Author: azeeadmin

Beware! There isn’t much time left to apply for Startup Alley. Take advantage of this opportunity before it’s too late.

When you purchase a ticket for Startup Alley, you can opt into being considered for a spot in our inaugural Startup Alley+ cohort. This very cool and downright extraordinary business development opportunity kicks off in July and takes you through TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 (September 21-23).

TechCrunch will select 50 startups to participate in Startup Alley+ and the only cost involved is the price you paid for your exhibitor’s pass. Here’s what Startup Alley+ delivers.

It all begins at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising in July, which you’ll attend for free. From there, you’ll receive three months of business development support. That support includes these three masterclasses on essential entrepreneurial topics:

• Key Principles of the Lean Startup Methodology with John Lynn, founder of CELA Innovation  
• How to Create Product/Market Fit with Dan Olsen, author of “The Lean Product Playbook”
• Outreach Strategies for Contacting VCs and Press with Annie Kadavy of Redpoint Ventures and TechCrunch editor Danny Crichton

You also get to perfect your pitch so you’re ready to impress potential customers at TC Disrupt. How? By pitching at one of our our weekly Extra Crunch Live events in the run-up to Disrupt.

And don’t forget — all Startup Alley exhibitors get two minutes to pitch live to the global Disrupt audience. This means you showcase your product to investors, media reps, corporate innovation teams and other attendees interested in your vertical.

What else? How about warm introductions to select VCs from the TechCrunch community? Check — we’ve got you covered on that front. Startup Alley+ cohort members will be introduced to relevant investors before Disrupt kicks off. Have your pitch deck ready and be prepared to give a product demonstration.

Times running out. Your chance to potentially join the Startup Alley+ cohort will not be around for too much longer.  Buy a Startup Alley Pass now. Take advantage of this opportunity and make the most of TechCrunch Disrupt 2021.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

“Game of Thrones” might be over, but HBO Max is still breaking new ground, and even breaking the internet – this past weekend, HBO Max blacked out right before the finale of “Mare of Easttown,” likely due to traffic. But if you haven’t hopped aboard the HBO Max train yet, it might be time to try it out. Today, the streaming platform premieres an ad-supported subscription at $9.99 per month. Its existing service – which features no ads – costs $14.99 per month. Subscribers can save 15% on their subscription, no matter which version they choose, if they pre-pay for an entire year. 

The advertisements aren’t the only drawback of the more affordable subscription option. The ad-supported tier offers a maximum quality of 1080p, which is still pretty good for most consumers, unless you’re watching “Friends: The Reunion” in your 4k home theater. But, lower-tier subscribers won’t be able to download content to view offline, nor will they have access to same-day film premieres of Warner Bros.’s newest theatrical releases. However, these films will become available to stream months after release. On the bright side, ads will not appear on original HBO programming.

With just four minutes of ad time per hour, the ad-supported tier “launches with a commitment” to maintaining the lowest volume of commercials among popular streaming services. HBO Max follows in the footsteps of Hulu, which also offers a discounted subscription with ads for $5.99 per month, as opposed to $11.99 per month. But on Hulu, a half-hour show can contain almost five minutes of unskippable ad time. Meanwhile, Netflix offers its most basic plan – which allows streaming on one screen at a time without HD – for $8.99 per month. Its standard plan is $13.99 a month. Now that HBO Max has a more competitively priced option, it might give these other platforms a run for their money. 

What kinds of ads can you expect to see on HBO Max? The company says that subscribers can expect “a greater personalization in the ads they see” over time, with “more innovation in formats to come.” This could resemble the ad experience on Hulu, which has experimented with viewer-friendly binge-watch ads.

As of April 2021, HBO Max and HBO reached a combined 44.2 million subscribers, and in Q1 of the year, added 2.7 million domestic subscribers. By comparison, Netflix reported an increase of 4 million subscribers in the same period, bringing them to about 207 million global subscribers. However, only 450,000 of those new subscribers come from the US and Canada.

On June 29, HBO Max will launch in 39 Latin American markets. Later in the year, the streaming service is expected to roll out in Europe. This will only further the platform’s rapid growth – in 2019, AT&T, which owns HBO Max, set the modest goal to attain 50 million subscribers by 2025. Now, HBO Max expects it will reach between 120 million and 150 million subscribers by the same date.

The ad-supported subscription option for HBO Max is available now.

Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week. The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million last April.

What does Confluent do? It built a streaming data platform on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. In addition to its open-source roots, Confluent has a free tier of its commercial cloud offering to complement its paid products, helping generate top-of-funnel inflows that it converts to sales.

Kafka itself emerged from a LinkedIn internal project in 2011. As we wrote at the time of Confluent’s $50 million Series C in 2017, the open-source project was designed to move massive amounts of data at the professional social network:

At its core, Kafka is simply a messaging system, created originally at LinkedIn, that’s been designed from the ground up to move massive amounts of data smoothly around the enterprise from application to application, system to system or on-prem to cloud — and deal with extremely high message volume.

Confluent CEO and co-founder Jay Kreps wrote at the time of the funding that events streaming is at the core of every business, reaching sales and other core business activities that occur in real time that go beyond storing data in a database after the fact.

“[D]atabases have long helped to store the current state of the world, but we think this is only half of the story. What is missing are the continually flowing stream of events that represents everything happening in a company, and that can act as the lifeblood of its operation,” he wrote.

That’s where Confluent comes in.

But enough about the technology. Is Confluent’s work with Kafka a good business? Let’s find out.

What does an electric vehicle sound like when it goes from 0 to 60, when it signals a turn, when it’s powered down for the night? EV motors have fewer parts and are therefore incredibly silent, which presents safety concerns for drivers who recognize speed by sound and pedestrians who can’t hear an approaching vehicle. 

In 2019, regulators in Europe and the U.S. began requiring EVs to have warning sounds, but they left it up to the car manufacturers to choose those sounds. Many have taken the new legislation as an opportunity to not only create a branded sound, but also to stir up some marketing hype by enlisting famous musicians to compose the noise of an electric engine. Hans Zimmer created the Blade Runner-esque sound concept for BMW’s i4 electric sedan, and, strangely, Linkin Park is creating EV sounds for BMW. 

Sound designer Yuri Suzuki, a partner at design consultancy firm Pentagram, recently conducted a research project into the crucial role electric car sound has on a user’s safety, enjoyability, communication and brand recognition, out of which he developed a range of car sounds. Suzuki says that while some automakers have chosen beautiful and interesting car sound designs, chasing celebrity clout is not the way to go when designing the sound behind serious machines. 

“We really have to design carefully based on the psychological effects on a human,” Suzuki told TechCrunch. “It’s all about the relation between the human being and the machine itself.”

Suzuki says smart sound design can help ease the difference between human and car by providing a shared language. Based on surveys he conducted, Suzuki came up with two new skeuomorphic electric engine sounds as well as adaptive sounds that reflect the time of day and the location of the drive. 

His engine sounds are reminiscent of internal combustion engine revs, providing both drivers and pedestrians with a recognizable indication of speed increasing and decreasing. The sounds are placed at different pitches: one quite low, like a spaceship taking off; the other a bit higher, like a hovercraft vertically ascending. Audi, Ford and Jaguar Land Rover have also chosen to make futuristic copies of gasoline engines for some of their new electric vehicles. 

Suzuki’s sound design also includes in-car sounds, like powering on, turn signals or horn honking, that use AI to adapt to the time of day. In the morning, there’s a higher pitch and a sunnier energy to the sounds, which get progressively lower in pitch as the day wears on. 

To make the sounds more customizable, Suzuki says he uses machine learning to help integrate the individual’s calendar so the sound can adapt to the type of activity the user is doing, from heading to work to running errands to going on a joyride. Video game-like sounds are activated whenever the driver arrives at their destination.

A lot of manufacturers allow the driver to choose the sounds their vehicle will make, but Suzuki doesn’t think that’s the best idea because people will likely choose what sounds coolest to them, not necessarily what is most useful. Not to mention what a strange cacophony of noises cities would sound like if everyone could choose their own sounds. It would be like when people started choosing their own cellphone ringtones, but on a larger, more anxiety-inducing scale.

“We suggest a pre-set sound that gradually changes as it shifts to your life and activity pattern,” he said. “Our AI can slowly adjust its sound to the driver’s behavior.”

Suzuki’s AI-based car sounds are designed so that they’re not repetitive. So if you’re on a long road trip, rather than constantly listening to the same sound, Suzuki’s sounds are capable of creating real-time generation of bespoke sounds, a task that’s nearly impossible for a human to do. He says the constantly progressing and shifting sounds use the same data as the original engine sound, but it can stretch for hours without repetition. 

Pentagram hasn’t yet produced a commercial application for Suzuki’s sounds, as it is more interested in sharing its research with the EV and sound design communities, as well as finding the right automaker partner to develop this project further. 

“There are no strong sound guidelines yet, so that’s something we’re interested in,” said Suzuki. “The first step for us is sharing the kinds of things we can do with AI and sound design.”

At today’s F8 developer conference, Facebook announced new capabilities for Spark AR, its flagship AR creation software. Since Spark AR was announced at F8 2017, more than 600,000 creators from 190 countries have published over 2 million AR effects on Facebook and Instagram, making it the largest mobile AR platform, according to Facebook. If you’ve ever posted a selfie on your Instagram story with an effect that gave you green hair, or let you control a dog’s facial expression by moving your own face, then you’ve used Spark AR. 

Soon, these AR effects will be available for video calling on Messenger, Instagram, and Portal with the introduction of a Multipeer API. Creators can develop effects that bring call participants together by using a shared AR effect. As an example, Spark AR shared a promo video of a birthday party held over a video call, in which an AR party hat appears on each of the participants’ heads. 

Creators can also develop games for users to play during their video calls. This already exists on Facebook video calls – think of the game where you compete to see who can catch the most flying AR hamburgers in their mouth in a minute. But when the ability to make new, lightweight games opens to developers, we’ll see some new games to challenge our friends with on video calls. 

These video call effects and multipeer AR games will be bolstered by Spark’s platform exclusive multi-class segmentation capability. This lets developers augment multiple segments of a user’s body (like hair or skin) at once within a single effect. 

Facebook also discussed its ongoing ambition to build AR glasses. Chris Barber, Director of Partnerships for Spark AR, said that this goal is still “years away” – but, Barber did tease some potential features for the innovative, wearable tech. 

“Imagine being able to teleport to a friend’s sofa to watch a show together, or being able to share a photo of something awesome you see on a hike,” Barber said. Maybe this won’t sound so dystopian by the time the product launches, years down the road. 

Last October, Spark AR launched the AR Partner Network, a program for the platform’s most advanced creators, and this year, Spark launched an AR curriculum through Facebook’s BluePrint Platform to help creators learn how to improve their AR effects. Applications for the Spark Partner Network will open again this summer. For now, creators and developers can apply to start building effects for video calling through the Spark AR Video Calling Beta. 

If you’re among the growing number of people interested in cryptocurrencies, you may be interested to know that nearly 7,000 people lost more than $80 million between October 2020 and March 2021 — a 1,000% increase from a year ago, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The scams include fake currency exchanges and phony “investment” websites selling the currency. More recently, more than $10 million was stolen in various cryptocurrencies in the days leading up to Elon Musk’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live.”

And here’s the rub: You have no way to protect your accounts from any theft. In the world of cryptocurrency, there are no guarantees. Unlike the traditional banking world, there is no equivalent to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to cover any losses on your account. If your assets are stolen, you’re out of luck.

Enabling secure access to these cryptocurrency assets is absolutely critical to preventing theft — which, as of the end of 2020, amounted to just over $10 million a day — and/or lockout of one’s potential fortune.

But how can you ensure that people can always access their accounts? That depends on how the accounts are set up initially — which usually means that passwords or other knowledge-based authentication (KBA) is involved. Unfortunately, passwords simply aren’t suitable for securing high-value accounts because they can be easily compromised, either through phishing attacks or outright theft.

Plus, if you have a less-used cryptocurrency wallet, you might forget your initial password and might have trouble recovering it — if there is even a mechanism to perform the recovery. KBA is also plagued with problems ranging from lack of recollection (what is my favorite hobby again?) to the wide availability of “personal” information on the web (for a few dollars, you can surely find my mother’s maiden name).

Cryptocurrency account takeovers happen with increasing frequency; it doesn’t help that there are few pre-established trust relationships between users and the exchange or wallet provider and that almost all transactions are finalized within minutes and not easily reversible.

Sadly, these takeovers make use of a very similar pattern that has been observed for years in the traditional banking world: An attacker will first try harvesting and then stuffing stolen credentials. If that doesn’t work — say a user has protected their account by requiring an SMS second factor — they will move on to popular techniques to overcome SMS, such as SIM swapping or a $16 SMS relay service that sends that SMS code to the attacker’s smartphone, which leads to a “successful” account takeover.

Even highly secure tokens or dedicated authenticator apps are vulnerable to replay attacks from a motivated hacker — and with personal fortunes at stake, there is no lack of motivation.

Furthermore, the vast growth in the number of cryptocurrency exchange users coupled with this need for strong cybersecurity has resulted in terrible support experiences where users have to wait for weeks or even months to regain access to their own accounts — simply because it is so difficult for them to prove they are the rightful owner.

Authentication best practices can help

So how do we fix this situation? With standards-based user authentication that has been proven to be resistant to phishing and account takeovers — and that is already embedded into billions of devices worldwide and available to just about any user on a modern browser. The FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) authentication protocols were developed by a who’s who of IT, payments and consumer services and ensure that all cryptographic credentials are stored on a user’s device — thereby eliminating even the most advanced machine-in-the-middle attacks.

The crypto exchange Gemini was an early adopter of FIDO for both its smartphone app and for browser users, with a growing percentage of its users protecting their accounts with FIDO authentication by purchasing FIDO Certified security keys. There have been a number of other exchanges that have added FIDO authentication, such as Coinbase, which also supports FIDO keys. Binance has FIDO for its web versions, but not on its smartphone apps yet. And STEX also has support for various FIDO devices and methods. Finally, Ledger hardware wallets support FIDO directly in their devices.

Ideally, it would be better and more effective if there was broad cryptocurrency industry acceptance of FIDO’s approach to modern authentication and adoption of several related best practices, such as:

• Standardize authentication flows and practices across crypto exchanges. Better user authentication should be a standard practice for every exchange, not a competitive differentiator. If all leading exchanges moved to industry best practices for account creation, login and recovery, it would help protect customers — and their collective crypto assets.

• Require users to enroll multiple authenticators to help with account recovery for each cryptocurrency exchange, whether that is two FIDO security keys or a FIDO security key and a biometric authenticator. Having multiple account recovery keys for each cryptocurrency exchange will help lessen support burdens and help users who lose a device. It will also offer users a choice of stronger authentication options.

• Eliminating less secure backup and recovery options, such as using SMS or other knowledge-based authentication factors, will also help improve overall security, particularly for account recovery.

The bottom line is that for the cryptocurrency market to reach its full potential, its exchanges need to collectively strike a balance between the anonymity and privacy that make crypto unique with the security of accounts and assets. Following the lead of crypto exchanges like Gemini and letting users lock down their accounts is a great step toward protecting users against phishing and account takeovers while maintaining privacy and convenience.

Andrew Shikiar is CMO and executive director of The FIDO Alliance, which promotes the development of, use of, and compliance with standards for authentication and device attestation.

WhatsApp now has more than 2 billion users globally, and by comparison its efforts to cultivate more business usage have been quite modest: just over 175 million people message with WhatsApp Business accounts daily for things like customer support or to discuss products. Today, as part of its F8 event, Facebook is unveiling some updates to the WhatsApp API to expand that experience.

The news comes on the heels of Facebook unveiling the general availability of Messenger API for Instagram earlier today, and forms part of a bigger series of announcements aimed at doing business more easily on the platform.

More generally, Facebook and its many apps are at their heart very consumer services — they are used by billions of people to keep in touch with each other, for diversion, and to stay informed about whatever matters to them.

But Facebook the business has been gradually building out a very extensive and lucrative commercial infrastructure around that engaged audience, one that started with advertising but has extended deeper into marketing, customer service, workplace productivity, and shopping.

The F8 conference, hatched originally as a hackathon, had grown into a very big event. This year’s installment is a significantly more toned down affair than in recent years — no big crowds (it’s all virtual), no big product and hardware announcements (it doesn’t appear that there are any… so far), and it feels more like a Zoom conference — and today’s news about business-oriented developer tools not only resets the event back around its original developer focus, but it also bolsters that commercial strategy.

With WhatsApp for Business it appears that one of the sticking points has been time — from setting up WhatsApp for Business in the first place to responding to different kinds of messages. This is what Facebook is now addressing.

First, it’s speeding up the time it takes to set up a WhatsApp business account to five minutes (versus what it described as weeks in the past).

Then, Facebook is making it easier to use the Business account once it is set up. For starters, businesses will be able to respond faster to inbound messages (which previously were “difficult to follow up with customers outside of a 24-hour window”), and they can now send out messages to those who have opted in, for example around stock availability.

Businesses using the tool for customer care, meanwhile, will be given the option to create up to 10 pre-written messages to speed up their responses, and they can also set up reply buttons to provide pre-populated, popular replies from customers.

In addition to the WhatsApp news, Facebook is also adding another tool to Messenger to expand its: Facebook Login Connect.

Essentially, if a business has integrated Facebook Login, it will allow users to log into their app or website using their Facebook credentials, and then carry on a conversation with the company over Messenger.

This is useful not just because it also means that a user can keep track of any conversations from one place, but it gives the company access to the tools that it has built to carry out conversations in Messenger already, whether those are chatbots or links through to other CRM databases. Facebook said that tests of the service indicate that 70% of users opt in to use the Login Connect tool, indicating that they’re willing to use their Facebook credentials in this way.

This is a closed beta now but will be more widely available in coming months, Facebook said.

Finally, Facebook is launching a new feature in its Business Suite — a platform that can be used by businesses to manage activity across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger — that will let developers build “Business Apps.”

These are not apps in the app store sense, but tools made by third parties (developers) to work alongside the Facebook-built Business Suite, further integrating Facebook tools into businesses’ sites and apps, and also bringing more of a businesses’ content — for example items from a catalog — into their Facebook Page, or Instagram account, and so on. The platform already has some 90 developers working on it and it integrates with e-commerce platforms like Bigcommerce, Facebook said.

Archer Aviation hit back against allegations that it misappropriated trade secrets and infringed on patents from electric aircraft rival Wisk Aero, telling a court this week that it designed its Maker aircraft with a third-party eVTOL consultant prior to any former Wisk employees joining the company.

Archer said it worked with consultant FlightHouse Engineering at the end of 2019, when the consultancy firm modeled a 12-rotor fixed wing aircraft, with the front six rotors capable of tilting from a vertical to a horizontal position. This is the design that ultimately became the Maker. By the time the first Wisk employee arrived at Archer, this design had already been modeled, Archer says.

“Despite the breathless innuendo and baseless speculation to which Wisk devotes its entire complaint, Archer’s eVTOL aircraft design is not only the best eVTOL aircraft around, it is entirely Archer’s design,” the answer says.

A Wisk spokesperson told TechCrunch that Archer’s filing changes nothing about the case. It “contains no substantive response to the allegations Archer misappropriated more than 50 specific Wisk trade secrets, which were disclosed in a court filing last month and cover multiple components, systems, and designs for the aircraft,” the spokesperson said. “We believe Archer’s business is built on Wisk’s intellectual property as detailed in our filings, and we look forward to proceeding with our case.”

Wisk filed its lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in April, alleging that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The suit came just two months after Archer announced it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Atlas Crest Investment Corp. in a deal valued at $3.8 billion.

In its filing Tuesday, Archer included counterclaims alleging “tortious interference and unfair competition.” Archer stated that Wisk engaged in a “media campaign” that was timed “to maximize harm to Archer after learning of Archer’s impending financial success.”

In a separate motion to dismiss, Archer also said that Wisk failed to identify any specific trade secrets that it allegedly misappropriated in the April complaint.

Wisk, born of a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk Corp., did include a 72-page trade secret disclosure in a separate injunction filed on May 19. That injunction could potentially bar Archer from using any of the purportedly stolen technology. An Archer spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company will file an opposition to that injunction on June 23, “which will address Wisk’s purported trade secret disclosure statement.”

A major part of Wisk’s suit are allegations that a former Wisk employee, Jing Xue, downloaded thousands of proprietary files from his work computer prior to joining Archer. However, Archer said in the motion to dismiss that Wisk does not allege that the former employee disclosed any such information to Archer. According to Archer, “such allegations do not suffice to show that Archer […] came into possession of the files or learned of the confidential information therein, much less that it did so knowingly, as is required to state a trade secret claim.”

The news this morning that e-commerce marketplace Etsy will buy Depop, a startup that provides a second-hand e-commerce marketplace, for more than $1.6 billion may not have made a large impact on the acquiring company’s share price thus far, but it provides a fascinating look into what brands may be willing to pay for access to the Gen Z market.

First, a few details: Per Etsy, the Depop deal is worth “$1.625 billion consisting primarily of cash, subject to certain adjustments for Depop’s working capital, transaction expenses, cash and indebtedness, and certain deferred and unvested equity for Depop management and employees.” So, $1.625 billion, plus or minus. We’ll use that number this morning.

Because Etsy is a public company and the transaction is material, it provided a good deal of information on the acquisition. The key facts that relate to the scale of Depop’s business are as follows:

• 2020 gross platform spend, revenue: “Depop’s 2020 gross merchandise sales (GMS) and revenue were approximately $650 million and $70 million, respectively, each increasing over 100% year-over-year.”
• Historical gross platform spend trend: “Depop’s GMS grew at a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 80% from 2017-2020.”

At $70 million in 2020 revenue, Depop is being valued at a multiple of 23.2x of the previous year’s top line. That’s rich, but not impossibly high for a company that just had a huge pandemic year. (Though it is somewhat notable that Etsy is valuing Depop as if it was a high-growth SaaS business and not a consumer marketplace.)

The category of e-commerce performed well during the pandemic, implying that Depop’s non-pandemic growth rate would have been lower than what it ultimately recorded. How can we tell? The company’s historical GMS spend figure of “nearly 80%” from 2017 to 2020 is inclusive of the 100%+ GMS growth it recorded last year. We can infer, then, that in 2017, 2018 and 2019, GMS at Depop grew at a slower pace, namely one that is under the 80% mark.

The legendary Q&A website for programmers (and probably one of the most copy-and-pasted sites on the Internet) Stack Overflow is being acquired. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Prosus (the primary shareholder of Chinese gaming mega co/WeChat developer, Tencent) will acquire Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

Update: Prosus confirms the $1.8 billion number in a press release here.

Co-founders Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky shared the following shortly after the news broke:

Spolsky elaborated in a blog post (aptly titled “Kinda a big announcement”) on his personal site, writing:

Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

Story developing….