Author: azeeadmin

I’m not immune to compliments, and Spencer Gerrol, founder and CEO of Spark Neuro, offered a real winner as he demonstrated his technology.

“I love your brain,” he told me. This was after the startup’s vice president of research Ryan McGarry had strapped sensors to my fingers and head, then showed me an intense movie clip, with my attention level and emotional response displayed on a screen for all to see.

That, in miniature, is what Spark Neuro does: It helps companies study the audience response to things like ads, movies and trailers.

The goal is to replace things like focus groups and surveys, which Gerrol said are subject to a variety of biases, including group pressure and the desire to give the answer that you think the researcher wants to hear.

For example, he showed me a Mr. Clean ad that had performed poorly among men in focus groups. Spark Neuro, in contrast, found that it actually had “beautiful performance” among both men and women, and it ended up being one of the best-received ads at last year’s Super Bowl. (Apparently the guys just didn’t want to admit that they enjoyed watching a seductive cartoon man.)

We’ve also written about startups that try to measure ad effectiveness using technology like eye tracking and studying facial expressions. Gerrol said those are valuable data points, and indeed, they’re part of Spark Neuro’s research. But they have their limitations, which is why the company also looks at brain and electrodermal activity.

Gerrol highlighted the EEG data (i.e. data about the electrical activity in your brain) as offering “such richness and such depth.” The challenge is that “the data is incredibly noisy.” So Spark Neuro has developed tools to automatically remove the noise and make the data easy to understand.

At the same time, it’s not just relying on technology — Gerrol said his researchers also do one-on-one interviews with participants afterwards to get a better understanding of their responses.

“The most important thing, by 100 fold, is the intellectual property around the algorithms,” he added. “The algorithms take a mess of data that’s meaningless to the human eye and turn it into something you can just understand as a marketing executive.”

My own readings looked daunting at first, but they quickly became comprehensible as Gerrol walked me through them, showing me where my attention and emotions spiked.

Spark Neuro is already working with a long list of clients that includes Anheuser-Busch, General Motors, Hulu, JetBlue, Paramount and Walmart. It’s also announcing that it’s raised a $13.5 million Series A led by Thiel Capital, with participation from Will Smith (yes, that Will Smith) and former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

Eventually, Gerrol suggested the technology could be applied in other ways, like measuring student attention in the classroom.

“There’s a million applications,” he said. “We’re very focused on being a dominating force in a discrete industry, but it’s also important to our future to set ourselves up for further applications.”

At Disrupt SF 2018, Facebook’s soon-to-be-former chief security officer Alex Stamos will join us to chat about his tenure in the top security role for the world’s biggest social network, how it feels to have weathered some of the biggest security and privacy scandals to ever hit the tech industry and securing U.S. elections in the 2018 midterms and beyond.

Following his last day at Facebook on August 17, Stamos will transition to an academic role at Stanford, starting this September. Since March, Stamos has focused on election security at Facebook as the company tries to rid its massive platform of Russian interference and bolster it against disinformation campaigns aiming to disrupt U.S. politics.

“It is critical that we as an industry live up to our collective responsibility to consider the impact of what we build, and I look forward to continued collaboration and partnership with the security and safety teams at Facebook,” Stamos said of the company he is leaving.

At Stanford, Stamos will take on a full-time role as an adjunct professor with the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and plans to conduct research, as well. Stamos previously lectured a security class at Stanford and intends to expand on that foundation with a hands-on “hack lab” where students explore real-world hacking techniques and how to defend against them. With the class, open to non-computer science majors, Stamos seeks to expose a broader swath of students to the intricacies of cybersecurity.

Prior to his time at Facebook, Stamos served as the chief information security officer at Yahoo . Stamos left in 2015 for his new security role at Facebook, reportedly over clashes at the beleaguered company over cybersecurity resources and the implementation of measures like end-to-end encryption. In both roles, Stamos navigated the choppy waters of high-profile privacy scandals while trying to chart a more secure path forward.

The full agenda is here. You can purchase tickets here.

After a largely successful IPO, Dropbox is adding another couple of hires today as it looks to continue its consumer-slash-enterprise growth playbook: bringing on a new VP of product in former CEO and president of Wealthfront Adam Nash; and a new VP of product marketing and global campaigns in Naman Khan.

Both have extensive experience from products that span multiple different verticals, with Nash previously working at LinkedIn and eBay and Khan spending time with Microsoft Office and Autodesk. The company went public earlier this year to a pretty successful IPO, though the stock hasn’t seen any dramatic fireworks, and has accumulated more than 500 million registered users in its decade-plus life. But it’s also gone through a kind of transition as it starts expanding into more enterprise-focused collaboration tools as it looks to woo businesses, which represent a substantial opportunity for growth for the company that started off as a dead-simple file-sharing service.

Previously an entrepreneur-in-residence for Greylock, Nash is now going to oversee a wide range of products that span consumer-focused file storage and sharing services all the way up to its Google Docs competitor Paper — each of which has a kind of consumer-born aesthetic that’s targeting use cases within enterprises, whether that’s building tools to get documents into its service or to actually helping teams spec out products within a kind of continuous document like Paper. But as it focuses on simplicity, Dropbox has to take care not to end up feature-creeping its way out of what made it successful initially, so the final product decisions may be a bit different. Naman will also inherit that challenge of marketing a consumer-oriented product that’s targeting businesses.

As Dropbox looks to continue to mature as a public company, it has to ensure that it still brings on talent that understands where it’s going now as it tries to wrangle larger enterprise customers that have a complex set of needs beyond just the typical consumer. Going public certainly helps with that credibility a little bit, but it’s hires like these that will determine what kinds of products actually make it out the door and the messaging that goes with them — and whether larger enterprises will actually adopt them.

Audius wants to cut the middlemen out music streaming so artists get paid their fair share. Coming out of stealth today led by serial entrepreneur and DJ Ranidu Lankage, Audius is building a blockchain-based alternative to Spotify or SoundCloud. Users will pay for Audius tokens or earn them by listening to ads. Their wallet will then pay out a fraction of a cent per song to stream from decentralized storage across the network, with artists receiving roughly 85 percent — compared to roughly 70 percent on the leading streaming apps. The rest goes to compensating whoever is hosting that song, as well as developers of listening software clients, one of which will be built by Audius.

Audius plans to launch its open sourced product in beta later this year. But it’s already found some powerful investors who see SoundCloud as vulnerable to the cryptocurrency revolution. Audius has raised a $5.5 million Series A led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Pantera Capital, 122West and Ascolta Ventures. They’re betting that Audius’ token will grow in value, making the stockpile it keeps worth a fortune. It could then chunks of its tokens to earn revenue instead of charging artists directly.

“The biggest problem in the music industry is that streaming taking off and arists aren’t necessarily earning a lot of money. And it can take 3 months, or up to 18 months for unsigned artists, to get paid for streams” says Lankage. “That’s what crypto really solves. You can pay artists in near real time and make it fully transparent.”

The big question will be whether Audius can use the token economy to crack the chicken-and-egg problem of getting its first creators and listeners on a platform that might be less functionally robust than its traditional competitors. There are a lot of moving parts to decentralize, but there’s also plenty of disgruntled musicians out there waiting for something better.

TechCrunch invites NGO’s and nonprofit organizations to exhibit at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco on September 7th. Organizations can apply here.

Founded in 2014, the TechCrunch Include Program aims to facilitate opportunities in tech for underserved and underrepresented communities. The TC Nonprofit Program is one initiative of this program.

Through an application, TechCrunch will select 10 nonprofit and/or NGOs to showcase on the Startup Alley show floor at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. This year’s Disrupt SF will be three times as large, giving these organizations three times as much exposure and access to investors, press and international startups.

Nonprofits and NGOs must be a registered 501c3 (or similar status for at least two years) and serve an underrepresented or underserved community in tech. Preference is given to local organizations. Apply here. Organizations will exhibit in Startup Alley on September 7th and receive two full conference passes, one exhibit space, inclusion in the printed program and online program guide, Wi-Fi and a branded tabletop sign.

Applications are open from now till August 13th. Groups will be notified of their participation status on August 15th and be expected to register within 24 hours. If you have additional questions, please email neesha@techcrunch.com

LetGo, the app-based marketplace for people to sell each other second-hand goods, has nabbed a great deal of its own. Today, the startup announced that it has picked up an extra $500 million in funding from Naspers, the South African e-commerce and media giant, which it plans to use to double down on growth, both in its core second-hand goods sales as well as in newer areas such as the housing listings that it launched last month.

The company is not disclosing valuation, although a source close to the business confirmed that it has definitely grown compared to its last funding round, when it raised about $100 million at around a $1 billion valuation. That means this round above $1.5 billion pre-money.

LetGo said that $150 million of the total was transferred earlier this summer. Naspers had been a previous investor, and other backers of the company include Accel, Insight Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, 14W, Eight Roads Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and FJ Labs.

LetGo competes with the likes of eBay, Craigslist, OfferUp (which has also broken through the $1 billion valuation barrier) and Facebook, among many others in the very crowded world of second-hand, locally-focused marketplaces .

Within that, however, it’s carved out a strong place for itself: LetGo says that its app has passed 100 million downloads and 400 million listings in total, with monthly listers up 65 percent since the start of this year. Some 13 million messages are sent daily in connection with goods on the site, and 6 billion messages have been sent since first opening for business three years ago. (The company does not break out any financials, but we are still digging on this and will update if/when we learn more.)

Part of its growth also has been due to some significant consolidation in the space: in 2016 it merged with rival Wallapop in a bid for more scale, and reportedly was looking to merge also with Offerup at one point.

“We are extraordinarily fortunate to have investors who believe so strongly in our vision and team,” said LetGo cofounder Alec Oxenford in a statement. “We are fueling unprecedented growth in the secondhand economy through meaningful innovation. Our app makes it simple for tens of millions of buyers and sellers to connect in their own neighborhoods so they can put more money in their pockets, declutter their lives and put their space to better use.”

Patreon is forming a patronage empire. Today it acquired white-labeled subscription membership platform Memberful, which lets creators sell exclusive access to content through their own site instead of a centralized platform like Patreon. Rather than being folded into a Patreon feature, Memberful will run as an independent brand maintaining its tiered pricing structure, though new sign-ups will get a rate closer to Patreon’s low 5 percent rake.

Terms weren’t disclosed for the deal that brings Memberful’s whole seven-person team and 500 paying clients aboard. But Patreon clearly sees rolling up competitors and complements in the patronage space as a worthy use of its $60 million raise at a $450 million valuation late last year that brought it to $105 million in funding. In June, Patreon bought Kit to let creators bundle in merchandise with their perks for paying monthly subscribers. It also bought out competitor Subbable back in 2015.

By teaming up, Patreon and Memberful will be able to provide subscription patronage services for creators, whether they want their fan community to live on Patreon, or through Memberful on their own WordPress or website with integrations of Stripe and MailChimp. Patreon already has 2 million patrons paying an average of $12 each to a total of 100,000 creators, and it expects to pay out $300 million in 2018 alone. The acquisition could let Patreon move up market, recruiting comedians, illustrators, game developers, and vloggers that already have an established audience elsewhere.

“I think membership is on the up and is going to grow for the next decade” says Patreon VP of Product Wyatt Jenkins. “Our strategy is to be an open, neutral platform” as opposed to a focusing on one type of content like YouTube with videos or Twitch with streaming where you’re locked into that platform’s tools. Memberful, launched in 2013, has bootstrapped the creation of its white-labeled tools without the need for venture funding.

Memberful gives creators like Stratechery’s Ben Thompson (who has an interview with Patreon CEO Jack Conte about the acquistion) and podcast producer Gimlet Media full control over branding with no Patreon chrome. But it’s more expensive and also requires more work since creators have to manage their own site, customer service, and payment processing. Memberful takes a 10 percent cut with no monthly fee for its limited basic tier, or $25 per month plus 4.9 percent for the full-featured pro version, though it also offers enterprise pricing. That pricing will remain for existing users, but “new customers will see a transaction fee closer to Patreon’s”, which is a flat 5 percent a Patreon spokesperson tells me. Patreon does basically everything for a creator, but it also ropes them into the Patreon-branded ecosystem that promotes other content makers too.

Sometimes Patreon handling everything can be a problem, though. Last week it experienced a higher-than-normal volume of declines from banks of charges to patrons. That left some creators without their expected income, and required patrons to deal with the chore of calling their bank to tell them paying $1, $5, or $20 per month to their favorite creator wasn’t fraud. Patreon now tells me that “as of Friday, we let everyone know that we were back to normal decline rates, and were going to continue retrying the rest of the cards like we normally do.”

It makes sense for Patreon to race to consolidate the patronage industry as it’s being invaded by giant incumbents. Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook all offer their own versions of paid subscriptions to creators that get patrons extra perks like exclusive content or badges so they stick out in chat rooms full of fans. While those platforms are all focused on video streamers, they still pose a threat to Patreon that needs to maximize the number of successful creators it hosts in order to earn enough from its tiny cut of payments. Facebook especially could muscle in, since many creators already run their own Facebook Pages.

Asked about competition from those platforms, Jenkins said “I think there’s a strong chance it’s a tailwind. The concept of membership is pretty new. If those big companies are going to drop millions of dollars into marketing the concept of membership I think that’s great. He stressed the question of “Do you want to own your fan base? On YouTube, those aren;t your fans, they’re YouTube users. YouTube is incentivized to keep them watching videos so it can show ads.”

That might lead fans to unsubscribe from a creator as YouTube promotes other similar ones they could watch instead. “You don’t own the relationship.” Facebook Page admins have found that out the hard way as algorithm changes prioritizing friends over public figures, making it tough to reach the followers they spent years begging to like them. If Patreon can offer creators audience growth through discovery on its interconnected network without cannibalizing anyone’s member counts, its neutrality and focus could make it a leader in this new wing of the digital economy.

Yesterday Oracle announced a new online transaction processing database service, finally bringing its key database technology into the cloud. The company, which has been around for over four decades made its mark selling databases to the biggest companies in the world, but as the world has changed, large enterprise customers have been moving increasingly to the cloud. These autonomous database products could mark Oracle’s best hope for cloud success.

The database giant, which has a market cap of over $194 billion and over $67 billion in cash on hand certainly has options no matter what happens with its cloud products. Yet if the future of enterprise computing is in the cloud, the company needs to find some sustained success there, and what better way to lure its existing customers than with its bread and butter database products.

Oracle has demonstrated a stronger commitment to the cloud in recent years after showing it much disdain for it. In fact, it announced it would be building 12 new regional data centers earlier this year alone, but it wasn’t always that way. Company founder and executive chairman Larry Ellison famously made fun of the cloud as “more fashion driven than women’s fashion.” Granted that was in 2008, but his company certainly came late to the party.

A different kind of selling

The cloud is not just a different way of delivering software, platform and infrastructure, it’s a different way of selling. While switching databases might not be an easy thing to do for most large companies, the cloud subscription payment model still offers a way out that licensing rarely did. As such, it requires more of a partnership between vendor and customer. After years of having a reputation of being aggressive with customers, it may be even harder for them to make this shift.

Salesforce exec Keith Block (who was promoted to Co-CEO just yesterday), worked at Oracle for 20 years before joining Salesforce in 2013. In an interview with TechCrunch in 2016, when asked specifically about the differences between Oracle and Salesforce, he contrasted the two company’s approaches and the challenges a company like Oracle, born and raised in the open prem world, faces as it shifts to the cloud. It takes more than a change in platform, he said.

“You also have to have the right business model and when you think about our business model, it is a ‘shared success model’. Basically, as you adopt the technology, it’s married to our payment schemes. So that’s very, very important because if the customer doesn’t win, we don’t win,” Block said at the time.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst and managing director at Synergy Research, a firm that keeps close watch on the cloud market, agrees that companies born on-prem face adjustments when moving to the cloud. “In order to survive and thrive in today’s cloud-oriented environment, any software company that grew up in the on-prem world needs to have powerful, cost-effective products that can be packaged and delivered flexibly – irrespective of whether that is via the cloud or via some form of enhanced on-prem solution,” he said.

Database as a Service or bust

All that said, if Oracle could adjust, it has the advantage of having a foothold inside the enterprise. It also claims a painless transition from on-prem Oracle database to its database cloud service, which if a company is considering moving to the cloud could be attractive. There is also the autonomous aspect of its cloud database offerings, which promises to be self-tuning, self-healing with automated maintenance and updates and very little downtime.

Carl Olofson, an analyst with IDC who covers the database market sees Oracle’s database service offerings as critical to its cloud aspirations, but expects business could move slowly here. “Certainly, this development (Oracle’s database offerings) looms large for those whose core systems run on Oracle Database, but there are other factors to consider, including any planned or active investment in SaaS on other cloud platforms, the overall future database strategy, the complexity of moving operations from the datacenter to the cloud, and so on. So, I expect actual movement here to be gradual.” he said.

Adam Ronthal, an analyst at Gartner sees the database service offerings as Oracle’s best chance for cloud success. “The Autonomous Data Warehouse and the Autonomous Transaction Processing offerings are really the first true cloud offerings from Oracle. They are designed and architected for cloud, and priced competitively. They are strategic and it is very important for Oracle to demonstrate success and value with these offerings as they build credibility and momentum for their cloud offerings,” he said.

The big question is can Oracle deliver in a cloud context using a more collaborative sales model, which is still not clear. While it showed some early success as it has transitioned to the cloud, it’s always easier easier to move from a small market share number to a bigger one, and the numbers (when they have given them) have flipped in the wrong direction in recent earnings reports.

As the stakes grow ever higher, Oracle is betting on what it’s known best all along, the databases that made the company. We’ll have to wait and see if that bet pays off or if Oracle’s days of database dominance are numbered as business looks to public cloud alternatives.

H1Z1 has spent a couple months on PS4 in an open beta. But today, the Battle Royale game is officially making its debut on the PlayStation platform.

Much like Fortnite Battle Royale, which has swept the gaming world unlike almost any title before it, H1Z1 drops 100 players into a map where they must loot up and survive. Unlike Battle Royale, H1Z1 is relatively more realistic, with a much larger map, more drab colors, and a handful of drivable vehicles.

Interestingly, H1Z1 was one of the earlier Battle Royale games during the game type’s wave of popularity, catching the attention of pro gamers back in 2015. Back then, the game was only available via Steam.

Since, games like PUBG and Fortnite have grown wildly, forcing H1Z1 makers Daybreak to play a bit of catch up.

But today, H1Z1 goes officially live on the PS4, giving gamers who are sick of Fortnite’s bubbly world a chance to get into the Battle Royale world in a different way.

Plus, Daybreak has added in a Fortnite-style Battle Pass for the season, letting PS4 players unlock reward levels for $5.49. H1Z1 is also getting a couple new weapons, including a Sniper Rifle and an RPG, as well as an ARV that can fit a full team of five.

You can check out the launch trailer below: