Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Babbel, the popular Berlin-based language learning service, today announced that its founder and current co-CEO Markus Witte is stepping down from his CEO role but that he will remain the executive chairman of the company’s board. The company’s current co-CEO Arne Schepker will become Babbel’s sole CEO.

In addition to these leadership changes, the company also today announced that it has appointed Katherine Melchior Ray, who held previous executive positions with luxury consumer brands like Japan’s Shiseido, Hyatt Hotels, Tommy Hilfiger, Gucci and Louis Vuitton, as its new Chief Marketing Officer.

All of these changes come as Babbel ends as Babbel hits 100 million Euro in revenue for its 2018 financial year.

As Witte and Schepker told me in an interview ahead of today’s official announcement, there were a few reasons why the team decided that this would be the best way forward. And while it’s unusual for U.S. founders to step back from their CEO role, especially as a company is hitting a new growth phase, Witter argues that going forward, being the chairman of the board will put him in the best position to ensure the company’s future going forward.

“Being CEO and chairman of the board has pros and cons,” Witte told me. “To say that the founder and chairman are one and the same person, that’s the West Coast model — and every now and then, that has its advantages. But it’s not what people would consider good governance in Europe and at times, it makes things harder because it creates a conflict of interest in board meetings.”

Those conflicts, Witte argues, made him less effective in the chairman role and in addition, he believes that Babbel has now reached a point where chairman and CEO just can’t be the same person anymore. And so he decided that if he had to choose, he’d stay as chairman of the board because that’s the role where he can ensure that Babbel remains true to its mission.

He also admitted that as the company grew, the workload became a bit too much. “CEOs like to overestimate themselves and I’m no exception,” said Witte. “But you get to the point where you have to say: I can’t fill all of these roles anymore.”

With Schepker, Babbel had brought on an outsider as CMO a few years ago who proved himself in the co-CEO role and was, in Witte’s view, ready for the CEO role, making his decision easier.

Schepker tells me that the company doesn’t plan to change its overall strategy going forward. “We have a clear strategy and we plan to implement that even faster — but that’s independent of these leadership change,” he told me. “The focus is on how we can create more value for our customers, our learners, by looking at how we can better guide them through their personal learning journey. The problem that most learners face is that, unless they studied it in college, they never learned how to effectively learn a new language.”

In practical terms, this means that Babbel will look at expanding the range of language learning opportunities for its users to better guide them through their learning experience (and for longer).

Apple announced this morning a significant $2.5 billion commitment towards easing the California housing availability and affordability crisis. The investment includes a $1 billion commitment to an affordable housing investment fund, $1 billion towards a first-time homebuyer mortgage assistance fund, and $300 million in Apple-owned land which will be made available for affordable housing.

Another $200 million will go to support new, lower-income housing in the Bay Area including by way of a $150 million Bay Area housing fund, with partners like Housing Trust Silicon Valley. This will consist of long-term forgivable loans and grants. Another $50 million will be directed towards vulnerable populations, specifically to address homelessness in the Silicon Valley area.

Apple says it will also look into similar efforts across both Northern and Southern California that are designed to prevent homelessness.

The company says the full commitment in the state — which is being done in parntership with Governor Gavin Newsom, the state of California, and community-based organizations — will take approximately two years to be fully utilized, and will depend on the availability of projects. The capital returned to Apple will also be reinvested in future projects over the next five years.

The investment comes at a time when the housing crunch in Calfornia has forced people from their homes, Apple explained in its announcement.

“Community members like teachers, firefighters, first responders and service workers are increasingly having to make the difficult choice to leave behind the community they have long called home. Nearly 30,000 people left San Francisco between April and June of this year1 and homeownership in the Bay Area is at a seven-year low,” Apple said.

The housing crisis didn’t develop overnight, nor is the tech industry’s growth the only reason there’s now an issue.

Like most complexities, the crisis arose from a combination of factors including also the area’s local laws, zoning regulations, protests against building vertically, NIMBY-ism, rental control’s impact on the market, the restricted housing supply and much more.  But tech has played a big role here, having led to a disparity between the wealthy tech workers and everyone else as well as contributing to rapid population growth that’s outpaced the growth in the housing supply.

Today, many area residents can’t afford to live in the cities where they work, commuting an hour or more from more affordable neighborhoods.

“Before the world knew the name Silicon Valley, and long before we carried technology in our pockets, Apple called this region home, and we feel a profound civic responsibility to ensure it remains a vibrant place where people can live, have a family and contribute to the community,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement. “Affordable housing means stability and dignity, opportunity and pride. When these things fall out of reach for too many, we know the course we are on is unsustainable, and Apple is committed to being part of the solution.”

Apple isn’t the first tech giant to make a contribution in an attempt to address the housing crisis. Facebook last month announced $1 billion to tackle affordable housing in California and elsewhere. Google earlier this year also announced a $1 billion investment aimed at easing the Bay Area housing crisis. Elsewhere, Microsoft committed $500 million for an affordable housing fund in the Seattle area.

The fact that the tech giants have to step in to address the problems — which do, in fact, impact their own businesses as they need to be able to hire more than the just high-paid engineers — is concerning. While some would applaud the sizable investments as proof of tech’s ability to be a good neighbor to their local communities, others would say we should just be taxing these companies more so the money is available to solve the problems upfront — instead of it going into loans that actually earn these companies more. Nor should they be invested into million- or billion-dollar programs that give these tech companies an incredible amount of influence in local politics.

But it could also be that crisis has gotten so out of control, it can no longer be solved at the local level.

“This unparalleled financial commitment to affordable housing, and the innovative strategies at the heart of this initiative, are proof that Apple is serious about solving this issue. I hope other companies follow their lead,” said Newsom. “The sky-high cost of housing — both for homeowners and renters — is the defining quality-of-life concern for millions of families across this state, one that can only be fixed by building more housing. This partnership with Apple will allow the state of California to do just that.”

Esports are the wild wild West right now. There’s clearly a huge potential for the industry to become incredibly lucrative, but everything from the infrastructure of competition to the overall culture isn’t quite ready for prime time.

This introduces a huge opportunity for the tech world to get in on the action. We’ve seen traditional VC money start to sniff around esports in ways big and small. Bessemer Venture Partners has invested in Team SoloMid, while Sequoia has invested in 100 Thieves.

Today, Gen.G has announced that it has accepted investment from the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, a longstanding New York City-based accelerator program.

Gen.G started as KSV (Korea plus Silicon Valley) in mid-2017 with a debut in the Overwatch League. In 2018, after expanding to other games including Heroes of the Storm, PUBG and League of Legends, KSV eSports rebranded to Generation Gaming (Gen.G) and launched a Clash Royale esports team.

At the end of 2018, Gen.G made yet another huge move. They lured Chris Park from his position as executive vice president in charge of product and marketing at Major League Baseball to join Gen.G as CEO.

Since, Park has been thinking about the long-term opportunities for the esports org and the industry as a whole. He secured $46 million in funding from Los Angeles Clippers minority owner Dennis Wong, Will Smith’s Dreamers Fund, NEA, Battery Ventures, Canaan Partners, SVB Capital and Stanford University, among others.

He signed a partnership with dating app Bumble to create Team Bumble, an all-female professional Fortnite squad.

Gender inclusion is one of the biggest misses in the esports world right now. Data shows that 46 percent of gamers are female (ESA) and that nearly one in four esports viewers are female (Nielsen). Despite no physical differentiators between men and women, women are severely underrepresented in the esports world.

Not one female competed in the Fortnite World Cup in 2018, despite the fact that qualifiers were completely open to any player. A big reason for the disparity here is that the gaming community isn’t generally a safe environment for female gamers, in big and small ways. Many female gamers experience abuse while playing games, like this streamer, and it’s gotten bad enough to push a small percentage of female gamers away from playing entirely.

But exclusion comes in many forms. Ninja announced in August 2018 that he won’t be streaming with female gamers, which you can read about here.

Beyond general principles about equality, the female gamer is a lucrative demographic that has yet to be properly tapped by any particular esports org, publisher, or otherwise. Gen.G is now ahead in the race to acquire female gamers as fans, customers and future talent.

Another forward-thinking move by Gen.G is its recent partnership with the University of Kentucky to help create and manage its esports program. We’ve seen startups like PlayVS look to build out the infrastructure and connective tissue that will eventually bind education and professional sports, as has been the case with traditional sports for generations. Gen.G is now tackling that ever-important bridge from academia to professional life by looking at universities.

The funding from ERA, the amount of which has not been disclosed, not only allows Gen.G to grow its foothold on the East Coast. It also gives the esports org a strategic partnership with ERA, which invests in super early stage tech startups. As more founders tackle the mounting challenges in esports, Gen.G is now in a prime position to watch over those deals closely and potentially tap into some of the solutions and services sure to sprout up in the next five to ten years.

“We are focused on ways to make it easier for people in the gaming community to connect,” said Chris Park, hinting at some of the technology that Gen.G is interested in. “My hope is that over time, platforms as well as teams treat fans and athletes as more than just users, and more like collaborators and partners.”

Adobe will be bringing another of its desktop-class imaging and graphics apps to the iPad: Illustrator, which is set for a launch win 2020, the company announced today at its annual MAX conference. Last year, Adobe announced a similar plan to deliver Photoshop for iPad, and that app launched on the App Store early on Monday.

Illustrator for iPad is still in “early” development, the company said, so we don’t know exactly what it’ll look like relative to the desktop version. But it will focus on making the most of touch and Apple Pencil-based input, which are uniquely available to the iPad. As with Photoshop, documents created on one platform will be available in full fidelity to edit on any others via Creative Cloud storage.

The app will be available in a limited private beta beginning immediately, but the group of those with access will remain very tight until Adobe has managed to get further along in the development process. You can sign up now to register interest, however, and maybe you’ll gain access sometime earlier than official launch to help with the beta and building process.

Adobe says it’s already been in touch with “thousands of designers” to understand how best to build them a version of Illustrator that works best for how they use tablets in their work. If the Photoshop for iPad release process is any measure, at launch next year Illustrator won’t offer feature parity, but it’s a starting point for turning the iPad into a true one-stop shop for creative pros who favor an Adobe working environment.

NASA’s commercial crew partner Boeing has achieved a key milestone on the way to actually flying astronauts aboard its CST-100 Starliner: Demonstrating that its launch pad abort system works as designed, which is a key safety system that NASA requires to be in place before the aerospace company can put astronauts inside the Starliner.

The Starliner’s demonstration mission involved starting from a standing position designed to simulate how it would be set up on top of the ULA Atlas 5 rocket during an actual crewed launch. It then activated its abort engines, which helped push the Starliner and its service module to a safe distance away from the launcher rocket. One issue is that only two out of three parachutes deployed, which will have to be investigated, but the actual fault tolerance defined by NASA here allows and anticipates that as a possibility.

The need for this system is described as a very ‘unlikely’ scenario by Boeing and NASA, but the agency and its partners are emphasizing safety as they develop both Boeing’s and SpaceX’s new crew transportation spacecrafts.

There’s an anthropomorphic test dummy on board, loaded with sensors that will provide Boeing and NASA with all the data they need about what the abort system impact would be on an actual human sitting in that Starliner, were this an actual incident with astronauts involved. That will provide further data about how people would’ve experienced the abort, which will be key information in addition to finding out why that third parachute didn’t fire.

In December, Boeing plans to launch its first uncrewed Starliner to the ISS for the next step ahead of launching with people on board. That remains on track based on an initial interpretation of these results.

Instagram and Snapchat have changed the way people look at photo editing. What was once a task limited to those with wildly expensive tools and years of training has become accessible to anyone with a smartphone. These apps and their filters aren’t going to replace Photoshop for the pros… but for people just looking to upload a quick selfie to their story, they’re Good Enough.

Adobe realizes this — and now they’re looking to flex a bit.

This morning the company announced Photoshop Camera, an AI-driven photo editing app for iOS and Android. Take a picture, and Photoshop Camera will near-instantly analyze it and offer up a drawer full of potential enhancements, from basics like shadows/highlight tweaks, to more complicated things like swapping out the sky in a complicated cityscape.

It recognizes what’s in the photo — be it food, people, or distant mountains — and bubbles the most relevant “lenses” (think filters) up to the top. All lenses and effects are non-destructive, so you can quickly roll back any changes it makes.

Powering the AI is years and years of data. Adobe has hundreds of millions of photos in its stock photo collection, along with the data on which of these photos people tend to buy and use. Perhaps most importantly, they have the tooling data on how photo editors take a picture and get it from point A to point B.

Adobe tells me that it’s working with artists — Billy Eilish, for example — to create custom filters and lens. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also hinted to me at the possibility of limited edition, region-locked lenses — like, say, those that only appear when you’re at a music festival or conference.

One catch: if you want to use the app any time in 2019, you’ll have to get Adobe’s thumbs-up. It’s going to be in private “preview” mode until sometime in 2020, when it rolls out to everybody. You can sign up for the preview here.

Deutsche Telekom is perhaps best known around the world as the telco behind mobile carrier T-Mobile, but today it’s making an appearance in a lesser-known yet also regular role: trademark troll.

The company’s German lawyers have sent a letter to Lemonade, the AI-based insurance startup headquartered in New York, demanding it cease using magenta — a color that appears across Lemonade’s logo and marketing material — globally. DT also filed for and received an injunction on Lemonade operating in Germany — a block Lemonade has temporarily worked around by dropping magenta for the moment in the country.

But that is not the whole story: Lemonade, which said the letter came in the wake of its launch in Germany this summer, said that it will put up a fight. Today, it filed a motion with EUIPO (the European intellectual property office) to invalidate DT’s claim to a trademark on magenta; and it has further petitioned the German trademark office to remove DT’s claim to holding a right on magenta in the insurance sector.

“We thought this seemed like a massive over-reach,” Daniel Schreiber, Lemonade’s CEO and cofounder, said in an interview. “Then when we started digging, we found that they’ve been doing this across a number of countries, covering big companies to the smallest businesses. It’s mind boggling. We are in insurance.”

To be sure, this is far from Deutsche Telekom’s first efforts to defend its pink hue. The company has gone after carriers like AT&T and Telia, our sister publication Engadget (before the days when it was owned by another DT competitor, Verizon), Apple device management specialist dataJar, invoice services provider Compello, and a now-defunct smartwatch maker.

The track record so far should give Lemonade some hope. In some cases — such as Telia’s and dataJar’s — DT has lost and magenta has run free. In others, DT has had the upper hand, and has danced a little in celebration:

Who’s the bully now, John?

“We feel like we’re a character in a Disney movie, fighting a baddie,” Schreiber said.

Lemonade’s CEO added that although DT’s legal papers specify that the startup stop using magenta globally, he thinks that the carrier waited until the startup entered Germany to take legal action because it put the startup squarely in German jurisdiction, where DT might get treated more favorably because of its ubiquity. (Indeed, the cases where it has lost have all be outside of its home market.)

Schreiber defended the use of magenta for Lemonade — incidentally, not typically a drink that is magenta — as part of its bigger ethos.

“We’ve been pink since launch because we wanted to give a sense of being trusting and fun and approachable. It’s a very prominent part of our brand, ” he said. “The backdrop to that is the monochrome of our industry, insurance.”

The company based more than just its logo on the color. Since being founded in 2015, all of its promotional materials have featured magenta, and its social media campaigns on services like Instagram are built around the color, with various household and other everyday objects dipped into magenta paint. (This is a reference to Lemonade’s insurance services: it offers home owner and rental insurance services that cover all your belongings.)

Lemonade’s Instagram effort in particular has gone somewhat viral: the company says that its posts have collectively been viewed 18 million times. Lemonade will now try to turn up the volume on that, with a new effort to defend its use of magenta with a #freethepink hashtag. As the saying goes, when life hands you lemons…

T-Mobile’s specific form of magenta that it has trademarked for its brand is RAL 4010, a color that is not exactly the same as Lemonade’s, Schreiber said. T-Mobile has been going after a number of companies using colors close to this as well.

One issue that might make this case not so clear cut is that Detsche Telekom, it seems, dabbles in insurance, both on services like cybersecurity, as well as on tech and specifically devices — carriers, of course, being major resellers of handsets. Not the same as household insurance, but perhaps an area that might see the two moving closer together as Lemonade grows.

And growth is something that is likely to keep happening. Schreiber said that while the company will not disclose any plans today, it will be expanding into more regions within the US and Europe, where it is now active, as well as further afield, and it is also considering entering into more product lines beyond home owners and home renters insurance.

Lemonade earlier this year raised $300 million on a $2 billion valuation led by the SoftBank Group — most of which, Schreiber said, is still in the bank.

Meanwhile, a small note on PitchBook dated October 28 noted that the company is now starting to look at a further $500 million fundraise, although if this is true, it’s very early days. “News to me,” Schreiber said when I asked him about it.

We’re reaching out to Deutsche Telekom and will update this post as we learn more.

Adobe is launching a slew of updates to its various Creative Cloud video production tools today. For the most part, these are aimed at professionals (or at least YouTubers). Premiere Rush, however, has always been positioned as Adobe’s tool for anybody who wants to dabble in video and so it’s maybe no surprise that the company today announced that it will now also support sharing videos directly to TikTok, the red hot (yet not uncontroversial) video sharing platform for sharing short clips. That makes Adobe the first third-party app that can publish directly to TikTok.

Rush launched last October, with support for sharing to all of the usual video publishing services. Now, thanks to this new partnership with TikTok, the company is bringing all of the built-in and easy to use editing features of Rush to the TikTok community as well. With that, TikTok users now get access to video editing features like auto-ducking, transitions and color filters, timelapse and slo-mo.

Thanks to some of Adobe’s machine learning smarts, video producers — especially those who don’t usually shoot the kind of vertical videos that TikTok prefers — can switch to a different aspect ratio with just the click of a button and Premiere Rush will automatically reframe these shots for you.

“We spoke to video-makers around the world and the thing we heard over and over was a need for speed, ease, and sharability,” Adobe notes in today’s announcement. “Enter your ability to share on yet another favorite platform, TikTok.”

The new feature is now live in Premiere Rush, which is available to all Creative Cloud users, as well as in a free version.

One of the most interesting (and confusing) news announcements of Microsoft’s Build developer conference earlier this year was the first public demo of the company’s Fluid Framework. Fluid is meant to make building collaborative real-time editing experiences easier for developers, but Microsoft is also building it into some of its own tools like Office and Outlook. It’s nothing less than a reimagining of what documents should look at feel like.

Today, at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida, Microsoft launched the first public preview of the Fluid Framework end-user experience, as well as a private preview for developers.

As Microsoft notes, the Fluid Framework has three main capabilities: the multi-person coauthoring features, the componentized document model, and the ability to plug in intelligent agents that can, for example, translate text in real-time or suggest edits. To some degree, this isn’t all that different from a Google Docs or even Microsoft’s own collaboration features in Office. But what’s new is that Microsoft is opening this up to developers and that it is looking at the Fluid Framework as a new way to deconstruct and componentize documents, which can then be used across applications.

Microsoft plans to build the Fluid Framework into lots of experiences across Microsoft 365, including Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneNote and Office. If you want to see it in action, you can now try the public preview to see what editing documents with it feels like.