company claims that its solution can cut 20 percent off the charging price compared to the rest of the market.
HP honestly isn’t generally a brand most associate with being at the cutting edge of new technologies, but the company’s new HP Reverb is probably the best PC-powered consumer VR headset out there when balancing price and feature set. It’s not only a big win for HP, but a big win for the Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) platform, which arrived with a bit of a thud, but now has a headset truly worthy of seriously competing with HTC and Oculus .
This thing looks A LOT like the Oculus Rift. between the velcro straps, the on-ear headphones and the overall design, HP really cloned the Rift here, but made some key improvements along the way. The headset is even lighter and more comfortable. The built-in WMR inside-out tracking makes setup a snap though it still only uses two cameras which is probably the biggest shortcoming of the headset.
The big difference is that the displays on this thing are amazing.
Right now, gamers obsessed with achieving the highest available resolution would likely shoot for the Vive Pro or Samsung Odyssey+. HP’s Reverb reaches 2160 x 2160 resolution per eye, compared with 1440×1600 per eye on the Vive Pro and Samsung Odyssey+. The resolution on the original Rift, which was released 3 years ago, is 1080×1200. Unlike the resolution bumps on the other headsets, this one is instantly noticeable and makes for a far more comfortable experience.
The 114-degree field-of-view is also slightly wider than most of what’s out there now, though far more confined than the ambitious but somewhat hack-y Pimax headsets, this comes at the expense of stereoscopic overlap meaning that objects outside the center of your view will appear less 3D though it wasn’t something I really noticed to be honest.
The headset is more expensive than the Rift at $599 for the consumer version and $649 for the enterprise edition, but even at a healthy premium to some of the other headsets, the Reverb (which comes with two WMR controllers) does a great job justifying its price.
While the first batch of Windows Mixed Reality headsets offered little differentiation from each other aside from small cosmetic deviations from Microsoft’s reference design — HP launched a headset then, it was nothing special — now it seems the company has made a significant bet on becoming the premium option for virtual reality-obsessed gamers.
This all comes as Oculus is preparing to release a PC-powered VR headset that makes some sacrifices for the sake of greater affordability and ease of use. With Oculus ceding the high-end market and HTC more focused on enterprise customers, this gives HP their best available change by selling a headset to cement themselves as the most high-end, yet still approachable experience.
I’ll have to spend some more time with the device, but I really like what HP has done with the Reverb so far. It seems to strike the best balance for enterprise customers (who might not want to spend $6,000 on the excellent Varjo VR-1). For consumers, it’s definitely a premium though it costs far less than other headsets and seems to be far better than many more expensive devices.
The new Aibo is impressive. Ultimately, however, it’s an extremely expensive toy that ultimately does very little. One of the upsides of opting for a robot dog over the real thing is the ability to buck the whole “old dog, new tricks” adage by way of software updates. As long as the company continues to support such things, that is.
Announced earlier this year, Aibo’s first major software update just dropped, bringing with it the ability to double as a (albeit nonthreatening) security dog. The upgrade uses Aibo’s cabers to build maps of a user’s home a la the Roomba, which they can then assign room names to.
From there, Aibo will “patrol” the designated areas at set times of day, playing a “Puppy Patrol” melody when it’s time to jump into action. From the sound of it, Aibo’s not going to be replacing smart home security features any time soon, instead, its main function is identifying up to ten people and reporting back their positions via the app.
The 2.0 software brings a couple of other upgraded features to Aibo, including improved head movement and posture, better photos and the ability to “feel” when its tail is touched. Welcome changes, surely, but that $3,000 price tag is still a tough pill to swallow.
Microsoft Teams, the collaboration platform that Microsoft built to complement its Office 365 suite of productivity apps for workers — which also ensures a way of keeping those workers staying within its own ecosystem — is hitting a milestone on its second birthday. Today, the company announced that over 500,000 organizations are now using Teams. The company is not spelling out what that works out to in total users but notes that 150 of them have more than 10,000 users apiece, putting its total user numbers well over 1.5 million.
Alongside this, Microsoft also announced a number of new features that will be coming to Teams as it works on native integrations of more of Microsoft’s own tools to give Teams more functionality and more relevance for a wider range of use cases.
“The rigid hierarchy of the workplace has evolved, and environments are now about inclusivity and transparency,” said Lori Wright, General Manager of Workplace Collaboration at Microsoft, in an interview. “We see these trends playing out all over the world, and this is giving rise to new forms of technology.”
The new features indeed speak to that trend of inclusivity and making platforms more personalised to users. They include customized backgrounds; and support for cameras to capture content to bring in new ways of interacting in Teams beyond text — something that will be further explored with the eventual integration Microsoft Whiteboard, for people to create and ingest presentations that are hand-written into the system.
For those who are either hearing-impaired or cannot use or hear the audio, Microsoft’s adding live captions. And to speak to the purview of CSOs, it’s adding secure channels for private chats as well as “information barriers” that can be put in place for compliance purposes and to make sure that any potential conflicts of interest between channels are kept out; screening for data-loss prevention to prevent sensitive information from being shared.
Finally, it is adding live events support, which will let users create broadcasts on Teams for up to 10,000 people (who do not need to be registered Teams users to attend).
All in all, this is a significant list of product updates. The company kicked off its service as very much a Slack-style product for “knowledge workers” but has since emphasized a more inclusive approach, for all kinds of employees, from front line to back-office.
No updates today to the number of third-party applications that are being incorporated into Teams — an area where Slack has particularly excelled — but Microsoft is focused on making sure that as many users as it has already captured in Office 365, which today number 155 million — eventually also turn on to Teams. “We using as many as the Microsoft services as we can, tapping the Microsoft Graph to feed in services and structure information,” Wright said.
Microsoft is somewhat of a late comer to the collaboration space, coming in the wake of a number of other efforts, but these user figures put the company’s effort well within striking distance of notable, and large, competitors. Last month, Facebook noted that Workplace, its own Slack rival, had 2 million users, also with 150 organizations with more than 10,000 users each included in the number. Slack, meanwhile, in January said it had over 10 million daily active users with the number of organizations on the platform at 85,000.
(Notably, just yesterday Slack made a timely announcement in its bid to court more large enterprises: they will now give regulated customers access to their encrypted keys, an important component to win more business in those sectors.)
The growing intensity of the US visa approval process has made it more difficult for companies to attract, support and retain foreign talent. However, recruiters are still sourcing talent from abroad at an increasing clip.
According to a recent, roughly 30-page, report published by Envoy – the corporate workforce immigration management platform – US corporate demand for foreign talent has remained resilient in the face of a stricter stance on immigration taken by the current government. With help from The Harris Poll, the Envoy 2019 Immigration Trends report surveyed 405 high-ranking human resource and recruiting professionals – across companies from a wide array of sizes, stages, and sectors – regarding changes and trends in the employment-based immigration process.
For a long while, you couldn’t swing a bag of cats around without hitting a retailer looking to create a digital presence. Now, the inverse is growing in popularity, with many digital-first retail brands looking to set up a brick-and-mortar shop.
The latest is Framebridge, a custom framing startup that has raised more than $67 million. The company is launching two new retail stores in the D.C. area, one downtown and one in Bethesda.
“We’ve tested a number of pop-ups, and there were people that had been to our site several times but wanted to see us in person,” said founder and CEO Susan Tysan. “At our pop-ups, average order values were 40 percent higher than they were online.”
The storefronts will still send orders through to the company’s production facility, which will ship final products to end-users. But for folks who come in the store, the hope is that the experience is hyper-similar to using the website.
Framebridge first launched in 2014 with a simple premise: take the pain out of custom framing. The startup lets users browse framing options on the website and see exactly what the piece would look like via website or app. Once the user chooses a frame, Framebridge sends a shipping label and materials to the user, who then sends it to be framed in the Framebridge framing center.
Putting the process online was one step, but bringing down the price was the real innovation here. Through some automation and a refined in-house production process, Framebridge is able to promise customers that the most they’ll pay through the service is $199.
In fact, founder and CEO Susan Tysan came up with the idea for Framebridge after her own harrowing attempt to get four national parks posters framed. Many hours and $1600 later, she decided to shake up the framing industry and has gone on to raise upwards of $67 million from investors like T. Rowe Price, New Enterprise Associates and Revolution.
With the store openings, Framebridge hopes to bring the same simplicity to brick-and-mortar. The company integrated a new POS that allows users to have a nearly identical experience to that of the web and app storefront, allowing them to see their art on screen before they purchase. Plus, the pricing for each frame in every size is clearly marked right on the counter so no customer is ever shocked by the price tag at the end.
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Tysan says that the strategy around launching two stores was to learn as quickly as possible. One store is larger and downtown, whereas the other is slightly smaller and in the suburbs, giving Framebridge the chance to see what works in various environments.
Tysan also mentioned that they’ve put particular effort into making sure the stores are beautiful and inspiring, rather than intimidating.
“The reality is that performance marketing continues to get more expensive and real estate is getting less expensive,” said Tysan. “Framebridge is a distinct category that makes senes offline. And even in my own painful experiences getting things framed before, I didn’t ever hate that it was offline. I hated that it was expensive and intimidating.”
The 14th Street store downtown, located at 1919 14th Street NW in D.C., is opening today at 11am ET, with the Bethesda location, 4806 Bethesda Ave, opening in April.
Instagram is opening a whole new revenue stream. Now the 130 million people who tap Instagram’s product tags on shopping posts will be able to buy those items without leaving the app thanks to stored payment info. “Checkout with Instagram” launches today in the US with more than 20 top brands including Adidas, Kylie Cosmetics, and Warby Parker who’ll no longer have to direct customers to their website to make a purchase..
An Instagram spokesperson confirms to TechCrunch “We will introduce a selling fee to help to fund programs and products that help make checkout possible, as well as offset transaction-related expenses.” When we asked how much the ‘selling fee’ would charge merchants, the spokesperson told us “We aren’t sharing the specific number right now. We are testing a selling fee with businesses during the closed beta. It will not change the price of the items for consumers.” That indicates Instagram wants merchants to cough up the fee in exchange for higher purchase conversion rates rather than forcing users to pay a convenience fee for buying through the app.
Instagram’s ad business could also get a boost as Checkout could convince brands that the social network produces better return on investment since there are fewer steps before purchase. For now, only organic posts from the launch partner merchants will feature Checkout buttons, and ads aren’t eligible. But Checkout-equipped ads could be a gold mine for Instagram just as Facebook’s News Feed ad business looks shaky and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares commerce as a fixture of the 2019 roadmap.
Checkout tags will appear on feed posts, Stories, and Explore content from the brands in the closed beta that Instagram plans to eventually open to more businesses. When users tap the post to reveal product tags and open one, they’ll see a Checkout with Instagram button instead of the old “View on Website” button.
Their first time through they’ll enter their payment information that’s stored for future purchases. “With their protected payment information in one place, they can shop their favorite brands without needing to log in and enter their information multiple times” Instagram explains. Saving merchants from abandoned shopping carts left by users frustrated with having to sign up with each different brand is the key value offering here. TechCrunch recently reported Instagram is prototyping a Fundraiser sticker for Stories that similarly saves payment info — a database Instagram clearly wants to build up.
After users buy something within Instagram, they’ll be able to track it from a new “Orders” section of their profile that shows the status of an order plus options to cancel, initiate a return, or contact the merchant. They’ll also get a notification from Instagram when the order ships. Interestingly, Instagram isn’t mixing receipts into its messaging product like Facebook does with Messenger.
Merchants will only get the details necessary to fulfill an order, including contact info and address, but not your actual payment info. Users will see an opt-in option to share their email address with the seller for marketing purposes. Checkout with Instagram could leave merchants with a little less data than if the purchase happened on their website. But Instagram says it will provide info on which sales it generates for a merchant.
Users can pay with PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, or Discover. Instagram plans to allow merchants to integrate their Shopify, BigCommerce, ChannelAdvisor, CommerceHub, and other tools with the Checkout feature. Meanwhile, Instagram confirms that interacting with Checkout will be used as a signal for ranking what content you see. Payments are processed by PayPal — an area of business Facebook has been content not to invade, and PayPal’s fees will likely be covered by Facebook’s selling fee.
“We started using product tags to make shopping more convenient for our customers” writes Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal. “Checkout takes this experience one step further, making it even more intuitive and seamless for people who have discovered products they want to purchase instantaneously.” Here’s the full list of launch partner brands: Adidas, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Balmain, Burberry, ColourPop, Dior, Huda Beauty, H&M, KKW Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, MAC Cosmetics, Michael Kors, NARS, Nike, NYX Cosmetics, Oscar de la Renta, Outdoor Voices, Ouai Hair, Prada, Revolve, Uniqlo, Warby Parker and Zara.
There’s still no sign of an Instagram standalone shopping app that was reportedly in the works. Instead, it launched a dedicated Shopping channel in Explore and tags for Stories six months ago. We recently spotted Instagram prototyping a Pinterest-style feature that would let users make their private Collections of Saved posts publicly visible. That would be a great way for commerce influencers to recommend Checkout-equipped products. Facebook has spent five years experimenting with different Buy buttons, but now it finally has them in a place they feel natural.
Instagram has fiercely protected the right to link out of its app in order to keep you steadily consuming its content. Now with over one billion users, Instagram has trapped people’s attention inside, and it’s finally ready to sell the right to sell there.
The most consistent feedback we have gotten from Extra Crunch members is that I write too much, and the Daily emails are too long for mortals (and apparently my mother) to read.
This is great feedback: a huge focus for Extra Crunch is to create signal from noise. To that end, we are experimenting with a new format of the Daily starting today that’s focused on keeping you up-to-date on Extra Crunch, as well as broadening your perspective outside the Silicon Valley bubble.
Have questions, concerns, feedback, anything? Reply to me here, or email me at danny@techcrunch.com.
From Extra Crunch
Are we living in a simulation? Twenty years after The Matrix opened our eyes (okay, sort of), the question is more relevant than ever. Rizwan Virk, the head of Play Labs @ MIT, gives us a deep look at this question from his new book The Simulation Hypothesis. This is a heady and deep form essay, so save it and savor it.
SAFEs are getting complicated. Now there are pre- and post-money varieties, and all that means more challengers for founders. Here’s a guide on how to parse the pros and cons.
We will have a second conference call this week on Friday with Lucas Matney and Eric Peckham talking about the trends coming out of the Game Developers Conference. Stay tuned for specific times and dial-in numbers.
Wide Angle
Stories from outside the 280/101 corridor
Photo by Hiroshi Watanabe via Getty Images
China just beat the US in AI patent filings. Quality not quantity, blah blah blah, but competition in this category is absolutely keen.
Russia is cracking down on the internet. Despite American impressions, the Russian internet has been fairly free compared to other mass media, but that is now changing with this new “fake news” law.
Great media deep dive into Wired. Paywalls, native apps, email newsletter performance, events — good insights and numbers here.
After users buy something within Instagram, they’ll be able to track it from a new “Orders” section of their profile that shows the status of an order plus options to cancel, initiate a return, or contact the merchant. They’ll also get a notification from Instagram when the order ships. Interestingly, Instagram isn’t mixing receipts into its messaging product like Facebook does with Messenger.
