Author: azeeadmin

The Supreme Court has ruled that a police officer who searched a license plate database for an acquaintance in exchange for cash did not violate U.S. hacking laws.

The landmark ruling concludes a long-running case that clarifies the controversial Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA, by putting limits on what kind of conduct can be prosecuted.

The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Nathan Van Buren, a former Georgia police sergeant who brought the case. Van Buren was prosecuted on two counts, one for accepting a kickback for accessing the database as a serving police officer, and another for violating the CFAA. His first conviction was overturned, but the CFAA conviction was upheld — until today.

Although Van Buren was allowed to access the license plate database, the legal question became whether or not he had exceeded his authorized access.

In the ruling, the Supreme Court said that the CFAA “covers those who obtain information from particular areas in the computer — such as files, folders, or databases — to which their computer access does not extend,” and that while Van Vuren “plainly flouted” the police department’s rules for law enforcement purposes, he did not violate the CFAA, wrote Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote the majority opinion.

The CFAA was signed into law in 1986 to prosecute hackers who gain “unauthorized” access to a computer or network. But courts have been split on what “unauthorized” means. Legal experts have argued that a broad reading of the law could criminalize violating a site’s terms of service, such as lying on a dating profile or sharing a password to a streaming service. The court said that the government’s interpretation of the law “would attach criminal penalties to a breathtaking amount of commonplace computer activity.”

Not all the justices agreed. “Without valid law enforcement purposes, he was forbidden to use the computer to obtain that information,” wrote Justice Thomas, who filed a dissenting opinion along with Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts.

Civil liberties experts said Congress should act to amend the CFAA following the court’s ruling.

“This is an important and welcome decision that will help protect digital research and journalism that is urgently necessary. But more is needed,” said Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute. “Congress should amend the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to eliminate any remaining uncertainty about the scope of the statute. It should also create a safe harbor for researchers and journalists who are working to study disinformation and discrimination online. Major technology companies should not have a veto over research and journalism that are manifestly in the public interest.”

It’s been a busy week for private equity with Cloudera, Stack Overflow and FireEye coming off the board on Tuesday and Wednesday. Today Blackstone bought media and data company IDG for $1.3 billion. The company had been owned by Oriental Rainbow, LLC, a subsidiary of China Oceanwide Holdings Group, Co. Ltd.

With IDG, Blackstone gets tech analyst firm IDC along with a collection of tech publications that includes CIO, Computerworld, InfoWorld, Macworld, Network World, PCWorld, and Tech Hive. The media publishing arm was once a powerhouse in the 1990s tech publishing world, although its shine has faded in recent years as the publishing industry in general has come under intense pressure.

The company has also been making some additions to the platform more recently with a stronger focus on data and analytics. Last year it bought Triblio, a marketing data platform to help companies deliver more personalized customer experiences. Last month it acquired Metri, an IT pricing service, which can help with IT budgeting and procurement. The latter could dovetail nicely with IDC’s consulting services.

Company CEO Mohamad Ali is hoping that Blackstone can infuse more capital into the company to keep building on its software services with a data focus. “Additional capital investment from Blackstone will allow us to cultivate our rich history of innovation and accelerate our product roadmaps to bring our customers the deeper insights and data they need to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving digital economy,” said in a statement.

That sounds like he wants to increase his data bet. It seems that the data side of the business was particularly attractive to Blackstone as well. “The high-quality data, analytics and insights IDG delivers to technology leaders are only becoming more critical as the pace of growth and innovation accelerates,” Peter Wallace, Global Head of Core Private Equity at Blackstone said in a statement.

The company launched in 1964 with the consulting side of the business, but founder Pat McGovern had a broader vision and began the publishing side of the company in 1967 with the launch of Computerworld. The publishing business actually grew to become integral part of the rise of the PC and the technology shift that occurred at a personal and business level in the 80s and 90s. It’s unclear what this deal will mean for the publishing side of the house or where that would even fit in as it continues the push to focus on data and analytics.

It’s worth noting that Verizon Media, which owns this publication along Engadget, was also recently sold to private equity firm, Apollo Global, as the private equity push into all parts of the technology ecosystem continues.

Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse, but Elizabeth Ruzzo says she experienced it firsthand after telling a doctor that she suffered from suicidal ideation after taking birth control pills.

Ruzzo’s doctor told her there was no connection between birth control and self-harm, but she decided to stop taking the pill to see if her mental health improved. When it did, Ruzzo grasped the disconnect between women’s unique hormonal makeup and blanket-statement practices from medicine today.

Her realization led her to found Adyn Health, a startup that proactively helps women make health decisions that complement their hormonal state and background. The company started with, of course, helping people pick more personalized birth control.

Ruzzo is part of a group of growing entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom. Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving, and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.

Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.

Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.

The future is proactive

Ruzzo views Adyn as a precision medicine startup. Its main product is an at-home test that tracks hormone levels, assesses genetic risk for specific side effects, and then gives recommendations for which birth control methods best suits the customer with the fewest side effects.

By Ruzzo’s estimates, 98% of sexually active women use birth control for 30 years of their life. That sort of lifetime value proposition made the company look like a sweet deal to founders, and Adyn raised a $2.5 million seed in April 2021 in a round co-led by Lux Capital and M13.

The moonshot, though, is using that as a way to become a trusted partner in a woman’s life, helping understand baseline hormone levels throughout those 30 years.

“My hope is that we can use precision medicine approaches, including looking at genetic markers to identify reliable diagnostic criteria, that can remove that uncertainty and pain and diagnostic odyssey that people have to go through,” Ruzzo said.

If Adyn becomes a trusted partner with teenage women, it could reach a point where it can detect changes in hormone levels over time.

“The hormone reference ranges that are used [in labs] are too broad to be personalized, let alone prescriptive,” she said. “And so what we’re hoping to do is correct for things that we know affect hormone levels like age, weight, ethnicity, and compare you to your own expectations.”

If the first wave of digital health was a company like Ro, which answers consumers when they have a condition such as erectile dysfunction or hair loss, the second wave will look more like Adyn, which helps consumers navigate their health before getting diagnosed with a condition or experiencing issues.

The industry standard is still to wait for consumers to realize they have a condition, and then go to the doctor to manage their symptoms or look for a cure. And a new startup that recently graduated from Y Combinator is finding its way into hormonal health through that angle.

One-tenth of all women are impacted by a hormonal condition

Veera Health is a startup that wants to help women in India manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or PCOS. The hormonal condition can cause irregular periods, infertility or gestational diabetes in women, as well as acne, weight gain and excessive hair growth. Plus, PCOS is far from rare, impacting one in 10 women.

Disrupt 2020 was an absolute banger of a conference, but we’re not ones to rest on our laurels. We have an incredible Disrupt in store for you this September 21-23, with an amazing line up of speakers across the hottest of topics, like crypto, health/biotech, SPACs, the creator economy, and the usual spread of startup how-to content and fundraising strategies and tactics.

And we’re ahead of schedule, which means we’re ready to share with you some of the speakers that will be gracing the Extra Crunch stage. As former Disrupt attendees know, the conference features two different stages: the Disrupt stage and the Extra Crunch stage.

The Extra Crunch stage is all about giving founders and operators as much strategic insight as possible, across a wide variety of startup core competencies, such as fundraising, product iteration, tech stack development, growth marketing and more.

As with past years, CrunchMatch (our system for matching investors with entrepreneurs and connecting all attendees) will be running throughout the whole show.

Today, we’d like to share with you a first look at the Disrupt 2021 agenda for the Extra Crunch Stage. More speakers will be added to this agenda, but we couldn’t resist giving you a peek under the hood.

Take a look and then grab your pass to join in on the action for under $99!

 

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Tuesday, September 21

How to Raise Your First Dollars with Luciana Lixandru (Sequoia), Rebecca Lynn (Canvas Ventures)

Deciding how to go about getting your initial funding is always a tricky subject, as the wrong move could adversely impact your young company. In this session we’ll hear from experts who’ve shepherded multiple companies from the earliest to the latest fundraises.

How to Cultivate a Community for your Company that Actually Lasts with Alex Angel (Commsor), Katelin Holloway (776 Ventures), and Lolita Taub (The Community Fund)

There’s no doubt about it: the word of the year in startupland is “community.” In this panel, Community Fund’s Lolita Taub, Commsor’s Alex Angel, and 776 Ventures’ Katelin Holloway will extract buzz from reality and help founders understand the growing importance of chief community officers in startup culture, and ultimately financial success, today.

The Subtle Challenges of Assessing Product-Market Fit with Heather Hartnett (Human Ventures), David Thacker (Greylock), and Victoria Treyger (Felicis Ventures)

Product-market fit is the holy grail for founders, and the key to unlocking the next phase of a startup’s growth. Behind “product” and “market” though, there are dozens of considerations, from types of users and product offerings to marketing and pricing that determine just how strong a fit a startup has found. Join early-stage investors David Thacker of Greylock, Heather Hartnett of Human Ventures and Victoria Treyger of Felicis as they discuss the subtler challenges in finding and assessing fit.

Sponsored: Powering the Small Business Economy with Cloud Technology by Steve Vamos, CEO of Xero 

Small business is a critical engine of job creation, economic growth, innovation and a driver in our efforts to recover from a global pandemic. Fifteen years ago a start-up company from New Zealand called Xero was founded with the purpose of making life better for people in small business and their advisors.  Xero achieved this by shifting accounting practices to the cloud and providing an open set of APIs which has enabled more than 1000 application partners to build affordable tech solutions connected to the Xero platform. Steve Vamos, CEO will discuss how Xero is revolutionizing the way small businesses do business by using cloud and its platform to connect real-time data, with bespoke business solutions that help small business owners be more successful. Steve will speak to a number of key initiatives that will change the game for startups and entrepreneurs who want to innovate and collaborate on the Xero platform, and he will explain how Xero’s vision extends beyond just technology to galvanizing a global community of support and purpose to help small businesses everywhere.

How to Accelerate Everything with Nik Sharma (Sharma Brands) and speakers to be announced

In the past year, growth marketing exploded as companies doubled down on what’s worked in the past and found new runway inside an increasingly competitive landscape. We brought together some of the best growth marketing minds across verticals to tell you how they conquered growth in 2021.

How to Ditch Traditional Fundraising with Arun Mathew (Accel), Nicholas Tommarello (Wefunder) and Michele Romanow (Clearco)

In 2021, venture capital has never been more plentiful, but some founders still can’t break into networks or have found that traditional fundraising isn’t the best route for their business. Fortunately, alternative fundraising techniques are gathering steam as founders find paths to raise cash that diverge from the startup success stories of the past.

The Pros and Cons (but mostly pros) of a Distributed Workforce with Wendy Nice Barnes (GitLab) and speakers to be announced

Coronavirus has changed so much, but perhaps nothing about our everyday lives has changed quite as much as the way we work. Corporations and small businesses the world over have moved to remote work, and as per usual in a time of change, startups have the advantage. Hear from founders who have cultivated fast-moving, highly productive (yet still culture-conscious) distributed workforces and how they’ve managed to do so.

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Wednesday, September 22

The Path for Underrepresented Entrepreneurs with Hana Mohan (MagicBell), Leslie Feinzaig (Female Founders Alliance), and Stephen Bailey (ExecOnline)

Being a founder comes with a wide array of challenges, but underrepresented founders unfortunately face an extra layer of bias, both conscious and unconscious. At Disrupt, we’ll sit down with founders who will share their journey through fundraising and scaling, as well as advocates who can offer tactical insights and advice.

How to Sign Your First Three B2B Customers with Kate Taylor (Notion), Abi Williams (Udemy)

The secret to revenue growth is great sales, but the definition of “great” and “sales” has changed dramatically post-COVID. Virtual meetings, simple onboarding, product-led growth, and more have upended the traditional approach to sales for enterprise companies, requiring new tactics for founders to get the kind of skyrocketing growth they desire and lock in those first customers. Join Abi Williams of Udemy and Kate Taylor of Notion as we discuss the best practices for handling sales in a re-energized 2021 economy.

So, You Want to Go Public. What’s Next? with Hope Cochran (Madrona Venture Group) and Deena Shakir (Lux Capital)

The path to your startup’s exit has grown increasingly complex in the last year. Acquisition? SPAC? Traditional IPO. Hear from seasoned tech experts about how to think about your company’s path to going public and weigh the pros and cons of the various routes.

Why You Probably Have Been Screwing Up Your Hiring Process with Jaime Bott (Sequoia Capital), Tawni Cranz (SignalFire), Doris Tong (EQ Talent Group)

Distributed workforces have rapidly become the new normal – but chances are that your hiring processes haven’t been re-invented at the same clip. In this panel, a host of experts including EQ Talent Group’s Doris Tong, SignalFire’s Tawni Cranz, and Sequoia’s Jaime Bott – will discuss how to hire with culture and competence at the core of each decision. And, more importantly, what within your process needs to be scrapped and rewritten for the post-pandemic world.

Where to Cut and Where to Spend in First-Check Fundraising with Nisha Dua (BBG Ventures), Richard Kerby (Equal Ventures), and Henri Pierre-Jacques (Harlem Capital)

Every time a founder raises financing, they usually have one goal: growth. But what does that actually mean? And how do you begin divvying up your new capital between the various goals your startup is barreling toward? In this panel, which includes Harlem Capital’s Henri Pierre-Jacques, Equal Ventures’ Richard Kerby, and BBG Ventures’ Nisha Dua, you will learn about how to spend your investment the best way, balancing runway with classic startup rigor.

Crafting a Pitch Deck that Can’t Be Ignored with Mercedes Bent (Lightspeed Ventures), Mar Hershenson (Pear VC), and Saba Karim (Techstars)

Investors may be chasing after the hottest deals, but for founders selling their startup’s vision, it’s never been more important to communicate it in the clearest way possible. Our panelists of pitch deck experts are digging into what’s essential, what’s unnecessary and what could just make all the difference in your next deck.

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Thursday, September 23

How Do You Select the Right Tech Stack with Jill Wetzler (Pilot) and speakers to be announced 

From day zero, startups have to make dozens of trade-offs when it comes to the infinite variety of tech stacks available to today’s engineers. Choose the wrong combination or direction, and a startup could be left with years of refactoring to fix the legacy damage. What are the best practices for assessing potential stacks, and how can you minimize the risk of a painful mistake? Top technologists will discuss strategies for improving engineering right from the beginning and at every stage of a startup’s journey.

How to Build Brand Buzz and Generate Influence in the Creator Economy with Rachel Drori (Daily Harvest) and Julia Munslow (Yahoo News)

Brands are the lifeblood of startups. The name, the design, the feel, and the emotional connection between customers and company can determine the entire trajectory of a business. It’s a well-trodden field that’s been upended in recent years thanks to the skyrocketing growth of the influencer and creator economies. What does it mean to build a brand in today’s competitive marketplace and how can you assess success? Julia Munslow of Yahoo News and Rachel Drori of Daily Harvest will discuss how they built and reshaped brands for 2021, and what tools founders should consider today in designing a compelling brand.

How to Use Customer Feedback and Data Analysis to Iterate Your Product with Eleanor Morgan (InVision) and Jean-Denis Greze (Plaid)

Everyone has an opinion on product changes. Customers complain, NPS scores are calculated, and internal leaders have their own vision on what comes next. Then there are all the people who are silent — including future customers who may not even know a startup exists yet. How do you find signal from all the noise and build a compelling product roadmap that properly calibrates every tradeoff? Jean-Denis Greze of Plaid and Eleanor Morgan of InVision offer their perspectives as product leaders on how to keep a bold perspective in product while getting the details right.

Pitch Deck Teardown with Maren Bannon (January Ventures), Melody Koh (NextView Ventures), and Benjamin Ling (Bling Capital)

An articulate, alluring pitch presentation is a big part of successfully fundraising, and yet it’s relatively uncommon for founders to get candid feedback on how they communicated the problem, their solution, and their path to success. During the Pitch Deck Teardown, VCs will offer their live feedback on decks submitted by audience members.

How DAOs Could Shake Up VC with David Pakman (Venrock) and speakers to be announced

Investment in blockchain startups and tokens exploded in 2021, and some investors are blowing up the idea of a venture capital firm as they look to back more projects in the crypto world. DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are starting to pop up more and more, turning traditional VC on its head by building investment organizations on the blockchain.

Pass prices for Disrupt are just $99 for a limited time – so if you want to get in on this action, get yours today and save up to $300.

Simplified, a marketing-focused design software looking to take on Canva, has raised $2.2 million in seed funding led by Craft Ventures. Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, former Uber CPO Manik Gupta, Pelican Ventures Ajay Yadav (also Roomie founder), Form Capital, 8Bit Capital, Early Grey Capital, GFR Fund, MyAsia VC and others participated in the round.

Simplified is aimed directly at marketers, who are inevitably responsible for generating an enormous amount of content across a variety of channels. The platform uses machine learning to automate as much of the content creation process as possible, including copy, imagery, format and sizing, and more.

For example, a marketer could be looking to post an inspirational quote on social media. They can designate that the content is meant for social media, run a search for inspirational quotes and ask the system to automatically provide an appropriate background. From there, the user can tweak whatever they’d like, like typeface or image cropping, and instantly publish.

Simplified also features collaborative tools that let teams share work and assets across the organization, as well as integrations with stock photo and video services.

The general principle here is to take what has already become a simplified process, through products like Canva, to the next level through machine learning and GPT3.

According to founder KD Deshpande, it’s all about scale. While it may be easier than ever to create a single piece of content, there is still the matter of volume. Simplified looks to speed up the process of content creation using its machine learning automation algorithms.

This comes in the midst of a massive evolution of the design space over the past several years, with players like InVision, Figma, and Canva leading the charge in providing fresh, new design tools that meet the demands of a new generation of designers and design-oriented organizations.

 

Twitter is updating its app to make its audio chat room feature, Twitter Spaces, a central part of the user experience. Today, the company will begin to roll out a dedicated tab for Twitter Spaces in the main navigation bar of its mobile app, initially on iOS to select users. The feature will see Twitter Spaces gain the middle spot in this bar, in between the Search magnifying glass icon and the bell icon for Notifications. As Spaces is not replacing any other tab, that means the navigation bar will now have to accommodate five icons instead of only four.

Not everyone will see the update immediately. Instead, only around 500 people from the original Spaces beta test will first see the new Spaces discovery tab, as it’s called, when it rolls out today.

Twitter says the tab will showcase the Spaces being hosted by people you follow, but these won’t appear like they do on the Fleet line today at the top of the Timeline. Instead, the discovery tab will present Spaces in a more visual format, similar to the promotion cards that appear when you tweet about upcoming Spaces.

 

The company told TechCrunch that, even though Spaces can be fun, it understands the live events have been hard to find and keep track of, given there’s been no dedicated place where Spaces can be discovered. The new tab aims to change that.

Within the tab, users will be able to see active Spaces with more details, including Space names, hosts, and people you know who are participating. The tab will also allow users to manage reminders for scheduled Spaces so you’re be notified when they’re about to begin, and give Twitter feedback about which Spaces you’d like to see more of.

App researcher Jane Manchun Wong had uncovered Twitter’s plans to revamp its app to include Spaces on the nav bar last month.

Currently, only Twitter users with at least 600 followers have been granted the ability to host Spaces, and Twitter told us that figure has not changed with the launch of the tab. However, the company still has grand plans for the Spaces product, including not only scheduled Spaces which are now becoming easier to find with this discovery feature, but also things like ticketed events, co-hosted events, accessibility improvements and more.

Putting Spaces directly in navigation bar represents a big push for Twitter’s audio chat rooms, which have otherwise been fairly easy to ignore by those who aren’t that interested in Twitter’s Clubhouse competitor. It also arrives at a time when Clubhouse is expanding access to its own social audio app. Following its debut on Android, Clubhouse said 2 million Android users have already joined its platform.

Twitter, meanwhile, hasn’t yet publicized how many users have tested out Spaces at this point, either as a host or an end user.

Alongside today’s launch, Twitter will also begin to roll out another Spaces feature that was previously being tested: displaying the purple ring around someone’s profile pictures from the Home Timeline.

Currently, profile pics can be highlighted with a blue ring that takes you to the user’s Fleets when tapped, but the new purple ring will indicate they’re actively using Spaces at that time. You can then tap their profile pic to join them. The feature makes it easier to find Spaces while you’re just scrolling your Twitter Timeline as usual.

After the new Spaces tab is tried out with the original beta test group, it will begin rolling out more people, Twitter says.

Get ready to spend a full day rubbing virtual elbows with the global mobility community’s best and brightest minds and makers. TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 takes place June 9, and we’ve packed the agenda with experts, interviews, demos, panel discussions, breakout sessions and a metric ton of opportunity.

Pro tip: It’s not too late to book a ticket. Grab yours here and save with groups of 4+.

If you’re still on the fence, here are five excellent reasons you should attend TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

Leading Voices
TC Sessions: Mobility represents a broad range of companies and topics within the mobility space.

Want to know what’s happening in self-driving delivery? We’ve got Ahti Heinla (CTO @ Starship), Apeksha Kumavat (Co-Founder @ Gatik), & Amy Jones Satrom (Head of Ops. @ Nuro).

Want to get the low-down on Commuter Cars? We’re talking with Jesse Levinson (Co-Founder & CTO @ Zoox).

Want to see what’s in the future for passenger aircraft? Then you’ll definitely want to watch the session with JoeBen Bevirt (Founder @ Joby Aviation) and Reid Hoffman (Co-Director @ Reinvent Technology Partners)

Check out the full agenda here.

Trendspotting

Mobility is a fast-moving target, and success depends on a company’s or individual’s ability to spot possibilities before they become mainstream. At TC Sessions: Mobility you’ll meet with exhibitors, founders, and leaders to figure out what’s coming next.  Here’s what our attendees are saying:

“Attending TC Sessions: Mobility helps us keep an eye on what’s coming around the corner. It uncovers crucial trends so we can identify what we should be thinking about before anyone else.”
— Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

1 on 1 Global Networking

At TC Sessions: Mobility you can take advantage of CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform (think speed dating for techies) makes connecting with like-minded attendees quick and painless — no matter where they’re located. A virtual conference means global participation, and you might just find your next customer, partner, investor or engineer living on a different continent. It takes only one connection to move your business forward.

Early Stage Expo & Pitch

30 early-stage startups will showcase their mobility tech in our virtual expo. Peruse the exhibitors, peek at their pitch decks, schedule a demo, start a conversation and see where it leads. During the show, you can also check out the pitch sessions where startups will present their company to a panel of TechCrunch editors.

TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9 is sure to be a blast and a great opportunity for you to expand your knowledge and network within the mobility industry. Book your tickets today as prices go up at the door. 

The agriculture sector is ripe for technological improvements, but beyond satellite-based crop management and bees-as-a-service, the actual people who work in the fields should be benefiting as well. Ganaz, empowered by a $7M A round, aims to change how people with little documentation and no bank account get paid and send money with a modern workforce stack that embraces low tech as well.

Growers — that is to say, the companies that own and operate the fields and sell the crops — are under pressure from multiple directions as wages rise, regulations increase, and willing workers dwindle. They need to save money to make money, but they can’t do so by paying less; in addition to being cruel to a marginalized class of people, it would only exacerbate the labor shortage in the sector.

There are plenty of companies out there that help save costs by automating things like payroll and onboarding, but the agriculture business has some unique limitations.

“It’s still operating like it’s the ’80s,” explained Ganaz founder and CEO Hannah Freeman. The number one service these workers rely on is check cashing or payday loans, and fees from these, currency exchange, ATM fees, and remittances eat up a significant portion of each paycheck. “The workforce in our world definitely doesn’t have corporate email and rarely uses personal email. They have trouble downloading and using mobile apps, don’t use usernames. But they’re very conversant in WhatsApp and SMS — so you have to kind of know how to build for them.”

The ecosystem has parallels to other regions that have stuck with older, cheaper technologies instead of adopting the latest and most expensive tech. Entire markets in Africa and South America, for instance, run on text-based commerce taking place on aging and unreliable infrastructure.

Ganaz has opted for a hybrid approach. The company’s platform offers several services on both the worker and employer side.

Onboarding and basic training can be done simply and intuitively for people who may not be highly literate, via tablets loaded with apps that also operate offline. The most common alternative seems to be file folders served out of a crate in the back of a pickup — that’s not a dig, it’s just what has made sense for years for this highly fluid, distributed workforce.

Payment and balance checks all happen over SMS or WhatsApp with workers, but for sensitive information they are shunted to a web app; similarly, integrated remittance partnerships are coming that will keep things simple and reduce fees.

On the employer side, the workers and all their vital stats and documents are tracked centrally in the kind of interface companies have grown to expect. And Ganaz works as an intermediary to send text alerts and questions.

So far Ganaz has 75 employers signed up, one of which is a Costco supplier group, and all told around 175,000 workers on the platform. Their ARR and user count both approximately tripled year over year, so they’re clearly on to something.

The company has tempered its rapid growth with designation as a public benefit corporation, which emphasizes the intention to do more than grow shareholder value. I asked about the tension between needing to show a profit and working in the service of a marginalized group.

“This keeps me up at night,” admitted Freeman. “We try to make sure to set ourselves up to be true to our mission. That means the folks we hire, our board of directors… we want to make sure we’re empathizing and honoring the trust we’ve built with people.”

That includes investors as well, and Freeman noted that the company ended up going with Trilogy as lead for this round partly because of that firm’s experience with Remit.ly.

For instance, Freeman noted, while it would be easy to juice profits by bumping ATM fees, that directly harms the people they’re trying to help. Instead, when they issue their payroll Mastercard later this year, that will allow workers to skip the check cashing step and its fees, and then Ganaz gets a share of the normal card transaction fee. “We can be equally successful that way,” said Freeman, and it doesn’t just replace another predatory structure.

After the cards the plan is to automate remittances, so a user can easily choose to send money to their family in a way that minimizes handling fees and so on. And there will be other options,m accessible via text, to choose where money goes if not to the card.

Ganaz’s main market is the U.S. and Mexico, since the agriculture business and workforce are both largely binational, but there are other targets on the horizon. First, though, the company wants to solidify its position and feature set here. “There’s no breakaway winner yet, so we want to be that winner,” said Freeman.

The $7M round also had participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders’ Co-op, Taylor Ventures, AgFunder and Techstars. Rapid expansion and aggressive pursuit of the roadmap are next up for Ganaz.

“We are conscious of both the huge opportunity ahead of us to digitize billions of dollars in payroll, as well as the responsibility to build inclusive, low-cost, wealth-building tools for workers,” said Freeman.

Google does a lot of things well. But hardware strategy has never really been among them. The last several years have seen the company at least finding some consistency with its Pixel and Nest devices. But the former, in particular, has continued to struggle as the company has worked to find its footing in an already crowded space.

In 2017, the company entered the wireless earbud space with the first-gen Pixel Buds. The product was certainly an original take on the category, both in terms of design and features. Ultimately, however, it fell flat. But an “A” for effort, I guess. The second-gen product, introduced in April of last year, corrected a lot of their predecessor’s problems, mostly by delivering a more straightforward approach.

Announced today, the Pixel Buds A-Series find the company capitalizing on that success with an approach that has worked well for Google’s smartphone line. The first Pixel A arrived just as the company was dealing with the consequences of poor mobile sales. The low-cost approach to the line sold well (by Google smartphone standards), helping deliver positive news for the beleaguered line.

As with the budget phones, the price is, once again, the thing. Here that means $99. It’s a price point that puts it below the new Echo Buds ($119) and Samsung Galaxy Buds ($110), and well under the AirPods 2 ($159). Essentially it’s the low end of the mid-tier of fully wireless earbud pricing. There is arguably even more competition at the really low end, where you can pick up of a pair of Anker earbuds for around $40. But relative to what we’d generally consider brand names, the pricing is quite aggressive.

It’s also a significant reduction from the standard Pixel Buds, which sport an MSRP of $170 (though you can find them quite a bit cheaper with minimal effort). The Series A aren’t replacing the standard Pixel Buds, so much as augmenting them — similar to what Apple did with AirPods, albeit on the other end of the pricing spectrum. With the new buds on the market, I would anticipate a further narrowing of the price gap between the products on many online retailers. As of this writing, there’s at least one offering the Pixel Buds second gens for $99.

As you’d expect, the lower cost comes with a bit of corner-cutting — or at least the removal of some non-essentials. Ultimately the value for a given user comes down to what you’re willing to lose for the sake of a lower price point. The top-level losses here are:

• No wireless charging
• The loss of Attention Alerts (a feature that momentarily reduces volume when things like a siren, baby crying or dog barking are heard), due to lower-cost sensors
• The loss of noise reduction for calls and wind
• Limited tap gestures

Otherwise, the Series A are a lot like the Pixel Buds 2, including a similar 12 mm dynamic speaker driver and a nearly identical design. In fact, I was struck by just how similar they were. The size, the shape — really, the only immediate distinction here is coloring. It wasn’t broke, so Google didn’t really fix it. Gone are the bolder matte colors of the predecessors. Now the headphones feature two glossy colors: Clearly White and Dark Olive. Google sent the former, which is a bit more off-white than the AirPods (a bit closer to the Echo Buds coloring), paired with a kind of dull gray. If you want bolder colors, you’re going to have to stick with the standard buds, which also feature a striking orange and mint green colors. I prefer the matte coloring of the original, but the company had to do something to set these apart, I suppose.

The case is the same vertically oriented oval design as the earlier version. It’s similar in volume to the AirPods Pro — so pretty easy to just pop into a pocket. The USB-C charging port is on the bottom; a light up front tips you off on charging status and the sync button is toward the bottom of the back. Flip up the top and reveal two familiar earbuds.

The size and shape are more or less the same as the Pixel Buds — a good thing, as they’re pretty comfortable over long periods. That’s certainly not something I can say for all of the competition. The silicone tips are user-replaceable for a better fit, but the small silicone ear tip is stuck in there for good. That’s fine for me, but your results may vary.

Like their predecessors, the A Series’ (total side note, but after writing so many funding rounds, I really want to write “Series A”) sound falls in the middle of the pack. You can get better quality from higher-end headphones like the AirPods Pro or Sony WF-1000XM3 (talk about being overdue for a refresh), but these are totally capable for day to day listening and making calls, even if the mic has lost a few of its tricks.

There’s no noise canceling here. That’s to be expected, of course, given that the standard Pixel Buds don’t have the feature either. Given that it’s becoming increasingly standardized, it’s probably a no-brainer that the Pixel Buds 3 will offer the feature to further distinguish them from the budget model.

The buds offer five hours on a charge (2.5 hours of talk time) and 12 hours when the case is factored in — again, same as the Pixel Buds. They also boast the same IPX4 rating for water/sweat resistance. The Bluetooth connectivity is fairly strong. I found I was able to walk over to another room without losing connection, which is often hit or miss on buds.

They’ll pair to either an Android (6.0+) or iOS device. Naturally, of course, they play nicely with the former, using Fast Pair. On an Apple handset, you’ll have to use the pairing button. Google Assistant — one of the standout features — also only works with Android devices. It’s handiest for enabling notifications, as well as real-time use of Google Translate.

Nothing about the Pixel Buds A Series is going to set the earbud world on fire. And that’s not really the point. More than anything, the product is an exercise in trimming the fat in order to deliver a solid experience at less than $100. And by that standard, they largely succeed.

VC funds Frst and Fabric Ventures are teaming up to create Le Crypto Fellowship. With this program, the two firms want to find the next 10 crypto entrepreneurs in France. And they think they might foster the most promising crypto startups if they don’t have any preconceived idea and team yet.

As Pierre Entremont from Frst writes in a Medium post, there are a lot of opportunities if you want to build the next crypto success, but few entrepreneurs are actively looking at this space.

“Nearly all crypto developers and entrepreneurs are already rich and therefore don’t step up their ambition,” he writes.

Blockchain development and DeFi projects are nearly always open source. Learning resources are available for free around the web. So it’s not that hard to get started and build a prototype, but you have to get started. Frst and Fabric Ventures think they can create the right framework to incentivize the next generation of entrepreneurs.

If you get accepted into the program, the two VC firms will hand you €100,000 in exchange for 7% of your company. Basically, this should cover one year of salary for one person in France with a salary of €50,000, €21,000 in employer contributions and €29,000 in expenses. You can be based in another country as long as it’s in the same timezone and you incorporate your company in France.

This way, you get to play around and think about an ambitious idea without feeling any financial pressure. You’ll join a Discord channel with other fellows and you’ll attend weekly Zoom meetings during the first few months. After that, Fabric Ventures and Frst partners will schedule regular office hours with you to check in on your progress.

If you end up creating a proper company and taking your idea to the next level, the fellowship may later ask to invest an additional €700,000 for a 20% stake in the company.

Candidates can apply until June 15. Le Crypto Fellowship isn’t looking for people who already have an idea or are only available part-time. But if you want to join as a team of 2 or 3, you can. Instead of €100,000, you’ll get €200,000 or €300,000. Working as a team will probably help you remain motivated over the long haul.

This isn’t the first startup mentoring program. The Thiel Fellowship is arguably the most well-known one. But Le Crypto Fellowship doesn’t limit itself to college dropouts and has a different focus. It’s going to be interesting to see if it pans out and if the VC firms will have a second, a third and a fourth batch down the road.