Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Every startup is a story and every startup’s success depends — on some level — on how well they can either tell that story or get that story told.

The best stories are the ones that create an instant brand. One that sparks a relationship or a moment of inspiration with customers and consumers alike. Those are the stories that transform industries and re-contextualize how businesses think of themselves and their competition.

On the ExtracCruch stage at Disrupt Berlin three of the finest practitioners of the dark arts of branding, public relations, marketing and communications will share their tips and tricks on how to get coverage for a company and how to use that coverage to get at the strategic objectives that companies need to fulfill as they grow.

These alchemists of allusive include Collette Ballou, the founder of the eponymous Ballou PR; Katy Turner, the managing director of Multiple; and longtime public relations pro, Joanna Kirk.

Ballou began her career in European public relations in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse in the U.S. in 2001. Both an investor and an entrepreneur, Ballou has worked with startups and investment firms including 83 North, Accel Partners, Box, Criteo, Eventbrite, Facebook, GoEuro, (now Omio), Lakestar, Pinterest, Stack Overflow, Stripe, TransferWise, Twilio, Waze, WhatsApp and Zendesk. She also is an investor in venture funds . including Cavalry Ventures and Connect Ventures.

Before founding Multiple, Turner worked in several different roles across the tech industry in the UK and Europe. She began her career at Orange, (in a time when it was actually cool to work for a mobile operator, she says). That role led to positions at Eden Ventures, Videoplaza, and as the chief marketing officer at Tech City UK. In addition to her work at Multiple, Turner also serves as a mentor for Seedcamp and Techstars and sits on the investment committee for the University of Bristol’s Enterprise Fund.

When Okta launched its $50 million Okta Ventures investment fund in April, one of its investments was in an early stage privacy startup called DataGrail. Today, the companies announced a partnership that they hope will help boost DataGrail, while providing Okta customers with a privacy tool option.

DataGrail CEO and co-founder Daniel Barber says that with the increase in privacy legislation from GDPR to the upcoming California Consumer Protection Act (and many other proposed bills in various states of progress), companies need tools to help them comply and protect user privacy. “We are a privacy platform focused on delivering continuous compliance for businesses,” Barber says.

They do this in a way that fits nicely with Okta’s approach to identity. Whereas Okta provides a place to access all of your cloud applications from a single place with one logon, DataGrail connects to your applications with connectors to provide a way to monitor privacy across the organization from a single view.

It currently has 180 connectors to common enterprise applications like Salesforce, HubSpot, Marketo and Oracle. It then collects this data and presents it to the company in a central interface to help ensure privacy. “Our key differentiator is that we’re able to deliver a live data map of the customer data that exists within an organization,” Barber explained.

The company just launched last year, but Barber sees similarities in their approaches. “We we see clear alignment on our go-to-market approach. The product that we built aligns very similarly to the way Okta is deployed, and we’re a true  partner with the industry leader in identity management,” he said.

Monty Gray, SVP and head of corporate development at Okta, says that the company is always looking for innovative companies that fit well with Okta. The company liked DataGrail enough to contribute to the startup’s $5.2 million Series A investment in July.

Gray says that while DataGrail isn’t the only privacy company it’s partnering with, he likes how DataGrail is helping with privacy compliance in large organizations. “We saw how DataGrail was thinking about [privacy] in a modern fashion. They enable these technology companies to become not only compliant, but do it in a way where they were not directly in the flow, that they would get out of the way,” Gray explained.

Barber says having the help of Okta could help drive sales, and for a company that’s just getting off the ground, having a public company in your corner as an investor, as well as a partner, could help push the company forward. That’s all that any early startup can hope for.

Aurora Insight, a startup that provides a “dynamic” global map of wireless connectivity that it built and monitors in real time using AI combined with data from sensors on satellites, vehicles, buildings, aircraft and other objects, is emerging from stealth today with the launch of its first publicly-available product, a platform providing insights on wireless signal and quality covering a range of wireless spectrum bands, offered as a cloud-based, data-as-a-service product.

“Our objective is to map the entire planet, charting the radio waves used for communications,” said Brian Mengwasser, the co-founder and CEO. “It’s a daunting task.” He said that to do this the company first “built a bunker” to test the system before rolling it out at scale.

With it, Aurora Insight is also announcing that it has raised $18 million in funding — an aggregate amount that reaches back to its founding in 2016 and covering both a seed round and Series A — from an impressive list of investors. Led by Alsop Louie Partners and True Ventures, backers also include Tippet Venture Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Promus Ventures, Alumni Ventures Group, ValueStream Ventures, and Intellectus Partners.

The area of measuring wireless spectrum and figuring out where it might not be working well (in order to fix it) may sound like an arcane area, but it’s a fairly essential one.

Mobile technology — specifically, new devices and the use of wireless networks to connect people, objects and services — continues to be the defining activity of our time, with more than 5 billion mobile users on the planet (out of 7.5 billion people) today and the proportion continuing to grow. With that, we’re seeing a big spike in mobile internet usage, too, with more than 5 billion people, and 25.2 billion objects, expected to be using mobile data by 2025, according to the GSMA.

The catch to all this is that wireless spectrum — which enables the operation of mobile services — is inherently finite and somewhat flaky in how its reliability is subject to interference. That in turn is creating a need for a better way of measuring how it is working, and how to fix it when it is not.

“Wireless spectrum is one of the most critical and valuable parts of the communications ecosystem worldwide,” said Rohit Sharma, partner at True Ventures and Aurora Insight board member, in a statement. “To date, it’s been a massive challenge to accurately measure and dynamically monitor the wireless spectrum in a way that enables the best use of this scarce commodity. Aurora’s proprietary approach gives businesses a unique way to analyze, predict, and rapidly enable the next-generation of wireless-enabled applications.”

If you follow the world of wireless technology and telcos, you’ll know that wireless network testing and measurement is an established field, about as old as the existence of wireless networks themselves (which says something about the general reliability of wireless networks). Aurora aims to disrupt this on a number of levels.

Mengwasser — who co-founded the company with Jennifer Alvarez, the CTO who you can see presenting on the company here — tells me that a lot of the traditional testing and measurement has been geared at telecoms operators, who own the radio towers, and tend to focus on more narrow bands of spectrum and technologies.

The rise of 5G and other wireless technologies, however, has come with a completely new playing field and set of challenges from the industry.

Essentially, we are now in a market where there are a number of different technologies coexisting — alongside 5G we have earlier network technologies (4G, LTE, Wifi); a potential set of new technologies. And we have a new breed of companies are building services that need to have close knowledge of how networks are working to make sure they remain up and reliable.

Mengwasser said Aurora is currently one of the few trying to tackle this opportunity by developing a network that is measuring multiples kinds of spectrum simultaneously, and aims to provide that information not just to telcos (some of whom have been working with Aurora while still in stealth) but the others kinds of application and service developers that are building businesses based on those new networks.

“There is a pretty big difference between us and performance measurement, which typically operates from the back of a phone and tells you when have a phone in a particular location,” he said. “We care about more than this, more than just homes, but all smart devices. Eventually, eerything will be connected to network so we are aiming to provide intelligence on that.”

One example are drone operators who are building delivery networks: Aurora has been working with at least one while in stealth to help develop a service, Mengwasser said, although he declined to say which one. (He also, incidentally, specifically declined to say whether the company had talked with Amazon.)

5G is a particularly tricky area of mobile network spectrum and services to monitor and tackle, one reason why Aurora Insight has caught the attention of investors.

“The reality of massive MIMO beamforming, high frequencies, and dynamic access techniques employed by 5G networks means it’s both more difficult and more important to quantify the radio spectrum,” said Gilman Louie of Alsop Louie Partners, in a statement. “Having the accurate and near-real-time feedback on the radio spectrum that Aurora’s technology offers could be the difference between building a 5G network right the first time, or having to build it twice.” Louie is also sitting on the board of the startup.

At the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. today, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos announced a new “national team” that will join forces in order to help return humans to the Moon via NASA’s Artemis program. They’ll focus on developing the Human Landing System that will be used to achieve this goal.

Blue Origin will serve as lead contractor for this new industry collaboration, which will also include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. The partnership will serve to pursue NASA’s stated mission of getting the first American woman and next American man to the surface of the Moon by 2024.

Each partner in this new alliance will take on specific roles pertaining to helping NASA achieve its goal. Blue Origin is going to be acting as the primary contractor and lead the program management of the partner involvement, as well as take on systems engineering, and responsibilities for safety and mission assurance. They’ll also provide the descent element of the overall the human landing system, which will consist of the Blue Moon lander and the BE-7 engine that will provide its propulsion.

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin will be developing the ‘Ascent Element’ vehicle and Northrop Grumman is building the ‘Transfer Element’ to get the whole landing element Blue Origin is providing in place towards the Moon. Longtime space industry non-profit Draper will lead the descent guidance efforts and produce flight avionics.

“Northrop Grumman built the original lander that now delivers cargo to ISS,” Bezos said during an award ceremony at the IAC where he made the announcement. “Lockheed Martin is, as far as I know, the only company that actually lands on the surface of Mars. They are unbelievably competent in space. They are experts in life support systems […] and Draper is doing the guidance and control – an incredibly complex job for landing on the Moon, especially when you want to do a precision landing. And of course they did that for the original Apollo Program way back then, but today it will be done in a completely new way.”

 

Bootstrapped tech company Doist, the company behind popular task management Todoist, is releasing a major update called Todoist Foundations — the update should be rolled out over the next 24 hours. As the name suggests, it lays foundations for many new features down the road.

But there are already some interesting improvements. Task lists in Todoist don’t have to be an endless list of checkboxes anymore. You can now create sections in your projects. You can then move tasks from one section to another, collapse sections when you don’t need to see them.

Down the road, those sections could play a bigger role. For instance, a project could have sections representing multiple steps to achieve a task. You could imagine other views that let you move a task from one step to another.

When it comes to labels, they are now sorted in two categories — your personal labels and shared labels with other coworkers.

Todoist has also added a new task view on desktop and mobile that centralizes everything you can do related to a task. You can modify the due date, the priority level, see comments, add labels and more. Even better, you can see all the subtasks associated with a specific task in this new view.

When it comes to mobile-specific improvements, the quick add bar has been overhauled. Quick add has always been one of my favorite features in Todoist. For instance, you can type “Send contract tomorrow at 9am @bestclient #work” to create a “Send contract” task in the “work” project, with a due date and the label “bestclient”.

Todoist first added buttons on mobile to surface those features and make them more intuitive. The company is simplifying the bar as it got really busy. It now displays existing due dates, projects and assignees in buttons directly. There are now fewer icons for less important features.

Todoist also borrowed a feature from Things 3 with the plus button. You can now drag and drop the plus button anywhere in a list to add a new task in the middle of the list. That feature is incredibly useful.

Behind the scene, everything should be faster as well. Finally, Todoist updated icons and its color palette.

Pizza Hut this morning announced plans to pilot Zume’s signature round pizza boxes. Testing for now will be extremely limited — in fact, it’s only happening at a single location in Phoenix, Ariz.

The boxes are one of a number of different technologies being pushed by the SF Bay startup. In fact, my recent conversation with Zume CEO Alex Garden quickly turned to the subject of pizza boxes.

“We did internet searches for two weeks trying to find packaging companies that made different pizza boxes and there really wasn’t very much out there, they’re almost all made by a small select group of companies that just repeat the same ideas over and over again,” he told me back in September. “So I said, wow that’s really weird. Okay, well, let’s just, we’re a startup, no one can tell us what the rules are. Why don’t we just get a white board and draw what a cool pizza box would be.”

Which is fair enough, I guess. And certainly there’s a lot to be said for a product that’s designed to be compostable, should it eventually be adopted by a massive chain with the scale of a Pizza Hut. For now, however, it seems the piloting is pretty limited in both time and scope. The same location will also be used to test a limited edition plant-based sausage topping by MorningStar.

Perhaps either or both will move beyond this limited publicity push. Certainly sustainable plant products and compatible packaging are steps in the right direction. It’s also another high-profile partnership for Zume, which recently announced that it will be licensing its food truck technology to the admittedly smaller-scale &Pizza chain.

The Ethereum community is hard at work on Ethereum 2.0, the next major upgrade of its blockchain. It is an incredibly challenging task, and the Ethereum Foundation has been completely transparent about its roadmap and progress. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

Justin Drake will give us an update on Ethereum 2.0. He’s been working on sharding and scalability in order to better support the Ethereum ecosystem and enable new use cases.

The current version of Ethereum can only handle a dozen transactions per second. With sharding, the computing load will be partitioned, which should lead to a drastic increase in performance.

And the most fascinating part of Ethereum 2.0 is that it’s a moving target. The Ethereum community has put years of research and development in the update in order to refine how it’s going to work and how it’s going to be rolled out. It’s a large scale experiment of distributed development.

Ethereum 2.0 will be rolled out in multiple phases in order to ensure the finality of a transaction, construct shard chains and make sure smart contracts run properly. If that sounds complicated, Justin Drake can tell you in simple words why Ethereum is such an interesting project.

Ethereum 2.0 could transform the Ethereum blockchain into a sort of “world computer” that can execute instructions across a network of servers all around the world. And that’s what so exciting about it.

And that’s not all. In addition to an interview on Ethereum, Justin Drake will also talk about building a blockchain startup on the Extra Crunch stage with other blockchain experts.

He knows how important it is to build a community of developers and researchers around your blockchain project. And he can tell you about the best strategies to communicate and iterate on complicated blockchain projects.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to those discussions — and many others. The conference will take place December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Justin lives in Cambridge, UK where he studied mathematics. He founded the Cambridge Bitcoin Meetup group in 2013, and in 2014 left his job as a programmer and FPGA engineer to study the blockchain space. In 2015 he operated a Bitcoin ATM and started a company providing a web interface for OpenBazaar. He is now a researcher for the Ethereum Foundation focusing on sharding.

In yet another letter seeking to pry accountability from Facebook, the chair of a British parliamentary committee has pressed the company over its decision to adopt a policy on political ad that supports flagrant lying.

In the letter Damian Collins, chair of the DCMS committee, asks the company to explain why it recently took the decision to change its policy regarding political ads — “given the heavy constraint this will place on Facebook’s ability to combat online disinformation in the run-up to elections around the world”.

“The change in policy will absolve Facebook from the responsibility of identifying and tackling the widespread content of bad actors, such as Russia’s Internet Research Agency,” he warns, before going on to cite a recent tweet by the former chief of Facebook’s global efforts around political ads transparency and election integrity  who has claimed that senior management ignored calls from lower down for ads to be scanned for misinformation.

“I also note that Facebook’s former head of global elections integrity ops, Yael Eisenstat, has described that when she advocated for the scanning of adverts to detect misinformation efforts, despite engineers’ enthusiasm she faced opposition from upper management,” writes Collins.

 

In a further question, Collins asks what specific proposals Eisenstat’s team made; to what extent Facebook determined them to be feasible; and on what grounds were they not progressed.

He also asks what plans Facebook has to formalize a working relationship with fact-checkers over the long run.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the DCMS letter, saying the company would respond in due course.

In a naked display of its platform’s power and political muscle, Facebook deployed a former politician to endorse its ‘fake ads are fine’ position last month — when head of global policy and communication, Nick Clegg, who used to be the deputy prime minister of the UK, said: ” We do not submit speech by politicians to our independent fact-checkers, and we generally allow it on the platform even when it would otherwise breach our normal content rules.”

So, in other words, if you’re a politician you get a green light to run lying ads on Facebook.

Clegg was giving a speech on the company’s plans to prevent interference in the 2020 US presidential election. The only line he said Facebook would be willing to draw was if a politician’s speech “can lead to real world violence and harm”. But from a company that abjectly failed to prevent its platform from being misappropriated to accelerate genocide in Myanmar that’s the opposite of reassuring.

“At Facebook, our role is to make sure there is a level playing field, not to be a political participant ourselves,” said Clegg. “We have a responsibility to protect the platform from outside interference, and to make sure that when people pay us for political ads we make it as transparent as possible. But it is not our role to intervene when politicians speak.”

In truth Facebook roundly fails to protect its platform from outside interference too. Inauthentic behavior and fake content is a ceaseless firefight that Facebook is nowhere close to being on top of, let alone winning. But on political ads it’s not even going to try — giving politicians around the world carte blanche to use outrage-fuelling disinformation and racist dogwhistles as a low budget, broad reach campaign strategy.

We’ve seen this before on Facebook of course, during the UK’s Brexit referendum — when scores of dark ads sought to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment and drive a wedge between voters and the European Union.

And indeed Collins’ crusade against Facebook as a conduit for disinformation began in the wake of that 2016 EU referendum.

Since then the company has faced major political scrutiny over how it accelerates disinformation — and has responded by creating a degree of transparency on political ads, launching an archive where this type of advert can be searched. But that appears as far as Facebook is willing to go on tackling the malicious propaganda problem its platform accelerates.

In the US, senator Elizabeth Warren has been duking it out publicly with Facebook on the same point as Collins rather more directly — by running ads on Facebook saying it’s endorsing Trump by supporting his lies.

There’s no sign of Facebook backing down, though. On the contrary. A recent leak from an internal meeting saw founder Mark Zuckerberg attacking Warren as an “existential” threat to the company. While, this week, Bloomberg reports that Facebook’s executive has been quietly advising a Warren rival for the Democratic nomination, Pete Buttigieg, on campaign hires.

So a company that hires politicians to senior roles, advises high profile politicians on election campaigns, tweaks its policy on political ads after a closed door meeting with the current holder of the office of US president, Donald Trump, and ignores internal calls to robustly police political ads, is rapidly sloughing off any residual claims to be ‘just a technology company’. (Though, really, we knew that already.)

In the letter Collins also presses Facebook on its plan to rollout end-to-end encryption across its messaging app suite, asking why it can’t limit the tech to WhatsApp only — something the UK government has also been pressing it on this month.

He also raises questions about Facebook’s access to metadata — asking whether it will use inferences gleaned from the who, when and where of e2e encrypted comms (even though it can’t access the what) to target users with ads.

Facebook’s self-proclaimed ‘pivot to privacy‘ — when it announced earlier this year a plan to unify its separate messaging platforms onto a single e2e encrypted backend — has been widely interpreted as an attempt to make it harder for antitrust regulators to break up its business empire, as well as a strategy to shirk responsibility for content moderation by shielding itself from much of the substance that flows across its platform while retaining access to richer cross-platform metadata so it can continue to target users with ads…

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk used an internet connection provided by his company’s Starlink constellation of broadband satellites early on Tuesday AM. Musk used the network in place with the Starlink satellites already in orbit to send a simple tweet, declaring that he’d done just that.

Starlink is SpaceX’s ambitious project to launch and operate its own network of broadband satellites, which will then provide broadband connectivity on a global level, including to areas which did not previously have reliable access to a high-speed internet connection.

This month, SpaceX signalled its intent to put as many as 30,000 more Starlink satellites into orbit, on top of a previously planned 12,000. The company is making the preparations it requires to address very strong demand, it says, and so it’s looking down the road at how large the network of small satellites potentially has to grow in order to serve all potential customers reliably.

In May 2019, SpaceX sent up its first 60 operational satellites  after launching a couple of prototypes last year. The satellites will work in tandem with ground stations that receive and convert the signal, which will be roughly the size of a pizza box, based on previously comments made by Musk.

How funding rounds are classified these days has much more to do with positioning than any VC definitions, but it’s still true that nothing has quite the pizazz as the “strategic investment” celebrity party round.

Sandbox VR, a location-based virtual reality startup that capped off a huge $68 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz at the beginning of the year, is bringing on some new investors in a $11 million “strategic” round, let’s call this one the Series A-listers round.

Yeah, there were a couple Silicon Valley folks, David Sacks and the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund led the round, but they joined the much glitzier names of celebs including Justin Timberlake, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom and Will Smith. Other investors include Michale Ovitz, Honda Keisuke and Kevin Durant.  Some of the investors in this latest round don’t have much in common beyond being LPs in the Andreessen Horowitz Cultural Leadership Fund, which seems to be the glue holding these stars together.

Sandbox VR operates physical spaces, generally in retail locations, that users can play multiplayer virtual reality games inside with friends. It’s a next-generation arcade of sorts that’s relying on expensive new technology to attract customers, but that formula hasn’t been a slam dunk for plenty of other VR startups, and it’s forced the leadership to get creative.

“It’s a difficult space to be in, because it’s one of those spaces where you have to be three startups in one,” Sandbox VR exec Siqi Chen told TechCrunch in an interview. “You have to build your own content, build your own technology and construct and operate retail locations.”

While most virtual reality startups that have raised substantial amounts of capital have had to dump it into R&D, Sandbox’s business is more focused on pinning virtual reality experiences to physical real estate giving the curious a hub to try out the technology.

Sandbox has plenty of obstacles ahead, the most dire of which will be building a content ecosystem that’s exclusive to the system. Even Facebook’s Oculus has struggled to court established studios to the system without bankrolling development, a process that could get very expensive very quickly for Sandbox. Consumer expectations are also quite high given the steep $48 ticket prices for the 30 minute experience. Sandbox recently partnered with CBS Interactive Studios to create a title based on Star Trek IP.

Sandbox will have to compete with consumer headsets like the Oculus Quest that are far cheaper and simpler than previous-generation at-home headsets. The startup will also have to find ways to deepen experiences while still relying on plenty of off-the-shelf consumer hardware. Sandbox’s success relies at least a bit on consumer VR headset adoption growing at a sluggish pace, something Facebook is still spending billions to accelerate.

Generating venture-sized returns will undoubtedly involve more than jacking up ticket prices for more immersive games, though we haven’t heard much of a grand vision from the young startup yet. Whatever Sandbox does, the team is going to have to walk in the same footsteps of many VR companies before it all while improving perceptions of the technology, something the company’s executives hope their new celebrity investor friends can help with.

For Sandbox, gathering attention from celebrities like Kanye West has already been part of the strategy. “Part of it is brand, in that VR is not perceived as a cool thing to do,” Chen says. “So having influential people onboard helps with that perception a bit.”

Sandbox has 16 locations planned by the end of 2020. The company has now raised a whopping $82 million.