Author: azeeadmin

An antitrust suit against Facebook by the FTC and several states had the wind taken out of its sails today by a federal judge, who ruled that the plaintiffs don’t provide enough evidence that the company exerts monopoly control over social media. The court was more receptive, however, to revisiting the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and the case was left open for regulators to take another shot at it.

The court decision was in response to a Facebook motion to dismiss the suit. Judge James Boesberg of the D.C. circuit explained that the provided evidence of monopoly and antitrust violations was “too speculative and conclusory to go forward.” In a more ordinary industry, it might have sufficed, he admits, but “this case involves no ordinary or intuitive market.”

It was incumbent on the plaintiffs to back up their allegation of Facebook controlling 60 percent of the market with clear and voluminous data and a convincing delineation of what exactly that market comprises — and it failed to do so, wrote Boesberg. Therefore he dismissed the complaints in accordance with Facebook’s legal argument. (I’ve asked the FTC and Facebook for comment and will update this post if I hear back.)

On the other hand, Boesberg is sensible that lack of evidence in the record does not mean that the evidence does not exist. So he his giving the FTC and states 30 days to amend their filing, after which the complaints will be reevaluated.

He also found that Facebook’s logic for dismissing the suit’s allegations regarding its controversial acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp was lacking.

Facebook argued that even supposing that these acquisitions were somehow problematic, the FTC is not authorized to prosecute such “long-past conduct” and is limited to more recent or imminent problems. Boesberg was not convinced, finding precedent that essentially says such mergers are legally considered current as long as they exist, and the government can revisit them any time it thinks it has cause.

That may very well be the plan of the FTC’s new Chair, Lina Khan, who has taken a hawkish regulatory position regarding antitrust in general and past acquisitions specifically. At her confirmation hearing she commented that the approvals of the mergers may have been made without complete information and as such represented a “missed opportunity” to understand and build rules around.

The 30 day punt in fact may be a great opportunity for Khan to put her ideas into practice, as the judge practically literally invites them to rewrite the complaint with more information. Whether she and the FTC have enough material to put together a compelling case remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: Facebook should put the champagne back in the fridge, for now at least. Khan may not stop at a slap on the wrist.

After raising tens of millions from investors and executing a pretty substantial pivot earlier this year, augmented reality startup Ubiquity6 and its team have been acquired by gaming chat app giant Discord.

The ambitious AR startup had raised $37.5 million from a series of top investors including Benchmark, First Round, Kleiner Perkins and Google’s Gradient Ventures who were betting on its vision of building a consumer-facing platform for hosting augmented reality content. Its most recent publicly disclosed financing was a $27 million Series B in October of 2018.

Terms of the Discord acquisition weren’t disclosed, though in recent months the startup seemed to abandon most of the products it had spent its first several years building, suggesting that Ubiquity6 had been having some issues finding wide audiences for its products.

Launching back in 2017, Ubiquity6 hoped to build an app that would be the central way mobile phone users would browse augmented reality content. In late 2019, the startup launched a product called Displayland, which aimed to gamify the process of 3D scanning physical environments with a smartphone’s camera.

The company’s efforts to find mass adoption were hampered by a mobile AR market which has largely failed to gain any momentum in recent years despite hefty investment from tech giants including Apple and Google.

In early 2020, CEO Anjney Midha told TechCrunch that the startup had some 65 employees.

In recent months, Ubiquity6 had executed a pretty drastic pivot, leaving augmented reality completely behind in favor of building out a desktop platform that allowed users to play simple online party games together remotely. The beta platform, called Backyard, was designed for pandemic era habits that seem to be on the decline as the US springs back into action. Backyard was discontinued this week as part of the acquisition announcement.

In a Medium post announcing the acquisition, Midha seems to downplay any expectations that Ubiquity6’s augmented reality technology will be living on inside Discord.

“Our mission at Ubiquity6 has always been to unlock new ways for people to connect through shared experiences,” Midha wrote. “Joining Discord today allows us to accelerate that mission — Ubiquity6’s team, Backyard product and multiplayer technology will be integrated into Discord.”

The road to entrepreneurship is never easy. The process is stressful and requires a tremendous amount of hustle, risk-taking and comfort with ambiguity. The sacrifices are innumerable, and they sometimes come at the expense of a person’s mental health.

Founders often find themselves in situations where they are under-resourced and overcommitted. While it’s exciting to chase a dream, the weight of responsibility — to employees, investors and customers — can feel overwhelming.

Compounding this issue is the reluctance many founders have to disclose how they’re feeling to those closest to them for fear that they will be perceived as a “failure” or ill-equipped to perform their job. Imagine for a moment that a founder is struggling with addiction or substance abuse because of the demands and pressures of running their company. Now imagine compounding the worry and anxiety by having to reveal something like this to investors.

Michael Freeman, a psychiatrist and former CEO who serves on the faculty of the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, investigated the prevalence and characteristics of mental health conditions among entrepreneurs.

He concluded founders are twice as likely to suffer from depression, six times more likely to suffer from ADHD, three times more likely to suffer from substance abuse and twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts than a demographically matched comparison. Freeman found that entrepreneurs are 50% more likely to report having a mental health condition, with some specific conditions being incredibly prevalent among founders.

The statistics are eye-opening, but the real, tangible impact can be truly devastating.

I say all the time that if I have a sore arm or a sore shoulder, I’ll come into work and I’ll whine about it. But if I couldn’t sleep last night or I’m paranoid about going outside or I’ve been taking too many sleeping pills or drinking too much wine, I won’t talk about it.

I’ll say that I’m going to my doctor to get my shoulder fixed, but I won’t say that I’m going to talk to my therapist.

At QED Investors, we experienced the terrible results of this silence firsthand. In 2018, we lost our partner Greg Mazanec after a long battle with substance abuse. Since then, we’ve been working with Greg’s family to determine how we can do our part to prevent others in the VC and startup worlds from suffering the same fate.

I can’t speak highly enough of Greg, both as a personal friend and a colleague. He was the definition of an amazing human being — an orthogonal thinker, tenacious, brilliant, quirky. We lost him far too soon. Today, we carry him around on our shoulders.

We had a team of 15 people at the time, so you can imagine how close everyone was. I swore to myself and to his family that I would talk about him wherever I had the chance. So, whenever I get in front of LPs or my portfolio companies, I bring this issue out into the open to tackle this corrosive stigma head-on.

Taking mental health discussions out of the shadows can massively change the trajectory of outcomes. Our world of venture capital is replete with people who are going through these kinds of difficulties, even before the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated people’s fears and worries. People have felt increasingly isolated, depressed, anxious and helpless. Some may have turned to opioids or another form of addiction or substance misuse.

The research is clear — support from friends, peers and colleagues is pivotal in conquering mental illness. As companies start returning to the office or adopting a home-office hybrid, organizations have a real chance to refocus their company cultures, destigmatize addiction and make mental wellness a priority. This is a unique window to focus on this disease.

The Mazanec family created Operation Lighthouse to address substance abuse and addiction in the ecosystem most dear to Greg — the founder and entrepreneur community. It was the easiest of decisions for QED to lean in heavily to support this wonderful initiative.

Earlier this year, QED piloted a program called Just Five with three of our portfolio companies. Created by national mental health nonprofit Shatterproof, Just Five delivers, in 5 minutes per lesson, the most important concepts and facts regarding addiction.

Today, we are excited to roll out that same self-paced and anonymous educational program free of charge to more than 16,000 employees across all 50 of QED’s U.S.-based portfolio companies.

This program’s intent is to provide mental health education and catalyze informed discussion to ultimately reduce stigma.

Over the course of the year, we intend to expand the reach of this program to our international portfolio companies, as well as to other VCs who might wish to support their founders. A Spanish-language version is already planned.

Each of the six lessons has a specific theme. The first two lessons touch on the science of addiction and how certain factors such as age of first use, genetics and environment can explain why some people become addicted and others do not.

The middle lessons explain the dangers of opioids and the signs, symptoms and treatment options for substance abuse, while the final topics touch on ways people can help. The majority of the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received so far has been centered around those final two lessons. We learned something that we anecdotally already knew — people want to help, but those who need help the most don’t always know how to ask for it.

I’ve taken every opportunity I’ve had to discuss mental health over the past few years. I truly believe that if you destigmatize it, people can deal with it. It’s a solvable problem. Just like your sore shoulder, it can be fixed. We just have to do a better job at creating a culture where people can take the first step and speak openly about it.

We can — we must — make a difference. Have your voice join mine.

Last fall, Facebook announced it was opening an office in Lagos, Nigeria, which would provide the company with a hub in the region and the first office on the continent staffed with a team of engineers. We’ve now spotted one of the first products to emerge from this office: an education-focused mobile app called Sabee, which means “to know” in Nigerian Pidgin. The app aims to connect learners and educators in online communities to make educational opportunities more accessible.

The app was briefly published to Google Play by “NPE Team,” the internal R&D group at Facebook, which has typically focused on new social experiences in areas like dating, audio, music, video, messaging and more.

While the learnings from the NPE Team’s apps sometimes inform broader Facebook efforts, the group hasn’t yet produced an app that has graduated to become a standalone Facebook product. Many of its earlier apps have also shut down, including (somewhat sadly), the online zine creator Eg.g, video app Hobbi, calling app CatchUp, friend-finder Bump, podcast community app Venue, and several others.

Sabee, however, represents a new direction for the NPE Team, as it’s not about building yet another social experiment.

Instead, Sabee is tied to Facebook’s larger strategy of focusing more on serving the African continent, starting with Nigeria. This is a strategic move, informed by data that indicates a larger majority of the world’s population will be in urban centers by 2030, and much of that will be on the African continent and throughout the Middle East. By 2100, Africa’s population is expected to have tripled, with Nigeria becoming the second-most populated country in the world, behind China.

Image Credits: Facebook NPE Team

To address the need to connect these regions to the internet, Facebook teamed with telcos on 2Africa, a subsea cable project that aims to serve the over 1 billion people still offline in Africa and the Middle East. These aren’t altruistic investments, of course — Facebook knows its future growth will come from these demographics.

Facebook confirmed its plans for Sabee to TechCrunch after we discovered it, noting it was still a small test for the time being.

“There are 50 million learners, but only 2 million educators in Nigeria,” said Facebook Product Lead, Emeka Okafor. “With this small, early test, we’re hoping to understand how we can help educators build communities that make education available to everyone. We look forward to learning with our early testers, and deciding what to do from there.”

Image Credits: Facebook NPE Team

The disparity between learners and educators in Nigeria greatly impacts women and girls, which is another key focus for Sabee — and the NPE Team’s efforts in the region as a whole. The company also wants to explore how to better serve groups who are often left behind by technology. On this front, Sabee is working to create an experience that works with low connectivity, like 2G.

We understand the app is currently in early alpha testing with fewer than 100 testers who are under NDA agreements with Facebook. It’s not available for anyone else beyond that group at present, but the company hopes to scale Sabee to the next stage before the end of the year.

There is no way to sign up for a Sabee waitlist, and the app is no longer public on Google Play. It was available so briefly that it was never ranked on any charts, app store intelligence firm Sensor Tower confirmed to us.

We should note that “sabee” and “sabi/sabis” have other, less-polite meanings in different languages, per Urban Dictionary. But the team has no plans to change the name for now as it makes sense in the Nigerian market where the app is targeted.

ON this week’s episode of Found, we speak to Rob Schutz, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Ro. Ro recently raised $500 million, bringing its total raised to date to near $1 billion. The digital healthcare startup now does everything from telehealth primary care, to operating physical pharmacies, but it originally began life as Roman, a startup addressing men’s health, and specifically, erectile dysfunction.

Rob told us how a windy path from founding a daily deals site in the heady times of Groupon, to teaching at General Assembly, and being an early employee at Bark Box (now just ‘Bark’) led him to meeting up with co-founders Zachariah Reitano and Saman Rahmanian and setting up Roman in the first place. He also detailed how the company evolved, first to address women’s health as well, and eventually to providing much more broad-reaching remote primary care.

We talked about everything from managing the dynamics in a a founder triumvirate (including declarations of love), to dealing with the ongoing complications of a rebrand, to operating a business in an industry with dense regulatory requirements that vary considerably state to state.

We loved our time chatting with Rob, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.

Yes, developers are a tough crowd. They hate being sold to, and it’s pretty easy for traditional marketing campaigns to fall flat with them because they’d much rather get a recommendation from a colleague. Failed campaign after failed campaign has led many software company executives to throw up their hands and declare all sales and marketing to be pointless.

And that’s just wrong. Selling to developers isn’t impossible — it’s just difficult. I cover why it’s difficult and offer examples of exceptional developer-focused marketing in my new playbook. Part of selling to developers involves balancing two things: building out a strong organic marketing function and targeting your audience with the right message at the right time throughout their buyer journey.

Easier said than done, right?

Yep. I see it all the time. Part of what’s blocking marketers from widening the top of the funnel (driving more developers to sign up for their free tools) for their developer-focused businesses is ensuring they have the right data and measurement capabilities in place to understand how much impact their activities have on the business.

That’s mostly because these marketers, community managers and developer relations experts have the most luck with organic marketing. In this industry, organic marketing is one of the most challenging to measure.

Organic marketing means investing in channels like referrals, organic search, organic social (community) and direct traffic to your website (brand). New users from paid marketing, banner ads, events or sales reps (the most measurable channels) don’t count as organic. We measure the fruits of these efforts with a new metric called Natural Rate of Growth.

In a digital, multi-touch-point world, it’s getting more challenging to measure which users hear about your brand from which channels. That’s why tools like Orbit, Tribe and Mighty have gained traction so quickly.

That’s all good, and it’ll be a huge boon for community managers in time, but these tools still don’t solve some of the core data strategy issues I see developer-focused software companies fighting. These quick tips should help your team align around what needs to be done and what’s just a “nice to have” so that selling to developers feels less like a battle.

1. Treat data like a product where a core end user is the go-to-market side of the team.
2. Map your customer’s journey from discovery to expansion and track it religiously.
3. Don’t overthink it.

Treat data like a product

Yes, developers are a tough crowd. They hate being sold to, and it’s pretty easy for traditional marketing campaigns to fall flat with them because they’d much rather get a recommendation from a colleague. Failed campaign after failed campaign has led many software company executives to throw up their hands and declare all sales and marketing to be pointless.

And that’s just wrong. Selling to developers isn’t impossible — it’s just difficult. I cover why it’s difficult and offer examples of exceptional developer-focused marketing in my new playbook. Part of selling to developers involves balancing two things: building out a strong organic marketing function and targeting your audience with the right message at the right time throughout their buyer journey.

Easier said than done, right?

Yep. I see it all the time. Part of what’s blocking marketers from widening the top of the funnel (driving more developers to sign up for their free tools) for their developer-focused businesses is ensuring they have the right data and measurement capabilities in place to understand how much impact their activities have on the business.

That’s mostly because these marketers, community managers and developer relations experts have the most luck with organic marketing. In this industry, organic marketing is one of the most challenging to measure.

Organic marketing means investing in channels like referrals, organic search, organic social (community) and direct traffic to your website (brand). New users from paid marketing, banner ads, events or sales reps (the most measurable channels) don’t count as organic. We measure the fruits of these efforts with a new metric called Natural Rate of Growth.

In a digital, multi-touch-point world, it’s getting more challenging to measure which users hear about your brand from which channels. That’s why tools like Orbit, Tribe and Mighty have gained traction so quickly.

That’s all good, and it’ll be a huge boon for community managers in time, but these tools still don’t solve some of the core data strategy issues I see developer-focused software companies fighting. These quick tips should help your team align around what needs to be done and what’s just a “nice to have” so that selling to developers feels less like a battle.

1. Treat data like a product where a core end user is the go-to-market side of the team.
2. Map your customer’s journey from discovery to expansion and track it religiously.
3. Don’t overthink it.

Treat data like a product

LocoNav, a startup that is helping drivers and fleet owners in over two-dozen nations run their vehicles more efficiently and save money, said on Monday it has raised $37 million in a new financing round.

Five-year-old LocoNav’s new financing round, a Series B, was funded by Quiet Capital, Anthemis Group, Foundamental, Sequoia Capital India, RIT Capital Partners, Uncorrelated Ventures, Village Global and others. The new financing round brings the to-date raise of LocoNav, which has offices in San Francisco and Gurgaon, to $47 million.

Scores of high-profile tech executives including Anjali Joshi (ex-VP of Product at Google), Anand Chandrasekaran (ex-CPO at SnapDeal and ex-Director Facebook), Manik Gupta (ex-CPO at Uber), Jai Shekhawat, Mark Licht, Akhil Paul, Vas Bhandarkar, Ajay Agarwal (Partner at Bain Capital Ventures), Abhi Ingle (COO at Qualtrics), Aadil Mamujee also participated in the new round.

Over half a million vehicle and fleet owners in 25 nations use LocoNav’s platform today that uses AI to help them manage their fleet operations, keep a watch on performance, and improve efficiency, the startup’s founders Shridhar Gupta and Vidit Jain told TechCrunch in an interview.

The startup’s platform delivers assistance and recommendations to drivers to make better choices. LocoNav also enables customers to track fuel usage, and any potential theft. Its platform supports over a thousand devices and sensors, enabling it onboard new customers very quickly.

The founders said that the market in which they operate has become very large over the past decade as many drivers and fleet owners begin to engage with tech platforms. Some of the players operating in this space include unicorns and decacorns Fleetcor, Trimble, and A16z-backed Samsara.

But these players are largely operating in developed markets, which has allowed LocoNav to win customers in emerging nations, the founders said. “In global developing markets, no one has ambitiously built a large player and we see ourselves as the first mover there,” said Gupta. The founders added that the biggest roadblock in the industry remains drivers and fleet owners who are not using any tech.

“LocoNav has built an end-to-end product that becomes deeply embedded in how fleet owners and operators run their business. As a result, LocoNav has been able to scale rapidly through word of mouth, allowing the company to become a hyper growth market leader while also being very capital efficient,” said David Greenbaum, Partner at Quiet Capital, in a statement.

By having such deep visibility into a vehicle, LocoNav has also become very attractive to a range of firms — from app-based cab aggregators, car vendors to fintech startups and sensor manufacturers, said Jain. The startup is also using its data insights to develop customer-relevant services and bringing them to a single platform, he added.

LocoNav plans to deploy the fresh capital to hire data science teams across San Francisco, Gurgaon and Bangalore. In the next two years, the startup aims to broaden its product offerings to help fleet owners cut their costs by up to 50%, the founders said.

“Shridhar and Vidit have found the ideal playbook for delivering world-class value-added services and products to fleet owners across the globe through the use of AI and software solutions. We are thrilled at how rapidly the firm has been able to expand its global footprint by replicating its own model and suite of offerings for fleet owners,” said Shubhankar Bhattacharya, General Partner at Foundamental, in a statement.

Samsung’s Mobile World Congress presser was, once again, all about wearables. The big news at this evening’s (or afternoon’s, timezone dependent) event was our best look yet at a redesigned interface for the company’s line of Galaxy Watches.

One UI Watch – which takes its name for the Galaxy mobile interface — will share a design language with the one found on the company’s line of Galaxy phones. The upcoming One UI Watch will debut at an upcoming Unpacked event later this summer, sporting the new UI, as well as the forthcoming joint Samsung/Google platform.

Image Credits: Samsung/Google

It was first teased at I/O last month that the two technology powerhouses would be teaming up on a wearables project. We still have little in the way of information about it, however, – including what it will actually be called.

The partnership was initially announced as a “unified platform” that would allow developers to create a single app for both Google’s Wear OS and Tizen, the open-source operating system Samsung has long relied on for its own smartwatches. As we noted at the time, third-party app development has proven a considerable hurdle for both companies as they look to take on Apple’s dominance of the space.

Among the benefits of the partnerships is that once a watch-compatible app has been downloaded on a connected smartphone, it will also be downloaded to the app. Along with first-party Google apps like Maps and YouTube Music, the list includes Spotify (naturally), Calm, Strava, Adidas Running and Sleep Cycle.

Image Credits: Samsung/Google

“Samsung and Google have a long history of collaboration and whenever we’ve worked together, the experience for our consumers has been dramatically better for everyone,” Google SVP Sameer Samat said in a release tied to the news. “That certainly holds true for this new, unified platform, which will be rolling out for the first time on Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch. In collaboration with Samsung, we’re thrilled to bring longer battery life, faster performance, and a wide range of apps, including many from Google to a whole new wearable experience.”

Such a partnership seems odd at first blush – Samsung long ago eschewed Google’s wearable operating system in favor of its own heavily customized version of Tizen. Ultimately, however, it seems the two are united against the monolith that is Apple – which currently enjoys somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% of the global market. Samsung is in second, but even with Fitbit under its wing, Google’s still got a ways to go.

Samsung will also be showing off improved development tools that make it easier to create things like watch faces for the platform.

Microsoft today released the first preview build of Windows 11 to those in the Dev Channel of the company’s Windows Insider program. If you have joined the Insider program and meet Microsoft’s new — and somewhat complicated — system requirements for the new operating system, you should see the update soon.

This first preview includes most of the new features Microsoft has promised for Windows 11, including the new look and feel, themes, widgets, the new snap layouts and the updated File Explorer. But there are also some features that didn’t yet make the cut for this first release. Support for Android apps and the new built-in Teams integration, for example, are coming in a later release, but a preview of the new Windows Store is already available today.

Otherwise, though, you’ll get to try out the new Start menu for example (and fret not, you will be able to move the start button to the bottom left if you don’t like the centered look — but you won’t be able to move the entire taskbar to another side of the screen). And while the Start menu is an iconic part of the Windows experience, most power users probably never use it and instead use their keyboard or the taskbar to start 99% of their applications. Still, Microsoft is trying to do something different here with its new “recommended” section that highlights newly installed apps and recently used files.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Another new feature you’ll likely spot right away is the new File Explorer, which now does away with the ribbon-style menu in favor of a flatter look (Microsoft calls it a ‘command bar’) and new, more modern icons across the board. It looks good, but we’ll have to give it a try to see if it hasn’t lost a lot of functionality in the process.

The File Explorer, just like every other app in WIndows 11, will also feature support for Microsoft’s new Snap layouts, which take the existing ‘snapping’ gesture or keyboard shortcuts in Windows that let you snap windows to any side of the screen and brings it to the maximize button. While the overall functionality isn’t new here, I’m pretty sure that a lot of Windows users never knew it existed, so this new feature will introduce window snapping to a lot more users.

Image Credits: Microsoft

The new widgets, too, are now prominently highlighted in the taskbar. Right now, there are calendar, weather, local traffic, Microsoft To Do and stocks widgets, as well widgets that show you recent photos from OneDrive and sports and esports news if that’s your thing. There’s also a personalized new feed.

The last new feature worth mentioning here is the new Settings menu. Ever since the ill-fated Windows 8, Windows essentially had two settings menus (the Control Panel and Settings). It looks like those confusing days aren’t over just yet, but the new Settings menu at least looks a lot cleaner than the existing one in Windows 10.

There are, of course, plenty of other changes in Windows 11. This is definitely more than just another bi-annual Windows 10 update with a few minor UI changes. Now we’ll just have to see how all of this works in the real world — though keep in mind that this is still an early release. The preview is now rolling out to Insiders, so we’ll likely hear more about how it performs soon. We’ll also put it through its paces in the coming days, too.