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The Crew Interactive Mobile Companion (or CIMON for short) recorded a number of firsts on its initial mission to the International Space Station, which took place last November, including becoming the first ever autonomous free-floating robot to operate aboard the station, and the first ever smart astronaut assistant. But CIMON is much more than an Alexa for space, and CIMON-2, which launched aboard today’s SpaceX ISS resupply mission, will demonstrate a number of ways the astronaut support robot can help those working in space – from both a practical and an emotional angle.

CIMON is the joint-product of a collaboration between IBM, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Airbus, and its aim is to design and develop a robotic assistant for use in space that can serve a number of functions, including things as mundane as helping to retrieve information and keep track of tasks astronauts are doing on board the station, and as wild as potentially helping to alleviate or curb the effects of social issues that might arise from settings in which a small team works in close quarters over a long period.

“The goal of mission one was to really to commission CIMON and to really understand if he can actually work with the astronauts – if there are experiments that he can support,” explained IBM’s Matthias Biniok, project manager on the Watson AI aspects of the mission. “So that was very successful – the astronauts really liked working with CIMON.”

“Now, we are looking at the next version: CIMON-2.” Biniok continued. “That has more capability. For example, it has better software and better hardware that has been improved based on the outcomes that we had with mission one – and we have also some new features. So for example, on the artificial intelligence side, we have something called emotional intelligence, based on our IBM Watson Tone Analyzer, with we’re trying to understand and analyze the emotions during a conversation between CIMON and the astronauts to see how they’re feeling – if they’re feeling joyful, if something makes them angry, and so on.”

That, Biniok says, could help evolve CIMON into a robotic countermeasure for something called ‘groupthink,’ a phenomenon wherein a group of people who work closely together gradually have all their opinions migrate towards consensus or similarity. A CIMON with proper emotional intelligence could detect when this might be occurring, and react by either providing an objective, neutral view – or even potentially taking on a contrarian or ‘Devil’s advocate’ perspective, Biniok says.

That’s a a future aim, but in the near-term CIMON can have a lot of practical benefit simply by freeing up time spent on certain tasks by astronauts themselves.

“Time is super expensive on the International Space Station,” Biniok said. “And it’s very limited, so if we could save some crew time with planning that would be super helpful to the astronauts. CIMON can also support experiments – imagine that you’re an astronaut up there, you have complex research experiments going on, and there’s a huge amount of documentation for that. And if you are missing some information, or you have a question about it, then you have to look up in this documentation, and that that takes time. Instead of doing that, so you could actually just ask CIMON – so for example ‘what’s the next step CIMON?, or ‘why am I using Teflon and not any other materials?’

CIMON can also act as a mobile documentarian, using its onboard video camera to record experiments and other activities on the Space Station. It’s able to do so autonomously, too, Biniok notes, so that an astronaut can theoretically ask it to navigate to a specific location, take a photo, then return and show that photo to the astronaut.

This time around, CIMON will be looking to stay on the ISS for a much longer span than version one; up to three years, in fact. Biniok had nothing specific to share on plans beyond that, but did say that long-term, the plan is absolutely to extend CIMON’s mission to include the Moon, Mars and beyond.

Long before Instagram toyed with removing “likes,” VSCO, an Oakland-based photo-sharing and editing app, built a community devoid of likes, comments and follower counts. Perhaps known to many only because of this year’s “VSCO girl” meme explosion, the company has long been coaxing the creative community to its freemium platform. Turns out, if you can provide the disillusioned teens of Gen Z respite from the horrors of social media — they’ll pay for it.

VSCO is on pace to surpass 4 million paying users in 2020, up from 2 million paying users in late 2018, the company said. Approaching $80 million in annual revenue, VSCO charges an annual subscription fee of $19.99 for access to a full-suite of mobile photo-editing tools, exclusive photo filters, tutorials and more. For no cost, users can access a handful of basic VSCO filters, standard editing tools and loads of content published by other users in VSCO’s photo feed.

In recent months, the company’s Oakland headquarters has swelled to 150 employees, an increase of 50% from 2018, with a new office in Chicago expected to fit several dozen more. The company, which counts 100 million registered users to date, has also recently inked a partnership with Snap. Together, they’ve launched Analog, VSCO’s first-ever Snapchat lens, in a deal that hints at a future acquisition. Needless to say, VSCO co-founder and chief executive officer Joel Flory is feeling pretty optimistic ahead of his company’s eighth birthday.

“When you walk into a museum, you don’t see the net worth of the artist,” Flory tells TechCrunch. “You don’t see how many people have walked through the museum. There’s not a space for people to write comments and leave stickers. It’s a moment. It’s for you. You get to sit in front of a piece of work, a piece of art. And does it move you? Does it speak to you? Are you able to learn something from it? Does it inspire you to go do something? How can we create a space in which you could do that online? That was our initial insight.”

Flory, a 40-year-old former wedding photographer, wears a grey Oakland Roots sweatshirt and a black Oakland Athletics hat when I meet him at VSCO’s offices on Oakland’s Broadway Avenue in November. He doesn’t look like the Gen Z whisperer I expected to meet, and his responses to my questions about the “VSCO girl” meme paint a picture of a CEO who’s inadvertently connected with a generation 20 years his junior. “It’s a sense of caring about the environment and kind of caring about causes that have a meaning and impact,” Flory said of “VSCO girls,” who have more-oft been described as 21st century valley girls or “annoying, white hopeless romantics.”

Regardless of Flory’s ability to decode Gen Z, VSCO continues to be beloved by millions of teenagers and young adults worldwide. Without selling ads or customer data, VSCO has developed a sustainable subscription-based business and written a new playbook for social media businesses in a world where Facebook’s advertising-based model is king. For those fed up with platforms that have facilitated bullying and failed to prioritize privacy, VSCO may be a protective corner of the internet.

“The creator always wins, the community always wins, who’s paying us wins and VSCO wins,” Flory said. “It sounds simple, but this creates a business model in which our business is not extracting value from any one group to give to someone else. It’s this direct relationship with who’s paying us.”

A sense of belonging

Hot off the heels of a rare moment in the spotlight, VSCO, reportedly valued at $550 million, is ripe for a new round of funding. Flory, naturally, remained mum on any plans to sell the company or raise additional capital. But he was ready and willing to speak to the company’s untraditional path and the unique connection it has fostered with its users.

Flory tells me 75% of VSCO’s registered users and 55% of its paying subscribers are younger than 25, giving the company a small foothold into the most coveted demographic. On top of that, the hashtag #VSCO has been viewed 4 billion times on the immensely popular video sharing app Tik Tok, again according to the company’s own statistics, and another 450 million times on Instagram. With 80 million monthly active users — Facebook had 2.45 billion monthly active users as of September, for context — VSCO is by no means a competitor to Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram, Snap or Twitter. What it is, however, is a leader in the new era of social media, in which users demand more transparent, equitable relationships with social platforms.

“[Gen Z] knows what each platform is good for and what the downfalls of each are,” Flory said. “They are actively making investments in creativity and in their mental health, and they are seeking out a space where they can be who they are. And the fact that they’re even talking about mental health, anxiety, depression and compare culture — it took me so long in life to be able to articulate what I was feeling … They’re putting their money and time in brands and causes that they care about. And so for us, that’s why I think we’ve seen a lot of our growth.”

Flory and VSCO co-founder Greg Lutze, a long-time creative director-turned-chief experience officer, began building VSCO, an acronym for Visual Supply Co., in 2011. Facebook was more than six years old and mere months from hitting the 1 billion monthly active user milestone when VSCO launched its first product, a photo-editing plug-in for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. Instagram, for its part, was a burgeoning photo-based social network that had launched the year before to “ignite communication through images.” Unlike Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who famously created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, or Instagram’s founding CEO Kevin Systrom, a former Google employee, Flory and Lutze had absolutely no experience in the tech or startup world. The pair banded together to build something focused around the creative community — not to construct a venture-backed startup.

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“We wanted to provide the tools for you to express yourself and then a space for you to do that, one that was void of the pressures around likes and comments that create this compare culture, which wasn’t even prevalent yet,” Flory said. “Now we’re seeing this played out on a large scale. So on one hand, we were ahead of the curve. But I think we were just being true to who we are.”

After launching VSCO as an Adobe plug-in, improved camera capabilities on smartphones motivated the business to change course. In the spring of 2013, the business launched its mobile app, a free photo-editing tool with in-app purchases and an affiliated community. The app reached 1 million downloads one week later and would eventually adopt a freemium model to earn money from its power users. Since its app launch, VSCO has remained a top-five grossing photo app on Apple’s App Store.

New opportunities

Though seldom mentioned on the venture capital and startup blogs, VSCO is indeed supported by VC dollars. Before its subscription revenue could sustain the business, the company brought in $70 million in VC funding from Accel, Glynn Capital Management, Obvious Ventures, Goldcrest Investments and others, closing its most recent round in 2015.

Flory and Lutze never sought venture funding. The former photographer and creative director didn’t have connections to venture capitalists or an in at a particular firm. Instead, Accel partners Vas Natarajan and Ryan Sweeney approached VSCO with “a thesis around the importance of design and creativity in the future,” Flory said, and quickly formed an alliance. Today, VSCO isn’t profitable, though it has been in the past, Flory said. It did, however, operate at “near break-even” last year — an accomplishment today as startups often lose hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis. With a valuation of $550 million, which Flory would neither confirm or deny, VSCO plans to invest heavily in growth next year.

As for the “VSCO girl” meme explosion, largely a mockery of white middle-class, social-media-savvy teenagers, it provided a jolt of publicity for a nearly decade-old company lost in the shadow of the giants. Though the meme entered the internet’s zeitgeist many months ago, the company is still riding a wave of press (and likely downloads) tied to its popularity. For many, the VSCO girl was their first encounter with VSCO, while for others, the photo-editing and sharing tool has been a fixture of their home screen for years.

As Instagram explores hiding likes in a bid to promote user health and other social media companies realize the importance of safety, security and mental wellness, VSCO may see its unique identity fade. Regardless, Flory says he wants other platforms to realize the impact of likes: “I honestly hope everyone thinks about what’s good for people’s mental health and builds more products that have a positive impact than a negative impact.”

Instagram’s experiments aside, VSCO is gearing up for another banner year, packed with plans for new features and products entirely. In our chat last month, Flory mentioned video design, publishing and editing, as well as illustration, as areas of interest for the now established photo-editing tool.

“The business is growing in a way that we’ve never seen before,” Flory said. “And what it’s doing is opening all of these new areas of opportunity. We’re focused on not only how you create content and how you edit content, but ultimately, how you tell a story with that content.”

Homeland Security has confirmed it will not expand face recognition scans to U.S. citizens arriving and departing the country, days after it emerged the agency proposed making the scans for citizens mandatory.

The department, whose responsibility is border protection and immigration checks, said in a government filing that it it wanted to “amend the regulations to provide that all travelers, including U.S. citizens, may be required to be photographed upon entry and/or departure.”

The American Civil Liberties Union criticized the move, saying it had “profound privacy concerns” despite promises from the government that it had no plans to expand the face recognition checks to Americans.

Currently, U.S. citizens are allowed to opt-out of face recognition scans at the airport, but foreign nationals and visitors are required to have their faces scanned when arriving or leaving the U.S., where the systems are installed.

Homeland Security says the scans are to help crack down on illegal immigration and visa overstays.

A spokesperson for Customs & Border Protection, which filed the proposal, said the agency has “no current plans to require U.S. citizens to provide photographs upon entry and exit from the United States,” and that it “intends to have the planned regulatory action regarding U.S. citizens removed from the unified agenda next time it is published.”

The agency spokesperson said CBP “initially considered” including U.S. citizens in its face recognition checks at airports and other ports of entry “because having separate processes for foreign nationals and U.S. citizens at ports of entry creates logistical and operational challenges that impact security, wait times and the traveler experience.”

“Upon consultation with Congress and privacy experts, however, CBP determined that the best course of action is to continue to allow U.S. citizens to voluntarily participate in the biometric entry-exit program,” the spokesperson noted.

Just yesterday, CBP said it met with privacy experts and that it was “committed to keeping the public informed about our use of facial comparison technology,” said CBP’s John Wagner.

A source with knowledge of the meeting said privacy advocates warned the government against expanding face recognition scans for U.S. citizens, citing privacy risks.

Hailing one of Waymo’s self-driving minivans is about to get a little easier.

One year after launching its Waymo One self-driving car service in the Phoenix area, the company is launching an app on iOS, the latest signal that the company is inching towards large-scale commercial service. Now, Phoenix residents can download the Waymo app to their iPhone and sign up to ride in one of the company’s self-driving vehicles directly from the device.

Waymo, which spun out to become a business under Alphabet, launched a limited commercial robotaxi service called Waymo One in the Phoenix area in December 2018. The Waymo One self-driving car service, and accompanying app, was only available to Phoenix residents who were part of its early rider program, which aimed to bring vetted regular folks into its self-driving minivans.

In April, the company put its app on the Google Play store. Now, one year after Waymo One launched, it has finally made its way to the App store. The company has made improvements to the app over the past several months, including simplifying how rides are ordered to speed up the process. Users can honk the car’s horn from the app, a feature that Waymo says gives riders, including those with low vision, another way to find their car at pickup.

All of these steps are bringing Waymo closer to fuller commercial service that will include driverless vehicles. Until recently, all hailed self-driving Waymos had a human safety driver behind the wheel. The company began in November to put fully driverless vehicles into the fleet.

Technically, Waymo has had Android and iOS apps for some time. Interested riders would only gain access to the app after first applying on the company’s website. Once accepted to the early rider program, they would be sent a link to the app to download to their device.

There are still caveats to the announcement. The ability to download and sign up for the service won’t give users the kind if instant access they might expect. This isn’t Uber or Lyft. Instead, potential riders will be added to a waitlist. Once accepted, they will be able to request rides in the app. Riders will first be invited to join the Waymo early rider program, which requires signing a non-disclosure agreement, fbefore moving into the public arm of Waymo One. Once on Waymo One, participants can invite guests and talk publicly about their experience.

SpaceX has launched its nineteenth resupply mission to the International Space Station (ISS) on behalf of NASA. The launch took place at 12:29 PM EST (9:29 AM PST) from Cape Canaveral in Florida, with a Falcon 9 blasting off with a Dragon cargo capsule on top carrying around 5,200 lbs of payload destined for the ISS.

The Dragon cargo craft used in this launch has actually made this trip twice before – first in 2014, and then in 2017. Both times after returning it was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean and refurbished by SpaceX in order to fly again. SpaceX has designed as much of its space launch system as possible for reusability, and the Dragon spacecraft, which return from the ISS loaded up with cargo sent back by the astronauts living and working on the space station is a perfect candidate for re-use.

SpaceX also recovered the first-stage rocket booster of the brand-new Falcon 9 used in this launch, landing the spent rocket component on its floating drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Next, the Dragon capsule will make its way to the Space Station, where it’s set to rendezvous on Saturday. It’ll dock with the station with the help of the robotic Canadarm2, and then spend around four weeks at the station, being unloaded and then loaded back up with 3,800 lbs or return cargo, which includes the results of experiments conducted on the station that researchers on the ground will study further.

Payloads being delivered on this mission includes a range of experiments, like beer brewing equipment sent up by Budweiser, a parking space that’ll live outside the station for mission-critical robots, and an updated version of the CIMON robotic astronaut assistant.

This week, security reporter Brian Krebs asked why the newest iPhone 11 Pro appeared to be sending out a user’s location even when the user disabled Location Services in their phone’s settings, in conflict with Apple’s privacy policy and the express wishes of the user.

Apple told Krebs it was “expected behavior” and that there were no security implications, but failed to say assuage fears of a location-leaking bug.

Krebs came to a logical conclusion. “It seems they are saying their phones have some system services that query your location regardless of whether one has disabled this setting individually for all apps and iOS system services,” he wrote.

He wasn’t wrong. The technology giant now has an explanation — two days after Krebs’ article went up and more than half a day after the company declined to comment on the matter.

Newer iPhones — including the iPhone 11 Pro which Krebs used — come with ultra wideband technology, which Apple says gives its newer handsets “spatial awareness” to understand where other ultra wideband devices are located. Apple only advertises one such use for this technology — users wirelessly sharing files over AirDrop — but it’s believed it may become part of the company’s highly anticipated upcoming “tag”-locating feature, which has yet to be announced.

“Ultra wideband technology is an industry standard technology and is subject to international regulatory requirements that require it to be turned off in certain locations,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch. “iOS uses Location Services to help determine if iPhone is in these prohibited locations in order to disable ultra wideband and comply with regulations.”

“The management of ultra wideband compliance and its use of location data is done entirely on the device and Apple is not collecting user location data,” the spokesperson said.

That seems to back up what experts have discerned so far. Will Strafach, chief executive at Guardian Firewall and iOS security expert, said in a tweet that his analysis showed there was “no evidence” that any location data is sent to a remote server.

Apple said it will provide a new dedicated toggle option for the feature in an upcoming iOS update.

But Strafach questioned why Apple hadn’t explained the situation better to begin with.

Apple could have said something days ago, immediately squashing rumors with a simple explanation. But it didn’t. That absence of explanation only welcomed speculation. Credit to Krebs for reporting the issue. But Apple’s lack of response made this a far bigger issue than it ever had to be.

Uniform Teeth, the teeth straightening startup that helped me figure out I needed a root canal, has just raised a $10 million round of funding led by Canaan Ventures. This brings Uniform Teeth’s total funding to $14 million.

With the new funding, Uniform Teeth plans to open up two more locations, one in Seattle and one in Chicago early next year. Uniform Teeth currently operates two locations in San Francisco. By the end of next year, Uniform Teeth plans to open more locations throughout the U.S.

The startup takes a One Medical-like approach in that it provides real, licensed orthodontists to see you and treat your bite. Ahead of the first visit, patients use the Uniform app to take photos of their teeth and their bite. During the initial visit, patients receive a panoramic scan and 3D imaging to confirm what type of work needs to be done.

The reason Uniform Teeth requires in-office visits is because 75 percent or more of the cases require additional procedures.

“There really is a need that is not being addressed in the market,” Uniform Teeth CEO Meghan Jewitt told TechCrunch. “We see so much of the activity in the space targeting simple vanity cases, but that’s just a small fraction of the market. We’re focused on the moderate to full-spectrum cases, which is like 75% of the market.”

Uniform Teeth faces a number of competitors, most notably SmileDirectClub and Candid. SmileDirectClub, which went public amid concerns from dental associations in August, provides an at-home teeth-straightening service. In its S-1, SmileDirectClub addressed those concerns as risk factors, saying, “national and state dental associations have issued statements discouraging use of orthodontics using a teledentistry platform.”

Uniform Teeth’s in-person approach doesn’t allow it to reach as many customers as the likes of SmileDirectClub and Candid, but perhaps customers will opt to meet with an orthodontist in person rather than not at all.

Figma, the design tool maker that has raised nearly $83 million from investors such as Index Ventures, Sequoia, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins, has today announced a new feature called Auto Layout that takes some of the tedious reformatting out of the design process.

Designers are all too familiar with the problem of manually sizing content in new components. For example, when a designer creates a new button for a web page, the text within the button has to be manually sized to fit within the button. If the text changes, or the size of the button, everything has to be adjusted accordingly.

This problem is exacerbated when there are many instances of a certain component, all of which have to be manually adjusted.

Auto Layout functions as a toggle. When it’s on, Figma does all the adjusting for designers, making sure content is centered within components and that the components themselves adjust to fit any new content that might be added. When an item within a frame is re-sized or changed, the content around it dynamically adjusts along with it.

Auto Layout also allows users to change the orientation of a list of items from vertical to horizontal and back again, adjust the individual sizing of a component within a list, or re-order components in a list with a single click.

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It’s a little like designing on auto-pilot.

Auto Layout also functions within the component system, allowing designers to tweak the source of truth without detaching the symbol or content from it, meaning that these changes flow through to the rest of their designs.

Figma CEO Dylan Field said that there was very high demand for this feature from customers, and hopes that this will allow design teams to move much faster when it comes to user testing and iterative design.

Alongside the launch, Figma is also announcing that it has brought on its first independent board member. Lynn Vojvodich joins both cofounders, Danny Rimer, John Lilly, Mamoon Hamid and observer Andrew Reed on the Figma board.

Vojvodich has a wealth of experience as an operator in the tech industry, serving as EVP and CMO at Salesforce.com. She was a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, and led her own company Take3 for 10 years. Vojvodich also serves on the boards of several large corporations, including Ford Motor Company, Looker, and Dell.

“I’ve never brought on an investor that I haven’t heavily reference checked, both with companies that have had success and those who don’t,” said Field. “A good board can really help accelerate the company, but a challenging board can make it tough for companies to keep moving.”

Field added that, as conversations progressed with Vojvodich, she continually delivered value to the team with crisp answers and great insights, noting that her experience translates.

Spotify’s annual “Wrapped” feature, which allows listeners to look back on their favorite music from the year, is expanding in 2019 to include a whole decade’s worth of favorite tunes, the company announced today. In addition, the feature is for the first time being made available to podcasters, in addition to Spotify users and Spotify artists.

“Wrapped” has become one of Spotify’s more anticipated releases among those who use the service regularly, as it allows users to explore their own top songs, top artists, top genres and minutes listened for the year. Many users also like to share their “Wrapped’s” findings on social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat.

As 2019 draws to a close, Spotify is offering its annual version of the personalized “Spotify Wrapped,” as well as a new one that showcases your listening history through the last decade. That means your Wrapped will include the songs, artists, albums, and podcasts you discovered on Spotify in 2019, as before, plus the artists you streamed over the past decade, through a “My Decade Wrapped,” option.

Notably, Spotify’s chief rival Apple Music last month launched its own multi-year retrospective, with “Replay,” a personalized playlist of your top songs by year. Replay is very much like Wrapped, except that it includes playlists for every year you’ve subscribed to Apple Music, retroactively.

Spotify’s launch of “My Decade Wrapped” is clearly meant to be a competitive offering.

This year, the feature is for the first time being integrated directly in the Spotify app, in addition to being available on the web at spotify.com/wrapped, as before. It’s also now highlighting how global users’ listening habits are, by showing your top artists on a world map.

Spotify Premium subscribers, meanwhile, will have access to more personalized data stories and insights, including things like the numbers of artists discovered and the top artist they discovered. Besides being a fun point of reference for Spotify users, this sort of data can help to reinforce the company’s brand message — that Spotify is more than just another streaming music app. It aims to demonstrate that it can actually help users discover new music, not just offer them an easy way to play the songs and artists they already know.

The final product, including now both the “2019 Wrapped” and “My Decade Wrapped,” can be posted to social media with the provided share card that summarizes your top tracks, artists and listening history.

Also new this year is an expansion of “Wrapped” to podcasters.

Already, Spotify artists had their own version of “Wrapped” which allowed them to discover how their music reached fans around the world, available through the Spotify for Artists dashboard. This year, podcasters will get their own “Wrapped” accessible through Spotify for Podcasters, the company says.

This feature will allow podcasters and their team to look back at their show and audience’s growth over the past year, and easily see which were the top episodes. They can also see their year over year gains in followers, their top country for audience growth, number of fans who have the show as their top podcast, the four related podcasts their fans also listen to, and more. Essentially, it’s a new way of packaging up analytics that podcasters already access, but looking back at the full year.

This information can also be posted to social media through the included “share” care, which includes the total number of episodes produced, the total number of hours produced, and the podcasters’ top two countries.

 

Ten years ago, the vast majority of designers were working in Adobe Photoshop, a powerful tool with fine-tuned controls for almost every kind of image manipulation one could imagine. But it was a tool built for an analog world focused on photos, flyers and print magazines; there were no collaborative features, and much more importantly for designers, there were no other options.

Since then, a handful of major players have stepped up to dominate the market alongside the behemoth, including InVision, Sketch, Figma and Canva.

And with the shift in the way designers fit into organizations and the way design fits into business overall, the design ecosystem is following the same path blazed by enterprise SaaS companies in recent years. Undoubtedly, investors are ready to place their bets in design.

But the question still remains over whether the design industry will follow in the footprints of the sales stack — with Salesforce reigning as king and hundreds of much smaller startup subjects serving at its pleasure — or if it will go the way of the marketing stack, where a lively ecosystem of smaller niche players exist under the umbrella of a handful of major, general-use players.

“Deca-billion-dollar SaaS categories aren’t born everyday,” said InVision CEO Clark Valberg . “From my perspective, the majority of investors are still trying to understand the ontology of the space, while remaining sufficiently aware of its current and future economic impact so as to eagerly secure their foothold. The space is new and important enough to create gold-rush momentum, but evolving at a speed to produce the illusion of micro-categorization, which, in many cases, will ultimately fail to pass the test of time and avoid inevitable consolidation.”

I spoke to several notable players in the design space — Sketch CEO Pieter Omvlee, InVision CEO Clark Valberg, Figma CEO Dylan Field, Adobe Product Director Mark Webster, InVision VP and former VP of Design at Twitter Mike Davidson, Sequoia General Partner Andrew Reed and FirstMark Capital General Partner Amish Jani — and asked them what the fierce competition means for the future of the ecosystem.

But let’s first back up.

Past

Sketch launched in 2010, offering the first viable alternative to Photoshop. Made for design and not photo-editing with a specific focus on UI and UX design, Sketch arrived just as the app craze was picking up serious steam.

A year later, InVision landed in the mix. Rather than focus on the tools designers used, it concentrated on the evolution of design within organizations. With designers consolidating from many specialties to overarching positions like product and user experience designers, and with the screen becoming a primary point of contact between every company and its customers, InVision filled the gap of collaboration with its focus on prototypes.

If designs could look and feel like the real thing — without the resources spent by engineering — to allow executives, product leads and others to weigh in, the time it takes to bring a product to market could be cut significantly, and InVision capitalized on this new efficiency.

In 2012, came Canva, a product that focused primarily on non-designers and folks who need to ‘design’ without all the bells and whistles professionals use. The thesis: no matter which department you work in, you still need design, whether it’s for an internal meeting, an external sales deck, or simply a side project you’re working on in your personal time. Canva, like many tech firms these days, has taken its top-of-funnel approach to the enterprise, giving businesses an opportunity to unify non-designers within the org for their various decks and materials.

In 2016, the industry felt two more big shifts. In the first, Adobe woke up, realized it still had to compete and launched Adobe XD, which allowed designers to collaborate amongst themselves and within the organization, not unlike InVision, complete with prototyping capabilities. The second shift was the introduction of a little company called Figma.

Where Sketch innovated on price, focus and usability, and where InVision helped evolve design’s position within an organization, Figma changed the game with straight-up technology. If Github is Google Drive, Figma is Google Docs. Not only does Figma allow organizations to store and share design files, it actually allows multiple designers to work in the same file at one time. Oh, and it’s all on the web.

In 2018, InVision started to move up stream with the launch of Studio, a design tool meant to take on the likes of Adobe and Sketch and, yes, Figma.

Present

When it comes to design tools in 2019, we have an embarrassment of riches, but the success of these players can’t be fully credited to the products themselves.

A shift in the way businesses think about digital presence has been underway since the early 2000s. In the not-too-distant past, not every company had a website and many that did offered a very basic site without much utility.

In short, designers were needed and valued at digital-first businesses and consumer-facing companies moving toward e-commerce, but very early-stage digital products, or incumbents in traditional industries had a free pass to focus on issues other than design. Remember the original MySpace? Here’s what Amazon looked like when it launched.

In the not-too-distant past, the aesthetic bar for internet design was very, very low. That’s no longer the case.