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Sony’s live TV streaming service, PlayStation Vue, is shutting down. The service will no longer be available as of January 30, 2020, the company announced today. The news comes only days after rumors circulated which claimed Sony was in search of a new owner for the struggling service.

A report in The Information claimed Sony had talked to fuboTV about a possible deal which would include Vue’s subscriber base of some 500,000 users and its underlying technology. It also said Sony had tapped Bank of America Merrill Lynch to explore a sale several months ago.

The business was said to be valued in the tens of millions.

The news of Vue’s closure will likely disappoint a number of fans of the streaming service, who appreciated Vue’s user interface and unique features — like multi-view, which let you watch multiple live programs at once —  as well as its decent sports package.

It’s not surprising, however, that Vue didn’t pan out. The service initially faced challenges in consumer adoption, largely because of its branding. By calling it “PlayStation Vue” made many consumers thought it was limited to PlayStation consoles. In reality, the service was available across platforms just like Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, Sling TV and others are. You didn’t even need to own a PlayStation to use it.

Sony has 100 million PlayStation 4s on the market, it says, which makes its inability to make Vue work even more disappointing. Not only was Vue one of the first live TV streaming services to arrive on the market, it had a built-in audience to advertise to. But the rising costs of programming make these live TV streaming services a thin margin business at best, and have forced price hikes across the industry, including all of Vue’s rivals.

In the end, Sony claimed market pressures are what led to Vue’s demise.

“Unfortunately, the highly competitive Pay TV industry, with expensive content and network deals, has been slower to change than we expected. Because of this, we have decided to remain focused on our core gaming business,” the Sony announcement stated.

The company directed PlayStation owners to its PlayStation Store on PS4 to continue to access movie and TV content going forward.

“We are very proud of what PlayStation Vue was able to accomplish. We had ambitious goals for how our service could change how people watch TV, showcasing PlayStation’s ability to innovate in a brand-new category within the Pay TV industry. We want to thank all of our customers, some of whom have been with us since PlayStation Vue’s launch in 2015,” the announcement read.

Some features are the result of consumer demand. Others simply make sense. And then there are features like the Galaxy Book Flex and Ion’s Wireless PowerShare that appear to be more a product of a “because we can” approach to product design.

Wireless charging is, in and of itself, kind of a no-brainer in an era when many or most flagship smartphones support the technology. Samsung’s implementation, however, leaves a lot to be desired here. It’s true, of course, that Wireless PowerShare’s implementation is less than ideal, requiring one of two phones to be face-down, but I can certainly see applications for the tech.

On the new laptops, however, charging the phone requires that it occupy all of the trackpad. In the case of the Flex, I suppose you can still use the touchscreen (there isn’t one on the Ion), but even so, there’s no scenario in which having a phone sitting on the trackpad doesn’t seriously dampen one’s ability to get some serious work done.

Between the issues and the fact that you can charge your phone the old-fashioned way with the laptops, it’s hard to find a scenario in which the feature is anything but a gimmick. Samsung says the trackpad offered the easiest implementation of the tech — versus, I suppose the palm rest or the top of the device. I’m not sure there’s a great implementation for a feature that might have better been left on the drawing board.

It’s a silly feature on what are otherwise very solid additions to Samsung’s laptop line. The Flex is the more premium of the two, featuring a touchscreen and the 360-degree hinge that gives the device its name. The laptop has an aluminum body with a “royal blue” finish and a built-in slot for the included S Pen. It comes in both 13 and 15-inch varieties, with a 10th-gen Intel processor, 16GB of RAM and up to a TB of storage.

Also available in 13 and 15-inch versions, the Ion ditches the touchscreen and 360 hinge, but maintains an ultra-thin, lightweight design.

Samsung’s jumping the gun a little early on the announcement here. Both models will be available in the U.S. early next year, priced similarly to their predecessors. Asked why the company didn’t just wait for CES for the announcement, it noted models arrive at different times in different markets.

Based on past systems, it seems like a pretty safe bet that they’ll be hitting Korean shores earlier. Perhaps in time for the holidays.

Yext helps businesses manage their presence on search and across the web; starting today, with the launch of Yext Answers, it’s also helping them provide a better experience on their own websites.

“It lets any company with a website answer a question about their own brand in a Google-like experience on their own site,” CEO Howard Lerman told me.

While Lerman is officially announcing Yext Answers onstage at the company’s Onward conference this afternoon, the issue is clearly one he’s been thinking about for a while — in an interview earlier this year, he described user-generated content as “tyranny,” and claimed the company’s “founding principle is that the ultimate authority on how many calories are in a Big Mac is McDonald’s.”

It’s a theme that Lerman returned to when he demonstrated the new product for me yesterday, running a number of Google searches — such as “student checking account” — where a brand might want to be relevant, but where the results mostly come from SEO-optimized advice and how-to articles from third-party sites.

“The world of search became pretty cluttered with all these self-declared experts,” he said.

The goal with Yext Answers is to turn a brand’s website into the source that consumers turn to for information on these topics. Lerman said the big obstacle is the simple fact that most site search is pretty bad: “The algorithms that are there today are the algorithms of 1995. It’s keyword-based document search.”

So if you don’t enter exactly right keywords in exactly the right order, you don’t get useful results. Yext, on the other hand, has supposedly spent two years building its own search engine, with natural language processing technology.

As Lerman showed me, that means it can handle more complex, conversational queries like “broccoli cheese soup recipes in 10 minutes or less.” He also pointed out how Yext has tried to follow Google’s lead in presenting the results a variety of formats, whether that’s just a straightforward answer to a question, or maps if you’re searching for store locations.

In addition, Yext Answers customers will get analytics about what people are searching for on their site. If people are searching for a question that the site isn’t answering, businesses can then take advantage of their company’s knowledge base to publish something new — and that, in turn, could also help them show up in search results elsewhere.

Yext Answers has been beta testing with companies like Three Mobile, BBVA USA, IHA and Healthcare Associates of Texas. You can also try it out for yourself on the Yext site.

“Yext Answers represents a level of sophistication that elevates our current search into a predictive, insightful tool that provides opportunities to better understand what our patient population is interested in finding on our site,” said Lori Gillen, marketing director at Healthcare Associates of Texas, in a statement. “It is intelligent enough to understand complex relationships between HCAT-specific facts, like doctors to procedures or specialties to locations, and give insights into what our patients want to know.”

Yext Answers is now available in English-speaking countries.

Contract, self-employed and temporary jobs are on the rise in developed markets, with some 85% of the global workforce, 2.7 billion people, estimated to be on some form of hourly wage rather than flat salary.

Today, a startup that helps companies source these kinds of candidates is announcing a round of funding to help meet that demand. Fountain, which has built a platform to find and screen candidates for field roles — not knowledge worker desk jobs, but hourly work that likely has you on your feet — has raised $23 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its platform, the kinds of services it provides to its customers, and its geographical footprint.

Fountain already has some scale: the company currently sources and processes more than 1 million inbound candidate applications each month, filling some 150,000 jobs in the process, CEO and founder Keith Ryu said in an interview.

In addition to building engines to source candidates through a number of channels such as traditional job boards, social media channels, a company’s own site, and more, Fountain then helps with screening, interview scheduling, background checks (using third-party providers for this part), communicating with the candidate, handling the paperwork and finally onboarding.

Led by DCM, this latest round also included a potentially strategic backer, the Chinese recruitment site 51job, as well as Origin Ventures, Uncork Capital, and others that are not being named. This brings the total raised by Fountain, which previously was called OnboardIQ and had been incubated in Y Combinator, to $34 million.

Fountain’s business targets two main kinds of employers. First, ridesharing companies like Uber, delivery startups like Postmates and home services providers like Thumbtack all function by virtue of their pools of “gig” workers, self-employed people who choose their own working hours and dip into the platforms for assignments when they have time to fulfil them.

But the challenge of finding good people for field jobs is not venture-backed startups’ alone. The second big category that Fountain taps for business is the wider pool of retail and food industry businesses that have long relied on hourly workers also find it hard to source qualified and reliable people.

Between those two, Ryu said that customers cover big “gig economy” businesses like Uber Eats, Caviar and Cabify; large fast food franchises including Taco Bell, Burger King and KFC chains; and a number of other customers that use Fountain’s APIs for white-label services and prefer not to be named. (I think it’s interesting that Uber Eats is on Fountain’s customer list, but Uber is not.)

Fountain was founded in 2015, arguably at the peak of demand for recruiting gig economy workers. In the years since then, and especially in recent times, demands have moved away for these companies from aggressive expansion (bringing on, for example, lots of new drivers), and into more profitable operations. Ryu said that the knock on effect for Fountain has not been a reduction, but a change, in terms of the services required, with some companies opting to outsource where in the past they might have handled recruitment in house.

“There has been some attention to reducing operating costs per driver, including driver acquisition,” he said. “That is where we have been getting involved, using our size [and reach] to reduce the cost to the employer.”

This has also had the effect of also seeing Fountain change up its own strategy to make more of an effort to target more traditional businesses that are based around hourly employees: no longer contractors, but still very much in the field.

“As the unrivaled leader in gig hiring and recruiting, Fountain is already reshaping the way billions of job seekers interact with employers,” says David Chao, co-founder & Partner at DCM, in a statement. “Fountain has been exceptionally capital efficient and has best-in-class customer retention,” adds Kyle Lui, Partner at DCM.

Fountain is not disclosing its valuation with this round. In its last round, back in 2017, it had a very modest $40 million price on it, although given its growth since then (it had sourced 5 million candidates in two years in 2017; now it sources 1 million each month) this is likely to be significantly higher.

Everyone’s in the wireless earbuds these days. Razer, never one to be left out of a trend, is entering the category this week with Hammerhead True Wireless, a pair of fully wireless earbuds targeting its core demographic of gamers.

Where the headphones set to distinguish themselves from the chattering masses of competitors is a focus on low latency. Anyone who’s ever attempted to use earbuds for gaming purposes knows that lag is an issue with a majority of the products on the market. Understandably so, as most are far more focused on music playback and therefore prioritize other features instead.

To achieve this, the company has tweaked Bluetooth 5.0 to offer a Gaming Mode with 60ms, according to the company’s numbers. What’s more, the Razer’s offering them up at an extremely reasonable $100, less than even Amazon’s new Echo Buds — not to mention Apple’s pricey AirPods Pro, which were announced earlier this week.

On paper, at least, the specs are solid for the price point, including a decent (but far from exceptional) three hours of battery life on the buds, for 15 total hours with the charging case factored in. The headphones also feature the standard array of touch controls for playing and pausing music. Honestly, aside from gaming mode, they’re an otherwise pretty standard pair of earbuds from the looks of it. 

The Hammerheads are available now through Razer’s site.

A group of Lyft, Uber and DoorDash drivers are announcing a statewide ballot measure for the November 2020 ballot this morning in Sacramento. Called the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services Act — funded by Uber, Lyft and DoorDash — the measure aims to ensure drivers and couriers can continue to be independent contractors with flexible work hours.

The ballot measure looks to implement an earnings guarantee of at least 120% of minimum wage while on the job, 30 cents per mile for expenses, a healthcare stipend, occupational accident insurance for on-the-job injuries, protection against discrimination and sexual harassment, and automobile accident and liability insurance.

This initiative is a direct response to the legalization of AB-5, the gig worker bill that will make it harder for the likes of Uber, Lyft, DoorDash and other gig economy companies to classify their workers as 1099 independent contractors.

“The new law could take this flexibility away – potentially eliminating hundreds of thousands of work opportunities and forcing app-based drivers into rigid employment schedules whether they prefer it or not,” the group wrote in a Q&A. “Furthermore, if rideshare and delivery drivers are forced to be classified as employees with set shifts, it could significantly limit the availability and affordability of these on-demand services that benefit consumers, small businesses and our economy.”

However, as driver and protest organizer Annette Rivero previously told TechCrunch’s Greg Epstein, “AB5 doesn’t take away anybody’s flexibility, it’s the companies that take away the flexibility. Because I know that that’s something that everyone’s stuck on right now, and it’s a lie. There’s no truth to it.”

In August, Uber, Lyft and DoorDash each put $30 million toward this ballot initiative. Following the passage of AB-5, Uber Chief Legal Officer Tony West said Uber would be willing to put additional money toward the initiative, and plans to keep defending its worker model.

On the other side of this battle is Gig Workers Rising, an organization with hundreds of gig workers who have consistently demanded better pay, workplace protections and driver-led unions.

“This is yet another example of corporations and billionaires trying to exempt themselves from the democratic process by using wealth and fear tactics,” Gig Workers Rising organizer and driver Edan Alva said in a statement. “For years, these companies have refused to pay drivers fairly or treat us with respect. After working 80 hour weeks, sleeping in our cars and surviving on poverty wages, drivers organized and won support for AB5 from both the public and lawmakers. Now, instead of obeying the law, Uber, Lyft and Doordash want to spend $90 million to avoid accountability – all while claiming it will “protect” drivers. Uber and Lyft were nowhere to be found for the past many years when drivers like me needed healthcare or basic labor protections. We call on the people of California to resist the corporate lies, to stand with drivers and against the billionaires.”

Coming up next week, Gig Workers Rising along with other organizations are protesting outside the homes of those who will cash out from Uber’s IPO.

I’ve reached out to Uber, Lyft and DoorDash and will update this story if I hear back.

A year ago, Google rolled out “.new” links that worked like shortcuts to instantly create new Google documents. For example, you could type “doc.new” (without the quotes) to create a new Google Doc or “sheet.new” to create a new spreadsheet. Today, Google is bringing the .new shortcuts to the rest of the web. Now, any company or organization can register their own .new domain to generate a .new shortcut that works with their own web app. Several have already done so, including Microsoft, which now has “word.new” to start a new word document, or Spotify, who has “playlist.new” to start adding songs to a new playlist on its streaming app.

The domains are designed to get users straight the action. That is, instead of having to visit a service, sign in, then find the right menu or function, they could just start creating.

However, some of today’s new domains aren’t quite as seamless as Google’s own. Because most Google Docs users are already signed into to Google, it’s easy to jump right to creating a new online document.

But other services aren’t used as often. That means Medium’s “story.new” doesn’t let you immediately start writing your blog post, unless you’re already signed in to Medium. If not, it drops you on a “Join Medium” sign-up page instead. This doesn’t make it necessarily any easier to use Medium — a better use case would have allowed the user to just start writing, saving their text under a temporary account, then prompt them to join Medium upon exit or clicking “publish.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Word.new, a direct rival to Google’s own doc.new, isn’t yet resolving.

Other participants include sell.new (eBay), canva.new and design.new (Canva), reservation.new (OpenTable), webex.new and letsmeet.new (Cisco WebEx meeting room creation), link.new (Bit.ly), invoice.new (Stripe’s dashboard), api.new (launch new Node.js API endpoints from RunKit), Coda.new (Coda), music.new (create personalized song artwork for OVO Sound artist releases and more), and repo.new (GitHub.)

Spotify also picked up podcast.new, which takes you to Anchor, in addition to playlist.new.

Considering the lineup, it’s clear that there’s not as much of a gold rush for these action-based domains as they are for other top-level domains. There are some fun use cases, like Spotify’s, and practical ones like Word.new, but others are less compelling because they drop you on sign up/sign in pages as they’re not everyday services.

And some are just odd land grabs. Like Ovo Sound, the record label founded by Drake, which snagged “music.new” — a domain that you would think would go to a larger streaming service. (In fact, it’s somewhat surprising that Google’s own music service, YouTube Music, didn’t grab that one for itself.)

Google says any company can register these domains, all of which are secured over HTTPS connections like .app, .page., and .dev domains are.

Through January 14, 2020, trademark owners can register their trademarked .new domains. Starting December 2, 2019, anyone can apply for a .new domain during the Limited Registration Period.

The Los Angeles-based mobile game development studio Scopely has become America’s newest unicorn thanks to a $200 million financing which values the company at a whopping $1.4 billion.

Scopely said it would use the capital to continue its strategy of developing and acquiring new games as it looks to continue its run of six consecutive mobile games that will gross $100 million or more in lifetime revenue.

The new investment follows Scopely’s milestone of achieving more than $1 billion in lifetime revenue. Games in the company’s portfolio include: Looney Tunes World of Mayhem and Star Trek Fleet Command, created with the recently acquired DIGIT Game Studios.

Indeed, part of the reason for the financing is to accelerate the pace of its acquisitions and investments into new game development studios, according to chief executive, Walter Driver .

“The barrier to entry from independent studios is to find product-market fit,” says Driver. “Increasingly, it’s helpful for them to have publishing capabilities that are more global in nature and more scaled.”

The unicorn gaming company has amassed increasingly larger rounds over the past three years on a nearly annual basis. The company raised a $55 million round of financing in 2016, $60 million in 2017 and $100 million in 2018.

For investors, what makes the company compelling (beyond its string of successful games) is the technology platform that undergirds its popular mobile gaming titles. “What the company allows you to do is look at engagement and alter a game midstream to tailor the experience,” says Ravi Viswanathan, the founder and managing partner of NewView Capital .

NewView, a growth stage venture capital firm spun out of the multibillion dollar investment firm NEA, led the most recent $200 million round for Scopely.

Scopely is the firm’s first major investment in a gaming company and was part of a portfolio of investments that NewView took over when it spun off from NEA.

For Scopely, the latest capital infusion is just more money in the bank to invest in or acquire budding game studios and give them access to the technology stack that has made Scopely so compelling, according to Driver.

“Our technology platform is about optimizing free digital experiences for the largest amount of players possible,” Driver says. “We’re primarily focused on finding the most passionate and talented game developers that want to specialize in making the kind of game design and might have the kind of specialized expertise that we admire.”

In the eight years since Scopely first launched the gaming industry has been transformed by the opportunities that exist in the mobile market — and both Scopely and companies like Jam City have capitalized on the new platform.

“We see the future of gaming as free live services that give users choice and agency of how they want to play,” says Driver. “Being able to refine those live services over time and react to the data that you’re seeing and optimize those products,” has been at the core of Scopely’s technology stack.

The company is already raking in more than $400 million in annualized revenue and it was that growth that convinced NewView and investors like the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board to commit capital as part of this latest round.

Scopely has already made a few select minority investments in gaming studios and with the new cash, Driver hopes to roll up more independent game developers.

Datameer, the company that was born as a data prep startup on top of the open source Hadoop project, announced a $40 million investment and a big pivot away from Hadoop, while staying true to its big data roots.

The investment was led by existing investor ST Telemedia . Other existing investors including Redpoint Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Nextworld Capital, Citi Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to almost $140 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Company CEO Christian Rodatus says the company’s original mission was about making Hadoop easier to use for data scientists, business analysts and engineers. In the last year, the three biggest commercial Hadoop vendors — Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR — fell on hard times. Cloudera and Hortonworks merged and MapR was sold to HPE in a fire sale.

Starting almost two years ago, Datameer recognized that against this backdrop, it was time for a change. It began developing a couple of new products. It didn’t want to abandon its existing customer base entirely of course, so it began rebuilding its Hadoop product and is now calling it Datameer X. It is a modern cloud-native product built to run on Kubernetes, the popular open source container orchestration tool. Instead of Hadoop, it will be based on Spark. He reports they are about two-thirds done with this pivot, but the product has been in the hands of customers.

The company also announced Neebo, an entirely new SaaS tool to give data scientists the ability to process data in whatever form it takes. Rodatus sees a world coming where data will take many forms from traditional data to Python code from data analysts or data scientists to SaaS vendor dashboards. He sees Neebo bringing all of this together in a managed service with the hope that it will free data scientists to concentrate on getting insight from the data. It will work with data visualization tools like Tableau and Looker, and should be generally available in the coming weeks.

The money should help them get through this pivot, hire more engineers to continue the process and build a go-to-market team for the new products. It’s never easy pivoting like this, but the investors are hoping that the company can build on its existing customer base, while taking advantage of the market need for data science processing tools. Time will tell if it works.