Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Launch provider Rocket Lab has gained a key clearance from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration that should mean it’ll be launching from its U.S.-based facility at Wallops Island, Virginia relatively soon. As it had done before for its LC-1 launch pad in New Zealand, Rocket Lab gained a Launch Operator License for its LC-2 pad in Virginia, meaning it can conduct multiple launches from the location without having to petition the agency for a mission-specific license for each individual flight.

Rocket Lab held its official opening ceremony for the Virginia-based LC-2 at the end of last year, and while we don’t yet know exactly when it’ll launch its first Electron from the location, it’s probably that COVID-19 and its related disruptions have had an impact on the planned debut activity at the site. The company expanded first to LC-2, and is now putting the finishing touches on LC-3 back in New Zealand, in order to help ramp its launch capacity – which it says will reach up to 130 launches per year with all three launch pads up and running.

Part of the reason that Rocket Lab spun up the U.S.-based pad to begin with was to serve government customers with rapid, responsive launches that could be put together quickly and often, so having this FAA multi-launch license is a big boon to its operating model. Hopefully that means we’ll see the Wallops location come to life sooner rather than later.

The Amazon app is getting a makeover. You may have already spotted the refreshed version of the Amazon shopping app with its new color scheme and revamped navigation if you’re an iPhone user. The changes began rolling out earlier this summer to iOS users in the U.S. and are on track to reach 100% of the U.S. mobile customer base on iOS by the end of this month. Other markets will see the updates arrive later this year and an Android release will then follow.

The company had not yet publicized the changes to its shopping app, but confirms the iPhone updates are a part its larger plan to make it easier to direct mobile users to their most-used features.

Amazon says the new version of the app will initially be available to customers in the U.S., Canada, Europe, China, Japan, and Central and South America, before reaching other markets.

Image Credits: Amazon app/screenshot by TechCrunch

You may first notice the Amazon app seems brighter, thanks to a change that standardizes the app’s top navigation bar to a new blue-green gradient. However, the bigger changes are focused on how the app works, not the colors it uses.

The redesign’s larger aim, Amazon explains, was to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for — even when they’re using their iPhone with one hand, as is common.

As you move through the updated app, you’ll notice a new “Quick Access” bar floating on the bottom of the screen that offers shortcuts to the most frequently accessed features. This bar provides links to the app’s Home page, where you’ll find your personalized shopping recommendations, program offers and other seasonal content. The second button, a profile icon, takes you to your account page where you’ll find your orders, lists, account options, and previously browsed and searched items.

With the third button, you can access your Amazon cart, where you’ll also find your orders and your “Buy Again” suggestions.

Finally, for those trying to navigate elsewhere in the Amazon app with one hand, the new Quick Access bar features its own “hamburger” menu (the three horizontal lines), where you can browse and discover other Amazon departments and programs, including deals, Whole Foods, and your Alexa Shopping List, among others.

Image Credits: Amazon app/screenshot by TechCrunch

The links listed in the navigation section are much larger than before, too, for easier reading on small screens.

Unfortunately, what Amazon hasn’t yet figured out how to manage its ever-growing list of “Programs & Features.” Today, this section of the app still somewhat randomly combines Amazon’s various initiatives like Treasure Truck, Subscription Boxes, curated collections (like Made In Italy or Amazon Launchpad), social features (like #FoundItOnAmazon), as well as its services like Amazon Fresh, Amazon Pantry, and others alongside links for physical destinations. (Amazon Go, for some reason, gets its own link, instead of being featured under Amazon Physical Stores.

Even the navigation’s name, the vague and all-encompassing “Programs & Features,” hints at a lack of organization. It’s also unclear why Amazon lists some things in both this section and in “Departments,” like Amazon Fresh. Meanwhile, others, like Amazon’s Handmade section, only gets one listing.

But Amazon likely has a plan in mind when it makes such choices. Online grocery, for example, is helping drive e-commerce sales amid the pandemic. It can’t hurt, then, to make Amazon’s grocery services easier to find by putting a link everywhere — including, of course, at the top of the home screen in the main navigation row.

Here, Amazon highlights its key features: Whole Foods, Fresh, Alexa Lists, Prime, Video, and Music. (Imagine how much screen real estate could be freed up if Amazon could only figure out how to consolidate its online grocery business into one service instead of two!)

Image Credits: Amazon app/screenshot by TechCrunch

Other areas of the app received layout changes in the redesign, as well.

At the top of the screen, for example, the app features a simplified navigation bar where you can quickly tap to perform a search using text or your camera or engage with Alexa.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the details and timeframe of its launch plans for the new app with TechCrunch.

“The new design for Amazon’s app on iPhone provides customers easier access to the features they use most, while on the go. This includes the homepage, account and order information, their cart and the ability to browse and discover Amazon departments and programs,” the spokesperson said.

The retailer has yet to update its App Store listing to showcase the app’s new look-and-feel, which, for reference, is displayed below.

Image Credits: Amazon

Not every mobile makeover deserves attention, but this revamp is one of Amazon’s bigger updates to date — especially as it’s entirely moved its main navigation and even changed its brand’s color scheme. (Well, except for the app’s icon, which still features the classic, darker shade of blue.)

It’s also notable because Amazon’s app is one of the largest on iPhone, often in the top 20 in the U.S. App Store. It’s currently the No. 26 Overall app in the U.S., as of the time of writing.

Dell has long held high esteem for the quality of its displays, and that hasn’t changed with its more recent models. What has changed is that more and more, people are looking for external monitors to complement their work laptops as they shift to more remote work – and settle in for more permanent home office configuration options. Dell’s 32-inch, 4K resolution UltraSharp U3219Q monitor is perhaps the best blend of quality, screen real estate, and connection flexibility you can get, provided your budget is in the mid- to high range.

The basics

The U3219Q has a 31.5-inch diagonal screen, with an IPS display and a matte finish that’s excellent for avoiding glare. Its max resolution is 3840 x 2160, with a 16:9 aspect ratio, and it can run at up to 60Hz refresh rate. It’s a very large display, but it feels a lot less large than it is, in part because of the extremely thin eels that surround the screen, and a relatively shallow depth. The display weighs just 12.8 lbs, which is extremely light when you consider just how much screen space it provides.

It comes with a stand that allows it to be adjusted across a range of around six inches up or down, and it’s able to be tilted up to 21 degrees, or swiveled 30 degrees in either direction. You can also rotate it from landscape to portrait, which is a handy feature for coding or document review, and it’ll still clear your desk with the integrated stand. The stand is also easy to remove, and it includes a standard 200×200 VESA mounting point for attaching it to monitor arms and wall mounts.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

For display connections, the U3219Q has 1 DisplayPort 1.4 and 1 HDMI 2.0 (both of which support HDCP 2.2 for playing back copyright protected content). There’s also a USB Type-C port which can provide DisplayPort 1.4 connectivity, as well as Power Delivery and USB 2.0 data connectivity, with a DP cable and a C-to-C cable included in the box. The monitor also features a USB 3.0 cable and port for connecting it to your computer to act as a hub, providing 2 USB 3.0 ports for accessories, as well as 2 USB 3.0 ports at the side of the display, and two of those also include charging power. While there are no built-in speakers, there is a 3.5mm audio output port for connecting headphones or an external speaker.

Dell touts the accuracy and quality of the panel, which boasts support for DisplayHDR content playback, and a factory color calibration that means it’s set to deliver 99% sRGB color accuracy out of the box, as well as 95% DCI-P3 and 99% Rec. 709 color for video. The display also features 400 nits of brightness, and 1.07 billion color depth along with impressive contrast. In short, it’s more than capable of handling even demanding video and photo editing tasks.

Design and performance

The Dell U3219Q lives up to its promises in terms of video and image quality. Out of the box, it looked fantastic when plugged into both a MacBook and a Mac mini, delivering excellent color rendering, contrast, brightness and blacks without any tuning. This is definitely a screen that has brightness to spare, useful if you’re working in a bright room with lots of natural sunlight, or if you need to crank up the brightness for specific tasks when editing photos or videos.

While the image quality is definitely a big advantage if you’re any kind of multimedia pro, that’s not the limit of who this screen should appeal to. The large size, and relatively small footprint, along with that 4K resolution, mean you can tune it to provide you with ample screen real estate depending on what resolution you choose. It’s easily able to handle multiple browser windows and applications arrayed next to one another in a variety of configurations, all while keeping text reasonable sized so that you don’t have to strain to read anything like you would running the same resolution on a smaller, but still 4K, screen.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

60Hz means that you’ve got a plenty fast enough display for smooth desktop computing and editing even 60fps video, but it’s not quite up to the high-speed standards that gamers are looking for today. Unless you’re very resinous about that, however, it’s a perfectly fine refresh rate for just about every other use.

Dell adding single cable USB-C connectivity makes it an ideal companion for modern Mac notebooks, allowing you to move from your couch to the desk with ease. Three total inputs across HDMI/USB-C and DisplayPort also mean you can have it connected to multiple devices at once, which can come in handy for some desktop console gaming breaks during your lunch break.

Video also looks fantastic on this display, either for editing or just for watching Netflix. And at 32-inches, it’s plenty capable of doing double duty in a home office/guest room where you want to also have a TV, but don’t want to invest in a second device. You would have to figure out an audio solution in that case, but Dell makes a monitor soundbar that you can add for $69 which mounts to the screen’s stand.

Bottom line

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

Office upgrades are almost a must depending on where you work, and what their evolving policy is on work-from-home vs. cautious office re-opening. The Dell U3219Q is normally $1,049, but on sale at $839.99 via Dell direct right now, which is a lot to spend on a screen – but it’s also a device you use every day, and one that you want to provide the most bang for your buck and potential longevity. I actually currently use two Dell P2715Q monitors with my work setup, and both of these early generation 4K monitors are still going strong half-a-decade after I initially bought and began using them.

Dell’s also just launched a 32-inch curved 4K monitor (S3221QS) and a 27-inch 4K (S2721QS) that pack many similarly features but at lower price points depending on your budget. The company’s reputation for high-quality displays is well-earned regardless, however, and will serve any home office well, now and into the future.

Wish, the San Francisco-based, 750-person e-commerce app that sells deeply discounted goods that you definitely don’t need but might buy anyway when priced so low — think pool floaties, guinea pig harnesses, Apple Watch knockoffs — said yesterday that it has submitted a draft registration to the SEC for an IPO.

Because it filed confidentially, we can’t get a look at its financials just yet; we only know that its investors, who’ve provided the company with $1.6 billion across the years, think the company was worth $11.2 billion as of last summer, when it closed its most recent financing (a $300 million Series H round). Meanwhile, Wish itself says it has more than 70 million active users across more than 100 countries and 40 languages.

The big question, of course, is whether the now 10-year-old company can maintain or even accelerate its momentum. It’s not a no-brainer. On the one hand, it’s a victim of the increasingly chilly relations between the U.S. and China, from where the bulk of Wish’s goods come. Then again, Wish has been beefing up its business elsewhere in the world partly as a result of the countries’ shifting stance toward one another. For example, it told Recode last year that it’s increasingly looking to Latin American markets — Mexico, Argentina, Chile — for growth, and that it’s planning a bigger push into Africa, where it’s already available in South Africa, Ghana, and Nigeria, among other countries.

But let’s back up a minute first. If you don’t know, Wish was cofounded by CEO Peter Szulscewski, a computer scientist by training, who previously spent 6.5 years at Google before cofounding a company call ContextLogic, from which Wish evolved. The idea was to build a next-generation, mobile ad network to compete with Google’s AdSense network, but Szulscewski and his cofounder, Danny Zhang, realized they were “pretty bad at business development,” as he once said at an event hosted by this editor, so eventually they pivoted to Wish.

Wish began as an app that asked people to create wish lists, then the company approached merchants, letting them know a certain number of customers wanted, say, a certain type of table. It was smart to recognize that showing the right recommendations to shoppers would become critical to its users, though it didn’t necessarily foresee the types of merchants it would ultimately work with, most of them in China, Indonesia and elsewhere in East Asia and Southeast Asia who are focused on value-conscious customers and who, at the time, didn’t have other ways to sell to or communicate with customers elsewhere in the world (so didn’t mind paying Wish a 15% take to handle this for them).

Wish also quickly focused around lightweight items that it could ship cheaply from China, if slowly, using something called ePacket. It’s a shipping option agreement that established nine years ago with the cooperation of the US Postal Service and Hong Kong Post (and later made available to 40 countries altogether) that enables products coming from China and Hong Kong to be sent cheaply as long as they meet certain criteria — they don’t weigh too much, they aren’t worth too much, they adhere to certain minimum and maximums regarding their size, and so forth.

The mix has proved powerful for Wish, despite growing competition from China-based outfits like AliExpress that offer many of the same goods to the same customers around the world. (Wish has also competed, always, with Walmart and Amazon.)

The company has also soldiered on despite apparent struggles to keep customers coming over time, too. Because it doesn’t sell essential items but rather a grab bag of different items, people tend to cycle out of the app after a few months of their first visit, as The Information once reported.

A bigger issue now is that, as of two months ago, a new USPS pricing structure went into effect that raises rates on international shipments. It also requires foreign recipient countries to ratify new rates under ePacket (whose recipient countries, by the way, have been downsized from 40 to 12). That means that companies like Wish either pay more to ship their goods — forcing its vendors to charge more — or they move to commercial networks.

Of course, a third option — and one that may position Wish well for the future — would be for Wish to invest in more local warehousing in the U.S, Europe and others of its growing markets, which it told Recode that it is doing, along with seeking out more local vendors near its biggest markets.

Given shifts in the way that commercial real estate is being used — with retail-to-industrial property conversions accelerating, driven by the growth of e-commerce  — it’s probably as good a time as any for Wish to be making these moves. Whether they are enough to sustain and grow the company is something that only time will tell.

Again, we’ll collectively know much more when we can get a look at that filing. It should make for interesting reading.

Wish’s private investors include General Atlantic, GGV Capital, Founders Fund, Formation 8, Temasek Holdings and DST Global, among others.

Last week TechCrunch sat down virtually with Jeff Lawson, the CEO and co-founder of Twilio as part of our long-running Extra Crunch Live series. As I expected, the chat was a good use of time.

Why? Lawson was early on the idea that software companies could deliver their features not through a web app, but through an API . Back when Twilio was getting started, the world was still uncertain on the future of cloud. But Twilio was already skating past that puck toward a more distant target.

And his company has been largely proven right in its view of the future. While cloud software is now the de facto position for startups and legacy providers alike, API-powered startups are having one hell of a year according to founders and investors.

The growing wave of API -delivered software is not looking set to slow down, with Lawson telling TechCrunch during our chat that “the world is getting broken down into APIs,” as “every part of the stack of business that a developer might need to build is eventually turning into APIs that developers can use.”

So, expect more startups to ask you to snag an API key instead of signing up for a 12-month commitment. That said, don’t get too excited, yet, as Lawson was also clear during our chat that “not everything that can be broken down into an API will end up being a huge business.”

As Salesforce helped set the stage for SaaS startups in year’s past, Twilio’s $40 billion market cap today could prove a similar North Star for API startups.

A big thanks to the Extra Crunch crew for showing up and helping us ask some fun questions. I’ve snagged some favorite quotes below and embedded the YouTube clip of the whole chat. Let’s go!

India, the world’s second most populated nation, sees more than 20% of the global flood-related fatalities each year as overrun riverbanks sweep tens of thousands of homes with them. Two years ago, Google volunteered to help.

In 2018, the company began its flood forecasting pilot initiative in Patna — the capital of the Indian state of Bihar, which has historically been the most flood-prone region in the nation with over 100 fatalities each year — to provide accurate real-time flood forecasting information to people in the region.

The company’s AI model analyzes historical flood data gleaned from several river basins in different parts of the world to make accurate prediction for any river basin.

For this project, Google has not worked in isolation. Instead, it has collaborated with India’s Central Water Commission, Israel Institute of Technology, and Bar-Ilan University. It also works with the Indian government to improve how New Delhi collects data on water levels. They have installed new, electronic sensors that automatically transmit data to water authorities.

Thrilled by the initial results, two years later, Google’s Flood Forecasting Initiative now covers all of India, Google announced on Tuesday.

The company also said it has partnered with the Water Development Board of Bangladesh, which sees more floods than any other country in the world, to expand its initiative to parts of India’s neighboring nation. This is the first time Google is bringing Flood Forecasting Initiative outside of India.

Alerts for flood forecasting

Part of the job is to deliver this potentially life-changing information to people. In India, the company said it has sent out 30 million notifications to date in flood-affected areas. It says its initiative can help better protect more than 200 million people across more than 250,000 square kilometers (96,525 square miles). In Bangladesh, Google’s model is able to cover more than 40 million people, it said.

“We’re providing people with information about flood depth: when and how much flood waters are likely to rise. And in areas where we can produce depth maps throughout the floodplain, we’re sharing information about depth in the user’s village or area,” wrote Yossi Matias, VP of Engineering and Crisis Response Lead at Google.

But the company says it found that there was room for more improvement. This year, Google said it overhauled the way its alerts look and function to make it more accessible to people. It also added support for Hindi, Bengali, and seven other languages, and further localized the messaging in the alerts. It has also rolled out a new forecasting model that doubles the warning time of many of its alerts.

Moving forward, the company said its charitable arm Google.org has started a collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to build local networks and deliver alerts to people who otherwise wouldn’t receive smartphone alerts directly.

“There’s much more work ahead to strengthen the systems that so many vulnerable people rely on—and expand them to reach more people in flood-affected areas. Along with our partners around the world, we will continue developing, maintaining and improving technologies and digital tools to help protect communities and save lives,” wrote Matias.

Google launched a few updates to its Contact Center AI product today, but the most interesting one is probably the beta of its new Custom Voice service, which will let brands create their own text-to-speech voices to best represent their own brands.

Maybe your company has a well-known spokesperson for example, but it would be pretty arduous to have them record every sentence in an automated response system or bring them back to the studio whenever you launch a new product or procedure. With Custom Voice, businesses can bring in their voice talent to the studio and have them record a script provided by Google. The company will then take those recordings and train its speech models based on them.

As of now, this seems to be a somewhat manual task on Google’s side. Training and evaluating the model will take “several weeks,” the company says and Google itself will conduct its own tests of the trained model before sending it back to the business that commissioned the model. After that, the business must follow Google’s own testing process to evaluate the results and sign off on it.

For now, these custom voices are still in beta and only American English is supported so far.

It’s also worth noting that Google’s review process is meant to ensure that the result is aligned with its internal AI Principles, which it released back in 2018.

Like with similar projects, I would expect that this lengthy process of creating custom voices for these contact center solutions will become mainstream quickly. And while it will just be a gimmick for some brands (remember those custom voices for stand-alone GPS systems back in the day?), it will allow the more forward-thinking brands to distinguish their own contact center experiences from those of the competition. Nobody likes calling customer support, but a more thoughtful experience that doesn’t make you think you’re talking to a random phone tree may just help alleviate some of the stress at least.

It was all supposed to be so different. When Rocket Internet IPO’d in 2014 it was the largest tech company floatation in Europe for 7 years. A year later it had lost $46m and it’s valuation had dropped by 30%. Since then the German start-up factory behind internet companies such as Delivery Hero, Zalando and Jumia has languished, in part because the reason for it’s existence – to provide growth capital for ‘rocket-fuelled’ startups – has ebbed away, as the tech market was flooded with capital in recent years. Today the company said it was delisting its shares from the Frankfurt and Luxembourg Stock Exchanges for just that reason.

Rocket’s market value has fallen from its high of 6.7 billion euros ($8 billion) on the day of its IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange to just 2.6 billion euros and is now offering investors 18.57 euros ($22.23) for each of their shares, lower than Monday’s closing price of 18.95 euros.

The company said it was “better positioned as a company not listed on a stock exchange” as this would allow it to focus on long-term bets.

In a statement, the company said: “The use of public capital markets as a financing source as essential [sic.] parameter for maintaining a stock exchange listing is no longer required and adequate access to capital is secured outside the stock exchange. Outside a capital markets environment, the Company will be able to focus on a long-term development irrespective of temporary circumstances capital markets tend to put emphasis on.”

Delisting, it said, will also reduce operational complexity when setting up new companies, “freeing up administrative and management capacity and reducing costs”.

Its investment division, Global Founders Capital, and CEO Oliver Samwer, will retain their stakes of 45.11% and 4.53% respectively, meaning the virtual shareholder meeting on Sept. 24 ask for shareholder approval to delist will be largely a formality. It has also launched a separate buyback program to secure 8.84% of its shares from the stock market. Although the decision to de-list makes sense, smaller shareholders will be burned, especially as Rocket is using its own cash for the buy-back.

The bets Rocket took, however, have of course paid off. For some. According to Forbes, Samwer and his brothers and co-founders Alexander and Marc are worth at least $1.2 billion each.

The Berlin -based firm became quickly known as a “clone factory” after Samwer famously conceded during his PHD that Silicon Valley had got innovation wrong by comping up with new ideas, and the ‘innovation’ would simply be to make existing models more efficient. The fact those existing models were usually dreamt up by other people never seemed to phase him.

Almost like clockwork Rocket produce clones of various guess for Amazon, Uber, Uber Eats and Airbnb. Its defence for this rapacious strategy was that it was simply adapting proven models for other markets.

Rocket would say it was merely adapting proven models for untapped local markets. Of course, the kicker was usually that the company would either scale faster globally than the original US-based startup, thus forcing some kind of acquisition, or that it would have its clones IPO faster. It did however produce some big, global, companies, even if they were not particularly original, including e-commerce firm Zalando, food delivery service Delivery Hero and meal-kit provider HelloFresh .

There have been successes. Jumia, the African e-commerce company, listed in April last year and when Rocket sold its stake earlier this year, it contributed tp Rocket’s net cash position of €1.9bn at the end of April.

But it has not benefitted from the recent stock market rally for tech companies, as it is overly exposed to e-commerce rather than pandemic-proof companies like Zoom .

For nostalgia sakes, here’s that interview I did with Oliver Samwer in 2015, just one more time.

I was recently part of an open forum about being Black in America, as well as in the startup space.

A white founder asked, “What can I do as the founder of a very early-stage startup?” The group gave various suggestions that included the obvious (or at least I would hope it’s obvious), “When you are growing your team, consider hiring Black team members,” or “When you are considering an investment from an investor, press them about the diversity of their current portfolio founders.”

But one suggestion really stood out, which was to make a concerted effort to find someone different from your current team’s makeup when bringing in subject matter experts. This intentional act shows your homogeneous team members that Black people, other racial minorities or genders can be experts too. It can also be applied when growing your team by making sure you interview diverse candidates whose level of expertise is often second-guessed.

This got me thinking about VC Monique Woodard’s statement that “Black founders are often overmentored and underinvested.” In June, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and open dialogue about anti-Blackness, we saw a slew of investors rushing to offer mentorship to Black founders. Some of the investors don’t have Black founders among their portfolio companies so to some onlookers, this rush to help Black founders was seen as insincere and a marketing ploy.

As a former founder, I can confidently say that most Black founders simply want a fair shot at presenting their startups to investors. The prevailing system of needing a warm introduction to access investors puts founders, especially Black founders, who don’t have the same networks as investors at a disadvantage. The proper mea culpa by these investors should be to make pitching more accessible for all founders. Although offers of mentorship are certainly welcome, the constant barriers Black founders tell me they struggle with are access to capital and networks, not a lack of talent or business savvy.

The quick emphasis on mentorship made me ask myself: How are the contributions of Black people (founders, investors, operators, etc.) to the startup space seen? Are we showcased as experts or as perpetual students in need of mentoring and advising? To directionally answer this question, I turned to podcasts. According to a New York Times article, “more than half the people in the United States have listened to one (podcast), and nearly one out of three people listen to at least one podcast every month.” This figure shows that podcasts are a wide-reaching medium that audiences use as a source of both entertainment and information.

I dug into the 2018 and 2019 guest lists of three of my favorite startup-related podcasts: “This Week In Startups,” “How I Built This With Guy Raz” and “The Twenty Minute VC.” These are all top-ranked podcasts with tens of millions in downloads and over half a million subscribers.

I analyzed more than 500 episodes that were aired in 2018 and 2019 across all three podcasts to get a racial and gender breakdown of guests that were featured on those episodes.

Image Credits: Kofi Ampadu (opens in a new window)

Image Credits: Kofi Ampadu (opens in a new window)

Image Credits: Kofi Ampadu (opens in a new window)

Image Credits: Kofi Ampadu (opens in a new window)

Image Credits: Kofi Ampadu

Not surprisingly, a majority of the guests featured were white men (60%). Black men and women were featured on 4% of all the episodes. A total of 15 Black (nine men and six women) unique guests were showcased as guests out of more than 400 unique guests during the two-year span. Also interesting to note that of those 15 Black guests, three were celebrities (a comedian, a TV personality and a rapper), two of whom were featured twice.

There are certainly more than 15 Black noncelebrities available who would fit the ideal guest lists of these podcasts. It is also interesting to note the percentage of Black guests decreased by 2% from 2018 to 2019 and incidentally increased by 2% for white guests during that span. The percentage of Black female guests within the female gender pool drastically decreased by 10% while white female guests increased by 21% in the two-year time period.

Conclusion

The results are a microcosm of what has been happening in the startup ecosystem: Black minds are undervalued and underappreciated. Oftentimes in the startup space, a founder is deemed a successful founder not based on how much money they collect from satisfied customers but by how much money they have raised from investors. Based on these misleading standards, Black founders will rarely be classified as successful because 1% of VC-backed founders are Black.

When it comes to the investor ranks, 81% of venture funds have no Black investors, so very often Black investors have to raise their own funds since the path to joining one is limited. Given these and other obstacles, I would argue Black people are the inspirational and relatable experts whose stories and advice need to be heard by wider audiences.

It is also worth noting that Black people are versed in varying topics and should not be exclusively invited on platforms to speak on Black issues. Black people are not a monolith and each person has their own passion and areas of expertise and outside of lived experiences not all Black people may be well-equipped to dissect Black issues.

In the spirit of not only pointing out systemic racism in the startup space, here is a list of emerging Black founders, investors and startup ecosystem builders, curated by Denisha Kuhlor and me. The talented people listed would make great guests for podcasts, conferences and any platforms that aim to amplify a diverse set of insights and experiences.

Methodology: Analyzed 484 guests across all three podcasts, the hosts of these podcasts were not included in the analysis as guests. As a result, podcast episodes that only included the host were excluded. Reaired podcast episodes were included in the analysis. If an episode had multiple guests, each guest was accounted for separately in the analysis.

The gender of guests was based on pronouns used to refer to guests on the podcast or publicly available information. The race of guests was objectively determined based on how the guest identifies or subjectively determined based on photographs, videos and publicly available information. The “Other Minorities” grouping includes Latinx, Southeast Asian and East Asian guests.

Disclaimer: This write-up is by no means written to cast aspersions on the three podcasts analyzed. They were simply chosen because I am an avid listener and they are all relatively popular in the startup space.

Digital locker service Movies Anywhere is today officially launching its movie-sharing feature dubbed “Screen Pass,” which lets you lend out one of your purchased movies to a friend or family member. The feature was rushed into beta testing this March, followed by a more open public beta trial in April, thanks to increased demand from consumers stuck at home during coronavirus government lockdowns.

The Movies Anywhere app today allows customers centralized access their purchased movies from across a number of services, including iTunes, Vudu, Prime Video, YouTube, Xfinity and many others.

Today, the app is jointly operated by Disney, Universal, WB, Sony Pictures and 20th Century Fox. The product itself had evolved from a 2014 version known as Disney Movies Anywhere, but later migrated to a new platform in 2017. The app was also rebuilt to accommodate an expanded group of operating partners, rebranded, and now operates as a different business than it did in years past.

In April, Movies Anywhere reported over 6,000 of the titles in its app were Screen Pass-eligible. Since then, it’s added 500 more movies to the collection, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit, A Star Is Born Encore, The Muppets, and National Treasure. With the additions, over 80% of its library titles can be shared through the new feature.

Image Credits: Movies Anywhere

To share a title, you’ll click the Screen Pass icon on the title and enter the details, like the recipient’s information. Shared movies can be sent out over text, email or a message to the recipient who has a week to accept. The shared movie then works like a digital movie rental, for the most part, as the viewer will have up to 14 days to watch and up to 72 hours to compete viewing after the movie has been started. But unlike rentals, the recipient doesn’t have to pay to watch — it’s free to both share and watch.

The company says early data from Screen Pass beta tests indicated the feature has the potential to drive new acquisitions and purchases.

45% of senders shared a movie using Screen Pass because someone else had first shared a movie with them. 30% of those who received a shared movie were new to the Movies Anywhere platform. A small number of movies drove around 9% of total shares, including Ready Player One, The Prestige, Tombstone, The Mule, Bad Times at El Royale, and Jaws. This data indicates that Screen Pass shares weren’t limited to newer titles, as one may expect, but also included older classics.

In addition, around half of sharers (53%) chose the movie they were lending, versus 47% who let the recipient choose. But this could be due to how the Screen Pass beta test was structured, as recipients would be opted into the beta test by accepting a share from another member. It’s likely that some portion of the early group was simply inviting their friends by sharing a title with them.

In addition to Screen Pass sharing, Movies Anywhere also recently introduced a co-viewing feature called Watch Together which offers a synced viewing experience with up to 9 other people. This product works via Screen Pass, and competes with a variety of solutions that emerged or grew in popularity amid the pandemic, including those from Hulu, Amazon, and third-parties like Scener and Netflix Party, among others.

Screen Pass is launching today to all Movies Anywhere customers in the U.S. The Movies Anywhere app works across a range of devices, including iOS and Android mobile, Apple TV, Roku, Kindle Fire, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast, and LG and Vizio smart TVs.