Joshira Maduro joined the LendingTree team in April 2020 and uses her background in market research and branding to write about credit card news and better ways to spend.
Subscription services are on the rise. During the pandemic, Americans have been spending more time at home and more money on the digital products that make navigating our new normal easier.
More than ever, Americans’ lives are aided by companies like Netflix, Instacart and, of course, Amazon, which reported record-setting earnings from its 2020 Prime Day savings event.
A recent survey even found that spending on subscription services had more than tripled since March, with one in three respondents saying they’d purchased a new online subscription while quarantining.
Now, a new concern lingers: Is the market getting oversaturated? The question doesn’t just apply to streaming services and food delivery companies — it’s an issue financial technology businesses can’t afford to ignore.
As subscriptions become an increasingly alluring business model, fintechs will be forced to consider whether this proven strategy is worth the risk.
Fintechs should take note of subscription services
In the CompareCards survey, two-thirds of respondents said they purchased a new streaming service mainly for entertainment. Still, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for fintechs to carve out their own space.
Bradley Leimer, co-founder of the financial consulting firm Unconventional Ventures, said he’s certainly seen more fintechs exploring subscription models. As Leimer explained, the financial services industry may have not fully embraced the idea, but it’s “starting to take notice.” Leimer, who has more than 25 years of experience in the industry, believes fintechs can learn a lot from subscription services — provided they’re willing to look in the right place.
One major lesson? Transparency. Subscription services give companies an opportunity to be upfront about their fees, as well as their benefits.
“When we talk about subscriptions, the more clear and more transparent we are, the better,” Leimer said.
Acorns is an easy case study. The microinvesting app offers three subscription levels — lite, personal and family — each with a clearly explained list of features. For what it’s worth, the company added more than 2 million users between March 2019 and March 2020, according to Forbes.
Leimer said fintechs should also take note of the way subscription services collaborate. For example, he pointed out how Amazon users can add an HBO subscription to their Prime Video account, essentially “bundling” two subscriptions into one. Fintechs, Leimer said, could stand to take a page out of that playbook.
“There are a lot of ways to sort of skin that cat — for a fintech company to generate income and for a customer to get value on top of that,” Leimer said.
PayPal announced today it’s dropping the waitlist to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency in the U.S. With the move, all customers in the U.S. will be able to purchase cryptocurrency directly from within their PayPal accounts. U.S. customers will also be alerted to the new feature through both an email and a push notification in the coming days, the company says.
The feature was already partially available in the U.S. before today, but PayPal had been onboarding interested customers via a waitlist.
With the update, users will no longer have to wait for a spot to open,
In addition, PayPal says that due to initial demand from its customers, it’s increasing its weekly cryptocurrency purchase limit from $10K per week to $20K per week.
In October, PayPal had first announced its plans to enter the cryptocurrency market by way of a partnership with cryptocurrency company Paxos. This partner helps to power the new service for PayPal, enabling its customers to buy, sell and hold a range of cryptocurrencies — initially including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin.
By next year, PayPal plans to allow users to make PayPal purchases with cryptocurrencies as well, the company has said..
In terms of exchange rates, PayPal will charge $0.50 USD on transactions up to $24.99 USD, 2.3% on transactions from $25 to $100 USD; 2.0% on transactions from $100.01 to $200 USD; $1.80% on transactions of $200.01 to $1,000 USD; and 1.5% on transactions over $1,000 USD.
PayPal notes there are no fees for holding crypto in your account. And, to get things started, PayPal is waiving fees until 2021.
The company somewhat quietly announced the news today via an update to last month’s press release.
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Topics cover a broad swath of technologies including 3D-printed rockets, earth observation data, orbital operations, ground station networks, launch services, broadband communications, defense operations and manufacturing in space. Explore the event agenda here.
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The day has finally arrived. The latest version of macOS is here, after a seemingly endless wait. That wasn’t just your imagination, either. Sure time is basically meaningless now, but this one did take a while to arrive, with nearly five months between its announcement at WWDC and today’s public release.
There are, no doubt, plenty of reasons for this. Among other things, this has been an usual year, to put it as benignly as possible. This also marks a pretty big annual update for the desktop operating system. And then, of course, there’s the fact that this is the first version of macOS expressly built for the company’s new Arm-based Macs — the single largest change to Apple hardware in roughly 14 years.
I’ve been running a beta of the operating system on one of my machines since June, along with developers and a smattering of brave souls. I’m not saying we’re heroes — but I’m also not not saying that. At the end of the day, it’s not for me to say.
The update brings a slew of design updates — many of which continue the longstanding trend of blurring the line between macOS and iOS. It’s a trend that may well intensify as Apple silicon ushers in the next era of Macs. At the very least, it makes sense from the standpoint of iOS having long ago taken the pole position in Apple’s software design. The mobile operating system has been the first to introduce many features that have eventually found their way onto the desktop.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Many of the changes are subtle. The menu bar is taller and more translucent, changing with different backgrounds and as the system toggles between light and dark mode. The Finder dock now floats a touch above the bottom of the screen and menus have a little more space to breathe. Windows offer a bit more space, as well, along with a smattering of new symbols scattered throughout first-party apps like Mail and Calendar.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
The shapes of the icons have changed to a more iOS-like squircle design, with subtle touches throughout — the Mail icon, for instant, sports the address of Apple’s HQ in barely visible text: “Apple Park, California 95014.” Like many of the other touches, the key is offering up a kind of stylistic consistency, both throughout Big Sur and across the Apple ecosystem.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
The most immediate and obvious change to the finder, however, is the addition of the Control Center. The feature is borrowed directly from iOS/iPadOS, bringing a simple, clean and translucent pane down to the right side of the screen. You can drag and drop the panels directly into the menu bar. It brings to mind the sort of control center functionality the company introduced with the Touch Bar, but more than anything the big buttons and sliders beckon you to reach out and touch the screen. It’s really hard to shake the feeling that the company is starting to lay the groundwork for future touchscreen Macs running Apple silicon.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
I won’t lie: I’ve never been a big Notification Center user. I understand why Apple thought to bring the center to the desktop several updates ago, but it’s just not as centralized as it is on mobile. Nor does it fit into my existing workflow. Apple has continued tweaking the feature — and it gets a pretty sizable overhaul here. Like much of the rest of the updates, it’s about how Apple uses space.
Now accessible by clicking the date and time in the menu bar (versus a devoted button), the two most appealing changes here are grouped notifications and widgets. Again borrowing from iOS, notifications are now stacked by group. Tapping the top of the pile will expand them down. You can “X” them out on the side to make them go away — but again, a swipe would be more satisfying. Also notable is the ability to interact with notifications. You can reply to messages or listen to podcasts straight from the river. It’s a nice addition for those who already use the feature as part of their workflow.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
The system also joins the latest version of iOS with the addition of new widgets into the Notification column. Currently the list includes first-party apps like Calendar, Weather and Podcasts, along with additional widgets available via the App Store. You can add and remove widgets and resize them. On a screen with enough real estate, it might be nice to pin them to the top, so they can stay open and anchored in place, while you’re working in other applications.
Sounds, too, have been updated throughout. The changes are mostly subtle, as in the case of the newly recorded startup chime. More pronounced are changes like moving a file, which has a nice humming sound — more pleasant that the old cold spring noise. Here’s a much better rundown of all of the sounds than I currently have time to put together:
A number of first-party apps get some key updates here. Safari is probably the biggest of the bunch, starting with the welcome page. You can set the background image, using something from your own library — or a pre-picked photo from Apple. It might be nice to have something a bit more dynamic, cycling through a series of handpicked images or using AI to choose the best from a library, but otherwise the implementation is good — and it’s nice to see something familiar when you open a new tab (in my very specific case, a rabbit who also lives rent-free in my apartment).
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Beyond that, home-page customizations include toggling between favorites, frequently visited sites, your reading list and even security reports, which tell you things like the number of trackers Safari has blocked. Clicking into that last bit offers up a more detailed profile of the specific trackers it blocked and which sites are doing the tracking. Apparently 80% of the sites I’ve visited with Safari on this computer use them — which, yikes.
Built-in translation in Safari is a nice step toward taking on Chrome — Google has been a longtime leader in translation services. Apple’s browser has great market share on mobile (thanks in no small part to being the default browser on iOS), but studies tend to put it at somewhere around eight to 10% of the desktop market share. Currently, however, the system is still in beta and the translation options are still limited, including: English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, French, German, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese. Apple will no doubt continue to update that list.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
One piece that I do dig are website previews, which can be accessed by hovering over a tab. That’s a nice addition for those of us who tend to go overboard with tabs — which I have to imagine is many or most people, these days. Apple has also added site favicons to tabs, which should also help you identify them quicker.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Things have been improved in the backend as well, with quicker site rendering and better power efficiency. The company says you should be able to get up to three extra hours of battery streaming video on Safari versus Firefox and Chrome. Seems like a pretty big discrepancy, though there are, no doubt, advantages to using first-party software. Even if the company still has a steep hill to climb with regards to desktop market share. Maps is another place where Apple’s got some pretty stiff competition from Google. At last measure, Google Maps has something like 67% market share. Apple’s offering got off to an admittedly slow start out of the gate, but the company’s been pushing pretty hard to catch up to — and in a few spot surpass — Google.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
Of course, many of these updates are the sort of things that will be easier to check out when there isn’t a pandemic happening. Meantime, things like the 360-degree Look Around (Apple’s Street View competitor) is a nice way to live vicariously. Indoor Maps, too, though the feature is still relatively limited. You can check it out in select spots like airports and indoor shopping malls. Other key additions include electric vehicle routing to plan trips around charging stages, cycling directions and mapped congestion zones for traffic in major cities.
Image Credits: Brian Heater
A handful of updates to Messages warrant mention here — many of which were also introduced with the latest version of iOS (a rare bit of cross-OS parity that could, perhaps, become more common going forward). In this case, it’s clear why the company would want to roll some of this stuff out all at once.
Messages is just more robust across the board on the desktop with this update. The list includes a Memoji editor and stickers, message effects like confetti and lasers and an improved photo chooser. Conversations can be pinned to the top of the app and group chats have been improved to include group photos, inline replies to specific messages and the ability to alert users with the @ symbol. It’s not quite a Slack replacement, nor is it trying to be one.
After months of beta, Big Sur is finally here. It boasts some key upgrades to apps and the system at large, but more importantly from Apple’s perspective, it lays the groundwork for the first round of Arm-powered Macs and continues its march toward a uniformity between the company’s two primary operating systems.
In 2009, Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani tried to convince people to learn online through live classes. But what he discovered instead was that everyone wanted an online repository of content that allowed them to learn at their own pace, whenever and wherever. So, he canned his idea and Udemy created what is now called a massive open online course provider, or MOOC.
In the years since, Biyani was let go from Udemy, started a 200-person food company, shut that down, took a sabbatical, and is now returning to the seedling he left behind in 2009: live, online courses.
Today, Biyani tells TechCrunch that he is teaming up with Wes Kao, the co-founder of AltMBA, an online cohort-based leadership program, to start an edtech company that combines both of their experiences into one focus: live, cohort-based learning. The duo grew up as friends in the same hometown, but only recently reconnected over education once Biyani returned from sabbatical. Kao’s experience building an online course from scratch, with an over 95% completion rate, was validation that the format worked. And soon enough, they incorporated a company together.
The company will focus on cohort-based learning, mixing live and asynchronous components. As it’s still in early stealth, the founders said it doesn’t have a name yet. Instead of a company site, they have a Notion landing page.
Despite those missing details, what Biyani did say is that the startup’s main focus is creating a community where anyone can start their own course. Kao says that creating a course requires over a dozen people behind the scenes — teacher assistants, community moderators and the process is essentially “an entire production.” With the startup, she wants to democratize that operation.
“I see it as a way to help more traders and experts be able to share their knowledge,” she said. “And take away the question marks on how to build community.”
The company from the start will focus on the back-end production of helping teachers, but eventually create a marketplace to allow students to see a directory of classes.
“It should be as easy as building a Substack,” Biyani said, referring to the popular newsletter service. Similar to Substack, the company will only make money if the instructor, or creator, does. It takes a chunk of each student’s subscription cost as revenue.
The company is entering a crowded space. Yesterday, CampusWire announced that it has pivoted to start offering build-your-own courses to experienced professors. MasterClass allows celebrities to teach classes, Teachable allows anyone to create their own course, and the list continues.
But Biyani views their biggest competitor as teachers who have already built courses without a third-party service. The company is planning to bring those creators onto their platform by offering ways to manage their customer base.
Ultimately, the market will only be won over by the startup that has the best strategy, product, and teacher pool. Based on their stealthy vision, the duo has raised $4.3 million in a round led by First Round Capital. Other investors include Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, Li Jin, Arlan Hamilton and co-founders from Lambda School, Outschool, Superhuman, and Udemy.
It’s a stacked term-sheet for a company in the early stages, suggesting that that edtech’s boom is still very much upon us. Lavingia says that he committed right away even though he didn’t use the product.
“Gagan’s name was enough for me,” he said. “I think I followed him on Twitter a year or two ago and i’d back anything he does just based on what he shares.”
Backstage Capital’s Hamilton said that Kao has been within the Backstage mentor network for a while, and added that “there’s a perfect storm for Wes and Gagan to execute within.”
Guido van Rossum, the creator of the Python programming language, today announced that he has unretired and joined Microsoft’s Developer Division.
Van Rossum, who was last employed by Dropbox, retired last October after six and a half years at the company. Clearly, that retirement wasn’t meant to last. At Microsoft, van Rossum says, he’ll work to “make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows).”
A Microsoft spokesperson told us that the company also doesn’t have any additional details to share but confirmed that van Rossum has indeed joined Microsoft. “We’re excited to have him as part of the Developer Division. Microsoft is committed to contributing to and growing with the Python community, and Guido’s on-boarding is a reflection of that commitment,” the spokesperson said.
The Dutch programmer started working on what would become Python back in 1989. He continued to actively work on the language during his time at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in the mid-90s and at various companies afterward, including as Director of PythonLabs at BeOpen and Zope and at Elemental Security. Before going to Dropbox, he worked for Google from 2005 to 2012. There, he developed the internal code review tool Mondrian and worked on App Engine.
I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows :-). There’s lots of open source here. Watch this space.
Only a few years ago, van Rossum joining Microsoft would’ve been unthinkable, given the company’s infamous approach to open source. That has clearly changed now and today’s Microsoft is one of the most active corporate open-source contributors among its peers — and now the owner of GitHub . It’s not clear what exactly van Rossum will do at Microsoft, but he notes that there’s “too many options to say” and that “there’s lots of open source here.”
A coalition of 135 startups and tech companies with services in verticals including travel, accommodation and jobs have written to the European Commission to urge antitrust action against Google — warning that swift enforcement is needed or some of their businesses may not survive.
They also argue the Commission needs to act now or it risks undermining its in-train reform of digital regulations — which is due to be lay out in draft form early next month.
The letter has been inked by veteran Internet players such as Booking.com, Expedia, Kayak, Opentable, Tripadvisor and Yelp, co-signing along with a raft of (mostly) smaller European startups across all three verticals.
A further 30 co-signatories are business associations and organizations in related and other areas such as media/publishing — making for a total of 165 entities calling for Google to face swift antitrust banhammers.
A European Commission spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch it’s received the Google critics’ letter — saying it will reply “in due course”.
‘Not competing on the merits’
While there have been complaints on this front before — the Commission has said it’s been hearing rumblings of discontent in the travel segment since for years at this point — a growing coalition of businesses (including some based in the US) are bandying together to pressure the EU antitrust chief to clip Google’s wings — with, for example, jobs-related businesses joining the travel startups whose complaints we reported on recently.
Reuters, which obtained the letter earlier, reports that the coalition is the largest ever to complain in concert to the EU’s competition division.
The group argues Google is unfairly leveraging its dominant position in Internet search to grab marketshare in the verticals where they operate — pointing to a feature Google displays at the top of search results (called ‘OneBoxes’) where it points Internet users to its own services, simultaneously steering them away from rival services.
The Commission is considering limiting such self-preferencing in forthcoming legislative proposals that it wants to apply to dominant ‘gatekeeper’ Internet platforms — which Google would presumably be classified as.
For, now, though no such ex ante regulation exists — and the coalition argues the Commission needs to pull its finger out and flex its existing antitrust powers to stop Google’s market abuse before its too late for their businesses.
“Google’s technical integration of its own specialised search services into its near monopoly general search service continues to constitute a clear abuse of dominance,” they argue in the letter to Vestager.
“Like no service before, Google has amassed data and content relevant for competition on such markets at the expense of others – us,” they go on. “Google did not achieve its position on any such market by competing on the merits. Rather, there is now global consensus that Google gained unjustified advantages through preferentially treating its own services within its general search results pages by displaying various forms of grouped specialised search results.”
A similar complaint about Google unfairly pushing its own services at the expense of rivals’ can be found in the US Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against it, filed just last month — which is doubtless giving succour to Google complainants to redouble their efforts in Europe.
Back in 2017, the Commission found Google to be a dominant company in Internet search. Under EU law this means it has a responsibility not to apply the same types of infringing behavior identified in the Google Shopping case in any other business vertical, regardless of its marketshare.
Antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has gained a reputation for taking on big tech during her first (and now second term) stint as the Commission’s competition chief — now combined with an EVP role shaping digital strategy for the bloc.
But while, on her watch, Google has faced enforcement over its Shopping search (2017), Android mobile OS (2018) and AdSense search ad brokering business (2019), antitrust complainants say the regulatory action has done nothing to dislodge the tech giant’s dominance and restore competition to those specific markets or elsewhere.
“The Commission’s Google Search (Shopping) decision of 27 June 2017 (was supposed to) set a precedent that Google is not permitted to promote its own services within the search results pages of its dominant general search service. However, as of today, the decision did not lead to Google changing anything meaningful,” the coalition argues in the letter dated November 12, 2020.
The Commission contends its Shopping decision has let to a significant increase in the rate of display of offers from competitors to Google in its Shopping units (up 73.5%), also pointing to a rate of near parity between Google offers on Shopping units getting clicks and rivals’ offers being clicked on. However, if Google is compensating for losing out on (some) marketshare in Shopping searches by dialling up its marketshare in other verticals (such as travel and jobs) that’s hardly going to sum to a balanced and effective antitrust remedy.
It’s also interesting to note that the signatures on the latest letter include the Foundem CEO: aka the original shopping comparison engine complainant in the Google Shopping case.
In further remarks today, the Commission spokesperson told us: “We continue to carefully monitor the market with a view to assessing the effectiveness of the remedies,” adding: “Shopping is just one of the specialised search services that Google offers. The decision we took in June 2017 gives us a framework to look also at other specialised search services, such as Google jobs and local search. Our preliminary investigation on this is ongoing.”
On the Commission’s forthcoming Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act package, the coalition suggests a lack of action to rein in abusive behavior by Google now risks making it impossible for those future regulations to correct such practices.
“If, in the pending competition investigations, the Commission accepts Google’s current conduct as ‘equal treatment’, this creates the risk of pre-defining and hence devaluing the meaning of any future legislative ban on self-preferencing,” they warn, adding that: “Competition and innovation will continue to be stifled, simply because the necessary measures to counter the further anti-competitive expansion are not taken right now.”
Additionally, they argue that a legislative process is simply too slow to be used as an antitrust corrective measure — leaving their businesses at risk of not surviving Google in the meanwhile.
“While a targeted regulation of digital gatekeepers may help in the long run, the Commission should first use its existing tools to enforce the Shopping precedent and ensure equal treatment within Google’s general search results pages,” they urge, adding that they generally welcome the Commission plan to regulate “dominant general search engines” but emphasize speed is of the essence.
“We face the imminent risk of being disintermediated by Google. Many of us may not have the strength and resources to wait until such regulation really takes effect,” they add. “Action is required now. If Google were allowed to continue the anti-competitive favouring of its own specialised search services until any meaningful regulation takes effect, our services will continue to lack traffic, data and the opportunity to innovate on the merits. Until then, our businesses continue to be trapped in a vicious cycle – providing benefits to Google’s competing services while rendering our own services obsolete in the long run.”
Asked for its response to the group’s criticism of its business practices, a Google spokesperson send this statement: “People expect Google to give them the most relevant, high quality search results that they can trust. They do not expect us to preference specific companies or commercial rivals over others, or to stop launching helpful services which create more choice and competition for Europeans.”
Earlier this year, Mirantis, the company that now owns Docker’s enterprise business, acquired Lens, a desktop application that provides developers with something akin to an IDE for managing their Kubernetes clusters. At the time, Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel told me that the company wants to offer enterprises the tools to quickly build modern applications. Today, it’s taking another step in that direction with the launch of an extensions API for Lens that will take the tool far beyond its original capabilities
In addition to this update to Lens, Mirantis also today announced a new open-source project: k0s. The company describes it as “a modern, 100% upstream vanilla Kubernetes distro that is designed and packaged without compromise.”
It’s a single optimized binary without any OS dependencies (besides the kernel). Based on upstream Kubernetes, k0s supports Intel and Arm architectures and can run on any Linux host or Windows Server 2019 worker nodes. Given these requirements, the team argues that k0s should work for virtually any use case, ranging from local development clusters to private datacenters, telco clusters and hybrid cloud solutions.
“We wanted to create a modern, robust and versatile base layer for various use cases where Kubernetes is in play. Something that leverages vanilla upstream Kubernetes and is versatile enough to cover use cases ranging from typical cloud based deployments to various edge/IoT type of cases.,” said Jussi Nummelin, Senior Principal Engineer at Mirantis and founder of k0s. “Leveraging our previous experiences, we really did not want to start maintaining the setup and packaging for various OS distros. Hence the packaging model of a single binary to allow us to focus more on the core problem rather than different flavors of packaging such as debs, rpms and what-nots.”
Mirantis, of course, has a bit of experience in the distro game. In its earliest iteration, back in 2013, the company offered one of the first major OpenStack distributions, after all.
As for Lens, the new API, which will go live next week to coincide with KubeCon, will enable developers to extend the service with support for other Kubernetes-integrated components and services.
“Extensions API will unlock collaboration with technology vendors and transform Lens into a fully featured cloud native development IDE that we can extend and enhance without limits,” said Miska Kaipiainen, the co-founder of the Lens open-source project and senior director of engineering at Mirantis. “If you are a vendor, Lens will provide the best channel to reach tens of thousands of active Kubernetes developers and gain distribution to your technology in a way that did not exist before. At the same time, the users of Lens enjoy quality features, technologies and integrations easier than ever.”
The company has already lined up a number of popular CNCF projects and vendors in the cloud-native ecosystem to build integrations. These include Kubernetes security vendors Aqua and Carbonetes, API gateway maker Ambassador Labs and AIOps company Carbon Relay. Venafi, nCipher, Tigera, Kong and StackRox are also currently working on their extensions.
“Introducing an extensions API to Lens is a game-changer for Kubernetes operators and developers, because it will foster an ecosystem of cloud-native tools that can be used in context with the full power of Kubernetes controls, at the user’s fingertips,” said Viswajith Venugopal, StackRox software engineer and developer of KubeLinter. “We look forward to integrating KubeLinter with Lens for a more seamless user experience.”
Video communication startup Livestorm announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
Co-founder and CEO Gilles Bertaux told me that the company started out with a focus on webinars before launching a video meeting product as well (which we used for our interview).
“The way we think about it is, webinars and meetings are not use cases,” Bertaux said.
He argued that it’s more meaningful to talk about whether you’re having a team meeting or a training demo or whatever else, and then how many people you want to attend, with Livestorm supporting all of those use cases and meeting sizes through different templates: “We’re trying to remove the semantic distinction of meeting and webinar out of the equation.”
Among other things, Livestorm is distinguished from other video conferencing tools because it’s purely browser based, without requiring presenters or attendees install any software. The company says it has grown revenue 8x since it raised its 4.6 million euro Series A last fall, with a customer base that now includes 3,500 customers such as Shopify, Honda and Sephora.
Image Credits: Livestorm
Of course, you’d expect a video communication product to do well in 2020. At the same time, Zoom has dominated the remote work conversation this year — in fact, Bertaux acknowledged that Zoom may have built “the best video meeting technology.”
But he also suggested that the landscape is changing: “The thing is, we’re entering a period where video is becoming a commodity.”
So the Livestorm team is less focused on the core video technology and more on the experience around the video, with in-meeting features like screensharing and virtual background, as well as a broader suite of marketing tools that allow customers to continue delivering targeted messages to event attendees.
Bertaux compared Livestorm to HubSpot, which he said “didn’t reinvent landing pages,” but put the different pieces of the marketing stack together around those landing pages.
The Livestorm executive team
“In 2021, we want to have the biggest ecosystem of integrations on a video product,” he said.
The round was led by Aglaé Ventures and Bpifrance Digital Venture, with participation from Raise Ventures and IDInvest.
In a statement, Aglaé Ventures Partner Cyril Guenoun similarly described Livestorm “the HubSpot for video communications,” adding, “Video and online events have become essential in 2020, and are here to stay. The Livestorm platform thrives in this environment, providing a seamless solution for meetings and events with all the connectors that marketing, sales, customer service and HR pros need to make video a tightly integrated part of their communications strategies.”
Bertaux said the new funding will allow Paris-headquartered Livestorm to continue expanding into North America — apparently, the U.S. already represents one-third of its customer base and is the company’s fastest-growing region.
The market for space observation is one of the few commercialized segments of the nascent industry and could be worth upwards of $8 billion by the end of the decade, according to some estimates.
At TC Sessions: Space this December 16 & 17, we’ll be discussing what’s ahead for the market with some of the industry’s leading founders, including Payam Banazadeh, the chief executive and founder of Capella Space; Rafal Modrzewski, the chief executive and founder of ICEYE; Peter Platzer, the chief executive of Spire Global; and Melanie Stricklan, co-founder and chief science officer, Slingshot Aerospace.
Between them, these founders have raised roughly $450 million for their respective companies. We’ll discuss the opportunities that investors see in backing companies looking down at Earth and what’s ahead for the industry.
Prior to founding Slingshot, Melanie worked in the United States Air Force, where she was responsible for Space Control and Battle Management integration across mission areas to increase the nation’s ability to protect and defend space capabilities against emerging threats. Then, at the Department of Defense she led the development and deployment of experimental spacecraft, electronic warfare and cyber technologies. She graduated from the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and received her master’s in Space Systems Operations Management from Webster University.
Before founding Capella Space, Payam Banazadeh worked as a project manager and flight systems engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s received the NASA Mariner Award, NASA Discovery Award and NASA Formulation Award. An advocate for raising awareness around volatility of life on earth and the consequences of technological innovation, Banazadeh holds a business degree from Stanford and graduated with an Aerospace Engineering degree from the University of Texas.
Peter Platzer co-founded Spire Global back in 2012 with a vision to provide satellite-powered data from any location on earth. Named a White House Champion of Change in 2013 and a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, Platzer is now regarded as one of the pioneers in launching small form factor satellites into space. The recipient of a Harvard MBA and an undergraduate degree from Vienna’s prestigious Technical University, Platzer received his early training at CERN and the Planck Institute before turning to a consulting career at BCG. He advised on space commercialization at NASA Ames’ Space Portal while completing an MSS from the International Space University
Rafal Modrzewski was a researcher at VTT, the Technical Research Center of Finland, working on RFID and wireless sensing technologies before he turned his attention to the stars. At ICEYE, which began as a project in 2012 and was formally incorporated in 2014, Modrzewski and his co-founder Pekka Laurila focused on launching and operating small radar imaging satellites to provide reliable Earth observation data.
We’re just about a month away from TC Sessions: Space 2020 and the deadline for securing the early-bird price (and $100 savings) expires this Friday 11.13.20 at 11:59 p.m.PST. If you’re looking for more ways to save, we’ve got you covered. We offer group discount passes ($100 each — bring four team members and get the fifth one free); student discounts ($50); and discounts for government, military and nonprofits ($95). If you subscribe to Extra Crunch, knock an extra 20% off the price of admission – simply email extracrunch@techcrunch.com to get your discount code.
