Category: UNCATEGORIZED

We’re excited to announce that government, nonprofit and military employees can get an Extra Crunch membership at a discounted rate of $50 per year, plus tax. If interested in claiming the deal, please contact our customer service team from your .org, .gov, .mil or similar work-related email domain. We’ll also accept other forms of verification, such as proof that the organization is a 501c3 or an employment ID. Our customer service team can be reached at extracrunch@techcrunch.com.

Extra Crunch unlocks access to our weekly investor surveys, daily private market analysis and in-depth interviews with experts on fundraising, growth, monetization and other core startup topics. Find answers to your burning questions about startup and investing through Extra Crunch Live, and stay informed with our members-only Extra Crunch newsletter. Other benefits include a faster-loading and cleaner TechCrunch.com experience, 20% off future TechCrunch event tickets and savings on software services like DocSend, Typeform, Crunchbase and more.

Learn more about Extra Crunch benefits here.

A lot is debated in the SEO world, but nearly everyone can agree that links are and will continue to be vitally important to the health and rankability of a website.

Luckily, link building and brand awareness goals can be built into your content marketing strategy, which can be vastly elevated by combining your efforts with digital PR.

I’ll walk through how creating high-quality content and pitching it correctly to top publishers can earn you the valuable backlinks you’ve always wanted (and if you employ this strategy on an ongoing basis, the increase in organic traffic you’ve always wanted, too).

Choosing the right content idea

I have to start by saying that the most important thing about being cited in news sources is that you have to be newsworthy. Now that might go without saying, but what we as marketers might consider newsworthy about our brands isn’t necessarily newsworthy to a writer or to the greater public.

Content ideation tip #1: The best way to ensure your newsworthiness is to gather and analyze data. Even if the data set already exists, if it hasn’t been analyzed and presented in a straightforward, applicable, easy-to-understand way, your illustration of the data could be considered new and valuable.

I’ll touch on this again in a moment. But first, let’s dive into the content example I’ll be using throughout this piece.

It’s a classic “last but not least” moment for the all the savvy early-stage startup founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020. The final webinar in our three-part interactive series takes place on August 26 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET]. Don’t forget to register right here.

Pro tip: You must be a Digital Startup Alley exhibitor to access this webinar (and other Disrupt 2020 events coming soon to the internet near you). Not an exhibitor yet? Buy a Digital Startup Alley Package and the webinar will be the first of many benefits coming your way. More on those in a minute.

Bonus pro tip: Curious about the look and feel of Disrupt 2020? Check out the video of our latest Ask Me Anything session: How TechCrunch turned Disrupt into a virtual event.

Got your pass? Tune in, bring your questions and get ready for a masterclass called Fundraising and Hiring Best Practices. Every startup founder needs to understand how these essential aspects work to mount a successful startup, and we have seasoned experts to guide the way.

The panel, moderated by our own Natasha Mascarenhas, includes Sarah Kunst (Cleo Capital) and Brett Berson (First Round Capital). Learn tips and effective strategies to help you secure funding for your startup. Learn to avoid pitfalls when you begin to hire — getting it right is one of those make or break moments.

Exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley can be one of the smartest investments you’ll ever make. Exhibit and demo your tech and talent to thousands of global Disrupt attendees. Use your custom exhibit page to feature your pitch deck or marketing video and collect leads from people who visit the page.

CrunchMatch, our free AI-powered networking platform, helps you find and connect with people who can help grow your business — investors, potential customers, media and other influencers. It helps them find you, too. Even better, CrunchMatch is live right now. Translation: more time to pitch, demo and schedule 1:1 virtual meetings.

You exhibitor status also gives you exclusive access to upcoming speed networking and interview sessions with accelerators and founder organizations. Connect with the likes of iFundWomen, Backstage Capital, Techstars, Plug and Play and Global Startup Ecosystem. There’s no telling where one conversation with any of these groups might take you.

Don’t miss out on our Fundraising & Hiring Best Practices webinar on August 26 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET. Already an exhibitor? Register to attend here.

And don’t miss out on the opportunities that come from exhibiting in Startup Alley. Be savvy. Buy a Digital Startup Alley Package, register for the webinar, and do everything in your power to drive your business forward.

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

Cloud photo storage app Ever is shutting down, citing increased competition with the default services offered by Apple and Google as the cause. The company, however, had other issues beyond the plight of a small startup trying to compete with tech giants. Last year, NBC News reported the company had been using its customers’ photos to develop facial recognition technology that it turned around and offered for sale by way of the Ever API to business clients, including law enforcement and the military.

The company’s real business model wasn’t properly disclosed to consumers who visited the Ever website or app, the report said.

Ever had argued at the time it wasn’t sharing people’s private photos or any identifying information with its facial recognition customers. Instead, it had used the billions of images its customers had uploaded to build an algorithm that can learn from matches and is now able to train itself on other data.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Northern California said the business was an “egregious violation of people’s privacy,” as few knew their family photos were being used to build surveillance technology.

While other companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, have built out facial recognition technology products of their own in recent years, they do so using public datasets. Ever had used its own users’ photos and without informed consent. (A line was added to Ever’s privacy policy only after NBC News had begun to investigate and reached out to the company, the report said).

After the news report came out, Ever rebranded its Ever AI as Paravision to distance itself from the controversy.

As of last month, Paravision was continuing to tout its product. In a July press release, the company announced its had achieved top-2 accuracy globally on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) July 27 report focused on face recognition with masks. The company also sells a suite of activity recognition tools in addition to its face detection solutions. It appears this business lives on, despite the consumer app closure.

Unfortunately, 2019 was not the first time Ever had made headlines for its poor business practices.

Amid the increased pressure from Google and Apple’s photo technology advances, Ever back in 2016 began to spam its users’ contacts over SMS with invites to check out its app. SMS invite spam had been a popular, if generally disliked, growth hack technique for social apps at the time. In Ever’s case, it helped the app climb the iOS charts ahead of its Android release.

It’s also notable that Ever is attempting to use the current focus on tech company monopolies as a way to redirect blame for the Ever app shutdown.

Today, Apple, Google and other tech giants are under antitrust investigations in the U.S., as the government works to determine if these companies have used their platform status to damage or even eliminate their competition.

Ever specifically calls out Apple and Google in its announcement, saying that:

The service has been around for over seven years, but with increasing competition over the last several years from Apple and Google’s photo storage products (excellent products in their own right, and worth checking out as an alternative), the Ever service is no longer sustainable.

The implication here is that Ever didn’t have a chance when faced with such steep competition and now its business is over.

The announcement fails to mention how Ever’s own behavior may have played a role in eroding its users’ trust over the years or how it has later found success as a B2B technology solution provider.

However, the company’s shutdown FAQ makes a reference to its facial recognition technology. Here, the company explains that once Everalbum shuts down the Ever service, users’ photos and videos will “never be used for any purpose, including improving computer vision capabilities such as face recognition.” It says also it will delete user data, except in cases where it’s required by law to keep it and confirms users’ actual photos were never sold to third parties.

That’s too little, too late for Ever’s customers who would never had agreed to allowing their photos to be used to build facial recognition technology in the first place. Now that the technology is built, it seems Ever has no further need for the initial training data collected over the years.

The Ever service shuts down on 11:59 PM PDT on August 31, 2020. Customers will be able to export data n delete their account before then, the company says.

Paravision, as the remaining part of Ever’s company is called, has raised $29 million in venture funding, according to data from Crunchbase. (This includes funds raised as Everalbum.)

Facebook France is going to pay $125 million (€106 million) in back taxes according to business magazine Capital — Facebook confirmed the agreement to both Capital and Reuters. French tax authorities raided Facebook’s offices in Paris in 2012 and later opened an investigation on unpaid taxes covering activities between 2009 and 2018.

According to the investigation, Facebook allegedly optimized its effective tax rate in France by funneling sales to other subsidiaries in different European countries.

It’s a grey area as funneling sales to a different country is legal. But you have to prove that there wasn’t any sales person based in France selling to a French customer. Those contracts can be reclassified as French contracts.

Many tech companies have had to pay back taxes in France for the same issue. For instance, Google agreed to pay a $549 million fine and $510 million in back taxes in 2019. Similarly, Apple settled a dispute covering $572 million in back taxes.

This is a new strategy for French authorities. Companies can avoid a public fight if they settle with tax authorities directly. This way, companies avoid some public backlash and it speeds up the process. Amazon was the first company to settle in 2018.

“We take our tax obligations seriously, pay the taxes we owe in all markets where we operate,” Facebook told Reuters. As a result, the company’s revenue in France has jumped from €56 million to €389 million between 2017 and 2018, representing a nearly 600% revenue increase in 12 months.

We’ve reached out to Facebook and will update this article if we learn more.

A big payday is on the way for Sequoia and its partners, assuming they beat the final boss.

Today after much anticipation, video game engine Unity filed its Form S-1 with the SEC as it prepares a roadshow to go public in the coming weeks. We discussed quite a bit about Unity’s business fundamentals, product design, origin story, and more late last year on Extra Crunch, so definitely check out that deep dive article for more background on the game engine and simulation company.

Now that the ownership information is out though, it’s clear that there is going to be one huge winner in the IPO, and that is Sequoia.

According to the docs, Sequoia’s total ownership of the company is roughly 24.1% today. The company was last valued at around $6 billion in mid-2019, and we will see how the shares perform with investors in the coming week. But owning nearly one quarter of billions of dollars is a huge return for the venture capital firm.

The other major VC investor was Silver Lake, which owns 18.2% of the company after an initial 2017 investment that was labeled as “up to $400 million.” Among founders and execs, David Helgason, Unity’s founder and current board member, owns 4.4% and John Riccitiello, Unity’s current CEO, owns 3.4%. The filing says that there are a total of 782 shareholders on record.

What’s interesting about Sequoia’s stake is how much it has grown over the years since the firm’s initial Series A investment into Unity more than a decade ago back in 2009. Take a look at this table of all of Sequoia’s investments from its various funds over the years:

While Sequoia did indeed get in early with the video game platform, what’s been key for it over the years has been buying up additional shares through growth investing as well as buying out common shares, presumably from earlier investors, employees, and perhaps founders as well. It’s original investment out of its twelfth fund owns 10.28%, but its growth funds collectively own another 13.82%.

Finally, here’s a chart of Unity’s share price growth since its Series A all the way up to the present day:

Unlike Palantir’s numbers, which we reported on Friday from a leaked copy of its S-1 filing, Unity has shown a relatively up and to the right exponential growth curve in price over the last ten years, with a huge gap in funding between its Series B in 2011 and Series C in 2016. Now, let’s see how the public markets react.

If you’re currently building a startup, you know what product you want to build. But do you know if people are actually going to notice you? That’s the question I asked of Red Antler co-founder Emily Heyward during our virtual TechCrunch Early Stage event.

In case you’re not familiar with Red Antler, Heyward’s branding company has worked with some of the most iconic startups of the past decade, such as Casper, Allbirds, Brandless and Prose. She knows her topic so well that she just wrote a book on branding called “Obsessed.”

Let me break down the key takeaways of her presentation and responses to questions from our virtual audience — we’ve embedded a video below with our entire conversation.

Branding matters — anybody can launch a startup

It has never been easier to launch a startup. If it’s a software company, your infrastructure will be managed by a cloud hosting company. If you’re selling consumer goods, you can find manufacturing partners more easily than ever before.

“There are fewer traditional gatekeepers standing in your way. You don’t need to be able to afford a national TV campaign to get people to notice you and to hear about you. It’s a lot easier to get it out there and start selling directly to people,” Heyward said.

The result is that there are many companies competing in the same space, launching around the same time. Casper isn’t the only online mattress company anymore for instance. Brand obsession can set you apart from the rest of the crowd.

TikTok is suing the U.S. government in federal court over the Trump Administration’s decision to ban TikTok in the U.S. market. Reports that TikTok would soon file a legal challenge to the ban were already making the rounds this weekend, ahead of TikTok’s formal announcement of the lawsuit, shared today on its company blog. TikTok plans to fight back against Trump’s executive order on the grounds that it was enacted without evidence and without any due process.

“We strongly disagree with the Administration’s position that TikTok is a national security threat and we have articulated these objections previously,” the blog post read.

The company claims the Trump Administration has ignored TikTok’s numerous efforts to address its concerns. Instead, Trump declared the app a national security threat over its ties to the Chinese government.

TikTok also continues to claim it protects U.S. user data by storing that data outside of China on servers in the U.S. and Singapore. It says it has erected software barriers to ensure the data is held separate from other products operated by TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance.

The lawsuit notes, too, that TikTok’s actions were already known to the U.S. government due the national security review by CFIUS (the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) that took place when ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in 2017, becoming TikTok. As part of that review, the government examined TikTok’s documented security practices and came to the conclusion that the deal could proceed.

The issue at hand, however, is not what TikTok claims it does. Even if TikTok can demonstrate where the data is stored and other such things, it’s not enough, the critics say. The concern is centered around China’s own cybersecurity law that requires tech companies, like ByteDance, to hand over any data to the Chinese government, if requested. This concern has bipartisan support in the U.S., in fact. The Biden campaign also told staff to remove TikTok from their phones, as one example.

TikTok is supporting its case by noting how it has filled its exec ranks with Americans, who would not be subject to the Chinese law. This includes its CEO Kevin Mayer, Global Chief Security Officer Roland Cloutier, and General Counsel, Erich Andersen. In addition, its U.S. content moderation is led by a U.S.-based team, independently from China, the company stresses.

In terms of the legal challenge to the order, the suit alleges that Trump’s executive order fails to meet the requirements of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which allows the government to prohibit activities that are found to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat.” TikTok writes:

By banning TikTok with no notice or opportunity to be heard (whether before or after the fact), the executive order violates the due process protections of the Fifth Amendment. The order is ultra vires because it is not based on a bona fide national emergency and authorizes the prohibition of activities that have not been found to pose ‘an unusual and extraordinary threat.’

TikTok reminds the government, too, that a ban would eliminate the creation of 10,000 American jobs TikTok had projected it would add over the next three years. TikTok employees were said to be planning their own legal challenge to the ban, as well.

The social video app maker has been working across a number of fronts to respond to the ban in recent days. It recently launched a public-facing information hub where it answered questions about its app and data privacy, in an effort to “correct the record,” it had said. Despite these efforts, it’s still unclear to what extent TikTok can really say no to the Chinese government, if it asked for data on TikTok’s U.S. users. This is why those in support of the ban would rather TikTok divest of its U.S. operations entirely to remain in the country.

Recent news reports have also given the U.S. other reasons to questions TikTok’s stated commitments. The New York Times, for example, reported that a third of the app’s users are 14 or under, according to internal documents. That begs the question of how well TikTok has been able to abide by guidelines set by the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act — a regulation that already resulted in a $5.7 million fine for the company in 2018. If it’s not acting responsibility on this front, how well can it be handling the other issues?, The NYT openly wondered.

Of course, TikTok may not have to actually win this latest legal challenge to remain in operation, it understands. If Trump loses the November election, the new administration could take a different tactic with regard to how it handles the TikTok situation, perhaps even rescinding the order entirely.

Setting our dive into Palantir’s gross margins aside for another day, Sumo Logic filed to go public this morning. The Redwood City-based, former startup raised around $340 million while private, according to Crunchbase data.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Sumo Logic parses information collected from its customers’ enterprise apps and integrations to help them pinpoint operational and security issues and lets them dashboard additional elements as they wish. The company claims in its S-1 that its code is “continuous intelligence,” which it brands as “a new category of software.”

Our own Ron Miller summarized Sumo Logic as a “cloud data analytics and log analysis company” when it raised a $110 million Series G last May. At the time, it was valued at north of $1 billion, making it a unicorn.

Sumo Logic’s IPO has been in its plans for some time. We can see this in a 2017 TechCrunch headline noting that Sumo had then raised $75 million, and was “on path” to a public offering. So, how healthy is the company, and what have its investors bought with about a third of a billion dollars in capital? Let’s find out.

Sumo Logic’s financial performance

Up top: Sumo Logic operates on a fiscal calendar that ends January 31 of each calendar year. This is super standard for SaaS companies as it allows the firm to not wrap its year during the holiday period. This is good for sales teams and so forth.

It’s time to mobilize for early-bird savings on passes to the all-virtual TC Sessions Mobility 2020, which takes place October 6-7. Prices will continue to increase as the event draws near. Buy your pass before September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) and you’ll save $100 over full price.

This ain’t no two-day webinar, friends. We have the tech and people in place to create a virtual experience that lives up to the high standards we set for our in-person events. You’ll tune in and interact with the leading mobility makers, investors, movers and shakers. Check out our speakers here.

Expect in-depth interviews, panel discussions and insight on crucial trends in autonomous vehicles, electrification, shared mobility and beyond. Plus, we’ve added a pitch-off this year — stay tuned to learn how early-stage mobility startups can apply to compete.

Networking is an essential part of TC Sessions: Mobility, and we’ve built time for it right into our event agenda (yep, we’re adding more cool stuff to in the coming weeks). The virtual aspect makes this the first time the global mobility community can participate in this conference. Now you can network with mobility startups and investors around the world.

Want to simplify, amplify and organize your networking? We supercharged CrunchMatch, our AI-powered networking platform, to help you connect and schedule 1:1 video meetings with the people you want to meet — based on mutual goals and business interests. And the upgraded algorithm makes those matches faster and more precise.

TC Sessions: Mobility may be virtual and yes, it will look and feel different. But virtual or not, the opportunities waiting to be discovered are very real. Look at what your peers have said about their TC Sessions: Mobility experience.

“People want to be around what’s interesting and learn what trends and issues they need to pay attention to. Even large companies like GM and Ford are there, because they’re starting to see the trend move toward mobility. They want to learn from the experts, and TC Sessions: Mobility has all the experts.” — Melika Jahangiri, vice president at Wunder Mobility.

“TC Sessions Mobility offers several big benefits. First, networking opportunities that result in concrete partnerships. Second, the chance to learn the latest trends and how mobility will evolve. Third, the opportunity for unknown startups to connect with other mobility companies and build brand awareness.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking

Nothing but opportunity awaits at TC Sessions Mobility 2020 on October 6-7. But if you want to get the best price, buy your pass before the early-bird offer expires September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). It’s time to mobilize and save.

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