Author: azeeadmin

Remote video podcasting is surprisingly still something of a Wild West these days. Given the massive sums of money currently being pumped into the category — not to mention the fact that pretty much all podcasting became remote podcasting in 2020 — you’d expect there to be a more unified solution. Many still continue to rely on catchall teleconferencing software to get the job done (full disclosure: I’ve been recording my podcasts on Zoom during the pandemic).

It’s not for lack of trying of course. A number of companies are vying to become the Zoom or Skype of remote podcasts, including, notably, Zencastr. SquadCast is another big name in the space. The company claims a pretty big footprint, though, again, its primary competitors are still non-specialized video calling apps.

While those platforms are generally reliable and ubiquitous, they do have their drawbacks: namely recording quality. SquadCast’s big selling point has been higher-quality recording than those services where sound is something of an afterthought. This week, the Oakland-based company is adding video recording to the mix.

“We were on an upward trajectory before COVID, but demand during the pandemic has resulted in over 280% growth in both revenue and customer acquisition,” CEO Zachariah Moreno said in a release. “Since Video recording is our most requested feature by current, past, and prospective customers, it was the natural next step to continue to move the needle in virtual recording for podcast professionals.”

The platform is adding the feature for existing customers starting this quarter. The latest beta version of the software records video locally as separate files at 720p. Once the recording is over, it will convert the files into MP4 or WebM.

SquadCast’s version 3.0 beta with Studio Quality Video Recording consumer plans start at $40/month up to $300/month. Zencastr began rolling out its own video recording feature in beta over the summer.

TikTok announces additional steps to fight misinformation, Myanmar’s military cracks down on Facebook and Google’s subsea cable goes online. This is your Daily Crunch for February 3, 2021.

The big story: TikTok will downrank ‘unsubstantiated’ claims

TikTok had already said it would try to reduce misinformation by removing videos flagged by fact checkers for including false information. Today it announced that it will go a step further by flagging videos where the fact checkers’ findings are inconclusive.

For example, the company said that there are cases where fact checkers cannot verify information in a video because events are still unfolding. Those “unsubstantiated” videos will then include a large banner, as well as an additional reminder prompt before users will be able to share them.

This feature is launching in the United States and Canada but will become available globally in “coming weeks.”

The tech giants

Myanmar military government orders telecom networks to temporarily block Facebook — The move comes after days of unrest in Myanmar, where earlier this week military took control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year after detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

Google’s new subsea cable between the US and Europe is now online — The almost 4,000-mile cable has a total capacity of 250 terabits per second.

Instagram confirms it’s working on a ‘Vertical Stories’ feed — This could give the app a more TikTok-like feel.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Vivino raises $155M for wine recommendation and marketplace app — The app and the company behind it have been helping people enjoy better wine since 2010.

Good Eggs raises $100M and plans to launch in Southern California — Good Eggs says that in the past year, it has grown revenue to the nine figures (more than $100 million), hired more than 400 employees and nearly doubled its customer base.

Rocket.Chat raises $19M for its open-source approach to integrated enterprise messaging — The service is used by banks, the U.S. Navy, NGOs and other organizations to set up and run any variety of secure virtual communications services from one place.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Spotify Group Session UX teardown: The fails and their fixes — Essentially a “party mode,” the feature offers a way for participants to contribute to a collaborative playlist in real time and control what’s playing across everyone’s devices.

Edtech valuations aren’t skyrocketing, but investors see more exit opportunities — Thirteen VCs discuss how their deal-making has changed in the last year.

Deep Science: AIs with high class and higher altitudes — This roundup kicks off with a study looking at the relative positions of the U.S., EU and China in the AI “race.”

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Global smartphone shipments expected to rebound 11% this year — New numbers from Gartner point to a rebound to pre-2020 levels.

Todd Rundgren is about to launch a geofenced virtual tour — Rundgren is staging the tour with support from NoCap, the livestreaming concert startup founded by musicians Cisco Adler and Donavon Frankenreiter.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Spotify again signaled its interest in developing new ways to monetize its investments in podcasts. In the company’s fourth-quarter earnings, chief executive Daniel Ek suggested the streaming media company foresees a future where there will be multiple business models for podcasts, including, potentially, both ad-supported subscriptions and à la carte options.

The company, which also revealed its podcast catalog has grown to now 2.2 million programs, said it’s seen increasing demand for the audio format in recent months.

For example, 25% of Spotify’s monthly active users now engage with podcasts, up from 22% just last quarter. Podcast consumption is also increasing, with listening hours having nearly doubled year-over-year in the fourth quarter.

Today, podcasts on Spotify’s platform are available to both free and paid users and are monetized with ads. This is still a key focus for the company — Spotify even recently acquired a podcast hosting and monetization platform, Megaphone, to help make streaming ad insertion technology available to its third-party publishers while also growing its targetable podcast inventory.

But Spotify recently put its feelers out about different means of monetizing podcasts, too.

Late last year, for instance, the company was spotted running a survey that asked its customers if they would be willing to pay for a standalone podcast subscription, and if so what would it look like and how much would it cost?

At the time, the survey offered a few different concepts.

At the low end, a subscription could offer ad-supported exclusive episodes and bonus content for $3 per month. This would be similar to Stitcher Premium, which today provides exclusives from top shows and other bonus episodes. But Spotify’s suggested version included ads, while Stitcher Premium is ad-free.

A middle option suggested a plan that would be even closer to Stitcher Premium, with exclusive shows and bonus material but no ads. This even matched Stitcher Premium’s price of $5 per month. And at the high-end, subscribers could get early access to ad-free interviews and episodes for $8 per month.

A survey, of course, is only meant to gauge consumer demand for such a subscription, and doesn’t indicate that Spotify has a new product in the works. (Spotify said the same when asked to comment on the news at the time.)

However, it’s clear that investors also want to know what Spotify is thinking when it comes to recouping its sizable investments in podcasts.

Asked if Spotify thought customers would be willing to pay for podcasts, Ek on the earnings call responded that he believed there were several new models that could be explored.

“I think we’re in the early days of seeing the long-term evolvement of how we can monetize audio on the internet. I’ve said this before, but I don’t believe that it’s a one-size-fits-all,” he said. “I believe, in fact, that we will have all business models, and that’s the future for all media companies — that you will have ad-supported subscriptions and à la carte sort of in the same space, of all media companies in the future.”

“And you should definitely expect Spotify to follow that strategy and that pattern,” Ek added, more definitively.

The answer seemed to indicate that Spotify is considering some of the ideas in that recent survey — of getting consumers to pay for some podcasts, instead of accessing them all for free or having them bundled into their music subscription.

Of course, that would change the meaning of the word “podcasts,” which today refers to freely distributed, serialized audio programs that get distributed via RSS feeds.

If Spotify chooses to paywall podcasts behind subscriptions or à la carte payments, then they’re no longer really podcasts — they’re a new sort of premium audio program.

This is an area where Spotify has plenty of room to grow, considering the significant investment it has made in podcasts over the years. To date, that’s included buying up content producers like Gimlet Media, The Ringer and Parcast, as well as signing top creators like Joe Rogan, Addison Rae, Kim Kardashian West, DC Comics, Michelle Obama and The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, among others. Spotify also bought podcast tools like Anchor and other ad technology and hosting services.

The advantage with podcasts is that Spotify has the ability to monetize them in multiple ways at once — with ads and subscriptions or direct payments, if it chose. And, of course, there are no licensing fees or royalties to contend with, as with streaming music.

Spotify could also adjust the podcast payments model as needed to fit its different geographies and the way customers around the world prefer to consume and pay for podcast content.

None of this thinking was about near-term launches, Ek also clarified.

“I think it’s early days, though, to specifically kind of look at how that could play out,” he said, talking about how the different models could take shape. “But, obviously, if that were to be the case, that revenue profile would be different than how we do music.”

The California Supreme Court today shot down the lawsuit filed by a group of rideshare drivers in California and the Service Employees International Union that alleged Proposition 22 violates the state’s constitution.

“We are disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear our case, but make no mistake: we are not deterred in our fight to win a livable wage and basic rights,” Hector Castellanos, a plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. “We will consider every option available to protect California workers from attempts by companies like Uber and Lyft to subvert our democracy and attack our rights in order to improve their bottom lines.”

The suit argued Prop 22 makes it harder for the state’s legislature to create and enforce a workers’ compensation system for gig workers. It also argues Prop 22 violates the rule that limits ballot measures to a single issue, as well as unconstitutionally defines what would count as an amendment to the measure. As it stands today, Prop 22 requires a seven-eights legislative supermajority in order to amend the measure.

“We’re thankful, but not surprised, that the California Supreme Court has rejected this meritless lawsuit,” Jim Pyatt, a rideshare driver who advocated for Prop 22 and worked with the Yes on 22 campaign, said in a statement. “We’re hopeful this will send a strong signal to special interests to stop trying to undermine the will of voters who overwhelmingly stood with drivers to pass Proposition 22. The ballot measure was supported by nearly 60 percent of California voters across the political spectrum including hundreds of thousands of app-based drivers. It’s time to respect the vast majority of California voters as well as the drivers most impacted by Prop 22.”

Meanwhile, Uber, Lyft and other companies have said they have their eyes on pursuing Prop 22-like legislation elsewhere. Given Uber and Lyft’s anti-gig-workers-as-employees stance, it came as no surprise when Uber and Lyft separately said they would pursue similar legislation in other parts of the country and the world.

Lyft, for example, has created external organizations that push for the independent contractor classification. Two of those organizations are Illinoisans for Independent Work and New Yorkers for Independent Work. Illinoisans for Independent Work was established in June and funded by Lyft with $1.2 million, according to committee filings. The stated purpose of the committee is “to support candidates who share the ideology of our organization and the value of independent work.”

But as we’ve previously discussed, the implementation of Prop 22 doesn’t mark the end of the battle for some gig workers to achieve employee status. There is a concerted effort to keep organizing this year, and getting ready to fight back wherever the next legislative battle emerges.

Myanmar has ordered local telecom firms to temporarily block Facebook in the Southeast Asian nation days after the military seized power in the country in a military coup.

Several users on Myanmar subreddit reported moments ago that Facebook was already inaccessible for them, suggesting that internet service providers have already started to comply with the order. In its order, Myanmar alleges that Facebook is contributing to instability in the country.

NetBlocks, which tracks global internet usage, reports that MPT, a state-owned telecom operator that commands the market, has blocked Facebook as well as Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp on its network.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Today, Andreessen Horowitz founder Marc Andreessen announced that social media product veteran Sriram Krishnan will be joining the firm as their latest general partner.

Krishnan, whose previous roles include stints at Snap, Facebook and Twitter, has gained a higher profile in recent weeks from his recurring audio show “The Good Time Show” on Clubhouse. His recent talk with Tesla CEO Elon Musk was something of a watershed moment for the audio chat platform driving plenty of new attention to the budding app.

This announcement follows a report in The Information regarding the hire earlier this week.

Krishnan’s hire comes at an interesting point for Andreessen Horowitz, the firm is at the center of plenty of chatter among media circles regarding their “go direct” content strategy. At the same time, a16z and its leadership have played an increasingly hard-nosed role in driving a broader backlash against tech media in recent years among founders and tech enthusiasts in their orbit. Krishnan has spent much of the past couple years building out his flirtations with “tech optimism” content with his interview newsletter The Observer Effect, his Clubhouse show and his prolific Twitter usage.

Broader “tech pessimism” among media outlets has, I think, partially been owed to a swift and outspoken shift in thinking regarding the societal responsibilities of social media platforms to more aggressively moderate the content they are surfacing on a global scale. Some of the partners at a16z, a Facebook backer, have been among the more vocal in pushing back on these critiques even as the executives at their portfolio companies have seemed more amenable to shift their thinking.

In his blog post, Andreessen notes that Krishnan will be joining the firm’s consumer team to invest in areas that include social.

Krishnan, well-regarded in tech circles, may play an important role at the firm as they approach more social investments in a world where the effects of rapidly scaled consumer platforms have become more understood. The firm and its partners have been throwing their full support behind Clubhouse in an aggressive push to promote the platform, flexing the firm’s celebrity connections and influence along the way as the platform quickly picks up millions of new users. Krishnan’s direct operator roles engaging with the product struggles of building platforms that responsibly scale will likely be an asset as the firm faces increased competition across an increasingly frothy venture market.

The idea of a virtual concert tour might seem tailor-made for the pandemic, but musician Todd Rundgren said he’s actually been thinking about something like this for years.

Rundgren told me that he’d become frustrated with our “collapsing” air travel system — exacerbated by hurricanes and climate change — that increasingly left him “sitting somewhere, unable to get to my next gig.” So he was already convinced that he need to “start imagining other ways” to reach audiences.

But it was in the context of COVID-19 that Rundgren finally decided to make it happen, with his Clearly Human Tour kicking off on February 14. He’d been planning for a traditional tour, but the dates kept getting pushed back due to the pandemic, until he finally told the organizers, “You have to let me do this. I can’t be committed to you and go two years without touring.”

Rundgren and his band will be performing entirely from Chicago, where they’ll play songs from across his career, as well as the entirety of his album “Nearly Human.” But the tour is taking place virtually across 25 U.S. cities, starting in Buffalo on February 14 and ending on March 22 in Seattle.

Rundgren said he found this more appealing than the idea of performing “one show and then blast it out to everybody.”

“People plan weeks or months in advance for this particular event, it attracts people from all over the metropolitan area or a particular region,” he said. “It’s a social event as much as anything else, and that’s what we are trying to do with the localization.”

That means performing live shows at 8pm, according to whatever the local time zone might be. Rundgren said the band will also try to “self-hypnotize” to get into the proper spirit: “We’ll dress all the walls with posters, sports team memorabilia … We’ll get food flown in from familiar local eateries.”

Other features include virtual meet and greets with local fans, as well as placing video screens around the concert venue to display virtual audience members. (There are a limited number of in-person tickets for sale as well, but obviously those attendees will need to be in Chicago.)

The concerts will be geofenced, although Rundgren said the approach has evolved — it’s less about limiting the Buffalo concert to Buffalo attendees, and more about enforcing geographic restrictions based on Rundgren’s contractual obligations. Or as he put it, “It’s less about enclosing an audience, and more about fencing them out.”

Rundgren is staging the tour with support from NoCap, the livestreaming concert startup founded by musicians Cisco Adler and Donavon Frankenreiter. NoCap has been around for less than a year, and Adler said that while it sold 700 tickets for its first show, it’s now selling “30, 40, 50 thousand tickets” per show. And he predicted that virtual concerts won’t be going away when the pandemic ends.

“There are all these underserved markets that you can visit once every five years, if that,” he said. “The future of this becomes a hybrid model.”

After all, he noted that televising sports has only made them “bigger and more global.” Similarly, when Adler was thinking about livestreaming concerts, he said, “I didn’t look at it as: How do we build a Band Aid and help everyone through this gap? It was more: How do we build a bridge to the other side of what music can be?”

Founders — by now you must have heard about TechCrunch Early Stage events on April 1 and 2 and July 8 and 9. The two-day founder and entrepreneur bootcamp brings together top experts to teach you how to get ahead and build a successful company. This year on the second day of each event we’re adding a twist — the Early Stage Pitch-Off. TechCrunch is on the hunt to showcase 10 early-stage startups to our global audience of investors, press and tech industry leaders. Apply here for the April 2 Early Stage Pitch-Off by February 21.

It wouldn’t be a TC event without highlighting the best startups in the business. Here’s how it will work. Ten founders will pitch on stage for five minutes, followed by a five-minute Q&A with an esteemed panel of VC judges. The top three will then proceed to the finals, pitching again but this time with a more intensive Q&A and a new panel of judges. The winner will receive a feature article on TechCrunch.com, one-year free subscription to ExtraCrunch and a free Founder Pass to TechCrunch Disrupt this fall.

Nervous to pitch on-stage in front of thousands? Fear not. After completing the application, selected founders will receive several training sessions during a remote mini-bootcamp, communication training and personalized pitch-coaching by the Startup Battlefield team. Selected startups will also be announced on TechCrunch.com in advance of the show. 

What does it take to qualify? TechCrunch is looking for early-stage, pre-Series-A companies with limited press. The Early Stage Pitch-Off is open to companies from around the globe, consumer or enterprise and in any industry — biotech, space, mobility, impact, SaaS, hardware, sustainability and more.

Founders don’t miss your chance to pitch your company on the world’s best tech stage. Apply today!

There’s more AI news out there than anyone can possibly keep up with. But you can stay tolerably up to date on the most interesting developments with this column, which collects AI and machine learning advancements from around the world and explains why they might be important to tech, startups or civilization.

Before we get to the research in this edition, however, here’s a study from the ITIF trade group evaluating the relative positions of the U.S., EU and China in the AI “race.” I put race in quotes because no one knows where we’re going or how long the track is — though it’s still worth checking who’s in front every once in a while.

The answer this year is the U.S., which is ahead largely due to private investment from large tech firms and venture capital. China is catching up in terms of money and published papers but still lags far behind and takes a hit for relying on U.S. silicon and infrastructure.

The EU is operating at a smaller scale, and making smaller gains, especially in the area of AI-based startup funding. Part of that is no doubt the inflated valuations of U.S. companies, but the trend is clear — and perhaps an opportunity for investors is as well, who might see this as an opportunity to get in on some high-quality startups without needing quite so much capital.

The full report (PDF) goes into much more detail, of course, if you’re interested in a more granular breakdown of these numbers.

If the authors had known about this new Amazon-funded AI research center at USC they probably would have pointed at it as a good example of the type of partnership that helps keep U.S. production of AI scholars up.

A touch of class

On the farthest possible end from monetization and practical application, we have two interesting uses of machine learning in fields where human expertise is valued in different ways.

At Switzerland’s EPFL, some music-minded boffins at the Digital and Cognitive Musicology lab were investigating the shift in the use of modes in classical music over the ages — major, minor, other or none at all. In an effort to objectively categorize thousands of pieces from hundreds of years and composers, they created an unsupervised machine learning system to listen to and categorize the pieces according to mode. (Some of the data and methods are available on GitHub.)

“We already knew that in the Renaissance, for example, there were more than two modes. But for periods following the Classical era, the distinction between the modes blurs together. We wanted to see if we could nail down these differences more concretely,” he explained in a university news release.

Chat platforms like Slack have been game-changes when it comes to what business users want and expect out of their work communications. Today, a company that’s aiming to move the goalpost again with an integrated, open-source alternative is announcing some funding to fuel its growth.

Rocket.Chat, a startup and open source-based platform of the same name used by banks, the U.S. Navy, NGOs, and other organizations big and small to set up and run any variety of secure virtual communications services from one place — they can include not just team chat, but also customer service, collaboration platforms covering your staff and outside partners, school classrooms, conferences and more — has raised $19 million.

The company plans to use the funding both to continue adding more customers, but also expanding the platform’s functionality, including more security features, a way to use the service over federated blockchain architecuture, apps for marketplaces, options for bots, and more social media and omnichannel customer service integrations, and potentially facilities for virtual events.

As more business interactions have gone virtual, it has essentially opened the door for companies like Rocket.Chat building virtual communications platforms to build in an increasing number of features into what it does.

The Series A round of funding has four lead investors — Valor Capital Group, Greycroft, Monashees, and NEA — with e.ventures, Graphene Ventures, ONEVC, and DGF also participating. The Porto Alegre, Brazil-based startup (which is incorporated in Delaware) has now raised $27 million to date.

Rocket.Chat is not disclosing its valuation with this round, but it comes on the back of some significant growth in the last year. The startup now has 16 million registered users across 150 countries, with 8 million of them monthly active users. Of that 16 million, 11.3 million users registered for the service in the past six months. It’s currently installed on some 845,000 servers, the company said, and has over 1,500 developers building on its platform.

Rocket.Chat’s funding and expanding business comes as part of a bigger focus overall for open source platforms.

The promise of open source in the world of enterprise IT has been that it provides a platform to customise a service to fit with how the organization in question wants to use it, while at the same time providing tools to make sure it is robust enough in terms of security, extensibility and more for use in a business environment.

Over the years, it has become a big business opportunity, in line with organizations getting more sophisticated in terms of what they expect and need out of their IT services, where off-the-shelf apps may not always fit the bill.

Rocket.Chat positions itself as something of an all-in-one superstore for any and all communications needs, with organizations putting their own services together in whatever way works for their purposes.

It can either be hosted and managed by customers themselves, or used as a cloud-based SaaS, with its pricing ranging between free (for minimal, self-hosted services) through to $4 per user per month, or higher, depending on which services customers want to have, whether its hosted or not, and how much the platform is being used each month.

As you can see in the mock-up here, its basic platform looks a little like Slack. But if you are using it for omnichannel communications for customer service, for example, you can build a platform within Rocket.Chat where you incorporate communications from any other platforms that might use to communicate with customers.

Its work collaboration platform also starts with Rocket.Chat’s basic chat interface, but also allows you integrate alerts and links to other apps that you regularly use, as well a video calls and more. These and other functions built on Rocket.Chat can then be made to interact with each other — for example handing tickets off in customer service to internal tech support teams — or separately.

The idea is that by providing a version that can be hosted and managed by organizations themselves, it gives them more privacy and control over their electronic messaging.

Its thousands of customers reflect an interesting mix of the kinds of organizations that are looking for solutions that do just that.

Gabriel Engel, the CEO and founder, tells me the list includes several military and public sector organizations including the U.S. Navy, financial services companies like Credit Suisse and Citibank, as well as the likes of Cornell, Arizona State, UC Irvine, Bielefeld University and other educational institutions, and a number of other private companies. 

That flexibility does not always play to Rocket.Chat’s advantage, however. Controversially, it seems that the list also includes the other end of the spectrum of organizations that want to keep their messages limited to a very specific audience: Islamic State it turns out also hosts and runs a Rocket.Chat to disseminate messages.

Engel says that while this is not something that the company supports, and that it works with authorities to shut down users like these as much as it can, it’s a consequence of how the service was built:

“We are not able to track usage if they are running Rocket.Chat servers of their own,” he said. “There’s a reason why the U.S. Navy uses Rocket.Chat. And that’s because we cannot track and know what they’re doing. It’s isolated from any external influence, for better or worse.” He added that the company has policies so that if an illicit organization is using its SaaS version, these get taken down in cooperation with authorities. “But just as with Linux, if you download and run Rocket.Chat on your own computer, then obviously we it’s out of our reach.”

Hearing about how a platform built with privacy by design can be abused, with seemingly little to be done about it, does seem to offset some of the benefits. The ethics of that predicament, and whether technology can ever solve it, or whether it will be up to government authorities to address, will continue to be a question not just for Rocket.Chat but for all of us.

In the meantime, investors are interested because of the alternative it provides to those groups that need it.

“In today’s environment, organizations must have a secure communication platform to engage teams internally, communicate with customers and partners externally, and connect with safe interest-based communities,” said Dylan Pearce, Partner at Greycroft, in a statement. “Rocket.Chat’s world-class management team and open-source community lead the industry in innovation and provide a communications platform capable of serving every person on the planet.”