Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Today after the bell, Alphabet announced its Q3 performance. The Google parent company generated revenues of $46.2 billion and per-share profit of $16.40 off the back of net income of $11.2 billion.

Analysts had expected Alphabet to earn $11.21 per share, from revenues of $42.88 billion according to Yahoo Finance; other estimates were larger, targeting $11.37 in per-share income off revenue of $42.84 billion.

The company’s shares instantly rose around 8.5% after its earnings beat.

Digging into the company’s numbers, YouTube revenue rose to $5.0 billion, from $3.8 billion in Q3 2019. Analysts had expected YouTube to generate $4.52 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.

Google Cloud managed to generate $3.44 billion from $2.4 billion in Q3 2019. The Google Cloud collection of cloud computing, productivity software, and other enterprise services generated $3.0 billion in the second quarter of this year. Analysts had expected Google Cloud to generate $3.31 billion in total revenue during the most recent quarter.

And Alphabet’s skunkworks division, Other Bets managed to generate $178 million in revenue, another quarter in which the set of companies was an excellent source of negative operating income. The collection of efforts lost $1.1 billion in the quarter.

Google is testing a new feature that could improve discovery for Android apps on Google Play. The company confirmed it’s experimenting with a “Compare Apps” option that would allow Google Play users to quickly and more easily understand the slight differences between otherwise similar apps by comparing specific features and metrics — like star ratings or total downloads, for example.

The feature was first spotted by Android Police, which found it at the bottom of an individual app listing page for a media player on the Play Store (ver. 22.4.28).

Image Credits: Android Police

Google confirmed the feature is live but only as a small test.

After users scrolled down past the app details and reviews, the page offered a comparison chart that allowed users to compare the VLC Player app with other media players across aspects like “Ease of Use,” support for offline play, and various media player specific features — like visual quality (HD, SD, etc.) and controls (gesture control, playback, scrubber, etc.).

The feature may leverage data Google has sourced from questions it asked app reviewers, though that aspect is not clear at this time. It also pulls in other data it already has on file, like the aggregate star rating and how many downloads the app has seen to date, for instance.

Typically, in place of the comparison chart, Google Play would provide a list of “similar apps” at the bottom of the listings page. This is similar to Apple’s “You Might Also Like” app suggestions and common across app stores. The idea with “similar apps” is to help point users researching apps to others in same genre. But making a determination of which to download often requires reading through the app’s descriptions and user reviews, which can be time-consuming.

With a comparison chart, users could more quickly figure out which app was the better fit for their needs, instead of wasting time researching or downloading multiple apps to install only to find they didn’t offer a particular feature the user had wanted.

Google confirmed to TechCrunch this is a “small experiment” that’s currently running, but says it doesn’t have immediate plans for a broader rollout. That’s a shame!

In 2019, only one Black woman was named partner in venture capital, according to All Raise, a nonprofit focused on accelerating female founders and investors. The data has shown, shows, and will continue to show how the tech industry fails to invest in underrepresented women of color.

Thus, hiring the next generation of founders and decision-makers is key (and promoting them is, too).

Sydney Thomas, who was the first hire at Precursor Ventures, a seed and early-stage focused fund led by Charles Hudson, has been promoted from senior associate to principal. Thomas is joined by Hudson, analyst Ayanna Kerrison, and entrepreneur-in-residence Chapman Snowden, to make up Precursor.

After graduating from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in 2016, Thomas joined Precursor to do what Hudson says most applicants wouldn’t: the operational work of bringing a solo-GP fund, then with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place.

“The fund was basically running out of my inbox,” Hudson said. “She really helped us get to a much better place operationally.” Hudson started off as an intern, toggling time between working for a Precursor portfolio company and the fund itself, and eventually came on as a senior associate.

As a principal, Thomas will now have more discretion to do deals and make decisions for the firm. “The goal was always for her to get us to a place operationally where she wasn’t as critical,” Hudson notes. Thomas did not respond to request for comment.

Roles within venture have grown increasingly, and often intentionally, vague over time. At any given fund, there can be principals, investors, partners, investing principal partners and senior associate investors. Depending on the fund, each person could just go under the guise of “partner” and call it a day. But in action, every member on a venture team has a varying range of investment autonomy, decision-making authority and weight at the firm.

While the vagueness can balance out egos within a firm, it can often leave founders confused over who has the ability to give them money.

Hudson says he takes role differentiation seriously, and (patiently) wants to build Precursor into a place that helps people in venture get their first start. With Thomas’s promotion, she has the ability to green light investments without the mass overhead of what it means to be a partner.

“I think the only reason to make someone a principal is if you think that they could develop into a partner,” he said.

There’s an AR ghost on Google Search. There’s a dancing skeleton, set of creepy jack-o’-lanterns, and costumed cats and dogs, too. Ahead of Halloween weekend in the U.S., Google has launched a set of fun, augmented reality-powered features on Google Search which appear as an option when you search for specific Halloween terms using a mobile device.

For example, if you search for the word “Halloween” and scroll down the search results page, you’ll see a box that prompts you to “Summon up a 3D ghost.” When you tap the “View in 3D” button, you’re able to see the ghost floating around your room.

On the iPhone, you’ll first have to move the phone around the room to get started, as with other AR apps. On Android devices, however, the ghost immediately appears in 3D but there’s a separate button, “View in your space,” that will place the ghost in the environment with you.

Google says the features work in the Google Search app and in the mobile browser.

Once the AR object has been placed in your room, you can move around it to view it from different angles, move closer or further away, or drag it around it around with your finger. The object even leaves a shadow on the floor, to make it seem like it’s really there.

Spooky, Halloween music will also play in the background as the AR objects float or dance in your space. You can then take a photo or a video to share elsewhere, if you choose.

In addition the AR ghost, you can search for a set of three jack-o’lanterns, a dancing skeleton, a hot dog (well, a dog in a hot dog costume), a pirate dog, and a magic cat.

The latter two appear when you google for the keywords “dog” or “cat,” while a search for “hot dog” will pull up the playful dachshund that paws at the ground and wags its tail. Searches for “skeleton” and “jack-o’-lantern” (and some variations) will bring up the others.

You may also see a pop-up at the bottom of the main Google.com landing page that suggests you try the new AR feature, but it wasn’t showing up consistently for us on every visit.

Google has experimented with AR features on Google Search for some time, having offered up 3D models of animals, places, spaceships, celestial bodies including the moon, the planets and more, as well as biology terms, anatomical systems, chemistry terms, plus cars, shoes, and even Santa.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to find all the AR objects offered in one place — you usually just stumble upon them when searching.

Besides the AR Halloween search feature, Google also introduced two new doorbell ringtones for its Hello Nest devices, “Black Cat” and “Werewolf.” You can continue to use the sounds introduced last year, like ghost, vampire, monster or witch noises, for example.

Google Assistant, meanwhile, now tells Halloween-themed riddles and can sing a Halloween song, as well, in another nod to the holiday.

The COVID-19 pandemic has already dramatically reshaped how Americans shop, with e-commerce expected to grow 20% in 2020 as a greater proportion of users shift from in-store to online. Due to this transition to greater online shopping coupled with the increased financial uncertainty of the American public, Button expects that COVID-19 will also reshape how Americans pay for their shopping with a similarly dramatic increase in adoption of “buy now, pay later” payment programs (BNPL) at checkout.

The greatest limitation to BNPL adoption is its availability, i.e., whether the retailer offers its customers a BNPL program. Offering such a program in the checkout flow doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch. It requires a direct integration into the retailer’s point-of-sale system, which is an onerous process and a meaningful moat for providers in place. Leaders in the BNPL field include Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay and Quadpay — and PayPal made a major announcement in August that it would begin offering BNPL services.

In anticipation of this season’s increased adoption of BNPL, mobile commerce platform Button examined our marketplace to understand the current state of affairs as it relates to BNPL — how many retailers feature BNPL programs, which programs are most prevalent and how often do the BNPL programs compete head-to-head.

Using Button’s Commerce Intelligence, we analyzed the payment method used by consumers in our marketplace over the past 90 days. We reviewed nearly 500,000 transactions across more than 300 retailers. Key highlights included:

• Of nearly 500,000 transactions, Button observed five available alternative payment solutions: Afterpay, Affirm, Klarna, QuadPay and PayPal. While PayPal’s payment option is not exclusively a BNPL option like the others, we included it in this analysis to highlight the significant foundation upon which it can build its BNPL program relative to its competitors.
• PayPal had the greatest retailer coverage with a presence of 65% retailers. Afterpay was a distant second at 10%, then Affirm 6%, Klarna 5% and QuadPay 2%.

Image Credits: Button (opens in a new window)

It’s difficult to step out of PayPal’s shadow … the other payment solutions had the following overlap with PayPal of their respective retailer inventory: Klarna (87%), Affirm (80%), AfterPay (77%) and QuadPay (60%).

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

A few notes before we get into this. One, we have a bonus episode coming this Saturday focused on this week’s earnings reports. And, second, we did not record video this week. So, if you like watching the show on YouTube, this is not the week for that!

Right, here’s what Natasha, Danny, and your humble servant got into this week:

• The huge COVID-related hit that public markets took this week, with tech getting hit extra hard.
• An antitrust brouhaha! As the Vista-Plaid deal and others gets a hard look, we wondered what it could all mean for startups were a bit more suited for M&A than an IPO.
• Up next we dug into how founders are raising money before they even quit their jobs, a trend that Natasha is digging into.
• From there it was a Danny segment, riffing on his 2020s piece, and dive into where he sees the most ripe chances for startups to truly change the world. We just hope the capital follows the opportunities.
• Then it was time to talk accelerators, with Natasha detailing on the Indie Bio class, and my taking of the show through some recent Techstars companies.
• VCs raised too, with the three of us talking about The Engine and Impact America raising fresh new funds.
• And then we chatted about the Yuanfudao round, and a Series B that The Wanderlust Group just put together.

We capped off with the latest from R2c, and then got the hell off the mics. Catch you all Saturday, and then back to regular programming on Monday morning.

Y Combinator-backed employment platform 70 Million Jobs is launching a new social network geared toward helping formerly incarcerated individuals connect with each other. While 70 Million Jobs focuses on helping people with criminal records find jobs, Commissary Club wants to serve as a place for folks to find community.

“Folks with [criminal] records have always, since prisons were first built, lived in the shadows,” 70 Million Jobs founder Richard Bronson told TechCrunch. “They’ve lived in fear and in shame — afraid to emerge with this terrible stigma, being treated as second class citizens in every single way.”

Through Commissary Club, folks can find community through topic-specific clubs, explore education courses, and find mentors, jobs and housing.

Image Credits: Commissary Club

The the unemployment rate for formerly incarcerated people, as of 2018, is 27%, according to Prison Policy. As a result of the pandemic, however, that percentage is likely much higher.

But in addition to facing barriers in employment, formerly incarcerated people face barriers to accessing stable housing and financial services. These types of barriers are a key driver recidivism for the more than 600,000 people who are released from prison each year. Between 2005 and 2014, an estimated 68% of people released in 2005 were arrested again within three years. Within nine years, 83% of those released in 2005 were re-arrested, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Bronson said he believes Commissary Club is in an ideal position to service this community. Already, through 70 Million Jobs, there are millions of people Commissary Club knows how to reach.

“This is a huge population, but nobody pays any attention to them at all and if they do, it’s negative,” Bronson said. “No political candidate has ever sought their vote. The problem is they’ve never come together, they’ve never been connected and have never been able to come together with one voice.”

Bronson says he’s felt encouraged by the Black Lives Matter movement and the Women’s March. It’s shown him, he said, the power of being connected and coming together with one voice.

“At a certain point we say enough is enough,” Bronson, who himself spent a couple of years in prison, said. “We are entitled to everything. We’ve done our time and we paid the price. Is it really fair for us to be walking around with a life sentence? I just think no one has really tried to galvanize them and by being separated, they lack connections, they lack help, inspiration and role models. And what they really lack is friendship. When you come out of prison, you don’t know how to navigate these critical aspects. We aim to be that help.”

Bronson said it’s not lost on him that he has white privilege, has a background in finance and therefore undoubtedly had an easier time transitioning from prison back into society. For some context, Black people make up 40% of the incarcerated population despite only making up 13% of the U.S. population, according to Prison Policy. Meanwhile, people in prisons and jail are also disproportionally poor compared to the overall U.S. population. Still, he said it was harder than he expected.

“It didn’t escape me that if it’s this hard for me, what it must be like for the guys I was in prison with who had limited job experience and education,” he said.

The plan with the social network is to take an ad-based approach, along with referral fees for things like online classes and wellness services. Commissary Club also plans to partner with brands and host events for the community.

“The population we serve is really desperately in need of help,” Bronson said. “But we’re not in position to provide all of it. We’re going to be a concierge for folks.”

But there’s an obvious risk with bringing formerly incarcerated people together and serving them on a platter to advertisers, given that some are notoriously predatory.

“I feel incredibly protective of our clients because there are bad actors,” Bronson said. “We’ve seen people try to come to our job business and gain access for their less than positive ends. So we’ve gotten smart and also sensitive to the fact that this could go on. We make damn sure that whoever we’re working with is operating with integrity and honesty. We’ve been in this space for a long time and we know the good lawyers and bad ones, the good education platforms and bad ones and many other verticals with good actors and bad actors.”

Commissary Club launched a few days ago in beta and currently has thousands on the wait list. But the service is doing a slow rollout because, Bronson said, “we want to get it right.”

To date, parent company 70 Million Jobs has raised $1.6 million from investors and is seeking an additional $2 million in funding.

NASA just made history by landing a spacecraft on an asteroid. If that kind of technical achievement carbonates your glass of Tang, join us on December 16-17 for TC Sessions: Space 2020, an event dedicated to early-stage space startups.

We’ve launched early-bird pricing, and $125 buys you access to all live sessions, plus video on demand. Don’t procrastinate. Buy your pass now before the early-bird reenters Earth’s atmosphere (and prices go up) on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

More ways to save: Go further together with early bird group tickets ($100) — bring four team members and get the fifth one free. We also offer discount passes for students ($50) and government, military and non-profits ($95). Looking for out-of-this-world exposure? An Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package ($360) includes four tickets, digital exhibition space, a pitch session to attendees and the ability to generate leads. Bonus savings: Extra Crunch subscribers get a 20 percent discount.

TC Sessions: Space is an unrivaled opportunity to learn from, connect and network with boundary-pushing founders, investors and officials from NASA, the Aerospace Corporation, the U.S. Air Force and leading space companies spanning public, private and defense sectors.

We’ve packed the conference with outstanding presentations, fireside chats and interviews. Plus, you’ll find breakout sessions on specialized topics, audience Q&As with Main Stage speakers and the expo area for partners and early stage startups.

Here’s a taste of the topics but keep an eye on the agenda, because we’ll add more speakers and sessions in the coming weeks.

Asteroid Rocks and Moon Landings

Lisa Callahan, vice president/general manager of commercial civil space at Lockheed Martin Space, discusses all aspects of scientific and civil exploration of the solar system — from robots scooping rockets from the surface of galaxy-traveling asteroids, to preparing for the return of humans to the surface of the Moon.

Sourcing Tech for Securing Space

Lt. General Thompson is responsible for fostering an ecosystem of non-traditional space startups and the future of Space Force acquisitions, all to the end goal of protecting the global commons of space. He’ll discuss what the U.S. looks for in startup partnerships and emerging tech, and how it works with these young companies.

Bridging Today and Tomorrow’s Tech

Corporate VC funds are a key source of investment for space startups, in part because they often involve partnerships that help generate revenue, and because they understand the timelines involved. SpaceFund’s Meagan Crawford and Lockheed Martin Ventures’ J. Christopher Moran discuss how these funds fit in with more standard venture to power the ecosystem.

TC Sessions: Space 2020 takes flight on December 16-17, but we’re starting our early bird countdown right now. Great savings disappear in two weeks on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your early bird passes today and celebrate your savvy shopping with a tall glass of Tang.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

Workplace SaaS tools for teams have seen rocket ship growth in the past several years, and that adoption has given rise to a host of software tools geared towards improving individual productivity. Many of the startups behind these tools see building a cult following among individual users as the best way to set themselves up for later enterprise-wide success.

Raycast is a developer-focused productivity tool that aims to be the quickest way to get common tasks done. Today, it’s launching into public beta and sharing with TechCrunch that the team has raised new funding from Accel months after graduating from Y Combinator.

The company has closed a $2.7 million seed round led by Accel with participation from YC, Jeff Morris Jr.’s Chapter One fund as well as angel investors Charlie Cheever, Calvin French-Owen and Manik Gupta .

The desktop software takes a note from peers like Superhuman and Command E, allowing users to quickly pull up and modify data with keyboard shortcuts. Users can easily create and re-modify issues in Jira, merge pull requests in Github and find documents. The software is very much a developer-focused version of the Apple’s Spotlight search that aims to help software engineers navigate all of the parts of their job that aren’t development work with a single tool.

Image via Raycast.

Like plenty of workplace tools startups, one of the keys for Raycast is building out a network of extensions that can encompass a user’s workflow. For now, the software supports integrations from Asana, Jira, Zoom, Linear, G Suite, Calendar, Github and Reminders alongside core functionality that can help manage system settings and a calculator that can handle complex math problems. As the startup launches out of public beta, they’re looking to double down on extensions and are rolling out a developer program for early access to their API.

The Mac-only software is free while in public beta, but the company does plan on charging a monthly subscription for the service eventually, though they aren’t quite ready to talk about pricing yet.

Raycast’s team is interested in appealing to individual users for now, but might eventually expand to becoming a teams-level enterprise product that could help onboard new employees faster by quickly orienting them with their office’s software suite, but that’s all a bit down the road, the team says.

“We’re staying focused on single-player mode for a while,” CEO Thomas Paul Mann tells TechCrunch.

Despite e-commerce firms Amazon and Walmart and others pouring billions of dollars in India, offline retail still commands more than 95% of all sales in the world’s second largest internet market.

The giants have acknowledged the strong hold neighborhood stores (mom and pop shops) have in the country, and in recent quarters scrambled for ways to work with them. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, has made the dynamics more interesting in the past year as he works to help these neighborhood stores sell online.

But the market opportunity is still too large, and there are many aspects of the old retail business that could use some tech. That’s the bet WareIQ, a Bangalore-headquartered, Y Combinator-backed startup is making. And it has just raised a $1.65 million Seed financing round from YC, FundersClub, Pioneer Fund, Soma Capital, Emles Venture Advisors, and founders of Flexport.

The one-year-old startup operates a platform to leverage the warehouses across the country. It has built a management system for these warehouses, most of which largely engage in offline business-to-business commerce and have had little to no prior e-commerce exposure.

“We connect these warehouses across India to our platform and utilize their infrastructure for e-commerce order processing,” said Harsh Vaidya, co-founder and chief executive of WareIQ, in an interview with TechCrunch. The company offers this as a service to retail businesses.

Who are these businesses? Third-party sellers, some of whom sell to Amazon and Flipkart and use WareIQ to speed up their delivery, e-commerce firms such as fashion e-tailer Nykaa, social commerce platforms such as Meesho as well as neighborhood stores, and social media influencers.

Any online store, for instance, can send its products to WareIQ, which has integrations with several popular e-commerce platforms and marketplaces. It works with courier partners to move items from one warehouse to another to offer the fastest delivery, explained Vaidya.

The infrastructure stitched together by WareIQ also enables an online seller to set up their own store and engage with customers directly, thereby saving fees they would have paid to Amazon and other established e-commerce players.

“The sellers were not able do this on their own before because it required them to talk directly to warehousing companies that maintain their own rigid contracts, and high-security deposits, and they still needed to work with multiple technology providers to complete the tech-stack,” he said. WareIQ also offers these sellers last-mile delivery, cash collection, and fraud detection among several other services.

“In a way, we are building an open source Amazon fulfilment service, where any seller can send their goods to any of our warehouses and we fulfil their Amazon orders, Myntra orders, Flipkart orders, or their own website orders. We also comply with the standard of these individual marketplaces, so our sellers get an assured tag on Amazon,” he said.

WareIQ is free for anyone to sign up with any charge and it takes a cut by the volume of orders it processes. The startup today works with over 40 fulfilment centres and it plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its network to tier 2 and tier 2 cities, he said. It’s also hiring for a number of tech roles.