Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Google is launching a few new privacy features today that include a refreshed Safety Center that’s now live in the U.S. and coming soon globally, as well as more prominent alerts when the company expects that your account has been tampered with.

The most interesting new feature, however, is a new Guest mode for the Google Assistant on Google-branded devices. Not to be confused with giving guests access to your Google Chromecast, for example, this new Guest mode is more akin to the incognito mode in your browser. With Guest mode on, which you invoke by saying “Hey Google, turn on guest mode,” the Assistant won’t offer personalized responses and your interactions won’t be saved to your account. It’ll stay on until you turn it off.

Typically, the Google Assistant saves all of your interactions to your account.  You can delete those manually or have Google automatically delete them after 3, 18 or 36 months. You can also prevent it from saving any audio recordings at all.

This new feature will roll out to smart speakers and displays in the coming weeks.

Talking about deleting your data, Google today also announced that you will soon be able to edit your Location History data in the Google Maps Timeline.

Also new: when you now search for “Is my Google Account secure” or use a similar query, Google will start displaying your security and privacy settings for you. That’s actually a useful step forward, given that we’ve reached a point where those settings are often hard to find.

Former Apple software engineer and designer Ken Kocienda, whose work included the original iPhone and the development of touchscreen autocorrect, has created his first iOS app, Up Spell. The fast-paced, fun word game challenges users to spell all the words you can in two minutes and uses a lexicon of words Kocienda built to allow for the inclusion of proper names. A portion of app revenues are also being donated to a local food bank, so you can help give back while relieving stress through gaming.

Kocienda says he had never before made a standalone iOS app.

When he worked at Apple, all the code he wrote was integrated into a bigger iOS release. So when Kocienda got the idea to develop a game, he looked to obvious sources of inspiration: his past experiences with typing, keyboards, and autocorrect.

The game’s lexicon was built first with the New General Service List to serve as its foundation. This was followed by weeks of writing small programs to generate lists of candidate words — like, by adding an “S” to existing words to pluralize them, for example. And hours more were spent scanning lists to choose the words to include.

Kocienda says he also wanted the game to fun, and personally found it frustrating that other word games wouldn’t allow proper names.

“Many games accept words like PHARAOH and PYRAMID, but not NILE or EGYPT. This doesn’t make sense to me. These are all words!,” he says.

So he built his own list that includes thousands of proper names, then added to it more slang and contractions to expand it even further. That means you can spell a word like S’MORES, which involves an apostrophe, for example.

Image Credits: Up Sell

While support for a variety of words, including proper names, is the key way the gameplay differentiates from rivals, the app’s business model is also one that’s becoming less common these days: it’s a one-time paid download.

The app is a $1.99 download that lets you pay once to play forever. Today, many games in this same space use a freemium model where the app download itself is free, but you’re then nagged with in-app hooks to buy coins or tokens to advance gameplay or unlock certain features.

Kocienda’s decision to forgo this model was intentional, he explains.

“I made Up Spell a two-minute game without much in the way of gameplay gimmicks,” says Kocienda. “You just spell words. 2020 has been a rough year for everyone, and sometimes taking out two minutes to think about nothing but spelling a few words is just the kind of right kind of stress reliever,” he adds. “I hope Up Spell brings people a little unexpected happiness to their 2020.”

Also of note, 25 cents per download is being donated to the San Francisco-Marin Food Bank, which works to get food to vulnerable people in Kocienda’s area.

If all goes well, Up Spell may be followed by other games with a similar model, like a sounds or color-matching games, for instance.

The new game is a one-time paid download on the App Store.

Most startup founders have a tough road to their first round of funding, but the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit tougher than most. The two young founders survived by entering and winning hackathons to pay their rent and put on food on the table. One of the ideas they came up with at those hackathons was DigitalBrain, a layer that sits on top of customer service software like Zendesk to streamline tasks and ease the job of customer service agents.

They ended up in Y Combinator in the Summer 2020 class, and today the company announced a $3.4 million seed investment. This total includes $3 million raised this round, which closed in August, and previously unannounced investments of $250,000 in March from Unshackled Ventures and $150,000 from Y Combinator in May.

The round was led by Moxxie Ventures with help from Caffeinated Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, Weekend Fund, Underscore VC and Scribble Ventures along with a slew of individual investors.

Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says that after he and his partner Dmitry Dolgopolov met at hackathon in May 2019, they moved into a community house in San Francisco full of startup founders. They kept hearing from their housemates about the issues their companies faced with customer service as they began scaling. Like any good entrepreneur, they decided to build something to solve that problem.

“DigitalBrain is an external layer that sits on top of existing help desk software to actually help the support agents get through their tickets twice as fast, and we’re doing that by automating a lot of internal workflows, and giving them all the context and information they need to respond to each ticket making the experience of responding to these tickets significantly faster,” Dinakaran told TechCrunch.

What this means in practice is that customer service reps work in DigitalBrain to process their tickets, and as they come upon a problem such as canceling an order or reporting a bug, instead of traversing several systems to fix it, they chose the appropriate action in DigitalBrain, enter the required information, and the problem is resolved for them automatically.  In the case of a bug, it would file a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it would take all of the actions and update all of the records required by this request.

As Dinakaran points out they aren’t typical Silicon Valley startup founders. They are 20 year old immigrants from India and Russia respectively, who came to the U.S. with coding skills and a dream of building a company. “We are both outsiders to Silicon Valley. We didn’t go to college. We don’t come from families of means. We wanted to come here and build our initial network from ground up,” he said.

Eventually they met some folks through their housemates, who suggested that they apply to Y Combinator. “As we started to meet people that we met through our community house here, some of them were YC founders and they kept saying I think you guys will love the YC community, not just in terms of your ethos, but also just purely from a perspective of meeting new people and where you are,” he said.

He said while he and his co-founder have trouble wrapping their arms around a number like the amount they have in the bank now, considering it wasn’t that long ago that they struggling to meet expenses every month, they recognize this money buys them an opportunity to help start building a more substantial company.

“What we’re trying to do is really accelerate the development and building of what we’re doing. And we think if we push the gas pedal with the resources we’ve gotten, we’ll be able to accelerate bringing on the next couple of customers, and start onboarding some of the larger companies we’re interested in,” he said.

Last year, Instagram announced it was ending support for its standalone mobile messaging app known as Direct, which had allowed users to quickly create and share messages with friends. Shortly thereafter, the company launched Threads, a new messaging app focused on status updates and communication with only those you identified in Instagram as your “Close Friends.” Now, these two messaging concepts are merging. With the latest update to Threads, Instagram is again offring the full inbox experience, it says.

The changes were noted in the latest app update and were soon spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra and noted reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong — both who keep a close eye on changes to popular social apps.

In the latest update, Threads will now present a two-tabbed inbox.

In the “Close Friends” section, you can continue to message with your most frequent contacts, as before. The new second tab, “Everyone Else” allows access to your larger Instagram inbox. The app will continue to prioritize the “Close Friends” tab, and your status will continue to only be visible to Close Friends as well.

Instagram also tells us that, by default, Threads users will continue to only receive notifications for their Close Friends. But this can now be adjusted in the app’s Settings if you want to receive notifications for all messages instead.

What’s interesting is that these changes are rolling out so closely following a major update to Instagram’s messaging platform.

Only last week, Facebook introduced cross-app communication between Messenger and Instagram, alongside other features.

That update allows Instagram users to opt to upgrade to a new messaging experience that includes the ability to change chat colors, react with any emoji, watch videos together, set messages to disappear and more. These “fun” features serve as a way to entice users to agree to the update, which then locks users further inside the Facebook universe as it opens up cross-platform messaging. That means upgraded users can use Instagram to message their Facebook friends.

With the changes to Threads, one has to wonder if Facebook is now envisioning the standalone chat app as another potential entry point into its larger messaging platform.

Instagram says that’s not the case today.

“Cross-app communication is an opt-in update for people using Instagram, and will not be enabled for Threads,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

That doesn’t mean Threads won’t be updated to later offer some of the other changes that Instagram users can now take advantage of, if they choose to upgrade their messaging experience.

In fact, we understand that Instagram is considering bringing some of those new features over to Threads in the future. There’s no exact timeframe for this project at this point, though.

Presumably, this would mean connecting the Threads app on the backend to the newly built messaging infrastructure. If that’s true, even if Facebook chose to keep cross-app communication an Instagram-only (and Messenger-only) experience, it would still be tying in another core app, Threads, to the new messaging platform. And this, in turn, could make it harder to unspool the apps in the case that Facebook is forced to break up its business, if regulators were declare it a monopoly.

It’s not clear, however, if Threads has yet been connected to that infrastructure or if it will further down the road. But it’s worth keeping an eye on.

The Threads update is live now.

This morning Zira raised $3.1 million in a seed round. The startup provides software that helps businesses schedule their hourly workforce in a more intelligent manner.

Software often fails to reach non-information workers, so it’s nice to see a startup focus on a somewhat forgotten demographic. General Catalyst and Abstract Ventures led the round, which also saw participation from a number of angel investors.

This is the company’s first known investment, according to Crunchbase data.

The technology that Zira sells looks neat from the outside. It can automatically set team schedules, taking a task that can be rife with favoritism or bias and making it a bit more standardized. Its service can also handle clocking in and out for workers, and provides a chat feature to help groups of workers stay in sync.

And most interesting of all, Zira’s platform has an automation feature, allowing managers to create triggers to replace missing staff for a shift, or provide rewards to the workers who come top in a category, like attendance.

Zira’s service costs $4 per employee, per month, or $3 if paid annually. It also executes custom deals with larger clients, for whom we presume discounts can be had.

The round

To better understand the round itself, TechCrunch asked Zira what the new capital will unlock for its business. Tito Goldstein, a founder at the company, responded that the funds will allow his company to scale its development team, “hone” its product and work on its sales function.

“We started with a product that was meeting customer expectations and winning deals against incumbent platforms,” Goldstein said in an email, “but now we want to really differentiate ourselves.” Hiring more developers should help the company move more quickly in that direction, and without money it’s rather hard to hire engineers.

On the sales front, Goldstein said that after depending on “referral or local connections” to secure customers, COVID has made those channels “increasingly difficult.” That means Zira needs a more traditional sales function, and capital.

Zira declined to share growth metrics, saying that it hopes to do so by the end of the year. That means we’ll check back in with Zira in a few months to get the data. Until then, it’s a fun startup with a neat idea. Let’s see how far it gets with its new capital.

Boom Supersonic is closer than ever to its goal of introducing supersonic commercial aviation back tot he global stage – the Colorado-based startup unveiled the final design of its XB-1 demonstrator aircraft today. This is a fully functional prototype airplane, which will help the company test out the flight capabilities and systems that will eventually make its Overture supersonic commercial passenger aircraft a reality.

XB-1 is a scaled down version of what Overture will be, lacking the passenger cabin that will offer business-class style amenities to commercial passengers. It does have a cockpit for the test pilots who will help Boom put its design through its paces beginning in 2021. It measures 71-feet long, and its propulsion is provided by three GE -made J85-15 engines that together provide 12,000 lbs of thrust. There are standard cockpit windows, but because of the extreme angle of the nose required for aerodynamics, there’s also an HD video camera and cockpit display to provide pilots with a virtual view out the front of the plane for maximum visibility.

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The frame of the XB-1 is made up of carbon-composite, which is designed for light weight while also offering very high tensile strength and rigidity, as well as an ability to withstand the high temperatures generated by traveling at supersonic speeds (even in the relatively friction-free environs of higher altitudes). Boom also kept pilot comfort in mind when creating the XB-1, optimizing for economics via user testing spanning “hundreds of hours.”

Boom plans to test XB-1 at Mojave Air and Space Port, located in Mojave, California. As mentioned, the goal now is to get that underway next year – but Boom will begin on its ground testing program immediately. Meanwhile, Boom will continue developing Overture simultaneously, working on wind tunnel tests and other elements of aircraft validation in order to help move towards the target of getting that commercial jet in the air for 2025.

Later today, Boom is hosting a virtual rollout event at its headquarters, with a Q&A to be hosted by Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl. You can check that out live at Boom’s site starting at 11 AM MT (1 PM ET/10 AM PT).

Grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and get ready for Day Two of TC Sessions: Mobility 2020! Yesterday featured an incredible lineup packed with trends, insights and opportunities designed to help you build a stronger business. Buckle up folks because we have even more in store today.

Heads up: There’s still time to get your mobility mojo working — buy a ticket and dive into today’s events and get access to the video on demand from all of yesterday’s content as well. Our networking platform will also be available until Friday so there’s still more value to be had.

Here’s a quick snapshot of what will transpire. Engage with founders, expert technologists, policy makers — people who have achieved success and want to help you do the same. Explore the TC Sessions: Mobility agenda to make sure you don’t miss what matters most in your world. Note: The agenda automatically lists event times based on the time zone in which you’re currently located.

Join us this morning at the TechCrunch Mobility Desk. It’s the place to catch up on what you missed from across the show or if you’re hankering for a preview of what’s to come (Main stage).

Autonomous vehicle developers face a boatload of regulations at every level — local, state and federal. Join government policy experts David Estrada, Melissa Froelich, Jody Kelman and Prashanthi Raman — from Nuro, Aurora, Lyft and Cruise respectively — as they discuss navigating self-driving car regulations (Main stage).

We hate it when people drone on and on — unless of course, they’re talking about actual drones. Tune in as Margaret Nagle, head of policy and public affairs at Wing, talks about how delivery drones could reshape cities and improve accessibility (Main stage).

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” That applies to technology and successful business building in a big way. Don’t miss Public-Private Partnerships: Advancing the Future of Mobility. Trevor Pawl, from the Michigan Office of Future Mobility and Electrification, moderates a discussion with some of the most innovative people about opportunities that await when public and private entities join forces (Main stage).

Did the Navigating Self-Driving Car Regulations discussion leave you wanting more? During this live Q&A, David Estrada, Melissa Froelich, Jody Kelman and Prashanthi Raman will answer your burning questions (Breakout).

Get ready for the Startup Pitch-Off! On the evening of October 5, 10 vetted mobility startups presented their best pitch to a panel of early-stage investors. Five of them earned the right to present today — live in front of a global audience. (Main stage).

Battery tech fuels mobility, and no one knows more about that topic than Celina Mikolajczak, vice president of battery technology for Panasonic Energy of North America, and JB Straubel, co-founder and CEO of Redwood Materials. They’ll discuss the current state of battery tech, what it will take to meet growing demand, minimizing the environmental impact and how their companies are working together.

That’s just a taste of Day Two, folks. There’s lots more to explore. Don’t forget to check out the 40+ startups exhibiting in the expo. Connect, collaborate, create opportunities at TC Sessions Mobility today!

This week, Unqork, a startup that helps other companies build business apps with a no-code platform, raised a $207 million Series C. The new capital valued the firm at around $2 billion.

Even given how much attention 2020 has brought to no-code startups and their low-code relatives, the investment stood out as outsized — and rapid. Previously, Unqork added $51 million to its Series B earlier this year, bringing that round to a total of around $131 million.

To see the company raise even more this quickly signaled that something was afoot.

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

So we sent in a raft of questions to the company to better understand the demand that it is seeing in the market for its service. I want to help both you and I better understand not only how Unqork managed to attract such a massive new check, but also what its notes tell us about the market for no-code services that help business build apps, a key portion of the no-code/low-code market.

What might be working for Unqork, in other words, could be working for other players in the space. And, if so, the whole no-code/low-code world could be enjoying an even sharper tailwind than we previously anticipated.

We’ll also bring in a few notes from Laela Sturdy, a general partner at Alphabet’s Capital G investing group. She led the company’s Series B and sits on its board. Luckily, we have a grip of her thoughts from our August no-code/low-code investor survey. Let’s get into it!

The round

Briefly, the round. Unqork raised $207 million at a roughly $2 billion price point — post-money, we presume — in a Series C led by BlackRock. Other money buckets took part, including funds from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Sunley House Capital Management, Eldridge and Fin Venture Capital, per the company. Prior investors including the aforementioned Capital G, along with Broadridge Financial Solutions, Aquiline Technology Growth, Goldman Sachs and World Innovation Lab also took part.

That is a long list of names. But it takes a while to add up to nine figures of capital, so perhaps the party-round style Series C is not too surprising.

Regardless, the firm is now incredibly well-capitalized and we can move onto more interesting things. Namely, how the company managed to raise so very much money. The Exchange asked Unqork a few questions:

• First, what is driving the demand for more business apps, a topic we’ve explored before.
• Second, we wanted to know what impact COVID-19 has had on the business; has the pandemic provided a dramatic lift to Unqork’s business, and, if so, did that drive its growth forward and help it secure the Series C?
• And, finally, we asked about the company’s sales cadence; is Unqork seeing faster sales cycles? If so, it could indicate that the market is moving towards no-code business app creation, lowering the hurdles that startups working in the space have to clear to snag new customers.
  
  

Delivery service DoorDash is giving employers a way to feed their remote employees through a new suite of products called DoorDash for Work.

There are four main products, starting with DashPass for Work, where employers can fund employee memberships to DashPass, a program that eliminates delivery fees on orders from thousands of restaurants. In fact, DoorDash says it already worked with Mt. Sinai to offer free DashPass subscriptions to 42,000 healthcare employees, and that other DashPass for Work customers include Charles Schwab, Hulu and Stanford Research Park.

DoorDash for Work also includes the ability for employers to provide credits for meal orders — there are options for day and time restrictions, so employers can be sure they’re paying for food while someone is working. For teams that are working in-person, there’s the ability to combine individual meal orders into a larger group orders. And the service also includes employee gift cards (Zoom, for example, is providing these on employee birthdays).

In a blog post, Broderick McClinton, the head of DoorDash for Work, noted that COVID-19 has had “a profound impact on our daily routines, including the way we eat.”

“Instead of meeting our favorite barista on the way into the office or socializing with our colleagues in the lunch room, we’re spending a lot more time in the kitchen and eating solo at home, missing out on those moments to engage with peers and support our favorite restaurants,” McClinton wrote. “In this new normal, companies are adapting and looking for ways to support their employees’ wellbeing and productivity through new work-from-home corporate wellness benefits, including food perks.

While free food might seem relatively low on the list of priorities during the pandemic (at least for those of us who have been fortunate enough to keep our jobs), DoorDash says it conducted a survey of 1,000 working Americans last month and found that 90% of them said they miss at least one food-related benefit from the office.

So DoorDash for Work is designed to help employers continue offering benefits in this area, and also it opens up a new source of revenue for DoorDash.

Solvo, a Tel Aviv-based startup that promises to automatically generate cloud security permissions by analyzing a developer’s code, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed funding round from TLV Partners and Surround Ventures. The idea here is to analyze the code and generate the least-privilege permissions that still allow the code to run.

Currently, Solvo’s focus is on AWS, with support for Python, Java and Node.js, but the team plans to expand its service to other clouds and languages over time.

The company was co-founded by its CEO Shira Shamban and its CTO, David Hendri. Shamban has 17 years of cybersecurity experience, leading security teams at Dome9 and CheckPoint, in addition to her time in the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200. Similarly, Hendri was one of the first R&D employees at Dome9 and served as an officer in the Israeli Intelligence Corps.

“Today, every software developer has their own AWS account — and they can scale up and entire crypto mining farm wherever in the world,” Shamban explained. “And when they do that, or when they write the next Tinder for cats they have to grant security permissions to the infrastructure because this is how it works. But there are software developers, not security engineers.”

Similarly, she argues, DevOps teams don’t typically focus on these security permissions either. At the same time, the security engineers also often don’t exactly know why a specific Lambda function in AWS communicated to a specific database, for example. Because of that, it’s often not quite clear who is in charge of infrastructure security.

“We created a solution that developers like to use […]. The developers like it, but the security team needs it — because they don’t have visibility and they don’t know the risks in their Cloud account,” said Shamban.

Because Solve creates very granular permissions, down to the row level in a database table, for example, when malicious actors do get into the system, they will only be able to access a small slice of the available data. That’s still obviously a problem, but it keeps the blast radius small.

As developers update their applications, the system automatically learns how a given company operates and updates its rules accordingly.

The company is already working with a Fortune 500 design partner to build out its service, which it offers as a SaaS product. But in addition to big enterprises, the team believes that small- and medium-sized companies can also benefit from its service.

Unsurprisingly, the company plans to use the new funding round, which it raised entirely over Zoom, to build out the team and product.

“The big problem that Solvo solves is the result of a growing trend in the market—the transfer of responsibility for code and product security in the cloud from the DevOps people to the development people,” said Shahar Tzafrir, a managing partner at TLV Partners . “In light of the enthusiastic responses we’ve received from potential customers that affirmed the necessity of the solution along with the unique ability of this particular team to offer a quick solution, we were quick to offer this seed investment to the entrepreneurs— and we are happy and proud that they chose us.”