Category: UNCATEGORIZED

YouTube is announcing new ad products today, designed to help marketers reach YouTube visitors who are doing more listening than watching.

The big addition is audio advertising. As the Google -owned video site puts it in a blog post, these are ads designed for viewers who “squeeze in a living room workout before dinner, catch up on a podcast or listen to a virtual concert on a Friday night.”

In other words, audio ads are designed for videos where audience members may only be glancing at the screen occasionally, or might ignoring the visuals altogether. To be clear, these ads won’t be audio-only, but YouTube says the audio should be doing most of the communication, while the visual side is limited to “a still image or simple animation.”

The company says that in early testing, more than 75% of audio ad campaigns on YouTube resulted in a significant lift in brand awareness. For example, this Shutterfly ad resulted in a 14% lift in ad recall and a 2% increase in favorability in its target audience.

The key, YouTube says, is that the audio has to carry the message: “Think: If I close my eyes, I can still clearly understand what this ad is about.”

In addition to launching audio ads in beta, YouTube is also announcing dynamic music lineups, allowing marketers to target their campaigns at collections of music channels on YouTube. These lineups can be focused on a genre, such as Latin music or K-pop, or on an interest like fitness.

In a separate blog post, YouTube’s Head of Music Lyor Cohen made a broader case to advertisers about why they should see YouTube as an essential music streaming platform.

After all, according to Cohen, more than 2 billion logged-in viewers are watching at least one music video each month. And, he wrote, “music is more front and center than you might think” — 60% of YouTube’s music viewing happens on mobile, where background viewing/listening is disabled.

That might seem like an odd thing to emphasize while launching an ad format better suited to background listening, but Cohen continued, “Regardless of when and how people are tuning in, we have ways to help advertisers connect, even when they’re consuming music in the background. Now you can complement the moments your consumers are watching, by engaging them in moments when they’re listening, with newly announced audio ads.”

Natalie Portman and John Legend are joining a group of venture capitalists and unnamed fashion brands backing MycoWorks, a company that just raised $45 million to commercialize its technology that makes a fungal-based biomaterial that can replace leather.

The goal is to get consumers to trade in their leather and lizard skin couture for some fungus fashion.

The company said it has inked some deals with big fashion brands as partners as it looks to bring its funky fungus to the masses in shoes, wallets, belts, and other goods that traditionally use cowhide or other animal skins.

“We have been working with a few luxury brands and a major footwear manufacturer in very close collaboration,” said Matt Scullin, the chief executive officer at MycoWorks .

The unnamed fashion brands have already started producing products for stores in a range of items including shoes, ready to wear apparel and bags, according to Scullin.

MycoWorks likes to differentiate itself from other brands that want to bring a fungus among us or plant new plant-based fabrics in fashion — companies like Bolt Threads (mushrooms), Ananas Anam (pineapple fibers), and Desserto (cactus leather) — with its emphasis on the durability of its fabric.

“We’ve had the product tested in a huge range of different applications of various leather-based apparel to upholstery to standard leather goods like handbags and wallets. The key difference between our material and mushroom leather is that the structural components is so high,” Scullin said. “We’re confident in the material’s ability to perform in a really wide range of applications so there’s a wide range of uses for that.”

To that end, MycoWorks is focused on the high-end fo the market. “There’s a misconception that brands are willing to sacrifice performance for sustainability and that’s not true,” Scullin said. “The real adoption occurs in an industry like this when the performance is there.”

Scullin won’t say how much the MycoWorks material costs nor would he talk about which specific companies are working with the company’s product right now. He did say that the company hopes eventually to be price competitive with not just the traditional leather market, but the plastic market for leather replacements, which is worth $70 billion per-year alone.

With the company’s current capacity it can produce tens of thousands of square feet of fungal material per yar, according to Scullin. That means MycoWorks still has a long way to go to catch up to an industry that produces billions of square feet of leather.

The funding for MycoWorks is impressive, but it also has to contend with some competitors that are getting traction of their own in the fashion industry.

In October, Bolt Threads announced the creation of a consortium alongside longtime partners Adidas, Stella McCartney and the fashion house behind brands like Balenciaga to explore mushroom leather-based products.

For MycoWorks investors including WTT Investment Ltd. (Taipei, Taiwan), DCVC Bio, Valor Equity Partners, Humboldt Fund, Gruss & Co., Novo Holdings, 8VC, SOSV, AgFunder, Wireframe Ventures, and Tony Faddell, the competition is expected. But they believe that MycoWorks functionality makes it the king (oyster) of the leather substitute world. 

“Fine mycelial leather is customizable to client needs” said DCVC Bio investor Kiersten Stead. “[It’s] customizable in terms of shape, and application. And prices will vary depending on what the application and the criteria from customers is.”

In all, MycoWorks has raised $62 million and the company’s new financing announcement coincides with the opening of a new Emeryville, Calif. production plant that takes its capacity up to its current tens-of-thousands of feet of fungal leather replacement capacity.

Behind all of this push to find replacements for animal skins is a growing awareness of the problems associated with traditional methods for manufacturing leather for clothes and shoes. It’s a terribly toxic and polluting process, both in the tanning and dyeing and in the waste and landfilling associated with both animal leather and its plastic replacements.

“The process of growing the mycelium is carbon negative. Customers will look at [our product] vs. an animal hide and say why wouldn’t I choose [that],” said Sculin. “In addition you have the non-animal aspects and the plastic free aspects that are driving so many decisions right now… what we really are to our brand partners is an advanced manufacturing company. We are motivated by sustainability. We represent a way for them to change their supply chains.”

Airbnb filed to go public yesterday, offering the world a look into its financial performance over the past several years. The company’s S-1 detailed an expanding travel giant with billions in annual revenue that was severely disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

But past our overview of Airbnb’s core financial results and our look into which investors will make the most from its public debut, there are still questions that need answering.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

We need to to better understand how far Airbnb’s bookings fell during the end of Q1 and the start of Q2, when travel first collapsed. And, how far those numbers have come back since. We also want to understand what sort of booking activity is driving those gains — is Airbnb really benefiting from a surge of long-term, local stays?

Then, to close, how profitable was Airbnb when times were good, and what sort of cash stockpile does the company have to get back to its former scale?

These five questions should help us better understand how Airbnb managed to survive some tough months and still file to go public before 2020 ran out. Let’s get to work!

We’ll take each question individually, to make our homework today as simple as possible.

How far did Airbnb’s bookings fall during Q1 and Q2?

Let’s start by looking at Airbnb’s gross bookings on a quarterly basis. The company defines gross bookings as “net of cancellations and alterations,” so these numbers are not artificially inflated.

Here’s the chart:

Where does the decline begin? Q1, as we’ll see when we dig into monthly data, but the above chart does a good job painting just how bad things got for Airbnb in growth terms as Q1 closed and Q2 kicked off.

As you can see, Airbnb’s second quarter gross bookings were its lowest in recent history; Q2 2020 put up the smallest bookings result since at least the first quarter of 2017. For a company that had done $10.0 billion in gross bookings in a single quarter just over a year before, the declines were catastrophic.

But the results are actually worse than that chart shows; Airbnb actually saw gross bookings go negative for a few months.

How is that possible? Recall that the gross bookings figure discounts cancellations and alterations. So, if Airbnb had a big wave of cancellations, its gross bookings number could fall so sharply it goes negative, even if the company were still seeing some new bookings.

That’s what happened in March and April. Observe:

So how far did Airbnb’s gross bookings fall? They fell to -$900 million in March. More simply, Airbnb saw its expected rental volume fall by nearly $1 billion in a single month. And then in April it fell by another $600 million as more cancellations piled up.

That’s why Airbnb cut staff and took on expensive capital; its business had gone from accreting to bleeding in no time at all.

How far have Airbnb’s bookings come back since?

Now that Apple’s getting more serious about its own branded headphones, Beats have, perhaps, lost a little bit of luster within the company. The products are still wildly popular, of course, and the brand offers a lot more options than its parent.

Powerbeats are one of the more utilitarian entries among the brand’s wireless offerings (though not quite to the extent of those new $50 models), trading the fully wireless form factor for a behind-the-neck cable and a lower price. Today Beats is offering a new special edition take on the product, launched a collaboration with the Ambush jewelry line and Nigerian singer, Burna Boy.

You’ve got your usual lineup of specs here: 15 hours of battery, sweat and water resistant design and Apple’s H1 chip, et al. Most importantly, though, they’re the first glow-in-the dark product from Beats. And hey, we could all use a little commoditized magic in this dark and depressing world that too often amounts to a ceaseless and increasingly intense parade of pain and suffering, right?

Image Credits: Apple

Here’s Ambush cofounder Yoon Ahn’s decidedly less defeatist take, ” “I thought it would be really cool to design a product that could capture that same city energy when you’re outside late at night listening to music.”

That way is nicer, I suppose.

Anyway, the limited edition comes at a bit of a premium at $200 (the standard Powerbeats are currently listed at $150). They’re available starting tomorrow.

Car sharing marketplace Turo has teamed up with Kiva to offer interest-free loans to Black people and folks from traditionally underserved communities to buy cars and then share them on Turo. The $1 million commitment aims to address the issue of wealth inequality in the United States.

Called the Turo Seed Initiative, those who are eligible can raise up to $7,500 via crowdfunding small loans platform. In order to raise money on Kiva, folks must use the funding for business purposes, which includes car-sharing on Turo. Turo will then match whatever the person raises. From there, they can buy a car and list it on Turo.

“This will make it easier for people who don’t have existing assets or the right credit score or doesn’t own a car to be able to get started that way,” Turo CEO Andre Haddad told TechCrunch. “They borrow the money and only reimburse the capital.”

Throughout the program, Turo says it will also work with hosts to ensure they can be effective in sharing their cars on Turo. In terms of repayment, Turo has a one-month grace period before hosts must start repaying the funds over a period of 42 months.

The program is limited to Turo’s top 15 markets, which include San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston and Houston, in order to ensure that there’s enough to demand to make it worthwhile for hosts. On average, hosts earn around $600 per month by sharing their vehicles about 11 days per month. On top of that, hosts can also use their cars to drive for Uber or Lyft, or deliver for companies like DoorDash and GrubHub.

“We’re very confident that there is real profit to be made here,” Haddad said.

Turo has raised $467.4 million to date and competes against the likes of Getaround, Car2Go, ZipCar and others. In September, Turo says it saw 17%% year over year growth in revenue and is on track to deliver 20% year over year growth in October. In October, Getaround raised a $140 million Series E round to bring its total funding to $600 million. At the time, Getaround said its worldwide revenue had mroe than doubled from its pre-COVID baseline.

Facebook today is rolling out an updated version of its Messenger Kids app with the goal of making it easier for kids to interact with their friends and family, navigate the app, and personalize their experience with features like custom chat bubble colors. The redesign also gives the kid-friendly app a look-and-feel that’s more like Messenger itself.

The updated app does away with the larger, colorful blocks that would flash when messages arrive for a more traditional messaging app design where chats are stacked in a vertical list. The child’s unread messages, now at the top of the inbox, are in bold with a blue dot next to them to call the eye’s attention. Media and message previews have also been added, too, allowing kids to more easily see updates for their conversations.

The redesign introduces new navigation with two dedicated “Chat” and “Explore” navigation tabs at the bottom of the screen, allowing for kids to switch between their conversations and the other in-app activities the app provides, like its mini-games

And with a new swipe gesture, kids can start a call from their inbox.

Finally, the update introduces a new option to personalize conversations, including both individual and group chats, with a custom chat bubble color.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook refers to the update as a “test,” but the changes here are not small tweaks to the layout, navigation or feature set — they’re a revamp. That makes it less likely that this is just some experiment that will later be rolled back based on user feedback. Instead, by referring to it as a test, Facebook gives itself more time before committing to a global rollout.

The company says the new features will first roll out to kids using iPhones in the U.S. and Canada. The update will later expand to other devices and markets in the months ahead.

The changes arrive shortly after Messenger itself received a significant update of its own, which included a visual makeover and new features, including support for chat themes, custom reactions, selfie stickers and vanish mode, in addition to support for cross-app communication with Instagram users. Those updates could have led to the Messenger Kids makeover as well, given there’s likely some underlying messaging infrastructure that’s shared here.

The Messenger Kids app has been steadily updated in the years since its launch, most recently with a big explainer on what Facebook is doing with all that data it’s collecting.

Image Credits: Facebook

Parents should be aware this app today collects a lot of personal information, including names, profile photos, demographic details (gender and birthday), a child’s connection to parents, contacts’ information (like most frequent contacts), app usage information, device attributes and unique identifiers, data from device settings (like time zones or access to camera and photos), network information and information provided from things like bug reports or feedback/contact forms. While some of this does allow the app to properly function, there’s also concern from some parents about how this data is really being used.

While the app does offer a suite of parental controls that make it easier for parents to monitor and restrict how and when their children chat online, Messenger Kids’ privacy policy still leaves itself a lot of wiggle room about how the data may be used to “evaluate, troubleshoot, improve, create, and develop our products” and be shared with other Facebook Companies. Parents should carefully weigh the risks of allowing their child to use a Facebook product with the conveniences of being able to use an app with a robust set of parental controls.

Meet Mati, a startup that recently raised a $13.5 million Series A round to build a digital reputation API that could change the way you interact with online services. Mati uses an API-first approach and lets users seamlessly share pieces of their legal identity.

Investors in today’s funding round include Tribe Capital with Arjun Sethi joining the board, Jerry Murdock from Insight Partners, Sima Gandhi who is the former head of business development and strategy at Plaid and Will Hockey, the CTO of Plaid.

Mati isn’t just an ID verification company with biometric checks. In many ways, Mati works a bit like Plaid, but not just for other types of data. When a company starts using Mati, they can verify various data points, such as residency, income and taxes.

Instead of taking a photography of important documents, Mati can help you connect to a government database or a utility provider to download and share data from those services directly.

“What we do is a digital reputation API that turns anonymous strangers into trustworthy users,” co-founder and CEO Filip Victor told me. And this kind of verifications are extremely important for fintech startups and companies operating in the so-called sharing economy industry.

Filip Victor himself has suffered in the past from poor reputation processes. As an immigrant in the U.S., he couldn’t verify himself on Airbnb. The issue is that most reputation services aren’t that flexible. You run into edge cases quite quickly when you’re an immigrant or you don’t have the right documents.

Mati has chosen to focus on high-growth regions, such as Latin America and South East Asia because they tend to be underserved when it comes to digital reputation. Clients include Te Creemos, Taptap Send and Tropipay.

“We went region by region, country by country and scraped into different databases. We gained access to things like social security access via the user,” Victor said.

Mati is thinking about other use cases beyond financial services and sharing economy startups. Many online services could benefit from some level of trust. By letting users choose what they want and don’t want to share, the company believes it has found the right balance between privacy and trust.

“Privacy is not about being anonymous or hidden. It’s about controlling your data,” Victor said.

For now, the company has managed to attract 200 customers. In the past year, Mati has tripled the number of customers. The startup now has 50 employees and plans to add another 20 employees with the Series A round.

Image Credits: Mati

In a September interview at TechCrunch Disrupt, Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston talked about how the pandemic had forced the company to rethink what work means, and how his company is shifting with the new requirements of a work-from-home world. Today, the company announced broad changes to Dropbox Spaces, the product introduced last year, to make it a collaboration and project management tool designed with these new requirements in mind.

Dropbox president Timothy Young says that the company has always been about making it easy to access files wherever you happen to be and whatever device you happen to be on, whether that was in a consumer or business context. As the company has built out its business products over the last several years, that involved sharing content internally or externally. Today’s announcement is about helping teams plan and execute around the content you create with a strong project focus.

“Now what we’re basically trying to do is really help distributed teams stay organized, collaborate together and keep moving along, but also do so in a really secure way and support IT, administrators and companies with some features around that as well, while staying true to Dropbox principles,” Young said.

This involves updating Spaces to be a full-fledged project management tool designed with a distributed workforce in mind. Spaces connects to other tools like your calendar, people directory, project management software — and of course files. You can create a project, add people and files, then set up a timeline and assign and track tasks, In addition, you can access meetings directly from Spaces and communicate with team members, who can be inside or outside the company.

Houston suggested a product like this could be coming in his September interview when he said:

“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product road map around distributed work,” he said.

Along these same lines, Young says the company itself plans to continue to be a remote first company even after the pandemic ends, and will continue to build tools to make it easier to collaborate and share information with that personal experience in mind.

Today’s announcement is a step in that direction. Dropbox Spaces has been in private beta, but will be available in public beta starting today. It should be available publicly at the beginning of next year.

Consumer healthcare stocks are plummeting this morning on news that Amazon has finally launched its integrated pharmacy service.

The news, which could dramatically reshape the healthcare landscape by offering deep discounts on prescription medication and two-day delivery services for Amazon Prime customers, has already taken a toll on the share price of companies like GoodRx, Walgreens, and CVS.

GoodRx was hit the hardest, with its shares slumping 19% in pre-market trading. Walgreens Boots Alliance was down nearly 10% before market open and CVS Health slid 7%.

Amazon has been steadily encroaching on pharmacy businesses in the same way the company has moved into grocery delivery and everyday consumer staples.

The convergence of food and pharmacy has been a decades-long evolution for mega-retailers on both sides of the divide — with grocers building out pharmacy services and pharmacies adding food to their shelves.

Since its acquisition of Pillpack in 2018, Amazon has been adding additional pharmaceutical and healthcare services. It launched its own over-the-counter drugs in 2019, and rolled out a healthcare network for its employees — Amazon Care for its workers in Seattle.

In August, Amazon launched its fitness tracker, Halo. The personal health and wellness monitoring and advice service includes a $64.99 wrist tracker and an application suite for monitoring health.

As TechCrunch noted, the service includes more than the standard health tracking gadget/app combo, by taking a comprehensive look at various measures of health, including body fat percentage, as measured at home with just your smartphone’s own camera and the Amazon Halo app.

Taken together, Amazon’s array of hardware, software, pharmacy services and healthcare network represents the most complete package of health services across industries.

It’s a powerful pitch to consumers, and one that could ultimately significantly drive down healthcare costs. And drive down the revenue of other pharmacies, which investors are not stoked to imagine.

The US property market has proven to be more resilient than you might have assumed it would be in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic, and today a startup that’s built a computer vision tool to help owners assess and fix those properties more easily is announcing a significant round of funding as it sees a surge of growth in usage.

Hover — which has built a platform that uses eight basic smartphone photos to patch together a 3D image of your home that can then be used by contractors, insurance companies and others to assess a repair, price out the job, and then order the parts to do the work — has raised $60 million in new funding.

The Series D values the company at $490 million post-money, and significantly, it included a number of strategic investors. Three of the biggest insurance companies in the US — Travelers, State Farm Ventures, and Nationwide — led the round, with building materials giant Standard Industries, and other unnamed building tech firms, also participating. Past financial backers Menlo Ventures, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Alsop Louie Partners as well as new backer Guidewire Software were also in this round.

This funding takes the total raised by Hover to just over $142 million, and for some context on its valuation, it’s a significant jump compared to its last round, a Series C in 2019, when Hover was valued at $280 million (according to PitchBook data).

Today’s funding, that valuation jump, and the interest from insurance firms comes on the heels of huge growth for the company. A.J. Altman, Hover’s founder and CEO, tells me that in 2016 the startup was making some $1 million in revenues. This year, it’s expecting to hit “north of $70 million” in its annual run rate, with insurance companies and other big business partners accounting for the majority of its growth.

Hover was founded in 2011 and it first made its name with homeowners and the sole-trader and small business contractors working on their homes repairing roofs and fixing other parts of their structures. Its unique contribution to the market was a piece of software that bypassed a lot of the fragmented and hardest work involved in doing home repair by tying the whole process to the functions of a smartphone: its camera, and the use of apps.

In essence, it allowed anyone with an ordinary smartphone camera to snap several pictures of a space (up to 8), which could then be used to piece together a “structured” 3D image to better assess a job.

Those 3D images are not ordinary 3D pictures: they are dynamically encoded with information about materials, sizes and dimensions and other data critical to carrying out any work. A contractor using the Hover app could set up a system where these pictures, in turn, could be used to automatically create priced out quotes, with bills of material and timings for work, for their prospective clients. And these days, it also serves as an e-commerce portal for builders to order in the parts to carry out that work. (Hover now has around 35 patents on its tech, Altman said.)

The company has had a lot of traction in the market in part because of how it’s digitized an analogue process that had before it been firmly offline and lacking in transparency, in what is essentially a very fragmented market, with some 100,000 home repair firms in the US today.

“The home improvement segment one of the few that is not online,” Altman said. “For example, if I needed a new roof, it’s not that easy to just tell me what that would cost. The reason is because someone has to pull dozens of measurements off a house before costing that out, estimating the time it would take to fix and so on. Hover built a pipeline that turns photos into all of those answers.” It currently has about 10,000 contractors using its app, Altman said, so there is still a lot of growth in that segment.

Altman said that in its early days, the company had something of a hurdle convincing people of the usefulness of having an app that let even the homeowner take pictures of an issue on a property in order to start the process of finding someone to fix it. That’s because even in an age where DIY is pretty commonplace — and The Home Depot, incidentally, is also a previous backer — many builders see that role as theirs, not their clients.

That has changed a lot, especially in the last year in the age of a global health pandemic that has driven many to reduce social contacts to help contain the spread of the virus.

“Eliminating the need for on-site home visits is a huge deal, but we were spending a lot of time convincing some before Covid that this was a good idea,” he said. “The Covid experience — whether it involved an insurance carrier or contractor — didn’t like the idea of engaging a homeowner, asking them, to do that work.” That has shifted considerably, he said, with many now asking for this option.

Insurance is the fastest-growing segment of its business, Altman said, where insurers are integrating their apps with Hovers, sending out links to customers to snap pictures that then get automatically sent to the insurance app to make customers good on claims.

“It’s important to us that we provide our customers with the best possible experience, and HOVER’s technology helps us to do that by creating a simpler, faster and more transparent claims process,” said Nick Seminara, executive vice president and chief claims officer of Travelers, in a statement. “We see a tremendous opportunity for HOVER in the insurance industry, and we’re pleased to continue our partnership and invest in their future.”

Longer term, there are a number of areas where you could imagine Hover’s technology to apply. The company is already doing a lot of work in commercial buildings, and the next step is likely going to be expanding to more interior work, including home design and decor.

This is a huge market where you could see tech like this linking up with the likes of home sales firms, where companies are able to not just market a home, but potentially fixer-uppers with all the planning work set out for how to fix it up when you buy it; and also of course the extensive landscape of e-commerce businesses selling home furnishings, electronics and more.

Many of these, like Ikea and Houzz, have already put in a lot of investment into leveraging newer tech like Apple’s AR platform to improve their user experience, and so the appetite to take things to the next level is definitely there.