Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Just as Qualcomm was starting to highlight its 5G plans for the coming years, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg hit the stage at AWS re:Invent to discuss the carrier’s team up with the cloud computing giant.

As part of Verizon’s (TechCrunch’s parent company, disclosure, disclosure, disclosure) upcoming focus on 5G edge computing, the carrier will be the first to use the newly announced AWS Wavelength. The platform is designed to let developers build super low latency apps for 5G devices.

Currently, it’s being piloted in Chicago with a handful of high profile partners, including the NFL and Bethesda, the game developer behind Fallout and Elder Scrolls. No details yet on those specific applications (though remote gaming and live streaming seem like the obvious ones), but potential future uses include things like smart cars, IoT devices, AR/VR — you know, the sorts of things people cite when discussing 5G’s life beyond the smartphone.

“AWS Wavelength provides the same AWS environment — APIs, management console, and tools — that they’re using today at the edge of the 5G network,” AWS CEO Andy Jassy said on-stage. Starting with Verizon’s 5G network locations in the US, customers will be able to deploy the latency-sensitive portions of an application at the edge to provide single-digit millisecond latency to mobile and connected devices.”

As Verizon’s CEO joined Vestberg on stage, CNO Nicki Palmer joined Qualcomm in Hawaii, to discuss the carrier’s Mmwave approach to the next-gen wireless. The technology has raised some questions around its coverage area. Verizon has addressed this to some degree with partnerships with third-parties like Boingo.

The company plans to have coverage in 30 U.S. cities by end of year. That number is currently at 18.

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced a new search tool called Kendra, which provides natural language search across a variety of content repositories using machine learning.

Matt Wood, AWS VP of artificial intelligence said that the new search tool uses machine learning, but doesn’t actually require machine learning expertise of any kind. Amazon is taking care of that for customers under the hood.

You start by identifying your content repositories. This could be anything from and S3 storage repository to OneDrive to Salesforce — anywhere you store content. You can use pre-built connectors from AWS, provide your credentials, and connect to all of these different tools.

Kendra then builds an index based on the content it finds in the connected repositories, and users can begin to interact with the search tool using natural language queries. The tool understands concepts like time, so if the question is something like ‘When the IT Help Desk is open,’ the search engine understands that this is about time, checks the index and delivers the right information to the user.

The beauty of this search tool is not only that it uses machine learning, but based on simple feedback from a user, like a smiley face or sad face emoji, it can learn which answers are good and which ones require improvement, and it does this automatically for the search team.

Once you have it set up, you can drop the search on your company intranet or you can use it internally inside an applications and it behaves as you would expect a search tool to do with features like type ahead.

Back in February, we wrote that Postscript “wants to be the Mailchimp for SMS.” Now they’ve raised $4.5 million to help get it done.

This round was lead by Accomplice, and backed by Kayak co-founder Paul English, Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale, Klaviyo co-founder Andrew Bialecki, Drift co-founder Elias Torres, Front co-founder Mathilde Colin, and Podium co-founders Eric Rea and Dennis Steele. The Postscript team is currently made up of 14 people.

Postscript is meant to help e-commerce companies — specifically Shopify shops, currently — connect with their existing customers over SMS. Their Shopify plugin lets store owners run SMS marketing campaigns with customers who’ve opted in, have two-way conversations with users who respond, and analyze the data to figure out what’s working.

Got a new product hitting the shelves, and want to let your most frequent customers know first? Plug the message into Postscript’s dashboard, tell it what segment of your customer base you want to receive it, and send away. Their analytics backend will tell you how many people received it, how many actually clicked through, and how much revenue you pulled in from those clicks.

If a customer types out a text and responds, it’ll pop up in the backend like a support ticket. Shop owners and employees can respond and have direct conversations, answer questions, and close out the ticket through the dashboard — or they can automatically pipe them into services like Zendesk or Zapier.

But what about spam? Our text message inboxes tend to feel like the last refuge from the overwhelming onslaught of marketing messages that have ruined e-mail; do we really want shops pinging our phones directly every time they’ve got a new pair of pants?

It seems like Postscript is pretty mindful of this, and is building things in a way that limits just how ‘spammy’ anyone on the platform can be — partly because (as we’ve seen with e-mail) flooding users with unwanted messages ensures that messages just don’t get opened, and partly because SMS is much more tightly regulated than many other messaging protocols. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the US, for example, SMSing marketing messages to someone without an explicit opt-in can get the company nailed with fines of thousands of dollars per text.

As Lucas Matney wrote in February:

The opt-in process for phone communications is already a bit more codified in the U.S., and as companies attempt to stay in the good graces of GDPR for fear of the EU god, it might be more likely they tread carefully.

As such, everything is opt-in, and easily opted out of if a user changes their mind. It also helps, of course, that sending SMS isn’t free for the companies. Each SMS you send to a customer who doesn’t care is money wasted — so there’s interest on all sides on limiting messages to just the folks who actually want them.

Postscript pricing varies depending on how many messages a shop is looking to send each month. Paid plans start at $50 a month for 1,500 SMS, climbing up to $2,000 per month for 83,000 messages — after that, they ask shops to reach out for a custom plan. Postscript co-founder Alex Beller tells me the company currently has around 530 paying customers, each spending anything from $50 per month to “the mid 5 figures.”

Three months after Goldman Sachs lent $100 million to Mexican fintech Konfio, SoftBank has invested another $100 million into the financial services company. The investment confirms Reuters’ August report that SoftBank was in advanced talks with the startup – now one of the most heavily-funded fintechs in Mexico. 

SoftBank is continuing to expand its Mexican portfolio, which now includes used car buying platform Kavak and payments startup Clip. Aside from Mexico, SoftBank has primarily focused its $5 billion Latin America fund on Brazil – and recently marked its entry into Argentina with an injection into financial services company Uala in a $150 million investment co-led by Tencent. 

As traditional banks shy away from small to medium sized business loans in Mexico, Konfio’s credit underwriting service provides a faster alternative. Konfio uses a data-first approach to enable fast credit assessment for SMBs looking to grow their businesses. The service can disburse credit in a one-day turnaround, as opposed to locking users into a traditional months-long approval process that can often require collateral. 

Meanwhile, if you’re a startup gathering massive amounts of data on the Latin America’s growing middle class, SoftBank might be interested in your growth funding. The Japanese conglomerate seems to want to know everything it can about Latin America’s consumer spending habits, mobile usage, and personal banking user behavior.

Watch Konfio founder and CEO David Arana’s panel at TechCrunch’s São Paulo event here.

When the storied venture firm Sequoia likes a deal, it will sometimes not only lead one of its financing rounds but fund it exclusively — no matter how that impacts earlier investors. Given the firm’s powerful brand, it’s hard to complain (too much), even if it means that earlier backers see their stakes diluted.

Such looks to be the case with Dolls Kill, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based online boutique for “misfits” and “miss legits,” that began selling platform shoes and other club-type clothing and has apparently grown like a weed, alongside the festivals that its customers attend, from Burning Man to Coachella.

The company has just raised $40 million in Series B funding from Sequoia, and when we talked yesterday with cofounder and CEO Bobby Farahi about the deal — which brings Dolls Kill’s funding to roughly $60 million — he said there was “no room” for earlier backers, including the consumer-focused venture firm Maveron.

He quickly added that the company’s board members — specifically Maveron partner Jason Stoffer, along with former Hot Topic CEO Betsy McLaughlin — have been instrumental in helping the company “think through growth while maintaining authenticity.”

It’s easy to appreciate enthusiasm around the brand, which employs around 400 people, has retail stores in both San Francisco and L.A., and sells its own clothes under an array of different brands, as well as sells the clothing of third parties whose aesthetic happens to fit that of Dolls Kill at any particular moment in time. As says cofounder and CEO Bobby Farahi, “RIght now there’s a resurgence in ’90s fashion, but in another year, we could move on to other third-party brands that we believe will resonate with our customers.”

Fahari doesn’t break out how much of the company’s clothing is made by the startup itself — in China and the U.S., among other “international” locations, according to Fahari. He shies from sharing many metrics at all, in fact. But the company, whose counter culture  approach began at the fringes of society, has seemingly gone mainstream as young shoppers increasingly ditch logos and increasingly look to express who they are through what Farahi calls “her inner IDGF.” Adds Farah, “I think the macro world changed a lot to give us a lot of tailwinds.”

It also has — for now, at least — a deep connection to its customers. The company has three million Instagram followers and earlier this year, when the brand toured an ice cream truck filled with a particular combat boot called the Billionaire Bling Boot to more than 30 U.S. cities, customers “four blocks long” waited in line to buy them, says Fahari.

In another creative twist, it opened its L.A. location –which looks more like a nightclub — to shoppers at midnight on Black Friday and it stayed open the following 24 hours.

Sequoia — which reached out to the company directly — told Farahi that it had looked at a lot of fashion brands and “they said we believe you’re the next generation-defining brand, the way The Gap was in the ’80s,” recounts Fahari. “I think they see the company not just as a brand but also a movement.”

Certainly, Sequoia’s Alfred Lin — who as Zappos’s COO helped grow the company into the giant that Amazon acquired in 2009 — understands such things given the famously strong early emphasis at Zappos on company culture and growing while remaining true to its early employees and customers.

As for the name Dolls Kill, the brand was the idea of Fahari’s wife and cofounder Shoddy Lynn, who chose the “dichotomous words, one very soft and one very hard,” says Fahari, saying that while “the brand is very girly, these girls aren’t taking shit from anybody.”

Adds Fahari, “And the domain was available.”

When the storied venture firm Sequoia likes a deal, it will sometimes not only lead one of its financing rounds but fund it exclusively — no matter how that impacts earlier investors. Given the firm’s powerful brand, it’s hard to complain (too much), even if it means that earlier backers see their stakes diluted.

Such looks to be the case with Dolls Kill, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based online boutique for “misfits” and “miss legits,” that began selling platform shoes and other club-type clothing and has apparently grown like a weed, alongside the festivals that its customers attend, from Burning Man to Coachella.

The company has just raised $40 million in Series B funding from Sequoia, and when we talked yesterday with cofounder and CEO Bobby Farahi about the deal — which brings Dolls Kill’s funding to roughly $60 million — he said there was “no room” for earlier backers, including the consumer-focused venture firm Maveron.

He quickly added that the company’s board members — specifically Maveron partner Jason Stoffer, along with former Hot Topic CEO Betsy McLaughlin — have been instrumental in helping the company “think through growth while maintaining authenticity.”

It’s easy to appreciate enthusiasm around the brand, which employs around 400 people, has retail stores in both San Francisco and L.A., and sells its own clothes under an array of different brands, as well as sells the clothing of third parties whose aesthetic happens to fit that of Dolls Kill at any particular moment in time. As says cofounder and CEO Bobby Farahi, “RIght now there’s a resurgence in ’90s fashion, but in another year, we could move on to other third-party brands that we believe will resonate with our customers.”

Fahari doesn’t break out how much of the company’s clothing is made by the startup itself — in China and the U.S., among other “international” locations, according to Fahari. He shies from sharing many metrics at all, in fact. But the company, whose counter culture  approach began at the fringes of society, has seemingly gone mainstream as young shoppers increasingly ditch logos and increasingly look to express who they are through what Farahi calls “her inner IDGF.” Adds Farah, “I think the macro world changed a lot to give us a lot of tailwinds.”

It also has — for now, at least — a deep connection to its customers. The company has three million Instagram followers and earlier this year, when the brand toured an ice cream truck filled with a particular combat boot called the Billionaire Bling Boot to more than 30 U.S. cities, customers “four blocks long” waited in line to buy them, says Fahari.

In another creative twist, it opened its L.A. location –which looks more like a nightclub — to shoppers at midnight on Black Friday and it stayed open the following 24 hours.

Sequoia — which reached out to the company directly — told Farahi that it had looked at a lot of fashion brands and “they said we believe you’re the next generation-defining brand, the way The Gap was in the ’80s,” recounts Fahari. “I think they see the company not just as a brand but also a movement.”

Certainly, Sequoia’s Alfred Lin — who as Zappos’s COO helped grow the company into the giant that Amazon acquired in 2009 — understands such things given the famously strong early emphasis at Zappos on company culture and growing while remaining true to its early employees and customers.

As for the name Dolls Kill, the brand was the idea of Fahari’s wife and cofounder Shoddy Lynn, who chose the “dichotomous words, one very soft and one very hard,” says Fahari, saying that while “the brand is very girly, these girls aren’t taking shit from anybody.”

Adds Fahari, “And the domain was available.”

Today at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the company announced AutoPilot, a new tool that gives you greater visibility into automated machine learning model creation, known as AutoML. This new tool is part of the new SageMaker Studio also announced today.

As AWS CEO Andy Jassy pointed out on stage today, one of the problems with AutoML is that it’s basically a black box. If you want to improve a mediocre model, or just evolve it for your business, you you have no idea how it was built.

The idea behind AutoPilot is to give you the ease of model creation you get from an AutoML-generated model, but also giving you much deeper insight into how the system built the model. “AutoPilot is a way to create a model automatically, but give you full visibility and control,” Jassy said.

“Using a single API call, or a few clicks in Amazon SageMaker Studio, SageMaker Autopilot first inspects your data set, and runs a number of candidates to figure out the optimal combination of data preprocessing steps, machine learning algorithms and hyperparameters. Then, it uses this combination to train an Inference Pipeline, which you can easily deploy either on a real-time endpoint or for batch processing. As usual with Amazon SageMaker, all of this takes place on fully-managed infrastructure,” the company explained in a blog post announcing the new feature.

You can look at the model’s parameters, and see 50 automated models, and it provides you with a leader board of what models performed the best. What’s more, you can look at the model’s underlying notebook, and also see what trade-offs were made to generate that best model. For instance, it may be the most accurate, but sacrifices speed to get that.

Your company may have its own set of unique requirements and you can choose the best model based on whatever parameters you consider to be most important, even though it was generated in an automated fashion.

Once you have the model, you like best, you can go into SageMaker Studio, select it and launch it with a single click. The tool is available now.

Each company’s culture is defined by a variety of factors.

One major factor is its leadership, and the type of workplace environment they choose to create. For example, are they approachable and encourage collaboration from all levels of the organization? Or do they prefer to maintain a tightly knit power structure, working only within the C-suite, from a rigid, top-down structure?

I’m quite fortunate to work for an employer with a culture that focuses on empowering and valuing the contributions of women equally to men at all levels of the organization. I recognize the gift that this culture is because sadly, not every company is like this. Tech companies especially must increase efforts to enable and encourage women with inspiration and opportunities that drive success. In fact, research has shown that companies with gender diversity in leadership experience greater financial returns.

So, how can other companies become more inclusive? The goal is identifying the right mix of ideas to create or institute programs that are unique but fit within the company’s mission and workplace culture. While the program at my employer is still being defined and developed, we have some great ideas for kickstarting an inclusive program that can be successful for your team, such as:

Create a community and attend events that expand your network

Getting involved in community events that are focused on women, like Women of Silicon Valley, is one way my team has made critical connections with the local talent pool and other female leaders in the Bay area. This creates significant value for our organization over time, and the investment in participation cannot be overstated. Partnering with those outside your company can also foster inclusive workforces, and that is a win-win.

Taking this a step further, we’ve also invited speakers to speak to our female employees on topics ranging from career development or tips and tools for avoiding imposter syndrome, to strategies for engaging with peers in the workplace and fostering more productivity.

As a developing program, I believe the inclusive initiatives at my company put them ahead of many others in Silicon Valley. The organization partners with our PR firm to identify and take advantage of industry speaking engagements, such as DefendCon and the Women in Tech Summits, to highlight female thought leaders, as well as industry award programs like Women in IT, that recognize significant achievements of female engineers in our market.

We are also currently pursuing a workshop for women to help them maximize their professional LinkedIn profiles. Here, our female employees will examine their own profiles to determine if their value is clearly articulated. They will be given suggestions on strengthening their profiles and representing their experience, and also have professional photos taken.

Finally, our company looks for ways to lift up women employees and celebrate their presence. As an example, we recently acknowledged International Women’s Day with a luncheon hosted by executive leadership for women in all departments, praising their contributions and the vital role they have in our company’s continued success.

Keep interoffice communication productive and professional, but also social

Having a dedicated interoffice communication channel where women engineers can go to ask questions or offer support to other women is very beneficial.

At my company, female employees at every level of the organization utilize a Slack group to collaborate and share information. Here, inclusion is immediate as you’re welcomed on your first day of employment and invited to contribute to the group.

The general vibe of our Slack channel is about ‘women empowering women.’ We encourage and lift each other up. Our team vice president also keeps us informed about special events and opportunities that might be of interest.

We also use the channel as a professional resource, whether it’s to brainstorm ideas, to share industry articles featuring other powerful women killing it in tech, or to communicate opportunities for professional development and upskilling that might benefit us all.

This exclusively women’s outlet has grown quite important to us, especially as our company was acquired earlier this year. As roles have evolved, women are finding support from one another and receiving encouragement as they adjust to new tasks and responsibilities.

This cultural empowerment is a movement for our company, and you can see it in how women will flock toward each other. For example, it’s noticeable in meetings how colleagues celebrate the successful completion of a project or amplify a great idea by eagerly offering support and congratulations.

These obvious benefits have spawned the idea to create group ‘empowerment chapters’ in each of our global offices in Houston, Belfast, and San Jose, where women will take turns acting as a chairperson and coordinator for that particular location. Since a company’s culture is also impacted by its physical geography within the world, or whether it is located in an urban or rural area, these chapters can enhance our understanding of colleagues in different parts of the world.

Use same-gender mentorship to build a more diverse workforce

Executive leaders are recognizing that in order to promote continued learning, stronger job performance, and swift career advancement that results in employees remaining with their organization longer, they must provide inclusive and effective mentors and sponsors. For men or women, the emphasis can be less on hierarchy and more on reciprocity, so companies can develop and provide mutual mentoring pairs.

The mentoring program for my team focuses women employees on increasing the inclusivity of women in the workspace; sharing motivational messages on being a woman in tech and recognizing and celebrating the successes of individuals within a group. These relationships help women to overcome individual challenges with the existing organizational hierarchy and quickly address progress-killing power dynamics that might be in play.

As an expansion of our mentorship program, we have also made a point to impress upon the recruiters and hiring consultants that we work with, to help with our efforts by identifying and delivering a more diverse pool of job candidates to apply for open positions within the organization. Being upfront and transparent about this requirement means that we’re actively fostering greater inclusion and diversity from the very beginning of a woman’s career with us – and it is supported from the top-down in the org chart. We even target colleges and universities with a favorable diversity profile to recruit interns and entry-level employees.

The U.S. recently celebrated Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting the right for women to vote. This amendment was hard-earned by 19th century women, who previously had little opportunity to assert their opinions or individuality.

Generations of women since then have had a vastly different life experience. Our aim as women is to keep pushing this effort forward. One way to do that is recognizing how much women contribute to the workplace and impact our corporate culture.

I heard a quote once that really resonates with me: “Diversity is being invited to the party, but inclusion is being asked to dance.” Explicitly defining and sharing criteria for advancement, offering exciting assignments to all employees, and most importantly, expecting, reinforcing and rewarding intentional inclusion can go a long way toward strengthening a positive corporate culture.

It’s expected that corporate culture may change over time, being re-shaped or molded by the influx of new people, new places and new ideas. Therefore, it takes some effort to develop a strong culture that continues to reflect the company’s values and ensures that any changes are still appropriately meeting the needs of every employee, while delivering on the company’s core mission.

We must address the workplace status quo and force organizations to address biases and stereotypes, or risk reinforcing gender inequalities. Promoting a corporate culture where talented professional women associate and engage with other professional women or advocates of women at varied career levels may be the revolution needed to truly transform workplace gender inclusion.

This morning at its annual Snapdragon summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm offered a glimpse at two new Snapdragon chips. You know how this works: the chipmaker offers some insight into the components that will power the vast majority of Android flagships over the course of the coming year.

The two headliners for the even are the flagship-level Snapdragon 865 and the lower-end 765. No surprise, Qualcomm is focused on 5G and AI for both systems — the latter of which has become an increasingly important piece of the mobile ecosystem, while the former is expected to start driving a majority of smartphone purchases beginning next year.

Here’ Qualcomm,

The flagship Snapdragon 865 Mobile Platform, which includes the Snapdragon X55 5G Modem-RF System, is the world’s most advanced 5G platform, delivering unmatched connectivity and performance for the next generation of flagship devices. The Snapdragon 765/765G brings integrated 5G connectivity, advanced AI processing, and select Snapdragon Elite Gaming experiences.

Notably, the mid-range765 features an integrated 5G option, unlike the higher-end 865, which utilizes the separate X55 5G modem.

Right now, it’s just a glimpse of what’s to come. Expect more information to be rationed out of the next few days of the summit.  We may also get a look at some of the first handsets this week in Hawaii, but likely the announcements will really begin in earnest comes CES and MWC in early-January and late-February, respectively.

Instagram is hiding Like counts to make people feel better. But what if you’re curious, competitive, or just petty? Now you can re-embrace the popularity contest by installing the Socialinsider Chrome extension that reveals Instagram Like and comment counts. “The Return Of The Likes” extension overlays the numbers of Likes and comments on the top right corner of posts on Instagram’s website. If you don’t want Instagram’s overprotective helicopter parenting, now you can download the extension here to put an end to it.

Obviously, it’s not as useful as showing Like counts right in the Instagram mobile app. You probably aren’t going to switch to browsing Insta just on the web, but if you see a post you want to know the Like count of, you can easily send yourself the permalink and open it on a computer.

Instagram is currently testing hiding Like counts with a percentage of users in every country worldwide. It started the experiment in Canada in April before adding six more countries in July and then the U.S. last month. Facebook launched a similar hidden likes experiment in Australia in September.

TechCrunch tested Return Of The Likes and verified that it works. It come from social media analytics company Socialinsider, which offers software for measuring engagement and benchmarking performance against competitors. The company insists that “No data is sent to Socialinsider servers.” We asked Instagram if the Chrome extension was in compliance with the app’s rules, and will update if we hear back.

As social media evolves, the emerging trend is for platforms to step in to protect users. In many cases, it’s warranted. Like counts can hurt people’s well-being by leading them into envy spirals comparing themselves against peers, or coercing them to self-censor to avoid an embarrassingly low Like count. Still, the question remains whether users deserve control over their own experience. Should we be able to opt back in to seeing Like counts, the way we have controls over block lists of offensive words?

After the platforms step up to ensure safety, we’ll have to decide when we want step in and demand to see what’s been covered up.

Additional reporting by Lucas Matney