Author: azeeadmin

The U.S. Department of Defense is setting up a working group to focus on climate change

The new group will be led by Joe Bryan, who was appointed as a Special Assistant to the Secretary of Defense focused on climate earlier this year.

The move is one of several steps that the Biden administration has taken to push an agenda that looks to address the dangers posed by global climate change.

Bryan, who previously served as Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy for Energy under the Obama administration, will oversee a group intended to coordinate the Department’s responses to Biden’s recent executive order and subsequent climate and energy-related directives and track implementation of climate and energy-related actions and progress, according to a statement.

The Department of Defense controls the purse strings for hundreds of billions of dollars in government spending and is a huge consumer of electricity, oil and gas, and industrial materials. Any steps it takes to improve the efficiency of its supply chain, reduce the emissions profile of its fleet of vehicles, and use renewable energy to power operations could make a huge contribution to the commercialization of renewable and sustainable technologies and a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pentagon is already including security implications of climate change in its risk analyses, strategy development and planning guidance, according to the statement, and is including those risk analyses in its intallation planning, modeling, simulation and war gaming, and the National Defense Strategy.

“Whether it is increasing platform efficiency to improve freedom of action in contested logistics environments, or deploying new energy solutions to strengthen resilience of key capabilities at installations, our mission objectives are well aligned with our climate goals,” wrote Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in a statement. “The Department will leverage that alignment to modernize the force, strengthen our supply chains, identify opportunities to work closely with allies and partners, and compete with China for the energy technologies that are essential to our future success.”

A newly launched Mac app called Superpowered aims to make it easier to stay on top of all your Zoom calls and Google Meets, without having to scramble to find the meeting link in your inbox or calendar app at the last minute. Instead of relying on calendar reminders, Superpowered offers a notification inbox for the Mac menu bar that alerts you to online meetings just before they start, which you can then join with a click of a button.

To use Superpowered, you first download the app then authorize it to access to your Google Calendar. The app currently works with any Google account, including G Suite, as well as your subscribed calendars.

Once connected, Superpowered pulls all your events into the menu bar, which you can view at any time throughout the day with a click or by using the keyboard shortcut Command + Y.

When you have a meeting coming up, Superpowered will display a dropdown to alert you, or you can opt for a more subtle halo effect instead to have it get your attention. You can also configure other preferences — like whether you want a chime to sound, how far in advance you want to be alerted, whether you want a meeting reminder as text to appear in the menu bar ahead of the meeting, and so on.

When it’s time for the meeting, all you have to do is click the button it displays to join your Zoom call or Google Meet. The solution is simple, but effective. The startup plans to add support for more integrations going forward, including Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, and others.

The idea for the app comes from four computer science and software engineering students from the University of Waterloo, who previously interned at tech companies like Google, Facebook, Asana and Spotify.

Image Credits: Superpowered team photo

Wanting to build a startup of their own, the team applied to the accelerator Y Combinator with an idea to build a lecture platform for professors. But they soon faced issues in keeping up with their own calendar appointments as they began to conduct user research interviews.

“We were struggling to keep up with each other’s calendars and balance all these meetings throughout the day,” explains Superpowered co-founder Jordan Dearsley, who built the service alongside teammates Nikhil Gupta, Ibrahim Irfan, and Nick Yand. “We would be at lunch and be like, ‘oh shoot, we have a meeting now — I have to run!’ or just completely miss it altogether,” he says.

Irfan had the idea to just put a button in the Mac menu bar to make it easier to join Zoom meetings, and soon the team pivoted to work on Superpowered instead.

The product itself is very new. Development work began roughly two months ago and Superpowered opened up to users just last month — a quick pace that Dearsley says was possible because three of the four team members are engineers, and the other, Yand, is the designer.

Image Credits: Superpowered

Although it’s a paid product offered at $10 per month, Superpowered already has hundreds of users who are interacting with the app, on average, 10 times per day. Busier users, like product managers, are clicking on Superpowered as many as 20 to 40 times per day — an indication that it’s found a place in users’ workflows. In the month since its launch, the app has connected users with over 10,000 online meetings, the company says.

Superpowered is not the first to add calendar appointments to the Mac’s menu bar. It competes with a range of products, like MeetingBar, Meeter, Next Meeting, and others. But users have been responding to Superpowered’s sleek, clean design.

The company also has a vision for the product’s future that extends beyond meetings. After solving this particular pain point, Superpowered plans to broaden its scope to fix other annoyances for knowledge workers — like Slack notifications, for example.

“It’s really annoying to be pinged all the time when I’m while I’m coding…and I don’t know if it’s something that’s worth seeing because Slack doesn’t really give me those controls or ability to peek,” explains Dearsley. Meanwhile, Mac’s built-in Notification Center isn’t smart enough to show you just those items that you really need to know about.

To address this, the team is now working on a Slack integration that will let you quickly check your messages and reply without having to launch the Slack app. Further down the road, the team wants integrate support for other platforms — like Google Docs, JIRA and GitHub — which would all be pulled into Superpowered’s universal notification inbox.

For the time being, Superpowered is $10 per month for Mac users, or $8 per month for those who sign up with a team. Annual pricing is not yet available.

Actor Terry Crews is going in on the blockchain. With the help of social currency startup Roll, Crews is launching his own social currency, $POWER.

But first, let’s break down what that means. Anyone can create a social currency, which hundreds of creators have already done via Roll, to change their relationships with fans and users. Roll enables creators to mint and distribute their own social currency under the ERC20 standard and then determine the ways in which their communities can earn and spend that social currency.

“Anyone, anywhere, anytime can create their own content,” Roll founder and CEO Bradley Miles told TechCrunch. “We refer to this as mass personalization of content. Right now, Roll is experiencing the same thing with money itself. Anyone, anywhere, anytime can create their own money.”

The way I think of it is it’s almost like the process for earning and redeeming credit card points but minus the credit card company and plus the blockchain and creators. I haven’t run this analogy by Miles, but I’m going with it. Just how your credit card provider gives you points for using your card and then you can redeem those points for cash, airline tickets, etc., creators give fans social currency for engaging with their work in a variety of ways. Then, fans can redeem that social currency for more art, content or what have you.

Currently, there are about 300 creators, including Crews, using Roll. Roll, which has $2.7 million in funding from investors like Balaji Srinivasan, Trevor McFederies and others, recently saw its social currency market cap surpass $1 billion. Bradley Miles gifted me .10 $WHALE (worth about $3) so I could get a better understanding of how creators are already using Roll. $WHALE is backed by tangible and rare non-fungible token assets, which means that I can use my $WHALE to buy NFTs. And because Roll enables users to trade their social currency for over 600 other digital assets, that means I could buy the below NFT over on NFT marketplace OpenSea.

Image Credits: Screenshot/OpenSea

However, you’ll see that the Podmork Pix 35 WS cost 28 $WHALE, so I will not be buying this NFT.

In the case of Crews, he envisions folks earning $POWER via blockchain art purchases, NFTs, physical goods and experiences. Initially, Crews is engaging with his $POWER community through Discord. Folks with 50 $POWER, for example, can access a special channel within Discord. To date, Crews had distributed $POWER to about 100 people, he said.

“If I give you $POWER, you own a piece of me,” Crews said. “There’s no other way to put it. And I want to be very careful about who is holding me, no puns intended.”

It’s still early days for $POWER, but Crews says he eventually wants to offer interest-free microloans to artists. The ultimate goal with $POWER is to empower artists.

“That’s our long-term plan,” Crews said. “To become this thing that this community can live and exist in. You could use it anywhere you are — at Target, the grocery store.”

Crews attributes his interest in this space to something that happened to him about four years ago.

While in Milan, Crews said he was trying to buy designer furniture from an artist he respected at Salone del Mobile. He realized he needed extra money to complete the purchase, but didn’t have enough cash in his checking account to cover it. So he got on the phone with American Express, he said, who told him to go to a local bank. American Express, on Crews’ behalf, then tried to explain the situation to the local bank manager so that Crews could get the funds he needed to complete the transaction. Crews said the local bank manager took one look at him and said, “no.”

“And I’m watching all these white men and women pass me in line, and they’re looking at me strangely,” Crews said. “I’d been standing there for 15 minutes and it slowly dawns on me that because I’m Black, I was not going to get my money,” he said. “That was the moment I knew everything had to change for me.”

Crews ended up going to a check-cashing place, in an area where he said his Uber driver refused to go, and got the funds to pay the fees.

“Bringing it up still makes me angry,” he said. “What I love about this new world of finance is that cryptocurrency does not know what race you are, how old you are.”

Through $POWER, Crews hopes to put power back in the hands of artists and creators, Crews explained.

“There’s no gatekeeper to tell us no,” he said.

Crews says he’s also going to start putting out his own content into the $POWER community, where the community will collectively own it together.

“This is bigger than me,” he said. “This is a new future.”

For Miles, he envisions a world in which $POWER is accepted at movie theaters or at Paramount Pictures properties.

“[Social currency] is not to replace the dollar,” Miles said. “It’s to complement [money] and do work that probably the dollar is not suited to do.”

I asked Crews if this means he’s leaving Hollywood and will solely focus on producing his own content for his $POWER community. But Crews said he left Hollywood when he sued William Morris Endeavor in 2017 alleging an executive from the firm groped him. Crews and WME settled the suit in 2018.

“And they were done with me,” he said. “But the deal is, is that I had my power. I still had my talent. William Morris threatened to end everything I’m doing. But everything I’m doing right now, you can’t take. So that’s when I separated from Hollywood. I’ve never felt like a Hollywood person, even to this day. But every artist out there probably feels the same way. They want their power.”

Facebook has challenged the FTC’s antitrust case against it using a standard playbook that questions the agency’s arguably expansive approach to defining monopolies. But the old arguments of “we’re not a monopoly because we never raised prices” and “how can it be anticompetitive if we never allowed competition” may soon be challenged by new doctrine and the new administration.

In a document filed today which you can read at the bottom of this post, Facebook lays out its case with a tone of aggrieved pathos:

By a one-vote margin, in the fraught environment of relentless criticism of Facebook for matters entirely unrelated to antitrust concerns, the agency decided to bring a case against Facebook that ignores its own prior decisions, controlling precedent, and the limits of its statutory authority.

Yes, Facebook is the victim here, and don’t you forget it. (Incidentally, the FTC, like the FCC, is designed to split 3:2 along party lines, so the “one vote margin” is what one sees for many important measures.)

But after the requisite crying comes the reluctant explanation that the FTC doesn’t know its own business. The suit against Facebook, the company argues, should be spiked by the judge because it fails along three lines.

First, the FTC does not “allege a plausible relevant market.” After all, to have a monopoly, one must have a market over which to exert that monopoly. And the FTC, Facebook argues, has not done so, alleging only a nebulous “personal social networking” market, and “no court has ever held that such a free goods market exists for antitrust purposes,” and the FTC ignores the “relentlessly competitive” advertising market that actually makes the company money.

Ultimately, the FTC’s efforts to structure a crabbed ‘use’ market for a free service in which it can claim a large Facebook ‘share’ are artificial and incoherent.

The implication here is not just that the FTC has failed to define the social media market (and Facebook won’t do so itself), but that such a market may not even exist because social media is free and the money is made by a different market. This is a variation on a standard big tech argument that amounts to “because we do not fall under any of the existing categories, we are effectively unregulated.” After all you cannot regulate a social media company by its advertising practices or vice versa (though they may be intertwined in some ways, they are distinct businesses in others).

Thusly Facebook attempts, like many before it, to squeeze between the cracks in the regulatory framework.

This continues with the second argument, which says that the FTC “cannot establish that Facebook has increased prices or restricted output because the agency acknowledges that Facebook’s products are offered for free and in unlimited quantities.”

The argument is literally that if the product is free to the consumer, it is by definition not possible for the provider to have a monopoly. When the FTC argues that Facebook controls 60 percent of the social media market (which of course doesn’t exist anyway), what does that even mean? 60 percent of zero dollars, or 100 percent, or 20 percent, is still zero.

The third argument is that the behaviors the FTC singles out — purchasing up-and-coming competitors for enormous sums and nipping others in the bud by restricting its own platform and data — are not only perfectly legal but that the agency has no standing to challenge them, having given its blessing before and having no specific illegal activity to point to at present.

Of course the FTC revisits mergers and acquisitions all the time, and there’s precedent for unraveling them long afterwards if, for instance, new information comes to light that was not available during the review process.

“Facebook acquired a small photo-sharing service in 2012, Instagram… after that acquisition was reviewed and cleared by the FTC in a unanimous 5-0 vote,” the company argues. Leaving aside the absurd characterization of the billion-dollar purchase as “small,” leaks and disclosures of internal conversations contemporary with the acquisition have cast it in a completely new light. Facebook, then far less secure than it is today, was spooked and worried that Instagram may eat its lunch, and it was better to buy than compete.

The FTC addresses this and indeed many of the other points Facebook raises in a FAQ it posted around the time of the original filing.

Now, some of these arguments may have seemed a little strange to you. Why should it matter if a market has money from consumers being exchanged if there is value exchanged elsewhere contingent on those users’ engagement with the service, for instance? And how can the depredations of a company in the context of a free product that invades privacy (and has faced enormous fines for doing so) be judged by its actions in an adjacent market, like advertising?

The simple truth is that antitrust law has been stuck in a rut for decades, weighed down by doctrine that states that markets are defined by the price of a product and whether a company can increase it arbitrarily. A steel manufacturer that absorbs its competitors by undercutting them and then later raises prices when it is the only option is a simple example and the type that antitrust laws were created to combat.

If that seems needlessly simplistic, well, it’s more complicated in practice and has been effective in many circumstances — but the last 30 years have shown it to be inadequate to address the more complex multi-business domains of the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook (to say nothing of TechCrunch parent company Verizon, which is a whole other matter).

The ascendance of Amazon is one of the best examples of the failure of antitrust doctrine, and resulted in a breakthrough paper called “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” which pilloried these outdated ideas and showed how network effects led to subtler but no less effective anticompetitive practices. Establishment voices decried it as naive and overreaching, and progressive voices lauded it as the next wave of antitrust philosophy.

It seems that the latter camp may win out, as the author of this controversial paper, Lina Khan, has just been nominated for the vacant 5th Commissioner position at the FTC.

Whether or not she is confirmed (she will face fierce opposition, no doubt, as an outsider plainly opposed to the status quo), her nomination validates her view as an important one. With Khan and her allies in charge at the FTC and elsewhere, the decades-old assumptions that Facebook relies on for its pro forma rejection of the FTC lawsuit may be challenged.

That may not matter for the present lawsuit, which is unlikely to be subject to said rules given its rather retrospective character, but the gloves will be off for the next round — and make no mistake, there will be a next round.

Federal Trade Commission v Facebook Inc Dcdce-20-03590 0056.1 by TechCrunch on Scribd

In 1998, Sun Microsystems piloted its “Open Work” program, letting roughly half of their workforce work flexibly from wherever they wanted. The project required new hardware, software and telecommunications solutions, and took about 24 months to implement.

Results were very positive, with a reduction in costs and the company’s carbon footprint. Despite this outcome, long-term remote work never really caught on more broadly. In fact, the 2010s were focused on going the other direction, as open offices, on-site perks and co-working spaces sprung up around the idea that in-person community is an essential component of innovation.

In 2020, companies of all sizes, in all corners of the world, were forced to shift to remote work with the onset of COVID-19. While some companies were better positioned than others — whether it be due to a previously distributed workforce, a reliance on cloud apps and services, or already-established flexible work policies — the adjustment to a fully remote workforce has been challenging for everyone. The truth is that even the largest companies have had to rely on the heroics of employees making sacrifices and persevering through numerous challenges to get through this time.

Technology like high-quality video conferencing and the cloud have been integral in making remote work possible. But we don’t yet have a complete substitute for in-person work because we continue to lack tooling in one critical area: passive collaboration. While active collaboration (which is the lion’s share) can happen over virtual meetings and emails, we haven’t fully solved for enabling the types of serendipitous conversations and chance connections that often power our biggest innovations and serve as the cornerstone of passive collaboration.

Active versus passive collaboration

Those outside of the tech industry may think that software engineers only need a computer and a secure internet connection to do their work. But the stereotype of the lone engineer coding away in solitude has long been shattered. The best engineering work isn’t done in isolation, but in collaboration, as teams discuss, wrangle and brainstorm through problems. Video conference platforms and chat applications help us collaborate actively, and tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Code and Google Docs allow for dedicated asynchronous collaboration, too.

But what we currently lack are the moments of spontaneous engagement that energize us and invite new ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have been part of the conversation. The long-term impact of not having access to this has not yet been measured, but it’s my belief that it will have a negative effect on innovation because passive collaboration plays such a critical role in fostering creativity.

The whiteboard

The best way to think about the differences between passive and active collaboration is to look at a whiteboard. Someone recently asked me, “What is it with people in tech and whiteboards? Why are they such a big deal?” Whiteboards are simple and “low-tech,” yet have become quintessential in our industry. That’s because they represent a source of multi-modal collaboration for engineers. Let’s think back to before COVID. How many times have you walked by (or been a part of) a scrum meeting of engineers huddled around a whiteboard?

Have you ever stopped by because you overheard a snippet of a conversation and wanted to learn more or share your perspective? Or maybe something on a whiteboard caught your eye and caused you to start a conversation with another colleague, leading to a breakthrough. These are all moments of passive collaboration, which whiteboards so excellently enable (in addition to being a tool for real-time, active collaboration). They’re low-friction ways to invite new ideas and perspectives to the conversation that otherwise wouldn’t have been considered.

While whiteboards are one mode of facilitating passive collaboration, they aren’t the only option. Serendipitous meetings in the break room, overhearing a conversation from the next cubicle over, or spotting someone across the room who’s free for a quick gut-check are also examples of passive collaboration. These interactions are a critical piece of how we work together and the hardest to recreate in a world of remote work. Just as silos in the development process are detrimental to software quality, so too is a lack of passive collaboration.

We need tools that will help us peek over at what other people are working on without the pressure of a dedicated meeting time or update email. The free and open exchange of ideas is a birthplace for innovation, but we haven’t yet figured out how to create a good virtual space for this.

Looking forward

The future of work is one in which teams are more distributed than ever before, meaning we need new tools for passive collaboration not just for this year, but for the future, too. Our own internal survey results tell us that while some employees prefer the option to be fully remote once the pandemic is behind us, the majority want a more flexible solution in the future.

Crucially, the answer is not to create more meetings or email threads, but instead to reimagine virtual spaces that can function like the classic whiteboard and other serendipitous modes of collaboration. As we all still look for ways to solve this challenge, we at LinkedIn have been thinking about how to encourage cross-team conversations and open Q&As to share resources, as a start.

For decades, the tech industry has paved the way for innovations in employee experience, creating spaces and benefits that reduced friction in collaboration and productivity. Now, as we look ahead to a hybrid work world, we must find new ways to continue supporting employee productivity and creativity. It’s only when we’re able to fully realize passive collaboration virtually that we’ll have unlocked the full potential of remote and hybrid work situations.

As Roblox began to trade today, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Currently, Roblox is trading at $71.10 per share, up just over 60% from the reference price that it announced last night. That effort finally set a directional value of sorts on Roblox’s shares before it floated on the public markets. 

Roblox, a gaming company aimed at children and powered by an internal economy and third-party development activity, has had a tumultuous if exciting path to the public markets. The company initially intended to list in a traditional IPO, but after enthusiastic market conditions sent the value of some public-offering shares higher after they began to trade, Roblox hit pause.

The former startup then raised a Series H round of capital, a $520 million investment that boosted the value of Roblox from around $4 billion to $29.5 billion. TechCrunch jokes that, far from IPOs mispricing IPOs, that $4 billion price set in early 2020 was the real theft, given where the company was valued just a year later. Sure, the pandemic was good for Roblox, but seeing a 5x repricing in four quarters was hilarious.

Regardless. At $45 per share, Roblox’s direct listing reference price, the company was worth $29.1 billion, per Renaissance Capital, an IPO-focused group. Barron’s placed the number at $29.3 billion. No matter which is closer to the truth, they were both right next to the company’s final private price.

So, the Series H investors nailed the value of Roblox, or the company merely tied its reference price to that price. Either way, we had a pretty clear Series H → direct listing reference price handoff.

The company’s performance today makes that effort appear somewhat meaningless as both prices were wildly under what traders were willing to cough up during its first day of trading; naturally, we’ll keep tabs on its price as time continues, and one day is not a trend, but seeing Roblox trade so very far above its direct listing reference price and final private valuation appears to undercut the argument that this sort of debut can sort out pricing issues inherent in more traditional IPOs.

To understand the company’s early trading activity, however, we need to understand just how well Roblox performed in Q4 2020. When we last noodled on the company’s valuation, we only had data through the third quarter of last year. Now we have data through December 31, 2020. Let’s check how much Roblox grew in that final period, and if it helps explain how the company managed that epic Series H markup.

Gaming is popular, who knew

British electric vehicle subscription service Onto has partnered with Shell to give its users access to charging stations in preparation for a wave of new EVs coming to market over the next several years. 

The partnership, which Shell announced Tuesday, will give Onto customers access to more than 3,400 Shell Recharge charge points in the UK, plus over 17 charging partners within Shell’s network. 

“Buying an electric car is a big, scary switch for most drivers,” Onto CEO Rob Jolly told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “Charging anxiety is an issue for them, so we’re trying to make EVs as accessible and affordable as possible, and the Shell partnership is a step up from that.”

This isn’t Onto’s first partnership. The company, which is an “all-inclusive” subscription model that covers servicing, road tax, insurance and charging in its monthly fee, has already locked up network partnerships with BP and Tesla. Onto has been expanding its electric fleet beyond its base of Tesla, BMW, Jaguar and Renault vehicles to Hyundai, which joined last month.

Sales of electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids climbed to more than 3 million and reached a market share of more than 4%, according to preliminary estimates from the IEA. While 4% can hardly be considered market saturation, automakers, charging network companies and energy experts expect existing infrastructure to be squeezed as new electric vehicles come to market. VW, GM, Ford, Hyundai and Rivian are just a few of the automakers that are introducing new electric vehicles in 2021. 

A subscription (ev)olution

In the UK, more than 90% of new car buyers finance their vehicles, a transition from a decade ago when the common practice was to buy a car outright. Jolly believes the EV subscription model is going to be the next evolution in the auto market, especially as the UK and other countries move to ban gas and diesel cars and drivers cozy up to the idea of having a flexible, accessible, all-inclusive means of getting into an electric car. Jolly’s pitch to consumers is that the startup’s EV subscription prices are competitive with premium financing deals, but they don’t include the big upfront deposits or the hassle of having to locate and pay for charging. 

“Forty percent of the UK population doesn’t have access to off road parking,” said Jolly. “They’re going from knowing exactly how and where to refuel to being unsure of how charging works. Will they leave it on a street nearby their house or will they charge it on the way to work, or will they charge it at work? That’s the ambition of working with Shell. It’s making the options available to them and making sure our charging infrastructure footprint is as far and wide as possible.”

Shell’s British network includes more than 950 charge points, including Shell Recharge rapid and high-powered chargers (50 kWh and 150 kWh respectively), which are powered by renewable energy sources, and the Shell Recharge and Ionity network of ultra-high power (350 kWh) charge points. Customers can find all of Onto’s participating charging stations through the company’s app or online map, and all customers have been issued Shell Recharge cards so they have fast access to energy company’s network. 

Shell’s move to partner with the EV subscription startup is in line with the company’s plans to move away from gas stations and towards charging stations. The energy giant made its first move in this space in 2019 when it acquired Los Angeles-based EV charging developer Greenlots. Earlier this year, Shell also acquired Ubitricity in the U.K. and announced its plans to launch 500,000 new EV charging stations in the next four years.

Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now. As it stands now, the platform automatically crops images to make them display in a more condensed way in the timeline, where users often scroll through without clicking on an image preview. But that approach has created some problems.

The biggest one, historically, is that Twitter’s algorithm that decides which part of an image gets the focus was demonstrated to have baked-in racial bias. The algorithm prioritized white faces over Black ones in its image preview, even cropping out the former president of the United States in one person’s tests.

Twitter’s automatic image handling is also hassle for photographers and artists, who generally prefer to have total control over how an image is presented. If the crop is off, that small misfire can be the difference between a photo attracting a ton of attention or getting ignored outright. It also ruins narrative tweets, as Twitter notes in its example of the tweet about a dog who is conspicuously absent from one of its crops.

It sounds like Twitter is also trying out showing more full images in the timeline. In tweets, Twitter’s Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis said that anyone testing the new image cropping system will find that most single image tweets in normal aspect ratios won’t get a crop at all, though super wide or super tall images will get a crop weighted around the center.

For photographers (present company included) tired of toggling between Instagram’s preference for portrait-oriented images and Twitter’s insistence on landscape crops, that’s good news too. As you can see in the sample image, the change could actually make Twitter a richer visual platform. That would likely mean more scrolling past images that take up multiple tweets worth of vertical space, but we’d be happy to trade the time spent clicking through images for a prettier Twitter timeline.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?

The ones I’ve heard the most about are the H-1B, O-1, and EB-1A.

— Intelligent in India

Dear Intelligent:

I’m happy to hear you’re considering the O-1A extraordinary ability visa and the EB-1A extraordinary green card! Individuals often assume they need to have won a Nobel Prize or some other major award or be well-known in their field to qualify for either the O-1A or the EB-1A—and that’s simply not the case.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

“Particularly for folks from Asia, being a self-promoter is massively looked down upon. Humility is important,” says Navroop Sahdev, a pioneering economist and blockchain expert whom I recently interviewed for my podcast. Sahdev is founder and CEO of The Digital Economist, a Connection Science Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a partner at NextGen Venture Partners.

She spoke with me about her immigration journey to the United States, which included two H-1B visas, an O-1A visa, and an EB-1A green card.

Here are the pros and cons of each visa and green card that you listed.

H-1B visa

Overall, the requirements for the H-1B specialty occupation visa are not as stringent as those for the O-1A visa and the EB-1A green card, which is why many employers sponsor international students who are on an F-1 visa and recently graduated or on OPT (Optional Practical Training) or STEM OPT for an H-1B.

Because demand for the H-1B far exceeds the annual supply of 85,000, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) holds a random lottery to determine who can apply for an H-1B. (That random lottery is slated to switch to a wage-based selection process next year.)

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise.

TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, and reporting on some of its business details when it took part in a recent Y Combinator demo day.

Something that stood out in our notes on the company when it presented at the accelerator’s graduation event was its economics, with our piece noting that the startup “already [has] several big ticket clients and [says it] will soon be profitable.” Profitable is just not a word TechCrunch hears often when it comes to early-stage, high-growth companies.

So, when the company picked up more capital, we picked up the phone. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s founding team, including Maxine Anderson, the company’s current COO; Ryan Laverty, its president; and Michael Ioffe, its CEO, about its latest round.

According to the trio, Arist raised its initial $1.9 million around the time it left Y Combinator, a round that was led by Craft Ventures at a $15 million valuation. Following that early investment, the company’s business with large clients performed well, leading to it closing $2 million more last December. The founders said that the new funds were raised at a higher price-point than its previous seed tranche.

The second deal was led by Global Founders Capital.

The company’s enterprise adoption makes sense, as all large companies have regular training requirements for their workers; and as anyone who has worked for a megacorp knows, current training, while improved in recent years, is far from perfect. Arist is a bet that lots of corporate training — and the training that emanates from governments, nonprofits and the like — can be sliced into small pieces and ingested via text-message.

For that the company charges around $1,000 per month, minimum.

Arist did catch something of a COVID wave, with its founding team telling TechCrunch that pitching its service to large companies got easier after the pandemic hit. Many concerns better realized how busy their staff was when they moved to working from home, the trio explained, and with some folks suffering from limited internet connectivity, text-based training helped pick up slack.

We were also curious about how the startup onboards customers to the somewhat new text-based learning world; is there a steep learning curve to be managed? As it turns out, the startup helps new customers build their first course. And, in response to our question about the expense of that effort, the Arist crew said that they use freelancers for the task, keeping costs low.

Recently Arist has expanded its engineering staff, and plans to scale from around 11 people today to around 30 by the end of the year. And while Anderson, Laverty and Ioffe are based in Boston, they are hiring remotely. The startup serves global customers via a WhatsApp integration. So Arist should be able to scale its staff and customer base around the world effectively from birth. (This is the new normal, we reckon.)

What’s ahead? Arist wants to grow its revenues by 5x to 10x by the end of the year, hire, and might share if it wants to raise more capital around the end of the year.

Oh, and it partners with Twilio to some degree, though the group was coy on just what sort of discounts it may receive; the founding team merely noted that they liked the SMS giant and deferred further commentary.

All told, Arist is what we look for in an early-stage startup in terms of growth, vision and potential market scale — the startup thinks that 80% of training should be via SMS or Slack and Teams, the latter two of which are a hint about its product direction. But Arist feels a bit more mature financially than some of its peers, perhaps due to its price point. Regardless, we’ll check back in at the mid-point of the year and see how growth is ticking along at the company.