Author: azeeadmin

On-demand food delivery startup DoorDash has partnered with mRelief, a startup focused on helping people access food stamps. As federal workers — especially low-wage workers like janitors, cooks and security guards — recover from the 35-day partial government shutdown, DoorDash and mRelief are teaming up to offer those eligible for food stamps in San Francisco DoorDash credit.

In San Francisco, about one in four people struggle with hunger, according to the SF-Marin Food Bank. Meanwhile, $13 billion in food stamps benefits are unclaimed every year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Because of the government shutdown, those low-wage workers are likely now eligible for food stamps, mRelief says.

“Our work at mRelief is about bringing the simplicity of technology typically used to provide on-demand services, to things that are critical needs,” mRelief co-founders Rose Afriyie (pictured above) and Genevieve Nielsen told TechCrunch via email.

Through startup mRelief, people with low incomes can easily figure out if they qualify for resources like food stamps, as well as other much-needed social services. Last January, mRelief launched an end-to-end process for people to enroll in the food stamp program in San Francisco. Once people complete the sign-up, qualified applicants can receive up to $35 in DoorDash credit as part of the collaboration.

“The value is that we are also trying to learn how this initiative might positively impact the process of applying for food assistance,” DoorDash Social Impact Manager Sueli Shaw said in a statement to TechCrunch.

mRelief first launched in 2014, as part of Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator. Since then, the startup has helped people receive $65 million worth of food stamps across the nation.

“You” first premiered on Lifetime last fall, but it’s moving to Netflix for its second season, making the show a Netflix Original — and fair game for the Original Content podcast.

The series stars Penn Badgley of “Gossip Girl.” This time, plays Joe Goldberg, a charming, “nice guy” bookstore manager (the second episode is pointedly titled “The Last Nice Guy in New York”) who becomes obsessed an aspiring writing named Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail). As the story (based on a novel by Caroline Kepnes) unfolds, we see Joe go to increasingly disturbingly lengths in his pursuit of Beck’s affection.

For our review, we’re joined by Anna Escher and Sarah Perez to discuss why audiences find Joe so compelling (to say the least), what we made of the frequently obnoxious twentysomething New Yorkers on the show (not that we wanted to see them get murdered or anything …) and what we’re hoping will happen in season two.

Also, since Anna, Anthony and Jordan were all big “Gossip Girl” fans, we debate how Badgley’s “You” and “Gossip Girl” characters compare (spoiler: they’re weirdly similar) before Sarah joins the conversation mid-episode.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

Cryptocurrency exchange Kraken just closed its biggest acquisition to date. The company is buying Crypto Facilities in a nine-figure deal.

Crypto Facilities is an exchange and index provider regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority in the U.K. In particular, Crypto Facilities lets you trade futures on multiple cryptocurrency pairs.

Following this acquisition, some Kraken users can now access both spot and futures trading. The company also has an OTC service for large orders. Futures are limited to six pairs for now.

Kraken currently has 4 million users who traded the equivalent of $90 billion in 2018. In the past, the company had acquired smaller exchanges, such as Coinsetter, Cavirtex and CleverCoin, as well as Glidera and Cryptowatch. While Coinbase is quite popular in the U.S., Kraken has been popular with European customers. It has a large volume of orders in EUR.

Fortune also reports that Kraken is about to close a $100 million funding round. Instead of raising from traditional VC funds, the company has emailed its most loyal customers for this new funding round.

According to Fortune, this unusual path provides multiple advantages. For instance, the company doesn’t have to register the round with the SEC. Kraken has been working exclusively with accredited investors or foreign investors that are covered by an exemption.

I’d love to see the list of investors, but it’s clear that Kraken wants to stay secretive with this funding round.

As Airbnb adds more features to court business users, a smaller startup has raised some funding to take it on in the $18 billion business travel market. 2nd Address, an Airbnb-style platform for business travellers looking for home rentals that extend beyond 30 days — as an alternative to staying in hotels — is announcing funding of $10 million from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and Foundation Capital, along with Amicus and Pierre Lamond.

The startup says it will be investing the money to improve its technology as well as to expand to more cities. Its current footprint covers the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington DC — where it claims that a property on its platform typically comes in about 40 percent cheaper on a per-night basis compared to a business or extended stay hotel — and the plan is to extend that to 17 more markets in 2019.

“We’ve seen a big change in the way people travel for business. They want the same experience they have as consumers,” said 2nd Address CEO Chung-Man Tam. “There have been many platforms built for consumers, but not specifically for business travel.”

Scale will be the name of the game for the startup, which today works with just 650 hosts covering some 3,200 listings.

Customers that have already signed on as users include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Google, SAP, Deloitte, KLM and Stanford and Northwestern University. 

2nd Address has raised $42 million to date, with a portion of that dating back to when it was a rentals platform called HomeSuite.

HomeSuite focused on providing a quick way to find and secure short-term rentals for people moving to new cities and interested in trying out different neighborhoods before committing to a housing arrangement longer-term. The original pitch was that HomeSuite handled all the paperwork and other painful processes to make it easy both to list a place and to rent it.

When it failed to find enough traction with people who were relocating, the startup changed its name to 2nd Address in 2017 and shifted to business travellers, where it saw a gap in the market. (And that backend technology, in turn, got repurposed.)

Aimed at people who stay between 30 days and nine months, Tam — who took over as CEO after founder David Adams stepped away from the role — said a lot of business travellers are looking for something more when staying in a city for an extended period, with the option of a kitchen, more living space and other personalised home effects beyond what you get in a typical business hotel or extended stay suite.

At the same time, 2nd Address saw an opportunity to target hosts as well.

Regulation is making it tougher in some markets to work with short-term letting platforms like Airbnb, Tam noted, adding that 2nd Address, operating in “what’s legally defined as the rentals market” because of the length of stay, is able to understand how to handle this. “Underneath the transaction with are making sure the booking is complying with all the rental regulations.”

That’s on top of the work that needs to be done to tidy up and maintain a property when guests are staying for as little as one or two nights. “And of course you can have a large variety of guests from those who are well behaved to those who are not,” he added.

That “variability,” he said, “has come to a head” for some hosts who are looking for more predicable guests staying for longer than a night or two. “They would rather take a business traveller staying for a whole month any day,” he said.

But 2nd Address is not the only company that has identified the opportunity provide an Airbnb-style platform catering to business users and those who want to host them.

Chief among its competitors is Airbnb itself.

As it inches closer to an IPO, Airbnb has been working on diversifying and expanding its operations, and part of that has been to expand Airbnb for Work, which targets business users. In January, Airbnb made its latest move in that area by acquiring Gaest, a startup from Denmark that lets people book rooms, homes and other venues for meetings and offsites.

It has also tailored the wider Airbnb experience for Airbnb for Work in other ways, offering team-building experiences, a searchable database of homes and boutique hotels meeting criteria like “homes for family relocation,” “work-ready homes,” and “homes verified for comfort.” Within this, it guarantees a specific check-list of amenities in the accommodations that match many of the standards of typical business hotels and might be a cut above the a typical basic Airbnb property.

So far, the higher-margin Airbnb for Work has had an impact at the business: last August Airbnb said business bookings accounted for 15 percent of all its business.

But even putting Airbnb to one side, there are a number of other competitors also providing platforms for hosts to list apartments aimed at business users, as well as corporate travel people to rent them.

Sonder has raised more than $130 million to built out a network of its own apartments that provide experiences on par with hotels (but with a personalised apartment feel); Domio has also been targeting urban visitors (and also raising funding to do it). Meanwhile in Europe there are also several startups also vying to tackle the same market. They include MagicStay and AtHomeHotel out of France and Homelike from Germany, which has also been attracting the attention of VCs from the Valley.

But despite all of this, Tam and his investors believe that 2nd Address still has an advantage over the rest of the field.

On the topic of Airbnb, the claim is that providing properties to both consumer and business users, using the same back end, can be problematic.

“If you are looking to book a place in February, a whole property can be out of the running if another guest had already booked that property for just one night in that month,” Tam said. “It’s hard to combine long-term and short-term rentals at the same time.” He added that for this reason, “we have a lot of inventory where Airbnb does not.”

Investors additionally think that while 2nd Address is benefitting from the overall opportunity, it also has unique and better technology. “We saw an acute shortage of vendors for monthly stays overall, but specifically also for business people,” said Paul Holland, a general partner at Foundation. “2nd Address not only proved the concept but are in a perfect position to take the market. Yes, rising tides lift all boats, including Airbnb, but it’s a very large opportunity.” He added that some of 2nd Address’s (unnamed) competitors are even using its back end and listings to power their own efforts.

On the tech front, 2nd Address plans to add more tools for hosts to help with home management, and beyond that planning for how they tailer properties in the future. Specifically, it sees an opportunity in providing analytics and business intelligence around guest preferences in terms of locations, pricing, detailing the interiors and more.

It’s also planning to add in more integrations with the tools that corporates are using to book travel today. These include not just platforms like Concur for searching and booking places, but reporting and billing services to manage aspects beyond the actual stay.

When Samsung announced a collaboration with Supreme at an event back in December, it didn’t go over great. It wasn’t that people weren’t excited about the potential of rocking a Supreme-branded Galaxy Note or whatever, so much as which Supreme the company had struck a deal with.

You see, there’s Supreme, the U.S.-based streetwear company beloved by hypebeasts everywhere, and then there’s “Supreme.” Or, in this case, Supreme Italia. There are all sorts of intellectual property-related reasons the company is allowed to exist with near-identical signage, but the long and short of it is that the deal rubbed plenty of people the wrong way.

After initially balking at the pushback, Samsung this week announced that it’s killing the deal. According to a Weibo statement translated by Engadget Chinese, “Samsung Electronics had previously mentioned a collaboration with Supreme Italia at the Galaxy A8s China launch event on December 10th, Samsung Electronics has now decided to terminate this collaboration.”

So, yes, those dreams of sporting that familiar red and white logo on your Android handset will have to wait. Or you can always just take matters into your own hands. 

Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop is coming to Netflix. According to a scoop from Variety, Goop will expand its original content offerings with a docuseries on Netflix, focused on issues related to physical and spiritual wellness, much like Goop itself. The brand also partnered with Delta Airlines for an exclusive podcast, and is planning its own in-house podcasts that will delve into areas like beauty, food and books, the report says.

The Netflix series, however, is the most ambitious of the new digital initiatives, as it will consist of 30-minute episodes hosted by Goop editors, chief content officer Elise Loehnen and Paltrow herself. The team will discuss topics like mental, physical and sexual health, with an emphasis on those stories that will benefit from having a TV-sized budget.

Last November, reports had leaked that Goop was in talks with Netflix for a show that Paltrow had been developing for more than a year. At the time, it was said the series would discuss wellness and homeopathic traditions in different cultures.

Goop is best known these days for its questionable, controversial products.

Word of the Netflix show followed the news that Goop had to settle a $125,000 lawsuit over false advertisements for a $66 vaginal jade egg, which the company claimed would balance hormones, prevent uterine prolapse and more. The egg has been one of many overpriced and ineffective, or even harmful, products that Goop has sold, according to medical experts.

Despite the controversies — and dangers — around some of the products Goop promotes, the company has continued to grow thanks to Paltrow’s star power and a growing interest in alternative health products. It pulled in another $50 million in funding this past March, bringing its total outside investment to $82 million and its valuation to $250 million. Investors include NEA, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felix Capital and others.

In addition, Goop’s live events — its wellness summits — sell out. Its newsletter also claimed 8 million subscribers as of last year. For Netflix, all this means Goop represents a sizable audience ready to be tapped, while Goop gets to market itself to a wider audience through the streaming platform.

In addition to the Netflix show, the Delta partnership will bring eight episodes of the Goop podcast to 600 planes, expanding its reach to 18 million-plus listeners, Variety says. The exclusive deal will include episodes hosted by Paltrow and Loehnen, including one that includes an interview with Oprah.

Goop’s standalone podcasts will also feature a food series by an award-winning chef, Goop book club and beauty podcast from in-house expert Jean Godfrey-June.

Google this morning unveiled a pair of new Android features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. As the company notes in a blog post this morning, the WHO estimates that 900 million people will be living with heading loss by 2055. The ubiquity of mobile devices — Android in particular — offers a promising potential to help open the lines of communication.

Live Transcribe is, perhaps, the more compelling of the two offerings. As its name implies, the feature transcribes audio in real-time, so users with hearing loss can read text, in order to enable a live, two-way conversation. It defaults to white text on a black background, making it easier to read and can also connect to external microphones for better results.

The feature leverages much of the company’s work in speech to text and translation. It starts rolling out today in limited beta for Pixel 3 users. It will be available in more than 70 languages and dialects.

Announced back at last year’s Google I/O, Sound Amplifier is designed to filter out ambient and unwanted noises, without boosting the volume on already loud sounds. The feature works with headphones, letting users manually adjust the settings for the right fit. That one is available now via the Play Store.

Choose Your Own Adventure-style stories have been making a comeback, thanks to Netflix’s adoption of the format for kids TV and other interactive tales, like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,” as well as earlier efforts, like HBO’s Mosaic. Now Amazon is testing out the genre for Alexa devices, with the launch of professionally performed, voice-controlled narratives from the publisher of the original Choose Your Own Adventure book series, ChooseCo.

You may remember ChooseCo from its lawsuit with Netflix over the Black Mirror episode. The company claims that Netflix never acquired the proper license to use the “Choose Your Own Adventure” trademark.

But clearly, ChooseCo still aims to benefit from the attention, and from Netflix’s ability to make this storytelling gimmick popular with a younger generation of tech-savvy consumers.

In collaboration with Amazon’s Audible division, the two companies are together releasing a (properly licensed) Alexa skill that will bring ChooseCo’s Choose Your Own Adventure stories to life on Alexa-powered devices, like Echo smart speakers, which are controlled through voice commands.

The voice skill itself was jointly designed by Audible, ChooseCo and the Alexa team, and will launch with two narratives to start: “The Abominable Snowman,” which takes listeners to the peaks of Himalayas in search of the yeti, and “Journey Under the Sea,” which ventures to the underwater Lost City of Atlantis.

The former offers 28 total endings and the latter offers 37.

Instead of Alexa’s robotic voice, the stories are narrated by voice actors Josh Hurley (Abominable Snowman), and Stephanie Einstein (Journey Under the Sea.)

Those of a certain age will remember reading Choose Your Own Adventure stories as kids, but these Alexa versions are meant to entertain all ages, Audible claims. Of course, it’s debatable how often adults will want to listen to fantastic but familiar tales like this, after satisfying their initial curiosity following the format’s smart speaker debut.

The stories will vary in length, depending on which narrative branch listeners take, but can provide “hours” of entertainment, Audible tells TechCrunch. In addition to responding to the questions about what to do next, you can also use voice commands like “go back,” “start over,” and “change story” to navigate the app.

Currently, the stories are free, as is the skill. Audible declined to say if a subscription or in-app purchases would be offered at a later date in order to provide listeners with access to more stories. Likely, the skill’s future is still being considered – for now, the companies are looking to see if consumers adopt and engage with the format on voice devices, or if the skill flops.

If the stories take off, however, others could be sold or Amazon could even opt to bundle the stories into its Audible Channels offering, which is used to entice Prime subscriber sign-ups.

To try the stories out yourself, you can say “Alexa, open Choose Your Own Adventure from Audible.” This will enable the skill so you can get started.

The stories begin with a warning similar to those you might remember from the kids’ books – that this story is different, and that “you alone are in charge of what happens.” It warns you that there are dangers, adventures and consequences ahead, and that your choices could “end in disaster…or even death!”

The stories then progress as you’d expect, with a bit of narrative before asking you to pick the next path. On Alexa devices with a screen, some simple illustrations are shown.

Audible’s new Choose Your Own Adventure stories aren’t the only example of this format coming to audio. In addition to ChooseCo’s own online audio-based games, there’s also a comedy game show that uses the format, and The NYT even tried a choose-your-own-news adventure in 2017. There are also skills for interactive stories, that aren’t using the ChooseCo trademark.

The official Audible skill is here on the Alexa Skills store.

Another week, another set of scandals at Facebook and Google . This past week, my colleagues reported that Facebook and Google had abused Apple enterprise developer certificates in order to distribute info-scraping research apps, at times from underage users in the case of Facebook. Apple responded by cutting off both companies from developer accounts, before shortly restoring them.

The media went into overdrive over the scandals, as predictable as the companies’ statements that they truly care about users and their privacy. But will anything change?

I think we know the answer to this question: no. And it is never going to change because the vast majority of users just don’t care one iota about privacy or these scandals.

Privacy advocates will tell you that the lack of a wide boycott against Google and particularly Facebook is symptomatic of a lack of information: if people really understood what was happening with their data, they would galvanize immediately for other platforms. Indeed, this is the very foundation for the GDPR policy in Europe: users should have a choice about how their data is used, and be fully-informed on its uses in order to make the right decision for them.

I don’t believe more information would help, and I reject the mentality behind it. It’s reminiscent of the political policy expert who says that if only voters had more information — if they just understood the issue — they would change their mind about something where they are clearly in the “wrong.” It’s incredibly condescending, and obscures a far more fundamental fact about consumers: people know what they value, they understand it, and they are making an economic choice when they stick with Google or Facebook.

Alternatives exist for every feature and app offered by these companies, and they are not hard to find. You can use Signal for chatting, DuckDuckGo for search, FastMail for email, 500px or Flickr for photos, and on and on. Far from being shameless clones of their competitors, in many cases these products are even superior to their originals, with better designs and novel features.

And yet. When consumers start to think about the costs, they balk. There’s sometimes the costs of the products themselves (FastMail is $30/year minimum, but really $50 a year or more if you want reasonable storage), but more importantly are the switching costs that come with using a new product. I have 2,000 contacts on Facebook Messenger — am I just supposed to text them all to use Signal from now on? Am I supposed to completely relearn a new photos app, when I am habituated to the taps required from years of practice on Instagram?

Surveillance capitalism has been in the news the past few weeks thanks to Shoshana Zuboff’s 704-page tome of a book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” But surveillance capitalism isn’t a totalizing system: consumers do have choices here, at least when it comes to consumer apps (credit scores and the reporting bureaus are a whole other beast). There are companies that have even made privacy their distinguishing feature. And consumers respond pretty consistently: I will take free with surveillance over paid with privacy.

One of the lessons I have learned — perhaps the most important you can learn about consumer products — is just how much people are willing to give up for free things. They are willing to give up privacy for free email. They are willing to allow their stock broker to help others actively trade against them for a free stock brokerage account with free trading. People love free stuff, particularly when the harms are difficult to perceive.

This is not to say that Facebook and Google shouldn’t try to improve their shoddy records on privacy, or rebuild trust with users. Those consumers are always able to leave, and their sentiment should never be taken for granted. But after more than a decade of abuse, we should look deeper at our analysis and perhaps conclude that these issues aren’t abuse at all, but rather a bargain, a negotiation, and one that people are quite willing to live with.

China’s influence pushed MSCI to add shares to index

(Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

MSCI runs some of the most important financial indexes in the world. Trillions of dollars of capital are pegged to these metrics, which is why changes to them can be so controversial. Few decisions by MSCI have been as significant though as the addition of Chinese “A-shares” to its emerging markets indexes last year, which for the first time added mainland Chinese stocks to these important benchmarks. Billions of dollars of capital was expected to flow to those stocks, as wealth managers matched their allocations to the updated indexes.

Now, we have learned just how much pressure MSCI faced in adding those shares. Mike Bird at the Wall Street Journal reports that China placed enormous pressure on MSCI to change its indexes, threatening to cut off its access to domestic wealth managers and stunt its growth in the number two economy. From the article:

MSCI’s discussions with several Chinese asset managers were abruptly curtailed in 2015 and 2016 after the firm didn’t add Chinese-listed stocks to the emerging-markets index following its midyear reviews, according to people close to or directly involved in the discussions. The Chinese firms communicated that they had been instructed by authorities to cut off negotiations with MSCI, the people said.

China’s two national stock exchanges also threatened to withdraw MSCI’s access to market pricing data, which the company provided to its customers all over the world, the people added. It was akin to “business blackmail,” said a person familiar with MSCI’s negotiations with Chinese regulatory authorities.

Companies the world over attempt to manipulate these indexes, particularly given the increasing amount of money flowing to ETFs and other index-backed funds. But few companies have the clout required to actually get MSCI to make changes that benefit them. China, with its huge market, clearly does.

MSCI is “now considering quadrupling China’s weighting in the emerging-markets index.” Maybe that’s objective and fair — after all, China is crucial for the global economy. With China’s meddling and MSCI’s capitulation though, one has to wonder how much is blackmail, and how much is financial science.

More links

• Behind Tech’s Shine, Some Warnings Signs Appear | The New York Times
• India takes aim at popular Chinese social media apps | Financial Times
• Tencent-backed Chinese movie-ticketing app Maoyan makes weak Hong Kong debut | Reuters
• Lawmakers Vow to Modernize Congress, One Modem at a Time | WSJ

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

Warby Parker is today introducing virtual try-on to let shoppers select a pair of frames and instantly see how they look.

The tech was built on Apple’s ARKit, and the feature is only available to users on the Warby Parker iOS app on an iPhone X or later.

Warby Parker, which launched in 2010, attempted to implement a virtual try-on feature on its website, but pulled the feature shortly after it debuted. The issue?

With something like glasses, virtual try-on needs to be as close to reality as possible. Virtual objects can’t be overlaid ‘close to’ the user’s face, but rather match up with all their facial curves, and the placement of the ears, eyes and nose.

“It was really our first time building out a full AR feature as a company, and there were two things that were really important,” said Sr. Director of E-Commerce and Consumer Insights Erin Collins. “The first was getting fit right, which was a technical challenge that required a bunch of revisions. And the second thing was making sure the frame images looked as photorealistic as possible, which meant getting 3D artists to digital render them and lots of revisions to get it pixel perfect on each pair of frames.”

The technology Warby Parker built uses a proprietary algorithm to perfectly place virtual frames on the user’s face. The feature also allows users to quickly snap a screenshot and share with others to get feedback on the frames.

Since inception, Warby Parker developed its ecommerce brand on the back of a relatively low-tech feature: in-home try-on. The company simply sent users five frames of their choice to try on at home and send back later, once they’d made their purchasing decision.

Collins sees the new virtual try-on as a great compliment to that program, while offering a quick and convenient experience for repeat buyers.

“This will make it easier for returning customers to buy glasses without trying them on, but we’re really excited about it as a tool for people to narrow down their home try-on choices,” said Collins.

Warby Parker has raised a total of nearly $300 million in funding from investors such as T.Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and General Catalyst.