Category: UNCATEGORIZED

The European Commission is putting pressure on Netflix and other streaming platforms to switch to standard definition during periods of peak demand as the coronavirus crisis puts unprecedented load on Internet infrastructure.

Across the European Union — a region with around 445M citizens —  it’s likely many millions of office workers will switch to teleworking, as countries impose quarantine measures and instruct people to work from home wherever possible. The European Commission itself, which employs around 32,000 people, moved all non-critical staff to remote work at the start of this week.

Yesterday Thierry Breton, the commissioner for the EU’s internal market who is also a former CEO of France Telecom, tweeted that he’d spoke to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings to make the case for standard definition streaming by default during the COVID-19 public health crisis.

A spokesman for Breton told us the Commission is inviting streaming platforms to follow the lead of telecom providers and consider adapting the throughput of video streaming, such as by temporarily moving to SD rather than HD streaming — at least for the most critical working hours.

In Breton’s call with Netflix a number of potential measures were discussed — per the spokesman — including an automatic switch to standard definition during peaks of Internet activities on impacted geographies, which the Commission says represents a “responsible option”, that will help secure telecommunications infrastructures while “keeping offering the best service to users and consumers, with no disruption”.

Many content and application providers are already applying this sort of flexibility measure, it added.

The Commission is also asking telecoms operators that provide Internet services to take steps to prevent and mitigate the impacts of impending network congestion, by inviting them to make use of “possibilities” offered by EU net neutrality rules.

Earlier this week Vodafone reported a 50% surge in Internet traffic in some European countries as scores of people logged on from home. “Covid-19 is already having a significant impact on our services and placing a greater demand on our network,” the company said in a statement, adding that: “We should expect this trend of data growth to continue.”

At the same time the Commission is calling for Internet users in the region to make responsible use of online recreational activities — such as by opting for settings that reduce data consumption, including using Wi-Fi (rather than mobile data) and choosing lower resolution for content whenever possible.

It wants joint action from all stakeholders to ease the pressure on infrastructure and facilitate remote working and online education at a time of region-wide public health crisis.

In a statement Breton added: “Europe and the whole world are facing an unprecedented situation. Governments have taken measures to reduce social interactions to contain the spread of Covid-19, and to encourage remote working and online education. Streaming platforms, telecom operators and users, we all have a joint responsibility to take steps to ensure the smooth functioning of the Internet during the battle against the virus propagation.”

It’s not clear exactly what wiggle room the Commission envisages in EU net neutrality rules for prioritizing certain types of traffic over others during the coronavirus crisis.

We asked Breton’s spokesman for clarification on this point but he responded by emphasizing that the Commission is hoping to steer off such a scenario, telling us: “By calling for all stakeholders’ responsibility (platforms/telcos/users) we are proactively ensuring smooth functioning of the Internet so that the question of prioritization does not need to be asked.”

We also reached out to Netflix to ask what steps it’s taking to help manage bandwidth demand in the region. At the time of writing the company had not responded.

Breton’s spokesman said the commissioner is due to hold a follow-up call with Hastings in the coming days.

More broadly, the Commission is working on setting up a reporting mechanism to ensure regular monitoring of the Internet traffic situation in each Member State in order to be able to respond swiftly to capacity issues, liaising on this with the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications and with the support of national regulatory authorities.

We’ve also contacted YouTube for comment on the Commission’s call for proactive action from streaming platforms to help manage increased demand on Internet infrastructure.

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Today we’re taking a look at the world of esports venture capital investment, largely through the lens of preliminary data that we’ll caveat given how reported VC data lags reality. That phenomenon is likely doubly true in the current moment, as COVID-19 absorbs all news cycles and some venture rounds’ announcements are delayed even more than usual.

All the same, the data we do have paints a picture of a change in esports venture investment, one sufficient in size to indicate that an esports VC slowdown could be afoot. As with all early looks, we’re extending ourselves to reach a conclusion. But… no risk, no reward.

We’ll start by looking at Q1 2020 esports venture totals to date, compare them to year-ago results, and then peek at Q4 2019’s results and its year-ago comparison to get a handle on what else has happened lately in the niche. The picture that the quarters draw will help us understand how esports investing is starting a year that isn’t going as anyone expected.

Venture results

Today we’re using Crunchbase data, looking at both global and U.S.-specific venture totals in both round and dollar volume. To get a picture of the competitive gaming world, we’re examining investments into companies that are tagged as “esports” related in the Crunchbase database. Given that this is a somewhat wide cut, the data below is more directional than precise and should be treated as such.

A new study whose results were published in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents has found early evidence that the combination of hydroxychloroquine, a popular anti-malaria drug known under the trade name Planequil, and antibiotic azithromycin (aka Zithromax or Azithrocin) could be especially effective in treating the COVID-19 coronavirus and reducing the duration of the virus in patients.

The researchers performed a study on 30 confirmed COVID-19 patients, treating each with either hydroxychloroquine on its own, a combination of the medicine with the antibiotic, as well as a control group that received neither. The study was conducted after reports from treatment of Chinese patients indicated that this particular combo had efficacy in shortening the duration of infection in patients.

The patient mix included in the study included six who showed no symptoms whatsoever, as well as 22 who had symptoms in their upper respiratory tract (things like sneezing, headaches and sore throats, and eight who showed lower respiratory tract symptoms (mostly coughing). 20 of the 30 participants in the study received treatment, and the results showed that while hydroxycholoroquine was effective on its own as a treatment, when combined with azithromycin it was even more effective, and by a significant margin.

These results represent a limited study with a small number of patients, but they are promising, especially when combined with earlier reports from patients in China with the same treatment options. Researchers globally are testing a number of potential treatments, including a range of drugs used previously in the efforts to combat Ebola, SARS, HIV and other global outbreaks.

There are no confirmed effective treatments specifically for COVID-19 to date, but regulators and medical researchers everywhere are working hard to get through the process of testing and approvals in search of something that can at least reduce the duration or severity of symptoms in patents. Vaccine development is also underway, but any approved and effective COVID-19 vaccine is at least 12-18 months away, even with resources redirected towards developing one as fast as is safety possible.

As a former Jam City executive, Jill Wilson led teams behind some of the top-grossing gaming franchises, like Cookie Jam and Panda Pop. Now she’s running her own startup, Robin Games, where a team of mostly women is working to create a new niche in mobile entertainment they’re calling “lifestyle gaming.” As the name implies, the idea is to create a mobile gaming experience — in this case, fantasy gaming — that’s more like the sophisticated and stylish lifestyle content that’s popular today.

Robin Games is backed by $7 million in seed funding, the company announced on Thursday, as it made its public debut. The round was led by early-stage fund LVP, which has invested in other to game companies including Supercell, Playfish, and NaturalMotion. Additional investors in the oversubscribed round include 1Up Ventures, Alpha Edison, Everblue Management, firstminute Capital, Greycroft Tracker Fund, Hearst Ventures, and Third Kind Venture Capital.

“Traditionally in gaming, when you say ‘fantasy,’ you mean dragons and other mythical creatures, disproportionately built women, armies and battles and explosions and glory,” explained Wilson, Robin Games’ sole founder and CEO. “As a lifelong gamer, I love (most) of these themes, but traditional gamers are no longer in the majority. Thanks to the smartphone, everyone now has access to a gaming console in their pockets. We are expanding the definition of ‘fantasy’ for this modern wave of gamers, whose fantasies are just as diverse as they are,” she added.

Wilson clarified that she’s not meaning to stereotype women as not enjoying fantasy games about things like warriors and dragons. Instead, Robin Games aims to expand the types of fantasies being explored through gaming — including those mobile gaming has yet to include.

While the company isn’t yet announcing its first titles or specific details, like launch dates, the games are said to cover content you’d typically find in a lifestyle magazine, on an Instagram influencer’s profile, or on a lifestyle blog, for example.

“We are focused on developing games that are deeply sophisticated under the hood, with an elevated, real-world, approachable style that reflects more of the lifestyle content you’d previously see outside of gaming,” Wilson told TechCrunch.

All this will be wrapped up in the free-to-play business model that powers most top-grossing games. In addition, Robin Games’ strategy will allow it to expand to include a partnership strategy, which will diversify its revenue streams further down the road.

Wilson said the idea for Robin Games was something she had in mind for some time, as she was personally looking for games to like this to play herself — only to find they didn’t exist.

“I’ve always designed products for myself first and foremost, which allows me to deeply connect with what the end-user really wants — since the end-user is me,” said Wilson. “Recently, I realized that not only did we have a unique answer to a pretty major gap in the market, but also that the timing was right and, most importantly, that we could pull together the exact right team to execute this vision.”

The startup is currently a team of nine based in Venice Beach. Management is 80% women and everyone had worked together to make hit games in years prior. In terms of hiring, the company is focused on building out a diverse team in order to better realize its vision, Wilson said, and, more broadly, change the face of the gaming industry as it stands today.

“Our mission goes beyond filling a gap in the market. We’re really looking to shake up the games industry, not only redefining what a modern game team looks like, but also changing the definition itself of what it means to be a gamer,” noted Wilson.

In previous studies, female players have been shown to prefer match-3 and social farming games, among others, with fantasy and MMOs further down the list, and sports and shooting games last. But the types of games Robin Games is proposing don’t really fit into any one category that exists today, so it’s still unknown how female gamers will respond.

However, it makes sense to target this underserved market, given that women account for 46% of all U.S. game enthusiasts.  

“Jill Wilson and her incredible team are already further along than most developers starting out,” added Are Mack Growen, partner at LVP and member of Robin Games’ Board of Directors, about the firm’s investment. “This team has developed and operated some of the world’s most successful games for a decade, and now they have assembled to bring premium experiences to the massively underserved audience of women. In addition to their industry expertise, they fundamentally understand their audience and the ingredients for powerful entertainment. We are proud to have led their seed round and look forward to helping them redefine what it means to be a gamer.”

Uber — the on-demand transportation and food delivery behemoth — has been hit hard by the novel coronavirus pandemic. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said today in a call with investors that ride volume has gone down by as much as 70% in the hardest-hit cities like Seattle, and that’s before you consider the pauses in some of its services, and the dubious distinction of becoming one of the earliest proof-of-concepts of just how spreadable this virus really is.

But Khosrowshahi also told investors in an update that the company believes it is “well-positioned” to ride the troubles out even in the worst-case scenario of rides down by 80% for the year. And even as rides for passengers are down, it is also considering leveraging its network for delivering other things, such as medicine or basic goods.

“We already have contact in the health sector, we’ve got all of the processes that we need,” he said, referring to Uber Health.

He also said that the company had “ample liquidity.” The company said it currently has $10 billion of cash on hand, with $1.5 billion of that earmarked for M&A. If rides globally declined by as much as 80%, that would still leave $4 billion in the bank, he added. Otherwise by the end of the year Uber expects to have $6 billion in cash on hand.

You can hear a playback of the call here.

Everyone knows that press features don’t drive sustainable traffic. But they still matter for one simple reason: sales requires trust. Trust is transitive. And the press is trusted.

Press features validate the legitimacy of a company, lend it authority, and ultimately lead others to trust it more.

I’ve seen this first hand, having gone from being an unknown outsider to becoming the most popular expert in the world in my space — contributing articles to 14 publications and driving more than 37,000 prospective customers per month to my blog.

In this article, you’ll learn the steps I took over the last year to go from being unknown to expert, and how this strategy has helped me open doors and close deals. All from this simple strategy that I used to build my own authority in the industry and leverage the press that people trusted to build authority and build SEO.

I initially discovered this strategy out of frustration. The businesses that I was selling to didn’t trust me because I was an outsider. I didn’t have credibility in my industry. I didn’t have status symbols people associate with trustworthiness.

In fact, I had the opposite. I dropped out of high school in 10th grade. I never went to college. I had never worked for a big company. And our customers in the early days were a few small independents. So people didn’t trust me enough to trust that my technology would work for them. I’d often be denied sales opportunities as a result.

The question was, how could I turn that around and become trusted before the sales process begins? Because that, I suspected, was how I could start closing more deals. This strategy was my solution to those repeated frustrations and it has since lead to deals with billion-dollar brands and small brands alike. It even impressed people who ended up backing my company.

We’ve aggregated many of the world’s best growth marketers into one community. Twice a month we ask them to share their most effective growth tactics, and we compile them into this growth report.

This is how you stay up-to-date on growth marketing tactics — with advice that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Our community consists of 1,000 startup founders and VPs of growth from later-stage companies. We have 400 YC founders, plus senior marketers from companies including Medium, Docker, Invision, Intuit, Pinterest, Discord, Webflow, Lambda School, Perfect Keto, Typeform, Modern Fertility, Segment, Udemy, Puma, Cameo and Ritual.

You can participate in our community by joining Demand Curve’s marketing webinars, Slack group or marketing training program.

Without further ado, on to our community’s advice.

Use behavioral psychology for more referrals

Insights from Kristen Berman of Irrational Labs.

How much would you want to be paid to give your friend a knowingly bad restaurant recommendation? Likely a lot, if you value the friendship. This is called a “social norm,” and it prevents us from selling out our friends.

After yesterday’s news that the U.S. automakers would temporarily close their doors and the US President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to shift manufacturing capacity to meet equipment shortages, trading on the major markets was mixed investors adjust to a global slowdown in trade.

Warnings regarding the current economic situation are coming fast, and are increasingly dire. Several large domestic banks are now anticipating a double-digit percentage decline in GDP for the US in Q2. The equities market is still coming to grips with the new normal.

Thirty minutes into the morning here are the numbers:

• DJIA: dropped 1.87%, or 372.76 points to 19,526.16
• S&P 500: fell just under 1%, or 22.03, to 2,376.07
• Nasdaq Composite: was up 0.51%, or 35.50, to 7,025.34

Pushing back

Global efforts to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus are impacting economies around the world, with Europe announcing a huge bond buying program and the US Federal Reserve supporting money market funds domestically. Unemployment in the US rose sharply according to federal statistics and the economy should expect more of the same as factories and stores close their doors while a large portion of the country stays indoors to halt the spread of COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the White House economic relief plan is slowly taking shape and making its way through Congress. The proposal calls for American adults to receive $1,000 in cash and $500 per-child over the next three weeks. Another payout would follow in May if the economy and businesses have not recovered.

That said, not all industries are taking blows of the same size. The divergence among the three major market indexes points to the different fates for the tech-heavy companies which are becoming increasingly central to business operations as the world moves to remote work; today’s tech rally in the face of further declines in the value of the firms that make up the DJIA is notable. SaaS companies, a key technology niche, are up a sharp 4% today in early trading.

Virtual services like remote networks, security, video conferencing, and other messaging tools are more necessary than ever as businesses which can continue to operate are doing so via the Internet. And as tech firms are more remote-work friendly, they may have a better shot at staying open. Investors are betting today that they will do better than the economy as a whole.

A day of mixed equities results first thing is welcome after recent declines. More at the end of the day.

Hiring chatbot Mya Systems — which uses a conversational AI to grease the recruitment pipeline by automating sourcing for agencies and large enterprises needing to fill lots of vacancies in areas such as retail and warehouse jobs — has closed an $18.75 million Series C.

The funding round was led by Notion Capital with participation from earlier investors, Foundation Capital and Emergence Capital, along with Workday Ventures . The 2012-founded company, which was previously known as FirstJob, raised an $11.4M Series A back in 2017.

Touting growth over the past year, Mya said it saw 3x customer subscription growth in 2019.

In all it says it now has more than 460 brands using its tools — including six of the eight largest staffing agencies, and 29 of the Fortune 100 — name checking the likes of Hays, Adecco, L’Oreal, Deloitte, and Anheuser Busch.

Its chatbot approach to engaging and “deeply” screening applicants via a mobile app has led to more than 400,000 interviews being scheduled with “qualified and interested” candidates, it added. 

Pointing to the COVID-19 pandemic, founder and CEO Eyal Grayevsky suggested there could be increased demand for AI job screening as companies face highly dynamic recruitment needs. “Now more than ever, organizations in healthcare, e-commerce, light industrial, transportation, logistics, retail, and other industries impacted by COVID-19 need help scaling recruitment to serve large, unexpected spikes in demand. Mya is uniquely positioned to help organizations with high volume recruitment needs and the increasing reliance on temp and contract-based work,” he said in a statement.

“While some hiring is slowing down due to COVID-19, we are seeing spikes in demand from industries such as healthcare, light industrial, call center, logistics, grocery, and supply chain. We have received multiple requests from our healthcare, light industrial and e-commerce customers seeking additional support to rapidly scale engagement with nurses, in-home care professionals, warehouse workers, call center representatives, etc. to serve rapidly growing demand for those functions,” he also told us, saying the team is prioritizing helping those dealing with spikes in demand as a result of the coronavirus public health emergency.

In addition to conversational AI, Mya has focused on integrating its platform with other tools used for recruitment, including CRM, ATS and HRIS systems — plugging into the likes of Bullhorn, Workday, and SAP SuccessFactors. Asked what the new funding will be put towards, Grayevsky told us deeper integrations with such partners is on the cards, along with expanding use-cases for the product.

“Mya will be using the funds to invest in our platform, further expanding the use cases designed to support the end-to-end recruiting and post hire engagement process, and continuing to deepen our integrations with partner ATS solutions like Bullhorn, Workday, and SAP Successfactors. In addition to deepening our integrations, we are also investing heavily in turnkey, fully-featured solutions built alongside our ATS partners that allow for even greater ease and speed to implement Mya,” he said.

“Mya will also be investing in deepening our core platform and conversational AI technology, specifically to expand our conversational capabilities across new industries. We will further enhance our self-service conversation design and configuration capabilities to make it even easier for our customers to rapidly scale the Mya conversational experience across both high volume, hourly and professional roles. Lastly, we are strengthening our infrastructure and support for global customers who are rapidly scaling internationally (e.g. L’Oreal is now live in 18 countries globally).”

At this point Mya is selling its product into more than 35 countries — predominantly in North America, EMEA and APAC — with a focus on large and mid-sized employers that operate globally, including staffing businesses and corporations across high-volume recruitment industries such as healthcare, light industrial, call center, retail, transportation and logistics, hospitality, grocery and automotive.

“We have teams in both the US and Europe to support our expanding global customer base,” Grayevsky added. “With the new funding, we will continue to invest in the distribution, infrastructure and support needed to address demand across target markets globally.”

He name-checks the likes of Olivia, AllyO, Job Pal, Roborecruiter, XOR, and TextRecruit as main competitors. In terms of differentiation, he points to Mya having processed “tens of millions” of candidate interactions thus far — amassing an “ever-growing domain specific conversational dataset” — which he said enables it to continue to enhance the experience the platform can deliver for candidates.

“We have the most robust conversational technology and platform enabling rich, dynamic, and natural conversational experiences that deliver higher engagement, conversion, and actionable insights,” he claimed “We have the most in-depth solutions that support use cases across the entire recruiting funnel (e.g. sourcing, talent pool nurturing and re-engagement, screening, scheduling, contractor redeployment, etc.).

“We have the most experience successfully delivering deeply integrated solutions that scale for the largest staffing business and corporations (e.g. our largest customer is now deployed in 600+ locations globally, across hundreds of job roles, and thousands of recruiters on the platform, engaging with millions of both passive and active candidates on an annual basis), and… we are closely partnered with the leading ATS providers such as Workday and Bullhorn, where we have differentiated integrations and channel relationships that give us a competitive advantage.”

We also asked Grayevsky how the recruitment tool is complying with different national employment and equality laws, and also avoiding introducing any discrimination/bias into its AI-aided screening.

On this he said: “Mya does not apply any advanced AI or machine learning to decision making (i.e. determining fit for a job role), we are squarely focused on developing a robust conversational experience that allows Mya to engage instantly, capture information with high response and completion rates, automate outbound sourcing and scheduling process, and provide ongoing engagement and support with both active applicants and passive candidates in our customer’s talent community.”

He also said they have put steps in place to confirm the accuracy of candidate responses through the conversation (such as by adding a confirmation step for core requirements); and by “employing processes that check for bias, both before a solution goes into production and once its launched”.

Another step it’s taken to “ensure a positive experience for all candidates”, as he put it, is to provides the user an option to reroute a question that the bot does not understand to a recruiter.

“Those queries are immediately submitted into our AI training and annotation pipeline, tested and deployed into production to continually expand our FAQ support within the platform,” he told us.

“Mya’s mission is to create a far more efficient and equitable job market powered by conversational AI, and a core principle of that mission is to level the playing field,” Grayevsky added. “Our AI, engineering and product teams (which includes individuals from highly diverse backgrounds) make all product design decisions to consciously remove bias from the hiring process and ensure that information surfaced to hiring teams is accurate and objective.”

“We are also investing extensively to ensure Mya is in full compliance with local employment laws, data protection and privacy regulations, rules around opt-in and consent, everywhere we operate in the world. Ahead of GDPR, we worked with outside counsel on a Privacy Impact Assessment. That led to our appointment of a Data Protection Officer, and informed our ‘Privacy by Default’ and ‘Privacy by Design’ philosophies. We’re continuing to keep an eye on regulations around AI in the EU, and are already in compliance with the seven key requirements identified in the European Commission’s white paper on artificial intelligence.”

Asked about the disproportionate admin burden automated hiring tools can place on candidates, as they grease up efficiencies of scale for employers — i.e. by requiring jobseekers respond individually to screening system vs just being able to submit a single CV to multiple companies — Grayevsky argued that dynamic data-capturing recruitment systems, such as Mya, offer a better experience to job seekers via increased responsiveness and through expanding potential future job-matching opportunities.

“Traditional job applications often have many steps, and can take a long time to complete, creating a negative experience and drop-off for the employer. Those questionnaires are not dynamic and often lead to no response. That time and effort invested often cannot be leveraged into other opportunities,” he argued.

“With Mya, everyone gets a response instantaneously and around the clock (24/7). They can ask questions and get answers in real-time, providing more transparency and insight into the opportunity, process, and employer. Mya can follow up and if deemed fit by the hiring team, schedule a phone call or on-site interview with the recruiter or hiring manager to help accelerate the process.

“If they are ultimately not deemed fit by the hiring team due to a missing requirement, Mya is able to re-engage to help that candidate connect to a role that is more suitable based on their profile, interests, and availability. The idea is that a candidate can build one profile and be connected to multiple jobs, quickly and efficiently. We built our solution through the lens of the candidate, making it easy to provide information about qualifications, interests, and availability, and get connected to the right opportunities.”

In a great example of what can happen when smart, technically-oriented people come together in a time of need, an open-source hardware project started by a group including Irish entrepreneur Colin Keogh and Breeze Automation CEO and co-founder Gui Calavanti has produced a prototype ventilator using 3D-printed parts and readily available, inexpensive material. The ventilator prototype was designed and produced in just seven days, after the project spun up on Facebook and attracted participation from over 300 engineers, medical professionals and researchers.

The prototype will now enter into a validation process by the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE), the country’s health regulatory body. This will technically only validate it for use in Ireland, which ironically looks relatively well-stocked for ventilator hardware, but it will be a key stamp of approval that could pave the way for its deployment across countries where there are shortages, including low-income nations.

Ventilator hardware in the U.S. is also likely to encounter shortages, depending on the progress of coronavirus spread in the country. On Wednesday, the White House enacted the Defense Production Act, which provides broad powers to the President for redirecting materials and private company production capacity to building much-needed supplies and equipment in a time of crisis.

During Wednesday’s White House briefing on the current COVID-19 situation, U.S. VP Mike Pence said that there are only 10,000 ventilators in the country’s strategic reserve, which, while it doesn’t take into account the stock of equipment in hospitals or healthcare facilities around the country, likely won’t address the overall needs of medical professionals in case some of the more serious projections about the infection come true.

The project could be one way to help address the shortfall, along with commitments by automakers including GM, Ford and Tesla to produce ventilator equipment should the need arise.

The group behind the ventilator also recently changed the focus of their Facebook community, renaming the group from the Open Source Ventilator Project to the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies community. They’re looking at expanding their focus to finding ways to cheaply and effectively build and validate other needed equipment, including protective gear like masks, sanitizer and protective face guards for front-line healthcare workers.