Category: UNCATEGORIZED

If the measure of progress in technology is that devices should become ever smaller and more capable, then OrCam Technologies is on a roll. The Israeli firm’s OrCam MyEye, which fits on the arm of a pair of glasses, is far more powerful and much smaller than its predecessor. With new AI-based Smart Reading software released in July, the device not only “reads” text and labels but also identifies people by name and describes other important aspects of the visual world. It also interacts with the user, principally people who are blind or visually impaired, by means of an AI-based smart voice assistant.

At the upcoming Sight Tech Global virtual event, we’re pleased to announce that OrCam’s co-founder and co-CEO, Professor Amnon Shashua, will be a featured speaker. The event, which will take place virtually on Dec. 2-3, is focused on how AI-related technologies will influence assistive technology and accessibility in the years ahead. Attendance is free and pre-registration is open now.

Shashua is a towering figure in the technology world. He is not only the co-founder of OrCam but also Mobileye, the company that provides the computer-vision sensors and systems for automotive safety and autonomous navigation. Intel acquired Mobileye for $15.3 billion in 2017, the single-largest acquisition of an Israeli company ever.

Shashua started OrCam at the prompting of his aunt, who was losing her sight and hoped that her technologist nephew could apply his prodigious talents as a scientist and AI expert to help. With that goal in mind, he started OrCam in 2010 with co-founder Ziv Aviram. The firm has gone on to raise $130.4 million dollars from investors, including Intel, and sell the OrCam MyEye device to tens of thousands of users in over 50 countries. At $3900 per device in the U.S., the OrCam MyEye is far from affordable for most people, but the firm says the device price will come down as production increases.

At the start of a new era for assistive technology, OrCam’s approach with the lightweight, offline-operating OrCam MyEye is nothing if not thought provoking (the device was recognized as a TIME Best Invention of 2019). Will miniaturization of sophisticated sensors and electronics lead to unobtrusive sensor arrays as the foundation of assistive tech? Will the AI-based natural-language processing lead to an all-purpose, customizable personal assistants that work with abilities as needed?

“In OrCam’s roadmap,” says Shashua, “the ultimate AT must have the right balance between computer vision and natural language processing. For example, the “smart reading” feature recently launched harnesses NLP (natural language processing) in order to guide the device to which text information to extract and communicate to the user. NLP allows the user to specify precisely what he/she needs to know. For example, the “orientation” feature recently launched allows the user to prompt the device to describe the objects in the scene and to provide audible guidance to those objects. We see the “orientation” feature growing with respect to vocabulary, with respect to search (e.g., “notify me when you see a Toilet sign”), and with respect to obstacle avoidance (where is the free-space in the scene). The technological challenge in bringing these desires into reality critically depends on the progress of compute and algorithms.

“By ‘compute,'” says Shashua,  “I mean the ever-growing trend to miniaturize processing power enables more sophisticated algorithms to reside on smaller and battery-powered footprint. By “algorithms” I mean the ever-increasing sophistication of deep-tech to mimic human intelligence. Combining the two creates a powerful impact on the future of assistive tech for people who are blind and visually impaired.”

Shashua received a B.Sc in mathematics and computer science from Tel-Aviv University in 1985 and his M.Sc in computer science in 1989 from the Weizmann Institute of Science. He received a Ph.D in brain and cognitive sciences in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), while working at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Sight Tech Global is a virtual event on Dec. 2-3 and attendance is free. Pre-registration is open now. 

Sight Tech Global welcomes sponsors. Current sponsors include Verizon Media, Google, Waymo, Mojo Vision and Wells Fargo, The event is organized by volunteers and all proceeds from the event benefit The Vista Center for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Silicon Valley.

Several months ago, before the world became so much more complicated, it was still crystal clear that TikTok was a force to be reckoned with and that its massive growth signaled big things for both Silicon Valley and the global tech scene. As the Bytedance-owned social media app has been drawn into a political crisis after the Trump administration made aggressive moves to force the app under new ownership, the conversation around the future of the app has grown even more intense.

As tech giants mull bids for the app, competitors in the space see room to swoop in and capture its momentum, convincing users to embrace what they’ve built. The usual suspects are pushing clones, including new features inside Snapchat and Facebook’s Reels product, but plenty of venture-backed startups are making their case as well. Perhaps the most convincing seems to be Los Angeles-based Triller which is itching to capitalize on the uncertainty and claims that its own app has more than 65 million monthly active users.

We’re excited to share that Triller CEO Mike Lu is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt in September to discuss his company’s ambitions and how social media is finding new ways to transform the music industry.

As TikTok’s geopolitical theater plays out, Triller is aiming to reach the thrown by nabbing more outside investment. The company has been aiming to raise a round of funding valuing it at $1 billion, even as it sues ByteDance claiming that TikTok’s app design violates patents that Triller owns. Triller’s existing backers include institutional firms like Lowercase Capital and Pegasus Tech Ventures but also musicians like Snoop Dogg, The Weekend, Marshmellow and Lil Wayne.

Episerver is announcing that it has reached an agreement to acquire Optimizely for an undisclosed sum.

Optimizely was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen. It became synonymous with A/B testing, subsequently building a broader suite of tools for marketers to experiment with and personalize their websites and apps, with more than 1,000 customers including Gap, StubHub, IBM and The Wall Street Journal.

The company had raised more than $200 million in funding from Goldman Sachs, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, GV and others. Earlier this year, it laid off 15% of its staff, citing the impact of COVID-19.

Episerver, meanwhile, was founded in Stockholm back in 1994 and offers tools for marketers to manage their digital content. Accel-KKR  sold the company to Insight Partners for $1.1 billion in 2018. (Today’s announcement describes Insight as a “strategic advisor and sponsor” in the acquisition.)

In a statement, Episerver CEO Alex Atzberger said this is “the most significant transformation in our company’s history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.” It sounds like the idea is to extend Episerver’s capabilities around content and commerce with Optimizely’s experimentation tools.

“The breakthrough combination of Episerver and Optimizely will transform digital experience creation and optimization, enabling digital teams to replace guesswork with evidence-based outcomes,” Atzberger said. “This, along with our shared mission to empower growing companies to compete digitally, makes me thrilled to welcome the Optimizely team to Episerver, as we prove there are no extraordinary experiences without experimentation.”

A company spokesperson said the deal is for a mix of cash and stock. The acquisition is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, with the companies remaining fully staffed and independent until then.

“Winning in today’s digital world requires delivering the best and most personalized digital experiences,” said Jay Larson, who replaced Siroker as Optimizely CEO in 2017, in a statement. “Episerver and Optimizely have a shared vision to optimize every customer touchpoint through the use of experimentation. Together, we will enable our customers to do more testing, in more places, with greater ease than ever before.”

Amid a racial justice reckoning following countless events of police brutality (justice for Breonna Taylor), it’s high time companies and investors in the tech industry do more than just say “Black Lives Matter,” but show that Black lives matter. As Human Utility CEO Tiffani Ashley Bell aptly put it, “Make the hire, send the wire!”

Black women are underfunded and under-appreciated in tech. Since 2009, Black women have received just .06% of all venture funding, according to digital undivided’s 2018 report. That’s despite a 50% increase in new Black women-owned businesses from 2014 to 2019, according to American Express.

When Founder Met Funder, an All Raise event for Black female founders (BFFs), aims to foster community and fuel more investment in BFFs. In its second year, When Founder Met Funder featured Incredible Health Co-founder and CEO Iman Abuzeid, Slutty Vegan founder and CEO Pinky Cole, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, Cake Ventures Founding Partner Monique Woodard and others.

“It was very important for us to be able to give different ranges of talks,” Domonique Fines, co-creator of the event, told TechCrunch. “I wanted people to see there are Black women founders out there. They might not all have the same path, but just because you don’t have the same path, it doesn’t mean you won’t have that same success.”

Before joining All Raise, Fines spent a few years at Y Combinator as the Silicon Valley accelerator’s director of events.

“As the batches got larger and larger, I started seeing less and less Black women,” Fines told TechCrunch.

In Y Combinator’s most recent batch of startups, 9% of the founders were women and 16% of companies had a female founder, while 4% of the founders were Black and 6% of the companies had a Black founder. Y Combinator, however, did not break out stats for Black female founders.

“And for me, it was super important to give them the experience to be in a space where they felt comfortable talking to people in a space where they can simply ask questions and not feel any type of way about it. And I just noticed I actually hadn’t seen that.”

When Fines would come home to Oakland after a YC event, there would be a lot of Black women around, she said. But for the Black female founders elsewhere, there just wasn’t a space for them to go where they could “feel comfortable asking the question they needed the answer to without feeling like they’re less than,” Fines said.

That was her passion, Fines said. Meanwhile, Megan Holston-Alexander of Andreessen Horowitz’s Cultural Leadership Fund and Planet FWD Founder Julia Collins were already volunteering at All Raise as Fines joined All Raise from YC.

“So it was one of those things where we just kind of put all of our heads together,” Fines said. “We wanted to make sure that we could do something that’d be super tactical and useful, but also make it not just an event. It’s an experience and we want to make sure that Black women are just getting the help they need all year-round.”

In addition to the event, a Slack group formed this year to help determine the next steps for the community. Some of the ideas floating around right now are founder bootcamps, adding more speakers to the event, facilitating better networking and workshops. But it’s ultimately up to the group’s collective conscience.

“I’m planning on polling them to find out exactly what the need is right now,” Fines said. “And then it just changes every day, like depending on what’s going on in the world. It’s one of those things where we just want to make sure that what we’re doing for them is super useful.”

Additionally, Fines envisions hosting smaller classes on fundraising and deck building.

“It’s one of those things that people need a lot of assistance with,” she said. “But they also need someone that’s going to be truthful and honest with them about it.”

Seibel touched on that element of honesty in his chat with Collins during the event. He told a story about what it was like when he was fundraising for his startup.

“When I started doing startups, it was 2006 and there weren’t many people who looked like any of us that were doing startups,” he told the audience. “I think what you would’ve expected was overt discrimination but actually I got something else, which was no feedback.”

He went on to say that people were afraid to be critical of him, for fear of being perceived a certain way.

“People were afraid of being critical with me,” he said.

That’s partly why Seibel says he’s become the type of person who will tell founders what everyone is thinking.

“Agree with it or disagree with it, I want you to have a good mental model of what people are thinking and not saying,” Seibel said.

Throughout the day, there were 120 founders and 40 VCs at the event. The next step for Fine is to get their consent to give their contact info to venture capitalists.

“I noticed a lot of VCs definitely want to continue the conversations but I want to make sure that all of the founders feel comfortable with that as well,” Fine said.

Next week, Fine plans to send out the poll to founders to better understand their needs and where to take the initiative from here.

“I want to make sure that we still keep our community tight knit,” Fine said. “I want them to continue to push and keep talking about it because this is not something that’s going to be an easy breezy thing. It’s going to be ongoing and forever.”

We’re just about a month away from launching TC Sessions: Mobility 2020, but you have only 48 hours left to save yourself $100 on the price of admission. Join the global mobility community on October 6-8 at the lowest possible price. Snag your pass before the early bird expires on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT).

You do not want to miss this opportunity-packed conference, especially this year. Why? We’ve added a pitch off! We’re searching for 10 superlative early-stage mobility startups to compete in front of a panel of expert judges on October 5 — the night before the conference begins.

The top five finalists will go on to pitch again the next day on the virtual Main Stage. Want more details? Read all about the pitch-off here. If you prefer the direct approach, apply here before September 15.

Whether you pitch or not, you’ll find plenty of opportunity waiting for you at Mobility 2020. Learn from top industry experts from around the world and stay steps ahead of the trend curve. Take a gander at the agenda, the speakers and the topics they’ll cover.

Expand your network using CrunchMatch, our enhanced AI-powered platform, to find and connect with the people who align with your business interests and goals. Schedule 1:1 video calls and explore partnerships, pitch investors, recruit talent — and get ready to grow your business.

Take a page from the playbooks of your contemporaries in the mobility community.

“The networking at TC Sessions: Mobility is terrific. Our company’s building momentum in the U.S. market, and the opportunity to meet and talk with all the players is very important. The CrunchMatch platform made it easy to connect, and I used it to schedule 22 meetings.”— Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

“TC Sessions is definitely worth your time, especially if you’re an early-stage founder. You get to connect to people in your field and learn from founders who are literally a year into your same journey. Plus, you can meet and talk to the movers and shakers — the people who are making it happen.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.

Early-bird pricing ends on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). You have 48 hours left to buy a pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 and save $100. Time’s a’wastin, folks!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Spark is one of those products in Adobe’s Creative Suite that doesn’t always get a lot of attention. But the company’s tool for creating social media posts (which you can try for free) has plenty of fans, and maybe that’s no surprise, given that its mission is to help small business owners and agencies create engaging social media posts without having to learn a lot about design. Today, Adobe added one of the most requested features to Spark on mobile and the web: animations.

“At Adobe, we have this rich history with After Effects,” Spark product manager Lisa Boghosian told me. “We wanted to bring professional motion design to non-professionals, because what solopreneurs or small business owners know what keyframes are or know how to build pre-comps and have five layers. It’s just not where they’re spending their time and they shouldn’t have to. That’s really what Spark is for: you focus on your business and building that. We’ll help guide you into expressing building that base.”

Guiding users is what Spark does across its features, be that designing the flow of your text, adding imaging or now animations. It does that through providing a vast number of templates — which include a set of animated templates, as well as easy access to free images, Adobe Stock and icons from the Noun Project (on top of your own imagery, of course).

The team also decided to do away with a lot of the accouterments of movie editors, including timelines. Instead, the team pre-built the templates and the logic behind how new designs display those animations based on best practices. “Instead of exposing a timeline to a user and asking them to put things on a timeline and adjusting the speed — and guessing — we’ve taken on that role because we want to guide you to that best experience.”

In addition to the new animations feature, Spark is also getting improved tools for sharing assets across the Creative Cloud suite thanks to support for Creative Cloud Libraries. That makes it far easier for somebody to move images from Lightroom or Photoshop to Spark, but since Spark is also getting quite popular with agencies, it’ll make collaborating easier as well. The service already has tools for organizing assets today, but this makes it far easier to work across the various Creative Cloud tools.

Boghosian tells me the team had long had animations on its roadmap, but it took a while to bring it to market, in part because Adobe wanted to get the performance right. “We had to make sure that performance was up to par with what we wanted to deliver,” she said. “And so the experience of exporting a project — we didn’t want it to take a significant amount of time because we really didn’t want the user sitting there waiting for it. So we had to bring up the backend to really support the experience we wanted.” She also noted that the team wanted to have the Creative Cloud Libraries integration ready before launching animations. 

Once you’ve created your animation, Spark lets you export it as an MP4 video file or as a static image. Spark will not let you download GIFs.

Apple is introducing a change to how subscriptions work. No, it’s not lowering its cut, despite the government’s antitrust investigation and its lawsuit with Epic. It announced that developers will be able to offer subscriptions via a new feature, called offer codes. These one-time use codes can be used digitally or printed out for use at offline events, allowing developers to more easily distribute either free or discounted subscriptions to customers.

The company says the feature can help developers to acquire, retain and win back subscribers.

Developers will be able to choose from one of three different pricing options for the new codes, which can be set to whatever duration the developer chooses. A free offer code will allow subscribers access to the service without charge for a specific trial period. A pay-as-you-go offer would allow the subscribers to pay a discount during each billing period for a specific duration, like a $1.99 per month trial that converts to a $9.99 per month standard subscription after a few months, for example. The third option is the pay-up-front offer, which allows subscribers to pay a one-time price for a specific duration, like $9.99 up front for a 6-month subscription. When the subscription renews, the developer could then introduce standard pricing.

The offer codes can be distributed digitally, like through email, or they can be handed out at events, or even provided alongside a physical product — like a hardware device that also includes a subscription component, perhaps.

The codes will expire after a maximum of 6 months after creation. Customers can only redeem one code per offer, but they may be eligible to redeem multiple offers for a single subscription, depending on the developer’s configuration choices.

Customers can redeem the codes on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 and later by way of a one-time code redemption URL, or within the developer’s app if they’ve implemented the API designed for use with the feature. Apple then handles the rest of the redemption experience, including displaying the offer details screen, with app icon, subscription display name, duration and pricing.

The feature requires that developers set up their server to validate the receipts and receive status update notifications, which could leave out smaller developers or those who don’t run a server for their app.

With offer codes, the developer can also opt to provide a different experience to those who enter the app as a first-time subscriber, highlighting the value of a paid subscription and its features, for example.

The new offer codes will join Apple’s other two existing subscription offers available today, introductory and promotional. Developers can provide any combination — or all three — types of offers at once, depending on their business goals, Apple says.

Developers have wanted more flexibility over how they can present their subscriptions to end users, as it can often be difficult to convince a user to pay for a subscription until they spend time using the app.

However, the offer codes don’t address some developer complaints that Apple’s subscription cut is too high at 30% for year one, followed by a drop to 15% for year two and beyond. When developers are doing the real-world work to find their customers and market their app — like sending out emails or attending trade shows, for instance — they could send those newly acquired customers through their own payment mechanism, too, if Apple allowed it…or so the argument goes. Offer codes, meanwhile, represent one of the ways Apple is working to help direct new subscribers through its own payment mechanisms, Apple Pay.

Apple says the new offer codes will be available soon.

Avo, a startup that helps businesses better manage their data quality across teams, today announced that it has raised a $3 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with participation from  Heavybit, Y Combinator and others.

The company’s founder, Stefania Olafsdóttir, who is currently based in Iceland, was previously the head of data science at QuizUp, which at some point had 100 million users around the world. “I had the opportunity to build up the Data Science Division, and that meant the cultural aspect of helping people ask and answer the right questions — and get them curious about data — but it also meant the technical part of setting up the infrastructure and tools and pipelines, so people can get the right answers when they need it,” she told me. “We were early adopters of self-serve product analytics and culture — and we struggled immensely with data reliability and data trust.”

As companies collect more data across products and teams, the process tends to become unwieldy and different teams end up using different methods (or just simply different tags), which creates inefficiencies and issues across the data pipeline.

“At first, that unreliable data just slowed down decision making, because people were just like, didn’t understand the data and needed to ask questions,” Olafsdóttir said about her time at QuizUp. “But then it caused us to actually launch bad product updates based on incorrect data.” Over time, that problem only became more apparent.

“Once organizations realize how big this issue is — that they’re effectively flying blind because of unreliable data, while their competition might be like taking the lead on the market — the default is to patch together a bunch of clunky processes and tools that partially increase the level of liability,” she said. And that clunky process typically involves a product manager and a spreadsheet today.

At its core, the Avo team set out to build a better process around this, and after a few detours and other product ideas, Olafsdóttir and her co-founders regrouped to focus on exactly this problem during their time in the Y Combinator program.

Avo gives developers, data scientists and product managers a shared workspace to develop and optimize their data pipelines. “Good product analytics is the product of collaboration between these cross-functional groups of stakeholders,” Olafsdóttir argues, and the goal of Avo is to give these groups a platform for their analytics planning and governance — and to set company-wide standards for how they create their analytics events.

Once that is done, Avo provides developers with typesafe analytics code and debuggers that allows them to take those snippets and add them to their code within minutes. For some companies, this new process can help them go from spending 10 hours on fixing a specific analytics issue to an hour or less.

Most companies, the team argues, know — deep down — that they can’t fully trust their data. But they also often don’t know how to fix this problem. To help them with this, Avo also today released its Inspector product. This tool processes event streams for a company, visualizes them and then highlights potential errors. These could be type mismatches, missing properties or other discrepancies. In many ways, that’s obviously a great sales tool for a service that aims to avoid exactly these problems.

One of Avo’s early customers is Rappi, the Latin American delivery service. “This year we scaled to meet the demand of 100,000 new customers digitizing their deliveries and curbside pickups. The problem with every new software release was that we’d break analytics. It represented 25% of our Jira tickets,” said Rappi’s head of Engineering, Damian Sima. “With Avo we create analytics schemas upfront, identify analytics issues fast, add consistency over time and ensure data reliability as we help customers serve the 12+ million monthly users their businesses attract.”

As most startups at this stage, Avo plans to use the new funding to build out its team and continue to develop its product.

“The next trillion-dollar software market will be driven from the ground up, with developers deciding the tools they use to create digital transformation across every industry. Avo offers engineers ease of implementation while still retaining schemas and analytics governance for product leaders,” said GGV Capital Managing Partner Glenn Solomon. “Our investment in Avo is an investment in software developers as the new kingmakers and product leaders as the new oracles.”

Europe’s justice commissioner has conceded there will be “no quick fix” for EU-US data transfers in the wake of the decision by the region’s top court in July that struck down a flagship data transfer agreement which was being used by thousands of businesses.

Despite the ‘Schrems II’ judgement being the second such CJEU strike in around five years, commissioners from the EU’s executive body and US counterparts in the U.S. Department of Commerce announced last month that they had begun discussions on a potential replacement for the now defunct EU-US Privacy Shield.

Justice commissioner, Didier Reynders, said today that talks on an ‘enhanced framework’ are continuing but he admitted there’s no fast track fix for the schism between Europeans’ fundamental rights and US surveillance law.

“There is a common willingness to fully comply with the judgement of the court — on both sides we want to find ways in which to address the issues raised by the court,” said Didier Reynders. “We will intensify our engagement with the US in the coming weeks but we also have to recognize that the judgement raises complex issues related to the sensitive area of national security. Therefore there will be no quick fix.”

He went on to suggest that changes to US law may be needed for any Privacy Shield 2 to be possible — giving the example of the lack of a redress mechanism for EU citizens as an area where legislation may be needed — before emphasizing that any such legislative change would clearly take time (he noted, for example, that the US election is looming — which bakes natural delay into any such timeline).

“We are working with the US counterparts to evaluate the possibility of a strengthened framework — and of course it’s possible to build on existing elements but of course it’s maybe also a necessity to have legislative changes,” he said. “That’s the real question that we have with the US authorities. And that will of course have an impact on the time needed to put in place a new framework.

“It’s a real political debate; it’s not just a technical issue. And if we look at the domestic developments and debates in the US around privacy at the state and federal level but also limitation for intelligence service program there are probably more common grounds to find viable solutions than when the Privacy Shield was negotiated. You have also seen that the reaction of US authorities were constructive; they want to explore where to address the issues raised by the judgement but again sometimes, on the base of actual elements, there is maybe some legislative changes [required].”

“What we need are sustainable solutions that deliver legal certainty in full compliance with the judgement of the court,” he added. “That is also the message I have clearly passed to my EU counterparts and on which I will keep insisting.”

Reynders was speaking to the EU Parliament’s civil liberties (LIBE) committee, which was holding a hearing into the implications of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) invalidating the EU-US Privacy Shield — aka the Schrems II ruling.

The chair of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), Andrea Jelinek, had also been invited to speak, alongside Max Schrems himself, the European privacy campaigner who now has two successful strikes against EU-US data transfer mechanisms — after the CJEU invalidated Safe Harbor in 2015 and the EU-US Privacy Shield this July following his complaints. 

The discussion delved into the implications of the CJEU ruling for an alternative data transfer mechanism called Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) which were not invalidated by the court, even as their use for US data transfers is now larded with legal risk as a result of US surveillance overreach.

Reynders told the committee the Commission is continuing its work on modernizing SCCs to bring them into line with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) framework — saying it will produce a draft version this month and is aiming to complete the process before the end of the year.

“Now that the judgement has been assured we will of course preserve the elements of the existing SCCs that have led to the court to find them valid. At the same time we will try to reflect and operationalize in all texts the additional clarification provided by the court on the conditions under which SCCs can be used — taking also fully into account the guidance issued by the EDPB that it should help companies in their compliance effort,” he added. “But of course we need to see what kind of more longer term evolution in the US [law there might be].”

Reynders said the same the issues around data transfers will arise with the UK, post Brexit — as it seeks an adequacy agreement and the Commission will have to assess its domestic laws, including infamously draconian surveillance laws — and with other third countries like China where there’s no adequacy agreement in place (nor any prospect of a finding of privacy protections that are essentially equivalent to those in the EU).

“We want to stay open to those that apply the rules,” he added.

Jelinek said the EDPB has just set up a taskforce to work on around 100 strategic complaints filed last month by Schrems’ digital rights group, noyb, that target EU-based entities across the region which are using SCCs for data transfers for Google Analytics and/or Facebook Connect integrations.

noyb argues there’s no legal basis for those transfers and that DPAs should step in and suspend them.

“We are going to work not only close together but closer together than we’ve ever done [with EU data protection authorities] to solve this issue,” said Jelinek. “We will analyze the matter and ensure that we will go together in the same direction.”

Enforcement of EU data protection law is both a duty for supervisory authorities and “a matter of credibility”, she added. “You can be sure we are investigating all together within the taskforce but again I have to tell you that enforcement… is a matter of the national supervisory authorities. Each and every supervisory authority has to enforce in their own country those complaints which are ruled with them.”

The prospect of any enforcement of Schrems’ original SCC complaint to the Irish DPC — filed some seven years ago at this point — is still a distant one, according to what he told the committee.

“Enforcement is going to be a matter of credibility,” he said. “So far the understanding is that there will be no enforcement — or no serious enforcement — that’s also the reason we have filed a couple of complaints already to make sure that there’s some movement. And I think there needs to be some kind of highlight cases where the industry feels there’s a feeling where they actually have to comply with all of this.

“I also want to throw in real short that we got a letter this week that I cannot disclose yet from the Irish data protection regulator informing us that, defacto, they will probably not pursue this case that is ongoing for seven years for the next, I would assume one or two years… We’re very sorry to see that the regulator in Ireland, despite being under a court order that they have to enforce this judgement is apparently choosing not to do so.”

We reached out to the Irish DPC for a response to Schrems’ remarks and it told us he is “wrong” in that supposition but at the time of writing the regulator had not provided any further comment. We’ll update this report if we get more.

Schrems was withering is his view of the Irish DPC’s record, telling the committee that its handling of his complaint was not a pro-privacy case but a “pro-delay case”.

“We have already said at the beginning that this case could have been done by the DPC itself. And we now get back to exactly the problems we have outlined five years’ ago — that the DPC is now working on again.” he said.

“The bottom line is probably there’s not going to be a decision within the next two or three years — if they continue like that. Which means the original complaint I filed after Snowden will probably take up to ten years to get a first instance decision. Then we’ll have three layers of appeals in Ireland. So I’m probably going to be retired once this case is actually finally decided! I’m going to be grey and old and that’s not how fundamental rights in Europe should work — and I think we really have to work on that.”

Late last week we discussed how, this deep into the earnings cycle, it appeared that public SaaS and cloud companies had largely made it through the Q2 gauntlet unscathed. Sure, through last week there was a report or two that wasn’t stellar, but by and large the results had been good and SaaS valuations were happily near all-time highs.

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That’s still the case today, albeit with some caveats. Yesterday, a few public SaaS and cloud companies were dinged sharply by investors after reporting their earnings and I want to talk about why.

My hunch: many SaaS companies that investors expected to accelerate during this period of more-rapid-than-anticipated digital transformation are not, or at least not enough to match market hopes. And that means that their results were not quite what investors expected. And, thus, down went their share prices.

The analogy for startups is pretty clear here, just slower. Public valuations are updated far more often than private valuations, so the stuff we’re seeing today in SaaS stocks won’t show up in SaaS startup valuations for a bit. But I wonder if the same expectation/reality gap that we can discern in a number of recent SaaS results could hit startups as well, with boards that were expecting more than will be delivered in time.

Overall, SaaS and cloud valuations are still strong. Zoom crushed the period. Salesforce did well, too. And with valuations high, revenue multiples remain historically stretched. So, I don’t think that today’s news changes the general market dynamic towards public SaaS companies, and thus SaaS startups. But yesterday’s results are a bit of a warning sign all the same.

Let’s explore.

Whoops

Friend of the column Jamin Ball compiled a list of the SaaS companies reporting yesterday, including MongoDB, Guidewire, SmartSheet, CrowdStrike, PagerDuty and Zuora. Those are the companies whose results we are exploring today.

To keep this post from becoming interminably long, we’ll be brief and direct. So, in bullet points and with terse language:

• MongoDB: Shares up 2.2% in pre-market trading. MongoDB beat on revenue ($138.3 million vs. $126.8 million expected), and per-share profit. It also guided higher for current-quarter revenue than expectations ($137 million to $139 million vs. $130.6 million). So, MongoDB managed to crush earnings, smashed expectations, and was rewarded with a tiny 2.2% gain this morning. That result is not a counter-example to our thesis. It’s early confirmation.