Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Box has always been a bit of an enigma for Wall Street and perhaps for enterprise software in general. Unlike vendors who shifted tools like HR, CRM or ERP to the cloud, Box has been building a way to manage content in the cloud. It’s been a little harder to understand than these other enterprise software stalwarts, but slowly but surely Box has shifted into a more efficient, and dare we say, profitable public company.

Yesterday the company filed its Q2021 earnings reports and it was solid. In fact, the company reported revenue of $192.3 million. That’s an increase of 11% year over year and it beat analyst’s expectations of $189.6 million, according to the company. Meanwhile the guidance looked good too moving from a range of $760 to $768 million for the year to a range of $767 to $770 million.

All of this points to a company that is finding its footing. Let’s not forget, Starboard Value bought a 7.5% stake in the company a year ago, yet the activist investor has mostly stayed quiet and Box seems to be rewarding its patience as the pandemic acts as a forcing function to move customers to the cloud faster– and that seems to be working in Box’s favor.

Let’s get profitable

Box CEO Aaron Levie has not been shy about talking about how the pandemic has pushed companies to move to the cloud much more quickly than they probably would have. He said as a digital company, he was able to move his employees to work from home and remain efficient because of tools like Slack, Zoom, Okta, and yes, Box were in place to help them do that.

All of that helped keep the business going, and even thriving, through the extremely difficult times the pandemic has wrought. “We’re fortunate about how we’ve been able to execute in this environment. It helps that we’re 100% SaaS, and we’ve got a great digital engine to perform the business,” he said.

He added, “And at the same time, as we’ve talked about, we’ve been driving greater profitability. So the efficiency of the businesses has also improved dramatically, and the result was that overall we had a very strong quarter with better growth than expected and better profitability than expected. As a result, we were able to raise our targets on both revenue growth and profitability for the rest of the year,” Levie told TechCrunch.

Let’s get digital

Box is seeing existing customers and new customers alike moving more rapidly to the cloud, and that’s working in its favor. Levie believes that companies are in the process of reassessing their short and longer term digital strategy right now, and looking at what workloads they’ll be moving to the cloud, whether that’s cloud infrastructure, security in the cloud or content.

“Really customers are going to be trying to find a way to be able to shift their most important data and their most important content to the cloud, and that’s what we’re seeing play out within our customer base,” Levie said.

He added,”It’s not really a question anymore if you’re going to go to the cloud, it’s which cloud are you going to go to. And we’ve obviously been very focused on trying to build that leading platform for companies that want to be able to move their data to a cloud environment and be able to manage it securely, drive workflows on it, integrate it across our applications and that’s what we’re seeing,” he said.

That translated into a 60% increase quarter over quarter on the number of large deals over $100,000, and the company crossed 100,000 customers globally on the platform in the most recent quarter, so the approach seems to be working.

Let’s keep building

As with Salesforce a generation earlier, Box decided to build its product set on a platform of services. It enabled customers to tap into these base services like encryption, workflow and metadata and build their own customizations or even fully functional applications by taking advantage of the tools that Box has already built.

Much like Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor told TechCrunch recently, that platform approach has been an integral part of its success, and Levie sees it similarly for Box. calling it fundamental to his company’s success, as well.

“We would not be here without that platform strategy,” he said. “Because we think about Box as a platform architecture, and we’ve built more and more capabilities into that platform, that’s what is giving us this strategic advantage right now,” he said.

And that hasn’t just worked to help customers using Box, it also helps Box itself to develop new capabilities more rapidly, something that has been absolutely essential during this pandemic when the company has had to react quickly to rapidly changing customer requirements.

Levie is 15 years into his tenure as CEO of Box, but he still sees a company and a market that is just getting started. “The opportunity is only bigger, and it’s more addressable by our product and platform today than it has been at any point in our history. So I think we’re still in the very early stages of digital transformation, and we’re in the earliest stages for how document and content management works in this modern era.”

Box has always been a bit of an enigma for Wall Street and perhaps for enterprise software in general. Unlike vendors who shifted tools like HR, CRM or ERP to the cloud, Box has been building a way to manage content in the cloud. It’s been a little harder to understand than these other enterprise software stalwarts, but slowly but surely Box has shifted into a more efficient, and dare we say, profitable public company.

Yesterday the company filed its Q2021 earnings reports and it was solid. In fact, the company reported revenue of $192.3 million. That’s an increase of 11% year over year and it beat analyst’s expectations of $189.6 million, according to the company. Meanwhile the guidance looked good too moving from a range of $760 to $768 million for the year to a range of $767 to $770 million.

All of this points to a company that is finding its footing. Let’s not forget, Starboard Value bought a 7.5% stake in the company a year ago, yet the activist investor has mostly stayed quiet and Box seems to be rewarding its patience as the pandemic acts as a forcing function to move customers to the cloud faster– and that seems to be working in Box’s favor.

Let’s get profitable

Box CEO Aaron Levie has not been shy about talking about how the pandemic has pushed companies to move to the cloud much more quickly than they probably would have. He said as a digital company, he was able to move his employees to work from home and remain efficient because of tools like Slack, Zoom, Okta, and yes, Box were in place to help them do that.

All of that helped keep the business going, and even thriving, through the extremely difficult times the pandemic has wrought. “We’re fortunate about how we’ve been able to execute in this environment. It helps that we’re 100% SaaS, and we’ve got a great digital engine to perform the business,” he said.

He added, “And at the same time, as we’ve talked about, we’ve been driving greater profitability. So the efficiency of the businesses has also improved dramatically, and the result was that overall we had a very strong quarter with better growth than expected and better profitability than expected. As a result, we were able to raise our targets on both revenue growth and profitability for the rest of the year,” Levie told TechCrunch.

Let’s get digital

Box is seeing existing customers and new customers alike moving more rapidly to the cloud, and that’s working in its favor. Levie believes that companies are in the process of reassessing their short and longer term digital strategy right now, and looking at what workloads they’ll be moving to the cloud, whether that’s cloud infrastructure, security in the cloud or content.

“Really customers are going to be trying to find a way to be able to shift their most important data and their most important content to the cloud, and that’s what we’re seeing play out within our customer base,” Levie said.

He added,”It’s not really a question anymore if you’re going to go to the cloud, it’s which cloud are you going to go to. And we’ve obviously been very focused on trying to build that leading platform for companies that want to be able to move their data to a cloud environment and be able to manage it securely, drive workflows on it, integrate it across our applications and that’s what we’re seeing,” he said.

That translated into a 60% increase quarter over quarter on the number of large deals over $100,000, and the company crossed 100,000 customers globally on the platform in the most recent quarter, so the approach seems to be working.

Let’s keep building

As with Salesforce a generation earlier, Box decided to build its product set on a platform of services. It enabled customers to tap into these base services like encryption, workflow and metadata and build their own customizations or even fully functional applications by taking advantage of the tools that Box has already built.

Much like Salesforce president and COO Bret Taylor told TechCrunch recently, that platform approach has been an integral part of its success, and Levie sees it similarly for Box. calling it fundamental to his company’s success, as well.

“We would not be here without that platform strategy,” he said. “Because we think about Box as a platform architecture, and we’ve built more and more capabilities into that platform, that’s what is giving us this strategic advantage right now,” he said.

And that hasn’t just worked to help customers using Box, it also helps Box itself to develop new capabilities more rapidly, something that has been absolutely essential during this pandemic when the company has had to react quickly to rapidly changing customer requirements.

Levie is 15 years into his tenure as CEO of Box, but he still sees a company and a market that is just getting started. “The opportunity is only bigger, and it’s more addressable by our product and platform today than it has been at any point in our history. So I think we’re still in the very early stages of digital transformation, and we’re in the earliest stages for how document and content management works in this modern era.”

Apple’s upcoming operating system iOS 14 (currently in public beta) could have a big impact on publishers who work with Facebook’s — at least, according to Facebook.

The company published a couple of blog posts yesterday outlining the potential impact of a major privacy change that Apple announced at WWDC — namely, the fact that Apple will explicitly ask users whether they want to opt-in before sharing the IDFA identifier with app developers, who can then use it to target ads.

In response, Facebook said it will not be collecting this data on its own apps, but it suggested that the bigger impact will be on the Facebook Audience Network, which uses Facebook data to target ads on other publishers’ websites and apps.

“Like all ad networks on iOS 14, advertiser ability to accurately target and measure their campaigns on Audience Network will be impacted, and as a result publishers should expect their ability to effectively monetize on Audience Network to decrease,” the company said. “Ultimately, despite our best efforts, Apple’s updates may render Audience Network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14.”

In fact, the company said that in testing, it found that without targeting and personalization, mobile app install campaigns brought in 50% less revenue for publishers, and it warned, “The impact to Audience Network on iOS 14 may be much more.”

To get a sense of how serious this might be, I reached out to a number of companies and investors in the adtech world. Ron Thomas, general manager for analytics at App Annie (which is moving into ad analytics), described this as “an acknowledgement from a top publisher that IDFA is truly gone and attribution in this post IDFA world is changing.”

And Brian Quinn, U.S. president and general manager at mobile ad attribution company AppsFlyer, said Facebook’s announcement is “a clear message to the market.”

“The possibility of losing Facebook Audience Network as a major source of revenue can potentially devastate the smaller publisher and developer communities on a global scale, which in turn would impact users worldwide that value and utilize apps as they navigate through their daily lives,” Quinn told me via email. “The ability to deliver relevant ads to users  – and prove their effectiveness through attribution – is integral for publishers and developers to build sustainable businesses around their apps and deliver quality content that users love.”

He went on to suggest that “it’s possible to give users control over their data and still provide developers transparency through privacy-centric attribution solutions.”

Others have been more skeptical about the way Facebook is framing the news. For example, famed gadget reviewer Walt Mossberg suggested that we’ll be seeing more “griping about this from Facebook and other leaders of the toxic ad tech privacy theft industry,” but he argued that rather than hurting publishers, all the change in iOS does is “give consumers clear choices.”

Similarly, Jason Kint of Digital Content Next (a trade body representing publishers like The New York Times and Condé Nast) scoffed that Facebook is “pretending to be the messenger of what’s good for publishers,” and he suggested that the company is using Audience Network publishers to deflect from its broader data collection practices.

“A majority of Facebook’s data collection happens across other company’s services and feeds the mothership,” Kint tweeted. (At the same time, Kint and his organization have other concerns about Apple’s control over the ecosystem.)

This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that Facebook has criticized Apple. Earlier this month, the company announced support for paid online events but complained that Apple wasn’t waiving its customary 30% fee. In both cases, Facebook’s language has been mild — but in the platitude-filled world of corporate PR, it still feels remarkable for the company to be challenging Apple so openly.

In a statement emailed to reporters, James Currier of venture capital firm NFX suggested that this conflict is a sign that history is repeating itself:

In 2009 at the beginning of the Facebook platform, you could build an app on Facebook, go viral and gain millions of followers. But Facebook slowly shut down all the viral channels and put an ad server in the way, meaning app creators had to pay to get traffic. Facebook extracted what money they could from the app developers. Similarly, at the beginning of the iOS platform, Facebook could be an app on iOS and get millions of users. Now Apple is going to slowly shut off the oxygen in order to take the value for themselves. This is the law of the jungle and the network effect makes it pretty clear who has the power: iOS.

Beyond Facebook, Apple and the publishers in the Audience Network, Eric Franchi of marketing- and media-focused VC MathCapital suggested that the changing landscape around privacy and ad-tracking is creating new opportunities for startups (including his own portfolio companies zeotap and ID5).

“Facebook’s commentary underscores a) how dependent the marketing ecosystem is on a couple of operating systems and platforms and b) the importance of user identification in making digital marketing work,” Franchi wrote. “We think there is opportunity here for new forms of consent-driven identity solutions to step up.”

I’d been asking for something like the reMarkable for a long time before it showed up out of the blue a few years ago. The device was a real treat, but had a few problems and an eye-popping price tag. The reMarkable 2 builds on the first with a more beautiful, streamlined device and several key new features, but keeps many of the limitations — some deliberate, some not so much — that make it a refreshingly specialty device. Costs a lot less this time around, too.

The reMarkable is intended to be a tablet for consuming and creating black and white (and grey) content: PDFs, sketches, jotted notes, that sort of thing — without all the distractions and complications of a full-on tablet or laptop. I certainly found that when I had a lot of content to get through and annotate, the device helped me focus, and it was useful for light note-taking and and other purposes ,like DMing a D&D game or sketching out a woodworking project.

The rM2, as I’ll call it, really is an improvement in pretty much every possible way. I’m honestly a bit baffled as to how they could make it thinner, faster, more battery efficient, better at pretty much everything, and yet drop the price from $600 to $400. Usually there’s some kind of trade-off. Not this time!

Specifically, the rM2 has the following major improvements:

• Thinner (an already svelte 6.7mm reduced to 4.7mm; for comparison, an iPad is about 6mm)
• Faster, dual-core ARM CPU (mainly for power savings)
• Double the RAM (a gig, up from 512 MB)
• Display response time halved to 21ms (comparable to LCDs)
• Battery life more than tripled (a couple weeks, or months on standby, instead of a couple days)
• Eraser on other end of stylus. Thank you!

What hasn’t been changed is the screen itself (that is, the resolution and contrast), the OS, and the general purpose of the thing.

The new device, left, and old one. Image Credits: reMarkable

Let’s start with the new design. To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t taken with it at first. The original’s softer white plastic case felt more organic, while the new one’s asymmetric chrome is more gadgety.

But it’s grown on me as also being more purposeful and focused, though of course it also now is rather more suitable for a right-handed person than a left. The original’s three enormous buttons always seemed far too prominent for the amount of utility they offered. I did sometimes wish for a home button on the rM2, but a new gesture (swipe from the top) takes care of that.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The power button at the top of the chrome strip is tiny, perhaps too tiny, but at least you won’t hit it by accident. The USB-C charge port is opposite the power button, on the bottom, and well out of the way of anywhere you’ll hold it, making charging while using easy (though you probably won’t need to).

Powerful magnets on the right side hold the stylus with a tight grip but no visible markings. Said stylus, I should add, is a very nice one indeed, with a weighty feel and rubberized finish. The new eraser function works great — definitely spring for it if you’re thinking about getting one of these.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

On the back are four tiny rubberized feet that serve to prevent it scooting across the table while naked, and which help align the tablet perfectly in its folio case. Projections like these on such a thin, smooth device bother me on some level — I tried to peel them off first thing — but I understand they’re practical.

Overall the rM2 is extremely streamlined, and while it’s significantly heavier than the first (about 400 grams, or .89 lb, versus 350g, both lighter than the lightest iPad) it isn’t heavy by any stretch of the imagination. The bezel is big enough you can grip or reposition the device easily but not so large it takes over. I could have done with maybe a little less but I’m picky that way.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m just a real stickler for industrial design. The flaws I’ve mentioned here are nothing compared with, say, the straight-up-ugly iPhone 11. The rM2 is a striking device, more so than the first, and it does a great job of both disappearing and showing strong design choices.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The display is the same as the first, and as such is not quite at today’s e-reader levels when it comes to pixel density and contrast. E-readers from Kobo and Amazon hit 300 pixels per inch, and reMarkable’s is down at 226. Sometimes this matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve found that certain fonts and pen marks show lots of aliasing, but mostly it isn’t noticeable because as a larger device one tends to hold it farther from their face.

There’s no frontlight, which I understand is a deliberate choice — you’re supposed to work with this thing under the same lighting you’d use for a paper document. Still, I felt its absence occasionally when reading.

I can vouch for the new battery lasting much, much longer. I’ve only had the device for a week or so, meaning I can’t speak to the months of standby, but I was always disappointed by the original’s need for frequent charging and this one has been far better.

It is also much faster to turn on and off. The original went to sleep and shut down after rather too short a delay and took a while to start up. The rM2 turns on instantly from sleep and takes about 20 seconds to boot from a full off state. Fortunately it doesn’t need to be turned off, or turn itself off, anywhere near as often as its predecessor. Removing these on/off and battery worries really goes a long way towards making this a practical device for a lot of people.

An excellent endless legal pad and PDF tool

You can write neatly, I just don’t. Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Where the rM2 succeeds best is as a reader for full-page documents like scientific papers, legal documents, and reports, and as a rough sketchpad and notebook with the chief benefit of having effectively unlimited pages.

For reading, the experience is not very different from the original device. It works with fairly few formats, and PDF the best. You can skim through pages, annotate with the pen, and highlight text — though annoyingly you’re still just painting the text with a translucent layer, not digitally selecting/highlighting the text itself.

You can search for text easily and navigation is straightforward, though I’d like the option to tap and go to the next page rather than swipe. Changes are synced to the document in the reMarkable app, where you can easily export a modified version, though again you can’t directly select text.

Writing and drawing on the screen feels great — better than before, and it was already the best among e-paper devices. The iPad Pro beats it for full-color illustration, naturally, but the idea isn’t to meet the capabilities of other tablets, it’s to provide the intended features well.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

The feel of the screen is smoother than the first reMarkable, but the texture change isn’t necessarily bad — one thing I could never quite get away from on the first was, due to its texture, the feeling that I was scratching the screen when I wrote. Nothing like that here, though the tactility is slightly less. As for the lower latency, it’s noticeable and unnoticeable at the same time: Certainly it’s better than all the other e-paper devices I’ve tested, including the first reMarkable. But even 21ms is noticeable and affects the way you write or draw. It isn’t “just like paper,” but it is pretty awesome.

I would never try to replace the small pocket notepad I use during interviews, but at a meeting or brainstorm I would much rather use this. The space you have for making little groups of names, flowcharts, random things to look up later, doodles of your boss, and so on is so vast and so easily accessible that it almost makes me wish I went to more meetings. Almost!

I realize showing this on video would be helpful to some, but the truth is even on video it’s hard to get a sense of how it looks and feels when you’re actually doing it. It feels more responsive than it looks.

A clutch new feature for writing and drawing is the integration of an eraser tip on the other side of the stylus. It works automatically, feels rubbery like a real eraser, and saves you a trip to the pen menu. Unfortunately you still have to open that menu to get to “undo,” which is sometimes preferable to erasing. Given the whole screen is multi-touch capacitive, I don’t see any reason why something like a two-finger leftward swipe can’t be mapped to undo, or double-tapping the eraser in an empty space.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Handwriting recognition is helpful, not that I have taken a whole lot of notes with the rM2, but it’s easy to see how it saves time when transferring mixed-media pages to your computer. It’s not like it would take you that much time to spell out the email address or name someone mentioned, it’s just nicer to be able to hit a button and it’s ready to copy and paste.

I definitely experienced transcription errors, but honestly, even I can’t tell my “u” and “n” or “r” and “v” apart all the time. I have a draggy style of longhand so I needed to focus a bit on picking up the pen from the surface rather than letting it trail at the lowest level of pressure.

A so-so e-reader

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

One aspect of the original reMarkable that didn’t thrill me was the handling and display of e-books and other pure text content. The rM2 improves on this and adds a very useful new time-shifting feature, but it still falls behind the competition.

The fact is that the reMarkable isn’t really intended for reading books. It’s formatted for content that’s already meant to be displayed as a full page, and it does that well. When it has to do its own text formatting the options are a little thinner.

With six fonts and six sizes per font, and three options each for margins and spacing, room for customization is low. The two most book-like text sizes seem to be “slightly too large” and “slightly too small,” while the others are comically huge, appearing larger than even a large-print book would have them.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

Several epub books I loaded onto the tablet failed in various ways. Initial tabs on paragraphs didn’t render; in-text links didn’t work; line spacing is uneven; large white spaces appeared rather than partial paragraphs. The team needs to take a serious look at their e-book renderer and text options, and I’m told that they are in fact doing so, but that writing, drawing, and of course the new hardware have taken up their resources.

It’s less of an issue with articles gleaned from the web with the new Chrome extension. These are more consistently formatted and make articles read more like magazine pages, which is perfectly fine. I do wish there were options for a two-column view or other ways to customize how the pages are transcoded. I give reMarkable a pass on this because it’s a new feature they’re still building out and it works pretty well.

No chance, unfortunately, for integration with Pocket, Simplenote, Evernote, or any of the other common services along these lines. For better or worse reMarkable has chosen to go it alone. reMarkable as a company is wary of making the device too complex and too integrated with other things, since the entire philosophy is one of removing distractions. That makes for a unified experience, but it hurts when a feature is simply not as good as the competition with which the company has voluntarily entered competition.

Image Credits: Devin Coldewey / TechCrunch

One serious gripe I have, and one which will surely bother reMarkable’s existing customers, is that you can only have one device active at a time per account. Yes: If you bought the first, you essentially have to disable it in order to set up the second.

This is a huge problem and a missed opportunity as well. For one thing, it’s a bit cruel to essentially throw their oldest customers under the bus. You could probably figure out a workaround but the simple fact that the old device has to be kicked off the account is bad. Because it could so easily have been very useful to have two of these things. Imagine keeping one at work and one at home, and they stay in sync, or sharing an account with a partner and sending documents or handwriting back and forth.

I asked the company about this and it seems that it is a technical limitation at this time, and that multiple devices are on the roadmap to support. But for anyone planning on buying an rM2 now, it’s a material consideration that your original device will no longer be usable by you, or at least not in the same way — it isn’t bricked or anything, it just won’t sync with your account.

Hope and dreams (and hacks)

As before, what is exciting about the reMarkable 2 is not just what it does, but what it could do. The company has significantly expanded what the ecosystem supports over the last couple years, improved performance, and responded to user requests. Most of my complaints are things the team is already aware of, since they have an engaged and outspoken community, and are somewhere on the roadmap to be fixed or added.

There is also a healthy hacking community putting together new ways to take advantage of such promising hardware — though of course with the usual caveat that you could brick it if you’re not careful. If reMarkable doesn’t want to build an RSS reader into the device because of their fundamental philosophy against such a thing, someone will probably make one anyway. I look forward to experimenting with the device not as a carefully tuned platform but as an all-purpose greyscale computer.

The previous reMarkable was a very interesting device but one that was rather difficult to recommend widely at launch. But the company has proven itself over the last couple years and the device has grown and solidified. This upgraded version, better in nearly every way yet a third cheaper, is much, much easier to recommend. If you are interested in exploring a more paperless world, or want to force yourself to focus better, or just think this thing sounds cool, the reMarkable 2 is a great device to do it with.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily we’ve managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.

Change is good.

But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here’s what we got into:

• The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling, and whom will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok’s global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
• The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
• About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
• But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
• And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can’t stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.

And with that, we’re all going to bed. We’re tired. No more news, thanks!

 Juni Learning connects kids with math and science tutors, but co-founder Vivian Shen would prefer not to be lumped in with other edtech startups, despite the sector’s pandemic-born boom.

“We’re not just in the middle to take a few percentage points off of each side and pretend like we’re delivering value,” said Shen. “That’s not scalable.”

Semantics aside, Shen’s words underscore a truth about live tutoring businesses: Anyone can start one. All it takes is smart friends, eager students and a platform to bring them together.

The low barrier of entry has given rise to a slew of new startups. Some view edtech as a marketplace play, others go the gig economy route, and some are trying to make tutoring as simple as calling an Uber — on-demand and only when you need it.

Juni Learning, co-founded by Shen and Ruby Lee, is entering a fragmented and fatigued market full of better-funded and well-known startups. The startup views itself as a consumer play instead of an edtech startup and raised a $10.5 million Series A back in February to prove it can take a slice of the market.

With only 4,000 active subscribers, Juni Learning is bringing in $10 million in annual run revenue (ARR), compared to $2 million of ARR in March, according to my calculations.

So how is it faring?

A word of warning

In 2005, Andrew Geant was thinking about two-sided gig economy marketplaces. He applied the model to tutoring, thinking he could grow a business from connecting students and tutors online to meet offline. So, Geant and Mike Weishuhn, both recent Princeton graduates, founded Wyzant.

Facebook announced today it’s suing multiple developers in the U.S. and, for the first time, in the U.K., for violations of its policies. In the U.K., both Facebook Inc. and Facebook Ireland are suing MobiBurn, parent company OakSmart Technologies, and its founder Faith Haltas, in the High Court of Justice for failing to comply with Facebook’s audit request, after security researchers flagged the company’s technology had been collecting data from Facebook users through its malicious software. Separately, Facebook Inc. and Instagram Inc. sued Nikolay Holper in federal court in San Francisco for operating a fake engagement service.

Facebook has been cracking down on malicious developers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal which saw the personal data of 87 million Facebook users compromised. Since then, Facebook introduced more protections over how app developers could access data and punitive actions. Earlier this year, Facebook also introduced new Platform Terms and Developer Policies that gave it permission to audit third-party apps by requesting either remote or physical access to developers’ systems, if need be, to ensure compliance.

According to Facebook’s announcement, MobiBurn failed to “fully comply” with Facebook’s audit request, where it was attempting to investigate the company’s use of a malicious Software Development Kit (SDK) to harvest user data.

News of MobiBurn’s activities first circulated in security research circles in late 2019. In November, both Facebook and Twitter announced that the personal data of hundreds of users may have been improperly accessed after they used their social accounts to log in to certain third-party apps that had malicious SDKs installed by MobiBurn and another company, One Audience. Facebook said it had issued cease and desist letters to those companies.

In MobiBurn’s case, it also took enforcement action, disabled its apps, and requested its participation in an audit, as its policies now allow for. MobiBurn “failed to fully cooperate,” Facebook says.

MobiBurn, in November, had responded that it didn’t collect, share or monetize data from Facebook. The company hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment today.

Facebook’s lawsuit alleges that MobiBurn paid third-party app developers to install its SDK into their apps. Once installed, MobiBurn collected information from the devices and requested data from Facebook, including the person’s name, time zone, email address and gender, explains Facebook, in its announcement of the lawsuit.

The suit is looking for an injunction against MobiBurn; the ability to audit the company’s systems; an account of the data it accessed, payments made to developers, and payments received; damages and other relief.

Meanwhile, in the U.S. lawsuit, Facebook is taking on developer Nikolay Holper, who operated a fake engagement service. Facebook alleges Holoper used a network of bots and automation software to “distribute fake likes, comments, views and followers on Instagram.” Several different websites were used to sell the fake engagement service to Instagram users, the suit says.

This is not the first time Facebook has cracked down on fake engagement services. Last year, it filed a U.S. lawsuit to shut down a follower-buying service in New Zealand. Instagram in 2019 also shut down the accounts of 17 fake engagement services that promises more followers to Instagram users.

Facebook had previously shut down the engagement service and formally warned the developer he was in violation, and sent a cease and desist letter.

While Facebook’s attempts to crack down developers violating its terms of service, users have found other ways to inauthentically grow their follower base. Many Instagram users, for example, participate in “pods” where they systematically coordinate liking and commenting on each others’ posts as a way to game Instagram algorithms.

“Today’s actions are the latest in our efforts to protect people who use our services, hold those who abuse our platform accountable, and advance the state of the law around data misuse and privacy,” said Facebook, in a statement.

“Will automation eliminate data science positions?”

This is a question I’m asked at almost every conference I attend, and it usually comes from someone from one of two groups with a vested interest in the answer: The first is current or aspiring practitioners who are wondering about their future employment prospects. The second consists of executives and managers who are just starting on their data science journey.

They have often just heard that Target can determine whether a customer is pregnant from her shopping patterns and are hoping for similarly powerful tools for their data. And they have heard the latest automated-AI vendor pitch that promises to deliver what Target did (and more!) without data scientists. We argue that automation and better data science tooling will not eliminate or even reduce data science positions (including use cases like the Target story). It creates more of them!

Here’s why.

Understanding the business problem is the biggest challenge

The most important question in data science is not which machine learning algorithm to choose or even how to clean your data. It is the questions you need to ask before even one line of code is written: What data do you choose and what questions do you choose to ask of that data?

What is missing (or wishfully assumed) from the popular imagination is the ingenuity, creativity and business understanding that goes into those tasks. Why do we care if our customers are pregnant? Target’s data scientists had built upon substantial earlier work to understand why this was a lucrative customer demographic primed to switch retailers. Which datasets are available and how can we pose scientifically testable questions of those datasets?

Target’s data science team happened to have baby registry data tied to purchasing history and knew how to tie that to customer spending. How do we measure success? Formulating nontechnical requirements into technical questions that can be answered with data is amongst the most challenging data science tasks — and probably the hardest to do well. Without experienced humans to formulate these questions, we would not be able to even start on the journey of data science.

Making your assumptions

After formulating a data science question, data scientists need to outline their assumptions. This often manifests itself in the form of data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering. Real-world data are notoriously dirty and many assumptions have to be made to bridge the gap between the data we have and the business or policy questions we are seeking to address. These assumptions are also highly dependent on real-world knowledge and business context.

In the Target example, data scientists had to make assumptions about proxy variables for pregnancy, realistic time frame of their analyses and appropriate control groups for accurate comparison. They almost certainly had to make realistic assumptions that allowed them to throw out extraneous data and correctly normalize features. All of this work depends critically on human judgment. Removing the human from the loop can be dangerous as we have seen with the recent spate of bias-in-machine-learning incidents. It is perhaps no coincidence that many of them revolve around deep learning algorithms that make some of the strongest claims to do away with feature engineering.

So while parts of core machine learning are automated (in fact, we even teach some of the ways to automate those workflows), the data munging, data cleaning and feature engineering (which comprises 90% of the real work in data science) cannot be safely automated away.

A historical analogy

There is a clear precedent in history to suggest data science will not be automated away. There is another field where highly trained humans are crafting code to make computers perform amazing feats. These humans are paid a significant premium over others who are not trained in this field and (perhaps not surprisingly) there are education programs specializing in training this skill. The resulting economic pressure to automate this field is equally, if not more, intense. This field is software engineering.

Indeed, as software engineering has become easier, the demand for programmers has only grown. This paradox — that automation increases productivity, driving down prices and ultimately driving up demand is not new — we’ve seen it again and again in fields ranging from software engineering to financial analysis to accounting. Data science is no exception and automation will likely drive up demand for this skillset, not down.

Bollinger Motors, the Michigan-based startup known for its rugged electric SUV and pickup truck, unveiled Thursday a delivery van concept that it plans to start producing in 2022.

The big takeaway here is versatility. The van concept called Deliver-E is configurable — notably the wheelbase and battery pack — to meet the needs of commercial customers, according to the company. The van will be front-wheel drive, have an 18-inch low-load floor height and variable wheelbases to accommodate multiple cargo configurations. The company said the wheelbase will be scalable to a variety of vehicle classes, including Class 2B, 3, 4, and 5. Bollinger will also offer five different battery packs sizes that range from 70 kWh to 210 kWh.

Image Credits: Bollinger Motors

While the van is certainly different than its B1 SUV and B2 work truck, all three vehicles share much of the same guts. The major components in the van, including the motors, battery and inverters are in the rest of the Bollinger Motors lineup.

Bollinger Motors said it won’t build this van on its own. The company said it will work with a manufacturing partner to build the DELIVER-E vans as well as trucks in the U.S. with production slated for 2022.

For followers of Bollinger, some might recall that the company unveiled in March its E chassis designed for a Class 3 commercial vehicles. But the E chassis shouldn’t be confused with the platform for the Deliver-E van. The Deliver-E has a new platform created to address the specific needs of delivery vans, according to the company.

Instacart is facing a lawsuit from Washington, D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine that alleges the company charged customers millions of dollars in “deceptive service fees” and failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sales tax. The suit seeks restitution for customers who paid those service fees, as well as back taxes and on interest on taxes owed to D.C.

The suit specifically alleges Instacart misled customers regarding the 10% service fee to think it was a tip for the delivery person from September 2016 to April 2018.

“Instacart tricked District consumers into believing they were tipping grocery delivery workers when, in fact, the company was charging them extra fees and pocketing the money,” Racine said in a statement. “Instacart used these deceptive fees to cover its operating costs while simultaneously failing to pay D.C. sales taxes. We filed suit to force Instacart to honor its legal obligations, pay D.C. the taxes it owes, and return millions of dollars to District consumers the company deceived.”

This is not the first time Instacart has faced legal issues over its service fees. In 2017, Instacart settled a $4.6 million suit regarding claims that the company misclassified its personal shoppers as independent contractors, and also failed to reimburse them for work expenses. As part of the settlement, Instacart was required to change the way it described a service fee, which many people mistakenly thought meant tip. Even when Instacart clarified the language, the suit alleges Instacart still buried the option to tip.

“In this respect, Instacart’s checkout design compounded
consumers’ tendency to confuse the service fee with a shopper tip,” the suit alleges.

This lawsuit comes as Instacart is facing uncertainty in California over the way it classifies some of its shoppers and delivery people. Despite a new law going into effect in January that clearly lays out what type of workers should and should not be classified as independent contractors, Instacart has yet to classify its workers as employees. Instead, Instacart, along with Uber, Lyft and DoorDash, are backing a ballot measure, Prop 22, that seeks to keep their workers classified as independent contractors.

TechCrunch has reached out to Instacart and will update this story if we hear back.