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Yext is making its site search product Yext Answers available to a broader set of customers today with the launch of a new program that it calls Hitchhikers.

The company launched Yext Answers in October 2019 with the goal of making a brand’s website — rather than whatever shows up via Google search — the authoritative source of information about that brand. And earlier this year, Yext also introduced a 90-day free trial, which CEO Howard Lerman said was designed to help more partners deliver coronavirus-related answers.

However, Lerman told me this week that Yext Answers has still been constrained by a setup process that requires a Yext employee “to understand our own software and build your knowledge graph,” which meant that the company had to turn away many potential customers. With Hitchhikers, that’s no longer the case.

Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino said the program is designed for digital marketers, SEO specialists and IT professionals. The goal is to provide everything they need to create their own site search experience — including starter “knowledge graphs” customized to specific industries that customers can populate with their own content.

And there’s an educational focus — Ferrentino said Hitchhikers should be accessible to “someone who is a novice when it comes to technology,” quickly getting them up to speed on topics like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with different tracks and modules all brought to life with “hands-on learning” and quizzes.

Image Credits: Yext

Like Yext Answers, Hitchhikers is available through a 90-day free trial. And if you’re wondering about the name, Lerman said it’s a reference to Douglas Adams’ classic novel “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy,” specifically the idea of The Ultimate Question. Hitchhikers, then, is designed to help businesses answers their own Ultimate Questions.

One of the recurring themes in my recent conversations with Lerman has been the importance of brands and businesses as a source of knowledge and authoritative information. It’s something he emphasized again when discussing Hitchhikers. For example, he pointed to a Google search about what qualifies as essential travel — the top result was an article from a popular travel blogger, rather than the official definition from the U.S. State Department (a Yext Answers customer).

“The ultimate authority how to claim your gift card from Krispy Kreme is Krispy Kreme,” Lerman said. “The ultimate authority on an internet outage in a certain area is Cox … Getting that information to the user is even more important in this terrible year of misinformation and disinformation.”

Digital technologies now serve as the central nervous system for the global economy, and making that nervous system work depends on networks of massive data centers that hoover up enormous amounts of power to keep businesses operating around the world.

It’s not just keeping those data centers on, but keeping the rows and rows of servers that house all the data companies access in climate-controlled environment so they can operate effectively comes with a massive heating and cooling bill.

As companies struggle to address their energy consumption in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, they’re going to need to find ways to use less energy to keep the servers going. That’s where Submer comes in.

The Spanish company has developed a new way to store and cool servers. Basically it dunks them in an eco-friendly goo that the company’s founders have designed and stores them in specialized containers. The company’s founders said the approach can reduce energy consumption by 50%, water use by 99% and take up 85% less space.

Submer’s story actually starts with a rejection. The company, founded by Pol Valls, a former programmer and engineer, and his brother-in-law, Daniel Pope, who operated a data center business that was sold to Telefonica.

Four years ago the two men began brainstorming ways to make data centers operate more efficiently. They’d reached out to a few engineers and material science technologists that they’d known through their various networks and started developing a new material that was non-toxic, non-flammable, and biodegradable. The idea was to submerge servers in containers filled with the goo to have them operate more efficiently.

Impressed with their own ingenuity, the two founders pitched Y Combinator. They made it to the final round but ultimately weren’t accepted by the early stage accelerator program.

“At that time, without having anything except for a crazy idea… we didn’t get into the batch but we made it through the interview stage,” said Valls.

The two men, working in concert with retired engineers coming from the world of industrial thermodynamics, developed three initial prototypes. After six attempts, they’d gotten the product to a place where they thought they could take it to customers.

Submer isn’t the only company working with the concept of using liquid to cool servers. Microsoft recently publicized the results of an experiment off the coast of Scotland where it used ocean water to submerge servers and had the natural environment work to cool and store the hardware.

Valls said the approach from Microsoft was interesting, but doesn’t solve some of the key problems that new infrastructure technologies for datacenters need to address.

Chiefly, computing needs to happen closer to applications that require real-time operations. Those are new 5G networking technology, smart cars, and other innovations.

“Hyperscalers and data centers are trying to move infrastructure to the city center to reduce delays in communications,” Valls said. “Delays are dependent on the compute and where the user is… low latency applications will require more and more compute close to the city center.”

Submer’s approach was compelling enough for the company to raise roughly $12 million in new financing from a group of investors led by the Swedish impact investment firm, the Norrsken VC (the investment arm of the non-profit Norrsken Foundation) and Tim Reynolds, the retired co-founder of Jane Street Capital.  Founded by one of the co-founders of Klarna, the European fintech unicorn, Norrsken focuses on technologies and services that promote the UN sustainable development goals of financial inclusion and sustainable development.

“Data centers power human advancement. Their role as a core infrastructure has become more apparent than ever and emerging technologies such as AI and IoT will continue to drive computing needs. However, the environmental footprint of the industry is growing at an alarming rate,” said Alexander Danielsson, investment manager at Norrsken VC. Danielsson said that Submer’s solution represented a compelling potential solution.

What’s likely equally compelling is the size of the market, which is expected to reach $25 billion according to data from Global Market Insights. 

Over the past several months, it’s become painfully clear that COVID-19 isn’t a problem that we’re going to leave behind in 2021. After hemming and hawing a bit, the CTA ultimately pulled the trigger for an online-only version of the show in January. Other tech shows are similarly — at best — still up in the air. There’s also the example of IFA, which was recently held in Berlin — albeit at a greatly reduced capacity.

Mobile World Congress, which traditionally falls in a the late-February/early-March timeframe was among the first major tech show to be canceled on account of the pandemic. There was understandably a lot of last minute handwringing on that one — but in hindsight, it’s pretty clear the GSMA made the correct decision.

This week, MWC’s governing body announced that organization’s flagship evening will go on in Barcelona, but has pushed things back a few months. The show is now planned to run June 28 through July 1. A lot can happen between now and then, of course. Numbers could go down, a vaccine could be issued. But even this far out, a show of that magnitude still feels overly optimistic.

The calendar shuffling also finds the GSMA pushing its MWC Shanghai event into the February slot. That is, for what it’s worth a considerably smaller show. In both cases, the organization would be well-served to have a robust online plan in place. Even if things go exactly according to plan, many potential attendees are still understandably wary of travel and big crowds. It seems likely that an event like this will have some permanent impact on the way trade shows are handled moving forward.

It’s certainly a difficult decision when dealing with a hardware show, where so much of its appeal lies in the ability to interact with devices in-person. That’s been a consistent shortcoming in all of 2020’s online-only hardware events. Such a show loses a lot of luster when it occurs entirely through a computer screen.

Last week, we talked a bit about how investors are seeking new techniques to bring humanity back to their deal flow and sourcing mechanisms, beyond the boring Zoom call. The newest strategy I’ve seen is PrimeTime VC, a game show that pits venture capitalists against each other to debate on topics like TikTok to Y Combinator Demo Day to Snowflake’s IPO.

With ESPN-like graphics, investors are led through a series of questions by host Charlie Stephens, who runs his own live show interviewing tech executives. Its tag line? “The show of accredited banter.”

Yes, you read that right. Here’s the latest episode:

PrimeTime VC launched its pilot episode on August 17 and is releasing episodes every two weeks. It is eyeing weekly releases in 2021. In terms of production, it uses Zoom, After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

The show has racked in 30,000 views and sponsorships from First Republic Bank, TechDay, and Entre to help with production costs. It still has a lot of room to grow. (At time of publication, the Youtube channel has 63 subscribers, and the Twitter account has 15 followers).

The show came together after Tyler Kelly, founder of Pitch Madness, teamed up with Leaders Live hosts Charlie Stephens and Nidal Harvey. The trio put together a founder debate competition online to raise money for frontline workers. Then, they saw an opportunity to grow the show.

Investors who want to sign up can submit a form. Participants on the show include Nihal Mehta of Eniac VC, Jenny Friedman of Supernode Ventures, Paul Martino of Bullpen Capital, Lo Toney of Plexo Capital, Sydney Thomas of Precursor Ventures and John Frankel of FF VC.

“The show is also an outlet for VC’s to casually promote their portfolio companies in a relevant way, but if they go overboard with it, that’s when the point deduction comes into play,” Kelly said. The real deal sweetener, though, might be what the winner gets: 30 to 45 seconds of a monologue at the end of the show.

“You can’t stop VCs talking about their companies,” Mehta said. That’s part of our job.”

The last winner, Bullpen Capital’s Paul Martino used his time to urge startups to build.

“I can’t wait for this to be a big successful thing like some of our startups,” Martino said.

Down the road, Kelly hopes PrimeTime programming could become premium content and partner with a “large streaming network.”

Until then, let the “accredited banter” roll.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I work at a tech company, married a U.S. citizen two years ago and got a two-year green card. The relationship went south and I needed to leave to protect my daughter and me. I want to get divorced, but can we keep our green cards?

Will we be able to apply for U.S. citizenship?

— Hopeful in Hayward

Dear Hopeful,

Thank you for reaching out and sharing the story of your courage to do the right thing for yourself and your child. Good news — U.S. immigration laws have been designed to protect individuals who have been subject to abuse or extreme cruelty, which is not limited to physical harm but can also include emotional abuse. So, yes, you and your daughter can apply for a permanent green card even if you divorce your U.S.-citizen spouse. And yes, you can also apply for U.S. citizenship when you are eligible. My law partner, Anita Koumriqian, and I discuss the naturalization and citizenship process in more detail in this podcast.

You will need to file a petition (Form I-751) with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to seek to have the conditions on your and your daughter’s two-year conditional green card removed. Usually, individuals with a conditional green card must file a petition within 90 days of when the conditional card is set to expire. However, an abused spouse or the parent of an abused child can file this petition at any time. I recommend consulting with an experienced immigration lawyer before filing this petition. You will be allowed to have your attorney go with you to the USCIS interview that will be required as part of this process.

Conditional green cards cannot be renewed. Individuals who fail to file a petition to remove the conditions run the risk of being deported. Once the conditions are removed, a green card will be valid for 10 years. This process can involve extensive documentation and the possibility of attending an in-person interview. One of the reasons that it’s important to speak to an immigration attorney about this process, especially in California, is because divorce can take at least six months and the timing of the legal processes can affect the outcome of your green card.

Down the road, when the time comes for citizenship, here are the requirements to apply for the naturalization process. You must have:

Pinterest is announcing its spin on the increasingly popular stories format today — Story Pins, which combine multiple pages of images, videos, voiceover and overlaid text.

We wrote about Story Pins back in June, and apparently various versions of the format have been in the works since last year. But the company is only officially launching Story Pins in beta today, along with a number of other tools designed to help creators on the platform.

Asked yesterday how Story Pins differ from the stories we’d see on Snapchat, Instagram or any other social media platform, Pinterest’s head of content, creator and homefeed product David Temple told reporters that Pinterest’s approach is different in a few key ways.

“Story features on other platforms are designed to show you what people are doing,” Temple said. “Story Pins are designed to show you how people are trying new ideas and new products. That means the features and intent are dramatically different.”

For one thing, he noted that they’re not ephemeral, meaning that they don’t disappear after a set period of time, and can still be surfaced via search or other discovery mechanisms: “The best ideas and Story Pins remain relevant for months.”

In addition, the main interaction with a Story Pin (as with other forms of content on Pinterest) is to save it for, rather than a simple like button. And they can include lists of the necessary supplies or ingredients.

All of this, Temple argued, tilts Story Pins towards inspiration, utility and a general positive tone, as does the gradual way Pinterest is rolling this out.

“We want to be deliberate and thoughtful with the growth that we have on on here, to ensure that the tone for the content and the community remains positive,” he said.

This new feature also makes Pinterest more of a platform where creator content can be published directly, rather than simply distributed and shared after it’s published elsewhere.

To that end, Pinterest is also unveiling new creator profiles designed to showcase a creator’s published content, rather than just the Pins that they’ve saved. It’s also launching a new engagement tab and analytics dashboard, so creators can see how Pinterest users are responding to their content.

Story Pins are being rolled out to select U.S. creators, while the new analytics features are available to all Pinterest users with business accounts.

The announcement comes as Pinterest just broke its daily download record and moved to the top of App Store rankings thanks to interest in iOS 14 design ideas.

Less happily, it also comes after Pinterest employees walked out over the summer following complaints of racial and gender discrimination. Those complaints weren’t addressed directly in yesterday’s press conference, but Temple did emphasize the company’s goal of ensuring that at least 50% of creators publishing Story Pins come from underrepresented backgrounds, and that a similar diversity is reflected in the company’s “creator amplifications and marketing and editorial surfaces.”

“We can only fulfill our mission of helping everyone to create the life they want to live if everyone on Pinterest can find inspiration,” he said. “And it’s really hard to feel inspired if you don’t feel represented.”

Bowery Farming has added to its executive team as it expands its retail footprint to 650 stores, the company said.

From three indoor farms in Kearny, N.J. and Nottingham, Md., the New York-based company is pitching a smattering of leafy greens and herbs. Irving Fain, Bowery’s chief executive and founder declined to disclose the company’s revenues or production capacity from its facilities.

To help Bowery sell its greens, the company has brought on a group of new senior management and executive staff including the former global chief supply chain officer for Walgreens Boots Alliance, Colin Nelson. Nelson will serve as the Bowery’s chief supply chain officer and joins a group of new executives including: Carmela Cugini, Chief Revenue Officer (formerly head of merchandising & curation at Jet.com and VP and general manager of Walmart’s US e-commerce team) and Katie Seawell, Chief Marketing Officer (formerly the senior vice president of product and marketing for Starbucks).

The company has also added Sally Genster Robling (the former executive vice president of Pinnacle Foods and founding President of its $1.1 billion Birds Eye Division) and Michael Lynton (Chairman of Snap Inc., and former Chairman and Chief Executive of Sony Pictures Entertainment). 

Fain said that the company is currently well-capitalized and has not raised any cash since its last round of funding led by Temasek in 2019. Bowery Farming has raised over $172.5 million from leading investors, including Temasek, GV (formerly Google Ventures), General Catalyst, GGV Capital, First Round Capital, Henry Kravis, Jeff Wilke and Dara Khosrowshahi, and celebrity chefs including Tom Colicchio, José Andres and David Barber of Blue Hill.

We’ve probably all been there: you’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it.. aaaand it’s a fifty page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your way through a document that’s clearly not meant for a screen that fits in your hand.

Given that the file format is approaching its 30th birthday, it makes sense that PDFs aren’t exactly built for modern mobile devices. But neither PDFs or smartphones are going away anytime soon, so Adobe has been working on a way to make them play nicely together.

This morning Adobe is launching a feature it calls “Liquid Mode.” Liquid Mode taps Adobe’s AI engine, Sensei, to analyze a PDF and automatically rebuild it for mobile devices. It uses machine learning to chew through the PDF and tries to work out what’s what — like the font changes that indicate a new section is starting, or how data is being displayed in a table — and reflow it all for smaller screens.

After a few months of quiet testing, Liquid Mode is being publicly rolled out in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader app for iOS and Android today with plans to bring it to desktops later. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also tells me they’ve been working on an API that’ll allow similar functionality to be rolled into non-Adobe apps down the road.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, the app will try to determine if it’ll work with Liquid Mode; if so, the Liquid Mode button lights up. Tap the button and the file is sent to Adobe’s Document Cloud for processing. Once complete, users can tweak things like the font size and line spacing to their liking. Liquid Mode will use the headers/structure it detects to build a tappable table of contents where none existed before, allowing you to quickly hop from section to section. The whole thing is non-destructive, so nothing actually changes about the original PDF. Step back out of liquid mode, and you’re back at the original, unmodified PDF. 

Image Credits: Adobe

We first heard about Adobe’s efforts here earlier this year; in an ExtraCrunch interview back in January, Parasnis outlined Adobe’s plans to bring AI and machine learning into just about everything the company does. Parasnis tells me that Liquid Mode is just the first step in giving Sensei an understanding of documents. Later, he notes, they want users to be able to hand Sensei a thirty page PDF and have it return a three page summary.

Nature, a Japanese hardware startup that focuses on IoT home devices, announced the launch Remo 3, its home appliance smart remote, in the United States and Canada today. Priced at $129, the Bluetooth-enabled Remo 3 allows people to control multiple appliances that uses an infrared remote, including air conditioners, TVs, robot vacuum cleaners and fans, with their smartphones or smart speakers.

Nature claims that its Remo series is Japan’s top smart remote, with over 200,000 units sold so far. The Remo 3, designed to be mounted on a wall, also has sensors for temperature, humidity, lighting and movement, allowing users to create customized settings for when they want devices to turn on or shut off. Remo 3’s app also has a GPS location feature, so appliances can turn on automatically as users get closer to their homes.

As COVID-19 forces people to spend more time at home than usual, many are embarking on home improvement projects.

Even though people may be reluctant to purchase new appliances because of the economic downturn, relatively inexpensive products like the Remo 3 may still attract buyers because it can help reduce energy consumed by devices they already own. The Remo 3 also adds another layer of functionality to smart speakers and before the pandemic, global smart speaker sales hit a record high last year with 146.9 million units shipped. The Remo 3 is compatible with Amazon smart speakers like the Echo Dot, as well as Google Home and Apple HomePod speakers.

Nature founder and chief executive Haruumi Shiode told TechCrunch that Nature conducted a pilot with Kansai Electric, one of the largest utility providers in Japan, to prove that it can lower the amount of electricity used by air conditioners. He added that the pandemic actually accelerated sales of Nature Remo devices in Japan and prompted the company’s decision to launch in the U.S.

The COVID-19 pandemic made mass-producing the Remo 3 more challenging because Nature’s team was no longer able to make monthly trips to Shenzhen, Shiode said. But the Remo 3 is the sixth product Nature has launched so far, so it was able to figure out how to work with factories remotely on production and quality assurance.

“I read that since the pandemic started, 70% of Americans are tackling home improvement projects,” Shiode added. “Similarly, people around the world have been looking for ways to make their shelter-in-place less mundane and more convenient. With the Nature Remo 3, we hope to offer the same convenience and efficiencies to the American market as we have in Japan.”

Five years ago, Traefik Labs founder and CEO Emile Vauge was working on a project deploying thousands of microservices and he was lacking a cloud native application proxy that could handle this kind of scale. So like any good developer, he created one himself and Traefik was born.

If you go back five years, the notion of cloud native was still in its infancy. Docker has been doing containers for just a couple of years, and Kubernetes would only be released that year. There wasn’t much cloud native tooling around, so Vauge decided to build a cloud native reverse proxy out of pure necessity.

“At that time, five years ago, there was no reverse proxy that was good at managing the complexity of microservices at cloud scale. So that was really the origin of Traefik. And one of the big innovations was its automation and its simplicity,” he said.

As he explained it, a reverse proxy needs to have several features like traffic management, load balancing, observability and security, but much of this had to be done manually with the tools available at the time. As it turns out Vauge had stumbled onto a major pain point.

“Initially I created Traefik for myself. It was a side project but it turned out that there was a huge interest and very quickly a community gathered around the project,” he said. After a few months, he realized he could build a company around this and left his job to start a company called Containous.

Today, he changed the name of that company to Traefik Labs and the open source project he developed has become wildly popular. “Five years later we are at 2 billion downloads. It’s in the top 10 most downloaded projects on Docker. We have 30,000 stars on GitHub. So basically it’s one of the largest open source projects in the world,” he said. In addition, he said that there are over 550 individuals contributing to the project today.

When he formed Containous, he developed an open core-based commercial project designed for enterprise needs around scaling, high availability and more security features. Today, that includes the Traefik Proxy and an open source service mesh called Traefik Mesh.

Among the companies using the open source project today are Conde Nast, eBay Classifieds and Mailchimp.

Vauge certainly was in the right place at the right time five years ago, which he modestly attributes to luck because he was working at one of the few companies at the time who were dealing with microservices at scale. “We had to build a lot of things and Traefik was one of those things. So I was basically lucky because I created Traefik at the right time,” he said.

Not surprisingly a company with that kind of open source traction has attracted the interest of venture capitalists and Vauge has raised $16 million since he launched his company in 2015 including $10 million led by Balderton Capital in January.