Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Over the past decade, a number of high-profile cybersecurity issues have arisen during mega-M&A deals, heightening concerns among corporate executives.

In 2017, Yahoo disclosed three data breaches during its negotiation to sell its internet business to Verizon [Disclosure: Verizon Media is TechCrunch’s parent company]. As a result of the disclosures, Verizon subsequently reduced its purchase price by $350 million, approximately 7% of the purchase price, with the sellers assuming 50% of any future liability arising from the data breaches.

While the consequences of cyber threats were soundly felt by Yahoo’s shareholders and widely covered in the news, it was an extraordinary event that raised eyebrows among M&A practitioners but did not fundamentally transform standard M&A practices. However, given the high potential cost from cyber threats and the high frequency of incidents, acquirers need to find more comprehensive and expedient methods to address these risks.

Today, as conversations accelerate around cybersecurity matters during an M&A process, corporate executives and M&A professionals will point to improved processes and outsourced services for identifying and preventing security issues. Despite the heightened awareness among financial executives and a greater range of outsourced solutions for addressing cybersecurity threats, acquirers continue to report increasing numbers of cybersecurity incidents at acquired targets, often after the target has already been acquired. Despite this, acquirers continue to focus due diligence activities on finance, legal, sales and operations and typically see cybersecurity as an ancillary area.

While past or potential cyber threats are no longer ignored in the due diligence process, the fact that data breaches are still increasing and can cause negative financial impact that will be felt long after the deal has closed highlights a greater need for acquirers to continue to improve their approach and address cyber threats.

The current lack of focus on cybersecurity issues can be partially attributed to the dynamics of the M&A market. Most middle-market companies (which constitute the nominal majority of M&A transactions) will typically be sold in an auction process where an investment bank is engaged by the seller to maximize value by fostering competitive dynamics between interested bidders. In order to increase competitiveness, bankers will typically drive a deal process forward as quickly as possible. Under tight time constraints, buyers are forced to prioritize their due diligence activities or risk falling behind in a deal process.

A typical deal process for a private company will move as follows:

• Selling company’s investment bankers contact potential buyers, providing a confidential information memorandum (CIM), which contains summary information on a company’s history, operations and historical and projected financial performance. Potential buyers are typically given three to six weeks to review materials before deciding to move forward. Unless there is a previously known cybersecurity issue, a CIM will typically not address potential or current cybersecurity issues.
• After the initial review period, indications of interest (IOI) are due from all interested bidders, who will be asked to indicate valuation and deal structure (cash, stock, etc.).
• After IOIs have been submitted, the investment banker will work with the sellers to select top bidders. Key criteria that are evaluated include valuation, as well as other considerations such as timing, certainty of closing and credibility of buyer to complete the transaction.
• Bidders selected to move forward are typically given four to six weeks after the IOI date to drill deeper into key diligence issues, review information in the seller’s data room, conduct a management presentation or Q&A with the target’s management and perform site visits. This is the first stage when cybersecurity issues could be most efficiently addressed.
• Letter of Intent is due, when bidders reaffirm valuation and propose exclusivity periods wherein one bidder is selected on an exclusive basis to complete their due diligence and close the deal.
• Once an LOI is signed, bidders typically have 30-60 days to complete the negotiation of definitive agreements that will outline in detail all terms of an acquisition. At this stage, acquirers have another opportunity to address cybersecurity issues, often using third-party resources, with the benefit of investing significant expenses with the greater certainty provided by the exclusivity period. The degree to which third party resources are directed toward cybersecurity relative to other priorities varies greatly, but generally speaking, cybersecurity is not a high-priority item.
• Closing occurs concurrent with signing definitive agreements, or in other cases, closing occurs after signing often due to regulatory approvals. In either case, once a deal is signed and all key terms are determined buyers can no longer unilaterally back out of a deal.

In such a process, acquirers must balance internal resources to thoroughly evaluate a target with moving quickly enough to remain competitive. At the same time, the primary decision makers in an M&A transaction will tend to come from finance, legal, strategy or operating backgrounds and rarely will have meaningful IT or cybersecurity experience. With limited time and little background in cybersecurity, M&A teams tend to focus on more urgent transactional areas of the deal process, including negotiating key business terms, business and market trend analysis, accounting, debt financing and internal approvals. With only 2-3 months to evaluate a transaction before signing, cybersecurity typically only receives a limited amount of focus.

When cybersecurity issues are evaluated, they are heavily reliant on disclosures from the seller regarding past issues and internal controls that are in place. Of course, sellers cannot disclose what they do not know, and most organizations are ignorant of attackers who may already be in their networks or significant vulnerabilities that are unknown to them. Unfortunately, this assessment is a one-way conversation that is reliant on truthful and comprehensive disclosures from sellers, lending new meaning to the phrase caveat emptor. For this reason, it’s no coincidence that a recent poll of IT professionals by Forescout showed that 65% of respondents expressed buyer’s remorse due to cybersecurity issues. Only 36% of those polled felt that they had adequate time to evaluate cybersecurity threats.

While most M&A processes do not typically prioritize cybersecurity, M&A processes will often focus squarely on cybersecurity issues when known issues occur during or prior to an M&A process. In the case of Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo, the disclosure of three major data breaches led to a significant reduction of purchase price, as well as changes in key terms, including stipulations that the seller would bear half the costs of any future liabilities arising from these data breaches. In April 2019, Verizon and the portion of Yahoo that was not acquired would end up splitting a $117 million settlement for the data breach. In a more recent example, Spirit AeroSystems’ acquisition of Asco has been pending since 2018 with a delayed closing largely due to a ransomware attack on Asco. In June 2019, Asco experienced a ransomware attack that forced temporary factory closures, ultimately causing a 25% purchase price reduction of $150 million from the original $604 million.

In both the case of Spirit and Verizon’s acquisitions, cybersecurity issues were largely addressed through valuation and deal structure, which limits financial losses, but does little to prevent future issues for a buyer, including loss of confidence among customers and investors. Similar to Spirit and Verizon’s acquisitions, acquirers will typically utilize structural elements of a deal to limit the economic losses. Various mechanisms and structures — including representations, warranties, indemnifications and asset purchases — can be utilized to effectively transfer the direct economic liabilities of an identifiable cybersecurity issue. However, they cannot compensate for the greater loss that would occur from reputational risk or loss of important trade secrets.

What the Spirit and Verizon examples demonstrate is that there is quantifiable value associated with cybersecurity risk. Acquirers who do not actively assess their M&A targets are potentially introducing a risk into their transaction without a mitigation. Given a limited timeline and the inherently opaque nature of a target’s cybersecurity issues, acquirers would benefit greatly from outsourced solutions that would require no reliance upon, or input from a target.

The scope of such an assessment ideally uncovers previously unknown deficiencies in the target’s security and exposure of business systems and key assets, including data and company secrets or intellectual property. Without such knowledge, acquirers go into deals partially blinded. Of course, industry best practice is to reduce risk. Adding this measure of cybersecurity assessment is an excellent practice today and likely a mandatory requirement in the future.

You have more ways than ever to find the right users for your startup — if you know what you’re doing. 

Today, you can pick from a selection of self-serve ad tools across large consumer platforms, build out your own content marketing and develop a sophisticated funnel to grow, retain and ultimately monetize your users, all using the most cutting-edge software that the SaaS industry can provide. But the best-practices from even a few years ago are out of date now, and the pandemic has created many new challenges. 

We’ve invited two top experts in the field to the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18 to help you think more strategically about growth, from the latest trends affecting any company, to the strategic framework you need for 2020 and beyond, to the best ways to communicate with investors about your hard-won gains.

• Susan Su is a startup growth advisor at Sound Ventures and longtime startup operator and angel investor. She previously led startup growth at Stripe, served as an in-house growth advisor at 500 startups and led the growth marketing as a founding team member at Reforge.
• Brian Balfour is the CEO of Reforge, a career accelerator program provide used by top operators at tech companies to hone skills on growth, monetization and much else. He was previously the VP of growth at HubSpot, an EIR at Trinity Ventures, prolific angel investor and serial founder.

You’ll find this session alongside several other founder-focused interaction sessions on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt 2020. You’ll need to grab your Digital Pro Pass or your Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package to be able to catch it all. And to top it all off, you’ll also get a complementary Extra Crunch subscription so you can take advantage of these insights for a whole year! Register today!

If you mashup feel-good summer music, ridiculous 80’s-inspired imagery and retro tech, you’ll get the lighthearted and fun web radio service Poolside.fm, the so-called “sunniest place on the internet.” The website where you can stream beachy, chill or disco tracks in a classic MacOS-like space relaunched last year to bring a little joy back to the internet. More recently, the team delivered a Mac app that somehow successfully mixes together the Mac aesthetic with touches early Windows. Today, the Poolside.fm iOS app has arrived, this time taking inspiration from old Nokia 3310 mobile devices.

The Poolside.fm project actually began back in 2014, when founder and serial entrepreneur Marty Bell was in search of some sort of virtual getaway. Bell lives in the Highlands of Scotland, where it’s often gray and rainy, he says. And that can be depressing. As an escape, Bell began listening to a certain type of uplifting, happy music via SoundCloud. He decided it would be fun to his favorite those tunes in a playful environment that also reminded him of his other “happy place” — “80’s beach movies on VHS, where it’s like the American summer dream,” Bell explains.

He then teamed up with developer Grant MacLennan to launch the initial version of the Poolside.fm website, then called Poolside Radio, in 2014. It received a handful of accolades and briefly went viral on Twitter, developing a small cult following.

The site initially ran on a rudimentary CMS (content management system) where Bell could submit SoundCloud tracks and YouTube videos which would then be played at random for visitors.

Image Credits: Poolside.fm

Over the years, Bell continued to work on his other business endeavours, which ranged from a DJ business with a clothing line to a sunglasses company, and later, a finance company called Nude, which helps young people save up for their first home. Though he continued to update Poolside.fm’s Instagram, the website for the radio service wasn’t updated for years. Despite the inattention, it continued to see thousands and, sometimes, tens of thousands of visitors per month.

Bell more recently returned to the project with the idea to reinvent the website with an operating system-like look-and-feel, and even paid people to do three different versions of the site until he found the right team. Unbelievably, the team working on the project now do so on a volunteer basis in their free time because they find it to be a positive experience. (And perhaps because they see long-term potential in the Poolside.fm brand.)

Visitors who go to Poolside.fm can switch through various “stations,” each with their own vibe. The default, Poolsdie.fm, features the upbeat music that prompted the project in the first place. But there’s also an indie channel, Indie Summer, a chill channel, Hangover Club, and fast-tempo disco, Tokyo Disco.

Since last summer’s relaunch, the updated website has seen 1.5 million listening sessions from over 900,000 individuals, with much of the listening taking place across the U.S. (32%), Japan (15%), UK (8%), Germany (4%), Canada (4%). Meanwhile, the recently launched Mac app has already been installed 30,000 times across the past 3 weeks and was featured by Apple in the “Apps We Love” section of the Mac App Store.

Today, Poolside.fm’s retro cool and somewhat goofy 80’s/90’s aesthetic arrives on the iPhone.

But instead of copying the user interface from the web, the Poolside.fm team created something new.

The iOS app, built by developer Josh McMillan, references older cellular devices — like the Nokia 3310, which once featured a grainy, pixel-y image of hands coming together and shaking. On Poolside.fm’s app start screen, however, a similar set of hands now drop a cherry in a martini glass.

Image Credits: Poolside.fm

The app’s main interface, meanwhile, recalls old cellular devices with its use of outdated fonts, pixel-y shading, and grainy imagery. Low-bit “video clips” play in the background, helping deliver the retro vibe. You’ll see women with big 80’s hair, terrible 80’s dancing, classic cars, beach parties, and more.

But the app isn’t the classic gray-and-green color scheme of old phones. It’s a bright and cheery pink. You also can opt for other jewel-toned shades in a theme picker, if you prefer.

The app includes Poolside.fm’s full channel lineup, which you can play, pause, skip or go back, and favorite, if signed in. And despite its old-school feel, Poolside.fm is a modern app with support for things like background play, AirPlay, and the ability to work with your AirPods.

Image Credits: Poolside.fm

The team is now six people, founder Marty Bell, designer Niek Dekker, lead developer Lewis King, iOS developer Josh McMillan, Mac developer Will Chilcutt, and backend developer Nick Haddad. They’ve done some side jobs here and there for cash, we’re told, but the cost of running Poolside.fm is surprisingly low, Bell tells us.

“The bills are like, I don’t know, Ii would say for both Firebase and the hosting, the whole thing is probably under $100 per month,” he guesses. That’s because the video and audio come from YouTube and SoundCloud, which handle the bandwidth load. The actual service itself is very light.

Though Bell says investors have been sliding into his Twitter DM’s, the team isn’t looking to immediately monetize their project. It’s funny, he adds, how the one business (of so many that he started) that wasn’t designed to be a success — the one with no business plan, in fact — has ended up attracting the most attention.

“I think that’s what makes the difference. When you’re just channeling pure passion into something, with a bunch of other people that are working on it because it’s fun — not because they’re being paid — the kind of product that comes out of that is unlike anything that’s going to come out of a product that’s working towards KPIs and metrics for investors,” explains Bell. “In that environment, you can’t build something like Poolside.fm, where it’s six people who are all working on it in their spare time, for free, because it’s their happy place and it’s fun to work on. You can’t get that energy in a business environment very easily,” he says.

That said, Bell does have a few ideas about where the project could go in the future.

The team already sold a little merchandise, like hats and tees. (He’s still packing up Poolside.fm’s motel-style keychains from his house, he says.) Bell could see the team running projects from a separate company, as “Poolside.fm presents X,” for example.

Post-COVID, these could include experiential events. But Bell is also talking to podcast studios about doing a fiction podcast series, and the team is thinking about selling more physical products — like pool accessories, naturally.

Of course, we had to ask if Bell finally now has a pool of his own, after all these years. But he hasn’t taken that victory lap just yet.

“I definitely do not have a pool in the Highlands of Scotland. I’m looking out onto a field full of sheep right now,” he laughs.

Poolside.fm is a free download for iOS.

A bug in United Airlines’ website let anyone access the ticket information for travelers who requested a refund.

The airline’s website lets users check their refund status by entering their ticket number and last name. But the website wasn’t validating the last name, making it possible to access other travelers’ refund information by changing the ticket number.

IT security expert Oliver Linow, who found the bug, told TechCrunch that he could see traveler surnames, the payment type and currency used to buy the ticket, and the refund amount.

United, like most other airlines, lets passengers access and modify their upcoming flights using only a passenger’s ticket number and last name.

Linow reported the issue to United on July 6. It took the airline a month to fix. But Linow did not hear back again from the airline.

It’s not known for how long the bug was present. United did not respond to our emails with questions about whether the airline informed data protection authorities about the incident.

Companies found in violation of European data protection rules can be fined up to 4% of their annual revenue.

Airlines have withheld billions of dollars worth of refunds during the pandemic amid a sharp decline in passenger numbers. United later received a $5 billion share of a $25 billion U.S. federal aid package aimed at keeping the airline industry afloat.

Earlier this month, United said it would furlough about 20% of its staff — some 16,370 employees.

It seems Los Angeles is becoming an enterprise software hotspot.

LA saw its first big enterprise exit in recent memory with the recent acquisition of Signal Sciences for $775 million, and less than a month later a hometown startup, Britive has raised $5.4 million from LA’s own venture fund, Upfront Ventures and a clutch of security experts.

For chief executive Artyom Poghosyan and chief technology officer Alex Gudanis, Britive is simply the latest initiative in a decades-long effort to reshape security technology.

Both Poghosyan and Gudanis have long histories in identity and access management, back in 2009 Poghosyan founded Advancive Technology Solutions, which was acquired by Optiv in 2015 to bulk up its identity access management service.

Now, he and Gudanis are trying to solve the issues of identity access management that the new, ubiquitous cloud computing model presents for security officers and developers.

“When Optiv acquired us, we were already seeing interesting and strong signals in the technolog space about the disruption that was being driven by cloud technologies,” said Poghosyan.

Those cloud technologies presented new challenges for the kind of privileged access management technologies that Poghosyan had developed.

The solution that Britive pitches is a dynamic model for granting permissions for access, Poghosyan said. Instead of granting permanent access to, there re policy-based pre authorizations that a company can set up defined for specific tasks and roles.

Based on a developer’s role and work, they can request and receive access automatically based on the specific parameters defined by a company or security officer.

The company already has over a dozen customers using its technology after launching merely two years ago. It’s a customer base that includes one of the world’s largest carmakers and a global clothing brand — companies Poghosyan declined to identify, citing contractual obligations.

The company charges based on the number of users who are requesting permission for access, Poghosyan said.

As more companies move to remote work in the COVID-19 era and distributed teams become the norm, streamlining the provisioning and access management process for companies is going to become even more important.

Undoubtedly, that’s why Britive was able to land investors like Upfront Ventures and why their partner, Kara Nortman is joining the company’s board of directors. It’s also the reason the company was able to attract some of LA’s leading enterprise executives to back the company, including Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences and Dave Cole, CEO of Open Raven.

Startups that deliver products via an API are seeing momentum in 2020, as their method of serving customers becomes increasingly mainstream. And investors are taking note.

It’s not hard to find a startup with an API-based delivery model that is doing well this year. This column noted a grip of recently funded API-focused startups in May, for example, underscoring how attractive they are to venture capitalists today.

Yesterday, I caught up with Alpaca, a startup whose API allows other companies to add equities-trading capabilities to their own services. The company’s business is skyrocketing this year. According to data it provided to TechCrunch, Alpaca’s trading volume, processed for its developer users and customers, has grown from $388.1 million in January to nearly $1.6 billion in both June and July. Volume fell some in August, but according to CEO Yoshi Yokokawa, September’s trading volume could see Alpaca surpass its summer records.

Alpaca announced a $6 million round from Spark Capital last November that TechCrunch covered, with Social Leverage, Portag3, Fathom Capital and Zillionize helping boost its total capital raised to nearly $12 million. We confirmed with Yokokawa that his startup’s revenue scales with volume, meaning that the company’s top line has exploded this year, with trading volumes up 10x from July 2019 to July 2020.

Alpaca is a good example of what to think of when we consider an API-powered company versus something more more traditional, like Robinhood, which provides services to end users. Alpaca considers developers as its users, and those developers bring Alpaca to market in their own fashion.

The developer-first model can lead to efficiencies. As Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson told TechCrunch regarding new software products: “I don’t want to go through a sales process,” he said, adding that he also doesn’t want to wait “a week to get a call back” but would rather “start exploring now.” With many API companies offering a free tier or low-cost options for tinkering, lowering sales and marketing costs in certain instances when developers sell themselves on an API-delivered service.

So what?

What’s driving the API-delivered model forward in 2020? Or, more simply, why do I keep hearing from API-powered startups that are either raising money, or are seeing rapid growth?

Alpaca’s Yokokawa has a theory. According to the startup exec, two macro trends are coming together to push API startups forward. The first is a simple evolution of the tech industry towards a new software delivery model. Yokokawa drew a timeline for TechCrunch, from legacy IT systems to on-prem software, through SaaS to API-delivered services today, the last in the bunch offering what he views as the most flexibility. That trend has combined with more folks becoming developers, in his view, through traditional education, coding schools, and even no-code’s growth.

An industry shift towards software and services in an increasingly on-demand model (SaaS is more on-demand than on-prem software, and API-delivered tools are even more on-demand than SaaS) and more developers to help plug APIs into other apps could make for a nice tailwind for companies employing the business model.

To get a bit more on the where we stand today, The Exchange chatted with Shasta’s Isaac Roth and collected notes from two Mayfield investors, Patrick Salyer and Rajeev Batra. There’s a general air of bullishness around startups selling APIs. Let’s learn how it is impacting venture interest.

The investor perspective

Remember how Heroku was a big break through when it was first released? Qovery wants to do it again by building an abstraction layer between your code and your cloud infrastructure. You push code in a git repository and Qovery manages your services for you.

“It’s a container-as-a-service platform for developers. Like on Heroku, you just have to put a .qovery.yml file to describe the dependencies you need,” co-founder and CEO Romaric Philogène told me.

Essentially, Qovery sits in-between your git repository and your cloud infrastructure account — the company doesn’t take care of cloud hosting itself. You can connect your Qovery account with your GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket account so that it automatically gets triggered when you push new code.

After that, Qovery automatically spins up new servers, managed databases and brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ) for you. There are some ways to automate your deployment already with Terraform and continuous integration/continuous delivery software. But Qovery makes it easy to get started.

More importantly, Qovery is building integrations with multiple cloud providers. It already works with Amazon Web Services and the team is currently working on DigitalOcean and Scaleway support. Next up, Google Cloud and Microsot Azure are on the roadmap.

Interestingly, you can design your own infrastructure for each branch. For instance, if you have a development branch to try out new features or a staging branch, you can spin up new servers for this branch without having to recreate your production environment from the start.

And that’s arguably Qovery’s most important feature. According to the startup, cloud hosting will become commoditized. Each provider will provide managed databases, message brokers, etc. It comes down to reliability, pricing and support level. You can imagine having a production application on AWS and a development branch running on another cloud provider.

Behind the scene, Qovery relies heavily on Terraform and Kubernetes, with an additional layer on top of them. When you compare it with Heroku’s monolithic philosophy, it scales more efficiently as it has been designed around micro-services from the ground up.

Qovery costs $15 per application per month. Many companies have dozens of applications running at the same time to handle different parts of a service. So if you switch everything over to Qovery, you’ll pay $15 for each application.

If you already have a CI tool that works with your development team, you can use it instead of Qovery’s built-in CI service. And there’s no lock-in effect — you can stop using it if you now have your own DevOps team.

The company has raised $1 million from Techstars and a long list of business angels.

Image Credits: Qovery

Zomato has raised $100 million from Tiger Global and said it plans to file for an IPO next year.

Tiger Global financed the capital through its investment vehicle Internet Fund VI, according to a regulatory filing. Infoedge, a major investor in Zomato, confirmed the development Thursday evening, adding that the new round valued Zomato at $3.3 billion post-money.

In an email to employees earlier today, Zomato co-founder and chief executive Deepinder Goyal said the startup had about $250 million cash in the bank and several more “big names” investors would be joining the current round, increasing its cash reserve to about $600 million “very soon.”

“Important note — we have no immediate plans on how to spend this money. We are treating this cash as a ‘war-chest’ for future M&A, and fighting off any mischief or price wars from our competition in various areas of our business,” he added in the letter, reviewed by TechCrunch.

Zomato, which acquired the Indian food delivery business of Uber early this year, competes with Prosus Ventures-backed Swiggy in India. A third player, Amazon, has also emerged in the market, though it is currently servicing food delivery in only select suburbs of Bangalore.

Goyal told employees that the 12-year-old startup is also working for its IPO for “sometime in the first half of next year.” (It’s unclear how Zomato plans to achieve this target, but it is likely looking at listing in the U.S. or some other market. Current Indian law requires a startup to be profitable for at least three years before they could publicly list in India — though there has been some proposal to relax this requirement.)

The new pledge from Zomato is the result of a major economic improvements in its business in recent quarters. Until mid-last year, Zomato was losing more than $50 million a month to win and sustain customers by offering heavy discounts.

The Gurgaon-headquartered firm, which like Swiggy eliminated hundreds of jobs in recent months as coronavirus ruined the appetite of Indians ordering food online, said in July that its losses for the month would be less than $1 million.

The startup also faced obstacles in raising new capital. It kickstarted its financing round a year ago, but had secured only $50 million as of a month ago. The startup had originally anticipated closing this round, at about $600 million, in January this year.

In an emailed response to TechCrunch queries in April, Goyal had attributed the delays to the spread of coronavirus and said he expected to close the round by mid-May. He wrote to employees today that Tiger Global, Temasek, Baillie Gifford, and Ant Financial had already participated in the current round.

Facebook is getting back to its roots as a college-focused social network. The company announced today the launch of a new social networking platform, Facebook Campus, which offers college students a private place to connect with classmates, join groups, discover upcoming campus events, get updates from their school’s administration and chat with other students from their dorm, clubs or any other campus group.

The new platform requires a school email address (@.edu) to join and will live within a dedicated section of the Facebook app. It will be accessible from a tab at the bottom of the screen or from the “More” menu alongside sections like Watch, Dating, Gaming, News, Marketplace and others.

“We wanted to create a product where it was easy for classmates to meet each other, foster new relationships and also easily start conversations,” explains Facebook Campus Product Manager Charmaine Hung. “And we really think that Campus is more relevant than ever right now. With COVID-19, we see that many students aren’t returning to campus in the fall. Now, classes are being held online and students are trying to react to this new normal of what it’s like to connect to clubs and organizations that you care about, when you’re not together,” she added.

More broadly, Facebook likely wanted to address its “teen problem,” and Facebook Campus is its solution.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook, according to reports, has been losing its grip on the younger demographic, as they’ve shifted their attention to other social apps, like YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram. According to a 2018 study from the Pew Research Center, only 51% of U.S. users ages 13 through 17 said they used Facebook, down from 71% who said the same in 2015. Meanwhile, a 2019 survey by Edison Research indicated that Facebook had lost 15 million users since 2017, with the biggest drop coming from the 12 to 34-year-old group.

Facebook Campus is built to bring these users back by offering a more exclusive place for private networking within Facebook. It’s similar, in some ways, to Facebook’s effort to address the needs of corporate users with Facebook Workplace. Instead of being new ideas for social networking, these platforms leverage Facebook’s existing technology, like News Feed and Groups, to deliver solutions for particular demographics.

At launch, Facebook Campus is only available at around 30 colleges and universities across the U.S. (see full list below), but the company plans to expand over time.

Some of the colleges have a deeper partnership with Facebook and have signed up to publish updates and news to their students’ Facebook Campus feed, as well. In these cases, the college or university may encourage various student leaders to join the network, too.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook will market the new app both within its app and offline. Students may be prompted to join Campus through a prompt in News Feed if Facebook has enough data to indicate they’re likely a student at a supported college. For example, if a Facebook user regularly visited a supported university’s Facebook Page, Facebook may display the Facebook Campus sign-up prompt. There are also student-led incentive programs where students who increase enrollment are rewarded with Facebook Campus swag, like t-shirts and towels.

In addition to requiring a .edu email address, Facebook Campus requires a graduation year — and it will need to be no more than five years out from the present.

After signing up, students create their Facebook Campus profile. While this is linked on the back end to the student’s main Facebook profile, it lets them add college-specific details that won’t automatically appear anywhere else on Facebook. Here, Campus users can add their graduation year, dorm, major and minor, classes they’re taking, hometown, Instagram profile and more.

Image Credits: Facebook

This information can only be viewed by other Facebook Campus users who attend the same school. It also helps power Campus’ student directory, where Facebook Campus users can search students by name, year, major or class, or browse to find classmates to add as friends, including those who are in their same dorm or clubs.

Image Credits: Facebook

Within Facebook Campus, students can also discover and join Groups and Events for their school. These can be those associated with official student clubs or Greek organizations, those associated with a particular dorm or even those just focused on a particular interest, like photography, cooking, writing, hiking, etc. Students can create buy/sell groups or roommate search groups, too, or anything else not in violation of Facebook’s terms.

These groups and events essentially function like those on Facebook itself, with the exception being that they can only be viewed, joined and accessed by students.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook Campus also has its own private Chat section, which is kept separate from Facebook and Messenger. These group chats work a little differently, as users don’t actually have to find and invite members. Instead, students in a particular group can opt to join its associated chat, if they choose.

All updates from your groups, clubs and events are in the Facebook Campus News Feed. But unlike on Facebook proper, students can’t post to their personal profile within Campus. They can only post to groups, events or chats.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook says this decision helps cut down on spam and allows users to focus their energy on engaging with smaller communities they’re involved with.

A small handful of universities have already partnered with Facebook to distribute announcements to their Facebook Campus channel for their students to see. However, any school can choose to opt-in to this feature at launch.

At launch, the following universities and colleges will support Facebook Campus:

Benedict College; Brown University; California Institute of Technology; College of William & Mary; Duke University; Florida International University; Georgia Southern University; Georgia State University; Johns Hopkins University; Lane College; Lincoln University (Pennsylvania); Middlebury College; New Jersey Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; Rice University; Sarah Lawrence College; Scripps College; Smith College; Spelman College; Stephen F. Austin State University; Tufts University; University at Albany – State University of New York; University of Hartford; University of Louisville; University of Pennsylvania; University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; Vassar College; Virginia Tech; Wellesley College; and Wesleyan University.

While Facebook’s early days saw it targeting Ivy League schools, the company says these first Facebook Campus schools were selected for diversity’s sake. That is, diversity of the student population, diversity of geography and diversity of school specialties (like liberal arts). They also represent a mix of public and private schools.

Image Credits: Facebook

Facebook Campus, notably, won’t include advertising in its Feed. But it will support Facebook’s advertising business. Advertisers won’t be able to specifically target Facebook Campus users, but they can target users by interest — even if the only place the user indicated they had that interest was within Campus. For example, a user who joined a cooking club in Facebook Campus could be targeted by an advertiser looking to reach users interested in cooking.

Hung said Facebook hasn’t tested Facebook Campus before today, even with small groups. Instead, this launch is considered a pilot for the new experience. The company did spend time conducting roundtables with universities and with student groups to gain product insight and feedback, however.

NASA wants to procure samples of lunar soil from private contractors, the agency announced today in a blog post by NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. This is part of the agency’s overall ambitions around returning humans to the Moon by 2024, and establishing a sustained human research presence there. NASA is asking for proposals from commercial space companies to offer up their proposals for collecting a small amount of rocks or dirt from “any location” on the Moon’s surface, along with a photo of the collection process and resulting sample.

The proposals ask only that private companies collect the material – they’re not responsible for actually getting it back to Earth for study. They will need to do an “in-place” handoff of the collected sample to the agency – on the Moon, but that’s much less of a challenge than shipping it all the way back here, and the specifics around retrieval will be handled by NASA “at a later date.”

Some stipulations and specifics to keep in mind: NASA wants the retrieval of the materials to take place before 2024, along with the ownership handoff. This is also open to companies internationally, so it’s not just for U.S. private space companies, and it’s also possible that NASA will make more than one award under the program. In terms of payouts, winning companies will get 10 percent o the total contract value at the time of the award, another 10 percent at launch of their retrieval vehicle, and the final 80 percent once the sample is collected and handed off.

There are a number of companies working on extraterrestrial resource collection, so this call could get some interesting applicants. It’s worth noting that this is separate from NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, which offers contracts for transporting experiments to the lunar surface aboard landers – but you can bet some of those startups and companies will be vying for the chance to use said landers and robotic rovers in development to pick up some Moon dirt for NASA.