Category: UNCATEGORIZED

TuSimple and Waymo are in the lead in the emerging sector of autonomous trucking; TuSimple founder Xiaodi Hou and Waymo trucking head Boris Sofman had an in-depth discussion of their industry and the tech they’re building at TC Mobility 2020. Interestingly, while they’re solving for the same problems, they have very different backgrounds and approaches.

Hou and Sofman started out by talking about why they were pursuing the trucking market in the first place. (Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity.)

“The market is massive; I think in the United States, $700-800 billion a year is spent on the trucking industry. It’s continuing to grow every single year,” said Sofman, who joined Waymo from Anki last year to lead the effort in freight. “And there’s a huge shortage of drivers today, which is only going to increase over the next period of time. It’s just such a clear need. But it’s not going to be overnight — there’s still a really long tail of challenges that you can’t avoid. So the way we talk about it is the things that are hardest are just different.”

“It’s really the cost and reward analysis, thinking about building the operating system,” said Hou. “The cost is the number of features that you develop, and the reward is basically how many miles are you driving — you charge on a per mile basis. From that cost reward analysis, trucking is simply the natural way to go for us. The total number of issues that you need to solve is probably 10 times less, but maybe, you know, five times harder.”

“It’s really hard to quantify those numbers, though,” he concluded, “but you get my point.”

The two also discussed the complexity of creating a perceptual framework good enough to drive with.

“Even if you have perfect knowledge of the world, you have to predict what other objects and agents are going to do in that environment, and then make a decision yourself and the combination knows is very challenging,” said Sofman.

“What’s really helped us is a realization from the car side of the of the company many, many years ago that that in order to help us solve this problem in the easiest way possible, and facilitate the challenges downstream, we had to create our own sensors,” he continued. “And so we have our own lidar, our own radar, our own cameras, and they have incredibly unique properties that were custom designed through five generations of hardware that try to really lean into the most kind of most challenging situations that you just can’t avoid on the road.”

Hou explained that while many autonomous systems are descended from the approaches used in the famous DARPA Grand Challenge 15 years ago, TuSimple’s is a little more anthropomorphic.

“I think I’m heavily influenced by my background, which has a tinge of neuroscience. So I’m always thinking about building a machine that can see and think, as humans do,” he said. “In the DARPA challenge, people’s idea would be: Okay, write a dynamic system equation and solve this equation. For me, I’m trying to answer the question of, how do we reconstruct the world? Which is more about understanding the objects, understanding their attributes, even though some of the attributes may not directly contribute to the entire self-driving system.”

“We’re combining all the different, seemingly useless features together, so that we can reconstruct the so-called ‘qualia’ of the perception of the world,” continued Hou. “By doing that we find we have all the ingredients that we need to do whatever missions that we have.”

The two found themselves in disagreement over the idea that due to the major differences between highway driving and street-level driving, there are essentially two distinct problems to be solved.

Hou was of the opinion that “the overlap is rather small. Human society has declared certain types of rules for driving on the highway, this is a much more regulated system. But for local driving there’s actually no rules for interaction… in fact very different implicit social constructs to drive in different areas of the world. These are things that are very hard to model.”

Sofman, on the other hand, felt that while the problems are different, solving one contributes substantially to solving the other: “If you break up the problem into the many, many building blocks of an AV system, there’s a pretty huge leverage where even if even if you don’t solve the problem 100 percent it takes away 85-90 percent of the complexity. We use the exact same sensors, exact same compute infrastructures, simulation framework, the perception system carries over, very largely, even if we have to retrain some of the models. The core of all of our algorithms are, we’re working to keep them the same.”

You can see the rest of that last exchange in the video above.

The pandemic has affected just about every business in the world, but tech has also geared up to fight back in its own way, as we found out from speakers at Disrupt 2020. But technology has opted to take a back seat to frontline workers and find ways to support them rather than attempt to “solve” the issues at hand.

The founders of tech-forward healthcare startups Color and Carbon Health explained their approach in one panel, emphasizing that the startup mindset is a resilient and adaptable one.

“You’re seeing, I think, the distributed nature of the U.S., where at some point it’s clear that you can’t wait for someone to solve your problem, so people just start jumping in and building the solution themselves,” said Othman Laraki, Color’s CEO.

His company took on the issue of bottlenecks in the COVID-19 testing ecosystem, finding that with a few tweaks Color could contribute a considerable amount.

“We realized that there were several assets that we could bring to bear,” he said. “We decided to build a platform to get around some of the logistical constraints and the supply chain constraints around COVID testing. We did that, got large-scale COVID testing lab online, but also repurposed a lot of our digital platforms for COVID testing … I think we’re doing approximately 75% of all the testing in SF right now.”

Carbon Health CEO Eren Bali noted that companies like theirs are important props at a time when the medical infrastructure of the country buckles under pressure.

“At this point the U.S. doesn’t have the best public health system, but at the same time we have best-in-class private companies who can sometimes operate a lot more efficiently than governments can,” he said. “We also just recently launched a program to help COVID-positive patients get back to health quickly, a rehabilitation program. Because as you know even if you survive it doesn’t mean your body was not affected, there are permanent effects.”

This type of at-home care has become increasingly important, both to take pressure off hospitals and frontline workers and to improve accessibility to resources.

“Sometimes the cost of care is a lesser problem compared to the access,” said Laraki. “Like if you need to drive for an hour and take time out of your day, etc., if you’re an hourly worker. That’s what makes healthcare inaccessible.”

This afternoon Affirm, a startup focused on providing point-of-sale credit to consumers making online purchases, announced that it has filed to go public.

The filing is confidential, so there’s little to be gleaned about the company’s performance from the news. That Affirm was exploring a public offering was reported by the Wall Street Journal back in July. In the aftermath of that news, TechCrunch tried to understand the valuation that Affirm was said to be targeting in its debut, which we placed at as much as $10 billion.

Affirm has been richly funded throughout its private life. The fintech unicorn has raised private funds in excess of $1 billion, including a $500 million Series G in September of 2020, a $300 million Series F in April of 2019, and a $200 million Series E in December of 2017. Affirm also raised more than $400 million in earlier equity rounds, and a $100 million debt line in late 2016.

Many venture bets are therefore riding on the success of Affirm and its future liquidity.

The company was valued at $2.9 billion at the time of its $300 million Series F last year according to PitchBook data. The company’s most recent valuation is not known. How much of a step-up a $10 billion public valuation would be, therefore, from its final private valuation is not clear.

Affirm will enter warm public markets if it chooses to list in short-order. The third quarter of 2020 was a bonanza of public-market liquidity, as the United States saw its most active quarter of public offerings since at least 2016, partially driven by the craze around SPACs. With retail investors and larger checkbooks alike active in their interest for growth-focused shares, unprofitable tech startups have done well in their recent debuts.

Those that make money have done even better, certain outliers like Snowflake aside.

After a confidential filing, Affirm will wait to hear back from the SEC on its application, and then will have the choice to file a non-confidential S-1 when it is ready. There is no set timeline here, but once the company’s numbers are public, we’ll be diving into them. Affirm joins other recent companies like Palantir who filed their public offerings confidentially first, before later making them public.

Podcast advertising growth is inhibited by three major factors:

• Lack of macro distribution, consumption and audience data.
• Current methods of conversion tracking.
• Idea of a “playbook” for podcast performance marketing.

Because of these limiting factors, it’s currently more of an art than a science to piece disparate data from multiple sources, firms, agencies and advertisers, into a somewhat conclusive argument to brands as to why they should invest in podcast advertising.

1. Lack of macro distribution, consumption and audience data

There were several resources that released updates based on what they saw in terms of consumption when COVID-19 hit. Hosting platforms, publishers and third-party tracking platforms all put out their best guesses as to what was happening. Advertisers’ own podcast listening habits had been upended due to lockdowns; they wanted to know how broader changes in listening habits were affecting their campaigns. Were downloads going up, down or staying the same? What was happening with sports podcasts, without sports?

Read part 1 of this article, Podcast advertising has a business intelligence gap, on TechCrunch.

At Right Side Up, we receive and analyze all of the available research from major publishers (Stitcher, aCast), to major platforms (Megaphone) and third-party research firms (Podtrac, IAB, Edison Research). However, no single entity encompasses the entire space or provides the kind of interactive, off-the-shelf customizable SaaS product we’d prefer, and that digitally native marketers expect. Plus, there isn’t anything published in real-time; most sources publish once or twice annually.

So what did we do? We reached out to trusted publishers and partners to gather data around shifting consumption due to COVID-19 ourselves, and determined that, though there was a drop in downloads in the short term, it was neither as precipitous nor as enduring as some had feared. This was confirmed by some early reports available, but how were we to evidence our own piecewise sample with another? Moreover, how could you invest 6-7 figures of marketing dollars if you didn’t have the firsthand intelligence we gathered and our subject matter experts on deck to make constant adjustments to your approach?

We were able to piece together trends we’re seeing that point to increased download activity in recent months that surpass February/March heights. We’ve determined that the industry is back on track for growth with a less steep, but still growing, listenership trajectory. But even though more recent reports have been published, a longitudinal, objective resource has not yet emerged to show a majority of the industry’s journey through one of the most disruptive media environments in recent history.

There is a need for a new or existing entity to create cohesive data points; a third party that collects and reports listening across all major hosts and distribution points, or “podcatchers,” as they’re colloquially called. As a small example: Wouldn’t it be nice to objectively track seasonal listening of news/talk programming and schedule media planning and flighting around that? Or to know what the demographics of that audience look like compared to other verticals?

What percentage increase in efficiency and/or volume would you gain from your marketing efforts in the channel? Would that delta be profitable against paying a nominal or ongoing licensing or research fee for most brands?

These challenges aren’t just affecting advertisers. David Cohn, VP of Sales at Megaphone, agrees that “full transparency from the listening platforms would make our jobs easier, along with everyone else’s in the industry. We’d love to know how much of an episode is listened to, whether an ad is skipped, etc. Along the same lines, having a central source for [audience] measurement would be ideal — similar to what Nielsen has been for TV.” This would also enable us to understand cross-show ad frequency, another black box for advertisers and the industry at large.

There are sizable, meaningful gaps in the knowledge collection and publication of podcast listening and engagement statistics. Coupled with still-developing advertising technology because of the distributed nature of the medium, this causes uncertainty in user consumption and ad exposure and impact. There is also a lot of misinformation and misconception about the challenges marketers face in these channels.

All of this compounds to delay ad revenue growth for creators, publishers and networks by inhibiting new and scaling advertising investment, resulting in lost opportunity among all parties invested in the channel. There’s a viable opportunity for a collective of industry professionals to collaborate on a solution for unified, free reporting, or a new business venture that collects and publishes more comprehensive data that ultimately promotes growth for podcast advertising.

Podcasts have always had challenges when it comes to the analytics behind distribution, consumption and conversion. For an industry projected to exceed $1 billion in ad spend in 2021, it’s impressive that it’s built on RSS: A stable, but decades-old technology that literally means really simple syndication. Native to the technology is a one-way data flow, which democratizes the medium from a publishing perspective and makes it easy for creators to share content, but difficult for advertisers trying to measure performance and figure out where to invest ad dollars. This is compounded by a fractured creator, server and distribution/endpoint environment unique to the medium.

For creators, podcasting has begun to normalize distribution analytics through a rising consolidation of hosts like Art19, Megaphone, Simplecast and influence from the IAB. For advertisers, though, consumption and conversion analytics still lag far behind. For the high-growth tech companies we work with, and as performance marketers ourselves, measuring the return on investment of our ad spend is paramount.

Because podcasts lag other media channels in business intelligence, it’s still an underinvested channel relative to its ability to reach consumers and impact purchasing behavior. This was evidenced when COVID-19 hit this year, as advertisers that were highly invested or highly interested in investing in podcast advertising asked a very basic question: “Is COVID-19, and its associated lifestyle shifts, affecting podcast listening? If so, how?”

The challenges of decentralized podcast ad data

We reached out to trusted partners to ask them for insights specific to their shows.

Nick Southwell-Keely, U.S. director of Sales & Brand Partnerships at Acast, said: “We’re seeing our highest listens ever even amid the pandemic. Across our portfolio, which includes more than 10,000 podcasts, our highest listening days in Acast history have occurred in [July].” Most partners provided similar anecdotes, but without centralized data, there was no one, singular firm to go to for an answer, nor one report to read that would cover 100% of the space. Almost more importantly, there is no third-party perspective to validate any of the anecdotal information shared with us.

Publishers, agencies and firms all scrambled to answer the question. Even still, months later, we don’t have a substantial and unifying update on exactly what, if anything, happened, or if it’s still happening, channel-wide. Rather, we’re still checking in across a wide swath of partners to identify and capitalize on microtrends. Contrast this to native digital channels like paid search and paid social, and connected, yet formerly “traditional” media (e.g., TV, CTV/OTT) that provide consolidated reports that marketers use to make decisions about their media investments.

The lasting murkiness surrounding podcast media behavior during COVID-19 is just one recent case study on the challenges of a decentralized (or nonexistent) universal research vendor/firm, and how it can affect advertisers’ bottom lines. A more common illustration of this would be an advertiser pulling out of ads, for fear of underdelivery on a flat rate unit, missing out on incremental growth because they were worried about not being able to get download reporting and getting what they paid for. It’s these kinds of basic shortcomings that the ad industry needs to account for before we can hit and exceed the ad revenue heights projected for podcasting.

If there’s a silver lining to the uncertainty in podcast advertising metrics and intelligence, it’s that supersavvy growth marketers have embraced the nascent medium and allowed it to do what it does best: personalized endorsements that drive conversions. While increased data will increase demand and corresponding ad premiums, for now, podcast advertising “veterans” are enjoying the relatively low profile of the space.

As Ariana Martin, senior manager, Offline Growth Marketing at Babbel notes, “On the other hand, podcast marketing, through host read ads, has something personal to it, which might change over time and across different podcasts. Because of this personal element, I am not sure if podcast marketing can ever be transformed into a pure data game. Once you get past the understanding that there is limited data in podcasting, it is actually very freeing as long as you’re seeing a certain baseline of good results, [such as] sales attributed to podcast [advertising] via [survey based methodology], for example.”

So how do we grow from the industry feeling like a secret game-changing channel for a select few brands, to widespread adoption across categories and industries?

Below, we’ve laid out the challenges of nonuniversal data within the podcast space, and how that hurts advertisers, publishers, third-party research/tracking organizations, and broadly speaking, the podcast ecosystem. We’ve also outlined the steps we’re taking to make incremental solutions, and our vision for the industry moving forward.

Lingering misconceptions about podcast measurement

1. Download standardization

In search of a rationale to how such a buzzworthy growth channel lags behind more established media types’ advertising revenue, many articles will point to “listener” or “download” numbers not being normalized. As far as we can tell at Right Side Up, where we power most of the scaled programs run by direct advertisers, making us a top three DR buying force in the industry, the majority of publishers have adopted the IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines Version 2.0.

This widespread adoption solved the “apples to apples” problem as it pertained to different networks/shows valuing a variable, nonstandard “download” as an underlying component to their CPM calculations. Previous to this widespread adoption, it simply wasn’t known whether a “download” from publisher X was equal to a “download” from publisher Y, making it difficult to aim for a particular CPM as a forecasting tool for performance marketing success.

However, the IAB 2.0 guidelines don’t completely solve the unique-user identification problem, as Dave Zohrob, CEO of Chartable points out. “Having some sort of anonymized user identifier to better calculate audience size would be fantastic —  the IAB guidelines offer a good approximation given the data we have but [it] would be great to actually know how many listeners are behind each IP/user-agent combo.”

2. Proof of ad delivery

A second area of business intelligence gaps that many articles point to as a cause of inhibited growth is a lack of “proof of delivery.” Ad impressions are unverifiable, and the channel doesn’t have post logs, so for podcast advertisers the analogous evidence of spots running is access to “airchecks,” or audio clippings of the podcast ads themselves.

Legacy podcast advertisers remember when a full-time team of entry-level staffers would hassle networks via phone or email for airchecks, sometimes not receiving verification that the spot had run until a week or more after the fact. This delay in the ability to accurately report spend hampered fast-moving performance marketers and gave the illusion of podcasts being a slow, stiff, immovable media type.

Systematic aircheck collection has been a huge advent and allowed for an increase in confidence in the space — not only for spend verification, but also for creative compliance and optimization. Interestingly, this feature has come up almost as a byproduct of other development, as the companies who offer these services actually have different core business focuses: Magellan AI, our preferred partner, is primarily a competitive intelligence platform, but pivoted to also offer airchecking services after realizing what a pain point it was for advertisers; Veritone, an AI company that’s tied this service to its ad agency, Veritone One; and Podsights, a pixel-based attribution modeling solution.

3. Competitive intelligence

Last, competitive intelligence and media research continue to be a challenge. Magellan AI and Podsights offer a variety of fee and free tiers and methods of reporting to show a subset of the industry’s activity. You can search a show, advertiser or category, and get a less-than-whole, but still directionally useful, picture of relevant podcast advertising activity. While not perfect, there are sufficient resources to at least see the tip of the industry iceberg as a consideration point to your business decision to enter podcasts or not.

As Sean Creeley, founder of Podsights, aptly points out: “We give all Podsights research data, analysis, posts, etc. away for free because we want to help grow the space. If [a brand], as a DIY advertiser, desired to enter podcasting, it’s a downright daunting task. Research at least lets them understand what similar companies in their space are doing.”

There is also a nontech tool that publishers would find valuable. When we asked Shira Atkins, co-founder of Wonder Media Network, how she approaches research in the space, she had a not-at-all-surprising, but very refreshing response: “To be totally honest, the ‘research’ I do is texting and calling the 3-5 really smart sales people I know and love in the space. The folks who were doing radio sales when I was still in high school, and the podcast people who recognize the messiness of it all, but have been successful at scaling campaigns that work for both the publisher and the advertiser. I wish there was a true tracker of cross-industry inventory — how much is sold versus unsold. The way I track the space writ large is by listening to a sample set of shows from top publishers to get a sense for how they’re selling and what their ads are like.”

Even though podcast advertising is no longer limited by download standardization, spend verification and competitive research, there are still hurdles that the channel has not yet overcome.

The conclusion to this article, These 3 factors are holding back podcast monetization, is available exclusively to Extra Crunch subscribers.

A group of Black Atlanta businessmen, politicians and entertainers — including former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, the entertainer Michael Render (better known as Killer Mike) and Bounce TV founder Ryan Glover — have launched a new digital bank focused on developing and promoting local communities and cultivating Black and Latinx entrepreneurs and small businesses.

Named Greenwood in an homage to the thriving Tulsa, Okla., business community known as “Black Wall Street” that was destroyed by white rioters in 1921, the digital bank has several features designed to promote social causes and organizations for the Black and Latinx community.

For every sign-up to the bank, Greenwood will donate the equivalent of five free meals to an organization addressing food insecurity. And every time a customer uses a Greenwood debit card, the bank will make a donation to either the United Negro College Fund, Goodr (an organization that addresses food insecurity) or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In addition, each month the bank will provide a $10,000 grant to a Black or Latinx small business owner that uses the company’s financial services.

For Render, the decision to launch a new digital bank alongside Young and Glover was a way to link Atlanta’s well-established, centuries-old Black business community with the technologies that are redefining wealth and creating new opportunities in the twenty first century. It was also a way to equip a new generation with financial tools that could empower them instead of undermine them.

“What I have learned about capitalism is that you’re either going to be a participant in it or a victim of it,” said Render. “The ultimate protest is focusing your dollar like a weapon.”

Young, who is also the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had seen the ways digital banking technologies were transforming the social order in countries like India — reducing the power of payday lenders and providing greater economic access — and wanted to bring those opportunities to communities in the U.S.

Atlanta is a perfect home for a new Black-owned digital bank. After riots in 1906 destroyed Atlanta’s own bustling Black business district in a prelude to the Greenwood Massacre 15 years later, the community rebuilt with banks like Citizen’s Trust (founded in 1921) and Carver (founded in 1946) serving the city’s Black community.

Rendon, a serial entrepreneur who owns a chain of barber shops called the SWAG Shop, some real estate, and a restaurant along with the rapper TI, said that he’s not just a founder of Greenwood, he’ll soon become a customer.

“Today, a dollar circulates for 20 days in the white community but only six hours in the Black community,” said Render in a statement.”Moreover, a Black person is twice as likely as a white person to be denied a mortgage. This lack of fairness in the financial system is why we created Greenwood.”

Greenwood will offer a physical debit card and savings and checking accounts to its customers — along with all of the digital features one would expect, including integrations with Apple, Samsung and Google Pay, the ability to make peer-to-peer payments, mobile checking deposits and free ATM usage at over 30,000 locations.

“It’s no secret that traditional banks have failed the Black and Latinx community,” said Glover, in a statement. “We needed to create a new financial platform that understands our history and our needs going forward, a banking platform built by us and for us, a platform that helps us build a stronger future for our communities. This is our time to take back control of our lives and our financial future. That is why we launched Greenwood, modern banking for the culture.”

To run the bank, the founding team hired Aparicio Giddins, who’s serving as the company’s president and chief technology officer. David Tapscott, a former executive with Combs Enterprises and Green Dot, is serving as the company’s chief marketing officer. Andrew “Bo” Young III, the managing partner of Andrew Young Investment Group and Paul Judge, the co-founder of Pindrop and TechSquare Labs, both have seats on the company’s board of directors.

The timing for Greenwood’s launch is somewhat auspicious, coming as it does nearly a century after the launch of Citizen’s Trust and days after the chief executive of Wells Fargo, Charles Scharf, said really, really dumb things about diversity in the financial services industry.

Backing the company is a $3 million commitment from undisclosed angel investors. The bank is currently taking deposits and the hope, according to Rendon, is for it to start a new wave of entrepreneurial activity among young Black and Latinx community members and their allies.

“The work that we did in the civil rights movement wasn’t just about being able to sit at the counter. It was also about being able to own the restaurant,” said Ambassador Young. “We have the skills, talent and energy to compete anywhere in the world, but to grow the economy, it has to be based on the spirit of the universe and not the greed of the universe. Killer Mike, Ryan and I are launching Greenwood to continue this work of empowering Black and brown people to have economic opportunity.”

Apple told me today that it will be extending AppleTV+ subscriptions that are set to end November 1, 2020 through January 31, 2021 through their billing date in February of 2021.

The basic situation is that Apple gave away a free year of AppleTV+ to new device purchasers last year and those are all set to end in November. Apple knows everyone is still looking at a tough winter ahead filled with COVID-related restrictions so it’s bumping those subs out to February.

Monthly users whose subscription start date is before November 1st, 2020 also get a deal, with a $4.99 credit (the cost of an AppleTV+ subscription) appearing for every month between November 2020 and February 2021. You do not have to do anything to receive the credit and users will be getting emails notifying them of these extensions/credits.

And, of course, if it gets to hold the total sub number steady through Q4 of a tough economic year so much the better, right?

AppleTV+ had a bit of a slow burn start, with a big sub onramp in the form of devices and some high profile launches that were tempered by early reviews of their marquee programming. But people warmed to the shows over time. 

I believed at the time that it was a bit of natural sugar crash happening. 

https://twitter.com/panzer/status/1196916700261670912

That proved out over time as The Morning Show ended up winning AppleTV+ its first Prime Time Emmy award. 

Total award nominations for Apple Originals now number 114 with 35 wins. 

And, by the way, Ted Lasso is one of the more clever and humane shows currently streaming at the moment. Please go watch it, it’s a well acted melange of sport, non-toxic masculinity and heart felt drama.

Also, as a quick note, if you were a day 1 purchaser of an iOS device last year it’s possible that your free year is actually ending October 31st, don’t worry, you’re covered in this offer too. 

Here are the particulars of the deal, for easy copying and pasting:

• If your AppleTV+ subscription ends on November 1, 2020 through January 31 of 2021 Apple is extending the free year to your sub date in February of 2021.
• This means that the yearly subscriber extension applies to people who subbed prior to January 31, 2020.
• As an example, if your sub was set to end November 15th 2020 then your first billing date would now be February 15th, 2020.
• If people signed up for yearly subs without a new device purchase during that same date period they will also get free through February 2021.
• If you have signed up for a monthly subscription before November 1st, 2020, you’ll get a $4.99 credit per month. 
• The new device program where you get a year free will still continue.
• Customers will get emails about this.

Google today announced it’s making it possible to use the voice command “Hey Google” to not just open but also perform specific tasks within Android apps. The feature will be rolled out to all Google Assistant-enabled Android phones, allowing users to launch apps with their voice as well as search inside apps or perform specific tasks — like ordering food, playing music, posting to social media, hailing a ride, and more.

For example, users could say something like, “Hey Google, search cozy blankets on Etsy,” “open Selena Gomez on Snapchat,” “start my run with Nike Run Club,” or “check news on Twitter.”

At launch, Google says these sorts of voice commands will work with more than 30 of the top apps on Google Play in English globally, with more apps coming soon. Some of the supported apps today include Spotify, Snapchat, Twitter, Walmart, Discord, Etsy, MyFitnessPal, Mint, Nike Adapt, Nike Run Club, eBay, Kroger, and Postmates, Wayfair, to name a few.

If the specific voice command you would use to perform a common task is a little clumsy, the feature will also allow you to create a custom shortcut phrase instead. That means, instead of saying “Hey Google, tighten my shoes with Nike Adapt,” you could create a command that just said, “Hey Google, lace it.”

To get started with shortcuts, Android users can say “Hey Google, show my shortcuts” to get to the correct Settings screen.

The feature is similar to Apple’s support for using Siri with iOS apps, which also includes the ability to open apps, perform tasks and record your own custom phrase.

In Google’s case, the ability to perform tasks inside an app is implemented on the developer’s side by mapping users’ intents to specific functionality inside their apps. This feature, known as App Actions, allows users to open their favorite apps with a voice command. And, with the added functionality, lets users say “Hey Google” to search within the app or to open specific app pages.

Google says it has grown its catalog to include over 60 intents across 10 verticals, including Finance, Ridesharing, Food Ordering, Fitness, and now, Social, Games, Travel & Local, Productivity, Shopping and Communications, too.

To help users understand how and when they can use these new App Actions, Google says it’s building touchpoints in Android that will help them learn when they use certain voice commands. For instance, if a user said “Hey Google, show me Taylor Swift,” it may highlight a suggestion chip that will guide the users to opening the search result on Twitter.

Image Credits: Google

Related to this news, Google says it also released two new English voices for developers to leverage when building custom experiences for Assistant on Smart Displays, alongside other developer tools and resources for those building for displays.

The Google Assistant upgrade for apps was one of several Android improvements Google highlighted today. The company also says it’s adding screen-sharing to Google Duo, expanding its Verified Calls anti-spam feature to more devices (Android 9 and up), and updating the Google Play Movies & TV app to become the new “Google TV” app, announced last week.

On the accessibility front, it’s introducing new tools for hearing loss with Sound Notifications and others for communicating using Action blocks, aimed at people with cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, autism, aphasia, and other speech related disabilities.

The features are available now.

For more than two decades, robotics market commentaries have predicted a shift, particularly in manufacturing, from traditional industrial manipulators to a new generation of mobile, sensing robots, called “cobots.” Cobots are agile assistants that use internal sensors and AI processing to operate tools or manipulate components in a shared workspace, while maintaining safety.

It hasn’t happened. Companies have successfully deployed cobots, but the rate of adoption is lagging behind expectations.

According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), cobots sold in 2019 made up just 3% of the total industrial robots installed. A report published by Statista projects that in 2022, cobots’ market share will advance to 8.5%. This is a fraction of a February 2018 study cited by the Robotic Industries Association that forecasted by 2025, 34% of the new robots being sold in the U.S. will be cobots.

To see a cobot in action, here’s the Kuka LBR iiwa. To ensure safe operation, cobots come with built-in constraints, like limited strength and speed. Those limitations have also limited their adoption.

As cobots’ market share languishes, standard industrial robots are being retrofitted with computer vision technology, allowing for collaborative work combining the speed and strength of industrial robots with the problem-solving skills and finesse of humans.

This article will document the declining interest in cobots, the reasons for it and the technology that is replacing it. We report on two firms developing computer vision technology for standard robots and describe how developments in 3D vision and so-called “robots as a service” (yes, RaaS) are defining this faster-growing second generation of robots that can work alongside humans.

What are robotics sensing platforms?

When Blissfully launched in 2016, it was focused on helping companies understand their SaaS usage inside their organizations, but over time the company has seen that there is a wider need, especially in midmarket companies, and today it announced it was expanding into broader IT management.

Company co-founder and CEO Arial Diaz says that the startup began helping to track SaaS usage, eventually expanding into employee onboarding and exiting, and today they are expanding into a broader set of IT services.

“Our vision when starting a company was really that IT is being redefined in the age of SaaS. So step one was to help with everything around managing SaaS. And step two is what does that mean in terms of the broader IT management vision,” Diaz told TechCrunch.

Blissfully believed that SaaS was going to take a bigger and bigger part of IT in terms of mindshare, spend and how you manage it, and they turned out to be right. Now, they felt the time is right to expand their original idea to encompass more of the IT management function.

That has resulted in a newly expanded platform they are releasing today that not only includes the earlier SaaS management components that it’s been providing all along, but also four other new categories.

For starters they are offering IT asset management. “We are now offering the ability to track not just SaaS applications, but all your IT assets including hardware devices and traditional software,” Diaz said.

Next, they are including help desk management and ticketing capabilities to handle requests that fall outside of their SaaS management workflows. In addition, they are adding role-based access control to allow different people access to various IT management services, which is increasingly essential during the pandemic as people are being forced to troubleshoot and manage various IT issues from home. Finally, the startup is opening up its APIs so that IT can tap into that and build customized functionality or workflows on top of the Blissfully platform.

Diaz believes that the company has reached a point of maturity when it comes to SaaS management, and they saw a need in the midmarket to provide these additional IT services that larger organizations tend to get from a company like ServiceNow.

The new services will be available starting today from Blissfully.