Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Aurora, the autonomous vehicle technology startup backed by Amazon, is expanding into Texas as it aims to accelerate the development of self-driving trucks.

The company said it plans to test commercial routes in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area with a mix of Fiat Chrysler Pacifica minivans and Class 8 trucks. A small fleet of Pacificas will arrive first. The trucks will be on the road in Texas by the end of the year, according to the company.

Aurora’s Texas office, which will staff about two dozen people, will be mostly comprised of new hires. Aurora said it’s hiring for a variety of roles, including technicians, team leads, truck drivers and vehicle operators.

Aurora is developing a full-stack solution for self-driving vehicles, which it calls the “Driver.” Since it launched in 2017, the startup has said its self-driving stack — the combined suite of software and hardware that provides the brains for an AV — could be applied to any vehicle. However, Aurora’s partnerships and public comments in those first two years centered on robotaxis, not logistics.

That started to change last year. In October 2019, Aurora wrote a blog post prioritizing the development of autonomous trucks over cars. In recent months, the company’s co-founders have talked more openly about making trucks a priority.

“While the Driver will ultimately move both people and goods, our first commercial product will be in trucking — where the market is largest today, the unit economics are best, and the level of service requirements is most accommodating,” the company wrote in a blog post Monday.

While the unit economics were a driving factor, the company says its acquisition of lidar company Blackmore and the integration of that tech in its self-driving stack, was made the shift to trucks possible. Aurora has said its FirstLight Lidar gives it a crucial competitive advantage in high-speed self-driving.

Self-driving trucks was once considered a niche category within the autonomous vehicle technology industry. That’s changed as companies have started to better understand the difficult unit economics of robotaxis, not to mention the complexity of operations.

Self-driving trucks have their own challenges. However, the growing consensus is that the path to profitability is clearer.

Let me lead with the news: After more than eight years as TechCrunch’s COO, I am leaving on August 21. My decision is as much about my appetite for a green field as it is a recognition that TechCrunch’s team is ready to put a fresh stamp on our remarkable brand.

TechCrunch’s leadership is now in the hands of Matthew Panzarino, our editor-in-chief, and Joey Hinson, our director of business operations. They are seasoned TechCrunchers and deeply respected by the team. I am confident that they will make brilliant progress on all that TechCrunch means to the startup world and beyond.

Ready as I am to move on, I have to say I will really miss this place and my wonderful colleagues. I came to TechCrunch back in 2012 thinking I had a lot to offer; what I discovered was that TechCrunch had far more to offer me. 

It’s rare to work on a brand that has such a clear and purposeful reason for being. At TechCrunch, the mission is to help startup founders make sense of their perilous journey by providing breaking news and analysis, startup data, and in-person events – all with a sense of fun and endless curiosity. 

That mission has a huge impact. Personally, I have lost count of the founders who told me that TechCrunch inspired them to start a company. TechCrunch has over 20 million readers in a hot month, which I take as a good sign for the future of entrepreneurship.  And to date, the 902 companies that participated in Battlefield, our signature startup competition, have raised $9 billion and produced 115 exits, most recent among those being Postmates. In that way and many others, TechCrunch delivers.

It’s no secret that media, especially the journalistic variety, is a tough business. I came to TechCrunch firm in the view that a strong editorial mission and editorial integrity are the twin foundations of any journalist-driven business success. It’s easy for short-term business considerations to chip away those principals, but one of my key roles has been to hold the line. Editorial crews are at their best when they have the brand’s lead and their business colleagues have their back, even as they dance through the ever shifting media revenue game. That is how we rolled for the past eight years.

As a result, the editorial team is TechCrunch’s’ crown jewel. Under Matthew Panzarino, they have become a globally respected journalistic force as well as one of the most multi-talented and productive teams anywhere in media. Jaws drop to hear that our 30-member editorial crew not only writes 30-40 stories a day but programs events around the world, produces podcasts and videos, and as of last year started a new membership-based editorial operation, Extra Crunch. Then of course there is The List, which launched last week. That astonishing productivity is a credit to Matthew’s gradual work to fine-grit away the rough spots at TechCrunch and brush in new coats of talent, process, and mentorship. 

If any media business and product team deserved a byline, it would be TechCrunch’s. You probably don’t know their names but they make it possible for the editors to lead the brand. I knew when I came to TechCrunch that the product, sales, and marketing and event staffing  would never be anything but small, sometimes even just “teams” of one. Today, they number no more than our editorial group, and that means every person has to take responsibility not only for their own work but what’s happening to their left and right. It works. As a colleague once remarked, “the ball never hits the floor at TechCrunch.” That’s a credit to a shirt-sleeves-up leadership that is highly inventive, pivots quickly, and has lots of laughs. 

I saw the first glimmers of all that back at Disrupt SF in 2012, when Joey Hinson, our director of business operations, managed in a matter of hours to find two giant HVACs we urgently needed to cool the stage in the venue. Why? Because it was really hot (as in 90 degrees hot) and Mark Zuckerberg might have bailed on his marquee interview if we did not cool things off. Reputation disaster averted. Joey and I have been close partners ever since, and we’ve successfully kept abreast of the ever-shifting revenue game across digital media, events and as of last year subscriptions. Thanks in part to Joey, TechCrunch is a significantly bigger business than it was eight years ago, and our corporate owners (AOL, Oath, and Verizon Media) have taken many cues from TechCrunch innovations.

Many have been brain storms from Alexandra Ames, who runs event marketing and epitomizes the high-return on collaborative work at TechCrunch. In 2018, Alexandra’s top objective was to move 10,000 passes for TechCrunch’s flagship Disrupt SF event. That was 2x prior years. With just one person on her team, Alex relied on her mastery of the TechCrunch organization and its audience — as well as our corporate colleagues — to marshal the editorial posts, social posting, search engine marketing, partnerships and PR to hit the number. I was proud to write marketing posts for Alexandra. She hit the number and Tim Armstrong, then CEO of  Oath, told his management team, “So damn awesome to see TC at a scale very few ever thought it could get to…amazing.”  

I could go on, and I will, for one more very important thing. It’s doubly rewarding when a brand has a moral compass, when it stands for something more than a feed of stories. It took an idiotic, sexist 60-second hackathon demo at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2013 to help TechCrunch find its bearings. We woke up to our responsibilities around diversity and inclusion as a result of that blow-up, and we gradually figured out what TechCrunch should do about it. The key insight was that TechCrunch itself – our powerful editorial, events, and data (CrunchBase) platform – was the core superpower we could use to help Silicon Valley make progress. Back in 2014, we launched Include, a series of projects aimed at helping under-represented groups gain visibility in Silicon Valley and break down the barriers to their participation. 

We knew at the outset that Include would take a lot of extra effort and focus from a very busy team. The fact that this year we will launch Include 3.0 shows our team’s conviction that we can always do better. At the same time, it’s worth pointing out that the Include framework has successfully built new norms at TechCrunch, such as diversity in casting for event speakers and selection of founders for the Startup Battlefield competition. Since 2016, we have set the pace in the tech event world by publishing an annual report that shows how we’ve done as far as choosing speakers and founders from outside the legacy pale of Silicon Valley as well as report cards on various initiatives. It also does the important job of keeping us accountable to ourselves, our attendees and our readers.

If you asked TechCrunchers what they are most proud of, many would point to the Include effort. I would too. It represents the best of TechCrunch’s dynamism as a brand as well as the team’s capacity and teamwork. 

As for me, in the short term I am working on a pro bono event focused on how many rapidly advancing technologies, especially various shades of AI, will influence the next generation of accessibility and assistive tech for people who are blind or visually impaired. You’ll be reading more about that soon on TechCrunch. 

I wish my TechCrunch and Verizon Media colleagues all the best on the road ahead. 

And for all the wonderful founders, VCs and others I’ve met over the course of my watch at TechCrunch, the pleasure has been all mine. Thank you for everything.

Today Jamf, a software company that helps other firms manage their Apple devices, raised its IPO price range.

The company had previously targeted a $17 to $19 per-share range. A new SEC filing from the firm today details a far higher $21 to $23 per-share IPO price interval.

Jamf still intends to sell up to 18.4 million shares in its debut, including 13.5 million in primary stock, 2.5 million shares from existing shareholders and an underwriter option worth 2.4 million shares. The whole whack at $21 to $23 per share would tally between $386.4 million and $423.2 million, though not all those funds would flow to the company.

At the low and high-end of its new IPO range, Jamf is worth between $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion, steep upgrades from its prior valuation range of $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion.

Jamf follows in the footsteps of recent IPOs like nCino, Vroom and others in seeing demand for its public offering allow its pricing to track higher the closer it gets to its public offering. Such demand from public-market investors indicates there is ample demand for debut shares in mid-2020, a fact that could spur other companies to the exit market.

Coinbase, Airbnb and DoorDash are three such companies that are expected to debut in the next year’s time, give or take a quarter or two.

Results, multiples

In anticipation of the Jamf debut that should come this week, let’s chat about the company’s recent performance.

Observe the following table from the most-recent Jamf S-1/A:

From even a quick glance we can learn much from this data. We can see that Jamf is growing, has improving gross margins and has managed to swing from an operating loss to operating profit in Q2 2020, compared to Q2 2019. And, for you fans out there of adjusted metrics, that Jamf managed to generate more non-GAAP operating income in its most recent period than the year-ago quarter.

In more precise terms:

• Jamf grew from 26.5% to 29.0% on a year-over-year basis in Q2 2020
• Its gross margin grew by 6% in gross terms, and 8.3% in relative terms
• Its non-GAAP operating income grew 123.4%, to 150.9% in Q2 2020 compared to the year-ago quarter

Profits! Growth! Software! Improving margins! It’s not a huge surprise that Jamf managed to bolster its IPO price range.

Finally, for the SaaS-heads out there, the following:

This data lets us have a little fun. Recall that we have seen possible valuations for Jamf at IPO that started at $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion, and now include $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion? With our two ARR ranges for the end of Q2, we can now come up with eight ARR multiples for Jamf, from the low-end of its initial IPO price estimate, to the top-end of its new range.

Here they are:

• Multiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 8.3x
• Multiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 8.2x
• Multiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 9.3x
• Multiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 9.2x
• Multiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 10.3x
• Multiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 10.1x
• Multiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 11.3x
• Multiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 11.2x

From that perspective, the pricing changes feel a bit more modest, even if they work out to a huge spread on a valuation basis.

Regardless, this is the current state of the Jamf IPO. Rackspace also filed a new S-1/A today, but we can’t find anything useful in it. A bit like the Jamf S-1/A from Friday. Perhaps we’ll get a new Rackspace document soon with pricing notes.

And, of course, like the rest of the world we await the Palantir S-1 with bated breath. Consider that our white whale.

Colin O’Donnell was already rethinking the notion of what makes cities and communities function even before the COVID-19 epidemic swept through the U.S. and revealed some of the cracks in centuries-old structures of urban life.

O’Donnell was part of the early wave of urban tech innovation, which began to rise about six years ago. He co-founded Intersection, a company manufacturing digital kiosks for public transportation services, which was eventually rolled up in one of the first big acquisitions from the Alphabet-owned subsidiary Sidewalk Labs .

While the initial optimism for — and interest in — technology’s ability to reshape the built environment has stumbled thanks to both Sidewalk’s data collection overreach in its initial Toronto project and the financial stresses that the COVID-19 epidemic has placed on cities across the country, experiments with how to integrate technology into society more intelligently continue on the margins. And investments in real estate technology continue to rise.

O’Donnell’s new company, Kibbo, takes advantage of both trends. The San Francisco-based startup aims to upgrade the American trailer park, making it a network of intentional communities for the remote-working, previously urban professionals (PUPs?).

To ensure that these remote working puppies (I’m going with it) can navigate the American roadways in the manner to which they’re accustomed, Kibbo pitches exclusive RV parks outfitted with amenities like kitchen supplies and basic staples like coffee and snacks, a gym and recreational facilities for congregating. The company is now taking applications for membership and will be charging $1,000 per month to access its locations of sites near major national parks across the West Coast.

For members who don’t have their own vehicles, Kibbo offers access to top-of-the-line Mercedes Sprinters outfitted with the latest in #vanlife amenities. The vans cost roughly $1,000 per month to rent.

Beginning in the fall, members who get past Kibbo’s virtual velvet rope and gain access to the company’s communities will be able to visit spots in Ojai, Zion, Black Rock Desert and Big Sur. Those locations will be complemented by spots in urban cores in Los Angeles, San Francisco and somewhere in Silicon Valley, according to a statement from O’Donnell.

“With the pressure of months of quarantine fueling the desire for people to get out of their expensive apartments in the city to explore nature and connect with people, we now have the demand and opportunity to rethink how we live, work, have fun, and find meaning,” he said. “We get to rethink the urban experience and define what we want cities of the future to really look like.”

With Kibbo’s launch, would-be puppies (still going with it) attracted to its vision of a network of community spaces shared by professionals whose companies have embraced remote work, can now pay $100 to apply to be part of the network.

The company is tapping in to a part of the American zeitgeist that’s nearly as old as the country itself. From its inception, people came (and colonized) the country in an effort to create communities that would reflect their values and beliefs and afford them an opportunity to flourish (at the expense of others).

It’s also working off of the glamping phenomenon that netted HipCamp a valuation over $100 million and grabbed Tentrr an $11 million round of financing. HipCamp offers a database of campsites that earns money by taking a commission from the bookings it facilitates to over 300,000 sites across the U.S.

Like Tentrr, Kibbo is using private land to set up sites accessible to membership. But unlike Tentrr, Kibbo owns its own real estate and is setting up its sites to be part of a community rather than just an experience for travelers looking for a different option from a city vacation or competing for campsites at national parks.

Kibbo also thinks of itself as developing a new kind of roving cities comprised of a certain kind of membership.

“Unlike, traditional top-down designed and built real estate developments, Kibbo is setting out to build the first of the next generation of cities: flexible, reconfigurable, designed and defined by the people that live in it, off the grid and sustainable,” O’Donnell said. 

That’s what attracted Urban.us investor Shaun Abrahamson.

“In the short and medium term, I think this looks like a specialty part of the RV market. However, our sense is that RV experience was designed for vacations or retirees and trends like remote work and van life suggest there is demand for different kind of infrastructure and experience… Our longer term interest is climate and affordable housing,” Abrahamson said.  

Climate change and the resulting flooding, fires and rising sea levels are going to change the kinds of infrastructure to support permanent housing, Abrahamson said.

“Van life is benefitting from mobile infrastructure — solar + batteries make off-grid easier. As prices come down, mobile housing and infrastructure will become more attractive. And Kibbo is filling in other lightweight pieces of infrastructure related to things like sanitation and security and, yes, they’ll layer in experiences, too,” he said.  

Both Abrahamson and O’Donnell think there will be more nomadic communities far beyond vacations and retirement, and Kibbo is the firm’s attempt to tap into that trend. It’s a vision for a future of cities that doesn’t include them, and one that O’Donnell, a New York transplant living in a communal space in San Francisco, embraces.

“While Kibbo offers an exciting lifestyle from day one, we’re making a bet that the future of cities is electric, autonomous, distributed, renewable and user-generated,” O’Donnell said.

Insider, a Singapore-based startup that develops software to help clients make marketing decisions, plans to launch in the United States after raising a $32 million Series C. The round was led by Riverwood Capital, with participation from Sequoia India, Wamda and Endeavor Catalyst.

Founded in 2012, the company says its SaaS for multichannel marketing and customer engagement is currently used by more than 800 brands, including Singapore Airlines, Marks and Spencers, Virgin, Uniqlo, Samsung and Estee Lauder.

Insider’s Series C brings its total funding so far to $42 million. In addition to entering the U.S., the new capital will be used on sales and marketing, hiring more engineers for its research and development team and adding new features to its platform.

One noteworthy aspect of the company is that half of its executive team, including co-founder and chief executive officer Hande Cilingir, are women. The company runs a program called Young Engineers that provides coding classes to high school students, especially girls, and it plans to expand to primary school-age kids as well.

Cilingir told TechCrunch that Insider’s AI-based technology differentiates it from older, larger competitors like Salesforce because it is able to integrate customer data from different marketing channels, including offline ones, to help companies make better predictions about customer behavior. Insider’s analytics help brands coordinate campaigns across different platforms, including the web, mobile apps, messaging apps, email and other channels.

“Insider, on top of all those solutions, creates a one-stop shop because you can overcome operational bottlenecks because of the technology, but at the same time, we are still offering all of the features, including personalization technologies, that online businesses need,” she said.

Helping brands create new marketing strategies is crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, e-commerce companies have seen a surge in traffic because of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, but need to figure out how to make that translate into sales. Meanwhile, other verticals, like travel and hospitality, have to find new ways of making revenue.

The company has teams in 24 countries across Europe, Asia and the Middle East to support brands’ localization strategies. Even though Insider’s software does not need to be adapted in order to work in different countries, Cilingir said marketing differs widely between cultures.

For example, in Indonesia, direct sales are important, but in Japan, sales operations are often dependent on agencies within a company. Insider’s customer support teams serve as a complement to its software, helping clients use it to create marketing strategies.

In a press statement about the investment, Sequoia India principal Pieter Kemps said, “We liked the Insider team from the first days, but have been positively surprised by their highly efficient go-to-market engine. The quality of customer interactions, combined with exceptional product and technology, has enabled Insider to stand out among the many point-solutions out there—and build up a very impressive list of customer logos.”

Google Maps is making it easier for bikeshare users to navigate through their city with an update to Maps now rolling out across 10 major markets. Already, Google Maps could point users to bike-sharing locations and it has long since offered cycling directions between any two points. The new update, however, will combine both walking and biking directions in order to provide end-to-end navigation between docked bikeshare locations.

That is, Google Maps will first provide detailed walking directions to your nearest bikeshare location before providing turn-by-turn directions to the bikeshare closest to your destination. It then offers the final leg of the trip between the bikeshare drop-off and your destination as walking directions.

Before, users planning to use a bikeshare would have to create three separate trips — one to the first bikeshare to pick up a bike, the second to the bikeshare drop-off point, and then walking directions to their final destination. Now, you can plan this outing as one single trip in Google Maps in the supported markets.

In addition to the new end-to-end navigation, Google Maps in some cities will also display links that allow you to open the relevant bikeshare mobile app in order to book and unlock the bike.

The feature is rolling out over the weeks ahead in 10 cities, in partnership with transportation information company Ito World and supported bikeshare partners. These include the following markets:

• Chicago, U.S. (Divvy/Lyft)
• New York City, U.S. (Citi Bike/Lyft)
• San Francisco Bay Area, U.S. (Bay Wheels/Lyft)
• Washington, DC, U.S. (Capital Bikeshare/Lyft)
• London, England (Santander Cycles/TfL)
• Mexico City, Mexico (Ecobici)
• Montreal, Canada (BIXI/Lyft)
• Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (Bike Itaú)
• São Paulo, Brazil (Bike Itaú)
• Taipei and New Taipei City, Taiwan (YouBike)

Google says it’s actively working to add more partners to bring the functionality to more cities in the months ahead.

The launch of the new feature again one-ups Apple Maps, which recently announced it was catching up with Google Maps by adding a dedicated cycling option within Apple Maps that will optimize routes for cyclists. Apple’s new biking directions can even show if a route includes challenging hills or there’s a bike repair shop nearby, if desired.

Ito World also noted in March it had partnered with Apple to integrate bikeshare data into Apple Maps, allowing iPhone owners to find bikeshare locations across 179 cities.

But Google continues to offer more detailed bikeshare information in its Google Maps product, having over the years launched features like dockless bike and scooter integration with Lime in more than 100 cities and real-time docked bikeshare information in select cities to show availability of bikes for rent.

Offering better biking directions has become even more of a competitive product in recent months for mapping providers, due to the coronavirus outbreak’s impact on travel and transportation. Some commuters, for example, have shifted to using bikes for their trips instead of relying on public transportation, like buses and subways. Google notes this impact has also been reflected in growing worldwide search interest for phrases like “bike repair shop near me,” which hit an all-time high in July — more than double what it was last year.

The updated bikeshare navigation is rolling out in the coming weeks, says Google.

Earlier today, news broke that Xpeng, a China-based electric vehicle company has raised $500 million, adding to its 2019-era $400 million Series C. The round, a Series C+ investment, brings the company’s capital raised to date to around $2.2 billion.

Xpeng’s huge fundraise comes on the heels of a recent boom in the value of some public EV companies, including Tesla, Nio and Nikola. Speculation into the future value (and therefore present-day worth) of EV companies has led to their ranking on lists of most-popular stocks with some retail investors, underscoring their popularity.

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You might anticipate that the public-market enthusiasm is helping drive outsized private investment into global EV startups. After all, it’s often true that public market activity has an impact on private market enterprise; if shares of a particular industry rise sharply, the value of their private cognates can similarly rise, and investment in the sector can pick up tempo.

Upon reading about the Xpeng round this morning, that the event was likely part-and-parcel of rising deal volume for private EV companies was our first hunch. In honor of scratching our own itches with data whenever possible, TechCrunch decided to dig and find out.

So, is public market optimism in EV companies driving more investment into private EV companies?

What the data say

To test whether EV investment is rising or falling amongst private companies, The Exchange ran a range of queries today against Crunchbase data, looking at rounds for companies marked as “electric vehicle” firms in its data, discounting crowdfunding, secondary market activity, all post-IPO rounds and any other non-equity rounds.

Here’s what we found:

• 2020: $3.61 billion from 63 rounds [query]
• 2019: $6.98 billion from 151 rounds [query]
  
  

Effx, a startup that aims to give developers better insights into their microservice architectures, today announced that it has raised a $3.9 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins and Cowboy Ventures. Other investors and angels in this round include Tokyo Black, Essence VC Fund, Jason Warner, Michael Stoppelman, Vijay Pandurangan and Miles Grimshaw.

The company’s founder and CEO, Joey Parsons, was an early employee at Rackspace and then first went to Flipboard and then Airbnb a few years ago, where he built out the company’s site reliability team.

“When I first joined Airbnb, it’s the middle of 2015, it’s already a unicorn, already a well-known entity in the industry, but they had nobody there that was really looking after cloud infrastructure and reliability there […],” he told me. The original Airbnb platform was built on Ruby on Rails and wasn’t able to scale to the demands of the growing platform anymore. “Myself and a lot of people that were really smarter than me from the team there got together and we decided at that point, ‘okay, let’s let’s break apart this monolith or monorail that we call it and break it up into microservices.’ ”

But microservices obviously come with their own challenges — they constantly change, after all, and those changes are reflected in different UIs — and that’s essentially where the idea for Effx came from. The idea behind the product is to give engineers a single pane of glass to get all of the information they need about the microservices that have been deployed across their organization.

At Airbnb, Parsons’ team built out a small metastore to track what each service did, who owned it, what language it was written in and whether it was in scope for PCI or GDPR, for example. After leaving Airbnb, Parsons went to Kleiner as an entrepreneur in residence and started to work on building out this idea of bringing to more companies some of the ideas of what the team built at Airbnb. He raised a small amount of money from Kleiner to hire the initial engineering team in 2019 and then started testing the product with a first set of pilot customers earlier this year.

In its early iterations, the product relied on engineers writing YAML files, which the product could then consume, but few engineers love writing YAML files and the value in a tool like this comes from being able to automate a lot of this work. So the team built out integrations with common service orchestration platforms, including Kubernetes, but also AWS Lambda and ECS.

“What we’ve found is that most companies that have been moving towards microservices are using some combination of those platforms — maybe one, maybe two, maybe all three — to orchestrate things,” Parsons explained. “So we built really heavy integrations into those platforms to where in Kubernetes we can drop a client in there, it automatically discovers all your services, populates as much as it can into the catalog from that and then does the same thing for an AWS Lambda or ECS perspective where we consume data from those platforms and pull data in.”

As Parsons noted, the value here isn’t just in getting that single pane of glass, but once you have all of this information and these services’ dependencies and combine it with your CI/CD data, it also becomes a new tool for troubleshooting as it helps you see which services changed before something broke. To even better enable this, teams can add links to their runbooks, documentation and version control tools too.

Parsons tells me that the team is currently in the process of closing more pilots and hiring more engineers as it works to build out its service, add more integrations and find new ways to help its customers make use of all the data it gathers.

“As the future of what we’re building comes more into fruition, the most important thing for us right now is to really deliver on the value that our existing product delivers to our end users as a platform to build more business,” Parsons explained. “I think that in the long run, the power of this feed and getting the data that’s behind it ends up being a really interesting mode for us simply because there’s a lot of great insights that you can build for organizations based on like the patterns and the cadence of information that shows up in this feed, to help teams really understand why there’s that incident that happens every Tuesday at midnight UTC.”

There are more promising signs from ongoing efforts to develop a vaccine that’s effective in preventing COVID-19: Two early trials, one from the University of Oxford, and one from a group of researchers in Wuhan funded in part by the National Key R&D Programme of China. Both early trials showed efficacy in increasing the presence of antibody responses to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that leads to COVID-19, and also indicated that these prospective vaccines were safe to administer based on available information.

The University of Oxford study is one of the leading vaccine development efforts in the world, and among those that are furthest along in development. The results of their study covered 1,077 participants, all of whom were health adults aged between 18 and 55 with no prior confirmed history of having contracted SARS-CoV-2. That’s important because they received double randomized trials of the vaccine candidate, or an existing vaccine for meningitis as a control acting as a placebo. The results showed that across the group, 100 percent of the participants had demonstrated neutralizing antibody responses by the end of the course, which include a booster does.

Additionally, while some participants exhibited side effects, including “pain, feeling feverish, chills, muscle ache, headache and malaise,” none of these represented what the researchers consider series reactions, and these were also mitigated with use of paracetamol (standard painkillers available over the counter). Patient reactions were monitored for 28 days following the administration of the vaccine.

Oxford’s team is now ready to move on to its Phase 3 trial, which is a large-scale human trial that is effectively the last major step before it moves on to potential approval, production and distribution. That’s a time consuming process, but it does put this development on pace for a remarkably fast research and development process relative to prior vaccines.

Meanwhile the study in China covered health adults 18 or older, and included 603 participants, screened down to 508 who received either the vaccine candidate or a placebo. The participants also showed no adverse reactions, according to the researchers, and they’re also now likely to move on to a phase 3 development program.

Earlier this month, Moderna also announced promising early results from its phase 1 trial, but that was limited to just 45 participants between 18 and 55, and indicated some potentially serious side effects that will need to be watched in later, larger trials. These new results, while also early and requiring further development and research, are much more encouraging given the scale of both trials.

It is very early to make too many assumptions about what these early trials indicate, however. For instance, we still don’t really know how effective antibodies are in patients that have recovered from having COVID-19 once, so a lot more investigation is required by scientists in better understanding the efficacy of antibodies, and potentially vaccines, over the long term.

The coronavirus pandemic and related government lockdowns have led to a surge in online gaming — particularly on social platforms where people can connect with real-life friends in a virtual venue. We’re already heard of Fortnite birthday parties, Roblox playdates, and Animal Crossing meetups taking place online amid the pandemic. Now, Roblox is launching a new feature called “Party Place” to directly cater to the growing demand among users for a dedicated, private place to host virtual events.

The company’s new “Party Place” venue is based on the technology the gaming company built to accommodate its own virtual events, including its 7th Annual Bloxy Awards and the One World: Together At Home concert, hosted in April in collaboration with Lady Gaga.

The venue itself doesn’t offer any activities or games itself, but rather serves as a private place for Roblox users to gather — for example, for a virtual birthday party, a remote learning activity with classmates, for virtual playdates, or anything else. From Party Place, the group can chat and hang out as they decide what Roblox game they plan to play next.

The product is in beta testing, according to the Roblox website, and has seen only around 45.3K visits since its launch last week. Likely, many of these visits were just from curious kids poking around in public area as you can today join the Party Place venue without a private server, if you want to just see venue. Roblox, however, says it’s making private servers available for free in Party Place, so parents and kids can create a place where only those friends they directly invite can join and play.

Roblox has been doing particularly well as the pandemic has forced children to stay at home under lockdown. The entertainment platform now has over 120 million active monthly players and, as of June, surpassed a milestone of $1.5 billion in lifetime player spending, according to a report from Sensor Tower. It hit the new record only 7 months after reaching its $1 billion milestone — a surge in consumer spend attributed directly to the global COVID-19 pandemic and the related growth in entertainment platforms and social gaming.

In March, Roblox revenue grew 28% month-over-month to $69.8 million, the report found. In April, revenue grew 34% to $93.2 million. And by May, sales hit close to $103 million.

Roblox had already begun catering to players’ interest in social gaming with its launch of its “Play Together” game sort in April, which made it easier for players to find those games where you socialize with others — like visiting a virtual shopping mall, going camping, or riding virtual water slides, for example. These games also offer an option for private servers VIP servers, often for a small fee paid in Roblox’s virtual currency, Robux, which renewed on a subscription basis until you canceled.

Of course, the company isn’t the only one developing products in response to user demand for online “hangout” spots in virtual worlds. Fortnite, for instance, introduced “Party Royale,” a game mode offering a weapons-free party island featuring mini-games and, sometimes, even live concerts. Its Travis Scott concert was hosted in the game, attracting 12.3 million concurrent players at its peak.

For today’s younger players — the COVID kids, so to speak — platforms like Fortnite and Roblox are becoming their own version of a social network. The kids don’t just go online to play. They socialize, chat, and hang out with a mix of real-life friends and virtual ones, blurring the lines between online and offline in ways that traditional social networks, like Facebook, do not.