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Amazon and Google have identified a solid use case for their smart speaker devices, powered by Alexa and Google Assistant, respectively: recipes. The companies this week have both announced new product features that aim to help users cook, hands-free, while guided by the voice assistant. Amazon this week rolled out a new feature integration in partnership with BuzzFeed’s recipe site Tasty, to offer step-by-step voice and video instructions to Alexa users. Meanwhile, Google partnered with entrepreneur and chef Ayesha Curry to bring her recipes to Google Assistant.

Curry’s recipes will also include step-by-step cooking instructions on Google Assistant-powered Smart Displays, like the Nest Hub Max.

Meanwhile, the Tasty recipes are available across Echo devices, but will include cooking videos on the Echo Show devices.

What’s interesting about the new features is that both involve content partnerships, instead of dedicated skills from third-parties. In fact, Curry is even providing her new recipe (Cast Iron Fall Bread Pudding with Brown Butter Apples) exclusively to Google Assistant users.

The growth in voice apps had been growing steadily over the past few years, with Amazon announcing earlier this fall it had surpassed over 100,000 skills. But that momentum may now be slowing, reports say — a possible indication that developer enthusiasm may be waning, as well.

The issue with voice apps is they’re hard to discover by way of voice commands alone, and they require particular syntax to properly launch. Sure, users may find a great weather app or game, but if they can’t remember its name later on, they may not visit again. Another issue is that many of the first voice apps were built by developers, some of whom lack user experience design backgrounds resulting in kludgy, confusing voice experiences.

Finally, it’s not clear that a large number of smart speaker or smart display owners are even regularly using voice apps. After all, Amazon and Google tend to tout the number of skills they have, not the number of people using them.

Content integrations by way of partnerships route around all these problems.

They simplify things and put Amazon and Google back in control of the user experience. And they still give users what they want without requiring them to launch a third-party app.

Recipes are also more straightforward, as far as integrations go. They consist of only a few parts — ingredient lists and cooking instructions, for example. And the commands to launch them are as simple as “Alexa” or “Hey Google,” followed by “show me recipes from…” and then the recipe source.

Navigating recipes can also be easier than other voice apps, thanks to basic commands like “Alexa, ingredients,” “Alexa, next step,” or “Alexa start recipe.”

The smart speakers can aid with general cooking questions, too, like “Hey Google, how many tablespoons in a cup?” or “Hey Google, show me how to brown butter.”

Before the Tasty partnership, Amazon had already tapped into the potential for recipes to boost device sales with the launch of a Guided Cooking feature that allowed Echo Show and Echo Spot customers to get step-by-step instructions from Allrecipes, Epicurious, Food52, TheKitchn, and SideChef while they cook without having to install a skill.

In addition, Alexa more recently was the debut voice platform for Discovery’s new subscription service Food Network Kitchen, which doesn’t just offer recipes and videos, but also live cooking classes with master chefs.

Ayesha Curry isn’t Google’s first recipe partnership, either. It had also indexed recipes from Bon Appetite, The New York Times, Food Network and others for use on Google Home. This year, it said recipe suggestions would be personalized to users with the launch of a “Picks for You” feature for its smart displays.

Both new recipe integrations are live now.

To get started, say “Hey Google, show me recipes from Ayesha Curry,” or ask Alexa for recipes from Tasty based on ingredients, dish name or occasion, like, “Alexa, find chicken recipes from Tasty.”

Norwest Venture Partners, the 58-year-old venture firm backed primarily by Wells Fargo, has closed its 15th fund with $2 billion. The firm closed its last fund with $1.5 billion at the beginning of 2018; the firm now manages $9.5 billion across all of its funds.

We talked with managing partner Jeff Crowe a couple of days ago about the outfit’s seemingly aggressive funding pace. Though venture firms have begun announcing new funds on what’s closer to a two-year cycle than than every three or four years as was long the case in the industry, putting $1.5 billion to work in even less than two years’ time seems notable.

Crow explained that the firm’s growth equity team — which can write checks that range from $50 million to $100 million– has been highly active, writing big checks in recent years to Cority, Vuori, and SmartSign, among others. Cority is a Toronto company that makes environmental, health, safety and quality (EHSQ) software, Vuori is an apparel performance brand, and SmartSign produces custom signs.

That growth equity team often goes after founders who’ve bootstrapped their companies, as might a more traditional private equity firm. It separately makes what it considers “late stage venture” deals, meaning it participates in traditional Series B, C, D, and later rounds.

Other bets from Norwest’s most recent fund include a wide variety of consumer brands, including the personal finance app Dave, the smart home products company Wyze (it makes a home security camera), the home-buying business OpenDoor, and the co-work space company Knotel.

Norwest has meanwhile seen numerous exits over the past couple of years. Health Catalyst, a Salt Lake City-based analytics vendor, went public this past summer, as did Silk Road Medical, a Sunnyvale, Ca., company that’s developing a neuroprotection and stent system used in transcarotid artery revascularization procedures.

Norwest was also an investor in both Uber and Spotify (though Crowe declined to say how much of either stake Norwest has since sold).

The firm has seen some of its portfolio companies acquired in the not-too-distant past, too. For example, in June, publicly traded WorkDay announced it was acquiring  Adaptive Insights. a cloud-based platform for business planning, for $1.5 billion. LinkedIn acquire Glint. Aveta of growh, acquired by Welsh Carson. (see a lot of growth equity world.) Another company, an employee engagement platform called Glint, was separately acquired by LinkedIn roughly a year ago for undisclosed terms.

As for this new fund, the team — to which it added partner Priti Choksi last year — remains the same, says Crowe. So does its mission of backing teams at a wide variety of stages and sectors, including, broadly, consumer, enterprise and healthcare in the U.S., India, and Israel.

E-commerce accounts for around 11% of all retail sales in the US, but it’s growing much faster than brick-and-mortar sales, going up 14.8% this year versus a mere 1.9% for physical retail, according to eMarketer. So to better compete today and in the future, retailers are now investing in more advanced tools not just to figure out more about what’s selling best, when and where, but how to serve individuals better — in essence, to provide the same kind of help, recommendations, discounts and communication with shoppers that online portals like Amazon provides.

Punchh, a company that got its start in loyalty cards (hence the name) but has since expanded into a wider world of analytics and customer personalization to tap into that trend, is today announcing that it has raised $40 million to continue expanding its business. The funding is being led by Adams Street Partners and Sapphire Ventures (which also led its previous round of $30 million in April 2018), with AllianceBernstein also participating.

To date, Punchh has raised around $73 million, with its valuation over $300 million. (To be clear, CEO and founder Shyam Rao said the exact number wasn’t being disclosed, but he did say it was “well north” of multiples of its last valuation, which was around $100 million. PitchBook has filled in the blanks: a first close of this round this summer, for just over $35 million, came in at a pre-money valuation of $300 million, which would make this about $340 million.)

Punchh has built most of its business up to now in the restaurant industry. Its customers include companies like Yum Brands (the Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC giant), Denny’s and other big and smaller operations, where it provides not just app-based loyalty card services, but ways to link up people’s payment cards with their purchasing history to better track what they are buying, and the ability to build subsequent discount and other promotional campaigns around that. Altogether, Rao tells me that it has data on some 125 million customers globally, covering some 80,000 locations.

“We get access to 100% of all transactions at those locations, working out to 3 billion transactions per month,” Rao said. That data in turn trains Punchh’s AI models to feed the bigger recommendation and analytics engine.

For the last year, Punchh been slowly expanding into other retail areas such as convenience stores and more: its most recent customer win, a deal with Casey’s General Stores, Inc. with 2,100 stores in 16 states in Midwest, is a sign that the strategy is working.

The opportunity that Punchh is targeting is somewhat ironic: the level of personalization that it’s building into the brick-and-mortar customer experience used to be a cornerstone of what it meant to be a “regular customer” at a local or favorite store, bar or restaurant.

These days — in part because of the decline of the small business, in part because our spending habits have changed, in part because everything has been digitised and retailers are looking for ways to actually downsize human-based customer relations — you don’t typically get that kind of experience anymore.

On the online front, online stores like Amazon have leveraged the model of personalization and seized the opportunity to use data to offer it in their own style: by recommending products to you when you come to their virtual storefronts, based on what you’ve bought or browsed for already online. So while old days of brick-and-mortar personalization have disappeared, they’ve been quickly replaced online, but not so in the physical world.

That’s now slowly changing in part because of innovations from companies like Punchh, which also takes into account cash purchases, since its technology is integrated at the point of sale.

“When you buy something in cash, we may not know who you are but we do know that you come in at, say, 8am and what you bought,” he said. “We can still use that to predict lifetime value and to generate a coupon.” 

Ironically, while the was a model that was pioneered in brick and mortar, it was honed online, and is now again being improved and advanced, Punchh supporters say, back in the physical — not online — world, which is, after all, still accounting for more sales overall.

“Punchh is the undisputed leader in this category. They work with the biggest brands, have the most sophisticated technology, and drive real results for their customers,” said Robin Murray, Partner at Adams Street Partners, in a statement. “While everyone else got distracted by maximizing ecommerce, Punchh took the best technologies and practices from that space and applied them to physical retail. Now the world is coming back around – just look at Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods – and Punchh is already 10 steps ahead of the game.”

Same-day delivery is coming to Target’s app. The retailer announced this morning that its same-day shopping service Shipt, which Target acquired two years ago for $550 million, will now be integrated directly into the Target mobile application. Though Shipt is widely known as an online grocery service that competes with Instacart and others, Target is putting the service to work to do more than deliver food and various household items.

Instead, Shipt is turning into Target’s own version of Amazon’s Prime Now. Currently, Target shoppers can order 65,000 items from the app for same-day delivery, including not just groceries and essentials, but also toys, baby-care products, kitchenware, and more. For comparison’s sake, Amazon says Prime Now offers “tens of thousands” of products for one or 2-hour delivery. Shipt may not have quite as tight windows, however — just “same-day.”

While Amazon doesn’t disclose how many exact products are available via Prime Now, as it varies by location, a 2018 study indicated that Amazon’s biggest markets offered around 55,000 Prime Now products per city, while many other cities offered 34K-41K SKUs.

Unlike Prime Now, Shipt doesn’t require a membership, though one is available. Instead, shoppers can opt to pay a $9.99 delivery fee per same-day order. This is similar to how Walmart Grocery operates, though it’s now rolling out a subscription option for its more regular customers.

Shipt’s integration with the Target app doesn’t mean the dedicated Shipt app is going away — that’s still a more convenient experience for shopping groceries at this time. However, it is a way for Target to offer Shipt delivery to a wider customer base of mobile consumers.

The mobile integration follows the launch of a dedicated shopping site for same-day delivery on Target.com earlier this year, which had a similar goal.

Target has been steadily modernizing its business to better compete with Amazon and help customers shop however they want — in-store, online or some hybrid of the two, as with Drive Up orders. In less than two years’ time, Drive Up became a top-rated service and it more than doubled the number of 2018 orders by fulfilling more than 5 million orders in the first part of the year, for example. Meanwhile, Target recently said that 1 in 5 customers were placing same-day orders with Target for the first time in Q2, indicating the potential for growth in same-day.

The same-day Shipt integration is rolling out today in the Target app which also includes a new “My Store” tab where shoppers can convert lists to a shopping cart with a “Delivery” button. A “Discover” also helps them to navigate and find other features, like deals and seasonal content.

Instagram is making Like counts private for some users everywhere. The test is expanding globally after Instagram began hiding Likes in April in Canada and then in Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia and New Zealand in July. Facebook started a similar experiment in Australia in September.

Instagram tells TechCrunch it wants its app to be a place people feel comfortable expressing themselves, and can focus on photos and videos they share rather than how many Likes they get. Users can still see who Liked their own posts by tapping on the Likers list, but they won’t see a count anywhere — they’d have to count the names manually..

Still, there remain concerns about how this could hurt influencers and creators after studies found many of them of various levels of popularity lost 3% to 16% of their Likes in countries where Instagram hid the counts. Instagram tells me it understands Like counts are important to many creators, and it’s actively working on ways that creators will be able to communicate their value to partners. Since Like counts won’t be public, influencer marketing agencies must rely on self-reported screenshots from creators and won’t be able verify a post got enough engagement to warrant payment.

An Instagram spokesperson tells TechCrunch: “Starting today, we’re expanding our test of private like counts to the rest of the world beyond Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, and New Zealand. If you’re in the test, you’ll no longer see the total number of likes and views on photos and videos posted to Feed unless they’re your own. While the feedback from early testing has been positive, this is a fundamental change to Instagram, and so we’re continuing our test to learn more from our global community.”

In the world of enterprise software, there are often strange bedfellows. Just yesterday, Salesforce announced a significant partnership with AWS around the Cloud Information Model. This morning, it announced it was moving its Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. That’s the way that enterprise partnerships shimmy and shake sometimes.

The companies also announced they were partnering around Microsoft Teams, integrating Teams with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

Salesforce plans to move Marketing Cloud, which has been running in its own data centers, to Microsoft Azure in the coming months, although the exact migration plan timeline is not clear yet. This is a big deal for Microsoft, which competes fiercely with AWS for customers. AWS is the clear market leader in the space, but Microsoft has been a strong second for some time now, and bringing Salesforce on board as a customer is certainly a quality reference for the company.

Brent Leary, founder at CRM Essentials, who has been watching the market for many years, says the partnership says a lot about Microsoft’s approach to business today, and that it’s willing to partner broadly to achieve its goals. “I think the bigger news is that Salesforce chose to go deeper with Microsoft over Amazon, and that Microsoft doesn’t fear strengthening Salesforce at the potential expense of Dynamics 365 (its CRM tool), mainly because their biggest growth driver is Azure,” Leary told TechCrunch.

Microsoft and Salesforce have always had a complex relationship. In the Steve Ballmer era, they traded dueling lawsuits over their CRM products. Later, Satya Nadella kindled a friendship of sorts by appearing at Dreamforce in 2015. The relationship has ebbed and flowed since, but with this announcement, it appears the frenemies are closer to friends than enemies again.

Let’s not forget though, that it was just yesterday that Salesforce announced a partnership with AWS around the Cloud Information Model, one that competes directly with a different partnership between Adobe, Microsoft and SAP; or that just last year AWS announced a significant partnership with AWS around data integration.

These kinds of conflicting deals are confusing, but they show that in today’s connected cloud world, that companies, who will compete fiercely with one another in one part of the market, may still be willing to partner in other parts when it makes sense for both parties and for customers. That appears to be the case with today’s announcement from these companies.

Apple in September announced its plans for a research app that would allow U.S. consumers to participate in health studies from their Apple devices. Today, that app has gone live for both iPhone and Apple Watch for customers in the U.S. From the new app, Apple Research, users can currently opt to participate in three health studies, including a women’s health study, hearing study, and a heart and movement study.

Apple had teamed up with researchers and health organizations on previous studies, but those would require participants to install a dedicated app on their iOS device for each study alone. The new Research app instead offers a dedicated place for this opt-in activity and makes it simpler for people who want to join multiple studies at once.

The data collected from Apple devices (and their numerous sensors) offers researchers the ability to conduct large-scale health studies in a way that hasn’t been possible before. Before, these sorts of studies were expensive and time-consuming, Apple says, but now users can opt into sharing health-related information directly with researchers — like signals from their heart, motion level and activity, and sound exposure.

Apple’s privacy promises come into play here as well, as it puts data-sharing in users’ control, and offers commitments that data will be encrypted, won’t be sold, and that studies have to inform users how your data will support their research. Participants can also withdraw at any time.

Among the first three studies is a women’s health study in partnership with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. It aims to advance understanding of women’s menstrual cycles and their relationship to infertility, osteoporosis, menopause, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). This will collect users’ cycle tracking logs from the Health app on the iPhone or the Cycle Tracking app on Apple Watch.

Another heart and movement study is in partnership with the American Heart Association and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and will use Apple Watch data collected during workouts, plus heart rate and activity data, along with short surveys. This data will be used to understand how certain mobility signals and details about heart rate and rhythm could serve as potential early warning signs of atrial fibrillation (AFib), heart disease or declining mobility, among other things.

The hearing study from the University of Michigan and the World Health Organization collects data about users’ sound exposure from the iPhone and Noise app on Apple Watch, along with surveys and hearing tests. The study will also test if Health app notifications will encourage users to modify their listening behavior, when loud sounds are detected.

“Today marks an important moment as we embark on research initiatives that may offer incredible learnings in areas long sought after by the medical community,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, in a statement about the app’s launch. “Participants on the Research app have the opportunity to make a tremendous impact that could lead to new discoveries and help millions lead healthier lives.”

The Research app is rolling out now to iPhone and Apple Watch in the U.S.

Ford has revealed the official name of its forthcoming EV SUV, which has a Mustang lineage and which will be officially revealed on November 17 in LA. The new vehicle is called the Mustang Mach-E, and following its official unveiling (hosted by Idris Elba, by the way), you’ll be able to actually sign up online and reserve one by putting down a $500 deposit.

The reservation system will include access to a limited ‘First Edition’ set of cars, which Ford says it will provide details around during the launch event. The deposit is also fully refundable, in case you get cold feet, and people who put down deposits will later get the opportunity to actually configure their vehicle prior to delivery. During the reservation process, you also select your preferred Ford dealer, presumably for eventually picking up the car.

Ford’s teases of the vehicle so far suggest a crossover-style electric SUV, and Ford has put up some collateral on the web with a few additional clues about hat it will offer, including a targeted EPA range rating of “at least” 300 miles, and a charging rate of around 47 miles in just 10 minutes with a 150kW DC fast charger, with two years of free charging across Ford’s EV chaser network included.

Below, you can see all the hints and glimpses of the car we’ve gotten from Ford so far, and you can probably fill in the gaps via imagination and reference to the existing Ford Mustang, but November 17 will finally reveal all, and we’ll definitely have coverage here on TC to satisfy your curiosity.

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1Password has been around for 14 years, and the founders grew the company the old-fashioned way without a dime of venture capital. But when it decided to take venture help, it went all in. Today, the company announced a $200 million Series A from Accel, the largest single investment in the firm’s 35-year history.

Dave Teare says he and his co-founder Roustem Karimov were resolving a major pain point for users around password creation and management when they launched in 2005, and that the Toronto company has been profitable from day one. That’s not something you hear from startups all that often.

Today, Jeff Shiner is CEO. He helped grow the company from 20 employees when he came on board in 2012 to 174 today. He says that as he helped foster this growth, he saw a tremendous market opportunity in front of him. That’s when he decided to finally take the plunge into venture investing.

“We’ve got the sophisticated business tooling that we built over the last five years, so that we can really go out there and just double and triple down on what we’ve been doing, and drive that much faster and further into the market, and again that market is honestly from consumers all the way up to enterprises,” Shiner explained.

While he is confident in his company’s ability to build a product people want and support its customers, it needs help with other aspects of the business to grow faster and take advantage of the market potential. “We have far less experience with things like go-to-market programs, with sales, marketing and finance teams — and things like that. And we need to grow and grow aggressively, which is not just hiring people, but also getting the right partners, finding the right leaders to help us with that growth,” he said.

Accel has a history of funding mature companies that haven’t taken funding before, so what it’s doing with this investment isn’t all that unusual for the firm. Arun Mathew, a partner at Accel, says he doesn’t come across companies like 1Password all that often. ““Like Atlassian and Qualtrics, the 1Password team impressed us by building a business that’s not only scaling extremely quickly but also has been profitable since day one — and that’s why today we’re making the biggest single investment in Accel’s 35-year history,” Mathew said in a statement.

The founders actually stumbled onto the idea of 1Password in 2005. They were running a web development consultancy when they decided to resolve a long-standing problem of logging into multiple websites, a particularly acute issue given their day jobs.

They decided to build a tool to help, and when they put it out in the world, they found lots of other people had the same problem. They ended up closing the web consultancy to build 1Password, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Moveworks, a startup using AI to help resolve Help Desk tickets in an automated fashion, announced a $75 million Series B investment today.

The round was led by Iconiq Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Sapphire Ventures. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, and Comerica Bank also participated. The round also included a personal investment from John W. Thompson, who is a partner at LightSpeed Venture Partners and chairman at Microsoft. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $105 million, according to the company.

That’s a lot of money for an early-stage company, but CEO and co-founder Bhavin Shah says his company is solving a common problem using AI. “Moveworks is a machine learning platform that uses natural language understanding to take tickets that are submitted by employees every day to their IT teams for stuff they need, and we understand [the content of the tickets], interpret them, and then we take the actions to resolve them [automatically],” Shah explained.

He said the company decided to focus on help desk tickets because they saw data when they were forming the company that suggested a common set of questions, and that would make it easier to interpret and resolve these issues. In fact, they are currently able to resolve 25-40% of all tickets autonomously.

He says this should lead to greater user satisfaction because some of their problems can be resolved immediately, even when IT personnel aren’t around to help. Instead of filing a ticket and waiting for an answer, Moveworks can provide the answer, at least part of the time, without human intervention.

Aditya Agrawal, a partner at Iconiq, says that the company really captured his attention. “Moveworks is not just transforming IT operations, they are building a more modern and enlightened way to work. They’ve built a platform that simplifies and streamlines every interaction between employees and IT, enabling both to focus on what matters,” he said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2016, and in the early days was only resolving 2% of the tickets autonomously, so it has seen major improvement. It already has 115 employees and dozens of customers (although Shah didn’t want to provide an exact number).